All the cops stood around me in their tight blue uniforms and the sky was golden above them. First RFK got my name and looked at my license. Then I had to hold my hand out and touch my nose while my neighbors watched. Another police cruiser slowed until it was in front of my driveway. There was a woman in the backseat with her face close to the glass. She didn’t get out, but I saw her nodding. Her face was all jowls, thick and hanging. Then the car left.
“Walk along this line,” said a tough lady cop pointing down at a line in the driveway. She had a square face and shorter hair than mine. Hers was combed.
I tried to walk along the line between the two slabs of cement in the driveway, but I couldn’t. It was spinning and jumping.
“I can’t,” I said, and the words rolled around under my tongue.
I saw Mrs. Bachman hobble over to watch with the others. I was tired of being the show.
“Say the alphabet backward,” said the tough lady cop.
“You say it,” I said.
“If you’re trying to get wise… ,” she said, but she got interrupted.
“Looks like we got a wise one here,” said the RFK cop.
“I’m not wise, Chip,” I said. “I just can’t say the ABCs backward, I can’t even do it normally.”
“Listen, smart-ass,” said the tough lady cop, “you can do this sobriety test, or we can go down to the hospital and they can do a blood test on you. Your choice.”
“I’m drunk,” I said. “Take me downtown or wherever, I give in.”
“Sir, I want you to say the alphabet backward. Now.” Her arms were crossed over her chest, and underneath, her breasts filled out the tight blue shirt.
I looked around. There were a lot of neighbors now. All the grown-ups and their kids, and Mrs. Bachman, her froggy, scowling face, with those red German cheeks, below that frumpy white hair.
Everyone waited solemnly; the lady cop looked as hard as Rushmore. I just wanted to go to Donkey Island where bad boys in leather jackets could smoke cigarettes and play pool and crash cars. I turned to the lady cop and said, “Z-Y-X… F-U-C-K U! U! U! U!” And I kept saying that letter while two cops bent me over the smashed-up hood of my Nissan Stanza. They cuffed me and walked me to the cruiser at the end of the driveway. The lady cop was shaking her head. The others guided me into the backseat, pushing down on my neck as I yelled, “U! U! U!… ,” so loud. I tried to break Mrs. Bachman’s hearing aid. If I could just reach those neighbors and tell them, “U! U! U!”
A month later, I went to court. My dad took me. I was assigned a lawyer. She told me I had to call the judge “ma’am” or “Your Honor.” We waited for the judge and I kept hearing this line from this song in my head: “You down with O.P.P. (Yeah you know me).” It had nothing to do with anything, but it kept going around in my head. Then the judge walked in from the side. She was in the black thing and had a thin face and glasses and long brown hair. She sat and looked at my police record and my school record.
“You know, Teddy,” she said, “normally I get kids in here who can’t multiply fifty by two, but you, you’re smart.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “O.P.P.” was blasting.
She told me she ought to put me in juvenile hall, but it was hard to hear because of all those guys singing in my head. She said she would give me one more chance and make me a ward of the court, which meant I belonged to the state.
“If you do anything, if you are caught jaywalking, I will put you right into juvenile hall, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Ma’am,” said my lawyer.
“Ma’am.”
“And as part of your probation, you’ll do sixty hours of community service.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you’ll make an official apology to Miss Grossman, the woman you hit.”
“Yes, ma’am.” We got to leave and finally, on the drive home with my dad, those guys in my head shut up.
The next week I reported to my probation officer and set up a supervised apology with Sally Grossman. We met at the little place Sandwich Etc. in midtown, not far from where the accident had happened. Sally Grossman was fat, and she came with her fat friend, and there was a moderator there, Jake. He had combed white hair and a weak, kind face. We all had coffee and we sat around a small round table and looked at one another. I said I was really sorry. Sally Grossman looked like she liked that, but the fat friend looked angry.
Then Sally said, “Look, you have a problem. You’re an alcoholic.”
I nodded that, yes, I was.
“I can understand that,” she said. “I have a problem too, eating. In some ways your problem is easier to deal with. I have to deal with temptation at least three times a day. You know?”
I said that, yeah, I did. Then Jake said that he had a problem too, that he had dealt with a gambling addiction. And that was it. The fat friend didn’t say she had a problem. So we drank our coffee and Jake talked about the benefits of 12-step programs and I said that it sounded like a good idea and I would probably go soon. Then we were done and the next week I started my community service at the Children’s Library.
The two old ladies who ran the library were nice to me. An old one with short brown hair in a bob was the assistant librarian, and a really old one with short gray hair in a curly flattop was the main librarian. The brown-haired one was named Judy; she was dry-skinned and thin. The other one was dry too, Mags; she didn’t say much. They must have seen a little kid inside me, because they smiled at me like they smiled at all the kids who came in.
I walked to the library after school twice a week and on Saturdays. The old ladies would give me a cart of books to shelve. But after the first day, I just started reading all the picture books and didn’t do the work. When the library closed at six, my cart of books would still be full, but the old ladies never said anything about it.
“See you soon, Teddy,” they would say, and I’d tell them that they would. Sometimes when I was sitting on the floor reading, the old ladies would walk by the room. I know they saw me but they never mentioned it. There was a garden behind the library; they called it “The Secret Garden.” There were sycamore trees in two rows and wooden benches with rounded cement frames. Sometimes I sat out there to think. But I didn’t know what to think about.
I didn’t talk to Fred for two weeks. I was a little angry that he had predicted the accident, but more because he had gotten out of the car, and even more because I was embarrassed about everything. One day, he showed up at the library. I was on the floor reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He sat down next to me and I read out loud to him. At the end the caterpillar turned into a butterfly. After that Fred came all the time.
One day, I started reading him The Rainbow Goblins by Ul de Rico. It was my favorite book when I was a kid. It’s about this group of goblins that are each painted a different color of the rainbow and they hunt rainbows because they live off the juice of the rainbows’ colors. The way they do it is they sneak up on the rainbows and they each lasso their designated color and then they drain the colors into their buckets and drink them. There are amazing pictures. Well, the goblins get sloppy and a field of flowers overhears their plans and then all the flowers of the valley conspire with the rainbow and the next day, when the goblins attack the rainbow, it disappears and the lassos spring back at the goblins and they’re trapped in them and then the flowers secrete weird colorful juices, tons of them, and drown the goblins. One thing that was always interesting to me as a kid was that the goblins didn’t wear underwear and when they drowned you could see the blue goblin’s butt.