Chapter 2
Nowadays any person's first DUI per se is not good. The legal limit being .08 allows very little, if any leeway, for anybody to legally drive when that person has had three drinks in an hour. This national blood alcohol limit has been the result of decades of social pressures, many of them due to the dogged determination and efforts of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and have been effective, patently evinced by a declining road fatality rate involving under the influence drivers. These social pressures coupled with stiffer penalties have worked. Gone are the days of an officer lecturing the inebriated driver to drive home slowly; gone are the 1960's to early 1980's television shows having most homes proudly and conspicuously furnished with, minimally, a small bar; gone are the movies hailing the leading besotted character. More firmly entrenched is the fear of being pulled over after knowingly having too much to drink; getting behind the wheel and receiving one's first DUI; the road vehicle checks putatively to nab drunk drivers; and the increasingly harsher penalties and fines doled out to drunk drivers, including the nasty work stigma and small town police beat opprobrium.
In the vast majority of states a second DUI racked up within five years of the first DUI conviction will bring the offender's life to an abrupt halt. The penalties, fines, opprobrium, and more than likely jail time in many cases precipitate this halt. Mac's first DUI was punished appropriately considering his .21 blood alcohol content as he was required to attend education classes designed to further indoctrinate all the drunk driving evils followed by the prescribed fifty-four hours of group therapy to deal with his possible alcohol problem and the automatic one year license revocation; the punishments being allayed by the state issuing a work permit allowing limited driving, and the presence within two blocks of his home a state sanctioned facility administering the required schooling and group therapy sessions.
Living in Colorado is living in a lot of carefree sunshine, endless beautiful summer days, and the summer of Mac's first DUI was no exception. The Saturday morning lessons and therapy classes were held late morning and the short nostalgic walks home, reminiscent of his boyhood walks home from elementary school, proved to be too powerfully enchanting, too winsome to the point Mac's adult inhibitions caved to childish impulses; convincing him puerilely that it would be justified to stop at one of three available liquor stores. Besides, stopping to say hi with cash in hand to the liquor store owners, his best friends from Southeast Asia, strengthened his communal ties.
It was thirty six years before the law finally caught up with him, caught up with his drinking and driving, being what should have been well past the age to scare him straight to the point of not drinking and driving. The lessons to be learned from his first DUI were washed down and blurred beyond comprehension by countless fifths and indeed within five years of the first DUI Mac was driving home from what was hoped to be a harmless Sunday afternoon lunch and a couple of beers, and driving home rear ended a car stopped at a red light. Fortunately Mac was sober enough to be applying the brakes and the collision was minor, but realizing he was over the legal BAC limit, knowing he already had one DUI and the second would spell absolute doom, he panicked and fled the scene. Ignoring the still red light he sped off from the main thoroughfare taking the residential area streets the last few blocks home only to be arrested within an hour at his home as the police were quickly able to ascertain his present position certified with a car having a warm engine and bashed in front end.
The perceived eternity between arriving at his apartment and the police's arrival was a nightmarish ordeal of evil thoughts frantically swirling inside his inebriated brain. Notions conjuring a