One drink leads Ina Chadwick to a struggle with class, gender, power and more than a few of her father’s ghosts.
I pulled over—and quickly threw my phone to the floor, a knee-jerk reaction—as soon as the police car flashed its lights. Was I driving under the influence? The question flashed through my mind, as did the power of denial. I had just come from an art opening. I’d had one vodka martini, then two cups of tea and a glass of water. I hadn’t eaten since noon. I felt a little dizzy, but not buzzed.
When the polite, attractive, young officer leaned in my window and asked if I’d been drinking, I replied without perjuring myself. “I did have one drink,” I told him, and he had me step outside for a sobriety test.
When he asked me to walk in a straight line, I couldn’t—not because of my dizziness, but because of the tall wedge heels I was wearing. I asked if I could remove them. He said yes, but his backup—a female cop in her 30s, waiting a few yards away—said no. If one drink is my limit, I thought, this is a swell time to find out. I’d take my DUI and let this handsome cop drive me home.
I had to go back to the precinct, they said. I watched placidly as my car was towed away. It was Friday night, so I couldn’t pick it up until Monday. Suddenly the woman cop yanked and cuffed my hands behind me. The steel hurt—especially when I was shoved into the backseat.
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In New York City, where I grew up, it was all too common for policemen to sympathetically pat me on the head as they kindly escorted my alcoholic union-leader father home. While New York City was a much bigger place with far more anonymity for the masses, my father was part of the powerful elite. It was understood that someone of his status could call the mayor or the police chief and be handled by the police with extra care. From the time I first met New York City cops, I understood the meaning of influence and camaraderie. And when my husband got pulled over and was asked if he’d been drinking, all it took was a “No, sir” and we’d be on our way.
Dad would’ve been enraged if a broad half his age—some “bossy dame in a guy’s uniform,” he’d say—had been the one to cuff him. It would’ve turned physical. The man was so bellicose that, once, when my mother tried to take his keys away after a night of drinking, he loaded us in the car and shouted, “You want to see drunk? I’ll show you what it really means.” He pulled his fedora over his eyes and drove, weaving, visibly drunk and now blind, until he felt he’d made his point: Male expertise with a machine was not to be questioned.
He pulled his fedora over his eyes and drove, weaving, visibly drunk and now blind, until he felt he’d made his point: Male expertise with a machine was not to be questioned.
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If you fight crime in a town like Westport, Connecticut, where the annual per-capita income is just under six figures, you’ve got a boring job. During the day, a soccer mom might rear-end a hedge-fund manager; there’s an occasional burglary, maybe a murder every decade, a suicide here and there—but for the most part, our 25,000 residents, me included, keep quiet and cause little trouble.
The average cop earns about $40k a year, and unless he’s snagged another breadwinner, he can’t afford the local lifestyle. It’s a dicey socio-economic dynamic where the less well-off hold such power over the very privileged, and in Westport, this divide rears its ugly head at times. I can safely call some of my neighbors overgrown spoiled brats. But I can also say that I’ve seen beautifully dressed women driving safely in a Lexus get stopped for no reason and detained.
In its heyday, Westport was the archetypal cocktail-hour town. Wives in station wagons used to wait for their husbands at the train with a martini glass and shaker in hand. Alcoholism wasn’t a worry if your husband wore a grey flannel suit, or if you in your Mary Tyler Moore adorableness tipped back a few glasses with neighbors and drove home.
Times change, of course, and I didn’t feel I ought to be exempt from the law. But something was off—something about the way the woman cop in the precinct station eyed my expensive jeans and jacket and the eight $20 bills in my pocketbook, which she counted and bagged.
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I felt guilty. I had never carried that much cash with me in my life, but I had just come from the West Coast and my husband had insisted I carry cash, just in case. Women of my generation rarely carry much cash. It’s a gender issue left over from the days when mothers told us women were vulnerable and having cash might make us targets. Though I have worked my whole adult life, I still carry about $20—and that’s a bonanza for me.
The male cop read me my Miranda rights. I passed on calling a lawyer, deciding instead to own up to whatever the Breathalyzer shows. But when I tried to blow, the volume of air I produced wouldn’t register. The machine aborted. I told them I had to pee.
“I’m older than you and I’ve had three kids,” I pleaded to the woman cop, crossing my legs. “It’s hard to take a deep breath when I drank two cups of tea and a large glass of water, plus one martini, more than an hour ago.”
She thought I was faking it. Some people do that if they think they’re “blind drunk” and would rather defend themselves after a night in jail—the penalty for refusing the Breathalyzer.
Believe me, I wanted to say, I know what drunk looks like. But I didn’t say it. It might be used against me. Alcoholism runs in families, and these cops didn’t need to know a thing about my father.
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Believe me, I wanted to say, I know what drunk looks like. But I didn’t say it. It might be used against me. Alcoholism runs in families, and these cops didn’t need to know a thing about my father.
♦◊♦
Finally, after the guy saw me struggling not to pee on the floor, he convinced her to let me go to the bathroom. The toilet was steel—without a seat—and it was low. The woman stood less than two feet in front of me, hands on her belt, poised to club me if I tried to bolt. She handed me a fine-gauge-sandpaper towel for personal hygiene.
I aborted the Breathalyzer test again. “Maybe you could take blood,” I suggested. And I asked, worried I wasn’t breathing right, if I needed a pulmonologist.
“You use too many big words,” she said.
We locked eyes. I told her I was sure she was doing her job pro forma and holding up to all the standard police-policy rules, but that I am also doing my job: “I’m a writer and a damn good one. I get paid to be articulate. So you do your job and stop trying to humiliate me for doing mine.”
We’d now drawn the socioeconomic line in the sand, and it was with our words. The tone in the room changed. In some part of her I could see that she must have worked hard to get to Westport, to save lives as well as give routine tickets.
Eventually I produced two vials of urine. I was given a court date. I learned I should hire a lawyer. My husband came and bailed me out: $500 in cash. He was told he could get a bail bondsman if he couldn’t come up with the money. This is a term most Jews in the suburbs have never heard: bail bondsman.
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I didn’t sleep for weeks. I considered attending an AA meeting. I wondered if I was a drunk and, just like my father, refusing to admit it. I also didn’t want to have a cocktail in front of anyone because my name had appeared in the papers, online and in print, and now I felt I was being judged. I considered staying home for the rest of my life. Or hiding a flask in my pocketbook and sipping it in the bathroom.
When I opened the envelope marked “State of Connecticut Department of Public Safety Scientific Services,” I winced. The legal ground zero is 0.08 and I was 0.10. My lawyer says that used to be the legal limit. I was “barely drunk,” but at my height and weight, even with a three-ounce martini I was over the limit. DUI.
He said he’d figure out how to let me keep my driver’s license. “Maybe a handicapped plea. It’s a first offense, but you’re in jeopardy whenever you finish a drink in a restaurant.”
I started asking friends if they thought I had an alcohol problem. They pondered and said no, but that I “like my one drink.” If I’m driving, they said, I should start appreciating my half-drink instead.
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The more illuminating issue for me is how rancorous I still feel about the woman cop who needed to overpower me. I would like to tell her that I didn’t feel powerless in the precinct—I felt far more powerless when my father was drunk behind the wheel. I feel powerless when any man I know insists on driving when I know he’s had too much to drink. The only thing I felt with this woman who had her hand on her pistol was humiliated, and that’s bully’s work: humiliation, not real authority.
A 19-year-old female filmmaking intern at our local arts center told me how she and a woman friend were forced to get out of the car and the car was searched. They were parked in a blinding rainstorm because they couldn’t see out the window. Two Westport cops, (and the same woman cop I encountered) said if they didn’t open the door they would smash the windows. They claimed they heard loud music and smelled alcohol and saw teenage girls. It wound up on an official citizens’ complaint, showing no reason the cops should have been so forceful.
In the 1950s and ’60s when we drove up to our summer house in Great Barrington, my family would arrive on a Friday before dark and be greeted by a cop in an enclosed, raised stanchion, the height of a lifeguard’s perch. His job was to guard the thoroughfare in a town of 5000 by stopping each car and checking out whether or not you belonged there. He wore a stiff-brimmed gold officer’s cap. He’d blow a whistle and hold up my father’s huge, black Chrysler Imperial.They’d exchange pleasantries until he gave us the OK: “Now move it on up.” My father loved that ritual. Real power, he’d chuckle, was holding up cars on their way to a beloved lakeside destination.
The summer I was 14 I told my parents I wanted to be a nurse. Both my parents shrieked, “Wear a uniform?” Women in uniforms were waitresses, toll takers, cooks, housekeepers, and maybe a “dyke prison guard.” The secret code for uniformed girls who were past Girl Scout age was “not of our class.” Not smart enough even to be a switchboard operator. Or a typist in the typing pool. Too poor to go to college.
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Forty-six years after my father’s alcohol-related death, I became locked in a class, power, and stereotyping struggle with a woman. Me, the daughter of a labor leader. Throughout my life I’ve fought for women’s financial independence. But I hadn’t ever thought about the entitlements I had witnessed growing up, and that here in the police precinct those entitlements were a detriment with another woman. The wit and playfulness that I had always been able to use with men amounted to hangman’s noose with this woman in uniform.
Forty-six years after my father’s alcohol-related death, I became locked in a class, power, and stereotyping struggle with a woman. Me, the daughter of a labor leader.
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My mother would’ve been penniless if she ever left my father. I lived through an era of “don’t ask, don’t tell” sexual harassment in the workplace. I fought for women to have equal power. Now, here is my backlash in this epitome of upscale suburban America.
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I only wish that alcohol hadn’t been the reason I met with this woman in uniform. My father’s ghost had scared the crap out of me about drinking. But the cop and I, I like to think, could’ve had a martini and a hearty meal together one night before my arrest. We could have bonded over the good fight, the gender and power war we’re still waging. We’d have been on the same side—if it hadn’t been my father’s ghost we were battling.
Or would we have? The DNA of my father’s disease haunts me, but is the fundamental Queen Bee Bitch theory of women in power truer than I want to believe? I was powerless over that one drink, was helpless over my father’s supreme power on all levels over our family. Thirty years ago, she wouldn’t have had any power over me.
My father would’ve loved my achievements, my rapport and friendship with men and women of all backgrounds. But that night, powerless over alcohol as my father once was, I crashed at the crossroads of socioeconomic and gender inequality. And my father, for all his power, couldn’t help me this time.
This piece is an amazing adventure in urban existence. Classes exist everywhere and we’re never but a single martini away from finding out who we can depend on. In a real emergency we believe the “authorities” are willing to help, but otherwise… The connection to Ina’s past (her father) gives this piece an intimacy that was unexpected. Excellent!
As usual, Ina has hit upon a truth we don’t like to deal with – the issues of gender equality and co-operation. How powerful is the old boys network? Does the old girls network have any force at all? Men, women, politics, power and alcohol – an explosive mix. Terrific writing.