Your dad has done a very bad thing, the suburban loser tells his eldest son over the phone one winter morning. A very bad thing and he needs your help. His eldest son is on his way to class downtown and the wind blowing through the high-rises makes it hard for him to hear, so again and again the suburban loser repeats himself. He did a bad thing and needs help. The bad thing, he later tells his eldest son on the short car ride from his house to the impound lot near the grocery store, was getting his fifth lifetime DUI. The night before, the suburban loser had been driving back from the casino where he had a successful sales meeting with some industry partners. Right as he turned into his subdivision, a cop pulled him over for having his brights on. He failed the FST, the field sobriety test, and although the blood draw at the station wasn’t actually legal without a warrant, they charged the suburban loser with drunk driving. The suburban loser reviews the dash cam footage and associated documents every single day during his house arrest. He has long phone calls with expensive lawyers where he asks them to chase down any leads on mandated monthly ticket quotas or requests court approved work releases for business lunches where his eldest son waits in the bistro parking lot until the suburban loser comes out hours later, either bloated from non-alcoholic beers or jittery from endless refills of diet coke, and his eyes water on the way home when he tells his eldest son that the judge took away the most important thing they could take from a man. Freedom. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, his youngest son drives him to dingy church basements and community centers where the suburban loser sits in a circle with men who wear tattered leather jackets that smell like cigarette smoke and ride old mountain bikes to the meeting. The only time you want to find yourself in one of those meetings, the suburban loser tells his youngest son on the way home, is if a judge with a hard-on says it’s mandatory. Noted, his youngest son replies. When the suburban loser can finally drive himself around again, it’s only with an expensive breathalyzer attached to the ignition that needs a blow every twenty minutes, even if the suburban loser is driving and even if there are other people in the car. It doesn’t work that well, either, so the suburban loser blows until he is red faced and lightheaded. If he’s driving with a business partner in the passenger seat, he tells them the name of the sheriff and the judge who had it against him for some reason and made him do all this stupid bullshit. It was chilling to think about what happened to people with less means who got caught up in such blatant corruption scandals, people who weren’t lucky enough to have such great sons to drive them around and be there for them.