Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  I had the whole first day to myself. They fed me through a slot in the door at exactly noon and again at exactly 5 p.m. I watched TV until I got bored, when I picked up a random book and read with the TV sounding in the background. Time moves very slowly when you can’t stop thinking about the next three days.

  I slept surprisingly well for a guy who’d spent the entire day lying in bed. Until midnight, anyway, when I got two roommates. They were both intoxicated and loud, but I couldn’t hold it against them. Anything is loud in a room made of steel. One of the guys jumped up to the top bunk, and the other dropped his mattress onto the floor. I pretended to be asleep, because I didn’t know what to say. Hi, I’m Brendan. I’m actually serving a seven-day sentence right now. How about you guys? DUI, I assume? Eventually, they stopped talking, and I fell back asleep.

  Three days passed, and at the end, my brother, Chad, came and got me. We had arranged it so my mother didn’t have to drop me off or pick me up from jail. My dad and my brother took care of it. Chad brought me a pack of Camel Lights, and I lit one as soon as I got in the car. We went to McDonald’s, then home, where I got to do the things I had been fantasizing about for three days: use a clean toilet—seat intact—eat nonjail food, and take a private shower.

  My mother and I left that afternoon for Cedar Rapids, where I attended drinking driver education school for the second time. The content of the class was the exact same as the one I had taken the previous summer—twelve hours of information about how many people are killed each year by drunk drivers just like me and the twenty other people in the room. I had obviously not learned anything my first time around.

  Saturday night, we drove back home. At 10 p.m. Dad dropped me off at the jail to finish the last three days of my sentence.

  This time, I got my own cell for the first night. The next morning, they moved me in with the rest of the guys in the eight-man cell. Everyone glanced up when I walked in, then went back to watching TV.

  Nobody introduced themselves, but I picked up enough about them from their conversations and our brief exchanges.

  Paul was two months away from release, serving six months for possession of crystal meth. He had a few missing teeth and a black mullet. Paul liked to talk about anything, but mostly what was on TV at the time.

  Todd was a few days away from finishing a four-month sentence for something he never mentioned. He had a blond mullet and didn’t talk except to affirm anything Paul had said.

  Jeremiah and Abe were awaiting trial on burglary charges. They had been caught breaking into a car-wash office the previous weekend and had so many priors that they were looking at a minimum of five years in the state penitentiary. They spent a lot of time fantasizing about cigarettes, hatching plans to have one of their mothers bring them a smoke on the day of their trial. Maybe they’d have time to suck it down during the hundred-yard walk from the jail across the street to the courthouse. I couldn’t believe that was all they were worried about. I also couldn’t wait to have a cigarette, but I didn’t have to consider a looming prison sentence. They were going to do a large amount of time in a very bad place because they jacked about a hundred bucks worth of quarters from a car wash.

  Jimmy was sweating out a few more weeks until his trial for five counts of statutory rape. He didn’t look like he was more than eighteen or nineteen years old, and I felt sorry for him. If no one else noticed the irony when Jimmy said, “Jesus, she’s hot,” about a seventeen-year-old Avril Lavigne on TV, I did.

  Out of the six of us, I got dealt the best hand. Hell, two weeks after I got out of jail, I’d be in Montana, going to graduate school. Jimmy, Jeremiah, and Abe could all be behind bars for at least a few years. Todd was getting out in a few days, but not to a very posh life. You don’t get a lot of great job offers after you’ve done four months in the county jail, especially in a county that small. Same for Paul. I hoped I’d be applying for jobs where my prospective employer didn’t do a criminal background check on me, and if they did, they’d let me explain my situation. But that was way off in the future.

  I didn’t fit in. Well, I fit in because I was a criminal like the rest of them and we were all wearing the same jumpsuits, but I wasn’t going back to the same life everyone else was. I didn’t say much about myself at all, other than that I was there because of a second DUI and that I’d graduated from New Hampton High School in 1997 (go, Chickasaws). I definitely didn’t mention grad school. I felt a little guilty about my secret, but more so I just wished the time would pass faster. I wanted to somehow fall asleep for seventy-two hours and wake up when my brother showed up again.

  It was hard to keep my attention on the words in my books when there were five other people talking in the small room, plus a TV. I’d read for a while, then try to sleep. Of course, when there’s nothing to do but sleep, you can’t sleep.

  I sighed, I itched, I changed positions on the bed, then repeated. I looked forward to my trips to the toilet, because they broke up the monotony. I forced myself to drink water so I could get out of my bunk and pee more often.

  I looked at the clock and counted the hours until my release, working the numbers over and over in my head, trying to make them seem shorter by breaking them up differently. Okay, it’s two in the afternoon, and I get out at eight on Wednesday morning. It’s Sunday. That’s two days and eighteen hours. Or sixty-six hours. Sixty-six hours. I’ll be sleeping three more nights here, so maybe eight hours a night. If I’m lucky, that’s twenty-four hours of sleep. So, really, I only have forty-two more hours of awake time. That’s 2,520 minutes. Sixty seconds in a minute times 2,520 minutes—what is that? Like 150,000 seconds. If I try to count to 150,000, by the time I’m done they’ll be calling my name to tell me I can go home. Or, I could count to 50,000 every day. That might work better. One . . . two . . . three . . .

  I usually counted to about eighty before losing concentration.

  The other guys would go outside in the yard every afternoon, but I stayed in. I didn’t want anyone in my hometown to see me in a jumpsuit, playing basketball at the county jail. It was a small town, but as far as I knew, no one I went to high school with had learned I was a big failure. I wanted to keep it that way.

  War and Peace plus Jimmy, Paul, Todd, Jeremiah, and Abe was an exercise in futility.

  And it was indeed only for a few steps that he ran alone. One soldier started after him, then another, until the whole battalion with a shout of ‘Hurrah’ had dashed forward and overtaken him. A sergeant of the battalion darted up and grasped the standard which was swaying from its weight in Prince Andrei’s hands, but he was immediately shot down. Prince Andrei snatched up—

  “Look at this fucking lady.”

  “What?”

  “This lady on Springer. Check out them shoes.”

  “Oh, yeah. Those are fucked-up.”

  Prince Andrei snatched up the standard again and dragging it along by the staff ran up with the battalion.

  I wonder what time it is.

  In front he saw our artillerymen, some of whom were fighting, while others had deserted their guns and were running towards him.

  Maybe it’s 2:30. I should look at the clock. No, I shouldn’t. The longer I read without looking at the clock, the better.

  He also saw French infantry pouncing on the artillery horses and reversing the field-pieces. Prince Andrei and the battalion were now within twenty paces of the cannon.

  It’s probably 2:30 by now. It sounds like that TV show is almost over. I don’t even need to look at the clock. I’ll just listen for the closing and opening music of these shows and I’ll be able to guess by that.

  He heard the incessant whizz of bullets overhead, and to right and left of him soldiers continually groaned and dropped. But he did not look at them: he kept his eyes fixed on what was going on in front of him—on the battery.

  2:21. Shit. That’s why I shouldn’t look at the clock. I’m too optimistic about how fast time is passing. I’m not going to look at the clock aga
in until I read fifty more pages . . . Okay, maybe twenty-five more pages.

  That’s how it went, for three days.

  On day two, everyone else went outside to the yard, and it was just me and a guy who had just arrived. I didn’t know his name.

  I nodded and said, “How ya doing?”

  “I gotta talk to my lawyer,” he said. “I can’t do this.”

  Really? What the fuck do you mean you “can’t do this”? This whole system is built around making you do this. You can’t just call your mom to pick you up because you’re not having fun, or sneak out in the middle of the night and end up with a dishonorable discharge. You have to do it. It sucks. That’s why they send you here when you do something bad.

  There is no feeling in the world like having your freedom taken away, for a few days or months or years. I will never forget it.

  I woke up early on my last day. I didn’t sleep much the night before. Once the clock said 5 a.m., I got up and packed up my mattress and pillow. My brother would be there to pick me up at eight.

  Breakfast came at seven, and I let Paul eat mine. He said thanks, and I think it was the first time I had looked him in the eye. I tried to watch TV but ended up checking the clock every minute.

  At eight, nothing happened. Obviously, the guards weren’t as excited about my departure as I was. Finally, after four minutes that felt like forty, the door opened. The guard carried my books, and I squeezed out the door with the rest of my stuff. No one looked up from the TV to say good-bye, but in my head, I wished them all luck.

  BIG SKY

  WHEN I WAS A CURLY-HEADED five-year-old trying to hit a T-ball in our backyard, I’m sure my mom never looked out the window and imagined that one day she’d be dropping me off in Montana, just a month out of substance abuse treatment and a week in jail. I suppose I also would have cried there on the steps of the apartment in Missoula, if I were her.

  I had no money, no car, no driver’s license, and no friends. Amy and I had broken up. She had supported me, long-distance from Omaha, through rehab, but without a license, I was unable to visit her much, and we’d seen less of each other after my last arrest. I was twenty-three. I was skinny, depressed, and alone. I was about to check off my sixth month of sobriety, which suddenly felt like six days. I had no idea what was going to happen to me in Montana, but I tried to act calm for my mom and dad. It was a long way from the humid ballfields of southwest Iowa, where tan, stubby-legged kids kicked up dirt and tried to care about winning.

  I wanted my parents to go, sort of, so I could smoke a cigarette and figure out how this whole Montana thing was going to work. They needed to get back, anyway, and there wasn’t much to say. Something like Son, as long as you don’t fall off the wagon or hang yourself, we’ll be fine would have covered it.

  So we stood there, Mom, pursing her lips, on the verge of tears, and Dad, still taking in the view to the south: the grassy slopes of Mount Sentinel and the buildings of the University of Montana at its base.

  “You’ll call?” Mom said, hugging me one more time.

  “Of course.” I didn’t have much else to do in that apartment on Front Street in the week before the start of classes.

  Missoula was beautiful. With two rivers and Rattlesnake Creek cutting through town, and pine-studded mountains on three sides, it was the idyllic West. My father had briefly lived out west, then left to go back to Iowa for a secure job when he was about my age. He wasn’t worried—he’d have been happy for me if I had been starting a job on an assembly line if it were in a place like Missoula.

  Me, I didn’t know. It seemed far enough away from my recent past that I could start over, but it wasn’t like they didn’t sell beer in Missoula. They sold beer everywhere in America. All I had to do was not drink any of America’s beer every single day for the rest of my life.

  As my parents turned their car out of the parking lot, I imagined my mom sitting up straight as a board in the driver’s seat, hands at ten and two, crying but trying to smile.

  I was scared. I felt as alone as I did on my first day of preschool, when my mom left me in a room where I didn’t know anyone. I was the kid who cried the whole first day. I turned toward Mount Sentinel and lit a cigarette.

  My new apartment still smelled like someone else’s that whole first week in Missoula. I walked around downtown a bit during the day and spoke with my mother almost every night, not knowing what else to do with myself.

  Missoula was like no other town I’d ever been in—people walked everywhere with their dogs off-leash, and when dogs weren’t allowed into a shop or a bar, they waited contently outside, sitting on the sidewalk. Higgins Avenue was home to three coffee shops, and none of them was a Starbucks. At Taco del Sol, you could get a gigantic veggie burrito for under four bucks. (The first time I ate there, I had to be told not to take the foil off all at once—you left it on and peeled it off as you went, so that the burrito kept its shape and contents.) Two outdoor gear shops sat within four blocks of each other. Bicyclists rode on the street right next to the cars, unlike in Iowa, where no one rode a bicycle anywhere unless they’d gotten a DUI and lost their license. (After my DUI arrests, I purposely walked to work, even though it was slower.) Everyone had beards or long hair or dreadlocks and fleeces or ski jackets, or cowboy hats and Carhartts. The cars all had roof racks for skis and bikes and kayaks, and license plates from every US state. Maybe I could grow a beard.

  I shrank more each time a new person introduced themselves to Professor Dennis Swibold’s class in room 201 of the journalism building on my first day of fall semester: Hans, originally from Sweden, had a master’s degree in Holocaust studies and had interned as a photographer at the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester, Massachusetts. Nic was a vegan from San Francisco who said he’d been inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson; I assumed Henri Cartier-Bresson was a photographer. Andrea was originally from the East Coast, had a master’s in public administration, and hosted a show on the UM campus radio station. Gwen was a member of the Salish and Kootenai tribes, and she had worked for Sony and Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Linsey was originally from Bigfork, Montana, and had an English degree from the University of Portland. Kristine had worked extensively in public relations and marketing for radio stations in Oregon and Texas. Tim, originally from the Washington, DC, area, had a degree in zoology from the University of Maryland, and had hiked all 2,190 miles of the Appalachian Trail in one six-month stint.

  Hi, I’m Small-Town Guy Who’s Never Been Anywhere. I barely graduated from Public University in the Great Plains, and I just got out of jail. What the hell was I doing in the same room with these people? I was from a town with six stoplights, had traveled to exotic locations such as Des Moines and Omaha, and spent parts of my summer in a cell and a group therapy room. Oh, and I wrote a little bit for my college newspaper. In my spare time, I like to chain-smoke and fight a constant compulsion to drink alcohol.

  A couple of weeks into the first semester, when we were in the hallway outside our editing class, Hans suggested going out for beers.

  “Yeah,” Tim said. “We should.”

  I tried to mention that I didn’t drink anymore without making it sound too strange. It sounded really strange.

  “That’s okay,” they said. “You don’t have to drink.”

  I know I don’t have to drink, jackass. I understand that they don’t pour beer down your throat the second you walk into a bar. I know they won’t kick you out of most establishments for ordering a water.

  “Well, I’m on probation,” I said, “and my probation officer says I can’t even go into a bar, so I’ll have to hang out with you guys some other time.”

  The first time they went out for beers, I was probably sitting at my apartment, clicking away on my computer, popping out the front door every hour or so to smoke a cigarette.

  It had been a little less than six months since what I now hoped was my last beer ever, and a little more than eight years since my first one: a can of Mil
ler Genuine Draft Light I’d stolen from my parents. It was May or June of my freshman year in high school. A bunch of us were at a friend’s house in the country.

  I sipped the beer and tried to look like I knew what I was doing. There were a few older kids, and most of the kids my age had already been drunk a time or two. It was raining off and on, and we sat out on the patio, talking and listening to somebody’s Creedence Clearwater Revival cassette. The beer was so bitter I could barely swallow it. I couldn’t finish it before the summer air warmed it up. I wanted to at least develop a taste for beer so I could hang out with my friends without feeling like a weenie.

  My friends and I had already had conversations about whether or not we were going to drink in high school, and a few times I’d mentioned that my father had offered me $1,000 if I didn’t drink until I turned twenty-one. He didn’t have the money, but I think he either guessed I wouldn’t do it or hoped to scrape it together by then.

  My friends said that was okay, that I could be the driver.

  In my high school, I think 90 percent of alcohol was consumed in cars slowly driving around the hundreds of miles of gravel road that crosshatched the county. We didn’t need a “designated driver”—you could drive those roads from 7:30 p.m. to midnight and not see another car—but my friends wanted to make me feel better about my uncool choice. I didn’t last long not drinking, though.

  A few weeks after I had my first two-thirds of a Miller Genuine Draft Light, on the Fourth of July, I managed to get drunk off of Old Milwaukee and some stale Black Velvet whiskey pilfered from my friend Scott’s grandmother’s basement fridge. Her house was right across the street from Saint Mary’s Catholic Church, where I spent every Sunday morning and church holiday for four and a half years. Poor Agnes never had any idea what we were doing. She died when I was in college.