A Story from my Doc...

Talking with my cardiologist a couple of years ago, out of nowhere he asked me, "Ever gotten a DUI?"

"I haven't."

"I have."

"What happened?"

"I'd just gotten back from Vietnam, did all the family things for a couple of days, I even called a few old girlfriends, no luck there. A buddy of mine from my residency at UCLA Medical Center called and said, we should get the gang together and have a few laughs. I said, "Great." 

We met at a bar close to the beach in Venice, I put on shorts and a t-shirt and borrowed my younger brother's Manx Dune Buggy and off I went. I got there about 8 and by midnight I was shit faced, I mean knee walking drunk on my ass. Time to go. I ordered a long neck, slipped it in my pocket and left. I found the Dune buggy in a parking lot a few blocks away, fired it up, the damn thing had a stinger exhaust, the kind with the long chrome pipe sticking straight up in the air."

"I remember those, really loud." 

"It would shatter your ears. I got in the buggy, put the log neck between my legs and pulled out on the street, I drove a few blocks and stopped at a light, took a drink of beer. I looked to my left and sure as hell, I'd had stopped next to a cop. I was staring at him with a beer in my hand. The cop had a big smile on his face. The light changed, he followed me across the intersection, wrote me up for open container, illegal exhaust, and driving under the influence. That god damn night followed me around for years."

"How so?"

"I'd decided to specialize in cardiology, I applied at UCLA, it came up in the interview, it came up in the board certification process, it came up when I joined Kaiser. It's classified as a moral deficiency or some shit like that."

"Did you ever drink and drive again?"

"Only when I had no other choice."

"Doesn't bother me, doc."

"I didn't think it would."