Folding tables and plastic chairs were arranged in orderly rows. A water cooler and a coffee maker sat on a table in the back corner. The room’s centerpiece was an old television strapped to a moveable cart. People marched in, slump-shouldered, already annoyed at having their names checked off a list. A county sheriff stood by the door, waiting for someone to slip. I took a seat in the back.

The man who addressed the room wore a lanyard. Brian. He showed off the tattoo of a dragon on his neck and told us that it was only half-finished because he got sober before the artist could. He passed out self-assessment worksheets. When I got mine, my roommate for the weekend leaned over and whispered, “Lie.” There was nothing to gain in being honest.

“Hopefully,” Brian said, “what you’ll learn over this weekend will keep you from ever meeting me again.”

I’d gotten good at lying. Once a month, I called my mom back in Virginia to tell her I was still doing background work, standing next to television stars. Really, I was pouring drinks for people who watched them.

Brian asked us to introduce ourselves. Let everybody know how we got here. There were about twenty-five of us in the group, all apparently innocent. 

     “My name is Charles,” said a tan kid in khaki shorts and a salmon-colored polo shirt. “I blacked out on campus and they say I stole a golf cart from UT.”

“My name is Leslie,” an older woman said. “A deer jumped in front of my vehicle and I crashed into a ditch. I’d had a couple glasses of wine at a charity event that night. The officers made me take a breathalyzer test because of the crash, and here I am.”

     I lied: the cops got me mixed up with someone else. People laughed. 

      “What really happened?” Brian asked.

  “Does it matter?”

    “You don’t think you should be here this weekend, do you?” he said.

    “Not really.”

     “That’s what I thought.” After that he launched into a memorized speech. “You are all here because you broke the law, and a judge decided that you need to participate in and complete the alcohol awareness training we will be providing this weekend. Even if you don’t believe you need to be here, if you fail to abide by the rules and regulations this weekend, you fail the course and will be required to complete your jail time.”

My roommate cranked the AC and turned on the television. His name was Montana. He had the thick forearms you get from being in weight rooms for twenty years. When he smiled, his teeth were perfect.

“They took my candy bars,” he said. He dropped his legs over the side of the bed and pulled up his t-shirt to reveal an insulin pump clipped to the waist of his sweatpants. “Took a diabetic’s candy bar. Can you believe that shit? Fucking candy bars, man.”

At the check-in, we’d waited in line to get searched. A roomful of offenders, ashamed. I was the exception, certain that the rest of these people were supposed to be here. After the woman with the teal nails zipped my backpack closed, another woman handed me a room key and the agenda with my case number at the bottom.

     “They give you a reason?”

     “Said it was because the bag was open. Told me I could get unopened ones from the vending machine. But all they got is peanut butter candy bars. Man, I’m allergic to peanuts. I swear I saw that bitch put them in her purse.”

     The ice machine down the hall started making this sound like someone crying. We both pretended not to hear it.

     “That’s how they fuck you,” Montana was saying. He stuck his finger with a pricker to check his blood sugar. “Like that self-assessment bullshit. You score too high on that test and they make you go see another motherfucker for counseling.”

     It was about the time I started bartending on Friday nights. I paced the room and parted the curtains. Down the frontage road, there was the glow of a gas station sign. It didn’t look too far away, but the walk through the parking lot would be tricky. I didn’t need a drink like one of the educational videos had said. But what else was there to do? I was bored. I wasn’t going to fall asleep anytime soon. I wanted to see what I could get away with.

     I told Montana that I was going to get some ice. 

     He said, “Don’t get my ass in trouble.” 

     “Do they actually room-check us?” I said.

     “They didn’t last time,” Montana said. 

     I propped open one of the hotel’s side doors with a rock. In the parking lot, I looked back at the rooms. A few were lit up, curtains closed. Nobody would see me. Or they would. Working in the service industry taught me that nothing matters for too long, that everyone is replaceable, that you have to keep it moving.

     At the gas station, I grabbed a half-rack of Lone Star and candy bars for Montana. The clerk smiled the way my regulars smiled ordering tequila shots at last call.

     Montana didn’t look away from the television when I returned. Just said, “You’re a dead cowboy if you get me put in jail.” I passed him a beer and the candy bars, then took the cans out of the box, folded it, and slipped it between the mattress and the bed frame.

     “Come on,” I said. “It’s not like they have cameras in our room.”

     We lay on our beds, beers in hand. An episode of a crime show started. It had something to do with a piano teacher. Montana flipped through the channels and stopped on a college football game. They were replaying a hit. The player looked unconscious sprawled out on the turf. They took off his helmet. He tried convincing the medics he was good to go back in.

     Montana said, “I used to coach high school. O-line, D-line. The big boys.”

     “Not anymore?”

     “No. Now, I drive a forklift around a warehouse and deliver magazines once a month.”

We chugged our beers, and I reached under the bed to grab more.

Montana waved me off. “I do a lot of dumb shit when I drink.”

     “That why you don’t coach anymore?”

Montana showed me a photo on his cell phone: a woman young enough that she could’ve been his daughter holding the hand of a kid with Montana’s jawline. Both smiling. The kind of photo you look at when you need to remember that you’re trying to be a good person.

     “We have a kid together now, but I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing back then.”

     During the commercial break, somebody knocked on our door. 

     “Shit, man,” Montana said. “The beer.”

     I grabbed the loose beers under the bed and our empties off the dresser and rushed into the bathroom. I lifted the lid off the toilet tank and dropped them in the water.

     Montana opened the door. 

     “Bed check.” It was Brian.

     “Present,” I said, stepping out of the bathroom.

     Brian was holding a clipboard. A roll of duct tape hung off his belt. Up close, it was obvious the line work on his dragon was faded, unfinished. The tattoo was truly one of the ugliest I’d ever seen, a half-finished mistake he had to wear every day.

     “Yeah, all here,” Montana said.

     “You mind?” Brian said, inching past Montana into the room. He scanned over our bed, the television, and the desk. He flipped up each comforter to get a look underneath.

     “You really gotta do that?” Montana said.

     “Procedure.” He opened the bedside drawer, took the Bible out and plopped it on the table. It looked like it’d never been cracked open before. He edged past me into the bathroom. I thought about the month of weekends I’d have to spend in the downtown jail. A friend from the bar did a week for possession and said it was enough to set him straight.

     Brian pulled back the shower curtain. Nothing. He clicked his pen and checked us off his list. 

     “You check every room like that?” I asked him.

     “No,” Brian said. “Only when someone doesn’t respect what we’re trying to do here.”

     He shut the door behind him. Out in the hallway, he pressed a strip of duct tape along the length of our door. 

They parked the television in front of us again. More videos.

     A guy waiting at the coffee pot caught a whiff of me and winked. “Smells like you found the hotel bar, too.”

     We settled down to watch “The Dangers of Drunk Driving,” an educational film from the eighties, which Brian called “a classic.” A group of people drank beers and drove cars around a closed course. Honestly, it looked fun, the recklessness. People did their best to avoid watching the film: looked at their phones under the plastic tables or hung their heads down like football players on the sideline after a loss. Brian paced the room waking the sleepers. Montana and I cracked jokes about the bad acting and dumb haircuts.

     “At least you guys are awake,” Brian said, passing us.

     “This video is older than I am,” Montana said.

     “Shame you’re having to watch it again at your age,” Brian responded.

     We broke for boxed lunches. Ham or turkey. People swarmed the vending machines. Back in our room, Montana checked his blood sugar. “Numbers are shit,” he said, crumpling the test strip. There was still one beer hiding in the toilet tank.

A woman we hadn’t seen before stood next to Brian, clutching a manila folder. She wore thin-framed glasses, and her blonde hair rested on the shoulders of her black blouse. She looked a little younger than my mom.

     Brian said, “We have a guest speaker this afternoon.” The woman tried smiling, but it looked more like a grimace. “Mrs. Janet Forrester is the vice president of the central Texas MADD affiliate.”

     “This is my daughter,” Mrs. Forrester said. “She would be twenty-six years old right now if she were still alive today.”

     A photo was passed around the room.

     “A drunk driver killed my daughter in a head-on collision in the middle of the day. She was seventeen, a junior in high school, on her way back from soccer practice.” She went into detail about the crash and its aftermath—body unrecognizable, the driver incarcerated, an inevitable divorce. Her voice was calm, unemotional. She was presenting facts. The photo reached my hands. Her daughter had the same half-smile my mom used to practice with me before school pictures. My mom still sent me job listings from back home—excavation company office work, delivery routes through the mountains—that told me there was no going back.

I hadn’t killed or hurt anybody. I broke the law and got caught. And now I was doing my weekend at the DWI Hotel because that’s what the court had ordered me to do. Mrs. Forrester was still talking, but by then I was only half-listening. She had told her story to thousands of drunk drivers.

      I passed the photo to Montana. He held it longer than I had, his eyes shifting from the photo of the dead daughter to the mother in front of us. His jaw trembled. After he passed the photo to the next person, he wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

     I was missing something inside. I couldn’t see what he was seeing.

     That photo. In the ensuing years, it would come back to me while I drove someone else’s car drunk or coked up, that face flashing around my skull. It appeared to me before I loaded up tin foil full of meth, her small teeth, the scar at her chin, becoming mine—what I saw as I bled out in a backyard in Bastrop.

     Of course, I lived.

     “We can all learn from our actions,” Mrs. Forrester said. “And grow to become better citizens of this world. I dream some nights that my daughter is still alive. She’s graduated from college, working for a non-profit in Dallas like she aspired to. She calls every couple of weekends to let me know she’s doing alright. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can almost hear her voice.”

I walked out of that room dry-eyed and thirstier than ever.

     I had to spend one more night in the DWI Hotel. In the morning, I would lie to a counselor to pass my evaluation. Brian would sign my forms, and I’d avoid doing any jail time. Montana would promise to take a cab down from the burbs and visit me at the bar. I'd call someone to pick me up.

     Looking back now, over a decade in the rearview mirror of my life, what I remember most vividly is a brief conversation. Mrs. Forrester had left, and people were filing back to their rooms. In the hallway, Brian stopped me.

     “Now tell me that didn’t get through to you,” he said.

     I told him that it didn’t.

     “What’s it going to take then?”

     I looked at his dragon tattoo, half-finished, permanent as regret. Both of us knew what it would take.