It Happened To Me: I Defended My Criminal Best Friend To A Judge - And I Regret It
My closest friend and drinking buddy caused a tragic drunk-driving crash. She wanted me to help her get leniency. Well, what would you do?
Hello friends and enemies!
I’m adhering to your preference that I keep my intros brief (for now). So I will just tell you that I think today's story is a capital-D Doozy.
I love you and let's talk about the following masterpiece and every other random thing we want to talk about in those comments that I love so much. You know I have a lot more to say (always) and I know you do too. So we’ll do it there!
Big XO, Jane
By Robin Wheeler
I met Steven Drozd of The Flaming Lips on one of the most surreal days of my life.
That summer morning in 2014 I dropped CJ, my 10-year-old, at day camp. In search of some dopamine, I went to the neighboring record store to get the new Jack White album. But first I found Steven.
I kept reaching for my phone to text my best friend Molly, “HOLY SHIT!! Steven from The Flaming Lips is at Vintage Vinyl OMG!!” We lived for moments like this—a music hero ensconced in layers of weirdness would make her laugh.
And each time I reached for my phone, I remembered the biggest surreality of the day: I couldn’t text Molly. She was in a courtroom in her town 600 miles away, awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to Vehicular Assault, and Operation of a Vehicle Under the Influence of Alcohol.
I never would have predicted this scenario when Molly and I became friends 14 years prior through an online group. She was 20 and I was 28, and we were in different stages of life. I was a newlywed home owner starting my second career and she was working on her undergrad, but we shared a love of music and books that quickly bonded us. Soon, we were regularly traversing the 600 miles between us to attend concerts together: Wilco, Bruce Springsteen with Michael Stipe, The White Stripes, U2, Garbage, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, Chuck Berry, along with music shrines like the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and Sun Studio in Memphis. We could always find a reason to turn a concert in one of our cities into an adventure.
We sat in pre-dawn, sub-freezing temperatures for spots near the stage, got locked in a parking garage, nursed cuts and scrapes from questionable punk clubs, and even dodged a couple of fights through the years. We both had hot tempers when it came to bad concert behavior. She had my back when I shoved a guy in the face because he braced his hands on my shoulders while pogoing (In my defense, I was pregnant at the time) [And you let him off easy, in my opinion. -Jane]. She invited some loud talkers to meet us outside, so we had to dodge them to make our escape. We always skirted our way out of trouble.
Sometimes we turned those tempers on each other. While visiting me two years into our friendship, she hooked up with one of my husband’s friends. Even though I’d played matchmaker, I was hurt and jealous when she opted to spend most of her visit at his place. This culminated in Molly and I screaming at each other in my kitchen until I was so furious I kicked her out. She could stay with him or fly home early for all I cared.
Just as fast as we had exploded in anger, we made up when we realized we’d taken it that far. She stayed with me.
When I got pregnant with CJ, Molly was the Chosen Aunt, buying gifts and nicknaming the fetus Coco Monkeytoes in honor of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s daughter and the Beastie Boys song “Brass Monkey.”
While I was in labor I played a homemade CD from Molly, a curation of the songs she thought should be the first ones my baby heard.
Molly was in town before my C-section stitches dissolved. Having her in my home was wonderful, as I was slipping into what would become a life-threatening case of postpartum depression. It was so bad my husband missed enough work to endanger his job. She visited often and helped take the burden off of my husband a bit while I tried to balance motherhood, my catering company, and my mental health.
How could I remain friends with someone in jail for causing such a horrific drunk-driving accident.
In these days before easy and affordable texting, Molly and I emailed daily. She always told me to turn to her when I needed anything. I tried to convey just how bleak I felt, how unable to handle anything I had become.
“Yeah, I know how you feel,” she’d type before telling me about a co-worker who pissed her off, the latest incident of her mother drinking too much, or whatever thing was bothering her. I know I was terrible when it came to asking for help, and it was clear my message wasn’t getting through, which left me feeling unheard and unsupported.
Molly told me that at least I had a husband, which was more than she had as a single woman. That was enough to send me spiraling until I didn’t want to share anything with her. I wasn’t angry. I was just too depleted to risk another argument.
I stopped answering Molly’s emails without explaining why.
Molly wrote me a letter from jail calling a victim of her car crash a bitch.
My silence dragged on for months. I spent time in therapy, closed my business, whittled my life down to the bare minimum I could handle, which wasn’t much.
Sometimes Molly would leave rage-filled drunken comments on my blog.
While she had every right to be angry with me for ghosting, I had no desire to argue on the internet with anyone who was drunk. I did something very foreign to me: I set a boundary, telling Molly that I would delete her hateful messages and wouldn’t communicate with her while she was drinking.
That broke the ice and started a conversation. Just not one about my silence. We just went along like it didn’t happen.
And so it went for the next seven years. She got her master’s degree, fell in love and moved into his house, adopted some pets, and landed her dream job in an academic library. I raised CJ, settled into mom-and-wife life, and got a job writing for the local alt weekly newspaper. Molly and I returned to our frequent visits. We grew into competent, responsible adults. Mostly.
Molly went back and forth with her drinking. Sometimes she hit it hard, others she abstained for extended lengths of time, especially when she was in graduate school. That facade started cracking in 2011.
During a visit to Molly that summer, while CJ played with her dogs, Molly told me about a night when she walked home alone from happy hour because she was too drunk to drive. While walking through the park, she blacked out, waking up on the ground in the middle of the night with her purse missing.
The next morning her boyfriend Tom scoured the park and found her purse with everything intact. We laughed at her good luck, but I was horrified, grappling with what to say and coming up short. Plus, I didn’t want CJ to overhear anything. That was my excuse for staying quiet.
By the time we returned home I had convinced myself that Molly’s night in the park was just an isolated incident. It’s easy to do that with 600 miles between us.
Molly seemed fine when she visited for my birthday a year later, but during her visit six months after that it was clear that her drinking was a problem. It wasn’t my problem, though. At least, I didn’t act like it was. I convinced myself this time that we were both blowing off steam and having fun.
The night she arrived, we went to a bar where I occasionally DJed. It didn’t seem like we drank a lot—a couple of stouts and a shot of bourbon each. I wasn’t drunk, but Molly staggered around the bar, bummed a cigarette and lit up. The owner almost threw us out.
The next day Molly slept late, blaming the single shot of bourbon for her hangover.
A few nights later we started with friends at a brewery which should have been enough. But we accepted an invitation to go dancing at a club, which led to harder drinks, and an incident with both Molly and me smooching my business partner on the dance floor.
Molly slept through the next afternoon while I took CJ to the playground. Thinking back, I was embarrassed and baffled by the night before. I wasn’t a big drinker. None of the throw pillows in my house said “It’s wine o’clock somewhere”. But when I was with heavy-drinking friends, I would keep pace like a peer-pressured high schooler.
Molly asked me to write a character reference letter to the judge in her criminal case. But I wanted her to be punished.
Years later I’d realize that I really was like a child, who morphed my behavior to match who I was with in a pitch for validation. This kept me from accepting that I should have initiated a conversation with Molly about her drinking, my disordered reaction to it, and how we could fix it. But I knew enough about addiction to know that I couldn’t force Molly to change. I could only change my behavior.
I couldn’t be Molly’s drinking buddy ever again. I also couldn’t handle a screaming match about it. My solution: I would slowly distance myself after Molly’s visit—shorter, less frequent messages that stuck to superficial topics while I extracted my heart from our relationship.
That worked for six weeks.
On Mother’s Day morning, I was at my childhood home, getting dressed for a day of celebrating with my mom and grandmother, when my phone rang.
There had been an accident.
I UNDERSTAND THIS IS KIND OF TRICKY TO MAKE YOU PAY TO CONTINUE READING RIGHT AT THIS PIVOTAL MOMENT. BUT CONSIDER THAT IF YOU DO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER, THAT MONEY GOES TO WRITERS LIKE ROBIN. AND SHE HAD TO LIVE THROUGH THIS TO TELL YOU ABOUT IT. WHICH IS WORSE? THANK YOU FOR THINKING ABOUT IT, FRIENDS! -JANE
