Sushi and drunk driving

Our plans for last Saturday night were for a low key evening with our friends Barry and Maria. Little did we know that it would turn into a harrowing encounter with a drunken sushi delivery man who kept singing the same Swedish love song over and over and over again. Is that what you expect after reading the title of this week’s blog entry? Well, titles are only there to get your attention. The real story went something like this…

We were thinking about a few games of darts, maybe a firepot in the back yard and laying out a nice spread of sushi, sake, and Japanese beer with Barry and Maria. Well, even with the deluxe new kitchen that we just had installed I’m still a bit a sushi neophyte and certainly don’t qualify as sushi chef (yet), so the plan was to call our local sushi delivery guy - The Sushi Man! At about 7:30, I cracked my first beer and hopped into the shower after a nice long run with the Sage. It was time to relax. By the time that Barry and Maria rolled up on their bikes at 8:15, I was already working on my second beer.

A few drinks were handed out to Barry, Maria, and Beth and we pulled up the menu of The SushiMan on the Internet (http://www.sushiman.nl/sushimenu.html) to figure out our order. Wow! What a spread! This was going to be a feast!

But when Maria dialed the number and was connected to the Sushiman, we all saw the utter look of horror cross her face. It was a recording – the Sushi Man was closed for his holiday….he was gone for the entire week. Complete devastation! A frantic search of the internet revealed only one other Sushi delivery joint in Amsterdam and there was no way that they would bring their little delivery scooter all the way out here to Haarlem.

Now, I understand that the gravity of this situation might escape some of you. I mean, it's only food, right? But there are those among you who truely understand this dilema (is Sue Cox still in the audience?) But we had sushi on the brain. It was like a deepest, darkest desire at that point. The notion of some other sort of delivery food such as pizza or Turkish shoarma was almost revolting. There would be no substitute. There could be no substitute. We needed sushi.

Our favorite Japanese restaurant here in Haarlem serves sushi, but it is more of a Benihana type setup, with large grills and chef shows….hardly a take-away kind of place. But it was our only hope, so we gave them a call to see if they could put together a sushi platter for home dining. With much relief, the girl on the other end of the line said that she could help us out. It would be a bit expensive, but she would see what she could do to satisfy our craving.

It is less than 3 kilometers from our house to the center of Haarlem and I can count on one hand the number of times that I have driven it. After all, we're now living in Holland. We bike everywhere under 15 kilometers....and some places further than that. But tonight the front tire of my bike was flat and we were in a hurry. So with no further thought, I took the last deep pull from my beer before Barry and I jumped into the car to go pick up the order.

Do you see where this is going yet? Funny how this type of shit happens to me, isn’t it?

Barry and I were pumped up, the music was going and we were having a raucous little chat as we rounded the corner just beyond Haarlem’s Central Train Station.

What the ....!

There they were. Lined up in the middle of the road, blocking any possibility of turning onto a side street. Three uniformed police officers were directing all traffic into the drinking-driving checkpoint.

.

So, at 8:20 on Saturday night, stinking like beer, I pulled the car over.

A gruff, no-nonsense officer - not a day over 25 years old - approached the window and started to rattle off his well rehearsed speech about the drunken driving checkpoint. In Dutch. I began fumbling around the car looking for my (illegal) US drivers license and generally didn’t catch a word of what he was saying. By the time that I found my wallet he had grown a bit impatient with me. It took me another minute of confusion to realize that he was not at all interested in my license (thank god!) , but only trying to get me to follow some apparently simple, and fast procedures to test for impairment.

But when I didn’t answer him directly, he stopped and quietly sized me up. He seemed to sense the concern on my face, and surely smelled the beer on my breath. He finally asked me in perfect English…”Have you had any alcohol to drink today?”

A rather unpleasant experience 22 years ago at IUP flashed through my mind...but it didn’t stop my lips from moving. “Yes sir. A half a beer,” I lied.

He let out a condescending, “hrmmph” that I knew meant, “Well, we’ll see about that now won’t we you foreign bastard.” He then pushed a dark little contraption into my face and told me to take a deep breath and blow into the tube until I hear it ‘click’. Don’t ask me how, but I misunderstood these simple instructions and took my deep breath in through the tube. Big mistake! Hardly any freaking air came into my lungs and when I tried to act nonchalant and began exhaling back into the tube I knew that I didn’t have nearly enough air to reach the ‘click’ point. I was sure that he already sensed that I was drunk so I dug as deep as I could and kept exhaling until the damned thing finally ‘clicked’. I wonder if he noticed that I almost passed out in the process.

He stood there, looking at the display on the little black contraption. I looked at him. He looked at me. He looked back at the contraption.

“It’s ok,” he finally said with a tinge of disappointment in his voice. Then he shook his head and added with forced pleasantness, “Please pull back into the traffic lane and have a nice evening.”

The blood alcohol limit for drivers in The Netherlands is .05% (it’s .08% in the US). Looking at a chart on Wikipedia, I would guess that my BOC was pushing .04% …except that maybe most of the last beer was still in my stomach and not yet in my blood. I certainly didn’t feel impaired and never even think about it here because I am always on the bike if I’m out and about after drinking. But the more that I think about it, the more thankful that I am for that little black contraption that officially measured my BOC. If the officer had just gone on probable cause (smell, nerves, etc.), I’d have been spending the night in jail.

But all is well that ends well. The sushi was delicious, the night was full of laughter with friends and once the car was parked, the warm sake was excellent.