Only a few minutes to spare, so I decide to change my clothes while driving. One hand holds the wheel. The other helps me squirm out of my jeans and Stetson-scented sweater, which now also emanates the honeyed fragrance of my new girlfriend because we’d just made out until our lips went numb, both of us still unsure, at 16, how to get beyond lip work. My long-sleeved pink button-down is slung over the passenger seat next to me. Khaki pants are also there, somewhere.

I am gunning it east on Route 35, a four-lane highway, toward the town of Xenia, Ohio, aiming to arrive at Perkin’s Family Restaurant by midnight where I work the third shift. I bus tables, my first official job. It’s the Saturday after Christmas, so I’m thinking it’ll be a heavier-than-usual 2am bar rush. And thinking about how I hope no drunk, after knocking back a full pot of coffee or eating one of our massive cinnamon rolls drizzled in liquid sugar, throws up. Like last week. I had to rip into another box of rubber gloves, scrub the carpet and wring half-digested chunks into a bucket, dump the bucket into a sink, shake the remaining hunks out of the sink’s basket strainer and into the garbage, giving extra flicks of the wrist when the strainer just wouldn’t release that drunk’s stomach chunks. I’m hoping for a better night.

Now I’m shirtless and reaching for that pink button-down when I see a very orange road sign reflecting the words, “LEFT LANE ENDS MERGE RIGHT.” And immediately another sign: “SOBRIETY CHECKPOINT AHEAD”. They guide me into a gauntlet of orange pylons and a series of construction barrels topped with blazing gold lights flashing a dirge of irregular rhythms.

Rhythms matching the beating of my heart. Which stops. Then starts. Then stops. And then leaps.

At least that’s how my heart feels. I’m not sure this actually happens, though – this heart stopping and heart leaping – but this is how people usually describe such moments of utter panic.

Or how about this: my heart isn’t, as they say, in my mouth even. No, my sloshing, throbbing heart wants to spring out of my body, bypassing said mouth, using a severed, flailing aorta to reach for the driver’s side window crank (power windows were not a feature offered on the 1984 Chevy Cavalier) to roll down the window, use its other severed artery-arm to thrust itself out the window and then down the road behind me, bounding and yipping along like some cartooned creature that had been nipped one too many times in the schnoz and is now bouncing off into a cartooned horizon.

My heart is like that. Because I see the “SOBRIETY CHECKPOINT AHEAD” sign and there goes my heart.

Because I am wearing no shirt. I am wearing no pants. Only my tighty whitey Fruit of the Loom undies and tube socks. I am mid-change, and I am about to enter a sobriety checkpoint.

As my car rolls up and over a slight knoll, I press the brake with my socked right foot. A few hundred feet ahead, two sedans topped with rolling red and blue emergency lights emerge from the darkness, parked in the median. The sides of these vehicles reflect State Police emblems. Those emergency lights, and an eye-level spotlight whose exact source I cannot discern, reveal more cars parked in the median. On the highway, about a dozen pairs of brake lights precede me. Pylons hem me in. I have, of course, nowhere to exit.

The cassette deck’s been playing big hair rock – Night Ranger’s “Sing Me Away.” I press the “off” button. I must focus. I must dress.

First the shirt. While my left hand steers the car, my right grabs at the cotton-polyester blend button-down on the passenger seat. My hand attempts to wiggle its way through a sleeve.

It does so successfully. This right hand then grabs the steering wheel as my body leans forward, and the left hand and left arm contort their way behind my back until they find the same cotton-polyester blend and wiggle their way through the remaining sleeve, which easily skims over a forearm and bicep until the left hand, now a fist, pops out the end of the sleeve. Again, success.

My right foot fully compresses the brake and the car stops completely, behind other vehicles. Both hands seize the moment, get to work pushing pearly buttons through eyelets. In the dim light, my eyes watch those hands maneuver, but then they look up again, ahead at brake lights and the Troopers’ rolling reds and blues, then again at the hands and buttons, then again at brake lights. Those hands need to work faster.

To their credit, my hands now work almost automatically, giving my eyes and brain the latitude they need to compute the scene. A Trooper standing at the front of this line of cars, flashlight in hand, directs the lead car into the median.

Then, another Trooper behind a beaming flashlight leans in toward the car’s driver’s side window, and a few moments later the driver steps out of his vehicle. Meanwhile, the directing Trooper waves two more sets of brake lights through the checkpoint before stopping the next vehicle.

I feel my right thumb press the shirt’s bottom button through its corresponding eyelet. So I have successfully clothed one-half of my body. For a brief moment, I feel tension drain out of my shoulders. I might make it.

But the Trooper directing traffic, with a beckoning flick of his fingers, reels a few more vehicles through the checkpoint – quite possibly on to Perkin’s Family Restaurant where cluttered tables are not being bussed.

So my heart – which has apparently stayed with me – is beating rapidly, and again considers that yipping-down-the-cartooned-road thing. Because as quickly as my agile hands have done their work, I am now, somehow, already fifth in line.

My best guess is that somewhere, in the dusty annals where such things are recorded and preserved, Ohio ordinance states that a driver must be clothed while driving, and therefore would be advised to have clothes on when pulled over by a State Trooper. And I imagine that if a State Trooper has a gray Cavalier saddle up to his sobriety checkpoint just after midnight, just a few fair nights before New Year’s Eve, and finds that this gray junker is being guided down the road by a mostly-naked teenager whose stunned, vacant gaze just screams, I have no clue how I got here officer, and now I’m seeing everything in red-tinted triplicate because I’m going into shock, and please, please help me, and have you seen my shoes?,  the Trooper, if he’s worth his salt, is going to suspect impropriety, much less inebriation.

My right foot lets the Cavalier roll a few more feet. The signaling Trooper, who is most likely worth his salt, stops motioning long enough to lean his flashlight into the lead vehicle. I am fourth in line.

This, I conclude, is going to go badly for me.

Pants. I must have pants. But I have no idea where they are. My right hand reaches for the ceiling light, but my brain thinks better of it and redirects my hand to reach in front of the passenger seat, where it only gropes darkness. Then my hand shoves its way behind the seat, through taco wrappers, audiocassettes, books and notebooks, wax cups sticky with droplets of Mountain Dew.

There. My hand grabs hold of a bundle of cloth and pulls, until in my lap I have a wad of khaki fabric intertwined with a leather belt.

But, oh good God, what my eyes and brain now perceive: I am next in line.

My socked right foot continues to press the brake while my hands unroll the pants, atop my thighs and down my shins. But my eyes find that the pants’ rear pockets are on top, so my hands flip the pants and reroll them. Then my mind finds it had been mistaken, and I’d had the pants positioned correctly the first time, so my hands flip the fucking pants again even though it doesn’t matter, because what fathead isn’t going to notice that my hairy thighs aren’t actually within these makeshift chaps, and isn’t going to glimpse the tighty-whitied buttocks flaring out the sides, but then somehow be fooled because the pockets happen to be where one would expect pockets to be? Both of my hands, hot with terror, know nothing else to do now but iron out these chaps and align the belt as the Trooper waves me forward.

My right foot releases the brake pedal. Then presses it, then releases it, staccato. Tires roll, and the car lurches several feet. Lights beam into my eyes. My eyes squint. I try to smile, but my stupefied muscles become rigid.

Except the muscles in my left arm and hand. They know to crank the window down.

My heart, it again contemplates leaping out that window – another chance at escaping this nightmare may never, ever come again – but it steadies itself, with some help from my lungs, which now expand and contract slowly, slowly … My heart feigns composure, tries to trust at least for a moment that all will be well on the other side of this checkpoint. Because, I am in fact actually innocent here, aren’t I? As alert and as sober as sober can be?

My car stops again. The Trooper and his flashlight are just feet away me. Wintry air breezes through the open window, arousing goose bumps on my thighs. I realize now that I need to pee. And also that I have no idea where my wallet is.

The Trooper approaches the car and blinds me with his flashlight. I cannot discern much, just glimpses, fragments – a sleeve of his black overcoat, chin strap holding up a pale jaw, narrow brim of a Trooper hat, glint of a badge. For a moment, hidden behind the flashlight, the man has no eyes. He is a specter, drifting into this misadventure and cruelly unnerving this driver, and every driver, but just doing his job.

“Good evening,” the Trooper says.

I finally find his eyes, and they are young, but serious. With all my might, I hang onto those eyes with my gaze and will them not to break away, not to look down. For a moment, the Trooper’s eyes do remain tethered to mine, but then they beam past me, along with his light, into the passenger seat, then into the back seat.

“Good evening,” I say, my eyes chasing after his.

His light flits in and out of the car, as if he’s suddenly distracted and isn’t sure where to guide the thing, and in the same motion he steps back.

“Please follow the directions of the officer ahead.”

He nods and points his flashlight forward.

I say nothing, simply mirror his nod, remain stiff and stoic. But internally, I feel unsettled. Whether I’ll be allowed to go free or be carted down to the county jail, I so badly want to know how this ends.

My right foot releases the brake pedal, too quickly. The car lurches.

Ahead, a Trooper stands in the median, illuminated by the floodlight. He signals me forward with a gloved hand. To his right are the two patrol cars and then a small hatchback and a yellow sports car. Flashlights dash here and there. For a brief moment, I’m able to see a large man alongside the sports car, speaking with a Trooper. He is bearded, wide-eyed, hatless in the cold, animated in his speech.

The Trooper waving me forward looks identical to the one I’d just encountered – black coat, brimmed hat – though the floodlight makes him ethereal, a kind of shadowy, faceless wraith.

Past this Trooper I see an expanse of darkness, disrupted finally by streetlights and a stoplight and a green, oval beacon that reads Perkins. I’ve never wanted so badly to bus tables.

My lungs continue their measured expansion and contraction. My heart tries, but fails, to match this pace. I consider searching for my wallet, but when I look down, I find my hands are busy, alternately kneading the chaps and smoothing them out.

The Trooper beckons me to him.

My hands return to the steering wheel. My socked right foot decompresses the brake. I look for a place in the median to park my Cavalier, and I await the Trooper’s redirection.

But the Trooper just waves me forward.

As my foot timidly releases pressure from the break, just enough, my eyes seek his eyes – seek his assurance, seek his absolution – but the Trooper is already looking to the line of cars behind me.

I press on toward that Perkins beacon. I drive on (staying well under the speed limit) to all those cluttered tables and obnoxious drunks. I thank God in heaven. I swear an oath, take a vow: I’ll never again let some lusty girlfriend distract me from my worldly duties.

Tonight, I will gratefully bus tables, be delighted to pick through peoples’ waste, happily wipe up their gravy spills and clean up food that their unruly children tossed and spit up. I will gladly wear this pink shirt and these stiff khakis, praise the work of my arms and legs within them. Like a sinner who has seen the light, the coming of the Glory of the Lord, my heart leaps for joy for I am a spared soul.