Justin Timberlake and Just One Martini

It's not funny. But I'm laughing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

I shouldn’t laugh about Justin Timberlake’s arrest for drunk driving. But unlike most people I know, you will never hear me say,

“I’m a good person!”

Because I’m not. I’m a person. It’s as far as I’ll go.

I’m laughing, and it’s terrible. If you’re judging me about it, don’t worry. I am judging myself too. I haven’t even written this essay and already it’s a bad idea.

Drunk driving is never funny. My first love was killed in his early twenties by a drunk driver. I was severely injured by one when I was sixteen and dumb enough to get in the guy’s truck, even as I noticed empty Budweiser cans littering the floorboards. I know more than one person who has gone to jail after killing someone while drunk behind the wheel.

While we’re at it, I’ve never understood our justice system when it comes to a DWI.

Two people take the same action: they both get in their car while over the legal limit. One gets unlucky and kills someone. The other gets pulled over.

One person is facing serious jail time for vehicular manslaughter. Another person is calling his lawyer, not in terrible legal danger because it’s his first offense.

The result of the crime is what’s judged, not the original action. I know it’s like every other crime, but when it comes to a DWI, this has always rubbed me the wrong way.

---

Now that we’ve established how unfunny drunk driving is, I make my plea:

Please, may an arrest for drunk driving be funny? Because I cannot stop laughing this morning over reports of Timberlake’s.

The best thing about Uber is that nobody of means, as in those of us with a credit card and a smartphone, need ever drive drunk again. There is no longer any excuse for it.

Forget Uber, Timberlake is rich enough to employ a fulltime chauffer.

I think it’s safe to say Timberlake has means. He’d have to, because he was driving a 2025 BMW in June of 2024, which somehow makes his actions exponentially more obnoxious.

Does he have to drive the newest car in the world, just to show us he can get it? Must he drive at all? Must we all fear for our lives because he’s so famous, driving himself somewhere is a radical act?

But all these obnoxious details aside, here’s the thing that killed me:

“I had one martini.”

If I hadn’t read what he’d said after he was pulled over, I would’ve just muttered to myself about what an insufferable jackass he is and moved on with my day, happy he didn’t kill anyone. I would have wondered why, with all the money in the world, he couldn’t just call an Uber.

What’s funny is one martini.

Oh, yes. I know all about one martini. Justin Timberlake is not the first person felled by one martini.

I once had two drinks and passed out. When everyone was yelling at me later, I kept saying “I only had two drinks!”

They were in solo cups filled with vodka.

Oh, the lies we tell ourselves. Nobody else believes us.

---

I don’t drink anymore, but I do have one circle of friends I still treasure who drink together. I used to drink with them. Now I club soda with them.

None of them drink like I did. They’re like Secret Service, normal drinkers. As in, a martini or two. And when I first started drinking with them, I pretended that I, too, was a normal drinker.

They were quicky disabused of this notion, but it was fun to pretend for a while. Looking back, I realize my ability to have just a couple of drinks was tempered by the quantity of opiates I was ingesting. This made one or two drinks possible. If you’re high, you don’t need as much booze to get you there.

Remembering this time and how I’d get in my car afterwards is almost enough to shut me up. I should close the laptop, take a break, and come back to the essay I was writing earlier. I do not want to report on my driving while intoxicated.

I have done exactly what Justin Timberlake allegedly did, and more than once; I did it often.

I feel genuinely ashamed of myself. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing to feel shame for something like this. Some shame is good. I need it to temper the outrageous arrogance which accompanies drug addiction and alcoholism.

I was all I thought about. The rest of humanity—even people I loved—were bit players in my self-deluded, self-centered (there’s a theme developing here) state of being.

Unfunny in the extreme.

---

I don’t know if I will ever understand the paradox of being an addict. I think the best I can come up with is that it’s a brain disorder with the most unattractive symptoms on earth.

It’s difficult to accept that along with the compulsion I feel when the disease is active—nothing feels like a choice, getting the elusive “enough” in my system is what drives me above all else—the disease carries with it some truly wretched behavior.

Long before I was a junkie, I was aware I had the disease of addiction. And for almost two decades, I didn’t drink or use other drugs.

But at one point I lived briefly with an active junkie. I was in such denial about it I pretended I didn’t know.

Right before we broke up, he owed me money for rent. He had it and wouldn’t pay me. When I was furiously lobbying him to give me what he owed, he said,

“Come on. Don’t be an asshole about this.”

I looked at him like he was from another planet.

“You’re calling me the asshole here?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said sincerely.

At the time, I found his response beyond comprehension. I couldn’t imagine any circumstance where I owed money to someone, had the money, refused to give it to them, and then called them an asshole for wanting to be paid back.

There was a complete absence of shame on his part.

This is no way made sense. Even so, he experienced nothing but a dogged determination to shut me up. He wasn’t giving me the money.

Twenty years later, when my daily dope bundle went from one ($100) to two ($200) and finally three, I finally understood.

My old boyfriend needed the money. He couldn’t pay his share of the rent, because if he did, he’d get sick.

---

I was treating my husband exactly as the old boyfriend treated me: like an ATM.

Secret Service was the jerk in our marriage. He was unwilling to let me blow through a second retirement account he’d worked his entire adult life to earn. I was so resentful he wouldn’t cough up more cash.

When he sent me to rehab in 2015, I sincerely believed the greatest problem we had was a financial one.

It’s staggering, the amount of harm I caused. I’m still making it up to him and imagine I will for some time. There are things I did over which I do feel shame, and I don’t mind having it.

I don’t mind because it’s a reminder I could go right back to living like that again, and I do not want to do that.

This kind of shame isn’t the battery acid that eats away at me. I look back at myself then and recommit to behaving differently today. I’m motivated because I’m changing. I don’t live like I used to, and I don’t look to him to get me out of every financial jam. I’m finally learning to make a living myself, just a few years before most people my age retire.

Better late than never.

---

Two opposing things are true at the same time:

There are stronger words than jerk which you can truthfully apply to me. Self-centeredness is a huge part of my make-up. And I understand the terrible boyfriend needing the money now. He was suffering.

We both have the same brain disease.

The brain is a tricky thing. I would love to live long enough to find out if the self-centered part of the disease of addiction could be pinpointed by science. I’d love to know if we develop a brain injury, of sorts, that makes us such unrepentant, self-serving fools without an inkling of honest self-awareness.

Because it’s not just alcoholics who develop bad behavior. Other brain injuries do as well.

My cousin Marjorie Nelson, who is a fine writer, wrote a fascinating essay about the side effects of Alzheimer’s in our writers group. One of them I’d never heard before is that many Alzheimer patients get addicted to porn.

I wonder how many Alzheimer’s families suffer with the shame of a loved one’s porn addiction but are afraid to talk about it. They don’t want others to know. But something about their loved one’s brain disease made this happen.

Michael Hutchence, the late lead singer of INXS and one of my Dead Imaginary Boyfriends (a future essay) was in a relationship with Helena Christensen, the Danish supermodel. They were bicycling together in Denmark when he was struck by a cabdriver and hit his head.

After the accident, it was reported his personality changed. He became angry and short-tempered, something uncharacteristic of his previous self.

And you certainly don’t have to be an alcoholic to drive drunk or have awful behavior. Plenty of normal drinkers get drunk and drive, and Timberlake may be just that: a regular drinker who made a very bad decision while under the influence.

The problem with alcohol is it leads to bad decision making, and there’s none worse than getting into a car saying the famous last words,

“I’m fine.”

Well, you’re fine now. An hour later, when you’ve survived the crash you caused, and watch emergency workers pry a dead body from the other car, you won’t believe what just happened. Chances are you’ll never be fine again. It’s not just alcoholics who kill people by drinking.

It’s ironic that cigarettes have a warning label, but they take years to kill you. There’s no warning label on a bottle of wine stating,

“May lead to poor decisions, some of which may ruin both your life and the lives of others.”

Maybe getting drunk is a tiny, temporary brain injury.

---

Now about that one martini.

My friend Dara, in the circle of normal drinkers, came up with a limit for our martini drinking years ago: two martinis a night. The hangovers were too atrocious if we drank more.

Well, this was all well and good at the White Horse, which is where we did most of our drinking. It was our favorite spot, near the theatre at HB Playwrights. But occasionally, we’d go drink somewhere else, and that’s where the two-martini rule ran into trouble.

The martinis at the White Horse came in small martini glasses, the old-fashioned kind. They held two ounces. The classic martini is straight booze; vermouth is not a mixer. Two ounces of alcohol is quite enough for one drink.

But there was a place down Hudson Street, now mercifully closed, that served martinis in a much larger glass. They held at least four ounces; maybe six. If you had two martinis, it was like drinking eight-twelve shots of vodka.

And it seems the fancier the place, the larger the martini glass. I swear we were somewhere once that had an eight-ounce martini glass. I have a tolerance for substances which could kill ten people. Even I would be in trouble after having two martinis in that joint.

All to say, it’s perfectly possible Justin Timberlake had one martini in an eight-ounce glass, because I don’t think he drinks in dive bars, especially not in Sag Harbor.

If you’re not from New York, the Hamptons are the playground of the very rich. I’ve spent a lot of time there, but not on my own dime.

I just had one martini, Officer.

Epic lies only we believe.

---

If I had to teach teenagers about drunk driving, what I’d tell them is to always have a plan about how to get home. Then have a backup plan. If you plan before you ingest a substance, all you have to do is stick to it. It’s a good practice to start.

Timberlake may, of course, have been the recipient of a fancy-pants ten-ounce martini. But he’s still in the doghouse with me. He was smart enough not to take a breathalyzer, not to sign the paperwork, and to lawyer up.

I live in a contrary state. Shame is terrible, and it’s good to have a little. Perhaps, like me, Timberlake could use some himself.

He may not know it, but he’s lucky like me. Nobody died as a result of our idiocy.