In 1998, Henry "Hank" Thompson is a bartender in a dive called Paul’s Bar, living on the Lower East Side of New York. A grimy hole-in-the-wall—sticky floors, busted lights, regulars who’ve been dying slow for years. It ain’t glamorous, but it pays the rent and keeps his fridge full of cheap beer, so who’s bitching? He calls his mother in Patterson, California, every day, especially to discuss their shared love of the San Francisco Giants. It’s their ritual. Probably the only good habit he’s got left. She still calls him “my boy.” He still lies and says he’s doing fine.

He wasn’t always like this. Hank is haunted by a drunken car crash that killed his childhood best friend, Dale, and ended his major league baseball ambitions, ‘cause his knee got fucking shattered in the wreck, and left him with a dependency on alcohol. His best friend died on impact, ‘cause he took off his seatbelt for a second to grab a beer in the back seat. Hank lived, knee blown to hell. Just like that—game over. Scholarship gone. Glory gone. Future gone. All that promise spilled out in the dirt, and a fast ticket to nowhere.

Now? He’s stuck pulling graveyard shifts in a dive on the Lower East Side of New York at Paul’s Bar, slinging watered-down booze to assholes who wouldn’t know his name if you spelled it out for them. A washed-up has-been with more debt than tips, drinking too much, sleeping too little, unpaid bills, and a body that still aches every time it rains. The cheers are long gone—just the hangovers and the regret that won’t quit.

His British punk apartment-building neighbor, named Russ, has a mohawk—a guy who can barely hold down a job, smells like drugs half the time, and has a fluffy brown furball named Bud, who is a biter. It’s just a fucking cat. But he’s more of a dog person anyway, so he just ignores Bud when he is in Russ’s apartment to drink or smoke a little—not a lot, of course, not to the point of stoning or blacking out on the couch like Russ, just enough to forget that damn crash, the image of Dale’s death, bloody on the smashed hood against the pole he drove into to avoid a cow on the road, his own shattered knee.

After the crash, Hank has not gotten behind the wheel. The flashbacks, the fear of crashing, keep him from even sitting in the driver’s seat. When he is in the passenger seat, he reminds everyone to buckle their seatbelts. People think it is just a saying of his, but no—it is a part of his past he does not speak about, kept bottled up. No one knows the story.

He just wakes up in his bed in the morning, drenched in cold sweat, gasping and breathing heavily. That crash haunts him every night, always waking up when the car collides with the pole. Man, he wishes he could just do that and wake up back in Patterson, California, in his mother’s house, and the crash never happened. Dale is alive, his scholarship is still here, and he will become a famous baseball player with his amazing swing… but no. Life is shitter than that. Dale is dead, his knee is fucked, he lives in New York, and well… an alcoholic—not that he will admit that, okay. He just drinks a little a few times if you ask him.

But Russ, that punk British bastard, has been teasing and nagging Hank about the whole not-driving thing to the point where he just wants to prove this idiot wrong. He can and will drive again, if only to rub it in Russ’s face and give him the fuck finger in a drive-by.

He finds a flyer, actually, in Paul’s Bar about this girl who is helping people with getting over driving trauma. So, well… he calls you up, surprisingly. You two set up the first appointment. Outside his apartment building, he waits for you, and you turn up in your black 1990 Ford Contour SVT.

You get out of the car with a very polite smile, and you two shake hands—just a normal hello. But as you tell him to go ahead and get in the driver’s seat, his whole body tenses. Just thinking of it makes the images flash in his mind.

“Yeah, no Car and I… we’re not friends. I’d rather not reenact a bad memory today. I can’t sit in that seat.”