The story of how I destroyed my life
by Tim Houp

I have often wondered when I might sit down and write about what has put me in the life situation that I am in and have been in since July 7, 2006. I guess today is the day. Some may ask why I am writing about this, others won’t care. If it helps just one person with a struggle they are going through in their life, then putting my personal struggle in writing is worth it. So now you may be scratching your head wondering what the heck I am talking about.

I am a 2 time Felon. Convicted twice of the same offence and while I haven’t served any time in prison, I have been on supervised probation since the first conviction on July 7, 2006. I was given 5 years supervised probation, fines and community service. It still burns me that they were felony convictions. Evidently in any other county in Missouri, other than Greene, my crime was a misdemeanor. My crime you may ask? I drove to work! No drugs (I don’t do drugs) and no alcohol involved just driving to work.

Okay, so both times I was charged with this Felonious crime, I was Driving While Revoked. I lost my license back in 2004 because of a second DWI within 5 years (5 year revocation). The irony of the DWI (misdemeanor) is that I was less than a mile from home and a sober driver ran a red light and almost killed me. I wasn’t seriously injured, but if he had hit the car about another foot farther into the car, I might have been. He got the ticket for the wreck, I was taken to jail for a DWI. If that’s not bad luck or a wakeup call, I don’t know what is!! Needless to say I’ve been a huge advocate of Taxi’s ever since. You will never catch me behind the wheel of a car again even after only just 1 beer. It’s not worth it!

The Felony Driving While Revoked convictions are what put me through a living hell the last 4 years. After the first one, I was at a loss. Living on my own, no girlfriend or anyone else willing to drive me to and from work. Between July of 2005 and November of 2006, I probably went thru 7 or 8 different jobs. There would be mornings I would wake up and just be sick to my stomach with fear I would get caught driving. The bus system here is not very good and can take an hour to 2 hours just to get somewhere. I knew I had to work to pay my rent, yet lost many of those jobs just because I’d get freaked out and just not show up to work, for fear of being caught driving again.

I finally got evicted from my apartment in November of 2006 and spent a week sneaking into the apartment at night (I kept the spare key) so I could sleep, then woke early enough to get showered and leave before the office opened as to not get caught. I got caught after a week and promised to be out the next morning as I actually was starting a new job. I left all my furniture and so on, only kept what I could fit in my car.

The job started out very well and my Dad gave me money to get a hotel room. I ended up living in the hotel for most of the next 6 months. It was next door to my workplace, so while expensive, it kept me from driving for the time. The job went well for a while and eventually thru roommates.com I found a place to live. Only problem, I was driving again and eventually my roommate convinced me to take another job, even though it was a longer drive. It was good advice, since at the current job it was a regular event for people to be smoking pot on the job, in the office. It was not a good work environment for a person on probation!

If you are not familiar with the conditions of Probation in the state of Missouri, you might not understand what it means to be on Supervised Probation. Here are a few of the conditions. You lose your right to vote. I was not able to vote in the last Presidential election which was very upsetting. You and anyone you live with cannot have alcohol anywhere in the home. You are not allowed to be in a bar (drinking or not), in fact, you cannot even be in the parking lot of a bar or liquor store. You cannot have any friends who are convicted felons (I had a bunch and didn’t know it!). You also cannot have a gun or a knife over so many inches in your possession or home as well. Your probation officer may enter your home without a subpoena at anytime day or night. You must see a probation officer, several times a week, month or whatever they decide is appropriate for your offence. And you can be required to give a urine sample to be tested for drugs at anytime. Plus you are required to pay the state $30 a month, for what reason I don’t know. It’s not fun.

It was October of 2007 and the new job was going well, but I was driving every day. I was driving on the highway which didn’t seem to freak me out as much at first. After a month, a guy that lived by me started working there, so he would drive me in my car every day and things were great. I had moved in with one of my buddies and things seemed to be going in the right direction for once. Until December, when one day I was awaiting the call from my friend that he was ready to go to work, a call that never came. My car had broken down and I was stuck. Unknown to me he had given notice, quit work, moved and never told me! So after trying to find more rides and eventually no one willing to take the extra 5 minutes to pick me up , I got my car fixed and started driving again.

On December 20th, 2007 it happened again. The month tab on my plates had faded and an officer stopped me to make sure everything was in order. I was honest and immediately told him when asked for a license, that I did not have one and was on a felony Driving While Revoked charge. He cuffed me and set me in the car, then called another officer to the scene. You see, he couldn’t figure out why it was a felony the first time!! They took out the law book and both kept shaking their heads and finally they let me go with just a ticket (first time I went straight to jail). They got an emergency call and told me to sit in my car until someone could pick me up. My roommate came with the trailer and we hauled my car home. It hasn’t moved since and actually probably won’t even run now!

Needless to say, I had to quit that job and was facing another court date. My roommate finally offered me a job working with him in his lawn business and I’ve been there ever since. I owed him so much money, that eventually he worked out a payment schedule, basically barter, work for rent and money owed. I finally got him paid off this last season. I didn’t go to court again until April 24th, 2009 where I was convicted of my second Felony Driving While Revoked offence. I was given 3 more years of probation (to run concurrently with my first), 150 hours community service and fines.

It’s been almost a year since the second conviction and I am beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel. My roommate helped me get my own apartment, I’m slowly getting the community service hours in, I might be able to actually get my license back this summer and sometime within the next year I should be eligible to be released from supervised probation. So if you’ve read this far, you must be wondering what good has come from this, what have I learned and how can this help someone else? First of all, there is no one to blame for any of this other than myself. I put myself in these situations and am paying the price for it. I’m lucky to be alive and there is one single thing that caused it all.

Alcohol and then driving after drinking it! For years I tried to blame other people, certain circumstances, luck….. you name it, I blamed it! After losing everything and watching other people it’s not hard to figure out. I have no one else to blame but me. I chose to drink, get in a car and drive. Even if I may have not been impaired in my mind, by law I was and that is all that matters. Fortunately, I never hurt anyone in an accident.

I lost most of my friends since I wasn’t going to the bars 4 or 5 nights a week, which is ok, because drinking “buddies” are really just that and partying every night will eventually cost you your job. Funny thing is, I didn’t go to bars because I wanted to drink, I went to meet women. It was just easier to communicate if you’d had a few drinks, or so I thought. I rarely drank at home, so not drinking at any time has never been a problem. I’m not addicted to it. Will I drink again? Sure, it’s not something I crave or care about, but a nice cold beer is refreshing every now and then. One good thing out of all this has been sitting back and watching people I know that are actual alcoholics. The first thing they try to do is bring you back into their level. Since they can’t control their drinking cravings, anyone who partied as hard as I did in the last 20 years certainly must be an alcoholic too.

What people don’t understand is that going to bars every night was part of my “radio” persona. I was Tim Austin “barman”. Going out drinking every night was part of my job, part of my success in Springfield radio, and my demise. It was so easy to party every night because I rarely ever had to buy my own drinks! I always had great ratings because I was out there every night drinking free beer with my listeners. Working at Rock stations, it was part of my core audiences’ lifestyle. I’d go out, pick up women, party with everyone and then talk about them on my show the next day. It proved to be a very successful strategy for several years, until the partying every night and women became more important than the job. It took over my life and it cost me my family. I was so busy partying, that I never took time to have regular or any dental checkups, so I have lost most of my teeth as well. It even got to a point in the late 90’s that the Morning show would call me in the morning to see if I was sleeping alone or got lucky the night before, crazy stuff. The DWI’s didn’t even really slow me down. They cost me my radio career, but I continued to be that “personality” for several years after I quit radio and to a point still am to this day. It took the Felony convictions for Driving While Revoked to wake me up. Having a Felony was very embarrassing to me and caused a major bout of low self esteem and depression. Being tagged as a “Felon” was something I never imagined would ever happen to me. It destroyed any self confidence I had.

It may sound like I’m in denial about drinking, but believe me I know what an addiction is. I smoke cigarettes and have tried on many occasions to quit. I don’t crave beer I can live without it, but cigarettes? At my low point in the summer of 2006, I would buy cigarettes before food. A daily meal would sometimes consist of a package of those 25 cent peanut butter crackers. I use to have over 1000 cd’s that I sold little by little to buy cigarettes. I pawned off whatever I had to pay rent and buy cigarettes, including 3 platinum albums I had been given by the record companies. That summer was truly the worst time of my life. Scared as hell I would go to jail with my first Driving Revoked Felony coming to court in July, I even missed my sons’ graduation from college because I couldn’t drive and was too depressed and embarrassed over my situation to find a single person to take me to Fulton for it. It’s something I will regret the rest of my life. I even considered taking my own life that summer, but I hate pain and realized that doing something that drastic wasn’t fair to my family and few friends I still had left. It would hurt them more than the pain I was feeling. It’s never an option!

All of this pain, depression, poverty and tears all comes back to one thing: a simple decision, the decision to drink and drive. I made the choice, I have paid a huge price for it and if nothing else at all that you take from reading this, please do this. Next time you go out with friends for drinks, as you walk to your car, see the red lights of a police car flashing. See yourself in handcuffs in the back of a police car. See yourself in the jail being fingerprinted and the embarrassment of calling someone to bail you out. Smell the stench of the guy who hasn’t showered in a week all hopped up on meth sitting next to you while you wait for your bail. Feel the stress you’ll feel waiting a year or more to go through court. See the breathalyzer you will have to blow into to start your car after you get your license back. Then take out your cell phone and CALL A TAXI!!! Believe me, the $10 taxi ride is much easier to cope with than the thousands driving drunk will cost you in the end. Don’t Drink And Drive!! It’s a life changing decision, not a catch phrase!

I didn’t write this for sympathy, I’m not asking for anything from anyone except maybe forgiveness from those I’ve hurt. I wrote this in hopes it might help someone else and for people who may not really know me well to understand “Why I Am At, Where I Am At”.

Tim