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A Day in the Life
© Loco Nunca Enterprises.
All Rights Reserved.
Stupid as stealing from Target was, getting caught for that wasn’t the closest I’ve come to going to jail. That came a few weeks later when I was driving Richie and Johnny back from the north side after buying a particularly sickly-looking plastic bag of junk from Cathy. She had moved from the east side to a suburb off the highway after some dealer a block away had been raided. I made the mistake of going through Montopolis again because it was the quickest route home.
This probably wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem if it weren’t for my horrible car, a 1995 Ford Escort hatchback with a bright teal paintjob and factory-optional spoiler with rims the first owner had obviously cared a lot about. The car was not my first choice, and apart from being needlessly flashy, it looked and ran like shit. Three weeks after I’d gotten the damn thing this dumb girl backed into the passenger side with her SUV, breaking the mirror and denting the door so badly that you couldn’t open it. In another impressive display of my own idiocy I’d told her I wouldn’t report it to my insurance company if she gave me forty bucks, and she was happy to oblige. I still have to drive that horrible shitbox and it breaks down about once a week, usually when traffic is at its busiest and most dangerous, which in Austin seems to be most of the fucking day. I often pray that someone will blindside me or something for the insurance payout. Even if it killed me, at least I wouldn’t have to use that horrible machine anymore.
Anyway, I was driving said shitbox through Montopolis when out of nowhere I see police lights flashing behind me, and immediately freak out. Johnny shoves his balloon in his asscrack with surprising grace and I start yelling at Richie to do something with our inferior but far more noticeable product. As I pull over I see him move just slightly but don’t see what he does with the baggie, and he does nothing to reassure me. When I finally bring the car to a stop I turn around to look behind us and realize there is not just one, but four police cars parked menacingly at my rear. My heart explodes in my chest and I start sweating uncontrollably. I was entirely sure that I was about to go to prison and that my life as I know it was over. In prison, they use people like me as Monopoly money.
The officers got out of their vehicles and the tallest, most Aryan-looking motherfucker I have ever seen walked up to my window while the other three hovered a few feet back. I could feel his eyes burning at me behind his ever-so-stylish mirrored Aviator frames. There was no time to wonder why they were each driving their own car before The Aryan tapped on my window and I rolled it down.
He asked for my license and insurance and after some fumbling I found them both and handed them over. My fingers had become gelatin by then, the fear only exacerbated by the fact I hadn’t had any heroin yet that day. He checked my documents with the kind of severity usually found only at border crossings, and with an unsatisfied glare asked me what I was doing in that part of town. I had not considered that two blisteringly white college kids might have looked at least somewhat suspicious driving a forty-year-old scar-faced Hispanic guy through a predominantly minority-inhabited neighborhood. My voice cracked like I was going through puberty again as I told him we were just giving our friend a ride home. The Aryan gave me a look that made me question my ability to speak human language and asked me to get out of the car.
As I stepped out into the May heat one of the other cops, a short lesbian with a buzzcut, grabbed me by the shoulders and sat me on the curb. I briefly entertained the fact that this woman probably goes to her barber and asks for the most stereotypical hairdo he can give her. “What do you have to make me look overly masculine and will guarantee anyone I meet will assume I’m completely humorous,” I imagine her saying. “No, no fauxhawks. I’m a professional.”
My nervousness-induced fantasy was interrupted by The Aryan pulling Johnny violently out of the passenger seat. Richie was still in the back and the look on his face radiated a Zen-like control that was so convincing that I started to calm down a little. The cops seemed to forget about him as they hauled Johnny over to the embankment of patrol cars and shoved him up against one of their doors.
Officer Bulldyke asked me in a scrotum-tightening voice if there was anything in the car she should know about. I was confused as to why Richie was still in the backseat. I said no, there was nothing, and I saw the other two cops, a pigfaced A-type and a shrimpy black dude, keeping Johnny pinned firmly in place. They asked him if there was anything in his pockets and he told them he had an unused syringe in his left one. Because I am a colossal pussy I pretended I didn’t know about this and yelled at him across the gap in the cars. He looked pissed but I could tell he knew what I was trying to do: Richie and I were just two upstanding young citizens giving a semi-homeless ex-con a ride to his house. Of course. Johnny started to play along pitifully accordingly. “They didn’t know about the needle,” he said. “I told them I was clean.” The cops were obviously not buying it.
Finally Pigface told The Aryan to get Richie out of the car, and he extracted him gently. I was having a religious experience as I prayed frantically to any god that might possibly be hanging around that Richie had done something to hide our baggie. He got out and The Aryan frisked him so thoroughly they could be on a date. Finding nothing, he sat Richie on the curb as well.
Pigface and Officer Bulldyke traded places. She said something I couldn’t hear to Johnny and I watched him start taking off his clothes. As he stood there practically in the middle of the road in nothing but his disgustingly stained boxers Pigface got up really close to me and asked why I was so nervous. If I didn’t have anything in the car, he asked, why did I look so worried?
“I don’t do well with authority,” I said. I asked him why we’d been pulled over by four cop cars. Did we look that dangerous?
“Slow day,” he says, and I wished nothing but the most painful possible death upon him. I hoped from the bottom of my heart that this man would one day be shot in the head by a drunken husband during a domestic disturbance, though I did not vocalize these feelings.
Officer Bulldyke and The Shrimp, who still hadn’t said a single word the whole time, seemed satisfied by Johnny’s bizarre striptease and told him to put his clothes back on. I marveled at the strength of his anal column for not dropping out his balloon, but when I think about all the time he’d spent in County, the clenching seems like it would probably be second nature.
The Shrimp took Johnny’s syringe and put it in his car. Richie and I were still on the sidewalk and I could feel the itch of ants creeping somewhere on my lower back, but I didn’t move. I was paralyzed but the fear was starting to dissipate, though I was still not sure if Johnny was in trouble. Conceivably he could be a diabetic or something I think before realizing that diabetics probably don’t have track marks on their necks.
I’d been expecting it for a while, so I was only mildly surprised when Pigface and The Aryan flung open both doors on my shitbox to start digging through it like they were expecting Christmas presents. I hate the car, but I couldn’t stand to see her violated by police officers, especially when I knew nothing I’d said could be construed as consent. I thought about it twice though and decided not to worry too much about that just yet. I was far more worried about Pigface and The Aryan’s potential findings than the authorization of their search.
Still, Richie’s apparent detachment to the whole situation was spurring a strange sense of confidence in me. I stopped shaking quite so badly, at least as much as I could 24 hours into withdrawal. Maybe he’d found a good spot, I thought. Maybe we’ll make it out of this alright. Maybe I won’t spend the next few years in jail getting my ass traded for cigarettes.
Pigface and The Aryan withdrew themselves from the car with the gentility and sentiment of multiple rapists pulling out before leaving any evidence. Both of them looked perplexed. I knew both they and I were expecting something to turn up, but they emerged empty-handed. Pigface waved to Officer Bulldyke and The Shrimp and motioned for them to come and do a search for themselves. Before waddling over, Officer Bulldyke looked to see if she needed to do anything about Johnny. He just sat on the hot asphalt, staring blankly ahead. I could tell he wasn’t about to run anywhere as long as he thought his heroin was going to remain unfound. Officer Bulldyke seemed to understand this psychically and went to inspect the car as directed. It was blindingly bright and painfully hot outside, it being mid-May in central Texas, but she unstrapped a flashlight from her Batman utility belt and went to town.
Another ten minutes passed and no one said a single word. Johnny looked sick, Richie looked completely disinterested, all four cops looked upset and I was nearly ready to piss myself, the anticipation was so heavy. The heat bore down on my neck and I knew I would be sunburned the next day.
Finally, Officer Bulldyke extracted herself from the back of my little green shitbox. With grave severity, she shook her head at her three compatriots. She transitioned into slow motion in front of me, and with each shake of the head, I heard the sound of locks clicking free. The policemen cursed themselves silently and, quicker than I could account for, Pigface and The Shrimp got in their cars and sat there, glaring. Officer Bulldyke pulled Johnny up from the curb and pushed him back towards my car with a righteous swagger. The disappointment on her face reminded me of how sharks must feel after tasting blood and then watch their prey get pulled from the water at the last second.
The Aryan told me and Richie to stand up, and we lined up next to Johnny as Officer Bulldyke got in her car. I heard the engines on the other two cars start up. Pigface, The Shrimp, and her all drove off with far less fanfare than preceded their arrival, and as they gunned down the road The Aryan removed a tiny notebook from the pocket on his shirt. Though his voice said something to the effect of I’m letting you go with a ticket for a lane change with failure to signal, all I heard was the Hallelujah chorus echoing in my eardrums. The joy in my heart swelled and I wanted to be friends with the entire fucking world. The Aryan handed me the ticket, gave me one last suspicious once-over, and got in his car, driving away to what I can only assume was a planning commission meeting at Bergen-Belsen.
Nobody said anything as we climbed back into the car. Johnny looked like he was about to throw up, and I can’t say I blamed him. We sat in silence for a few seconds before I finally turned around and looked Richie dead in the eyes. Wordlessly, he dipped a finger in the crack between the seat and the back cushion and pulled out the baggie of heroin, which looked warm but none the worse for the wear.
My eyes widened as he stuffed put the baggie into his pocket. It was a terrible hiding spot. If the cops hadn’t had the collective IQ of a squeezed grapefruit, we’d have been fucked. How the fuck could he have been so calm about the whole thing? We could have gone to jail, for fuck’s sake! I was screaming at this point, continuing with a general theme of the day.
There was nothing in Richie’s eyes that suggested he was registering my anger. Without looking directly at me, he pulled from his other pocket a bag of small, white, ellipsoid pills.
“Xanax?” he offered. As I took one from him and started to drive off, I laughed. I did not stop laughing until we got to Johnny’s house, wondering with all my fucking heart how I had gotten myself into this mess.