“Oh…Trey…man, I was just walking home.”
See, I poured out his weed.
I know, there are those who’d think that was a bigger crime than anything I could have arrested him for, but hear me out…I was actually trying to help society.
I’m heading back into town following a car that might be a drunk driver. The car had swerved just enough for me to notice it so I follow long enough to decide the driver isn’t drunk and then I’m planning on getting some gas and maybe a soda or two and a bags of chips and some beef jerky…and maybe a donut along with some cheese crackers and –
“Whoa! What the fuck?”
Yeah, I talk to myself in the car. Usually, it’s a soliloquy on the day’s events – politics, my moronic professor in my Master’s Program (more on that soon), what a waste local city politics is, etcetera. Lately my self-involved diatribes have been about the ravages being visited upon the publishing industry. Anyway, I’m fairly deep into a solo conversation – sort of a verbal onanism – when there is suddenly a man in front of me.
Understand, I’m in the squad car…on the roadway? And he…well, wasn’t. Standing in the roadway, sans car, and even from inside my squad, I can smell the drunkenness. Damn, I think, a drunk wants to interrupt my jerky and cheese crackers and whatnot? That’s bullshit. So maybe I’ll just drive around him and ignore him, he’ll get home okay.
Don’t make it a half-block before I have visions of him getting hit and splattered and killed. So I turn around and get back to him just as dispatch calls the local city coppers about a drunk on the street.
“Yeah, I got him,” I say. “He’s not on Main, he’s here at Crockett and Bowie.”
“Maybe he lives right there,” one of the city officers says.
The city guys are talking about a different local drunk who once said he wanted to kill himself and was going to jump. Problem was, he was about six feet up in a tree. Not much of a death jump.
“Not him,” I say, as I realize I know the guy. “Ricky. What’s happening?”
He grins. “I been drinking.”
“I see that.”
“I’m walking home.”
“I see that.”
“What’choo arresting me for?”
“No cuffs, buddy, I’m just gonna take you home so you don’t get hit. Call it Trey’s Taxi Service.”
He kind of stares at me, bleary eyed, and then nods. “Cool. Ain’t never ridden in the front of a police car before.”
So he staggers and climbs in and immediately, his eu de cologne gets all over my car. It’s gonna take me a week to get his funk outta there.
Per procedure, I tell dispatch who I’ve got and where I’m going and what’s going on. Dispatch gets cranky when they don’t know those things…worried about me getting shot blah blah blah.
Then I get this from dispatch: “Deputy, are you clear for traffic?”
Crap on a shingle. Nothing good comes from radio traffic like that. It’s like realizing there’s a squad car in front of your house at 2 in the morning. Bad bad voodoo, baby. What it means, in coded dispatch language, is: ‘Did you know the drunk in your car has a warrant?’
Damnit. “Ricky, you gotta warrant?”
“Fuck, no!”
“Are you sure?”
“Fuck. No.”
“If you had a warrant, whose would it be?”
A loooooonnnnnggg pause. “Fuck, Trey, I was just walking home.”
“Well…walk’s gonna be a little longer now.”
So he puts his hands out and I go to cuff him up. Then he snatches his hands back and I tense up. I have no idea what’s coming, what he’s doing, or why he’s hesitating, but that kind of twitchy shit makes me nervous.
“You gonna charge me?”
“With?” I ask, though I have a decent idea.
He stares at me.
“Tell you what, let’s see how much we’re talking about and then we’ll decide. But I’ll give you some rhythm ‘cause you were honest with me.”
It’s my standard thing, giving people a break on marijuana when it’s not much. See, this is where I’m helping society. I think the jails are waaaaaaay overcrowded with personal use marijuana arrests. I think they clog the system like a backed up toilet and there ain’t no way in fucking hell a couple of joints does any more damage than the six packs and fifths of whiskey which we, as a society, happily drown ourselves.
Making marijuana illegal was a bogus argument created on a need to build empires within a bureaucracy. Now, 80 years later, it’s still bogus. Alcohol kills tons more people than dope, causes tons more roadway accidents, and exacts a higher cost to society.
Yeah, call me Peter Tosh…. “Leeegaliiiiiize iiiiit.” boom-chicka-boom-chicka. Imagine me singing with a Jamaican accent.
Meanwhile, back at our story line, Ricky pulls out a dented and cracked pipe which is just sad in a ‘I’m so poor I can’t even afford a decent hitter pipe’ kind of way, and a tiny little bit of weed. He’s been through the system and he knows it’s much better to cough up the ganja to the road officer than it is to be found with it inside the jail. That’s a whole other steaming pile of crap with which he’d have to deal.
I put the pipe in my pocket and dumped the weed in the road.
“Oh…Trey…man, I was just walking home.”
“Yeah…well…next time you better walk faster.”
And off we go, Peter Tosh’s reggae bouncing around in my head. “Leeegaliiiiiize iiiiit.”
boom-chicka-boom-chicka
