I was a horrible person in 1995. My sense of responsibility was non-existent. I laughed at every bill that arrived in the mail. The fate of the envelope was one of two possibilities: opened and thrown away or unopened and placed in a growing pile. My financial situation was comparable to a Baghdad chandelier maker during Desert Storm. I felt like a truck driver who had jack-knifed his 18-wheeler and the ass end of the trailer was facing 45 degrees from the cabin—a point of no return. No matter what I tried to do to rectify my situation, it was pointless.
If potential success was measured in water, God let me fill up my bathtub and then pulled the plug in April 1994. I had dropped out of the Aerospace Engineering program at Texas A&M University, because of two reasons: I found out I was two inches too tall for the Space Shuttle, and I ran out of money. So I moved back to San Antonio for a few months, ultimately had to abandon everything and hopped on an Amtrak train bound for Daytona Beach, FL.
My life changed dramatically: Thursday Thermodynamics Pizza Night became Wet T-Shirt Contest at Razzles. Gone were the dreams of terraforming the surface of Mars into a hospitable ecosystem and replaced by large quantities of beer, shitty cover bands, lame raves in Orlando, and menial jobs.
I was employed at Aunt Catfish Restaurant on the Halifax River as a waiter. Tourist loved the overpriced fried crap, and waited up to three hours in the Florida sun for the experience of eating coconut shrimp and cornbread and the privilege of drinking super sweet tea out of Mason jars. To top off my misery, I had to introduce myself as Cousin Dan, because they wanted everyone to believe that we were all relatives of ole Aunt Catfish.
The only thing going for me was that I owned a baby blue 80’ Ford Mustang with cobra decals, spokes and a leather LeBra on the headlights and was making payments on a black 84’ Chevy Camaro. My credit was so horrible that I couldn’t even get a landline telephone in my name. I didn’t have any savings, so I was forced to get a $3,000 loan for the Camaro through a cutthroat used car dealer that required a payment of $75 in cash every Friday or he would repossess the vehicle. My bitchin’ Camaro would have been a lot cooler if it had a working stereo, an air conditioner, and I had a flux capacitor and an 18 gigawatt generator to transport me back to 1984 when a Camaro was “cool”.
The 80’ Mustang on the other hand was never hip, but it was free. My Uncle Howie had used it for years, handed it down to my cousin Marty, and finally bequeathed to me. Since we lived on A1A (a.k.a. Vanilla Ice’s “Beach front avenue”), the Atlantic’s salt air had corroded the exhaust manifold. The engine sounded like a throaty Harley Davidson chopper. I had to stop driving it because every time my brother Chris, and I drove across the Dunlawton Bridge to Aunt Catshit, we would get high as a kite from the carbon monoxide fumes. I parked it on our front lawn, handed Chris the keys, and wished him luck.
I had to carry full insurance on the Camaro, so I dropped the state required liability coverage for The Stang, assuming my little brother would take care of it, which he didn’t and left it untouched in the front lawn of our beach house. In the state of Florida, not having insurance can guarantee the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles in Tallahassee will revoke your license. But as I mentioned earlier, I never read my mail. I had no idea I was driving around town with a suspended license.
One day, a buddy and I were pulled over by a courteous, female police officer a half mile from my house. We were coming back from 7-11™ with a six pack of Icehouse®, Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey® and a can of Kodiak® chewing tobacco. She politely told us that my passenger headlight was out, and asked me for my license, insurance, and registration. She came back to the car and asked me if I knew that my license was revoked. Perhaps she saw the sincere shock and confusion in my face by this information. Since we were only 2,000 feet from my house, she let my friend drive and I told me to take care of this immediately.
When I got back to the crib, I decided to start reading the mountain of mail that I thought would magically take care of itself. It was extremely depressing to finally put an exact figure on what I owed. Each letter dug me deeper into a pit of poverty. Discovery Card, Firestone, Montgomery Wards, Exxon, American Express, AT&T,…it just went on and on. Finally, I found a dusty correspondence from the DMV postdated from six months prior. I opened it and discovered my license had been suspended and I was given thirty days to prove that I had the minimum liability insurance coverage required by state law. I kept reading the mound of unread letters, looking for any “official” scary looking envelopes—I found four more. Two were from Florida DMV, one from The Courts of Daytona Beach Municipality, and the last one was from Daytona Beach Shores Police Department. Not good.
I felt like I had discovered a shoebox of letters from my long lost father that some bastard had maliciously withheld. Unfortunately, that bastard was me. Everyone thought I’d become a rocket scientist for NASA, now I was an uneducated fucking waiter in thousands of dollars in debt.
Each letter I read was more of a demand and less of a warning. It appeared they gave me a chance to pay a small fine and fix the problem, but since I hadn’t resolved it, they had elevated it to Code Red and revoked my license. They set up a court day, which I never showed up to. I guess that’s a big deal, because they issued a bench warrant for my arrest for “Failure to Appear”. I really feel they overreacted. I could understand if it was a big wedding, and the poor prosecuting attorney or bride would be standing there in tears just shrugging his or her shoulders constantly looking at the judge or minister and then self-consciously back at the courtroom entrance hoping I’ll be dashing in with sweat pouring down my apologetic face. But it wasn’t a wedding; just go to the next case.
What the fuck is the big deal? So I didn’t have insurance on a car that nobody drives—who cares? Well, I’ll tell you right now. They cared. They cared a lot.
The next week was shitty: I now had to walk across the Dunlawton Bridge in the balmy Florida heat, so I could be Cousin Dan. I tried to get my license back without going to the police station, but it couldn’t be done. That Friday, from nine am to five pm, I bounced back and forth between the DMV and the courthouse without success. After eight hours of bureaucratic bullshit, I decided I needed a night of drinking to remedy my aggravation. So my cousin Marty and I went to Razzles, the proclaimed hottest night club in the city. Since I couldn’t drive, I gave the keys to my Camaro to Marty. Normally, I always drove, but for obvious reasons, I couldn’t. We drank bottle after bottle of Icehouse®. For some reason, that was my beer of choice in 1995. It seemed sophisticated, yet rugged. Now it seems cheap, yet shitty.
Marty had drunk eleven beers and two shots of Jägermeister® to my seven beers and one shot of Goldschläger®. His toxin tolerance had always been higher than mine. I had the drug tolerance of Sandra Dee in the beginning of the movie of Grease. Since we blew all our money on booze, we couldn’t afford a taxi, not to mention our car would be towed in the morning if we left it over night.
So logically, we decided it would be best if Marty drove since his license wasn’t revoked. We stumbled to the parking lot and climbed into the car. In my head I told Marty to be careful because he was renowned for driving recklessly, but I was so drunk and about to throw up that it came out as, “Let’s get the fuck out of here (hic-cup)”.
He put it in reverse, braced his hand behind my seat, slammed on the accelerator and turned the wheel to the right. I lurched forward and hit my head on the dashboard. He devilishly grinned and stomped on the brake. I flew back to my seat and then went forward again, but I stopped my body with both of my arms. Again, my brain told Marty to be cautious because there were a lot of cops out that night, but it came out, “(belch) Hit it.”
We were only five miles from our house on A1A. Since we were going 60 miles an hour, it would have only taken us five minutes, however, the speed limit was 35 miles per hour. I started to hear sirens, so I looked in the rearview mirror and thought it was a team of fire trucks going to a high-rise apartment building on the beach. I started to scream, “Pull over, pull over, there’s a fire.” Marty slowed down and veered to the right to let them pass.
Except the fire trucks didn’t go by. Instead cop cars surrounded my Camaro and forced us to stop. Both our car doors opened at the same time, and several cops materialized on each side with high-powered MagLites aimed at our retinas. It felt like my corneas were melting. All the commotion was making me queasy. One officer took Marty’s license and went back to his patrol car. About five minutes later, he came back and ripped Marty out of the driver’s seat. He had some prior felony charge and this offense apparently broke his parole agreement. They demanded mine as well—I told them it wasn’t necessary because I wasn’t driving and that it was suspended. They told me to, “Shut the fuck up” and hand over my license. So I did.
Well, remember that “Failure to Appear” bench warrant thingy. Once they ran my license, it came back with a warrant for my arrest. Somehow, their system couldn’t differentiate between me being a rapist, my lack of insurance, or if I had illegally ripped off a mattress tag. For all they know, I could be a serial killer.
When they came back to the car, an officer snarled, “Well, looky here boys, looks like we got a goddamned fugitive from justice. Step out of the car, son.”
I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Confused I said, “No, I’m not a criminal. My license is just…”
At that point, he became enraged, grabbed me by my arm and pulled me out of the car. I could still taste the hot, cinnamon Goldschläger® and felt the Icehouse® swish around in my stomach. My mind raced back to my 2nd grade science project when I made a papier-mâché volcano: vinegar, baking soda, and little orange food coloring. Except this time, I was Mount Vesuvius and Officer Pompeii was going to get hit with my lava. He kept shaking me and telling me to stand up. Like carbonated soda, I reached the threshold of containment. I began to puke on the cop, straight from the scene from The Exorcist. I sprayed him with $47 worth of alcohol. I started at his waist and worked my way down to the tip of his shoe.
He screamed, “You better not have AIDS, boy!”
Disgusted, he turned me around and threw me to the hard-packed ground. He stepped on my back and roughly put handcuffs on me. The other officers were laughing, while Marty cheered me on. Bad move for him. An officer pushed him head first into the back of a squad car. Two different officers grabbed me and put me in the same car with my cousin. Once in, I passed out.
What I awoke to was the one of most disturbing things that I have experienced in my life. A goober police officer who looked like Ned Flanders from The Simpsons held my wrist with his left hand and was driving his fingernail of his right index finger into the flesh beneath MY index finger on MY right hand.
I yelled, “FUCK! OW!! What the fuck are you doing?”
I snatched my arm away and noticed I didn’t have my shirt on. I heard my cousin behind me inside a cell slur out, “They’ve been pinchin’ your nipples, tryin’ to keep you awake, the sick bastards.”
Officer Flanders went over to his cell and said, “Shut up, boy. We’ll take your boxers from you if don’t shut your monkey mouth,” and raked his nightstick across the bars.
“You’ve been puking since you got here. We didn’t want you to die in your sleep, so we’ve had to keep you awake.”
Rubbing my sore nipples, I said “Have you ever heard of smelling salts?”
I still couldn’t understand why I was in jail. I never had any trouble with authority. In fact, throughout my entire academic career, I had only visited the principal’s office three times in my life.
My first time was in 2nd grade at lunch, when I got spanked by a sadistic, draconian principal, who thought he was Shaft, because I had dropped my K.I.S.S. Thermos® which leaked all my Tropical Punch Kool-Aid; forcing me to go to the drinking fountain without asking for permission. I turned the white handle and my parched pallet enjoyed the refreshing arc of H2O. While standing there lapping the water like a thirsty little puppy, Principal Marquis de Sade pulled a paddle riddled with holes for less air resistance to deliver more speed and produce higher momentum to punish four to ten year olds for lack of obedience. He blasted three swats to my ass in less than second. He turned me around and shouted, “That will make you think twice before getting up and drinking water!” I was speechless. Terrified. I wanted to cry, but I was afraid he would slap my face and call me a baby. So I decided to piss my pants instead, like a man. The lunch room exploded with laughter and he spanked me again for peeing.
That same year at a different school, I pissed my pants again in P.E. while hula hooping and had to go and get a new pair of jeans from the vice principal.
My final and most recent episode, I was sent home my senior year at Robert E. Lee High School by idiot Vice Principal Valdez because my shorts were three inches above regulation. I pleaded with him to let me take my calculus test first, then go change, but he denied my request. Obviously, my GPA was not as important as properly-covered femurs.
Since I was an Air Force reservist at the time, I tried to reason with them and show them I also sucked Uncle Sam’s cock and said, “I’m in the Air Force. Have you guys ever served? I just got transferred from Kelly AFB, I was an air transportation specialist, now I’m at Patrick in Cocoa Beach with the 301st Search and Rescue Squadron. Call my unit. Talk to my First Sergent. Hell, I got Airman of the Year.”
They couldn’t care less and said, “Just shut up, Puke Boy, we’re taking you to county.”At least I had graduated from Piss Boy to Puke Boy.
About three in the morning, they let me put my shirt back on. Then they handcuffed our wrists behind our backs and led my cousin and me outside to a cruiser. We didn’t know where we were exactly, but it was a hot and muggy and I smelt salt in the air so we knew we were still on beachside. The two weasel cops signed us over to the new trooper and pushed us into the backseat.
Since belts can be used as weapons, they had taken Marty’s away. He was wearing extremely wide oversized pair of JNCO jeans, which were barely in style. Without a belt, they were at his ankles and revealing his purple, “Yabba-Dabba-Doo” Fred Flintstone boxer shorts.
We were both writhing in pain from having our body weight against our pinned back arms. Being 6’6” with disproportionably long legs, I had to do something. So I slid my wrists down, hooked them underneath my feet, and brought them to my chest. What a difference. I stretched back and forth and cracked my neck. It was a small victory in a shitty situation. I felt like Anne Frank enjoying a jam sandwich. I wasn’t free, but damn this jam sandwich tasted like a dream. I wanted to share my contortion technique with Marty so he could benefit from my discovery.
Since his bulky JNCOs were at his ankles we couldn’t get his wrists underneath. I guess we were making a lot of noise because the officer told asked us what we were doing.
I politely replied, “Just getting comfortable.”
He saw my hands were free in the rear view mirror and his eyes bulged out like the Run Away Bride from Georgia. He slammed on the brakes and our heads slammed forward. “Who do you think you are—goddamn Houdini? Tryin’ to escape, that’s a felony offense!”
“I’m not trying to escape,” I said, “I’ll put them back if you want.”
He finally settled down and we drove to the Volusia County Correctional Institution. Scenes from Stir Crazy with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor flashed in my head. I prayed that our cellmate would be like Cheeseburger, an intimidating exterior with a teddy bear heart.
We had to relinquish all our valuables, which were annotated. Nicotine products were confiscated and thrown away. Marty had a pack of Marlboro Light® and I had a can of Kodiak®.
We then joined ranks with ten other “criminals”. Single file, heel to toe we marched raggedly one at a time into an office and were told to undress. My flaccid penis shriveled to the size of a tator tot. They manifested your clothes to your list of items and issued you an orange jumpsuit, flip-flops, a comb, a toothbrush, and toothpaste. In most rap videos you see a young hip-hop artists sporting a fly, loose-fitting suit, they’re tailored for the average 5’11’ thug not a seven-foot, albino Ethiopian.
I needed a custom job. Perhaps an XXLT, but they gave me a Medium. Essentially, it was an orange bathing suit from the 20s. A tight-fitting, one-piece pair of knickers that exposed my calves and gave the appearance of me smuggling golf balls in the groin region. Also, it accentuated my normally flat buttocks into an Orange Dreamcicle®. I think this was my punishment for puking on the cop and trying to escape. After dealing with city cops, I had come to terms with the apathetic nature of my captors and nonchalantly said, “Would you mind if I had a bigger size? This one is a little tight?”
The officer didn’t even look up from his paperwork and said, “Why? You want to look pretty for the ladies?”
“No, this will be fine. I’m sure everyone will enjoy it. Thank you. It must be really hard living your life with such a little dick.”
Not the wisest comeback. It was somewhat of a blur after that. Things went downhill from there. They separated Marty and I and put me in a holding cell with some more drunk kids.
Now I had no idea what time it was. I was really hungry and was surprised when they delivered brown bags containing bologna and cheese on Wonder Bread and rotten apple. However, they had miscounted the prisoners and shorted us by one. I wasn’t quick enough to snag a bag, so I called a guard over to tell him they made a mistake. To my great fortune, it was Officer Little Dick and he just sneered at me and turned his back.
I dosed in and out of sleep on the bench in the corner as my stomach growled. Hours later, we were escorted out of the holding cell and told we were being assigned to Cell Block Ten. Fuck. This was it. My innocence would soon be gone. I tried to replay my crappy Taikwondo moves in my head, but I had to drop out at yellow belt because I ran out of money. My self-defense only worked if they grabbed the left lapel of my jacket with their right hand. My flip-flops were especially loud and my orange jumpsuit was riding up my ass. I clutched my toothbrush and vowed I would gouge out the eyeball of any dumb motherfucker who tried to mess with me.
When we arrived at Cell Block Ten, it was filled with a couple dozen tables with newspapers and televisions suspended from the walls. Sunlight bathed the area from white portholes near the ceiling. Expecting the worse, I was surprised to see more now-sobered people like me staring into the distant in their own insular world. I released my Kung-Fu Grip off my toothbrush, found my bunk, and went to sleep.
Marty finally found me and shook me violently, “Wake up, dumbass! They’ve been calling your name for the last ten minutes. Someone bailed you out.”
“Me. Who? Who knows I’m in here? I just want to sleep.”
“Get the fuck up! Go sleep at home.”
I rolled off my bed and got dizzy when the blood drained out of my head. Marty started to laugh when he saw my skintight body suit. “Shut up, dude. My head hurts,” I said.
I slowly walked to the exit door and a guard grabbed my arm. We went back to the receiving room and retrieved my belongings minus the can of Kodiak®. As I was filling out the final paperwork, I asked who bailed me out and how much was it? They told me that someone named Mr. Galbreath had dropped $500 bucks to set me free. I couldn’t place the name and then I realized it was the name on my paycheck. It was the owner of Aunt Catfish, the restaurant where I worked at. I crept outside and fortunately it wasn’t the owner but his son, Brandon.
He was really good-natured about the whole thing and said everybody was laughing about it back at the restaurant. No one could imagine Cousin Dan in prison. I laughed half-heartedly to make him feel comfortable. The air-conditioner felt wonderful in my face as I rested my head on the passenger window. I asked him why his father had bailed me out. “We need you to work section seven upstairs, and you’re the only one available who can handle it,” he said.I couldn’t fucking believe the only reason I was being bailed out was because they couldn’t fill a shift. God forbid, another fat fuck NASCAR fan doesn’t get his hush puppy and homemade cinnamon roll.
But I was just glad to be out so I said, “Great, can we swing by my place so I can shower and get something to eat?”
When we drove up to my house, I saw the reason for my night in hell. The baby blue 80’ Ford Mustang with cobra decals, spokes, and a leather LeBra on the headlights.
We should be proud of our legal system. They had righted a wrong. I was a criminal because I didn’t have insurance on an un-drivable car that was permanently parked.
God Bless America!
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