You don’t want to be a black guy pulled over for speeding in a Red state – especially if the inside of your car smells like a Dutch confectioner’s oven. Oh well, that’s exactly what happened to me in 1994 when I was a sophomore in college

You don’t want to be a black guy pulled over for speeding in a Red state – especially if the inside of your car smells like a Dutch confectioner’s oven. Oh well, that’s exactly what happened to me in 1994 when I was a sophomore in college. I don’t blame the cops, I don’t blame The White Man; I was a stupid kid driving high, and I deserved to get pulled over.

I didn’t deserve what happened next though, and that’s what I want to talk to you about. Normally I don’t open up about this chapter of my life, but you folks are different: the fact that you laugh in my face and tell me how full of shit I am and how you wish I would die all the time – I dunno, it’s just a much more nourishing environment than what I’m used to at home.

God fuckin damnit, I almost made it back that day – Just needed to drive another 5 miles through the Southern countryside to reach my school – an academic green-zone of drug use, socialism, and homosexuality that existed right smack in the center of god’s country.

Instead, I got pulled the fuck over 5 minutes from freedom.

To make matters worse, I was driving back from buying a half-ounce of “kindbud,” and the transaction had left me cakingly high. Ever been to a dealer in the South or in the Midwest? Well, it’s not a fuckin Manhattan Delivery Service; there are no glastic boxes of furry buds sealed with stickers of Deputy Dog and names like “White Widow” and “My Herbal Romance.” They didn’t NAME pot in the South in 1994, except to call it “Who’s the nigger you brought with you” or “Billy didn’t tell me you were a nigger” or “Herb.”

After you go into these guys’ filthy little bungalows and sit on beanbag chairs listening to the Insane Clown Posse on the stereo, you have to sit there while they pack you a big-ass bowl and you huff it down. THEN he sells you weed, when HE feels like it and asks you how much you want – you never ask first. THEN after he sells you the bag, if you’re dumb enough to try to leave, he looks at your weed and goes, “BRO – you gonna MATCH??” Translation: “pack me a bowl to make up for the one I just had to spend to make sure you weren’t a cop.”

Five minutes away from school, and the red lights go on behind me. I don’t know if I was speeding, but I was definitely DWB with weed in the car, so I should have been more careful. Stupid fucking kid.

The officer that pulled me over was a state trooper, and he was far more gentle than he could have been. As you can imagine, caught with about a quarter ounce in 1994, and being black, my heart was pounding with fear and panic like some Edgar Allan Poe shit – just thought it was gonna burst right out of my chest.

Here’s some advice: never get busted on a Friday. What are you into, Coke? Weed? Hookers? It’s just as easy to fuck with that shit on the weekdays, no? See, processing at any booking facility, usually regardless of district, tends to shut down on weekends. Like all guidelines, There’s some flexibility here, but a good rule of thumb is this: you go into the tank on Friday, you’re stayin the weekend.

This was to be my fate in the Red state holding facility that I was headed for, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. When I got to the highway jail, I wasn’t even fingerprinted or photographed, just tossed into the cell by a different officer who was stationed in a tiny room set off from the main cell. He slammed the gate and told me someone would come for me later on.

The cell he put me into was a holding cell – it was big, about the length of a subway car, and a little wider. It was pretty dimly lit – dark and blue – with shitty linoleum flooring that wasn’t all that
clean. But listen – it could have been a lot worse – the place didn’t smell like flowers, but it really wasn’t THAT bad – smelled much better than say, a bathroom at Yankee Stadium. (The old one)

There were benches on both sides of the cell, and most of the guys inside were sitting on their asses doing nothing. There were probably about 20 guys in there when I arrived, mostly rednecks, a couple of other black guys, and maybe a Mexican or two.

The guys were all pretty sketchy – I mean, it wasn’t the fucking South Bronx or Rikers or OZ or some shit like that, but they were all pretty tough looking Real Men. I’ll put it this way: out of all of us, I’m sure I was the only one who had a paper on Flaubert due the next Wednesday.

When you first go into a jail cell like this, you’re in for a surprise – at least I was – because you’ve probably seen too many fuckin movies: There wasn’t some cast of characters waiting to greet me, like “Lefty,” and “Bricks,” and “Otis,” the wiry con man who keeps asking “what’re ya in for?” Fuck that Shawshank Redemption shit – there was no “scene” – niggas didn’t say shit. Everyone sat on their ass, and didn’t say shit to each other, and they didn’t look at each other, and they didn’t say shit to me.

The only exception was these two cats all the way at one end of the cell – they seemed amped up or strung-out and they were bitching to each other and sounding pretty disappointed. Everyone else was sticking to themselves, closing their eyes, resting, and waiting.

I followed their lead and didn’t say shit. After awhile of sitting still and melding in, I looked slowly around and got the lay of the place. I saw that the attendant was up in a tiny room by one end of
the cell – saw him walking around his little office, putting papers away and then going back to his seat, which was out of view of the cell, at least from where I was sitting.

That’s when I got my second big disappointment of the day: When I looked down, I noticed that I happened to be wearing a “Race-For-The-Cure” AIDS shirt with a big fucking red ribbon on the
front. Listen: the contrast between real life and college has never been more stark. At a liberal arts school in 1994, that shirt put me right in there with the progressives – shit, it might have even gotten me laid – There in the real world though, at that moment, I wished that before the cop had cuffed me, I had thought to BEG HIM to let me turn it inside-out.

I started ruminating on the fucking shirt, and brought myself to the first real twinges of panic. Shit: did the shirt make me look like a fag, or just a pussy? I stressed so hard that I even wondered whether I should try to flip the shirt inside-out right then and there, but I quickly realized that calling this much attention to myself, let alone in such a pussyish way, let ALONE having my SHIRT off for even an instant, would probably be the worst idea imaginable.

My stressing was interrupted by our attendant opening the cell door. I looked over and saw him use his foot to push a big package into the cell – then he closed the gate and left.

People didn’t rush it, everyone was cool – but a couple of guys did go over slowly and open it up – it was a case of Nature Valley Granola bars – all of them were the green regular crunchy kind. Again, it wasn’t a movie: The guys didn’t fight over them and there were plenty to go around – enough for everyone to have a few. In retrospect, I guess the reason they didn’t fight over them was probably because they were so sick of them. The guard gave us another case every few hours for the entire weekend – and this was the ONLY thing they fed us the whole time I was there.

Now here’s what happened:

The two strung-out guys got up and went over to a window that was cracked open. They took out a little pipe, and started smoking – meth, crack- I have no idea. I couldn’t smell it and I was a pothead – The fuck did I know from real drugs?
So at this point, guys started looking over – some of ‘em started laughing and a few of them finally started talking to each other. After 6 hours of near silence, finally some chatter. What an ice breaker – Tough room!

Then though, one guy got up from the bench and walked over- big guy, white dude. He approached the smokers and started talking to them in a low voice. No one had any idea what they were saying, so people got real quiet again straining to hear – and now everyone was looking over.

The two guys started sounding pissed, but the white dude kept his calm. They got worse until they were almost yelling despite his cool; it was real one-sided and incongruous. Then all of the sudden, the real strung-out dudes EXPLODED and started kicking this white guy’s ass- he was MUCH bigger than both of them, but they sucker punched him an kicked him low and shit – he doubled over and they pounded him – he didn’t get a single punch in, and they kept kicking his ass, all amped and shit, even after he was on the ground.

Remember: my dad’s a dentist and I went to private school. I bought Raising Hell in 1986 and wore a RUN DMC sweatshirt and watched Wild Style and shit to front, but I’m a little pussy. I had never seen anything like this in my life and I still haven’t- the only thing I had to compare it to was that scene in Clockwork Orange at the beginning where they kick the old man’s ass, an just keep whippin him and whippin him even after he’s down.

Finally, the other guys in the cell started tutting, like a little “tsk” and “oh man” etc. But nobody got involved- the guys just stopped when they were ready to stop. When they did, the white dude was passed out – he wasn’t like, that fucked up that we was pouring blood or anything, but he was on the ground motionless when the two guys went back to smoking out the window and talking shit.

It was pretty terrifying to be in the same room as that, especially with his body lying there and no one doing anything about it. I remember thinking how loud it had been – definitely loud enough for the attending officer to hear. I thought – isn’t this guy gonna come in and break this shit up? But he didn’t.

I started feeling panicky again, and then I had my second fucked-up realization: I hadn’t taken my Prozac that morning, and I realized that if I was there for much longer, I was really going to start feeling it. I started to get the little fireflies on my flushed face and my body, and my hands started sweating – I really tried to keep my shit together, but I finally lost it – I blurted to his one white guy near me – the guy who looked the most normal:

“How fuckin long can they keep us here!?”

Bad move. Some of the guys let out a laugh and a bunch of em sorta went “all weekEND, all weekEND man.” The guy I had actually asked said to me, pretty nicely and helpfully, “It’s a Saturday, so yeah, they won’t start processing folks until Monday most likely.”

I don’t want to tell you the panic I felt at that moment. The idea that I would be there FOR DAYS with these guys, with no one knowing where I was, and no Prozac… I pictured myself going into the inevitable withdrawls, and then my throat started closing and I decided what if I just start SCREAMING, would that make me look crazy enough so that the guard would come, or would I look crazy enough so that no one would fuck with me, and I could get back the cred I lost by asking about what was gonna happen?

“DON’T Worry, dony worry boy, we got the cub so the time go fast”

It was a dark black older guy – 40s – real fat with a big neck. He called this out to me, and a couple of the other guys on the bench started to chuckle a little.

I couldn’t really tell what the fuck he had said, obviously, but it stopped my panic attack pretty dead in it’s tracks. Somewhere, my brain knew I had REAL problems, and it shut down my sniveling bullshit placebo prozac withdrawl real fast.

The nice-ish guy who had explained the weekend schedule was now looking away.

I shut the fuck up.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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