NOTE: This chapter will open the story. It is the prologue and should be ahead of chapter I.
PROLOGUE
Illinois
“What the fuck are we supposed to do now?”
I was saying this to my friend Rob, who
was standing next to me on the shoulder of Interstate 80, somewhere in Southern
Illinois. It was between two and three o’clock in the morning and as dark
as a night could be. There were no headlights coming from either
direction and clouds obscured any moonlight that was trying to get
through. Scattered around us along the side of the road were multiple
suitcases, duffel bags, clothes, a few boxes and a super heavy 36 inch analog
television. Just ninety minutes ago all
of these items had been tightly packed into my 1996 Jetta. Some had been in the back seat and some in
the trunk. I couldn’t have fit anything
else into the car even if was paid to do so.
Rob had to put his own gym bag full of clothes on the floor in front of
his seat. It had taken me over two hours to squeeze everything in that
I’d need for an entire summer working at a kid’s camp in Maine. Just
moments ago the area was buzzing with the congestion and noise of at least a
dozen police cars, a squad of overeager officers, unintelligible radio chatter
and a helicopter that hovered above with a spotlight that turned the middle of
the night into noon. But now it was just
Rob and me, standing on the side of the highway. In the dark.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said.
“How do they expect us to re-pack the car
with no light out here?
“Um, what?” Rob said. It was a
typical response.
“Unbelievable. Simply
unbelievable.” I was officially and totally dumbfounded.
It was unbelievable. I had left
Denver around eleven a.m. and drove all day to get to Rob’s house in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa. Although he wasn’t working at the camp with me, it seemed
like a good idea for him road trip to New York and Boston and then fly back
home while I made the final stretch to Maine alone. He didn’t have
anything better to do, anyway. Like me,
he was a teacher and his summer vacation had just started.
Rob and I met when we both worked at a summer camp in Minnesota. We had been friends for almost exactly ten
years. We lived together for a few years in Kansas City and he actually
stayed with me at my parent’s house for a stretch of time. We were notoriously poor in our 20s and in
our camp counseling heyday. We had taken
many, many road trips together and it made sense that he’d go with me on this
one since I’d be driving right by his house. I had just picked him and we
couldn’t have been on the road for even an hour when I noticed the police
lights that had turned on behind me.
The natural thought when you think you’re being pulled over is to try to figure
out why. I wasn’t speeding because I knew that I had to be extra cautious
when I left the state of Colorado
“You have to be fucking kidding me?” I said, again. I just stood with my
hands on my hips and looked around into the darkness. It was a little colder than I thought it should
be in early June. Neither of us had
moved in at least five minutes as we tried to process what had just taken
place. When we were pulled over, the first thing the officer asked me was
whether or not he could search the car.
“Was I
speeding?” I asked.
“Sir,
do you mind if I search inside your vehicle?” he said.
Since I
had nothing to hide, I said OK. That was my first mistake. This
triggered a slew of activity as several more police cars arrived on the scene
while Rob and I were asked to stand near the rear of my car while we were both
searched. It wasn’t the fourth time that year that I had to spread my
legs and be patted down. I asked why they wanted to search the car and
was told that the area in which we were travelling was a known drug trafficking
corridor on I-80. The officer had noticed that we had turned on our dome
light as we drove past him, which, apparently, is a highly suspicious move in
Southern Illinois after midnight.
“Officer, we don’t have any drugs and we
don’t have anything to hide,” I said to
the man who had pulled us over.
“Then everything will be just fine,” he
said as another police vehicle slowed to a
stop in front of my Jetta. It
was marked “K9 Unit.”
Rob and I could hear a group of officers talking near us and one went to the K9
car that had just arrived. He and another cop opened the back door of the
car and a German Sheppard trotted out from the backseat. I leaned over to
Rob and whispered something about Rin Tin Tin, which made us both laugh. One of the officers put a leash on the dog
and a couple of other guys opened all four of the doors of my car and the
trunk. I already thought that there were way too many people on the scene
and that it was bordering on the absurd.
The officer holding the dog pulled him near the passenger door and
pointed into the front seat area. While he pointed, he kept excitedly
saying things like, “Go get it!” and “Good dog!
Good dog!” This was surely the
highlight of his week. The dog was
anxious and sniffing everywhere as he hopped into the passenger seat and moved
his face and nose back and forth like he was hungry and someone had hidden
Kibbles and Bits in the car. The eager officer kept pointing and
directing the dog as it sniffed the dash board and seats. I could hear
the paws of the dog scratching the dashboard over and over. I just stood
and watched in amazement. I had
experienced some real shit fairly recently, but somehow this was taking the
cake. My car was being searched by a dog
in the middle of the night with a battalion of police while I stood on the side
of the road and watched. After a few
minutes, the dog holder pulled on the leash and backed away from the car.
He knelt down and petted the dog vigorously while he took a dog biscuit from
his front pocket and dropped it on the ground.
It was immediately gobbled up. After a few biscuits were eaten, he
squatted down and put one slightly in his mouth and let the dog take it from
there. It was like watching Shamu take
the fish from the mouth of the woman on the pool deck. The officer was really, really into it, and
for a moment I wondered what the rest of his sad life was like.
“Good dog. Good dog,” he said over
and over. I assumed he was divorced.
While he was still kneeling down and enjoying the dog licking his face too
much, he motioned towards the group of officers standing near us and both Rob
and I could distinctly hear him say, “We have a positive hit.” I didn’t
take that as a positive for us.
From that point forward, the real fiasco
ensued. If we were at a seven on the
fiasco scale before the “positive hit,” we rocketed to an eleven after. Rob and I were immediately separated and put
into the back seat of separate police cars.
We were not handcuffed, but were told that we were being detained while
the entirety of the contents of the car was searched. The officer who pulled us over put me into
the back seat of his car, which was parked directly behind mine.
“We got
you now, buddy,” he said while he assisted me into the back seat and shut the
door.
I pretty much had an unobscured view of
everything that was going on around my car.
I figured that no less than fifteen or so cops were standing around in
different groups. It was fairly amazing,
really. Looting and riots could be
occurring in whatever the nearest town was since every available officer was
now on the scene of the two guys in the Jetta who had driven with their dome
light on. As I watched, I realized that
nothing was happening. I couldn’t see
the dog and there wasn’t much movement, just groups of cops talking. Just when I thought that it couldn’t get any
worse, it got worse. The sound was
unmistakable and kept getting louder and louder. A helicopter was very, very close to us and suddenly
the entire area was turned into daytime.
I immediately knew that they were all just waiting until the chopper
arrived with the spotlight so they could see better. A fucking chopper with a spotlight. I had now seen it all. I sat back into my seat and noticed that my
mouth was actually wide open agape in amazement. It would have been a perfect close-up if this
were a movie.
The helicopter was super loud and I
couldn’t figure out how low to the ground it was. It had to be sitting directly above us, but
since I didn’t notice a massive wind swirling, I assumed that it was probably
higher up than I imagined. I was
impressed, however, at how bright the area had become. The spotlight was no joke.
Within a minute, the dog and his divorced handler
reappeared and a few other officers began taking bags out of my car and
bringing them over to the dog. They
would bring over a bag, set it down, open it up and then start filtering
through the clothes and contents while the dog sniffed through it all. I didn’t have any drugs and I know that Rob
didn’t have any drugs and neither of us did drugs, so I didn’t have anything to
worry about. But given what I had gone
through in March, I was extremely nervous.
Franklin’s warning about getting pulled over was coming to life and who
knew how far these idiots would go to make sure that they were right to call in
this massive enterprise in the middle of the night. I began to feel very nervous and tensed up a
little every time they brought a new bag or box to the dog and was relieved
each time it passed the test and was discarded elsewhere on the shoulder. It was not lost on me that it had taken me a
painstaking two hours to pack the car and it didn’t appear that anyone was in a
hurry to put the stuff back where they found it.
Bag after bag was brought over, sniffed
through, and tossed off to the side.
They even got out my TV and had the dog sniff around it. Shit, there could have been a million dollars
worth of smack hidden in that thing for
all I knew. It would have explained why
it was so fucking heavy. It took two
guys to carry the thing over and one stumbled a little. I would have traded the loss of the TV to
watch them drop the thing and break it.
But it, too, passed the dog test.
Just as one of the officers opened my
trunk, my stomach dropped and I nearly got sick right in the back of the
car. I had totally forgotten that I had
agreed to carry two of my buddy Billy’s duffel bags of clothes for him. Fuck.
FUCK! Billy was a friend of ours
who would also be working in Maine with me, but he wouldn’t be coming out for
another week. I had just been in
California with him the past weekend when I ran my first marathon. I hadn’t checked any bags on my flight out
and Billy asked if I could take his two back to Colorado with me and bring them
to Maine. My exact words to him, not
even 48 hours prior, were, “I will, but DO NOT put any drugs in my bag. I don’t want to fly with any of your
drugs.” He promised that the bags were
clean. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
Billy and I met and became friends at the
same camp where Rob and I met. There was
a large group of us camp friends spread out around the world. Within our group, there were the beer
drinkers and the pot smokers. Rob and I
were in the beer drinking group and Billy was in the other. Everyone drank, but the pot smoker group
smoked a lot of pot. A lot. I had done it on occasion, but generally
stuck to alcohol. I knew that Billy
would be bringing a substantial amount of marijuana to camp, and I didn’t want
to carry it on the plane. Even if I
hadn’t gone through my jail saga in March, I still wouldn’t have wanted to
travel with it. I trusted Billy, but I
was now sweating and more or less terrified of the two red Nike bags sitting in
my trunk.
Bag after bag came out of the trunk and
finally the first of Billy’s. I was
trying to figure out what I was going to do when they found the drugs. Of course I would deny that it was mine, but
I would certainly go to jail that night.
My summer would be over before it started and I would be very, very
screwed. I kept telling myself that I
trusted Billy and that the bags were clean, but why had the dog smelled drugs
in the first place? Either it was a
mistake, the cops were lying or Billy put pot in his bag. I would know the answer very soon since bag
number one was being opened in front of the dog. He sniffed and sniffed and the officer
rummaged through the clothes and then tossed it aside. One down.
My body was still tense.
The
next bag wasn’t Billy’s and I didn’t even pay attention since I knew that my
bags were okay. In fact, irony would
have it that Billy’s second bag was the final bag pulled from the trunk and the
last bag to be searched. The entirety of
my summer belongings were scattered along I-80, mostly open and all illuminated
by a hovering helicopter. Every officer
in Southern Illinois had gathered to watch the entertainment, and for me, it
was all coming down to a red Nike bag. A
bag in which I didn’t know the contents and one that I had explicitly asked the
owner not to put drugs into. The windows
inside the police car where I was sitting began to fog up a little with my
rising body temperature. I was gripping
the seat and my jaw was beginning to get sore from me clinching it so
hard. It was slow motion watching that
dog sniff through the bag. I was certain
that the officer squatting down helping the dog sift through the contents would
gleefully hold up a huge bag of drugs to a massive roar of excitement that
would drown out the chopper. Cops would
be high fiving and hugging. I would be
on the front page of the Shitville, Illinois Daily the next day. It wouldn’t be the first or tenth time I made
a paper that year.
When you’re watching your favorite team
play a nail-biter game and it’s intense and back and forth and the ending very
much is in doubt, your body gets tense, your heart races and it is
stressful. But when your team holds on
to win, you immediately feel a sense of relief and your body relaxes. This is exactly how I felt when Billy’s bag
was tossed aside and the search complete.
It was a nail-biter with an ending very much in doubt, but, in the end,
my team pulled it out and held on for the win.
Just like after a high school fight in the
cafeteria is broken up, most of the police officers who had shown up to watch
the show started to slowly disappear.
Groups of guys finished their conversations and headed to their cars. One by one, the cars switched off their
swirling red and blue lights and headed down either side of the highway. The dog and his “owner” were one of the first
to go. There were maybe five cops still
on sight when my guy came back and opened the door to the back seat.
“You
can get out. I know you guys are hiding something,
but we couldn’t find it,” he said.
“Honestly,
we don’t. But if someone had smoked a
bunch of pot in the car in the past, would the dog have smelled it?” I had totally forgotten that I just bought
the car in January from our friend Chris, who was one of the leaders of the pot
smoking camp group. He had smoked a lot
of pot in that car. I was shocked that
this fact had escaped me.
“I
don’t know, maybe. Why, did you smoke a
bunch of pot in there?”
“Nope,
but the guy I bought it from did.”
He gave me my license back and Rob was now
standing next to me. Suddenly, the spotlight went out and we could tell that
the helicopter was flying away. All of
the other police had already left and it was shocking at how dark it really
was. The chopper spotlight was on us for
at least thirty minutes, so now the dark was even darker. The guy who first pulled us over and started
this entire shit show was getting back into his car. After all of that he wasn’t even going to
have the decency to say “goodbye” or “have a nice night” or “drive safe” or,
God forbid, “sorry.” He opened his door
and was just about to get inside when I yelled over to him,
“So,
we’re on our own to pick all this up?” I
knew we were, but I was just curious as to what he’d say.
“We
take it out, you put it back. Have a
safe drive.”
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