Once upon a time, something like 25 years ago, I was but a wee chicky, and I was one of those kids who never got in trouble.
Never.
Ok, maybe I was caught making out with my boyfriend once or twice, but nothing really serious.
I never got detention, or suspended, or skipped school. Unlike my sister, who was caught at a number of illicit parties as a teenager, my high school drinking experience was limited to splitting a Bartles & James wine cooler with my best friend on News Year’s Eve.
The one exception to being a good girl was Halloween of 1995. I was 17, and I was dressed as a court jester. I left school and went to work at the Little Caesar’s K-Cafe in the nearby K-Mart. At the time, I had been sort of “going out” with my supervisor, Freddy; a movie dates, making out in the walk-in refrigerator at work. We were working the closing shift that night. It was mostly slow because people were taking kids out trick-or-treating and we didn’t deliver. Freddy, who had dressed as Michael Meyers for his shift, was giving me a ride home in his brand new pickup truck. He probably thought he was King Shit of High Turd Mountain.
I’m not sure how it is in other states, but here we have a couple of different types of vehicle registrations. Trucks, no matter what they are used for, are always designated as commercial, and their plates are branded with “COMMERCIAL” on them. Freddy, being stupid, hadn’t registered his truck yet, and just slapped the plates from his old car onto his big, black truck.
On that fateful Halloween night, we barely got 5 minutes away when a cop pulled up behind us, lights flashing. We got the typical cop question, “do you have any idea why I pulled you over?” It turned out that Freddy’s stupidity had gotten him in trouble, and his non-commercial plates were more obvious than he thought. The cop says he’s going to tow the truck, but he’ll give us a ride to my house. He opens the back doors of the squad car, tells us to stay put, and asks Freddy if there’s anything in the truck he wants.
“Yes sir,” he replies. “My wallet is in the center console, and my beeper is clipped to the visor. Oh, and I went hunting this morning, and my gun is behind the seat.”
You’ve never seen a cop’s attitude change so quickly. The cop goes to the truck and pulls out the wallet and grabs the beeper. We’re shitting ourselves in the back of the cop car, watching the cop pull the seat forward. The first thing he grabs is a latex Mike Meyers mask, a plastic butcher knife, followed closely by a torn and (fake) bloodied flannel, followed by the gun. He later told us that the only thing that would have been worse would have been an empty egg carton.
It was a quiet ride back to my house. Keep in mind, this is before the age of cell phones, and I couldn’t text or call before we got home. All I could do was walk in to my mother, already upset because I was late, and say “Now, I’m sorry I’m late, don’t freak out….” as Freddy came in behind me. Then she saw the cop.
And then she swore at me in no less than four languages.
In the end, the cop explained to my mom that we weren’t in trouble, only that Freddy was an idiot.
