by OVAL
Before they stuck that intrusive piece of plastic in my noise-orifice, I asked the officer what his name was. He cocked an eyebrow and tapped his name tag. Sheng.
"No, what's your first name?"
Sheng the cop looked uncomfortably at his partner and said, "Christian." His uneasiness was apparent, and I found it a small victory that I could make him squirm like that. To me it was slightly comforting to see that behind his tough-guy exoskeleton was a child, playing a game of men. At least it’s what I liked to think.
The other cop stood unseen behind me as Sheng penetrated my warm open mouth with the device’s hard plastic tube. A soft whimper escaped me. It was as if The Universe had taken the script of what was supposed to happen that night and switched the characters and setting for its deranged amusement.
Sheng told me that the breathalyzer was impossible to fool, as if machines were infallible, and that he would know if I tried to cheat. After having to breathe deeply into it, the machine emitted a scandalous incriminating beep. Sheng inspected it and after a moment that seemed to trudge by in extra slow motion, gestured the doughy cop with his eyes.
I knew exactly what was coming.
Two thick hands greedily grasped my shoulders while a steel-toed boot wedged itself in between my legs, forcing them to spread out. The hands then expertly groped down my arms and snatched my hands from out of my pockets and into a set of icy metal loops, circumference, comfort, and freedom decreasing with every click. At this moment, I was experiencing a strobe light of emotions, synchronized with that of the red and blue. Anger at the cops and the schemes of fate, fear of the consequences, self-loathing, frustration, fury towards that escort, disappointment that the touch of a woman eluded me once again, but eventually all of these were silenced with the arrival of one axiomatic realization:
I was officially fucked.
Would things have gone according to plan, I still would have been officially fucked, but in an infinitely better way.
The ride to the station was unbearable, or would have been had it not been for the tranquilizing dregs of the vodka that festered in my stomach. Riding on the less-comfortable side of a police car is a very peculiar experience. After the tumult of arrest that leaves you with a farrago of conflicting emotions, the ride to the station is eerily tranquil. It also leaves you in an odd state where your thoughts are your biggest enemy. They stray into the abyss of ideas about all of the possible consequences and drag you down with them. My biggest concern was how to get home two hours away, without a ride.
No, this night was not going well, and it was probably not going to get any better in the foreseeable future. The pigs had confiscated my car and taken my cell phone (which was in my car). Also, I had work the following morning. To echo a previous sentiment, I was fucked.
I walked into the police booking station as the last remains of my luck walked out. The place was a small sterile-white room with insipid lighting and a bench on one side, a few computers and devices lined up on a long desk, and another area with a mug-shot camera separated by a glass divider.
Sheng the cop asked me whether I wanted to take a breath test or a blood test. I mulled the option over for a second, I could either have that little plastic device stick its little plastic dick in my mouth again, or, I could be paid a visit by Dr. Acula. There was a vague memory about the high-school driver's-ed teacher, a drunkard himself, suggesting that if ever caught, one should always ask for the blood test. Although the exact reason why escaped me at the moment, I gave the cop my decision. His frustration, to me, was a good indicator that I had done something right.
"If you want the blood test, we'll need to wait for the nurse to drive down here. It's four thirty in the morning, are you sure you want it?" He said, attempting to appeal to my non-existent concern for the nurse’s time.
Ah, now I see. He's afraid that by the time the nurse gets here my blood alcohol level will have dropped.
"Yeah, I'm sure. By the way, what was my BAC when you arrested me?"
He looked at me with culpable eyes, "It was .09 percent…"
Point-oh-nine percent?! That's one fucking hundredth of a percent over the limit! What is that, like two fucking molecules of ethanol over the line? As if I needed more proof that The Universe was out to shit on my muffins, there it was.
The pig, almost conscious of the ridiculousness of the arrest, tried to rationalize it, "I mean, it's like having your leg broken, it's either broken or it's not." An admittedly apt comparison, if by “leg” he meant wallet, and by “broken” he meant “thoroughly and savagely violated”; the financial burden of a DUI, irrespective of the details, is notoriously stratospheric.
The cop dragged me through the booking process. I could have gone kicking and screaming, but it seemed mock-compliance was the more sensible option. Fingerprints were taken, information was gathered and somewhere out there, a file bearing my name shat itself; I no longer had a clean record.
At one point in the process of being savagely plundered for info, the pig loosened up.
"You seem like a good kid. Can I ask you something?"
"Shoot away, officer." For a moment I hoped he would take that literally.
Before he said anything, the door of the station creaked open. In came another pig with a frumpy woman closely resembling an actual swine, in tow. The arriving cop looked absurdly all-American. He was tall, scarily clean-cut, handsome, and ultra-buff. Captain fucking America's here! Join the party, man! He sat the woman next to me and gave Sheng a pat on the back as he passed by him to the other booking computers. The woman looked at me vacuously then pointed her gaze to the floor.
Sheng acknowledged him and continued, "What do you think makes life worth living?" His tone seemed to indicate some spark of compassion, or sympathy. Maybe neither.
"Why? Is 'anything I do or say going to be used against me in a court of law'?"
"No, no. I just like to ask people that."
My knee-jerk response would have been from the nihilistic point of view; that life is intrinsically worthless, but by then, my intoxication had become acute. My lips were loosened and the old war propaganda phrase, “Loose lips sink ships,” forgotten. Despite the source of the question, it held a special relevance for me. What the hell was I living for? I had no real love in my life, I had only a few (pseudo) friends, and my family all had lives of their own.
Then and there, I realized that it was I that had become distant from my friends family, not the other way around. I had alienated myself from them. In that instant, I realized they were all I had, and all I would likely ever have. The only source of affection I could ever hope to receive.
"Family. Friends and family is what makes life worth living." Was I right? Was that a sincere statement, or just the sound of the alcohol-heavy fog seeping out from my mouth?
Sheng, the cop looked at me in subtle appreciation, "I agree. Family is a good thing to live for.”
A moment. A pause.
“Do you believe in God?"
The question, at once unexpected and expected, had hit another sore spot. It seemed so irrational that someone could look at all the horrors in the world, all the rape, murder, despair, torture, misery, McDonald's restaurants, kids TV shows, and conclude that it was the doing of an all-loving, goody two-sandals, deity who loves us so hugging much. If there is an omnipotent force controlling the universe, it is certainly not benevolent –at the very least capricious. It would have to be some sort of Hitler/Bundy/octopus hybrid who clubs baby seals for exercise and flosses with the intestines of grief-stricken widows for the world to make any fucking sense.
"No, I don't." I answered. "Do you?"
"Yes, I'm a Christian." He did not elaborate on it because there was no need to; that one word told you everything you needed to know.
"What do you think happens after death?" Sheng proceeded, his real motivation for the questions still nebulous.
Aware that we had piqued the interest of Captain America, I tried to cut the conve
rsation off. "Wow, you're starting to get pretty metaphysical, officer."
"Metaphysical? That's a pretty big word. You go to school?" Captain America asked with a patronizing smirk.
"I used to."
"Hmm, Used to." The patronizing smirk widened into an insultingly toothy grin.
Sheng seemed to be genuinely tickled, but tried to hide it for my sake.
"But really, what do you think happens after death?"
After the skirmish with Captain America, my defenses were up and running once more and the default nihilist cannon was ready to fire. "Nothing. I think once you die, there's nothing. Just a big, black, hollow void."
"Seems like a kind of scary thing to believe in. Isn't it?" he offered.
"I think it’s scarier to believe that my fate doesn't belong to me, but to some bozo floating in the sky wearing sandals.”
"Doesn't exist? You don't believe in God just because you can't see Him? Then what about love, do you believe that exists?"
"Yeah, but-"
"Love is real, and you can't see it or prove it's there."
"Actually love has been shown to exist as a set of chemical patterns in the brain." I should have kept my mouth shut. Nobody likes a know-it-all and at that moment, my tone sounded like that of the all-knowing deity whose existence I was refuting.
After a wordless pause he apparently felt that we had become trusting enough of each other for him to ask me, "So, is alcohol the only thing in your system?"
The subject change was about as smoothly transitioned as a snapped neck and all of a sudden, his ulterior motivation for asking me such questions came into sharp focus. He was trying to establish some sort of connection in order to squeeze out a confession of further culpability, but the asshole would get nothing from me.
One thing the cop neglected to mention-and I forgot to remember-is that I had the right to remain silent. In the forward-thinking, backward-leaning state I lived in, cops are apparently not required to read you your Miranda rights even after arresting you. It is a decidedly underhanded tactic that officials use to try to pry as much prosecutable information from you as they can. If they have you believe that they are the unquestionable authoritative masters of reality, you are more likely give them what they want... and more likely to bend the truth. I could have at any point in the process, refused to answer any questions posed by the pigs but as I was ignorant of the right, the idea never came up. Frankly, it would have saved me a lot of trouble.
While Captain America began the information mining process with the woman sitting next to me, Sheng dragged me over to the mug shot area like a captive prisoner of war. He sat me next to a glass divider on a bench that couldn't have been less comfortable if it was made of flaming sandpaper, and he positioned himself behind an intimidating, evil-seeming camera. Its sharp angles and cold inhuman lens made me feel like a germ under a microscope once again.
As the cop adjusted the lens and fiddled with the aperture, he told me to look up and face the unforgiving optics which peered unblinkingly at me. A deep-seated camera shyness, which no amount of alcohol could cure, muscled its way through my currently disinhibited state and declared its intentions to make me fidget uncontrollably.
"Okay, three, two, one..."
Click. The camera winked, immortalizing my bloodshot eyes and unkempt, drunken visage. I had feebly attempted to hide behind cover that wasn’t there, averting gaze to the side before it clicked, but I could just imagine how brutally honest the image of myself would be. I could imagine looking at the image years later and staring in a sickening mixture of horror, disgust and regret. If even ostensibly beautiful celebrities looked terrible in their mug shots, the best I could hope for would be to hit the "atrocious" mark. Later generations could probably use it as a form of torture; waterboarding sans the water.
Sheng looked at the image on his screen and said, "Are you sure you don't want to do it right? You look kind of..." as if to confirm my fears.
After that ordeal, he brought me back to the bench next to the frumpy lady. She was conversing loquaciously with Capt. America in a way that seemed too happy and friendly for someone who had just been arrested and groped by Johnny Law. She gladly acquiesced to the uniformed pig's requests and even sprinkled the conversation with the occasional joke.
"How can you be so upbeat right now?" I asked during a lull in their exchange.
"Well, I was brought in on a warrant for a missed court date and my theory is that there's no use in being unhappy in situations like these. I mean, what good will it do me? It'll only make things worse, right officer?" The pig agreed absently and continued his digitized paperwork. "'When in doubt, smile' is what my mother always used to say and experience has taught me that that's the only way that you can get ahead in life and move past difficulties, you know?"
And I guess it also helps if you're high on speed, I thought, cynically questioning her rapid-fire delivery. She seemed way too energetic at nearly five in the morning. She continued her mindless, circular babble while I nodded meaninglessly at the words she spewed my way.
"It's like that one Beatles song goes, 'don't worry, be happy.' Or was it Bob Dylan? I forget. I used to be big into Dylan in the sixties, you know. You kids nowadays can't tell good music from a stick up your ass. Hahaha. Naw, I'm just messing with you."
Tired of pretending to care, I stopped paying attention to her and just stared into space, as if trying to see if I could count the number of individual molecules of air. I wondered if Candy The Cunt was laughing somewhere. Maybe she was with God, watching me through his magic bedroom TV after a steamy session of deity-fellatio. God is in all of us!
When the verbose woman sitting beside me finally stopped talking, I looked over at Captain America with a bitter, sullen resentment and turned back to the woman beside me, and said "I fucking hate cops," with intention unclear even to me. Then, turning back to the cop I muttered with restrained volume, "Especially you."
"What did you say?" He said, snapping his gaze at me, burrowing into my eyes with his.
I was unsure if he had heard precisely what I said, but he was sure to have known that it wasn't good. His contempt towards me turned into quiet vindictive anger, as was evidenced by his steely glare.
"Nothing," I said, quickly retracting my claws. He seemed ill-humored to begin with and I did not want to test his limits. I’ve seen videos of cops beating down civvies for a lot less. He gave me a look that said motherfucker and went back to the delights of bureaucracy,
The rest of the miserable procedure played itself out with an odious sluggishness. After booking me, I was allowed to make a call. I arranged for a ride, and while giving details on how to traverse the tangled convoluted path to this rotting town, Captain America, stating his impatience, snatched the phone away from me and slammed it on the receiver, his officiousness on display for all to see. The way in which he aggressively asserted his authority over such a trivial matter ignited a spark of pure rage within me. The spark cackled and popped, igniting its immediate surroundings with viral flames. The flammable alcohol sashaying through my veins aided in turning the whole thing into a raging wildfire. First they had taken my car and means of communication, now this? Action had to be taken. I raised my hand up to his meticulously groomed, apple pie scarfing, flag saluting, face and flipped him the finger -although not the one you might expect.
In an ill-conceived attempt to convert an R rated gesture into a more security-camera-friendly PG13 one, I lifted my ring finger instead of the tradition-dictated middle one. On reflection, it seemed a bit needless, as my intention was as obvious as the expression of bewildered anger on the finger-recipient’s face. Like a fat guy ordering three quarter pounders along with a diet soda, I fooled no one but myself.
The pig, infuriated by my irreverence and utter contempt for his authority bellowed, "...and get the fuck outta my booking station!"
Not to be outdone, I retorted with a visceral, guttural, "Fuck you, asshole!" The first word sounded
out with such cutting vitriol, that it thrust out like a white-hot ninja star and stabbed itself directly into the spine of his ego. I didn't cross the line, I pole vaulted over it.
There was an audible gasp from the woman behind me; validation of the proclamation's brute impact. Words fail me in expressing just how deeply gratifying and cathartic the outburst was. Since the start of my uneventful puberty, I had been a meek and timid doormat, absorbing all kinds of insults and japes at my expense like so much mud. To be liberated, however briefly, from the chains of restraint and inhibition (not to mention common sense) was a fantastical rush unto itself.
The acidic words lingered in the air of the booking station, making it seemed more cramped than it actually was and slowly eroded the time until someone would inevitably have to say something. With the cause now cemented firmly in place, I was not going to stick around to witness the effect. At this point, the other cop had already opened the door and was waiting for me to exit, but just as I did so, he reminded me to pick up the papers; the papers which were in front of the vein-poppingly upset Capt. America.
As Sheng drove me back to the hotel, it was clear that he too, knew I had crossed as line few dared cross. My flimsy attempts at small-talk were met with a hardened lack of verbiage. He dropped me off from where I was stopped, and I offered insincere thanks which were mirrored with a goodbye of the same sincerity.
The events following my encounter with the ugly white fangs of the law were of an actuality I cannot vouch for. The real and the imagined, normally separate entities like oil and water, combined, and mixed. A lot of it could be attributable to the record amount of eighty-proof amnesia-swill I inhaled down my throat. Immediately after Sheng the cop dropped me off in that same parking lot where my luck had shriveled like an old man’s dirty nethers in frigid arctic waters, I headed to the nearest alcoholics’ convenience store, which in a town like that, abound. After purchasing a sufficient amount to blur the reality of what had happened, I gulped with a savage, angry thirst from the bottle of acidic liquid: corrosive to memory, sadness, anger, and pretty much everything else.
