Enjoy!
RUSHED!
It’s about 10:30 at night, and after seeing Ken at the Calahoo court apartments, I circle around the other side of the block to find a place to park. There is nobody calling, so I decide to pull over by a cal-de-sac in front of a church that I usually chill at when the phone isn’t ringing. Tucan and Robbie are with me, Robbie sitting in the backseat just coming along for a ride. They both ask where I am going and I reply, “My chill spot, I gotta take a leak.”
I have the Ford Taurus, and I am not happy about it. I just insured a new work car under my name. So it’s got no heat, no history, and above all it’s not fresh out of the impound lot. Tim had landed the Taurus in there for a month when he put it in the ditch and got arrested on warrants and for not having a license. While the car was impounded we had to get a new work car, a Plymouth Breeze and I insured it. I’m new, and the car isn’t known, so I should be using it. It’s only been out on the road a couple of times. But as soon as the Taurus gets out of the lot, I have to use it instead, because Tim wants to ride around in the new work car so he can have an E party. This is so fucking stupid. I told him before I left his house, where he was parked outside in the new car, that I had a bad feeling about this one. “It’s fine man, it’s running beautifully, just fucking drive it man” Tim told me in his stupid, drug slurred monotone voice.
We pull over on the inside of the cal-de-sac where I usually go to sleep and I scope out a nice little bush for me to drain my main vein. It’s in the middle of the grass island of the cal-de-sac. I put the car in park, and press the automatic unlock button on the door. The sequence to follow takes place in a matter of seconds.
Right at that moment, a gold GMC Sierra truck pulls up right behind me and I knew something wasn’t right because it pulled up right behind my bumper. “What the fuck’s up with this guy?” Robbie says with a carefree tone from the backseat, not really thinking much of it at first, but I do. I instantly become paranoid and know that something is awry. I clicked the doors locked again and look at Tucan and say “put the food in your mouth.”
We could all hear whoever it was behind us exit the vehicle, but we couldn’t see a thing amidst the sea of shine coming from the headlights of the truck. Robbie, the most experienced of us all, quickly seconded my statement by punching the back of Tucan’s seat and saying “put the fucking food in your mouth man, quick! Grab the tin!” Tucan is looking around nervously, the tin gripped between his sweaty palms and I can see that he is freezing up and doesn’t know what to do. God dammit! I’ve heard horror stories of situations like this, especially with new kids.
We see a flashlight flick on behind us, and I turn to Tucan and start repeating quickly like a broken record “put the food in your mouth, put the food in your mouth, put the food in your mouth….” Only a few seconds have passed, but it is now obvious what’s going on. I put the car in drive and get ready to speed off, but just then a Ford Ranger truck pulls in front of the car from the other side of the cal-de-sac. It must be undercover officers; they’ve boxed us in.
A mountain of a man, mean looking, about the size of an NFL linebacker exits the Ford Ranger in front of us. He’s probably about 5’10; wearing a white Nike dry fit t-shirt and jeans. I’m sure his clothes are like XXXL, but they fit him skin tight due to his sheer muscle mass. The look on his face dictates that he is in quite a serious mood. He flicks on his flashlight, puts his hand to his waist where his gun is holstered and marches towards the passenger side of the vehicle where Tucan is seated.
I turn towards Tucan and see that he has finally jolted into action and is frantically fiddling with the tin, trying to get it open, with the steroid freak cop only a few steps away from his window, his gun already in his hand. When he does get it open, a terrible feeling engulfs me as I view the open tin has a full, unwrapped game ball in it along with an extra loose piece. How could I have been so stupid, why wasn’t I paying more attention to what Tucan was doing?
Tucan had told me explicitly that he didn’t think he could swallow a game ball, nor could any of us really, except for Tim. I had warned him just as I had been warned before, that if you think you cannot swallow a ball, always carry it in piece formation… ALWAYS! This means every time you pick up a fresh game, you bust it open and put it in piece formation in the tin so that you can pop it in your mouth quickly without delay. Only weirdo veterans like Tim could actually put a game ball bigger than a peach pit in their mouth and swallow it whole.
At the same moment that the big black cop was making his way over to Tucan’s side, the figure from the back made his way up to my driver side window. He lightly taps the glass window of the vehicle with his flashlight, a gesture to roll it down.
I roll the window down nervously, about halfway, just a crack. I didn’t know at the time, but this would prove to be a pivotal move. A tall, white man with a tie-dye t-shirt, jeans, and a mustache greets me at the window. His hairline starts near the middle of his head, and he has an ugly grimace beneath the hair on his lip, like that of a drill sergeant.
“Saw you leaving the apartment there a minute ago, what were you doing?”
I reply with a nervous, crackly tone “ I just dropped off a friend.”
It’s funny how in a situation like this, I would still try to act innocent and friendly, like this officer is here for my benefit. I know that he is here at my window because he knows what’s going on. I told him I just dropped off a friend, but at this point, I may as well have said that I have years worth of jail time clutched between the fingers of my colleague in the front seat, because it doesn’t really matter what I say, the cop already knows what he is going to do and so do I. It is almost like the calm before the storm. Like a gun draw in the old west, I was just waiting for that moment to strike where we would both spring into action.
“Yeah well, why don’t you grab your license and registration and step out of the car for me.” The tye-dyed cop commands through the crack of my window. I turn to reach over Tucan’s lap to the glove compartment and as I do, I see that the big black cop is right at the window shining his light in with his face only inches from the glass that separates him from us.
I just say it, “swallow, swallow, swallow” with the angry black cop staring right at me through the window, his facial expression changing as he watches my lips move. Then I notice that Tucan is fiddling with the game bag between his legs. Trying desperately to bust it open so he can get it into individual pieces and throw it in his mouth. The bag however, has been stretched and has taken that gooey, coating texture over the tightly wrapped pieces so he can’t fetch them out properly. He was trying to pull on the bag knot discretely with his hand instead of biting it off and has made it even harder for himself to get the pieces out. Meanwhile all this time, he has been fiddling with a ball of cocaine in between his legs right in plain sight of the two cops at our windows.
“What’s your partner doing there?” says the voice from my side of the car. As I turn back to face him, I see the barrel of a gun pointed right at my face, rested on the partially opened window. “Tell him to stop moving around and show us his hands or one of you two is getting a bullet in the head” says the cop in an elevated, serious tone.
I twist back to Tucan and this time I scream and exclaim “do it, fucking do it, get it down” disregarding the orders of the officer to stay still. I can see the big black cop ragingly ripping at the passenger side door in frustration and anticipation as I watch Tucan try to force the 10 loose pieces into his mouth.
A moment of sheer, slow motion, surrealism ensues and time seems to come to a complete halt around me. I hear faint screams, distant voices that are obviously still close by and for the first time in my life I feel like nothing else in the entire world matters for one single bit, because every ounce of my existence is vested into this very moment.
“He’s swallowing!”
“WHAT?”
“Get it open!”
“SMASH!”
“C’MON!”
The two men exclaim in succession of one another from opposite sides of the car. The tye-dye cop on my side starts to smash at the window with the bottom end of his gun. He does so about 2 or 3 times until it shatters in my face. All the while screaming with each successive smash “He’s swallowing the dope, he’s swallowing the dope, he’s swallowing the dope!” as if we’re in some kind of fucking Hollywood crime epic.
The window shatters and glass goes everywhere. I turn my face towards Tucan’s side to shield myself from the flying shards. The street clothes cop reaches through the non-existent window to open my door. I see that Tucan is chugging liquid from a glass bottle of Nestea right in front of the muscular black cop who is going berserk outside his window, tearing at the car door, screaming unidentifiable profanity.
I feel a punch to the side of my head, and then my door opens and the white cop swoops in with his arms and attempts to haul me out forcefully.
As he is grabbing at me, trying to get me out of the car, I saw Tucan had finished drinking, and that the black cop was ripping at his door and growling like a psychopath in a pissed off rage. The white cop who is trying to wrestle me out of my seatbelt, pauses for a moment to push the automatic unlock button on my door. Just as I was being pulled from the vehicle, Tucan paused and said nervously to the cop opening his door “please don’t hurt me.”
BOOM! Tucan’s door opens, and just as I am being hauled from sight out of the car, I see a massive leg shoot in the door and boot Tucan’s head straight downward in a violent whiplash, his head bouncing off the radio in the center console. Commotion and anarchy fill the atmosphere in full swirl, and there is absurdly loud music pumping out of the Taurus. I then move to the sightline above the roof when I get pushed up against the car chest first, and see the black officer jumping around aggressively, huffing and puffing, screaming hateful words that I couldn’t quite make out above all the commotion except for the occasional “piece of shit” that was thrown amongst them.
When the roid raged cop stuck his boot in Tucan’s face and kicked him into the radio, it set the volume off full blast.
“Booty booty booty booty rockin' everywhere, booty’booty-boody-boody rackin' everywhere” is blaring through the street in a loud, obnoxious echo. It’s that new song from Bubba Sparxxx, miss new booty.
The tye-dye cop punches me again in the back of the head lightly, then spreads my legs and puts my arms out, and proceeds to search me. The whole time he’s frisking me, I’m watching Tucan get the living shit kicked out of him to this strange soundtrack. The black cop has him outside the car and is jumping up and down in an exaggeratory form that looks like it is taken from the books of pro wrestling. It almost looks like Rodney King in reverse as Tucan gets stomped repeatedly. All I can hear is Tucan screaming and griping in pain as the angry black officer kicks him again and again.
The tye-dye officer tells me to stay put and not move, he then quickly walks back to his truck and picks up his radio. Within seconds, regular marked police cars are all over the scene.
Now, somehow, amidst all of this madness, Robbie is still just sitting awkwardly in the backseat, and hasn’t even been acknowledged by the officers, his door still shut. The black roid monkey has been too busy beating up Tucan to even notice that there was someone in the back seat on his side of the car, and the white cop somehow didn’t notice him either. The white cop comes back to the car and cuffs me, and then sits me on the curb. He then realizes someone is still in the backseat. He orders him to step out slowly, gun drawn. Robbie cooperates, exits the car, and gets handcuffed and placed beside me. He seems to have a very calm and professional attitude about what’s going on, like he has nothing to worry about. It’s probably because he has been through this before.
We both sit on the curb right by the bush I had originally intended to piss in, watching Tucan get beaten and kicked repetitively. Multiple uniformed police officers are now walking all around us and none of them seem to have issue with what’s going on.
Is this normal? Is this what happens when you piss off the cops? They never even said they were cops; they just started rushing us, pulling guns and smashing windows. I had heard a few stories about kids getting beaten up by the cops, but I wasn’t expecting anything like this. There are people watching, there are uniformed cops on the scene, Tucan is on the ground, not resisting at all. He is also only like 140 pounds, so he is obviously a neutralized threat, even if he ever as one.
“Stop fucking kicking me!!!” I hear Tucan scream. All the cops on the scene, both plain clothes and uniformed, gather around Tucan in a circle behind us. They all just gather around him like a gang of bullies, as if it was some form of police intimidation. “So what’s going on, dopers?” one of the uniformed officers says. The black cop lifts Tucan up by his hair, scalping him, flashlights pointed at his bloody face from every direction. “This little fucker swallowed” says the white cop. “Open your fucking mouth bitch” says the angry black man. Tucan opens his bloody mouth and lets out a faint “bbeeuuwweehhh” as a hand separates his lower jaw from his face and points a flashlight for a closer inspection. “You’re under arrest for obstruction of justice and proceeds to crime” says the white undercover officer. “You’re going to jail.”
Finally, the big black cop asks one of the uniformed officers if he has a pair of handcuffs to “lockdown this piece of shit”. Even then, he’s still not done.
The black officer grabs Tucan by the back of his shirt collar and drags him across the grass aggressively, then boots him again, hard, right in the ribs. I swear I heard them crack under the pressure of his boot. I’m starting to actually get worried, not even about myself thinking I’m about to get hauled off to jail, but that Tucan is actually about to get either beaten to death or the point of paralysis. Even Robbie looks concerned as we both stand by and watch.
“Yo man he isn’t even doing anything stop it, leave him alone” I say pleadingly to the aggressing officer, who still hasn’t let up on his attack on Tucan. Even though he is now in cuffs, on the ground, bloody, and people in the surrounding houses are watching, the intimidating black cop continues to kick him and cuss at him.
This is seriously something beyond my wildest dreams at this point, I can’t even fathom what is unfolding in front of my eyes.
“Alright let’s search it” the tall, white, plain clothed officer says to his surrounding minions.
“And take these boys in the cruisers and check their dicks, make sure they didn’t crotch anything.”
In succession, Robbie and I get plucked from the curb and taken to the marked police cars now on scene. Tucan follows from his face down position in the grass, and the black cop pulls him up swiftly by the back of his pants just because he can.
I sit down in the back of the police car with my feet outside and the door open, hands cuffed behind my back. The officer undoes my belt and proceeds to unzip my fly, a most awkward feeling. He’s business as usual performing this, not saying a word. He pulls up my underwear to its bulkiest and baggiest degree, and flashes his light right on my dick. “Bet you don’t really enjoy this part of the job, eh?” I exclaim sarcastically and nervously. The man was looking at my dick with a flashlight, I didn’t know what to say but I felt I had to say something. The officer takes me out of the cruiser, and sits me back on the curb with Robbie. The plain clothed officers are now searching the car and tearing it apart. I see cards from my wallet scattered as far as 20 feet away from the car, as they search through my wallet hastily. Meanwhile, as they’re searching, all of our phones are ringing off the hook. The work phone has Brandon calling wondering what’s going on and junkies ringing us not knowing we are with the cops right now. The black cop picks up the work phone and answers and demands someone meet him “right now, RIGHT NOW!” He’s demanding it as if it will be convincing somehow that he is one of us. Then he answers my personal phone. “Yeah, you looking for Gavin, well he just got fucking busted!” He screams and spits into the phone and then overhand throws it with all his might back into the car door with anger and aggression, presumably destroying it. He then continues searching through the car savagely, tossing useless search items out and littering the pavement with them. The other officers just scan the area of the car methodically and rapidly with their flashlights, looking for any kind of evidence they’re convinced might exist. All the while, as they’re searching, every 5 seconds you just hear one of them pipe up and say, “you guys are going to fucking jail” or “you guys are busted, you’re going to jail.” They must have said it dozens of times.
At this point, Tucan has been laid down right beside Robbie and I, left alone by the angry black man, at least for the moment. I make eye contact with him, and ask him, “did you get it all down?” The last time I looked at him he was struggling to get it into his mouth, but I did see him drinking liquids. He gives me a nod, and I breathe a small sigh of relief.
“Weed, weed, we got weed boys” the white cop and the black cop are pointing both their flashlights at the indent in the handle of the door. There is literally nothing but the crumbs of a bud that would have previously lain there. The crumbs wouldn’t even add up to enough to weigh out. The cops jump up and down in celebratory trash talk and intimidation, like a football team before kickoff. “Oh we got weed boys, oh man you guys are so fucking busted, you guys are going to jail” they taunt and scream to us. Are you fucking kidding me?
I’m obviously not worried about the weed, but I see a group of officers gathering at the back seat of the car, and now the white cop is standing there with the tin in his hand, empty. I hear a quick chatter about something they have their light shined on in the back seat.
Meanwhile, one of the uniformed officers opens up the trunk of the vehicle and pulls out Robbie’s bagpipes. Robbie usually hauls them around with him when he works the dayshift because sometimes he has practice at night. It must have been cancelled tonight because he’s out here with us in handcuffs instead.
“Who’s pipes?” one of the officers asks.
“Mine sir” Robbie replies.
“Oh yeah, who do you play for?”
“Alberta White Hackle”
“Oh yeah, we gotta band to, The Pipes and Drums of Sawmill.”
“Really?”
“Yeah we play every other Thursday.”
“Right on” Robbie says, “The Pipes are my life.”
“Looks like you’re hanging with the wrong crowd tonight Myles.” One of the officers says to Robbie.
Now that’s rich, Robbie’s been doing this for years and has a reputation in the city, but out here he isn’t known, so the cops think he’s a goodie goodie because he has bagpipes and he was sitting in the backseat. Meanwhile they’re treating Tucan like he is a kingpin and they have a vendetta to settle. “Hanging with the wrong crowd Myles”, you got to be kidding me.
The cops gathered by the back seat now are chattering excessively and intently about something, and as they turn to walk away from the area of the back seat, the white undercover cop raises the tin to his ear and shakes it, and I am horrified at what I hear.
Something is rattling around in the tin. My life as I know it is over, I’m actually going to jail. He looks towards us and smirks as he shakes the tin around yet again, and the same rattling ensues. I turn to Tucan “You got it all down, right, RIGHT?” He nods intently; confused as to why the sound is occurring when the officer shakes the tin. Something’s in there, but what? What the hell is in there? There wasn’t anything in there a minute ago or they wouldn’t have gotten so excited about the weed crumbs. I snap to Tucan, nearly enraged, gritting my teeth. “Did you drop a fucking piece?” He shakes his head again, blood pouring off his lips onto the grass.
“Whose car is this?” The white undercover officer demands.
“It’s my friend, Trevor’s” I reply. The car is insured under a junkie’s name, Trevor Chavez.
“K, unhook these two” the white undercover says to a couple of the nearby uniformed officers. Robbie and I are freed from our handcuffs, and the officers start to walk away towards the group, without even a word from either of them. Robbie and I look at one another quizzically. Aren’t we going to jail or something? At least spend the night so they can try and scare us, or for some B.S. charge like failure to obey? What’s going on? And what about the tin? Something was in the tin, or was there? I never saw anything, but he shook that tin. I swear I heard something rattling and I know there was no way I was going home tonight if there was a piece in that tin.
Robbie and I continue to stand by, clueless as to what is going on. Uniformed officers are heading back to their cars, and one of them is taking Tucan with him and throws him in the back seat of his marked cruiser. The two undercovers are both conversing by the gold Sierra truck, the mustache, tye-dye shirt one on his microphone simultaneously relaying something as the black one talks in his ear.
The undercovers then converse with a few of the uniformed officers, as the marked car with Tucan in the backseat takes off to chauffer him away.
Robbie and I remain standing in the spots where we were let loose of our shackles, and I turn to him and ask what’s going on. “I have no fucking clue” he replies.
The officers, undercovers and uniformed, break from their huddle and retreat to their respective cars. Not a word has been spoken to us within the last minute or so. No, “you’re free to go”, “I’ll see you around” or “I’ll get you next time you punk”. All the officers just drive away, leaving us, smashed window, scattered belongings and all. They just take off without a word, leaving us with our own thoughts and feelings about what just transpired.
Robbie and I turn to each other:
“Do we just, get our stuff and go or something?” I ask.
“Yeah let’s get the fuck outta here I guess” Robbie replies with a chuckle.
We walk over to the car, where everything that was in the car is now scattered around the inside of the car and outside of it in a debacle. I begin to collect things like my cards from my wallet and my cell phone, which are all lying outside the vehicle. My phone now has a massive dent in the side due to the impact it received upon the big black cop throwing it into the car. He threw it so hard it hit something and bounced out the broken window onto the pavement.
After gathering my things, I sweep the shards of glass that are everywhere off my driver seat and get in the car, Robbie places his bagpipes in the trunk, takes a quick look around, and gets into the passenger side.
“Yo what the fuck just happened?” I exclaim.
Robbie bursts out into laughter.
“I have no idea man, but that was intense! Tucan got mashed, that big nig went buck wild on him. I’ve never seen someone get beaten up like that.”
“Can they just do that? Like, they were kicking the living shit out of him, even in the handcuffs, he wouldn’t stop.”
Robbie
“They’re cops, they do what they want man. He swallowed right in front of them and that pissed them off I guess, bahahaha.” Robbie again bursts back into laughter.
I too am now giggling, high on the adrenaline, feeling goofy and lightheaded as I retrieve the keys, which were laying in between the seats, and start the ignition. My heart is going a mile a minute. What just happened, and why am I still here? But only minutes ago I had a gun pointed at me, a window being smashed right in my face, and my friend was beaten brutally right in front of my eyes and now I’m just, driving away from the situation?
My cell rings, it’s Brandon, wondering what the hell is going on. I explain to him what just happened, that Tucan got taken away and that they took the phone and the money. He says we’ll meet tomorrow and figure things out.
I pull onto the highway and begin our trek back to the city. I light a smoke and breathe it down like pure oxygen. On the ride back, Robbie and I converse excitedly about what just occurred and how absurd it was.
“Tucan’s a fucking soldier!” Robbie screams.
“Yeah, ahahaha, his third day in and he’s already down as fuck” I yell back.
We can’t understand why we were left alone though, why we weren’t arrested. Robbie maybe because they thought he was a goodie goodie, and he was in the back seat, but I was the driver, I should have been taken in for sure if there was something in that tin. Robbie tells me that he saw Tucan get all the food down though; he said he didn’t drop any. Tucan was immanent to me as well that he had gotten all the food down. For now, it will just remain a mystery I suppose.
Robbie
“Yo, maybe they think Tucan’s like…the boss” Robbie says while simultaneously breaking out into laughter.
“No way, he’s the mot broke person we know, but I think you might be right! They beat him down pretty hard. He did swallow right in front of them though.”
Robbie
“Yeah true, cops hate it when you don’t listen to them. Hah, he pulled his gun out and stuck it in your face, like he was really gonna shoot you. What an idiot, those guys are idiots. They can’t even bust kids like us.”
We continue to converse about the night until we arrive at Tim’s mom’s house to tell him the news.
We walk in through his open front door. It’s only like 11:30 at night, but everything is quiet. Even Justin, who is staying in the basement in the meantime until he and Tim find a new place, is asleep. We head into Tim’s room, and see him passed out, with an atrocious look on his face. Robbie tries to shake him awake, but it’s no use, he is completely incoherent. His face gleaming, his lips drooped down like they are about to fall off of his chin. Robbie is shaking him saying, “Tim, get up, we need to talk. We got rushed, and Tucan’s in jail.” Tim just rolls over and goes back to sleep. Looks like Tim had himself another party night with some pills.
We go downstairs and wake Justin up and feed him the story of what just happened. We trade tales for a bit. This is what dealers’ do, trade stories when shit goes down.
After an hour or so at Tim’s Mom’s house, talking with Justin, I finally decide to call a cab and make my way home.
I arrive home at nearly 1am. Wow, I’ll get 6 hours of sleep tonight before school if I can manage. I haven’t slept 6 hours in a night since I started. Too bad, tonight of all nights, I’m not going to be getting any sleep. I’ll just be thinking long and hard about what just happened.
Haha names have been changed to protect the innocent?
ReplyDeleteNo, not the names, but maybe a few other things to avoid involving groups that wouldn't want involvement.
ReplyDelete