I Fought The Law...

When I was younger, I was quite a hell raiser. I know, I know...hard to believe, isn't it? Well, it's true. If there was trouble to be found, I found it. Sometimes it found me. If there was no trouble, I *made* the trouble. My teen years were spent mostly in a drunken haze, treating my body like an amusement park. Some kids did drugs, some kids were into breaking into houses, some kids fought all the time...not me.

Not to say I didn't do those things as well, but they weren't my forte, so to speak.

Booze was my thing. No matter what you called it...if it was an alcoholic beverage, I drank it. Beer was my favorite, hands down. There just wasn't enough beer in the world for me. Cans, bottles, glasses...it didn't matter to me. Beer was my thing.

By the time I hit 18, I was a seasoned alcoholic. I make no bones about it...I was. I'm not ashamed of it, but I am ashamed of some of the things I did while I was under the influence of it. Most of my high school career was under the influence...there are very few days I remember from start to finish. I would sell my soul to the devil himself to go back and change that today...I really would.

People who like to drink have an uncanny knack for finding other people who like to drink...it's what we do. Drinking is the one thing that brought people together in my school...I partied with people who otherwise wouldn't give me the time of day. After time, I even drank with people in other cities...and other states altogether. It was like my own personal national pastime.

One such night, I was out with a buddy of mine and an uncle of his who was our designated buyer. I was 18 and so was my buddy, so we needed someone to buy us beer as the drinking age had been raised to 21. We were driving around in my first car, my beloved 1978 Chevy Nova...a two-door model. Man, the stories that car could tell...anyways. That night was cold as hell...it was the middle of December and the heater in my car didn't work all too well, so we kept bundled up so as not to freeze to death. Out cruising around, a couple cases of beer in the backseat, a buncha empties all over the place, tunes crankin' on the AM radio and we felt like we had the world in the palm of our hands.We were invincible. Life was good...damn good.

Until...

We got hungry, so we decided to stop at a convenience store to get some snacks and of course, some more beer and cigarettes. We weren't out of either one, but it might have been a while before we stopped again. I stayed in the car, and my buddy and his uncle went inside the store to get our supplies. I kept the car running so the heat would stay on, which wasn't really doing that good of a job in the first place, but I did it anyways. My buddy and his uncle came out, walked back to the car and got in, and I raised my beer to finish it off.

And then...

ALLLLLLL hell broke loose.

My buddy starts saying "Cops! Cops! Cops!" and I panicked and started to put my empty beer can under my seat, which I know now was really stupid. I saw myself hiding a beer can (like they weren't going to see the other two empty cases floating around the front and back seats), but the officer at my window saw me reaching for a weapon of some kind. The next thing we heard was "PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM AND DO NOT MOVE!!!!!"

There was an officer at my window, one at the passenger window, and one at both ends of the car, all four with guns drawn on me. I was mortified. I couldn't even open the door when the officer asked me to. I think I might have even peed a little. They had to search the car, of course, and we could have built a small fortress out of all the empties they took out of the car and put on the trunk.

See, when we pulled into the parking lot, we were all too drunk to notice the police car at the other end of the parking lot AND the police car in the parking lot at the fast food restaurant next door (it was dark...that's my only defense). And of course, I pulled into the closest spot to the driveway, which happened to be one of the two spots the clerk couldn't see very well from inside the store. Two guys run in, one waits in the car...yeah. They thought they were going to be robbed, so the second clerk tipped off one of the officers in the store (my buddy and his uncle were totally oblivious to the two officers in the store, for some reason...they must have been more drunk than I was). Then the second car rolled in nice and ninja-like with its lights off after the other two got in the car, and we were stone cold busted. The nights' adventure got me my second underage drinking citation, and I don't remember what the other two got and frankly I don't care.

It didn't scare me enough to make me quit, but it DID make me more a cautious drunk for the future.