I had my first run in with the police when I was sixteen years old.
Okay, so it wasn’t actually the “police” per say, but they were park cops, and they were trying their hardest to be really, really scary.
I had a large group of friends in high school. We were basically straight-edge, though I don’t think any of us knew that straight-edge existed at the time. We didn’t smoke, we didn’t drink, we didn’t do drugs, and those of us who were having sex (not me though, alas) weren’t talking about it. Most of that changed when we all went away to college, but throughout high school we were all too busy being high on life and theater to go into anything else. Except caffeine and sugar, of course.
The evening we ran into the cops, we were over at my friend Derek’s house. The boys wanted to play Risk, or some other big, world domineering army game that the girls weren’t terribly interested in. So we, being me, Christie, Nicole, and I think Celeste and Liz, though I’m not certain any more, decided to go find a park.
It was dark out, but it was a generally safe neighborhood, so we went to the local kiddie park, and played around on the swings. Now, Liz or Celeste had left something at Derek’s house, so they walked back to go get it. Christie and Nicole and I stayed behind, playing on the swings and doing balance beam acts. We were three girls, on nothing other than our own excitement and sense of fun, hanging out at the park after dark. When the cop car showed up and started shining his light on us, we figured that he was there just to make sure we stayed okay.
He says that he called us over on his loud speaker, but we never heard a thing.
When Liz and Celeste finally showed back up, we decided it was time to leave. So we walked back up the hill to the parking lot and Christie’s car.
And the park cop who was threatening to have us all put in jail.
We tried to explain that we were simply looking for a little bit of fun. We explained that we didn’t know we were doing anything wrong, and that we hadn’t seen any signs telling us that the park was closed after dark.
We certainly didn’t know that all the parks in the county closed after dark, and that playing on playground equipment was considered trespassing. The cop asked us if we wanted to spend the night in jail, and a few of the girls started to cry. He asked us for identification.
Christie, Nicole, and I had liscences. The other girls only had school ids, and the cop wasn’t happy about that.
I remember the cop reading out the spelling of Christie’s last name in that wacky cop speak that assigns each number its own word, so that the fact that most of the letters of our alphabet end with the same sound won’t cause any mistakes. I remember Stefan, who was Celeste’s brother and at the time dating Christie, showing up because he saw her car and the cop car and wanted to be a good, manly man and protect his woman. I remember the cop taking his id too, and threatening him more than he did us because he was male. I remember another cop car showing up, and I remember sitting down on the curb with the other girls, and wishing Stefan would shut up already before he got us into more trouble.
One of the new cops to show up was a woman. I think that helped our cause.
Finally, the park police decided to let us off with a verbal warning to never, ever, enjoy ourselves after dark without booze again. I think he was annoyed that we weren’t drunk. A case of underaged drinking would have just made his night, I’m sure.
After the cops left, we decided to head over to Stefan and Celeste’s house, because it was closest other than Derek’s and the girls were crying and they didn’t want to show the other guys. Once we got there, we grabbed sodas, and called our parents.
I didn’t start crying until I got on the phone with my mom and had to tell her what happened.
That’s what I do. I never cry during something weird and emotionally straining happening, I let it all out after the fact, whether I really need to cry or not.
Once I was done explaining the whole thing, my mother had one question for me:
“Why the heck are you crying?!”
I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t know myself. My mother and I are rather stoic people when it comes to tears. We avoid it at all costs, and prefer to think rationally and logically about situations. My mother’s favorite phrase is “logistical nightmare”. We finally determined that I was crying because my friends were crying, and the emotions were running high all over hte house, and that the best thing for me to do would be to come home, and relax, and watch a girly movie or read a book, or follow my mother’s favorite advice and “take a shower and go to bed”.
Mom was laughing most of the time we were talking.
In my mother’s defense, she wasn’t laughing at me. She was laughing at how her youngest daughter could get so upset over an encounter that really didn’t have any consequences. She was laughing because she managed to raise at least three kids who generally didn’t have run ins with cops, and thus didn’t know how to deal with it. I think she was relieved.
It can be very hard to tell what my mother is feeling at any given moment. I love my mother for that, for the fact that can be the strong, logical one and hold her own in the family of creative, insane packrats that she’s lived with for the last twenty-eight years.
My mom rocks, but don’t tell her I said that. She’d never let me hear the end of it.
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