London Calling, pt. 4: Burden In My Hand

Assuming that all things are equal,
Who'd want to be men of the people,
When there's people like you?
- Arctic Monkeys, "Teddy Picker"

Good things are gonna start happening to me now.
- Navin R. Johnson, "The Jerk

When dawn breaks on Sunday, I'm up with it. Despite the copious amounts of toxins that I willingly (ignorantly?) dumped in my system the night before, I feel absolutely amazing. It's almost as if I've shed a filthy layer of skin, a dead sheath of epidermal loathing and hate that forced me to be wrapped in the very thing I've been trying to escape since I set foot on native soil. The company, the jokes, watching 300 on an amazing projector in Kevin's rec room. All of it helped to purge this necrotic part of my heart, or at least sufficiently opiate me to it.

Basically, I haven't even thought of Michelle in two days.

I manage to catch Kevin's wife and thank her for her ear before she's off to count pills, and chat it up with Kevin before I go. The least I can do to thank that jerk is leave him Chuck Klosterman's IV as a parting gift. If he's read even half of it, he must absolutely loathe me by now for dumping something like that on him. Sure, pop culture and the over-analysis of it is fine and dandy, but when you combine a pop culture critic with a man who's entire subsistence depends on furthering and sustaining pop culture as well, it's like a monkey with a hand grenade: You don't know what's going to happen, but you know it can't be good.

The drive to Little Rock is entirely uneventful, a blessing at this point. To put it simply, I'm vegging beyond vegging out. I hum every song on the radio in a tone that is not just tone deaf, but has no idea tone even exists. Tone is dead to my hum, and it'll wake up with a horse's head in its bed if it's not careful. What's really strange is driving away and hearing Kevin's voice on the radio for a good 30 miles outside of Memphis before I switch to another station.

Sometimes, you just can't lose a good friend no matter how hard you try.

Serene and sedate, I pull into Little Rock during the early afternoon. I honestly don't remember if this was the time I pulled in to our quaint little capital, but it felt like early afternoon. It felt like reading a book on the grass at Riverfest Amphitheater, it felt like riding a bike across the Big Dam Bridge, it felt like going to the beer garden at Dickey-Stephens Park and watching the Travs wallop some team while being pleasantly baked in the gentle, warm air along the banks of the Arkansas River (So, the Travs don't always win, but they do to the people watching them as per the laws of Arkansas sports). I'm happy, in a serene manner not entirely unlike that of a marshmallow Peep floating in a pranked fountain. So much so, in fact, that I don't really remember what I did that day until the early evening. I'm pretty sure I saw Lynn at UALR. I'm pretty sure I tried to call Aaron or even swing by in Jacksonville. I'm pretty sure I saw Mary at some point. I sure as hell know I went by Dillard's to harass and joke with Marcus all afternoon.

Marcus got off work and agreed to meet me and Mary at Carino's in North Little Rock. Mary and I, consciously choosing to be uncharacteristically punctual, arrive a full 45 minutes before he can even show up, giving us more than enough time to put away several bellinis. Marcus and his fiancée arrive, and the night gives way to hearty laughs, jokes, and do-you-remember-whens. Times like this, when I'm surrounded by unrelenting love at the dinner table, make me wonder what it was like to be around Christ as He lectured and preached to the masses. Christ, His most passionate sermons, and food are intrinsically linked as it very well should be. When our minds and hearts are being piqued and tickled, why shouldn't our bodies be equally warm and stable?

Eventually, dinner ends. My friends, damn true as they are and amazing to the end, part ways with me and I drive Mary around for a bit. We talk, we're brutally open with each other, we're entirely at ease and completely, rapturously enveloped in the moment. It's like being back in the pool, a feeling so good that I'm oblivious to everything around me, which is why I'm very curios to catch sight of blue lights in my rear-view mirror.

Cops don't and never have worried me. Sure, there are more than the fair share of pricks out there on every force, those that are drunk on the modicum of power they have, those that feel they are above the law instead of servants to it (Boys In Tha Hood, anyone?). More often than not, the police I've run into are congenial and professional. I've always treated them respectfully and gotten out of speeding tickets or other moving violations. And I don't even have a rack.

The guy pulling me over is a State Trooper, and his backup arrives almost immediately. I had spilled some bellini on my jeans while at Carino's, so their first concern is to make me take a breathalyser test. Since the day saw fit to turn 100+ degrees, their anti-Irish gadgetry has over-heated and won't work. I pass a field test with flying colors and immediately go through the rigmarole of having my license called in for a background check. No problem. I'm clean. I speed, I take little pens from the library, I lie, I take change left in soda machines. But I have no major crimes to....

....there is a fucking warrant out for my arrest?! In Conway?!

Have you ever had a moment where everything in the world you believed in came crashing down around you simply because one of the smaller things at the bottom that supports bigger things at the top turned out to either be a lie or was somehow invalidated? To shorten that sentence and sound all the more pretentious at the same time, have you ever had an existential crisis? I've had two. Finding out I was a wanted criminal was the second. The first was when a friend of mine from AGS, Elyse, confided in me that she absolutely loved giving blowjobs. I don't know why I made that out to be such a big deal, but my world was pretty much based on a few simple presumptions about the nature of reality:

• The Rolling Stones are a better rock band than the Beatles (The Beatles are unquestionably pop, meaning the Stones win on a technicality)

• Apocalypse, Now! is the best Vietnam movie. Ever. And one of the greatest of all time.

• If a town has far too many shoe stores in proportion to the people residing within it, it isn't worth living there, mentioning it, canvassing districts there during a primary election, or anything more than a general life-passing-a-small-town-by sort of phenomenon. Usually these places are either small out-of-the-way towns that were granted interstate access, or former small towns that became squashed between two larger, more meaningfully existing cities.

• Elyse is cute, intelligent, virginal, and most certainly does not get visceral pleasure from giving men oral sex. This is a matter of fundamental importance to the existence of the universe as we know it. It really is. It's a catechism for Christ's sake.

• I'm entirely mediocre in every regard except for my mastery of ad hominen attacks involving compound curse words (See: Assfucking shitwhore).

I think it was because for a split second after Elyse told me this, I figured that all innocence in the world had just become evanescent (Last American Virgin, anyone?). Fucking Holden Caulfield. I'm stuck in the goddamn rye field with you after all, trying to save innocence that is only doomed to be lost. So, that's that meaningless anecdote.

The arresting trooper was far nicer to me than I would like to think he is to most law-breakers he takes into custody. He actually apologized for handcuffing me, telling me he knew I wasn't going to make trouble but that it “a procedural precaution.” Fair enough. He even held my cell phone to my head so I could make the single most embarrassing and humiliating phone call of my life to my dear old mum. On the ride to the station, he even went so far as to ask me why I was so tired, why I wasn't with Mary, and that I should gladly forget that Michelle had deigned it worthy to remove herself from that equation that I call my life. This wasn't an arrest or extradition. This was two actors in some cosmically misaligned drama throwing caution and the script to the wind and ad libbing a few lines of black comedy. There is no way that this is anywhere in the same ZIP code as real.

The Conway officer picking me up wasn't bad, either. In fact, he handcuffed me with my hands in front after the trooper told him I was “a good kid who just made a stupid mistake.” Joke's on him, I used that chance to text every single person I knew in Conway to come bail me the fuck out of jail. Joke's on me, nobody came save for Mary. The guy riding with me wasn't too much for company, though. Being drunk and having just beaten your wife will do that for a person. Understandably so.

When my jolly troupe (Mr. Officer, Mr. Drunkard, and myself) arrive at Faulkner County Detention Unit II, I am finally served my warrant and go through a bit of a cold tremblor as the extent of my crimes that made me wanted man are no more than $2.76 worth of a hot check.

Say what you want about comedy, but absurdism is absolutely amazing for a laugh in a dark moment (Dr. Strangelove, anyone?). The deputies in the jail all shoot me looks like I'm worth killing on the spot when I laugh at the fact that I was arrested in one town, hauled to another for extradition, and then hauled to a prison in another county over an amount that won't even buy a small popcorn at a movie theater. That may be why I was last to be processed and thrown into my cell with three other guys long after everyone else was pulled for fingerprints and mugshots.

Yes, processed. Stripes (Smell odd). Fingerprints (Nifty, all digital!). Mugshot (I'm oddly photogenic). Shower in front of a deputy (The ultimate in humiliation). Thrown in a room with nothing to sleep on but the concrete floor (Been there). Yeah, the ol' fuzz finally caught Tom Joad.

This place unnerves me in a way that almost makes me doubt that I'm really here. Even though I see the people outside my door, the way they completely ignore the prisoners here is an insult that just breeds self-loathing. It makes you wonder if you truly aren't good enough for these good people, these right people anymore. I sometimes wonder if criminals are repeat offenders so often because they don't know how to validate themselves after living an existence in which they are practically denied the acknowledgment that they even take in oxygen. It sounds trite and insignificant, but this place honestly makes me wonder if Michelle was right when she yelled some of the things she did at me that last night.

I'm set to be arraigned at 1:30, whenever that is. Probably an hour and thirty minutes after I'm served two rubbery hot dogs, if logic doesn't fail me. Still, that leaves a lot of time between the applesauce and white bread and rubbery hot dogs to burn. The denizens of cell #22 resort to the one thing that all American men have turned to in times of dire need and absolute malaise: Paper football. We play paper football over and over and never tire of it. We bounce the “ball” off the wall. We try and shoot it through the slot in the door that the food trays were delivered through (The deputies catch on and shut the door within minutes). In a place where time has no meaning and where meaning has no pertinence to begin with, where else do we have to go but back to the comforts of high school boredom?

Two dollars and seventy-six cents. Sure, a law is a law. I broke a law, and I have to pay for it. But seriously. What is the fucking point in shackling my ankles and wrists to go before a judge for two dollars and seventy-fucking-six cents?! For the cost of my stripes, hours for the manpower (trooper, CPD officer, deputies, the judge), my three meals, and the gas to transport me here, the state could have probably done something more worthwhile. Orwell himself couldn't have penned a more biting satire than what this state is willingly doing to itself. Compared to many of the guys in there, I get off easy. I pay a $3 (HA!) bond and walk out after only 18 hours in jail.

I flew home from London a broken, hurt, despairing person who was in a dive straight into self-inflicted oblivion. Then, I waged a war with demons that won and drove me east. Finally, I drove home, happy and free only to end up behind bars with a guy who looked like the Unabomber and had a toenail that he could peel back to keep a small stash of pot in. Sometimes, life throws you a curveball. Sometimes, it just intentionally walks you.

In less than a week, life was going to bean me in the temple with a Nolan Ryan fastball and there was nothing I could do about it. Everything I had worked hard to free myself was going to return, with a bloodlust from hell.