Mood:
chatty"My character was the most inept policeman who had ever been given a badge. He was a motorcycle policeman - whoever came up with this concept I don't know - who wore red socks which attracted the local dogs, so the dogs would pull him off his motorbike. And there were kids who had flour bombs and he thought they were cocaine. Sadly it wasn't an ongoing role."
-- David Wenham, speaking of his role in "A Country Practice" in Wenham Goes True West
I think I have an idea what happened to this policeman: he was hired by the Berkshire County sheriff's department.
Back in college, I had a friend whom we'll call Eliot (although his real name was Mike). Eliot, a hardcore Deadhead and budding white-collar felon, lived across the hall. Eliot's hobbies included hacking the school computer system, smuggling tubs of peanut butter out of the dining hall, disproving all of Western philosophical thought, making avant-garde recordings, and cooking up interesting postmodern room decor schemes involving 200 votive candles, an ice pack lashed to the dorm thermostat, and a single helium balloon in perpetual motion. It was like having Andy Warhol as a neighbor.
One afternoon, Eliot took some bad LSD and went off on a nature spree across campus. He was apprehended two hours later, stark naked, on the lawn of the college president's house.
The cops raided his dorm room, thinking that Eliot had a stash hidden away somewhere. They found two plastic bags of clear aquarium gravel, which they identified as a quarter of a million dollars' worth of crack. Then they found several needles belonging to Eliot's diabetic roommate, Frank. Obviously, they were dealing with a hardcore junkie here. Possibly even a dealer. They impounded his wastebasket (to dust for illegal substances), hard drive, and answering machine (to check for incriminating messages from local addicts). From across the hall, I could hear them yakking on the 2-way walkie-talkies: Biggest drug bust in the history of Berkshire County! Front page news! This is gonna be huge!
In all of the excitement, they missed the 19 pot seedlings growing on the windowsill.
In the end, the cops were only able to charge Eliot with public intoxication & lewdness. In return for not pressing charges, the dean gently persuaded Eliot to take a year off. Like Huck Finn, Eliot promptly lit out for the Territory (aka the U.S. Trust Territories of the South Pacific). Periodically I'd get cryptic postcards scrawled on cardboard torn from miniature cornflake boxes: "I HAVE DRIED FLOWERS AND A COW PARADE!!" or "JULIE = BITCH PLEASE READ AND DESTROY". (I never did find out who Julie was.)
Eliot returned from exile the semester after I left. I saw him once more, at the following year's graduation (my then-boyfriend was in the same class). After that we slowly lost touch. Probably he's either in prison now, or a dot-com millionaire.
I was telling this story to a friend over lattes at Starbuck's a few weeks ago. The guy in the next armchair over seemed very interested in listening in. When I was finished he came over to us, said "You two seem like a pair of nice ladies. If you want to know a great way to relax, try dunking a teabag of pot into some hot water", waggled his eyebrows, and sauntered off.
My friend looked at me and said, "You are the biggest weirdo magnet."
surprised
quizzical
hungry
accident prone
d'oh
lazy
energetic
on fire
caffeinated