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You guys are going to think I'm lying anyway (most people do) but I'll share.
I did actually have about 15 cops point their guns at me when I was a teenager. Washtenaw County cops. I had just left my music teacher's house (in Ann Arbor, Miller/Maple exit of M-14). I was carrying a Steinberger bass guitar propped up against the passenger seat of my mom's 87 lime-green Chrysler LeBaron.
If you've never seen one, a Steinberger is an odd instrument. It has no headstock (the tuners are back below the bridge) and it has very little body. It's long and thin, and it comes with a padded nylon bag.
So I'm trying to get back on the freeway from Maple Rd. - back in those days, before they built the roundabouts, the freeway entrance was 3/4 mile long, so you'd be driving through the woods for a while before you actually saw the freeway. And I got pulled over, of course. Lights flash, I pull to the right, and I wait.
And wait.
I know they usually process your license plate through the computer or whatever when they pull you over, but it sure seemed like everything was taking a long time. The cops kept flashing their spotlights at the back of my head over and over again, and eventually 20 minutes had passed with no one approaching my car. It was a school night. I was young, impatient, tired of waiting, and so I rolled down my window (actual window levers in that car) and stuck my head out to see what was going on.
What I was met with was the sight of 3 or 4 chubby cops with their guns pointed at my face, screaming at me to turn the fuck around and don't move.
So I didn't. I was strangely not panicking or anything - I was just trying to be calm so that maybe my calmness would show them I wasn't up to anything bad. They instructed me to do this weird contortionary process that involved holding my right hand out the window and taking the keys out of the ignition with my left hand, passing them to my right hand, and dropping them out the window next to the car. I did everything they asked, without saying a word. Eventually I was kneeling behind my car as I was being placed into cuffs, and then stuck in the back of a cop car.
By this time, helicopters with search lights were flying overhead and more cop cars had arrived. Finally one of the cops, a big fat black guy, searched my car, pulled out the bass guitar, and had a good laugh. Apparently they were expecting a rifle. He lectured me about driving without a lit license plate and a cracked windshield, which I presume was the reason they pulled me over to begin with, and sent me on my way.
On my way home, the magnitude of what had just happened finally hit me, like a curtain pulling away over the fear I had been keeping at bay. The fear welled up in me, and I began shaking, and I had an uncontrollable urge to shit. I had to pull the car over to the side of the road where, in plain view of the maybe 5 or 6 people that were driving that night on M-14, I shat into a plastic bag and cleaned up with fast food napkins from the glove box. I sat silently for a while, contemplating the ease with which life can end, and then drove home.
And that's why, for the rest of my life, no birthday will ever be worse than the one when I turned 18.
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Originally Posted by LDB
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