T. Kid Gets Arrested

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Victor

During my teen years, the police regularly chased me, but I got away nearly every time. When the cops caught me, they typically harassed me for a bit and then set me free. The cops only arrested me once.

It was the end of a long summer that my friends and I had spent doing drugs in the New Jersey town where we lived. A handful of our friends getting arrested didn’t slow our momentum. Kev, my friend who was busted three times over a couple of months, was in the midst of an ecstasy bender, though he faced a charge for possessing several pills. I was with him every time he was cuffed, but remained unfazed by the threat of going to jail. I had only done ecstasy a couple of times, and though it didn’t seem worth the hangover, I wanted to continue experimenting. Getting pills was a pain in the ass, but one Friday, my friend gained a bundle of pills.

In addition to procuring the drugs, we also had to find a safe spot to experience them. The cops knew most of our outdoor hangout spots, so we tried to find a house to chill at, but everyone’s parents were home. We would have gone to Jerry’s house—his mom never cared what we did—but Jerry and his family were out of town. It was starting to get dark, and we had nowhere to go, but a few of us decided to take the pills anyway. We ended up sitting around a small pond, the least likely place the cops would find us. To my dismay, a terribly annoying kid named Theo showed up to join the party. He was normally pretty jittery and loud, and once the pills kicked in, he started getting on everyone’s nerves. Kev even asked him to leave, but Theo laughed it off and stuck around.

As time passed, the temperature seemed to drop dramatically. I’m still not sure if this perception was purely because of the pills or if it was unseasonably cold that night, but it was real enough to make us move. We were debating where to go when someone suggested we break into Jerry’s house. The back door was always unlocked, so we could easily slip in and spend the rest of the evening in his basement. Kev called Jerry to ask if it was OK. “Fine,” Jerry told him on the phone, “but if I get a call from the cops, you’re on your own. I’m not telling them I let a bunch of rolling kids hang out in my mom’s house.”

We filed into Jerry’s basement as silently as we could and crept to the basement in the dark. Once we were down there, we relaxed a little. My pill finally started to kick in, but it didn’t feel like my previous rolling experiences. For one thing, I was hallucinating pretty hard. I had experienced visual hallucinations on acid and mushrooms, but nothing like this. For the first time, things were appearing out of nowhere. As the effects grew stronger, I began seeing toys, which I had owned as a kid, laying around the room, partially obscured by imaginary piles of leaves and gravel. The illusions screwed with my head. I was having a hard time distinguishing between reality and hallucinations.

I lost all concept of time, so I have no idea what time it was when we saw a cop car roll past the house. We were smoking a blunt in the dark living room for what felt like days, when suddenly panic erupted. Kev told us we should disperse throughout the house and hide in case they decided to knock on the door. I was still fraught with powerful hallucinations, so Theo led me to the basement with a very drunk girl and a first-time roller named Fish. We sat quietly in the basement for about a minute before we heard someone ringing the doorbell. There was a second of silence, and then we heard the door burst open and several men storm into the living room above us. This scared the crap out of the drunk girl. She stood up, yelled, “I’m getting the fuck outta here!” and then ran for the doors leading outside. She didn’t manage to open them, but tried to go through anyway, slamming her head loudly against the door. We heard the footsteps above us stop and then the men began running toward the basement door.

We all knew that we were fucked. The town’s cops rarely dealt with this kind of excitement, so they were definitely going to cuff us. The lights came on, and then six cops rushed into the basement. The main cop said, “Well, well. What do we have here?” All the cops started laughing and smiling. One of them approached Theo and asked, “Now, what do you suppose this little nerd is on tonight?” Theo twitched visibly, which made the cops laugh even more. The same cop turned to me. “Seriously, though,” he said, “you guys just smoking pot, or are you on something else?” I tried to respond, but my jaw was locked. As soon as the cop saw this, he said, “Alright! I guess that answers that.” They led us upstairs to ask us some more questions. Once they figured out that none of us lived there, they got Jerry’s number from us and called him. As he had told us, Jerry denied any knowledge that we were in his house, and none of us blamed him. Then the cops asked for our parents’ numbers and started calling them to tell them what was going on. Fish had recently turned 18, so he was spared this humiliation. Theo had gotten into trouble plenty of times before, so the call to his parents was routine. When they called my mom, she asked to speak to me. I have never been more terrified of my mom than I was at that moment. She asked me if I had done what they were saying. I said, “Yes.” She was silent until the cop took the phone back and told her to come pick me up at the hospital.

“Hospital?” I asked the cop when he hung up the phone. “Yeah,” he said. “You guys are obviously fucked up. We have to take you in for detox and testing.” They cuffed Fish behind his back and cuffed me to Theo. He was twitching uncontrollably, jostling my arm with every movement. The cops brought us outside and put us in the back of a cruiser. They left us alone for a moment, and Theo started freaking out. “You think Kev got away? I hope so. He’ll go to jail if he gets arrested again.” I told him to shut up and used the cuffs to smack him with his own hand. I was sure that the cops were searching the rest of the house and that we’d see Kev walk out in cuffs any minute. Luckily, they didn’t bother. They seemed satisfied with their haul for the evening.

My mom was already there when we arrived at the hospital. Rather than being upset with me right away, she patiently waited through the detox process before disciplining me. I had to drink a cup of nasty charcoal solution, give a urine sample, and wait around while the cops told my mom about the details of the arrest. I grew worried when they told her that I was technically breaking and entering Jerry’s house. After my mom and I left the hospital, we silently sat in her car for a few minutes. She finally broke the silence by giving me a firm smack in the face. My mom has only struck me about ten times in my life when I’ve displayed my worst behavior, and this was the last time. She grounded me and made me take on more hours at work so that there was no way I would hang out with the same group of kids again. I didn’t fight her over it. I still smoked weed and did some mushrooms now and then, but I never touched another pill of ecstasy.

It turned out that the pills barely had any MDMA in them. Instead, they were chockfull of DXM, the chemical found in cough medicine that can make you trip, which explained the hallucinations and the skewed perception of time. It didn’t explain the lockjaw—I think genuine guilt caused that. Because I was under 18, I wasn’t charged with a crime and only had to give a written statement admitting what I did was wrong, but I didn’t feel like I had gotten away with anything. I had disappointed my mom, and that was the hardest punishment of all.

Getting arrested might have been the best thing for me at the time. My experimentation with drugs was getting a bit too wild, and I may have ended up trying something that I wouldn’t have come back from easily. The experience was also a reality check for my mom, who learned something about drugs. She had always seen drugs as a general category of bad things, but over time she has learned to understand that there are all kinds of drugs and the way they are treated by the law doesn’t always reflect their nature. Today, she’s an avid Weediquette reader.

Hi mom!

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