When we last left off, dear readers, I had just been arrested and charged with two counts of “Cruelty to Animals” for vigorously petting a police horse while drunk, shirtless and dancing a jig in the middle of Bourbon Street. Let’s continue…
The New Orleans Police Department is notorious for two things: 1) employing some of the biggest douchebags alive and 2) going out of their way to humiliate any Yankee guilty of even the most venial of offenses. By the time I arrived at the NOPD station, I had been informed umpteen times by the skinny dipshit dork of a cop who arrested me that I was lucky he wasn’t going to have me booked on two counts of “Striking a Police Officer”. The temptation to reply to his insipid claptrap with some variation on “dude, it’s not my fault you were the biggest loser in your high school class and still don’t know what a breast feels like” was tempered by the realization that my Miranda Rights did nothing to guarantee I would not be taken into a holding cell and Tased for the enjoyment of a bunch of badge-wearing hicks. So I kept my mouth shut. While I was being “processed” at the station, I was shackled – hands, feet and all – to a “bench of shame” with three other hard-core criminals guilty of such offenses as “Public Drunkenness”, “Public Urination” and “Publically Insinuating That All Southerners Are Flaming Racists”. Which they are. I was still shirtless, mind you, and it was freezing in that station, so even though my eight bad-ass tatts were out in the open to lend me “street cred”, I could probably have picked the lock on my shackles with my nipples if the laws of physics had been more cooperative.
New Orleans cops love to take their sweet ass time filling out paperwork, and even though I suspect this is because they’re sick enough in the head to enjoy the anxiety that an impending visit to jail causes all white yuppies, it probably has more to do with the fact that they are semi-literate at best, which would explain why they couldn’t get a real job in the private sector. Sixty minutes after my arrival at the station, Officer Assbag finally figured out how to write the postal abbreviation for Connecticut in kindergarten-style block letters in the “State of Residence” box on my booking form and it was time for me to be transferred to the Orleans Parish Prison (hereafter referred to as the “OPP”).
The ride from the police station to the OPP was an absolute debacle. For whatever reason, I was put into the back seat of a police cruiser whose primary use MUST have been transporting Oompa Loompas who stole Everlasting Gobstoppers from the Wonka Factory. I had to sit SIDEWAYS just to fit in that taxpayer-subsidized death trap. Making matters worse, I had a neighbor in the back seat: a Latino crackhead who spent the first five minutes of the ride threatening to kill the cop driving the car and, after I erupted into a fit of giggles at his stereotypical ridiculousness, spent the last ten minutes of the ride threatening to cut me. As an aside, I must say that the cop driving the car was a exceptionally good sport because not only did he refuse to acknowledge the crackhead’s idiotically psychotic threats, he joined me in laughing at that asshole for the final few minutes of the ride. When we arrived at the OPP, I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard.
The “admissions” process at the OPP is very slow, very deliberate and designed to make you wish General Sherman had hung a right at Savannah and burned New Orleans to the ground. After being chained to another “bench of shame” for an hour, I was thoroughly and generously searched, told to strip down to my underwear (which didn’t take long because I was still shirtless) while my possessions were confiscated and inventoried, and finally given an orange jumpsuit that said “OPP Inmate” on the back. Thank God I was still shitfaced because otherwise I think I would have been pooping my pants. Instead, I found it all rather amusing.
Attired like a convicted felon, I was tossed into a holding cell with approximately 40 black men, 1 other white man, and the aforementioned Latino crackhead. This was the moment in which I discovered once and for all just how batshit crazy I really am. If you’d told me a week earlier that I would find myself in a Louisiana jail with the demographic deck stacked so heavily against me, I’m positive I would have been terrified. Nosce te ipsum – “know thyself”. Clearly I didn’t know jack shit about myself, because when I entered that holding cell my alcohol-soaked prefrontal cortex had decided that if anyone so much as looked at me the wrong way, they were going down. If you’re thinking to yourself “oh my God, what a friggin idiot”, you have reacted correctly. I mean, my God, I’m from one of the richest, whitest towns in America. A town where a shoving match is a “rumble” and where we tolerate a maximum of two minority families at any one time. To this day I shudder at the thought of what might have happened if someone had actually started with me. The headline would probably have read something like “Stupid Yankee Starts Race Riot in OPP, Is Beaten To Death With Own Dismembered Limbs by Fellow Inmates”. Because I’m sure the writers at the Times-Picayune are giant douchebags too. But lo! I was sorely mistaken about the demeanor and temperament of freshly-incarcerated men! Remember the first episode of “Arrested Development”, when Michael goes to visit his father in prison and his dad goes, “I am having the TIME OF MY LIFE”? Not a joke. Totally accurate. Aside from the severe alcohol withdrawal that kicked in around Hour Twelve and the debilitating hunger (which I refused to sate with one of the “Aged Baloney on Generic Wonderbread” sandwiches they tossed at us), I was about to make many new BFFs.
Now when the door to the holding cell slammed behind me, the first thing I noticed was that the more muscular black dudes had taken the top portions of their jumpsuits off to flash their guns. I immediately decided that this was the route that I myself should take, so off came the top of my jumpsuit. Hoping to God that none of my cellmates mistook my Celtic tatts for Neo-Nazi symbols, I put my best “don’t f**k with me I’m a badass” face on and took a spot on the bench that ran around the perimeter of the cell. Within ten seconds, the only other white guy in there (an emaciated, middle-aged guy with a bushy grey beard) got up and walked over to where I was sitting. “Do you mind if I join you, pal?” he said. This was the chance I had been hoping for to prove my hardcore chops. “Yeah, I DO mind”, I replied. “Go back to your own f**king seat and leave me alone.” The hurt that surfaced on this poor man’s countenance in response to my harsh rejoinder nearly tore my heart in two, but this was the State of Nature and I was the only guy in that room that had even heard of Thomas Hobbes. The man turned and walked away, and I saw a few of the black guys raise their eyebrows at each other as if to say, “that pale gentleman sure is crazy”. Mission accomplished.
I managed to fall asleep for about 30 minutes after that. Now let me ask you: is there anything worse than waking up from a dream in which you are sandwiched between two naked Swedish bikini models on a Jamaican beach, only to find that you are surrounded by criminals who may or may not want to violate you in the worst possible way? The answer to that riddle is “no”. That said, my initial panic upon waking was quickly assuaged by a tap on the shoulder from the guy who would become my prison “Buddha” for the next 20 hours – Jerome from St. Louis. “Hey, wake up, baby”, he said, “this ain’t no place to be nappin!” I realized that this young man possessed the kind of street wisdom I could benefit from, so I replied, “Yeah, I hear you, man, I’m just so goddamn drunk!” Jerome thought this was hilarious and so did about ten other guys within earshot. In that moment I became the resident comedian. And I decided to press this advantage with all the vigor I could muster:
“You hear the one about the dumb cracka who built a submarine with a screen door?” Hysterical laughter.
“My momma is so fat, her blood type is Rocky Road!” That was a big hit too because apparently black people haven’t watched an Eddie Murphy movie since “The Golden Child”. And for the record my mother is incredibly fit. Sorry, mama, I had to throw you under the bus to ensure I would one day see you again.
“Whaddya call a white woman with one leg shorter than the other? Eileen!” One older guy with no teeth actually fell off his bench at that one. It didn't seem to matter that these were the WORST JOKES EVER TOLD.
I grew bolder: “Why is it that all you brothas be diggin on white women with huge asses?” Peals of laughter echoed off the walls for 10 seconds. Unfortunately no one actually answered my question – they didn’t realize how badly I’ve always wanted to know the answer to that mystery.
Things were going swimmingly. Anyone within earshot of me was having a jolly good time in jail. To the great relief of my conscience, even the middle-aged white guy seemed to be enjoying himself - in spite of the verbal flogging I’d given him. But I'd forgotten about the Latino crackhead, who had been tweak-pacing back and forth from one end of the cell to the other the entire time, oblivious to what was going on around him. Then, all of a sudden, he came to a dead stop ten feet in front of me, turned, looked me right in the eye, and said, “You, white boy, I told you I was gonna cut you mothaf**ka!” Dead silence. Everyone waited with baited breath to see how the funny-ass white boy with all the weird tatts would handle the sociopath who had threatened to murder him for the 20th time that night. I initially hesitated, not really sure what to do and a little fearful that this could escalate to a fight and land me in the hole. Then I remembered one of my all-time favorite movie lines, uttered by middle linebacker Alvin Mack of ECU in “The Program”: “you about to have 250 pounds of pissed of [n-word] up yo ass!” Should I? Hell yes.
“You listen to me, crackhead, and you listen good. If you don’t sit down and shut the f**k up, you gonna have 250 pounds of pissed off white boy up yo ass!” Not having had a seismograph handy at the time, I conservatively estimate that the ensuing laughter registered a 7.2 on the Richter scale. It actually got so silly that one of the guards came over to the bars and screamed at us to “shut the f**k up” or he “would take five of [us] to general population”. I loudly announced that he “can’t do that because it constitutes unreasonable search and seizure and therefore violates our Fourth Amendment rights”, which is totally untrue but triggered another round of risible hilarity.
In the interest of time I’m going to end this part of the story here, but not before I leave you with one final anecdote: about 18 hours into my incarceration I was FINALLY taken out of the cell and given a chance to post bail. In the OPP you wait for the bail clerk to call your name in a wide open section of the prison and you’re mixed right in with the female prisoners. A few chairs away from me sat a drop-dead gorgeous stripper who was eyeing me like a starving tiger eyes a gazelle carcass. With my outstanding peripheral vision I was able to watch her watching me and eventually I became so unnerved that I wheeled around, faced her, and asked her what the crap she wanted. She looked me dead in the eye, donned her best stripper smile, and said, “Hey white boy – if you bail me out I’ll [censored for explicit sexual content].
Stay tuned for the final chapter in this epic tale, in which I am finally released from prison (after a round of teary-eyed fist and chest bumps with my new friends), return to Bourbon Street in a state that closely resembles insulin shock, drink two pitchers of beer in ten minutes, threaten to beat the crap out of a smelly old guy who tried to sell me cocaine and refused to take “no” for an answer, and help Mean Joe D complete the 54-bar pub crawl.
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