October 2002

I have seen and done a lot of crazy shit, but there is one night that will forever be remembered and engraved in my head as the worst of my life.

That was the night of October 4th, 2002. One month into my freshman year of college. It started out with going to meet 2 girls at a club. Not a bad start, eh?

Nowadays, the whole club scene is the death of me- I fucking hate how fake and expensive it all is. But back then, I was still in my hip-hop phase. So paying 20 bucks for a cover and singing along to DJ ChewyGum’s selections the whole night was my idea of a good time. What a tool I was indeed.

The two lucky girls were Linzo and the disease known as Clymidia- you will see why I call her that later on. These were two fellow NYC natives who I was just clinging to because they knew some people I did back home.

So I was having a good time: they were playing the likes of Biggie and DMX, I was rolling with two girls, and I even got to chat up a couple of ice queens. What could possibly go wrong? Answer, everything.

At a certain point about an hour into the club, as they usually do the girls got bored. The club was beyond walking distance from campus- and the subway was already closed (Note: The Boston public transportation system is the shittiest in the world. It closes down BEFORE the bars close and parties end- leaving thousands of drunk college kids stranded and begging for rides, therefore encouraging people to drive them back to campus drunk. I wonder what dumbass figured that one out)

After deliberating what to do, Clymidia discovered that she “knew some guy” who could drive us back to a “good party” in the College Ghetto (the town all the cool off-campus kids called home). Just a note, there never has been a “good party” in the College Ghetto, and there probably never will. They are all just about a hundred underaged college kids packed to the gills into some poor kid’s apartment fighting each other over beer from a soon-to-be-kicked keg. They are all just ticking time bombs to be busted up by the stick-up-their-ass Boston police.

So the three of us get into a car with an Irish meathead, who is swilling a bottle from the shotgun position, and a John Mayer lookalike who is obviously a little tipsy himself. I was scared for my life. This guy started driving, and I could tell immediately he was drunk. He was swerving all over the road, speeding down narrow back roads like a demon motorcycler, and blasting loud Dr. Dre from his speakers.

At one point during the ride, I even looked over at Linzo and whispered to her “I really hope we don’t go out this way”. I already had a vision in my head of the article in the school paper the next day. Just a small little Obituary article in the back, with the headline “Three college kids get in a car with drunk driver, all die”. And the article would only contain the words “Yep. Who woulda thunk it?”

After finally reaching our destination, from a full-speed parallel park that nearly upended two cars and a tree, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and said my thanks to God. I got ready to have a good time at this party, thinking that my troubles for the night were over. Nope, they had not even begun.

Having been a straight-edge in high school, I was a complete novice drinker. Because of my neurological disabilities. I was really blindsided in this all-too-unfamiliar of situations. I didn’t even know the most obvious rule in the world of drinking: Dude, Finish Your Fucking Beer Before You Leave The Party.

The party was OK- the highlight of which was when I had my very first taste of shitty keg beer. My first beer I was handed- which I would later realize is a gift from the Gods, and the other one I had to wait on line 20 minutes for. And by the time I got it- I realized that the party was getting lame. I didn’t know anyone there, and Linzo and Clymidia were both talking to random guys. “Fuck this man, I’m heading home”

So I wave goodbye to the girls, thank the drunk driver guy for mercilessly sparing our lives, and head back to my freshman dorm. With an unfinished beer in hand. I figured I’d just finish it on the way home. I walk down the stairs, onto the street, and see a little situation. A man in handcuffs, and three police officers. They are going in to bust up the party. I think to myself. “Well, that must suck for him”.

But then, before I could walk away, all the policemen’s eyes completely leave their arrestee and turn directly to me. One fat, balding officer radios a squad car: “We’ve got another one”. Even then, my semi-retarded 18-year old brain could not process the fact that I was totally fucked. Two of the officers walk right up to me and grab me by the arm. “What is in that cup, sir?” The officer grabs my cup, recognizes it as beer, and spills it out. “Let me see ID sir”. At this moment I should have fucking ran. Now, I would have ran. If I had any sense, I would have ran the fuck away from there.

But instead, I complied. Before I could move a muscle, or even get my ID back, I was thrust against the side of the building, turned around, and cuffed. At this point I start screaming and crying at the officers “Don’t do this to me. This is a mistake. I SWEAR I’m a good kid. I wasn’t even drinking it,”, etc, etc. Too little, too late.

Then, I see Linzo and Clymidia come out of the party and absorb the sight of seeing me in cuffs. They ask me what happened. With tears in my eyes, I barely had enough time to explain before I was thrown into the back of a darkened paddywagon.

What did Linzo do in this situation? She actually went to the police station to make sure I was gonna be OK. We are still friends to this day. And what did Clymidia do? She was just like "Whatever" and went to another party with some random guy because “she needed some weed”. I don’t think I will ever forgive her- and I have made no attempt to contact her since. I have no idea of her story since that night. But I’m pretty sure it involves dropping out of school, lots of drugs, and lots of sex with shady people in shady locations.

This has to be the #1 scariest moment of my life. I could not see a thing in front of my eyes, I couldn’t move my hands because of the handcuffs, I had no idea how far away this jail was, and I had no one to talk to. I was crying, bawling, thinking about what the consequences would be. I was almost sure I was gonna be kicked outta school for life. Just for drinking a cup of beer.

So after what seemed like eternity, I got out of the wagon and was herded into a ghetto-ass Massachusetts police station. I was fingerprinted, un-handcuffed (which at the time, felt almost as good as an orgasm), and thrown into a closet-size cell for the night. As you could imagine, I couldn’t fucking sleep in there. I was still scared shitless. And the worst part about it was that in jail, the cops took away my keys, my wallet, my cell phone, even my shoes. All I had for four excruciating hours was four stone walls and a piece-of-shit push-button phone (meaning you had to push and hold a button to talk). In all my panicking and crying, I had to deal with the question of a lifetime: who do you call when you’re in jail?

I was unaware that prisoners didn’t have any rights to their cell phone, and I choked under pressure- I couldn’t remember a single number on there. I couldn’t remember Linzo’s number, nor any of the guys at the dorm, nor Clymidia’s (although in the middle of stoned sex with a random dude, it’s unlikely she would have been much help). I came to the harsh realization that the only numbers I remembered were my parents and my grandmother’s. It was only my luck that my parents were out of town- they were doing something in Philadelphia, which is a long way from Boston.

So, at around 3:04 AM on this night, my grandma’s house phone rang many times. She picked up, only to hear the words “This is a call from (Jail). Do you wish to accept?" Followed by her grandson’s voice. I don’t remember what exactly I said, but it was something like “Listen, I’m in jail, please help me out” before encouraging her to call my parents in their hotel room.

So then, at around 3:10 AM, there was a phone call in my parents’ hotel room somewhere in Philadelphia, awakening them from a deep sleep to learn their son is in jail.

Imagine how horrifying the scene was. My grandmother is someone who throws a panic fit if her food comes out 5 minutes late at a restaurant. I could only imagine the hysterics she was throwing. If I was a normal person, I would feel extreme and deep sorrow for what I put her through. But because I was born with a social impairment (Asperger’s Syndrome) , I’m unable to express emotion in a normal capacity, so to this day I see it as a “necessary evil”.

So at about 6 AM, much to my relief my cell was opened and I had a date with the warden. Amazingly, I had just enough money in my wallet for bail, 60 smackeroos. But much to my disgust, when retrieving my belongings I only got one of my shoes back from the dumbass parole officer.

In one of those “can-it-get-any-worse?” moments, I remembered that those weren’t even my own shoes. Earlier, I had scoured my tiny dorm and was unable to find a single pair of shoes that were appropriate for the club. So in a last-minute fix, I had convinced "Jada", a large black dude on my floor, to let me borrow his $200 loafers for the night. I promised they would come back “untouched”.

Well Jada would never see those loafers again, and now I would have to deal with owing this large black dude, who used to be a defensive lineman by the way, 200 bucks or facing the worst beatdown of my life.

So with the earliest light of day barely coming through, I was released. I began to walk over five miles from the police station to my dorm. I had spent all my cash on bail- so I had no money for a cab or the nonexistent subway train. And I only had one shoe to walk it on. At around the halfway point I began to feel uncomfortable, so I just scrapped the remaining loafer in some garbage and walked the remaining distance barefoot. What good is it to have just one shoe on anyway? At this point I just screamed at the sky, as loud as I could, "Does anything EVER go fucking right?"

So then, just as the first rays of the day were coming through, I finally saw the grassy area which was the entrance to my massive freshman dorm complex. And just as I staggered into Rich Bastard Hall, the skies were set ablaze and Osama Bin Laden unleashed his sequel to 9/11.

OK, that didn’t really happen. But seriously man, that would be the only way I could imagine for my night to be any worse. I mean if you tried to write a script for the worst night ever, there’s no fucking way you can get any lower than mine. I double-dare you motherfucker.

Aftermath: My parents drove all the way from Philadelphia to Boston to be “moral support” at my court hearing. I was sentenced to like 200 hours community service and some AA meetings. I had to listen to hours of stories about alcohol abuse and “the bottle”. These meetings scarred me for life and may have subconsciously turned me into the alcoholic I would become in later years. My grandmother began to baby me, and still calls an average of 5 times a day. Hey man, wouldn’t you do the same if your grandson lived on his own one month and he got fucking arrested? Yea that makes a lotta sense.

Jada never got his sneakers, or his 200 bucks back. He was super-pissed at me when he and everyone else on my floor found out I was arrested, but I avoided a beatdown by promising him I would pay him back for the loafers by the time we graduated. I never got the chance, because the very next semester he was kicked outta school for smoking weed. Bonngg!

The dean of my school read the local police reports and found out about my arrest, then threatened to expel me. I put together a manifesto, and made up about 5 detailed witness reports detailing how innocent I was. He totally bought it, and I was allowed to continue my education. I graduated in 06’. So I guess all’s well that ends well. The ultimate proof of this:

You’re reading my fucking story.