Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Jan 02 - "I'm placing you under arrest"***

Sunday, January 2, 1972
LOCATION: Newport Beach, California

Pretty drab day. I read a couple hundred pages in "The New Centurions." I may be able to finish it before we leave. I wouldn't want to be dragging it around all over the country.

Got all my clothes washed, so everything's clean for tonight the trip. I'll start packing my clothes tomorrow. I drove around today alone. Hope Matt will get his license before we leave.

I've got alot of room, so I might as well mention my arrest yesterday morning.

Leaving Matt's house extremely depressed, I was walking toward Meg's house to get my bike (I left it there earlier in the day so I wouldn't have to be dragging it around). As I was walking at an intersection, a car stopped and a man called, "Hey, where are you going?" I replied brilliantly: "I don't know..." and kept walking. He said "Hey, come back here!" and I realized he was a policeman in an unmarked car. I graciously sauntered over and explained that I was going home from a friend's house. After more questions, I told him I was going to 406 CLUBHOUSE to pick up my bicycle from which I would go home, which was 112 WEST COAST HIGHWAY, which was Eyesore Park [actually: Bayshore Park, Newport Beach, CA], which is a trailer court.
The front door of my trailer (AKA Grandlydia) in Bayshore Park
I was only idly wondering if he could tell I'd been drinking, or if I still smelled like grass -- generally I was acting rather suspicious because I didn't want him to leave right away. He examined my driver's license, looked at my pocket knife -- "A friend just gave it to me tonight," I told him, "It's one of those things companies give to kid's fathers for free, and the kids hand 'em out for friends." He was examining the blade closely, so I said, "I haven't killed anybody with it lately, though." "That's not what I was looking for," he said, giving it back.

He put my driver's license on his clipboard and shined his flashlight on it, but the light kept flickering. "Damn thing," he muttered, "I just bought it today." He hit it a few times, then left it alone. Eventually he told me to get in the car so we could drive to 406 Clubhouse. It was farther than I thought. A man was walking down the street, obviously inebriated. "Lots of drunks out tonight," the policeman said. "Yeah, the city's not safe with them walking around." -- "The bars are just letting out now," he said, as we turned a corner. "That's right, it's two o'clock, isn't it?" I said, looking at my watch. "Two oh five," he corrected.

"How do you like getting to work on New Year's Eve?" I asked him. "Pretty shitty," he replied. "I guess so... you turn left here." He had to back up and turn into the dead end street. The lights in Meg's house were off, so I figured her mother was asleep. After a few minutes of the car radio blaring out, the lights came on. I showed the bike to the cop, unlocked it to prove it was mine, and he wrote down the license of the bike and radioed it in, along with my name. I explained it was my brother's bike, and the license probably wasn't his because he got it where he worked.

The radio said I'd been picked up in Feb. for truancy -- and the bike registration evidently was suspicious. The policeman said, "I don't like your story, and I'm placing you under arrest. I've called for another car to carry your bike and take you to the station."

The reason he really arrested me was because his own car couldn't carry my bike, so he couldn't drive me home, and he needed an excuse to call a second car for such a minor violation as curfew. Poor guy.

[At the police station I called my dad and he came to get me and my bike. We were back home by 4:30 AM.]

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