Olmsted County Anti Massacre Movement

It all started almost two Christmases ago;  that is a year ago, just before Christmas, when some friends and I went to a restaurant in Rochester.  We had loaded up  the back of a rusty tan escort wagon with foster kids and tacos and headed south on Broadway.  A passing police car, ever alert for criminals, international terrorists, and other heinous malefactor types, did a U-turn and began to follow us.  He was a particularly astute  officer because he knew that criminals, international terrorists, and other heinous malefactors usually drive rusty bent up escorts full of teenaged kids.  He followed us for a while before pulling us over.  He walked up to  the car and asked to see my license.  Being a upright and relatively honest citizen, being as how I am handicapped and cannot partake  in crime, international terror, and other heinous behavior, on account of my inability to operate a skate board, roller blades, hackysack, freestyle bike or other weapon of mass destruction and public mayhem , I answered the officer confidently, and with a bit of  a slurred speech due to partial paralysis of my upper bulbar region.  He asked me if I had been drinking.  I lied and said that I hadn’t;  even though I knew that the diet coke I had with my taco was still affecting my judgment.  He was a brave officer because he then asked me to breathe in his face, and I not only had not brushed my teeth that evening, but there was no telling what sort of evil condiment  from my taco was lingering on my breath  just  waiting for me to breathe at someone.

He decided I  was not drunk, did not cite me for halitosis and I figured I was in the clear, but then he said, “Mister”  (He couldn’t say “kid” cause I was older than he,) “do you have insurance on this vehicle?”  I proceeded to tell him the story of how I had obtained, paid for, and procured the finest minimum liability the state would allow and he stopped me right there and said, “Mister, do you have any proof of that insurance?”  I proceeded to tell him a story about delinquent mail, sloppy record keeping, and me being a space cadet and he stopped right there and said, “Mister,  I’m gonna write you  ticket”

I went home and a while later, after the state reminded me by threatening to suspend my drivers license, I called my faithful insurance agent in who's good hands I placed my reputation as a forthright and upstanding member of the number one place to live in the U.S.  He said he would fax the proof, without which the entire state of Minnesota would be hopelessly plunged into anarchy, to the proper authorities in the DMV, which I assumed he did since the department of motor vehicles told me it was all taken care of the next day.  Order was restored to Minnesota,  and I could once again respond, “Not too bad” when asked how it was going.

I proceeded with doing whatever it is that Minnesotans do and didn’t think about it until almost the next Christmas when I got a call from a policeman who said that I had better get down to the sheriffs office by 8:30 the next morning to deal with a charge of no proof of insurance from last December.  The next morning at 8:30 my time, which is about the same as 10 am for most people, my son wheeled me into the sheriffs office.  I was armed with a genuine proof of insurance certificate stating that in December of the previous year my rusty and bent escort, (now retired) was covered from dirty headlamps to cracked taillight lenses by the finest and most minimal liability insurance the state of Minnesota would allow.

Now at that time I had what doctors call a “viral infection.”  A few hundred years ago it was known as the black plague.  You knew it wouldn’t kill you but after the third week of your one week viral infection you might be beginning to hope it will.

They told me to wait at the desk until they could figure out who I was and what to do with me.  I used the time wisely by blowing my nose and hacking up small pieces of what appeared to be lung tissue.  After about ten or minutes or, so an officer came up and said I would have to go with him to be “booked.”  That sounded alright to me being as how I had always fancied myself as somewhat of a literary type and he led us down to the county jail where he instructed me to leave my cell phone, keys, wallet, and other offensive weapons  with my wife who was by now beginning to be angry enough to actually use  them as offensive weapons.  The officer pushed me through a metal detector,  which was not nearly as cruel as it sounds since I was in a wheel chair and not standing.  He pushed me through a locked door.  Then he pushed me through another locked door.  Then he rang a buzzer and asked for permission to push me through another locked door. Then we went through another locked door.  After that, just for a change, we went through a locked door.  They must have been afraid I would have a miraculous instant recovery,  over power the deputy, pull a lock pick out of some unprobed bodily orifice open all those locked doors  shoot my way through the officers at the front of the building, and disappear into the surging masses of the metropolis of Rochester Minnesota.  But, I didn't.  Instead I sat passively in my wheel chair and got pushed into the inner sanctum of the county jail.

I should explain a bit about my world view.  My official position is that all people are scum and unless an outside force (like God) changes them they cannot be trusted.  Of course, being a slacker, I never seem to live up to my own standards and consequently have a hard time not believing that most people are doing pretty much the right thing most of the time.  I was not worried.  Not the peaceful bliss of a man of faith.  Not even the determined calm of a confident man who is aware of his situation and figures he can handle it.  I was more like the idiot from the cover of "Mad Magazine" who's motto is,  "What?  Me worry?"

It wasn't until I saw the other prisoners, the seamy underside of Olmsted County,  The shaved headed, shackled, tattooed, hardened, menaces to society, that I realized that I had not only been arrested but that they had every intention of incarcerating me until my debt to society was fulfilled.  I looked at the shaved headed, shackled, tattooed, hardened, menaces to society sitting around a table reading news papers and watching TV.  They looked tough.  They looked bad.  They looked at me.

Wanting to get off on the right foot, and having knowledge of such things since I had seen "Cool Hand Luke" two times,  I nonchalantly wheeled my self over to the biggest, most thoroughly saved headed, hardest, most dangerous looking prisoner there and said, "Hi."  Actually I don't think I quite got the whole sentence out; I kind of nodded it.  He asked me what I was in for.  I said, "I didn't have proof of insurance with me in the car."  He looked at me and started laughing.  Then I explained about the genuine proof of insurance certificate which proved that my rusty and bent escort was covered from dirty headlamps to cracked taillight lenses by the finest and most minimal liability insurance the state of Minnesota would allow.  Then he began to get angry about the injustice inherent in the system and I discovered that everyone in that jail was as innocent as a new born babe, and would be honored members of our community if not for some terrible and tragic miscarriage of justice.  I knew I was among friends and began watching "Born in East L. A." which was playing on the jailhouse TV.

After a while, they took my to my private room and locked me in.  The floor was concrete.  The walls were concrete.  The small privacy partition positioned almost between the window and the toilet, (where both male and female guards could watch to make sure everything came out alright) was concrete.  I looked with some trepidation at the bed.  It was not concrete.  It was steel. Bolted to concrete.

I sat there looking at the toilet, (steel toilet seat of course) knowing that it was only a matter of time before nature would call and I would be forced to answer.  There were no grab bars in sight, so standing was out of the question and I was trying to calculate the necessary angle required to stay seated in my chair, shoot an arch over my legs, and hit the toilet.  Postponing the inevitable seemed like the best option at the time.  I thought about laying down in the bed.  With a little ingenuity I stood a pretty good chance of crawling out of my wheel chair into the bed without falling, but getting back out of the bed would have resulted in a very close and intimate knowledge of the floor of my cell, and judging from all the toilet paper strewn about the floor held tightly into little wads by a substance I did not want to be able to identify, such knowledge of the floor was a little more knowledge than I wanted.  Instead I spent my time depositing small pieces of my lung in the toilet and trying to reach the flush button without being able to get my chair close to it.

Meanwhile, my faithful wife and my son, having decided against using my cell phone as an offensive weapon, were trying to bail me out in time to get me to a doctor yet that morning.  They found out you can't just hand the jailer the cash.  She was told that it takes several hours for them to make sure you are securely nestled in your cell before they will accept bail.  After a few hours, but not soon enough to still make it to the doctor's,  they let her pay my bail and I was sprung.  I managed to get to the doctor the next day and found out I had aspiration pneumonia. 

As fate would have it however,  that was not the end off my story.  I still had to appear in court to answer to the charge against me and to prove that I was not a purveyor of mayhem and anarchy and after a few days at home, I reported to the court house to do just that.  Buoyed by the support of several friends and armed with a genuine proof of insurance certificate which proved that my rusty and bent escort was covered from dirty headlamps to cracked taillight lenses by the finest and most minimal liability insurance the state of Minnesota would allow, I entered the courtroom.  The judge looked at me.  Then he read the charges.  Then he looked at the genuine proof of insurance certificate which proved that my rusty and bent escort was covered from dirty headlamps to cracked taillight lenses by the finest and most minimal liability insurance the state of Minnesota would allow and he said, "Case dismissed."


Epilog
"Case dismissed" was a good ending as far as I was concerned since it got me my bail money back and did not result in another stay at the jail, but it makes a lousy ending for a story, and since I always wanted to use the word "epilog,” adding one seemed to be the obvious solution to making a story out of an event.  I had asked to talk to a public defender, who assisted me in getting the case dismissed.  I also asked him about not being given my Miranda warning or being told that I was under arrest or having no handicapped bathroom or other such amenities in the jail and he said if I had a complaint I should take it to the county sheriff.  I thought about how the conversation would go.  I was going to make a complaint about how the jail was run and about arrest procedures.  Ultimately the blame would fall on the guy in charge of both of these areas.  The sheriff was in charge of both of these areas.  I would be making charges against the sheriff, to the sheriff which would then be judged by the sheriff and any penalties assigned by the sheriff and enforced by the sheriff upon the sheriff.  I suspected that there would be a breakdown in the chain of responsibility along the way.  The more prudent course of action would be to not make any complaints lest any one of the people responsible for how the jail was run, or handling charges about it or adjudicating those charges or enforcing the adjudication, or getting adjudicated upon, would take offense at me for mentioning it and I would end up once again wondering if nature would call before my wife would be allowed to pay bail for not having a piece of paper with me. I left well enough alone and things were once again "not too bad" in Minnesota.