Once every month or two, I like to co-host my friend John’s radio show. Usually, we like to build a group of songs around a theme, such as Beatlesque or Girls’ Names, or Valentines’ Day. Sometimes, however, we like to just get together and randomly select songs, trying to surprise each other and create a compelling, seamless ‘flow’ from one song into another. Last night’s show was a ‘flow’ kind of show. John texted me to let me know that he was at a nearby pizza place, having a last-minute snack and drink before the show. I told him I’d be right there, and I drove over to the station, parked, and walked over to meet him. He was finishing up his food and drink when I arrived, but we still had plenty of time before the show, so he got a second drink, and I ordered a glass of wine while we talked and joked about what the show would hold.

It turned out to be a particularly good flow show, too, if I do say so myself. I thought we were totally on our game, and we were playing songs that really complemented each other and went together well. At three o’clock in the morning, when the show was over, we gave each other a hug and went our separate ways. We’d been doing the show since midnight, and I’d been out at a dinner/drinks/movie night with a couple other friends earlier in the evening, so I was definitely looking forward to going home to bed.

As soon as I left the station and came to the traffic light at the end of the block, there was a guy in dark clothing who surprised me by walking across the intersection against my green light. I had to swerve a bit in order to avoid him, which sent my heart racing. I turned onto Couch, and then Grand, heading toward home. Around the point where the freeway crosses Grand, a guy was crossing against that light as well. He was slowly pushing a shopping cart across the street, and he was very difficult to see in the darkness. Right before my turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, there was a construction cone in the edge of my lane, so I had to maneuver to avoid hitting it. All of these obstacles turned a normally tranquil late-night drive into a very nerve-wracking event.

As soon as I turned onto Lloyd, I saw police lights come on behind me. I pulled over right away. “Do you know why we stopped you tonight?”

“I don’t, actually.”

Apparently, I had made what appeared to be a wide turn onto Lloyd, and they’d noticed my swerves for ShoppingCartGuy and the construction cone, and assumed that I had been drinking. I had been, yes, but not for many hours, and I hadn’t been home to brush my teeth so it was still on my breath, though the effects had all but worn off. Suffice it to say that my tiredness and nervousness caused me to fail the standing-on-one-foot test, though, so they placed me under arrest and sat me in the back of the police car. They confiscated my laptop and had my car towed.

Speaking of my car, an important tidbit in this story has to do with the fact that the interior smells like marijuana, and it has since long before I owned it. I’m well-known in my social circles for my stance on marijuana. I’ve voted for it to be legalized a number of times, particularly for medical uses, but I don’t smoke it myself, and to this day I still never have. I didn’t know the car smelled like that when I bought it, but whenever the weather is rainy (and this is Portland, after all, so it’s always rainy), the smell is particularly pungent and strong. I’ve tried to scrub the interior, I’ve pulled the panels off and cleaned inside the doors, I’ve pulled up the carpet in the back to clean underneath it, and still the smell persists. I’ve half-joked about taking it to a K-9 police unit and having a dog sniff the car to find the source of the smell, so I can get rid of it, because I don’t like the smell of pot, and I don’t like the impression of me that it gives people when they ride in my car.

One of the officers noticed the smell when he was searching the car, and he walked to the door of the police car, poked his head in and told me, “Hey, your car really smells like marijuana. Are we gonna find something in there? If you take a urine test, are you gonna turn up positive?” I smiled and told them that no, they weren’t and that I don’t smoke, and that’s just the way my car has always smelled. He didn’t believe me; no one ever does. They drove me downtown for processing and further questioning. By this time, it was approximately four in the morning, and I had no idea what was going to happen to me. I answered their questions, and took all of their tests, while they filled in the paperwork. They gave me a breath test, which registered “.00”, which made the two officers very suspicious, so they decided to get a third opinion from their drug specialist. I was ushered into a cement and steel holding cell with a long wooden bench. I sat down and was amazed to see that even in a police holding cell, people will still attempt to carve their initials in a wooden bench.

DrugSpecialist appeared in the doorway, and ushered me to a chair next to his desk. He took my vital signs and blood pressure, and had me perform more stringent variations of the tests I had performed on the street for the two other officers. I had to close my eyes, tip my head back, and touch a finger to my nose repeatedly. I had to walk a straight line. I had to stand on one leg and count the seconds until he told me to stop. Each series of rapid-fire instructions was punctuated with, “Do you understand the question?” I easily passed all of these tests. He gave me a barrage of eye exams and asked me lots of medical- and drug-related questions. I answered all of them truthfully (I’m not on any medications, I don’t use drugs, I don’t intend to harm myself, I’m not suicidal, etc.) and they put me back into the holding cell while they conferred with each other about my mystifying results. It seemed to them that my stories all checked out, and that I was telling the truth; I wasn’t drunk, I was just tired and nervous. At about five-thirty, I think they decided that they were satisfied, and I was not the threat that they had originally perceived. They each made it a point to tell me that nothing like this had ever happened before in their many years of experience. One of them went so far as to sit down and say, “I don’t get it. I don’t know how you ‘blew a zero’, when I could smell alcohol. Your car smells like marijuana, and you say you don’t smoke. I believe you, but we’ll have to wait for your urine test to come back before we know for sure. You’ve been nothing but cooperative, but you have to look at this from our point of view. You’re a one-in-a-million case.”

They somewhat apologetically handcuffed me again, not because they felt they needed to but because the law said they had to, and they led me to a room where a different man frisked me and told to exchange my steel-toed Doc Martens for small, uncomfortable slippers. The original two officers again took me through a maze of electronically locked doors. “Sometimes people run,” one of them said, “but you don’t seem like a runner.”

The other one continued. “Assuming that you’re telling the truth, and your urine test comes back clean (and I’m sure it will), this case against you will disappear. You won’t have anything on your record, and it’ll be like this never happened. Your car’s been towed, so you’ll have to deal with that, but the rest of this. . .” He trailed off. They opened the door to the waiting room, unclasped my handcuffs, and gave me one of the strangest looks I’ve ever encountered. They still couldn’t believe the way this was turning out. I should mention that they were totally cool and respectful with me, and they did a great job, especially considering the bizarre circumstances. I thanked them and walked into the fingerprint room. The fingerprint attendant was a very friendly, almost jovial guy. “Did you know that you have what looks like eczema on your thumb?” I didn’t know that. “It’s not red or anything, but see how you don’t have much of a fingerprint there? That’s a classic sign of eczema.” Interesting. At this point, I thought the whole ordeal would be over soon. The fingerprint guy said, “Okay, looks like we’re done. Only four to six more hours, and you’ll be out of here.” Four to six more hours?

It was six o’clock in the morning now, and I was told to wash my hands and go sit in the waiting room, which reminded me of the old Firesign Theatre joke about the butler ushering a man into his home. He told the man, “You can sit here in the waiting room, or you can wait here in the sitting room.” There was a mens’ side and a womens’ side of the room, which were divided by a short cement wall. The room was gray on gray, with government-green highlights. There were two televisions mounted on the walls, and the sound was only turned up on the mens’ television. Sitting there with me was an assortment of serious drug users and repeat criminals. I kept thinking, BUT I PASSED ALL THE TESTS. I SHOULDN’T EVEN BE HERE. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, while avoiding the burnouts and miscreants I was trapped in there with. On the television was one of Dick Clark’s blooper shows, followed by an ‘urban’ sitcom, followed by Married With Children (a meth-head behind me blurted out, “That’s what I’M talkin’ about,” when MWC came on), followed by an hour-long show about a guy who pretended to be developmentally disabled so that he could run in the Special Olympics and beat their champion, becoming a champion himself and winning a bet for his partner in crime. It was painful.

Around eight o’clock in the morning, they finally called my name. I staggered wearily to the desk and faced another barrage of questions. The woman used the same loud, deliberate tone that they all use, after years of dealing with deadbeats and cretins. “We just need to confirm your identity, okay? Do you understand the question?” You have GOT to be kidding me. Yes. “If you have any friends or family members, we need to call them and talk to them, okay? Do you understand the question?” JESUS CHRIST; I’M NOT ONE OF THESE CRETINS! Yes, I understand the question. The only phone number I know by heart anymore is my mom’s land line, since people rarely have to manually dial phones anymore, so I gave the attendant my mom’s number and name, adding, “This ought to be a nice surprise for her.” The woman told me that it wouldn’t be much longer now. Did I have any questions?

“Yes, actually.” I tried very hard to formulate this sentence in a way that wouldn’t seem flippant. “I passed all of my tests with the officers just now, so I guess I’m wondering why I’m still here.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but you’ve been booked, so you have to follow the procedures just like everybody else.” The phrase ‘just like everybody else’ echoed through my head as I made a quick scan of everybody else in the room. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

I glumly walked back, slumped in my seat, and noticed that Not Just Another Teen Movie was playing on the television now. A staff member went around and provided us with a sack lunch that consisted of a dry bologna sandwich, a piece of dry coffee cake, a hard boiled egg, an orange, and a tiny carton of milk that proclaimed it was “best if used before 04-08.” In my delirium, I thought the date meant April of 2008, and that they were feeding us three-year-old milk. I sniffed the milk nervously before sipping it ever so slowly. With all the recent milk issues my stomach has had, I hoped to God that I wouldn’t explode vomit all over the room. Luckily, I managed to keep it all down. I left the egg and the orange sitting in the bag on the chair next to me, until an attendant wearing a prison-orange jumpsuit took and deposited the bag in the garbage can.

I sat for another two hours, head bowed and eyes closed, barely able to maintain my rapidly declining sense of equilibrium. Suddenly, a little after ten o’clock in the morning, someone came in and announced quietly to the staff, “We have a release.”

“A release?”

“Yeah, for [my last name]. It came in just after you guys showed up the last time.” Incidentally, I should note that ‘the last time’ (the last THREE times, in fact) was for a group of guys who were lining up to have their clothes checked in, so that they could be issued the clothing for their stint in jail. I had been expecting to hear my name each time, and each time it wasn’t called, my nervousness intensified. When they told me I was released, I was too tired to even feel relieved. The man told me to follow the black line, and I was ushered through another maze of electronic doors until I was finally let out to the room where I collected my phone, keys (minus my car key), car insurance card, and debit card.

“I had a laptop, too,” I told the man, “and a bunch of CD’s and a black scarf. Would that stuff be here?”

That stuff turned out to be in the Property Room, which wasn’t the property room I was standing in front of. “You can ask the gentleman over there about the Property Room.” I walked to the gentleman over there, who was seated on a high chair alongside a security checkpoint near the main door to the building. I was almost outside.

“I had a laptop and a few other things in a backpack, and I need to find the Property Room.”

“Oh, that’s not here,” he told me, rattling off a series of rapid-fire directions. “Gooutsideandturnleftandit’sinthissamebuilding, andthengointhedoorandtalktotheguyinthere.”

“Uhhh. . .errr. . .I spent the night here, and I’m a bit sleep-deprived,” I stammered. “So. . .out the door, turn left, and in this building. What’s the department name?” He told me what it was. I thanked him and walked out into the blinding blue morning. After staring at grey and green for the last seven hours, the beauty and color of downtown Portland was overwhelming. I called my mom’s cell phone, but she was unable to answer. I talked to John on the phone for a while, recounting the highlights of the previous hours. I got on the train and headed toward home. Luckily I live close enough that commuting to downtown and back is easy. Mom called back just as I was stepping off the train, and I told her that despite what the call must have sounded like, the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, and that everyone knew I would be cleared of this charge in no time.

I have a court date this week, and I have to get my car and computer and everything back, and those things will surely cost money to resolve. I didn’t need any of this to happen, since I have enough happening already, but I’ll just keep being honest, and I’ll keep doing what I have to do to keep my name clear.

I can’t wait for this ridiculous nightmare to be over.