Day 15, part 3
"I pulled you over because
you look funny. You fit our profile of ideal drug carriers," he said.
Oh yeah right, I thought. Ideal
drug carriers. Three punk rockers in an obnoxious car with California
plates. If I was running drugs I'd be wearing a suit, and sure as hell
wouldn't have California plates on the car.
"Which license do you want,"
he continued. "The Illinois or the California? I'm mailing the fake
ones to California where I suspect they'll follow through on the charges."
That didn't worry me. I doubted
he'd actually bother with the paper work, and even if he did, I couldn't
imagine the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department caring enough to find
some punk kid who had a fake ID taken off him in another state two thousand
miles away.
I took back my California license,
and he told us to get out of his parish. Louisiana divides their state
into parishes instead of counties. It's some throwback to the way churches
divide counties, I think.
"There's a campground in
the next parish," he said. "I suggest you stop there for the
night and then continue on your way out of my state."
He drove off, and Steve and Rory
realized he kept their licenses. The car started and we took the next
exit to find a pay phone.
I called up the Lafayette Sheriff. They said it wasn't their jurisdiction,
and they connected me to the local police department. They said it wasn't
them who pulled us over. We didn't know who pulled us over. They gave
me another number to call.
That number was two dollars and
ten cents from the pay phone. We didn't have the change.
I called the operator, and asked
for the Acadian Sheriff's Department. 9-1-1 answered. It wasn't an emergency,
so I apologized and hung up. I called the operator again and explained
it wasn't an emergency. She connected me to 9-1-1 again.
The 9-1-1 lady tried to help.
She named the different law enforcement agencies that could've pulled
us over. That didn't help, so she described the different uniforms to
us until she narrowed it down to the Crowley Parish Sheriff's Department.
Not her jurisdiction, but she gave us directions and wished us luck.
The department was 23 miles in
the way we had just come from. We watched the odometer. About five miles
on the freeway, the rest was off. It wasn't a big town and we drove around
until we found the Sheriff's department. As we walked up, prisoners yelled
out of the second floor windows. They described, in amazing detail, the
sexual acts they wanted to perform on Rory.
The cop at the desk ignored us
for a while as he filled out paper work. He finished and impatiently asked
what we wanted. Steve and Rory explained what happened, and that they
wanted their licenses back.
The cop looked at us like it
was our fault, then had the dispatcher return the cop to the station.
We sat in the lobby, and looked through the "Wanted" stacks.
That got old the second time through. Rory pointed out the box of donuts
in the break room, and we laughed.
Occasionally cops would walk
through to laugh at us freaks in the lobby. Then back to the break room
for another donut, and cheap jokes at our expense.
Rory and I had originally planned
to dye our hair green or blue for the trip, but ended up chickening out
at the thought of driving through the Deep South calling more attention
to ourselves. Good thing, I guess. It's bad enough having colored hair
in a city, let alone the rural South. It could've been worse.
We sat around the lobby being
bored, whispering jokes about inbred Southerners.
What do you call a virgin in
the South? A girl who could outrun her father and brothers.
A Southern boy called off his
wedding and his father asked him why. "Well pa, I found out she was
a virgin," he said. His pa said, "Well that's good son. If she
hain't good enough fer her fambly, she hain't good enough fer ours."
Finally the cop showed up with
their licenses. He apologized, and offered me two dollars gas money. I
shook my head, "No that's okay. We don't need it."
He held out the two dollars and
told me to take it. I thought he'd shoot me for reaching for his gun,
but I took it. He apologized again for causing us any inconvenience. Said
it was a misunderstanding and all his fault. We left.
The prisoner's hooted at Rory
as I struggled to get the car started. The engine finally kicked over
and we drove to the campground the cop told us to go to. The gate was
locked. It was after 10:00 p.m. We kept driving.
New Orleans should have been
an easy five hour drive from where we crossed into Louisiana at the Texas
border. It took us eleven hours to get there. It was hot and humid as
we slept in the car.
I hated New Orleans. It was Old
Sac with full nudity girlie bars. Bars advertising "Wild French Lesbian
Orgies Every 90 Minutes" with pictures of scab covered women piled
on the floor were funny at first, but got old fast. Voodoo shops on every
corner were worse, and the local punks we met were snobs. The best thing
about New Orleans was a bumper sticker that read "Say NO to drugs.
Get high on the Rosary."
We blew the state and found a
freeway rest stop that had fire ants in Mississippi. Steve and I had more
fun flipping burning Sterno onto the mound, playing Viet Nam War Atrocities,
than we had all day in New Orleans. Ten minutes of being stung by fire
ants in Mississippi was funner than two days in Louisiana.
Rory took the bus home from my
sister's house in Athens, Georgia a week later. She woke up knowing she'd
have to leave or kill me before my childish antics gave her an aneurysm.