Outlaw? You decide.
‘Country Music Outlaws’, a song by Keegan McInroe really is one of my all-time favorite tunes. Give a listen and you’ll see why. The song opens letting the listener know both terms, ‘outlaw’ and ‘music’, get abused. The album Uncouth Pilgrims is a gem for sure, and one I kept on repeat for an entire year.
It should be apparent to everyone that Outlaw music is louder and prouder than ever. Naturally, all the deviations and copy cats are out there as well. My personal opinion on the matter is there is great music being made right now. Stuff that rivals the old classics and greats. Artists everywhere are answering George Jones’ question, “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes.” every day. With the Mike Judge series Tales From the Tour Bus, which I highly recommend paying for and watching in its entirety. The series gives great insight into the whole outlaw thing and the degrees of outlaw-ness from ones who were just petty criminals and drinkers to those who were as bad as murders and rapists.
If you haven’t already devoted a couple weeks of your life to listening to all of Tlyer Mahan Coe’s Cocaine & Rhinestones, then stop what you're doing and take care of that. It’s amazing. Back in 2017, when I was doing quartarly runs to Knoxville to play the Lonesome Dove, I would binge Season One during the 14-hour one-way drive. There are some amazing stories, and despite what you might think of the son of David Alan Coe, he’s very tasteful, to the point and doubly researched in any of the podcast’s now two seasons. It’s a real thrill.
Being my father is a cop, and has been in some form my whole life, I have to thank Frued for pointing out my criminality is most likely derived from some subconscious Oedipus urge and need for attention. I’d say being criminal has never been a total part of my nature, but petty theft and a desire for things I couldn’t have has been with me as early as I can remember. The first memory I have of stealing something is actually a memory of being caught and reprimanded for it. I had stolen a piece of 5 cent bubblegum off the bottom shelf while my parents were paying. Upon getting home I chewed the gum, but in my excitement, I hadn’t disposed of the wrapper. Hearing the request that I visit my parents in their bedroom, the wrapper out on the edge of the bed where I could plainly see, my mother and father there, both so young, maybe 25 or 26, waiting for me to notice what was going on. I, of course, was still chewing the gum. I’m not sure if I lied, but my father took me back to the store and made me tell the clerk what I’d done and then pay for the gum. He gave me the 5 cents so I’m sure he took those five cents out on my ass.
Technically, that was my first arrest. My father, who seemed to live in his uniform, or at least the t-shirts he’d cut the neck out of, and his fatigues or some sort of police or army slacks, had detained me, interrogated me, arrested me, judged me guilty, sentenced me, sanctioned me and dealt corporal punishment all as swift as any justice system could. I wonder if he suggested actually calling the police. If you knew him, you’d have to ask the same questions.
From then until 8th grade, I was a relative saint. As I’ve described before, school couldn’t have been better for me, at least until puberty. From the age of 6 until 13, although I did make frequent visits to the principal’s office and receive my share of swats, at school and at home, I lived in a peace and with a feeling of success and wholeness I can only attempt at describing, and one I have again yet to really feel, down to the marrow of my bones as in my youth, to even the slightest degree.
Until about the age of 10, I was a literal saint, but a total momma’s boy. My younger brother and I competed and fought for the attention of our single mother. But as I gained independence and was allowed to go out and play with the other neighborhood kids, I grew away from my mom and as most young people do, away from all authority. I seemed to long for more independence, venturing further and further from the house on daily bike rides of exploration and adventure. It’s interesting now to recall my time in the trails and the natural heir archery that set in and governed the every move among the distinct groups of kids out playing. Lord of the Flies comes to mind, and I remember, to my astonishment and horror, a boy named Kevin biting off the head of a live grasshopper during a game of hide-n-seek. We were hiding together. Upon crouching down a grass hopper landing on my arm, and without a word, Kevin grabs it and starts to let its head protrude out from his clasp fist. He looks at me and says, “Wanna see something?” I nodded, also keeping an eye out for the seeker, and he chomped down on the thing and chewed a few times before spewing it out all over the place and coughing in a fit of near vomit. I ran to the base, “Olly, Olly, Oxen Free” That sure was something.
I take back what I said about saintliness, now that I’m thinking about it, in kindergarten I stole a few 20-dollar bills from the kid’s cubby above mine. Even then I was very calculated. I remember doing it because he was so smelly and so dirty each day, so much so no kid would ever even talk to him and even the teachers maintained distance for fear of a staph infection or scabies. So it was my thought that no one would ever notice or believe him if I took it. The twenty was there in plain sight, just above my cubby and on the way to lunch I slipped it in my pocket while grabbing my lunch ticket. Robert, the boy’s name, had a free lunch card as well so when we went to lunch it wasn’t like he was missing anything. But I think Robert knew what he was doing. As an adult, I can conjure up quite a few scenarios in which a kindergarten child would have $20 bills and still be so smelly and uncared for. Drug dealer comes to mind.
Anyway, I think Robert did it and let me do it on multiple occasions and then used my guilt so that I’d interact with him. I’m not sure what I did with the 20s or even if I had a chance to spend them, but I’m sure in some way I was able to buy pencils from the little vending machines outside the library or even order from the Scholastic catalogue without my mother knowing, paying with the hidden 20s I’d stolen.
Where did this impulse come from? Do animals steal?
I know there are animals even stealing from humans and other animals that have evolved over time to rely solely on stealing for survival, but I have to admit, none of my stealing was ever about survival. Everything I stole I could have gone without. Even all that food, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Stealing really didn’t take after the whole thing with Robert. I was proud to be the good boy and beam in the eyes of authority, but something strange happened as my parents’ divorce really took hold and the ensuing new reality for all of us set in. My mother dated a bit, nothing out of the ordinary, and my father remarried immediately and was set to have another child within two years of the divorce. Although the divorce seemed to make my dad work harder, and over the years I noticed him growing wealthier and wealthier, buying bigger houses and moving to richer parts of town, the extra kid and the other two step brothers that came along with my step-mother made it seem at times my dad was poorer than my single mother.
It was 1989 and my mom worked in Azle at the nursing home as a social worker and my dad worked in University Park as a police officer. My mother’s father was dead and didn’t have a huge inheritance or anything, so my mom’s mom lived down the street from us in an assisted living center. My father’s dad was a millionaire and retired coronel from the Pentagon who lived on a couple of acres in Aledo, TX where he’d planted a Pecan orchard. To say that my mother and father’s lives were different and from distinct socio-economic backgrounds would be an understatement. My paternal grandfather, from where I got my name, George Joseph “Joey” Savage, received an airplane as a birthday gift when he was 16 years old.
I’ll be the first to tell you, I never felt rich in my entire life, and my step brothers used to steal my clothes when we’d go to my dad’s house. They had all this nice stuff and better toys, but we felt just as poor over there as we did at our mom’s house. Around age 9 or 10, I started to become aware of these types of disparities, not to mention the constant gas-lighting from my dad and step-mom about how my mother wasn’t sending over enough socks and underwear, but in fact they were taking them and giving them to their kids. It was crazy. Once when my father was coming to pick me up for a summer visitation, which was Wednesday to Sunday (dreaded!) all summer, and my mother had to work and couldn’t get off in time to be there to facilitate the child exchange. Not to worry my Nanny (mom’s mom) would come and wait with us.
When my dad and step-mom pulled into the driveway to pick us up, everything seemed to be going smoothly, then all of a sudden, I remember, having to hide behind my grandma’s leg as we both stared in amazement out the window to the side of the door. I don’t know if we’d gotten in the van with them and then somehow came back in side or if they started screaming immediately upon exiting their vehicle to walk towards our door, but I’ve never seen anything like it. My father, wearing his Tasmanian Devil tank top, yellow baseball shorts (like men’s daisy dukes) and knee-high socks with white sneakers was jumping around and flailing his arms in a mad rage on the front lawn to my mother’s house. Screaming about socks and underware and scaring the shit out of my Nanny, me and my brother.
Somehow, we made it into the Astrovan and pulled out of Azlewood headed for Bedford, a small suburb about an hour from Azle, where my father was living in a house of Dee Lane. My little brother, bawling in the backseat, probably scared more than anything, was immediately scolded and yelled at and told that if the crying didn’t stop, he’d be left at his mother’s. I thought to myself, “Wish I could be left at my mother’s”. And they did it, they turned the car around, even though my brother was trying to stop crying and trying to get his shit together, but was still whimpering out little sniffles in the back seat, my father, the policeman, jerked the car around, screeching tires, slamming the breaks to a stop in front of the house his parents put the down payment on, and threw my 3-year-old brother out on the lawn speeding away.
There’s a good chance my mind has made an amalgamation of different events into this one memory, but suffice to say, all of those things happened and things like that, and so much worse, happened on a daily in our lives back then. Its this set of circumstances, and hundreds more exactly like it that started causing me to be so angry at my dad’s house, and really very angry overall. After picking us up, we’d be dropped off to spend the visitation with our step-brothers and step-mom while my father worked nights and slept all day. We never saw him. The bullshit about the relationship and blah blah blah he would spew in the endless times he took my mother back to court for custody was tantamount to the boy crying wolf. He no more wanted to be a father and spend time with us than he wanted to go to work and provide for a family. My father is a complex man, and so I am his biologically similar and complex child raging with anger in the middle of the night in a house at 80+ degrees (to save money). crying myself to sleep on the top bunk of a four-bed room.
When I was certain everyone was asleep, I got up and plundered. People think I’m loud and obnoxious, but I can be quiet as a mouse and sly as a fox when I want to. I snooped through the living room drawers and entertainment center, sitting cross-legged in front of a powerless tv in the wee small hours with copies of my dad’s Batman anthology comics he’d never let me read. I was just about to go back to bed, when I saw a grey plastic bag out of the corner of my eye. It looked new and I wondered what my dad had bought. I always felt like he should buy me more stuff, but what kid doesn’t feel that way. The fact is my dad didn’t really buy me anything ever. Everything he bought for me was to be left at his house and never truly owned by me. Anyway, he’d often accuse me and my brother of only wanting him for money when we’d suggest we stop off at the 7-11 on the way home from visitations. I used to feel guilty about it, but as an adult, what fun is it to go riding long distance without snacks. No reasonable human being would deny a rider their snacks. My father was not reasonable.
I say all this to frame what I did. I was angry when I open the grey plastic bag and found a carton of 1991 Upper Deck Baseball cards. Baseball cards were the thing I was sure I had in common with my dad, but it was actually more like a competition to get the better cards. To get a card worthy of this master collectors’ attention and show it off when I came over to get some goddam attention from the man. I loved baseball cards because he did. I collected, re-organized and toted boxes of baseball cards from house to house on each visitation. I loved them. Baseball cards were my life. I wanted to be just like my dad, and I’d sit at the table , with my Beckett and little stickies, pricing my collection. When I saw an entire carton of packs of cards unopened, my stomach sank. It meant my dad was lying to me when he said he couldn’t afford one pack of Topps cards for me. It meant he really didn’t care for me. It meant he might as well and could at any moment turn the fucking car around and throw me out on the lawn too.
I started by only taking one pack. I tidied up all I had plundered through, put the carton of packs back in the grey sack and with one pack, I brought my binder out and added its contents to my collection. I prayed to God that the highly sought after autographed Nolan Ryan card would be in my first pack, that I could get in and out, grab the best card and add it to my collection and my father would be none-the wiser it came from his carton. The anger vanished. The resentment was gone. I was now enthralled in my world of baseball card collecting and beating my dad. Having the best card. I normally couldn’t even afford Upper Deck cards, but the Nolan Ryan wasn’t in there. I think I got maybe a Mike Messina rookie card, but no Griffey, no Ripken, nothing good. The thought of getting caught for that was infuriating and my anger came back. I convinced myself I could take another pack, and another and another, until I’d taken them all and left an empty box in the grey bag, stuff inside the cabinet with the Batman comics, knowin he would find them eventually. I only hoped he wouldn’t go looking for his cards until I was back at my mom’s house.
”I didn’t mean to take them all,” I thought to myself lying back in my top bunk, torn between exhilaration of my new additions and a feeling of absolute I-don’t-give-a-fuck about my dad finding out. I’d took the whole box, stolen from him what I thought was rightfully mine. I mean all his lies and the screaming and treating my brother and me like shit all the time. Who the fuck cared if this cop found out I stole from him? What was he gonna do? Arrest me? Well, at least then I’d get to spend some time with him.
Instead the worst thing happened. My dad woke me up at 6am when he got home and showed me he’d discovered what I’d done. He made me, right then, remove each card out of its sleeve from within my binder and put them back in the box. Then he went to bed and told me to be ready to go to church with my step-mom. She ridiculed me all the way there in her best 20 something routine. They were all so young back then. “I can’t believe you would do something like that to your dad, Joey. You’re going to sit in the chair for the rest of your visit and think about what you did.”
My mom came and picked me up later that day while my dad was still asleep or had already gone off to work. My punishment was to have to return all of the old 1960s and 70s baseball cards my dad had given me for my collection. They were my only cards worth more than a dollar. I turned them over. He told me I might get them back someday, and I bothered him about that day for ages. I’m sure he never really trusted me after that, but I didn’t care, at least he knew how I felt about him, and he didn’t arrest me after all, but I bet he wanted to.
Back home in Azlewood at my moms, making forts out on our trails became more intricate and complicated as we got older. By 11 years old I had shown everyone how to go to the construction sites and take from the wood laying around. A 2x4 here and a piece of plywood there. No one ever noticed and if they did, I bet they thought it was cute as hell. It was 1992. We built little forts and stole candy from the Hornets’ Nest. While getting soda one day, I must have been extra tired from the bike ride, I noticed by pressing softly on the spicket only syrup would come out. That change the way RC and Big Red tasted for me forever. I’d fill my cup with syrup about half way and then then rest with the soda. I taught my friends how to do it too. We eventually go in big trouble and weren’t allowed to fill our own sodas anymore.
The Hornets’ Nest was the local gas station, and the only one back then that close to my neighborhood. You could go to Tommy’s down by the highway or you could use the trails and get over to K-Mart and Tin-Top, but Hornets’ Nest was just a couple blocks away and so we always went there on nearly all our bikes and journeys. Around 12 and 13 years old some of the kids started smoking cigarettes and surprising to me, a group of the prettiest girls in school also started smoking. One afternoon we were hanging with some older kids who had a car, and they needed cigarettes. I pictured in my mind that my friend Jason Brawley used to knock a pack of cigarettes off the counter and then kick them over to the door while the clerk was filling up a water for him at Tin-Top. He’d pick the pack up on his way out and we’d all go to the woods and smoke.
Since the prettiest girl in school wanted cigarettes, and as I noticed myself becoming less and less cool as we grew older and I more and more nerdy, geeky, and all the other words they used in the 90s to describe dorks like me, I wanted to do anything to be considered cool with Cole and Carly, the two neighborhood kids my age who I was with that day. Carly was trying to flirt with the older boys and Cole was trying to flirt with Carly. I was simply bored out of my mind. I told them I could get some cigarettes. They drove me down to the Hornets’ Nest, I went in and asked for a water, the clerk would have to go to the back for a second to fill the water up so I got two or three them, and while the clerk was back there, I loaded my pockets with cigarette packs from the stash they use to keep just above the counter.
It was 1995. There were no cameras, and a lot of illicit product was within reach. The trusting clerks never suspecting a thing. Almost sweating with adrenaline, I paid for the waters and left. Jumping in the truck I waited, expressionless, in the bed of the truck with them all looking at me until we’d pulled back out on the road and then revealed the 6 or 7 packs of smokes I’d just stolen. None of us were 18 yet, so no one believed that a 13 year old kid could pull off getting everyone cigarettes. I might have got a kiss on the cheek, and I was definitely the coolest mother fucker alive for a few minutes. No one had seen or heard of anything like that before. I thought of Two-Bit and The Outsiders.
Things started to heighten in this era for me and it was almost like a competition. My best friend Jason also read the same books I did. The S.E. Hinton stuff and the Gary Paulson. We had a lot in common intellectually and philosophically, although I’m sure we didn’t describe it as such back then. We’d go to K-Mart and see who could steal the most, or the coolest object. Again, no cameras anywhere. One thing I used to do was go in throgh the gardening section, grab a pair of garden snippers and then go to the model cars section with the deep shelves, and cut the plastic anti-theft cage from any CD I wanted. Then I’d take it from the shelf as if it were any ‘ol product, and somewhere along the way put it in my pocket or down my pants. Me and my brothers and all my friends also robbed the BMG music catalogues blind. The one-penny-clubs or whatever they were called, would call our house demanding payment, and my mother would scream into the phone, “They are 13 years old! They have no money. You shouldn’t have solicited a minor,” and she’d hang up. We got in trouble and weren’t allowed to order cds anymore. Oh well. We had all the coolest music. Like I said the skating rink was playing all the hits and we were buying them up. My first CD was Green Day Dookie.
For me, things stayed at petty theft for most of jr. high. But it was on, and I mean I was looking for opportunities everywhere to get an edge on someone. To have access, privilege and wealth. When all the schools mixed at the jr. high level I further realized how poor I really was. But hey, it was the 90s, my mother and step-father were working hard to advance themselves and things did get better. My father moved from Bedford into an even nicer house in The Colony. All in all, both families were moving up. It was the 90s and Reganomics had come to an end, finally. Me being the oldest and having experienced the poverty of being raised by 20-something year-olds, I would feel poor for years and years to come. My friends and I were so bad about being bad, one of us got ahold of the master key to every door on the entire school property. We’d sneak to the concession stands during lunch and load up on sodas and candy. We’d lie about the number of chicken tenders we had at lunch, ordered water but poured soda at restaurants, took cigarettes from the packs left on the porches to the lawns we mowed or from unsuspecting parents and stole all the loose change we could from our parents and anywhere it might be found. We needed money and we needed it bad.
Because I was smoking cigarettes and dipping snuff and generally talking too much in all my classes and causing a ruckus, I had a target on my back. Jason and I spent so much time in ISS, I don’t even really remember my classes from jr. high. I didn’t really know what it meant, and I still generally thought very highly of myself, but I was a bad kid, and maybe one of the baddest. I was paddled many times by both Mrs. Baily and Mr. Hufstedler and by a couple of the coaches. I had been disciplined so much I hated school. I made straight As, was on the A-team in football and baseball, was highly coveted in the student council, theater and math teams, but I had no adult ally.
This all accumulated into my first arrest at 14 years old. I had gone to spend the night at Jason’s house and he wanted to play bartender. His father died in a tragic rafting accident a year or two earlier and we were unsupervised over there. Jason gets me so drunk I can hardly walk and then our friend Ryan takes us to his grandmothers where we drink more liquor before walking to Tin-Top at 9 or 10 at night to rent some videos and do what we told our parents we were going to do, which was play video games and watch movies. Yet here I was drunk as fuck, smoking cigarettes and walking down the street passed the jr. high field house on our way to the video store. and I mutter, “I fucking hate that place.” probably mimicking one of the characters from Dazed and Confused, and before I know it Jason and Ryan are throwing rocks at the school and even breaking windows. I joined in as we walked, and we mostly threw pebbles and small stones at the concrete parts of the building in protest and in jest. I picked up a huge bolder and drunkenly wielded it forward, never reaching more than a few feet high and almost hitting Jason, before we all rolled around on the grass laughing hysterically.
I had been drunk once before and that time was only on beer. We were just kids having fun. We really did hate school and all three of us were too smart to be held captive in the public school system. Being minors we were useless, a burden on our families and society with nothing to do but pretend we were on track to a good life though the school system. I don’t think we did very much damage throwing those rocks. It was more gesture than malice, but the police report listed 16 broken windows in total. I wouldn’t put it past the maintenance guy to add any windows he’d been meaning to fix and just hadn’t got around to.
As we were approaching the video store a cop car pulled in front of us, flipped on his lights and jumped out telling us not to move. It was Ryan’s cowboy hat that had identified us for the person who called in the crime and now for the officer stopping us. He arrested us and took us back to the Junior high and got us out of the car and separated us again. He beat the hood of his car to rile up the dog inside to get it barking and he yelled at me to tell him the truth. I stayed steady with, “I didn’t do anything.”
After what seemed like an eternity, and mind you I am 14-year-old kid drunk as shit, we were arrested and taken down to the Azle Police Department, the same place my dad had worked before he left. I will never forget my mother showing up there and being so angry with me. I immediately started in on her when I saw her come through those doors, “Mom, I didn’t do….” and I want to say she slapped me, but would rather not be sure. She had a few words with the police, which probably saved me from an MIP or a Minor Under the Influence charge, and a few words were exchanged with Jason’s mom and we left. I was no longer allowed to hang out with my best friend. He’d been there since 4th grade and we spent every Saturday night together and never missed an episode of SNL. School kicked us out to the alternative education program (AEP), which was held in the old Boys Club where I used to go to after school care when I was in elementary. I could still hear Nivana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit blaring in what was a gym converted into a detention center. I was also never allowed to participate in sports or extracurricular activities again.
When we moved to Fort Worth, we stayed just off Boat Club Rd. near Lake Worth and my brother, our friends and I would spend our mornings after sleep-overs playing basketball at the YMCA down the street. We’d get there early around 9 or 10 and wait for them to open while smoking joints down at the park bench out of sight from the main road. We did this so often, and had memberships, we didn’t think we’d ever get in trouble. One morning out of nowhere we see the uniform coming over the hill and walking down toward us. I stash my weed in my sock and my buddy Mike throws his weed over to the bushes. The officer approaches us, detains all of us, lines us up and begins to search us all within a few seconds of getting close to the park bench. He knows we’ve had time to get rid of our stuff, and before he got all the way down therea worker-lady from the Y had come out and told us not to get up until the cop arrived. It’s 1998. I’m a freshman in highschool.
He makes us all take off our shoes and socks, empty our pockets, show the inside of our hats, the whole nine, but fortunately for me, he was an idiot. To do the search he made us all line up and do it at the same time, inspecting little pieces and making his mental check list of what had been checked and what hadn’t. First, he did all the pockets, and then came back and did the shoes and socks. So when he was reaching down to look inside my socks, I slipped my bag of marijuana back into my pocket, which I had in my hand. Since he’d already patted me down and made me turn it out my pockets and sicne he didn’t see me grab the bag of weed out of my sock as I took it off, he didn’t suspect I had just pulled a fast one on him. Cops can smell the fear off everyone. They know when the group is hiding something. If you ask anyone watching that day, it was amazing. Also, my youngest brother was with me and it would have been terrible to be arrested in front of him. The cop eventually found the baggie of weed thrown to the bushes, but we were all smart enough to play stupid. The officer opened the bag and smelled the weed looking at us as if he’d won, “Oh, this is some good shit,” he said to us and he rolled the baggy up and put it in his pocket, “I’m going to enjoy this.” We were free to go play basketball now.
The next time I was arrested was at 16. My friends and I had taken to staying up all night and plundering the unlocked cars throughout the neighborhood. We’d gotten so ‘good’ at it we started scheduling to meet up and hit different neighborhoods using my car to travel around the city. I was always saving money. I saved a lot of what I made and when I got $400 I bought a pound of weed and sold that and saved most of that money too. We got busted one night in Saginaw as one of us had actually ripped out a head unit from the dash of a car and made so much noise a neighbor who stayed up all night caught us with his night vision binocs. We were pulled over after fleeing the neighborhood and making it back to the car and had started back toward Lake Worth. Even though I was about as smooth a talker as they come even then, we were all arrested and sent to Kimbrow Rd. If it weren’t for my father being a police officer, they would have stuck us with organized crime. Also due to one of the kids with us being 17 and opening admitting to the crime of stealing the head unit while we were being detained, the rest of us got off with misdemeanor theft and had to build some guy a back porch as part of the community service.
I was arrested again just a few months later at Wal-Mart in Burleson. I had heard about a scheme where you could steal zip disks, then go back in and return them for in-store-credit. I was attending Joshua High School, at the time for one semester, and needed something I couldn’t ask my parents for, so I stole the zip disks. Just as I walked out the door, I heard from behind me, “Wanna tell me about it?”. I turned around to a badge in my nose. The man detained me in the back room of the Wal-Mart and called my step-mom. She came and got me and I was given a ticket and banned from Wal-Mart for life.
A few months later I stole a hundred-dollar bill off this girl while we were both passed out from too much Xanax. When she woke up and realized it gone, she and her boyfriend strip searched me in front of everyone there after I denied having takin it. Her boyfriend got the shotgun out and told me to strip or, “that’s it”. Little did I know, my high and super dumb ass, had placed the stolen hundy in my sock, flat against the bottom of my foot. While sleeping and sweating, the bill had stuck itself almost seamlessly to the arching sole of the underside my foot and was almost invisible. Amazing. They didn’t find it, and finally satisfied themselves letting me put my clothes back on. I was selling them Xanax and they were melting them down and mixing them with heroin or dilaudid and shooting them together. Everyone was fucked! I never used needles, but I loved getting drunk on Xanax.
Things kind of went downhill from here and I was out on my own at 17, obviously not a good person nor one that could be trusted. The more I started taking Xanax regularly, my stealing increased. Although I finally stopped stealing from other people and would only steal from big stores or the mall, I was brazening and bold and would steal anything any time. I especially started to try and steal all the food I ate. I saw no reason to pay for food when there was so much available. My motto became, “Always steal the cheese,” and I did. Until 2015, when I had a change of heart and realized I was only stealing from myself, I stole over 75% of the food I ate during those 15 years. The other portion was food I ate at jobs, family gatherings and parties. I It’s crazy to think about now, but I hardly ever paid for my food. It was just so easy and I did it not out of need but out of greed. I never paid my tickets either, and so one night out at Mosque Point in Lake Worth, while trying to impress my girlfriend with drinking and smoking at the pavilion with friends and my brother, a cop rolled up on us. Even though we stashed all contraband before he pulled up, we were there after park hours and he had the right to detain, interrogate and search us. I had a warrant for a traffic ticket out for running a stop sign, and was taken in. This was 1999 and I already had a bank account then, and checks and the whole deal. My brother followed us to the police station in my car and wrote a check for the ticket and I was out within an hour or two. the officer was nice enough not to impound my vehicle.
There were countless petty run-ins with the cops at parties and while being pulled over, and at 19 years old in 2002, I was arrested again on traffic warrants and spent about two weeks in jail It was a night here and a night there, traveling around the 820 loop on some scenic tour of the local jail cells and holding tanks sampling the variety of unique microwaved hell each facility had to offer. I had my first beard when I finally got out and I felt accomplished. I’d used my one phone call to call my boss and let him know I was in there. When I returned to work, to my amazement, I was treated with a hero’s welcome.
Almost losing everything to being arrested puts things in perspective. I now understood what it was like, not only to sit in a jail cell, but to have your whole life have to stop because of it. I moved to Arlington, kept a steady job and went to TCC and didn’t have another run-in with the law until I was pulled over for speeding in Eugene, OR in 2008. They gave me a ticket and that was that, but what I didn’t know is that because I’d stopped paying on my car, the lender was notified to its location. And, even though I only owed a total of $900, a total of three final payments, the lender authorized the repossession of my car, which I happened to be living in at the time. What a bummer!
When I finally recovered from that it was four years later. I was testing out a VW bus my friends and I had basically built out of two inferior buses, when I was pulled over again. Being how I was, I had waited to address the speeding ticket until just that very day when I was going out to test drive the bus. I had resisted paying it and getting my Oregon D.L. I stupidly thought since I had gone to the DMV and got the paperwork and paid the tickets at the courthouse I could drive, but here I was on my way back from the test drive, things not going so well, and I have my hazard lights flashing, when I see the reds and blues. He has my van impounded for failure to have a D.L. and generously gives me a ride back to Eugene with him. I’m furious. I didn’t have $300 to get the van out of impound. Some friends lent me the money and when I went to court, I showed that I had been all legal and the judge just said, “well our system hadn’t updated and even though you could prove it with your paper work, the officer’s computers told him something different and he had to act accordingly.” I was awarded no compensation.
Again, I had a great run of very little trouble with the police but for a few tickets here and there, that I didn’t bother paying anyway. This luck lasted until 2016 when I was arrested in front of my house from a DWI, which I admitted to on camera while standing outside my car and telling the cops, “How you gonna arrest me when I’m already home?!”. It was embarrassing and I cried like a little bitch in the jail cell waiting to call someone to get me out. When they called roll, the police stuff everyone into just a few cells and because I was so drunk and pill fucked, I ended up having to lay by the fucking toilet. It was degrading.
For the first time in my life, now in 2021, almost 2022, I have my car, D.L and address all registered to the same physical location. I feel like I’ve made it! This hasn’t been the case my whole life. I also have managed to steer clear of the police all together and I’ve even stopped getting tickets. My insurance has peaked at $250/mo due to accidents and traffic violations and I’m on the mend with a mission to get that back down to around $90/mo. For the first time in my life, I can walk up to a cop and not fear being arrested for traffic warrants. It’s a great feeling. When I fought that marine in the bar a few years back in 2018, when the cops arrived, I wanted to press charges on him as he hit me first, but then the officer asked for my I.D. I knew I had warrants for traffic tickets and knew he’d arrest me.
Today I don’t have problems with cops, I don’t steal and I don’t use drugs. I feel like I may never get arrested again, but my father is still out there.