Candyman and I - Part 2

It was stupid. It was stupid to tell my lover that I was having some tense emotions come up and that I needed to work some things out with a quick bike ride - at ten at night on a Friday in his less than rosy, not totally familiar neighborhood.

He asked me several times if I was sure this was a good idea, but having learned that getting in the way of my roaring independence will get a guy mauled, he resigned himself to worrying about me rather than having me be mad at him. I was going to be real quick and real careful. Didn’t even take my phone, wallet or keys. No drama. Be right back. I rode a large loop south and when I came back by his house, I decided to take another small loop north. Just to the main road and back.

I am a strong bike rider and I don’t mean in the spandex sense. I mean in the city riding sense. I am confident and steady on my mountain bike and when I take my hands off the handlebars, feel the wind in my hair and my music in my ears, I let go. I fly. This is when I can feel my central nervous system unwind and I finally relax.

And then, with the beats of Jurassic 5 in my ears, I got cocky again and pushed into the busy intersection on a yellow light. I should have known that I was playing with my luck, but I stupidly seem to think I am invincible a lot of the time. Before I even made it to the other side of the street, I saw the flashing lights of a squad car. It’s okay. I was a girl on a bike. There was no way this guy was going to give me more than a warning. I slowed my bike, still happy and floating from the joy of riding and climbed off as I smiled at the police officer who was coming around his squad car and walking towards me.

His face says, he isn’t in a mood to chat.

‘Can I see your ID?’

Charmingly and with a smile I say ‘Officer, I am so sorry, I am headed straight home, I didn’t bring my wallet, I just ate a big dinner and wanted to head out for a quick spin before bed. We don’t need to do this. I get it.’

‘You don’t have your ID?’ ‘

‘No, I am just five minutes from my house, really.’

He pulls out a notepad and asks me for my name. I am stunned. Didn’t we skip a part?

‘Wait! No! No! No! We don’t have to…’

I am shocked. I can’t handle another ticket. He is not really giving me a ticket for this?! I can’t afford another ticket.

He repeats himself.

‘Name!?’

‘Sarah’. I spell it out. ‘S-A-R-A-H’.

I am used to spelling out my name since no-one can spell Spieth right, but I am hoping Jordan Spieth, the up-and coming golfer who recently glossed the cover of a Sports Illustrated, will change that.

‘Last name?’

I freeze. I have never been in this situation. I have nothing on me verifying my ID. Do I have to give him my real name?

He lifts the mic on his left breast pocket to his mouth.

‘Single, white female on a bicycle. Yes.’

‘Last name!’, he shouts at me.

‘Smith!’ I blurt out. Then I spell it ‘S-M-I-T-H’

‘Date of birth?’

                    

My voice is shaky.

’10/08/82’

Back into his radio: ‘Yes. E Speedway.’

‘Last four digits of your social?’

‘What?! I don’t have to give you that! This is ridiculous! Come on. Let me go home! Let me just go home!’

He skips onto the next question.

‘Address?’

I take a big inhale and push out the first number of the permanent address associated with my driver’s license.

‘5’ then the next ‘4….2’

Then I freeze. I can’t get another word out.

My mind goes to my lover, his apartment so close that I can almost see it, but the safety that I feel when my head rests on his chest is a million miles away. I can barely breathe as my eyes well up.

He looks up from his notepad: ‘Now, I am going to warn you - ’

‘Oh god!? Oh God! Really!? Thank you!’

My chest opens up.

‘No! No, I am warning you that if I go to my car and call this in and find that you have been giving me fake information, I am taking you to jail.’

My throat closes more tightly than before, my wide eyes watch as two more squad cars show up. I am petrified.

I don’t see the other two officers get out of their cars and walk over. I only notice them once they are already standing in formation around me. I appear to be encircled by three grown men, their three squad cars, and all their lights that are turning my night into day. I am frozen. My insides are trembling. My body is getting so hot under my hoodie and my eyes start pouring out tears. I would have never expected myself to require that much man power.

He sneers at me: ‘Now do you want to start over?’

‘Yes’ I push out.

We start over.

‘First name?’

‘Sarah. ‘S-A-R-A-H’.

‘Last name?’

 ‘Spieth. S-P-I-E-T-H’

 ‘Date of birth?’

                    

’10/08/82’

‘Address?’

I churn out the rest of the information he is asking me for.

‘Do you have a warrant out for your arrest?’

‘NO!’ I let out in a helpless shout.

‘Then why are you crying?’

Why am I crying? Is he serious?!

‘Because you scare me! Because this is scary! Because I want to go home!’

‘Do you have anything on you?’

‘NO!’

I sound like an idiot as I whimper: ‘I am a yoga teacher! I have a Master’s degree!’

I feel neither served nor protected.

‘Can I search you?’

‘Yes!’

I think it can only help my case as he runs his hands over my body, hot and trembling inside my hoodie.

‘If I put my hand in this pocket, will I get poked?’

Is anyone hearing me?

‘No!’ I push past my tears.

The other pocket. ‘If I put my hand in this pocket, will I get poked?’

‘No’, as I shake my head and then let my tears pull my head down.

The officer goes back to his car while the other two keep an eye on me. Even in my hysteria, I am not blind to the fact that there is a well-rehearsed protocol at play here. The officer standing closest to me now has to engage me. He is older and corpulent and has a lisp and I can tell he is struggling to think of things to talk to me about. So the questions repeat, which just adds to me agony.  

‘Do you have a warrant out for your arrest or something?’

‘NO!’ I whine.

He doesn’t seem smart. The angle at which he is standing has him questioning me without making direct eye contact. I don’t know if it is by protocol or because he is socially awkward. He seems awkward.

‘Then why did you lie about your last name? If you have nothing to hide?’

‘Because I am scared! Because you scare me! Because I am not exactly in this situation every day, you know!’

‘Well that was stupid’.

Seriously? Stupid? Right now I want to tell him how small he is. Right now I want to tell him that I watched the Wall fall, that I speak four languages, that I remember Desert Storm, and that I have sat in a bomb bunker waiting for the sirens to stop.

Why am I continuously given the idea that because I don’t have a warrant out for my arrest, I ought to be just fine with the events of my current situation? Armed and around me in formation, shining their bright lights on me and making efforts to intimidate me, the three grown men just can’t figure out what’s got the girl so scared! Maybe if I take my sweater off and try to look hot.

The third officer, standing farthest away from me is young and handsome and seems to have a pained expression on his face in what almost looks like empathy for how I am unraveling, but I realize there is a chain of command at work here and I know better than to put my hope in it.

The first officer’s head pokes out from behind his squad car and tells the other two they can leave telling me to ‘hang out for a minute’. At this point I know I am not ‘hanging out’ to await my gentle warning and my heartfelt wishes for a safe evening. I am hanging out while he takes down everything that I said that he liked in detail in case I decide to fight the stupid ticket he is currently printing for me in court. I am a fucking veteran at this by now!

‘Sarah, I am citing you for running a red light.’ as he hands me my ticket.

350 dollars. The law treats a bike like a car.

I rip the ticket out of his hand and shout at him: ‘You are a detestable person!’ How on EARTH am I supposed to absorb another ticket?!’

I can tell he doesn’t give a shit about what I think of him as he makes his way back around his car. As I turn to pick up my bike and as I watch a tear roll off my cheek and hit the ground, I shout into the night air ‘You are a fucking prick!’

The single syllable has barely left my lips before remorse sets in. Fuck! These things are only over as long as the officer says they’re over! A cold shiver runs down my back as I stand frozen staring straight ahead into the night and bracing myself to hear his car door slam in anger and see him stomp back around his car to teach me a lesson about insulting an officer.

He doesn’t. He drives off.

I am still trembling as I turn my bike around and push it back to my lover’s house, but my tears slow and then stop, my mouth is dry, my mind is blank. As I walk through the dodgy neighborhood, shaken and insecure, my throat and my gut are clenched as tightly as the crumpled ticket in my hand. I cannot figure out what exactly was made safer in all this. It surely wasn’t me.

When I arrived at his house, I dropped my bike in front of his door, walked in and unhinged myself onto his bed where he is  laying. I wrapped his arms around me and curled myself into a ball.

‘Hey!? Hey!? Hey…What’s going on, Baby? Hey.

Seeing that something had definitely happened to me, he worked incredibly hard to stay calm and said sweetly: ‘Heeey You. Wanna talk to me? Hmmm.?’

I couldn’t get a word out for one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three- and then I busted open. I just busted open. In no time, I drenched his shirt with hot tears and struggled to squeeze words past the shame of my stupidity and having been hit with yet another ticket. Every time I get a little breathing room, I fuck everything up again.

He was still trying to keep himself calm as his mind started running like crazy. It wasn’t fair. Though not intentional, it wasn’t fair to leave him guessing for so long. He has seen too much. He has seen too much of the very, very worst of what happens to people. And he has met the people who do the very, very worst to people. 12 years in the joint. He has shared only some of the dark stories because he knows how sensitive I am, but what I do know is enough to know that he had reason to imagine a kind of worst case scenario that is far, far beyond your and my darkest imagination.

As I started squeezing out the words of what had happened, he couldn’t line up the information I was giving him with the fear I had made him feel. They didn’t fit. And he got angry. He got angry at himself for letting me go and he got angry at me for being so damn naïve.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know until he explained to me then, that those women out there are hookin’ and that this is a drug neighborhood, that the cops have lost a couple of their own around here and are real uptight, that I would have been more likely on a drug run than on a bike ride because ‘I had a big dinner’.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know that who I was and what I was doing made next to no sense for the neighborhood I was at the time I was in it. I didn’t know that the officers had little precedent on a master’s degree’d, yoga therapist just going for a spin in this neighborhood at night. I didn’t know the high likelihood that any other person they would have stopped on the bike would have indeed had something in their pocket to poke them. He struggled to empathize with my collapsed state. He didn’t want to coddle me. He wanted me to grow up, be smart.

I felt really alone. I begged him to hear me, but he couldn’t. Not then. Not till the next day when the horrors that were thrashing around in his mind of what could have happened to me finally stilled.

I can’t figure out if I am naïve or European. I had gotten half way through my teens before I left Germany and I still come from a time where the police were like us. They helped me get home safely and even cheersed champagne with us on the streets on New Years’ Eve. I don’t remember ever being afraid of the police. I rightfully understood myself as part of the peaceful majority. None of my friends in Germany are afraid of the police. But then this is crazy socialist Germany, where you can climb a tree without getting arrested, tactfully alleviate your bladder without being slapped with a lifelong label as sex offender, where you may be belligerently drunk in public as long as you are not hurting anyone or yourself, where children aren’t hit with arrest records that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, and where prison is, believe it or not, rehabilitative.

There is a notion at work in this country that I may ‘expect’ to get in trouble with the police if certain conditions are present. Am I supposed to expect harsh treatment by police officers because of how I present based on where I am, what I am doing and how I look? And if that is the case, then is this justice of ours really all that blind? And what if I didn’t look like I look? What if I looked brown?

Over the last months, I have often thought of the famous Ted talk where brain research expert Jill Bolte Taylor recounts the events of her very own stroke. Much like that, I have been able to apply my Master’s level expertise in Peace and Conflict Studies to the bubble of my very own life. I have had to render the privilege of considering only intellectually the profound injustices in our system and had a chance to feel a few of them on my own skin. I am better for it.

Recently, as I have been driving past scenes of 6 or 8 officers standing around a single homeless-looking person, I wonder why we act surprised that we have a bullying problem in our children. Things have come too far and you know it.

This is us. And we are looking at two very frightening and interrelated facts: 1) an overstaffed, over-equipped, over-eager and over-funded police force and 2) a system of private prisons that are entering contracts with state and local governments that guarantee a minimum occupancy rate of 90 to 100 percent.

What I am telling you, even If you don’t believe it yet, is that it will be you. It will be you and you and me. It will be us. Injustice and structural violence are a dish no longer just served to the poor and it is time we do something.

Forget that the federal prison population more than doubled between 2000 and 2010. Forget that  more people are being funneled into the prison system even if actual crime rates are falling. Forget that we are looking at what is called a postive feedback loop with our own societal disease. People are profiting from a malfunctioning system. People thus have a vested interest in maintaining a malfunctioning system. This, by definition, will grow the malfunctioning of the system. Forget all that.

What is much, much worse, is that currently there is a board room somewhere, where people are analyzing recent kindergarten growth rates and deciding how many prisons to build. 

It is time.

It is time. 

 
‘Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither, Liberty nor Safety.’

    ~ Benjamin Franklin

As for me. on June 10 I am headed back to court. I have no illusions about getting out of this ticket. But I am going to stand in my dignity. I am going to take back my power. And I may even decide to draw a few diagrams of my own.