3 Times in One Night

With a title like that I bet you’re probably thinking that I banged some hot chick 3 times in one night when I was a young child, which would make for a bad-ass story, but sadly that’s not the story and you’ll probably be really disappointed now, but I’m going to tell it anyways. Oh and if you haven’t figured it out, I’m going to start using Fridays to tell a true story from my past to lead into the weekend. So yes, this story is 100% true just like the potato cannon being shot at girls playing soccer and feeding a small asian kid a mixture of everything we could find in the kitchen. So I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy writing them and reminiscing about my childhood.

The day was July 8, 2000, we had recently graduated from high school and were wasting away the summer before heading off to college. The company I worked for (and actually still work for 9 years later) owns a sky box at a local arena in the Chicago land area so we would occasionally get tickets to concerts, events and stuff. We managed to get 12 tickets for the sky box to the “Up In Smoke Tour” that night. The show featured artists like Eminem, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit and maybe a few others. So I headed to the concert with my co-workers and my friends headed to the beach since they had nothing else to do… I was going to meet up with them after the show.

So we’re at the concert and obviously I’m underage and can’t buy booze, but my co-workers were all older and since I didn’t drive down there they had no problem buying me a couple mai thais. The concert was actually really good and I was pretty buzzed from all the drinks so I didn’t really want to go home yet. So I called my friends that had gone to the beach and asked them what they were doing, and apparently they were just leaving the beach as they had just been approached by the cops.

I guess you’re not allowed to be on the public beaches after sundown so the cops were called to come boot them out of there, which was the first time that night… Can you figure out what the title means now? So they left the beach and were coming to pick me up and head to Steak N Shake to get some food. Some of our other friends had been a party nearby and were all going over there so we were going to meet them. When C picked me up, N and S were with him in the car (first initials are being used since they probably wouldn’t want me writing about them). S was pretty drunk in the backseat, I was still pretty buzzed from the concert, and N and C were stone sober.

C did not have the greatest car back in the days of high school, I believe it was a 1992 Ford Topaz and on this particular night it was apparently missing a headlight. So on our way to Steak N Shake we notice we’re being followed by a cop… No big deal, C hasn’t been drinking and I’m only buzzed at this point, but S was still pretty drunk. And seeing as he was drunk, he decided it would be a good idea to flick off the cars behind us, not realizing it was a cop. So we’re almost at the restaurant, everyone else had just pulled into the parking lot as we’re turning into the mall where it’s located when all of a sudden the blue and red lights start flashing behind us…. great.

S is freaking out saying that he just flicked off the cop without realizing it was a cop and he would pay for the ticket since it was his fault. We just told him to relax and see what the cop was pulling us over for first. As it turns out he pulled us over cause C’s car was missing a headlight. I’m sure it was probably just an excuse to pull us over and since he didn’t smell alcohol or anything, he wrote C a fix-it ticket for the headlight. 5 minutes later we were in Steak N Shake enjoying a delicious drunk meal.

After Steak N Shake we had to drive S home to the town that borders our hometown. It’s not that far away from where we live so it was no big deal. So after dropping him off we’re headed back towards home, coincidentally down the same road we were on when we got pulled over going to Steak N Shake. C is driving along and recognizes a familiar street and decides to turn right. Apparently he didn’t realize that this street is not the street of the same name, that is in our town… it doesn’t go all the way through (it does now). So we get to the end, which is a dead end, and turn around. There are a bunch of new construction houses going up back in the area, so we just turn around and head back out the main road to go home.

As we’re approaching the light at the main road a cop is pulling down the street we were just on, we don’t think anything of it and turn back onto the main road to head home. And that’s when we see the nice blue and red lights flashing behind us again… awesome. I’m pretty sober by this point so I’m not too worried, besides C was driving the car so it’s not like I did anything wrong. So the cop just sits in his car with the lights on for about 10 minutes waiting… never approaching the car. I guess if it’s after midnight they usually call for backup just in case, so he had to wait for another squad car to pull up behind him so they could hold hands and skip up to our windows. So they come up to both the passenger and driver side window and ask what we were doing back on that road so late. C explained that he thought it went through to our town, but he was wrong so he turned around and headed back out. That’s when the cop tells us that there have been a bunch of burglaries at the new constructions back there and it’s a little suspicious that we would be coming out of there at 1am. C tried to explain that it was a misunderstanding which is when N decided he wanted to talk. So from the passenger seat N opens his mouth and goes “Look at me, I’m wearing all abercrombie, does it look like I’d be robbing a house?”

Now I don’t consider my friends douche bags, but that was hands down one of the douchiest things I’ve ever come out of N’s mouth. So now I’m thinking, great N just pissed this guy off and now they are going to either search the car or take us in. Not that searching the car would have turned up anything, it’s just the fact that by now it was almost 2am, I was tired, coming down from a good buzz and just wanted to get to sleep. Luckily for us the cop didn’t take the time to pull us out and search the car, but he did try to find something to bust us on… and that something was curfew.

In our town growing up, curfew was 10pm on weekdays and I believe 11 or 12pm on weekends if you were under 17. And if you were caught driving a car after curfew it was basically like driving without a license. This wasn’t a big deal cause we were all 18, but we still had to wait while he took all of our IDs and ran them through his computer. He finally came back, handed us our IDs and told us to get home safe, but the whole stop seriously took about an hour (as far as I remember, or maybe it just seemed like an hour). And that as the 3rd time that night we had a run in with the cops.

So has anyone else been confronted more than 3 times in a 3-4 hour span by the cops? At least the only ticket anyone got was for a busted headlight which was like $20 bucks. I do have some other cop stories, but they aren’t as long as this one so I may combine a few into one post in the future, but this one always sticks out in my mind because I don’t get pulled over that often. Actually I’ve only gotten 2 tickets in the 11 years I’ve had my license, first one was for going 73 in a 40 (coincidentally on that same road as above) which I got 4 hr traffic school and supervision for. The 2nd one was for going 93 in a 65, which was lowered down to 87 in a 65 since the 1st cop couldn’t turn around fast enough to catch me he had to radio it back and that guy only got me at 87. I got supervision for that one without going to court (it was out of town so I had my lawyer figure it out, it cost a bit of money, but I didnt have to drive 4 hours to goto court or take traffic school). And the only other time I’ve dealt with the cops due to my vehicle was my car accident that happened in October 2008 (which you can read about on here).