Another reason not to drive drunk

I was telling one of the 17 year-old kids at my job the other day (I know) about one of the times when I lost my car when I was in college.

I had been out sipping some of the pain go bye bye juice, and I don't mean to suggest that I drove back home intoxicado, because a) drunk driving is wrong, and I don't do things that are wrong; and b) even if I did, I wouldn't want any kids thinking that shit's ok, just because they've got skills like that.

But I somehow ended up in my car, drunk like a mofo, doing laps around the parking lot outside my dorm. I couldn't find a parking spot, because I went to the kind of school that would just let problems pile up year after year, rather than actually try to find a solution - as long as no one had to balls to actually quit or anything, and hence cut off that tuition money.

And of course hardly anyone ever did. The thing about college is, they don't actually tell you that, even if you graduate, you could end up just as shit out of luck as if you didn't go in the first place. If I would have been aware of what my odds were, I might have just taken my chances.

It's not like you need more than an 8th grade education to blog for one of these hip-hop websites.

But I digress. One of the problems was that there was never anywhere to park. Even though this school was way the fuck out in the middle of nothing but cornfields, it was like the stadium the Brooklyn Dodgers played in before they moved to LA - only the first few people who showed up could actually park their car. Everyone else was shit out of luck.

This night in particular, I ended up parking at the football stadium, which is kinda far from where I lived, but I was wasted. I figure at least I parked my shit in an actual parking space. How in the world I made it from there to my bed is beyond me, but I seem to have a knack for finding my way back to my bed - or at least some place nice and warm - when I'm deprived of some or most of my senses, due to inebriation.

It's like, you wonder how an animal can survive in the wild when it's like, 8 degrees out. I've got strong animal instincts like that when I'm wasted. If I was drunk enough, I could probably survive in the wild in the dead of winter like it was nothing. (One obvious downside is that sometimes when I'm wasted, I have to fight the urge to force a woman to have sex with me against her will. I seriously doubt the "laws of nature kicked in" defense would actually play in court.)

Fast forward to several days later. I needed to drive to Taco Bell to get some tacos. It probably wasn't any further from where I lived than the football stadium, but how the fuck was I gonna look walking to Taco Bell. We just don't do shit like that here in the Midwest. But then I realized I didn't know where my car was. So I did what any reasonable person would do in that situation and just said fuck it.

And so it went, for like two weeks. I would need to go somewhere, and then I would realize, "Oh, that's right, I got drunk and lost my car." I only realized it was at the stadium one day when I absolutely needed to go to Wal-Mart. I was running out of deodorant, and I'm too big to be walking around without deodorant. People might think I was from Africa or something. (Er, like, recently from Africa.)

I was reminded of all this just now, when I came across the story of this guy Tank, who also had some issues trying to find his car, down in New Orleans during NBA All Star Weekend. His story may have actually ended worse than mine did. I was indisposed for quite some time, but at least I didn't incur any physical harm.

Tank was wandering around in an alley after having left the House of Blues at about 1:30 in the morning. He claims the reason he couldn't find his car was because he wasn't familiar with New Orleans, being from LA and all, and I suppose it would be racist for me to suggest that the real reason he couldn't find his car is because he was drunk off his ass. Probably on Hennessey.

So fine, the guy got lost. However, I could see why the cops would be concerned with people just wandering around the alleys down there. You could probably fuck around and get mugged by some sizzurp-addled Katrina victim. Also, based on what I know about New Orleans (i.e. the time I saw JFK as a child), I'd say there's a lot of fags down there. A guy could walk into an alley healthy, and walk out with AIDS.

Therefore, if I got lost down there, I wouldn't necessarily be upset to run into 5-0. But you know how it is when you're black. The police treat you as if you're some sort of criminal just because you're wandering around an alley drunk at two o'clock in the morning. Pshaw!

So of course there ended up being an issue between Tank and the police. Supposedly, he had realized where his car was, but it was around the corner. Then, when he went to go around the corner, the cops were like, "No, you can't go around that corner. You're gonna have to go the other way." But then Tank was like, "Why am I going all the way around the other way, when I could just go around this corner and be done with it?"

That's probably where he fucked up. Even if he had a good point, and it sounds like he does, you know how cops are just people who are barely smart enough to graduate from high school, who live to wield their false sense of authority over people.

Next thing you know, they had him hemmed up against the wall, where they zapped his ass with a taser. Why in the world they would need to zap him with a taser when they already had him hemmed up against the wall is beyond me, but I've heard that the cops down there are especially brutal. Once they had him good and subdued, they took him to a hospital, where he was treated and then sent to jail, where he was charged with disturbing the peace, public drunkeness (I thought he was lost!), and resisting and obstructing an officer.

He was finally released, and he enlisted the services of a lawyer down there whose name sounds like it might be Creole or something. They released a statement which has been copied and pasted in full on a bunch of these hip-hop sites, which is where I read about this shit. They've yet to announce anything yet with regard to a lawsuit or anything, but here's hoping they clean up.