LAW SCHOOLED – PART I

Believe it or not, I went to law school.

Not all of law school. Just part of it. Most of it, actually. Two years, from 1989 to 1991. Can we just get past this, please?

Anyway, I went to law school. And I really enjoyed it. A lot. But as I have since learned, enjoying law school is the first sign that you’re doing it wrong.

And I did so much of law school wrong. Starting with my first day of law school, when I went to the wrong class, an error I discovered about 10 minutes into the lecture. I spent the next 10 minutes debating whether to leave or wait it out. Being the man of action that I was (translated: wholly unconcerned with what anyone thought), I got up and walked out, bringing the entire lecture to a halt for the duration of what everyone else in the room thought was my First Day Dropout Walk Of Shame.

Continuing, I went to class only when I felt like it. I spent most of my time drinking beer and organizing intramural sports teams. I was especially interested in naming our various intramural sports teams. Our flag football team was called “Go Deep,” a name which I chose because that was our primary play call. I was shocked, shocked I say, to learn there was an alternative – and extremely dirty – interpretation of the name. Our basketball team was called “Second Year Girls Are Easy,” because that’s what everyone said about second year girls. And by “everyone,” I mean “me.”

Okay, here’s what happened.

Early in my first year, I went to a party that was attended by a number of other law students, including some second-year students. I got into a conversation with a second-year student, who was a girl, which quickly devolved into a condescending lecture from her about how there “was no way” I could understand blah blah blah because I was just a “first year” blah blah blah, which was cool, I guess, but then she wouldn’t get off it and kept on with the “first year” this and “first year” that. So I said, “Yeah? Well who fucking cares what you think? Second-year girls are easy.”

She did not think that was amusing. So…I had the phrase printed on our basketball jerseys in her honor.

I don’t remember what name we/I came up with for our softball team, but I do know that by the time softball season rolled around, I had adopted a persona by the name of El Gato.

El Gato was derived from the letters running down each side of a pair of sweatpants I’d purchased from a thrift store. The letters originally spelled “GATORS,” which was, to me, an abomination, so I cut the “R” and the “S” off each leg. The subsequent Spanish word that remained gave rise a character I called “El Gato,” who spontaneously emerged for the first time in a softball game against another grad school team.

To say El Gato was “cocky” would be like saying Bill Clinton “had a thing for the ladies.”

El Gato wore a do-rag on his extremely Caucasian head on the ever-so-slight chance there weren’t enough reasons already for you to hate his guts.

El Gato was a screaming, preening, Latino-impersonating, asshole.

El Gato announced his arrival upon this plane of existence when I was at bat in the first inning. I stroked a solid hit into the right-field gap – a hit which should easily have gone for a double. But rather than cruise into second standing up, I stopped at first base, planted both feet squarely on the bag, and began taunting the pitcher – who had done nothing more than pitch a ball at me, underhanded – in an awful and racist Spanish accent.

“EL GATO LIVES!!! YOU HAVE NOTHING!!”

Or words to that effect.

During my second year, one of my professors read off a list of students who had been dropped from his class for insufficient attendance. Later that day, when I finally made it to campus, my classmates informed me that I was on that list.

The good news is that I was able to talk my way back into his class. The bad news was that my re-admission was granted only after I physically pushed my way into his office – as he was physically blocking my entrance to his office with his actual, law-professor body. True story.

Once, my Civil Procedures professor was having an especially delightful time mowing down unprepared classmates by fast-forwarding through 9 or 10 case discussions, instead of the usual 4 or 5. When he called out the style for what had to be the 10^th case of the day, everyone in the class was scrambling through their casebooks in hopes that, just maybe, a friendly ghost had left some succinct and accurate analyses tucked among the pages.  

Everyone but me, that is.

You see, I had managed to remain just a whisker ahead of his demands, mostly because I can read super-fast and didn’t mind not listening to the actual discussion going on around me. These two skills had allowed me to be sort of prepared to stand and deliver, had he called on me to recite any of the first 9 cases.

But this was just too fucking much.

As everyone was scrambling, hoping for a miracle, I remained still, my eyes locked on the professor. He looked up to continue his interrogation – I mean – his lecture and his eyes met mine with the intent, I’m sure, of calling on me. But as we looked at each other for just a moment, I gave him the slightest head shake, like a pitcher who wants to bring the fastball instead of the curve.

It was no more than a left-right-left. Less than an inch in either direction.

He took a breath, shook his own head a bit, and called on the guy next to me. And totally fucked that guy up.

The next day, I showed up ready to recite for the full class session. And he did call on me, more than once, but not as often – or as cruelly – as I anticipated. I did not fare so well later that semester when I publicly embarrassed my Torts professor just a few weeks later. But you’ll have to wait for the next blog for that story.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

GOING POSTAL

It was August 1986. I was just a couple months out of college and was putting my BBA to good use as a doorman for a Sixth Street honkytonk called “Raven’s Garage.” (If I’m not mistaken, Raven’s was in the same spot Emo’s would occupy for many years before relocating to Riverside Drive.) Anyway, as might be expected of any good college graduate working in a bar, I was in the habit of staying up late, drinking a lot, and sleeping until well after noon.

And I was good at it.

Per my usual routine, I woke up on this Wednesday morning afternoon, enjoyed a “breakfast” of Dr. Pepper and god-only-knows-what-else, and got dressed for work. On this particular day – for no reason at all – I decided to wear my U.S. Postal Service shirt which I’d purchased a couple of years earlier in an Austin thrift shop. I probably wore it 2 or 3 times a year and had never given any thought whatsoever to its history or how it had been used prior to me owning it.

To put it in perspective, I put way more thought into the purchase and subsequent frequent wearings of my Gumby & Pokey screen printed AND flocked t-shirt depicting Pokey and Gumby engaged in a game of baseball, with Pokey pitching to Gumby supported by an infield and outfield comprised of eight Blockheads. Squinting hard at the pitcher, Gumby has a thought bubble above his head saying, “This one’s going downtown.”

Wearing that shirt was a social, artistic, religious, and political statement of grave consequence. Wearing my letter carrier shirt was not. At least not prior to August 20, 1986.

I pedaled my one-speed cruiser across the Congress Avenue bridge to Raven’s. It was still only about 4pm, so there were few, if any, customers. As 5pm approached, I took up my position at the door in anticipation of the happy hour crowd’s arrival.

The first person to walk up was a largish man wearing Wranglers (in Austin, in July) and a largish-er cowboy hat. I was just about to give him the spiel about drink specials and who would be playing on the stage when he cut me off. With extreme prejudice.

”You think you’re funny??”

“What?”

Instead of simply repeating himself, the Cowboy shoved me up against the wall and then repeated himself.

“You think you’re funny, motherfucker???”

While, of course, I thought I was funny – because, I mean, come on – I did not think he was truly seeking my opinion of humorous talents. So, instead of answering, I decided to go with just being terrified and confused.

He then pulled at my shirtsleeve, where the USPS patch was sewn.

“What the fuck are you even thinking, man?”

Now I was actually more confused than terrified, which was, itself, sort of terrifying. I thought, maybe, for a moment, that there was a law prohibiting the unauthorized wearing of USPS-approved apparel – a law which this particular citizen took very seriously.

“I don’t have any idea what you are talking about, man.”

My confusion must have been apparent, because the guy quickly dialed it down, seeming to believe I was telling the truth.

“Don’t you know what happened today?”

I was 21 years old, still technically drunk from the night before, and had been awake for only 90 minutes. All of which meant there was no way I could possibly interpret “what happened today” in the way that he meant for me to, because all I could think was, “Umm…not much, dude. The day just started.”

“Some lunatic shot up a post office in Oklahoma today and killed a bunch of people.”

Holy hell.

The blood drained from my face as I apologized about a thousand times. I then went straight to merchandise display where they were selling Raven’s Garage t-shirts. I pulled the first one I saw right off the wall and changed shirts right there in the club.

I don’t think I ever wore that shirt again. And I don’t even know where it is today. Which kinda bums me out. But it bums me out even more that I don’t know where that Gumby and Pokey shirt is.

I wrote this on the anniversary of the Edmond, Oklahoma, post office shooting – the first mass shooting of its kind and the event which gave rise to the term “going postal.”

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

FIRSTS – VOLUME III: Busted In Brownfield

Continuing my blogs about various “firsts” in my life, here’s the one about the first (and, so far, only) time I ever saw the inside of a jail cell. I call it….

Busted In Brownfield

One hot summer evening in September 2004, Kandyce and I loaded our three youngest kids into our Suburban and left Wichita Falls, Texas, bound for Ruidoso, New Mexico. Our oldest, Margaret, was already en route with her grandparents. We were traveling late in the day because the temperature that day had reached 104 degrees and the air conditioning had recently gone out in the Suburban and we didn’t want to die all at once in the same car from heat stroke.

So, the plan was to drive to Brownfield, Texas – just south of Lubbock – and get a hotel room, then drive the rest of the way to Ruidoso early the next morning. The kids were young then – Jack was 4 and the twins were 6 – so we made a palate of blankets in the back, hooked up a portable DVD player, and set aside three doses of allergy medicine in case we needed to diagnose any of them with “the need to become very sleepy so as not to make Mom and Dad insane.”

We were set! We thought!

Little did we know a series of seemingly random, inconsequential events would ultimately lead to my becoming the least popular cellmate in the Terry County jail some five hours later.

The first thing that happened was the swarm of grasshoppers, an exigent circumstance of such obviously Biblical foreboding that I’m disappointed I didn’t immediately turn around and go home.

We had been on the road a couple of hours and were midway through Knox County. And if you’ve ever driven through Knox County, you already know that when you are driving through Knox County your only goal in life is to make it out of Knox County to where there are people, because Knox County is 855 square miles of lonely, terrifying – and as it turns out – grasshopper-infested nothingness.

In my life, I have never seen such Orthopteran carnage. It was beyond belief. And my attempts to use my windshield wipers to remedy the situation resulted only in smearing a gooey paste of grasshopper sludge across my windshield, causing me to utter words almost certainly never before spoken in Knox County: “Thank god we’re in Knox County.”

I said these words because being in Knox County meant there was almost no chance of oncoming traffic – or any traffic at all – so if the film of visibility-ruining grasshopper guts caused me to unknowingly veer across the center line, there would probably not be an 18-wheeler approaching from the other direction.

Finally, we made it out of Knox County, at which time I said another phrase that had probably never before been spoken: “We’re almost to Guthrie, thank god.”

Guthrie, Texas, is the county seat of King County, Texas. And while the population of King County is, literally, THIRTEEN TIMES SMALLER than the aforementioned demographic black hole known as Knox County (King County population: 276; Knox County population: 3789), the county seat of Guthrie is at an actual highway crossroads, making it the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport of travel and transportation for the area. Anyway, assuming commerce in Guthrie wasn’t closed down for the night – it was, after all, approaching 9 pm on a Friday night – I figured I’d find a convenience store or filling station where I could refill my washer reservoir and scrub the bug guts off my windshield.

Fortunately, Guthrie was still open for business when we got there. And while I took care of the grasshopper situation, Kandyce got the kids drinks and snacks and got us a 12-pack of Keystone Light for consumption later in the hotel room, where we would be cooling off and relaxing in less than two hours. She broke open the 12-pack, dumped it in the cooler, and poured a bag of ice over the top. Watching her do that was the sexiest thing I had ever seen. There should be entire websites dedicated solely to videos of women we love making beer cold for us.

But I digress.

We got back on the road, bug free and iced down. We were in the home stretch. As we neared the city limits of Brownfield, Kandyce asked me I wanted to crack open a beer and have a sip. (Yeah, yeah…I’m the kind of irresponsible, 200-pound, man who would take a sip of a light beer after driving for four hours in 95-degree heat with no air conditioning with my kids in the car. Pray for me.)

Despite my intense, genetic-level desire to drink all the beer in the entire world, all in one gulp, at that very instant, I declined her offer, telling her that I wanted to wait until we were in the hotel room – with the thermostat set on “They Can’t Charge You Extra For A/C No Matter How Low You Set It” – and watching Sports Center before I had my first beer. I may have also told her (I really don’t remember) that I had been dealing with a growing situation of a more personal nature over the last hour or so. At the risk of being indelicate (which is silly for me to say, given the extremely indelicate turn this story is about to take) I was really, really, motivated to avail myself of a certain facility found in every hotel room. I had actually, briefly, considered taking care of the situation back in Guthrie, but I was so sweaty and bug-sticky and gross I decided to wait until my environment was just a little more civilized to take care of things.

Besides, we were just a few miles from the hotel.

Two minutes later I got pulled over by a DPS trooper.

Okay, before we get into the meat of this story, I want to make something clear. Every law enforcement official I encountered during this, um, transaction was professional and courteous way above and beyond the call of duty. I was stopped for speeding (didn’t know the night time speed limit was 5mph lower than daytime) and the tail light over my license plate was out. Guilty as charged. That said, my brother – who also played the part of my attorney on this night – did get a little static from the jailer and the Terry County Sheriff, but we’ll get to that soon enough.

Continuing, from the first moment the trooper walked up to the driver’s side window and saw Kandyce and the kids, it was clear that his only goal was to get us back on the road. He asked me to walk back with him to his car while he ran my license and wrote up a warning. We were sitting in his car, exchanging chit chat and talking about the weather and basically becoming lifelong bff’s, when a voice came over the radio saying something about a warrant for my arrest issued out of Williamson County in 2000.

I was as surprised as he was.

He asked me if I knew anything about a warrant and I told him truthfully I did not. I did, however, know that my “situation” had suddenly blossomed from a 6 to a 9.5 on the “You’re Running Out Of Time” meter.

He said he would check with the Williamson County folks directly. He said sometimes there were mistakes. He said it would take just a little more time.

Erp.

So we waited. And waited. I could see the kids’ faces pressed up against the back glass of the Suburban. I wondered what they were thinking and what Kandyce was thinking. I wondered if anyone had ever actually died from peristaltic denial.

Williamson County came back affirmative on the warrant. The trooper quite apologetically informed me that he had to take me to jail. (The warrant was for a Failure To Appear for a registration sticker violation in 1999 issued by the Round Rock, Texas, PD which I had forgotten about. Somehow, the various notifications had never found their way to Wichita Falls, where we had been living since April 2000.)

Not wanting to scare my kids, the trooper put together a plan which let me talk to Kandyce about the situation and then leave with the kids before he had to handcuff me beside his car. I gave Kandyce all our cash and plastic, as well as my brother’s cell number, and she went on to the hotel to await further instructions. I was a reporter at the time, so we told our young, trusting, impressionable, children that “Daddy was going to go do a story about the police man” and would meet them at the hotel later.

The trooper handcuffed me with my hands in front, not behind my back, and allowed me to sit in the front seat next to him. He said that since the issuing judge in Williamson County had already set bond ($500), it would be a quick process to post bond and be on my way. He also said that he would inform the jailer that I had been a “cooperative” subject who was deserving of a private cell.

Accordingly, my situation cooled down to 7.5.

We got to the jail, where the trooper made good on his word and told the jailer about how I was a great guy, to which the jailer replied, “Well, that is a shame, because we are all full up tonight.”

8.5

I told him my attorney and my wife were working together to post bond and asked how that worked.

“Well, you’re not going to post bond tonight. You’re gonna have to wait til the morning to get magistrated.”

9.999

My emotional and physiological anxiety were such that it didn’t even occur to me until an hour later that “magistrated” is not a word.

I was fingerprinted and photographed and placed in a cell with three other guys, all in their 20s. One was Hispanic, one was black, and one was white. The only one I remember anything about was the white kid and that’s only because he was wearing a suit, had been arrested much earlier in the day for public intoxication, and was supposed to be on his way to Amarillo where he was scheduled to get married the next day.

The poor bastard had gotten arrested during his bachelor party. He was going to miss his own wedding. Damn.

The cell smelled like sweat, feet, and cheese. All the benches were “taken,” so I sat on the floor, a change in altitude which only enhanced the sweatfeetcheese sensory experience. The room was, ironically enough, well air conditioned, so much so that it was actually cold. I leaned against the wall, wrapped in my prison-issue blanket, and practiced Lamaze breathing.

The cell door was immediately across from the jailer’s work station, so I could hear pretty much everything going on out in the hall. Plus, there was a PA speaker above the door and every 10 minutes or so, there would be an announcement about how “so-and-so has posted bond” or “is there a so-and-so in Cell A?”

At the back of the cell, there was a low wall, probably three feet high, behind which was the toilet. From my vantage point on the floor, all I could see were the stainless steel pipes coming out of the wall. It was plain that any person seated there would be visible from the torso up.

Over the next hour or so, I maintained a fairly steady 8.5 to 9.5 level, which may have been consistent, but was nonetheless unpleasant. I begged, mentally, for the damn PA to announce that “Lee Weaver has posted bond,” but it wasn’t happening. I began to make my peace with the idea that I would be sleeping here tonight.

And if I was gonna sleep, I needed to take care of my situation.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, out in the free world, my brother was running into repeated road blocks between myself and liberty. He had faxed paperwork to the jail identifying himself as my attorney and requesting to post bond so that I could be released. In response, the jailer informed him that I couldn’t post bond until I was “magistrated” the next morning. At first, Walt attempted to argue that (a) bond had been set, (b) we were ready to post bond, and (c) “magistrated” was not a word.

He eventually gave up on (c), but kept asserting (a) and (b), and each time he thought I was close to being sprung, he would call Kandyce and say “Go get him!” and she would load up the kids and drive them from the hotel to the jail where she would then find out that I had yet to be magistrated and she’d go back to the hotel and start over again. All the while, she told our 4-year-old and twin 6-year-olds that it was “all part of the story Daddy was working on.”

It was during the third trip to the jail house that Mary, one of the twins, looked her mother square in the eye and said, “Dad got arrested, didn’t he?”

Busted!

Running out of options, not to mention patience, Walt finally asked the jailer if he could speak to the sheriff. Of course, being after midnight, the sheriff was not there. So Walt then asked/bluffed, “Well, can you give me his home phone number?”

At which time, the jailer, literally, opened the Brownfield phonebook, looked up the sheriff’s home phone number, which was listed, and gave it to an attorney. This remains the most unlikely occurrence I have ever witnessed or heard of and that includes the time the Republicans nominated Sarah Palin to be Vice President of the United States.

Walt took a deep breath and called the sheriff at home, waking him from a sound sleep. After a brief, heated exchange, during which Walt was certain he was doing more harm to my cause than good, the sheriff consented, saying he would call the jail and instruct them to accept bond payment. All of which happened, I swear to god, five minutes after I became the least popular person in the Terry County lockup and seven minutes after I’d asked my cellmates to buzz the jailer for a roll of toilet paper – there were, literally, three squares left on the roll when I sat down – only to see my request met with unanimous you-gotta-be-kidding-me silence from all three of them.

All I can say is that I made the most of the resources available to me.

My situation resolved, I made the 15-foot walk of shame back to my spot against the wall, where I closed my eyes and pretended to fall instantly asleep. A minute later, I heard, “Lee Weaver has posted bond.”

Sweet Liberty!! Oh-and sorry, dudes! If I’d known I only needed to hold out for five more minutes I would have! Who knew?

I met Kandyce and the kids in the lobby, retrieved my shoes, ID and whatnot, and we hauled ass to the hotel.

I set the thermostat on “Deep Space,” turned on Sports Center, and drank the coldest, bestest, “magistrated-still-isn’t-a-word-iest” beer ever.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

FIRSTS – VOLUME II

This is my second “first time” story. Probably do a couple more before I move on to something else. Idk. Whatevs.

  

First Traffic Stop

This one’s a doozy. I was 16 and I was driving intoxicated. I know it sounds glib and irresponsible to just say that like it’s not a big deal. But in 1981, it wasn’t remotely the big deal it is now. You’ll just have to take my word for it on that. Plus, I was 16. So there’s that, too.

It was a rainy and cold Saturday night in February and we were making the drag in my 1978 Jeep CJ-7. It was about 10:30. I don’t remember who was sitting beside me, or if anyone at all was sitting on the passenger side of the back seat. But I do know the seat behind me was occupied by a young man and that his name was Jim.

I remember Jim because he was the person who dumped beer on my head about 30 seconds before I got pulled over by a state trooper.

See, when you’re 16 and a new driver and reckless and a complete dope and driving a Jeep and, let’s not forget, you’re a complete dope, you do super-smart stuff like drive over things instead of around them because you’re driving a Jeep and all those other reasons. We were parked at the A&W Drive-In (similar to Sonic) and when it was time to leave, I drove over the sidewalk in front of me, rather than backing out of my spot. And in my excitement to execute this douchebaggy maneuver, I failed to tell my passengers of my intentions and they were all caught quite unawares by the resulting bump.  

We were drinking Coors from a can and Mickey’s Big Mouths, which came in green glass bottles shaped like a hand grenade and had openings at least twice the size of a regular beer bottle. And when I bounced up one side of the sidewalk and off the other, the lurching sent Jim’s bottle of Mickey’s sloshing everywhere, including all over my head and my shirt, all of which I thought was just an absolute hoot.

I peeled out of the parking area and raced up to where the driveway met the highway. I paused for the briefest of moments and then slid and skidded onto the rain-slick highway. Two seconds later, I saw flashing red and blue lights in my mirror.  

Like I said before, these were the days before MADD, but even by the standard of the day, I figured I was in huge trouble. I got out of the car and waited for the cop to approach me.  

He was not happy. In fact, I would describe him as clichéd-rural-sheriff-from-a-1970s-movie-or-TV-show unhappy, because he actually yanked his hat from his head and slammed it to the ground a la Rosco P. Coltrane whenever he was once again bested by “those Duke boys.”

As it turned out, my dramatic peel-out from the A&W parking lot onto the highway had forced the trooper to seek the safety of the bar ditch to avoid a collision, something he apparently took no pleasure in doing.

 I stood in the drizzling rain shivering, but not from the cold. As the trooper approached, I could see him clearly trying to regain his composure. I stood, wallet in hand, awaiting his instructions.

“Son, how you answer the next several questions is going to determine how you spend the rest of this night.”

“Yes, sir.”

I was hoping there would be no math, although I was always up for a state’s capitals quiz and had actually rehearsed saying the alphabet backwards for just such an occasion. Bring it on.

“I need to see your driver’s license.”

The first questions are always the easiest.

“Yes, sir.”

Wanting to look honest (because it was too late to look law-abiding), I maintained eye contact with him as I reached into the compartment within my wallet where I kept my license. I removed it and extended my hand toward the trooper.

“That’s not gonna work, son.”

Now, technically, this was not a question. But it sounded like trouble nonetheless.

I looked down at my hand and saw that I had offered him my mom’s Mobil gas card. Explaining, unnecessarily, about how I’d gotten gas earlier that day and had slid the credit card under my driver’s license but then forgot about it and so when I felt something plastic-y I just assumed it was—

“May I see your driver’s license please?”

He had now asked me the same “easy” starter question twice now. I was not off to a good start.

Breaking eye contact so as to ensure I did not hand him my Duncan High School Future Business Leaders of America Membership Card, I located my actual driver’s license and gave it to him.

“Have you been drinking beer tonight?”

My hair and shirt were wet with Mickey’s malt liquor and I’m sure my breath reeked of alcohol. So I gave what seemed to be the only available to me.

“No sir.”

But then I buckled under follow-up questioning.

“Son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many?”

Calculating….calculating…

“Three. Four at the most.”

“Son?”

Oh, this guy was good.

“Six. No, seven.”

“Is there any beer in the car?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m going to check.”

Again, not a question. But it seemed to require a response just the same.

“Then, yes sir.”

“You’d better pray there aren’t any open containers in there.”

These non-questions were gonna be the death of me.

“Oh, there aren’t sir.”

The trooper walked me over to the back of the Jeep, and I watched him unsnap the vinyl flap serving as the rear “windshield.” He pulled the flap back and shined his flashlight into the small space between the tailgate and the back seat, at which time I discovered the small space was surprisingly watertight, because there were two empty Coors beer cans actually floating – like tiny aluminum boats – in about an inch of beer.

It seems that, when the cop’s lights came on, my passengers had attempted to hide their current and former beer cans “behind the back seat” – an act of evidence-hiding subtlety which took place in full view of the trooper who was just a few feet behind us at the time and shining multiple, very bright, headlights and spotlights in the direction of the rear end of my vehicle.

They might as well have tossed the cans onto the hood of his cruiser.

The trooper directed his flashlight at me. The jig was up, so I figured I should just get out in front of the situation and not wait for a question.

“Um.”

“Please follow me to my car.”

I had most certainly failed the test. I sat in the passenger seat of his cruiser and watched him confiscate all our beer. First, he stacked all the cans on the ground beside my car. Then, he went through each one, dumping out the open ones and setting the full ones to the side. That concluded, he gathered up the unopened cans and carried them to the rear of his cruiser. In a moment, he sat down in the driver’s seat next to me.

The trooper made a great show of talking on the radio, checking my record, and running the Jeep’s tags. There was much encoded chatter passing back and forth between him and the dispatcher. Meanwhile, I sat there awaiting the inevitable.  

I was absolutely going to jail.

“Mr. Weaver, this is a written warning.”

It was the first non-terrifying non-question of the night.

“What does that mean?”

He explained some blah blah blah to me, but all I heard was “You are the luckiest bastard alive.”

Now, I assumed at the time – and thought for many years – that my unexpected free pass was the result of the fact that there were only two Weavers living in Duncan at the time and they were both attorneys. The joke, of course, was on the trooper if he thought the Weaver who was my dad would do anything other than assist the District Attorney with his prosecution of me.

But none of that mattered anyway, because I know now that I was wrong about the trooper’s motivation to let me go.

Again, remembering that this was still the era of “boys will be boys,” it’s clear to me now that this was a guy who was about 15 minutes from the end of his shift, yet he most likely worked out of Lawton, which was 45 minutes away. Arresting me would have meant a trip to the Stephens County Jail in Duncan for my booking, then all kinds of paperwork and so on, and only after all of that would he get to drive back to Lawton and “clock out.”

The guy just wanted to go home and relax on a Saturday night after a long shift. Besides, he’d almost gotten killed by an idiot teenager just a few minutes before.  

So he took our beer and let me off with a warning.

It would be the cheapest traffic stop I would ever have.

(Next Up: My first time to actually be placed inside a jail cell.)

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver

FIRSTS – VOLUME 1

For the next blog or two or whatever, I’m gonna talk about some of the “firsts” in my life.

My First Kiss

I was 15. And a half. Almost three-quarters. Anyway, it was April 1980 and I had a date with destiny in a week. Specifically, it was Saturday night and the Spanish Club Banquet was the next Saturday. At that banquet, I was going to be crowned “Spanish Club King” and as part of the coronation ceremony I would be tasked with giving a coronating kiss to the new Spanish Club Queen, an extremely lovely young woman by the too-perfect name of Allison Apple.

Allison Apple was a Senior.

Allison Apple was a Cheerleader.

Allison Apple was a SENIOR CHEERLEADER.

I, on the other hand, was a never-kissed sophomore whose high school career highlight to that point had been Not Yet Sodomized In Gym Class. The thought of my first kiss taking place in front of a room full of people, two of whom would be my parents, was causing me almost as much anxiety as the whole gym class sodomy thing.

(NOTE: Now that I am a man of the world, having lived in as many as three other cities since high school, I have been made aware that my high school’s tradition of newly crowned kings and queens – homecoming, prom, Spanish Club, what have you – actually tongue-kissing each other as part of the coronation ceremony is not a universally observed practice. And now that I think about it, it is odd that the same school officials who would suspend or paddle students for making out behind the art building not only tolerated, but encouraged, that same behavior as long as it was in public and involved some combination of sashes, tiaras, and scepters. Plus it’s just creepy.]

But before I was faced with that dilemma, God intervened. And he took the form of a Catholic Youth Conference up in Oklahoma City the Saturday before the banquet. During the day, the conference focused on Catechism training, post-high-school religious education, and other Catholic-y stuff. That was followed by a giant pizza party, if memory serves. It might have been burgers. But after the sun went down and the lights came up, the conference became a disco dancing paradise.

No bullshit.

I’m fuzzy on the details – plus I was super distracted about having to kiss a cheerleader in front of my mom in less than 170 hours – but I seem to remember there were about 1000-plus kids at this thing, so it must have been a pretty big dance floor/DJ setup. I remember walking around the perimeter of the venue about five times trying to work up the nerve to ask this one girl to dance. Not sure why she stood out. For all I know, she might have been the only girl remotely observing my repeated laps around the dance floor.

In any event, I finally asked her to dance. It was a slow song. Probably Lionel Richie. Or the Commodores, featuring Lionel Richie. Or Lionel Richie and Diana Ross. Probably. After the dance, we went and sat down together and I began the gut-wrenching process of putting my arm around her. Seventeen hours later, my left hand was over her left shoulder. Her leg was touching my leg from the hip to the knee. I could actually smell her hair.

Oh—her name was Wanda. That was her actual name. I can still remember her last name and her hometown and there’s a slight chance that I found her on Facebook and, for about one nanosecond, thought about sending her one of those “You probably don’t remember me, but” messages that one hopes will be written with just the right combination of charm and self-deprecation to be met with a nostalgic smile and a warm response, but in reality just sounds totally fucking creepy and results in an angry and threatening reply from her cop/biker/military husband.

So…yeah. We’ll stick with just “Wanda.”

Anyway, the arm around the shoulder eventually blossomed into full-blown hand holding and it soon became apparent that this girl – Wanda – expected me to kiss her. Thank God we had fast danced just enough to justify at least some of the perspiration coursing from every pore in my body.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my sweaty pants and turned to face her. To face Wanda.

My time had come.

I leaned in and closed my eyes.

Strike that. Other way around.

I closed my eyes and leaned in.

Unfortunately, I leaned in too quickly and way off course and landed my first kiss, somewhat violently, on her chin. And I’m talking about the “neck side” of her chin – not the lip side.

I was a quarter-inch from missing her face entirely. If I were an Olympic gymnast and the goal was to stick the landing with both feet, I basically landed on my ear and both elbows.

Perhaps it was my nascent charm. Perhaps it was the pulsing beat. Maybe it was the holy spirit. I don’t know who or what gets the credit for the fact that Wanda did not, at the very least, burst out laughing or, at worst, point and scream and run away.

But she did none of those things. Instead, she just sat there, quietly, with her eyes closed, waiting for me to find her mouth. Which I did about two seconds later. Which was followed by one of those epic 30-minute, uninterrupted, make-out sessions that only people who have no idea what sex is would ever think to engage in. We would probably still be making out if our Youth Director hadn’t smacked me on the side of the head and told me the group was leaving.

I wore a smile on my face the whole drive home. And the whole week at school. And the whole day Saturday leading up to the Spanish Club Banquet.

I was ready for Allison Apple. The MC called our names.

She placed the traditional Spanish Club King sombrero on my head. I placed the Spanish Club Queen tiara on hers. We faced each other a long moment. I leaned in to give her a peck – just a peck. I swear. She was a Senior Cheerleader, for god’s sake. This was no time for a peasant to go forgetting his station in life.

But then I learned that I was not ready for Allison Apple.

I’ll leave it to the people who were there to debate whether the coronation make-out session that ensued was appropriate or not. But let there be no doubt or debate about one thing:

I stuck the landing.

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver