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