Getting Pulled Over is a Massive Buzzkill
By Mo Mozuch

I had been driving along I-70W, cruising in the fast lane with a full bladder and an empty stomach. It had been about five hours since I left Pittsburgh for Indianapolis , and I just crossed the border from Ohio into Indiana . It's an amazing sight, somehow the barren wasteland of Ohio becomes flatter and more dull.

My King Crimson CD blared as I passed two rest stops, ignoring the three bottles of ice-tea swishing and swashing in my plump bladder. My weed logic told me it would be better to wait until I hit a White Castle , as taking a huge piss AND gorging on tiny, adorable cheeseburgers go hand-in-unwashed-hand. I mindlessly sped above 70 mph.

Now I sat on the shoulder of the road, losing a killer buzz and wishing I'd stopped to piss. The cop, whom I'll call Russ since I don't remember his name, walked around to the passenger side of my car unnoticed. He tapped on my passenger side window, scaring the hell out of me, and gave me a look that said "Roll down the window, dumbass."

"What seems to be the problem officer?" I said as soberly as I could.

"You know why I pulled you over?" he replied, chewing gum and looking behind us down the highway.

"Yeah . I was going a little fast back there, huh?" I said, jokingly.

"83. License and registration," he said flatly. I fumbled around my messy glovebox trying to find my registration, and I could hear his impatient gum chomping as I shuffled through papers. Stay calm, I thought. It's just a ticket, no big deal. Hell, it's in Indiana , I won't even have to pay it, will I? Fuck it.

He took my license and registration and walked back to his patrol car. He wasn't a state trooper, just a county sheriff. Figured he got his rocks off ticketing out-of-staters. When he came back to the car I braced myself for a stern lecture and a meaningless ticket. Instead, I got two terrible questions.

"Is there anything illegal in this car I should know about?" was the first. Obviously, there was a lot he shouldn't know about in the car, mainly the half-ounce in my trunk, and I stammered out an unconvincing "N-no."

Then the whammy. The question, innocently and politely worded so as to provide lube for the life fuck you're about to receive.

"Would you object if I searched it, sir?"

I realized I was fucked, so I decided to try joking with Russ again.

"Yes I would, sir, because I have a lot of weed in the trunk."

He laughed. This was a good sign.

I handed Russ my pipe and my dugout, then opened my trunk for him and showed him which suitcase had my weed in it. He walked me back to the car, and began to explain what he was 'gonna' do. He looked over my license.

"OK Brian ."

"Call me Mo," I said, interrupting him.

"What?"

"Everyone calls me 'Mo,' nobody calls me Brian," I explained.

"OK Mo , I'm gonna take a picture of you here by my car, then I'm gonna cuff ya, and stick you in the car for a minute here and take a picture of your trunk. So, please turn around for me," he cuffed me, and turned me back around for the picture. He raised the camera and started laughing.

"I'm gonna have to take off that hat," he said, removing my 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' hat. "Don't want ya to look like a psycho, huh?" I laughed my best this-is-not-fake fake laugh, and smiled wide for the camera. Russ snapped one picture of me and put me in the car. He snapped a picture of my open trunk, and got the dog out of the backseat.

Russ came back to the car and read me my rights. He stuck me back up front, and put the dog in the backseat. Fun Fact: When the cop is in the car the dog doesn't make a sound, but when he leaves the dog will put its head directly behind yours and bark non-stop. More cops showed up to search my car and I was ready to get Rodney Kinged into a coma, as long as it meant silence.

The cops removed several copies of Deek's how-to incident during the search. As these portly, mustachioed Midwestern lawmen began perusing the pages of Deek magazine I had a revelation that sent me towards detoxification. I sat there, hands numb from the cuffs, having to take a monstrous huge piss with a drug dog barking directly in my ear as I watched a cadre of 5-0 flip through a magazine that had my article "How to smoke marijuana, constantly" and thought "Hey, maybe smoking weed six or seven times a day isn't all I thought it was." Russ came back to the car, and hollered at the dog in some serious foreign tounge. Finally, it was quiet.

"What'd you say?"

"It was Dutch," said Russ. "I told her to shut the fuck up."

With that, he drove across the median of the highway and began heading east towards the jail.

My car ride with Russ was an exercise in friendship building. First, I needed to break the awkward silence.

"At least this thing has AC in it, my car's a hunk of shit."

He laughed a little bit and muttered something about it "getting it done." He seemed bored, and I felt I was losing him. Was this the same Russ who had laughed at my kitschy hat? Who had used such casual profanity with me? I began to feel hurt, so I asked him some business related questions about what kind of sentence I could get, and so on. It was all standard "it's up to the judge" stuff, but he did say something that gave me a glimmer of hope.

"It's a good thing I believe you when you told me the weed was for personal use." I asked why and he explained they could charge me with trafficking and intent to sell, which would mean my car would be impounded and, if I had more than 27 grams of weed, my case would be turned over to the feds. Knowing I had nowhere near 27 grams I joked that if I did, I received one hell of a bargain. Russ shot me a wry smile.

"Maybe an hour ago, but certainly not now."

We chatted about "Cops," meth labs and the price of weed in Pittsburgh . We laughed the whole way back, and Russ kept telling me not to piss on his seats, since I made it abundantly clear I'd need to use a bathroom immediately upon arrival at the station.

Having to take a huge piss in a roomful of cops isn't easy, especially when you have a tiny, AC-shriveled penis and your hands are numb from being cuffed underneath your fat ass. But once I got going, I kept going. For almost two minutes I took a hard, loud horsepiss. So loud, in fact, that I didn't notice until I was almost done that Russ and the booking officers were laughing.

"Boy," said Russ, wiping a tear away from his eye, "your back teeth must've been floating! " I blushed amidst the roaring laughter, and thanked god I was a middle-class white kid. Things could be much worse.

After I took my piss I sat on a bench in the waiting area of the station while Russ filed his report. I overheard him tell the booking officers "actually, he's a pretty nice guy" and knew my car ride was a success. When he left he shook my hand, wished me luck, and told me my cooperation would be reflected in his report.

My booking officer called me over to get my prints and mugshot.

"You a Steelers fan?" Mike, the booking officer, asked as he led me into a storage room.

"Hell yes!"

"Yeah? Me too. I catch a lot of shit from the Colts fans I work with, but the Steelers are my team. I think that Rothburger kid might be OK. He's a big fucker. Here," he said, handing me a bright orange jumpsuit. I looked at it for a second, not wanting to register what this implied.

"You need to put that on," he explained. I took off my sandals, shorts and shirt and stepped into the suit.

"Lose the underwear, too." I gave Mike a "yeah right stop messing with me" smile, and continued dressing.

"No, I'm serious. No colored underwear in the jail."

That's it, I thought. I'm getting my ass pounded, Oz-style. No colored underwear? Doesn't he realize underwear is the last line of defense?

Soon my chubby, freeballing ass was inside a holding cell with a dozen other guys. All of whom, I assumed, were after my ass-cherry. I scurried into a bunk in the corner of the room, and sat on the bed. I was ready for the raping to begin. Instead, a Springer-esque chant of "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" started up. I stuck my head outside the bunk to see what was going on.

"Dude, it's Jerry Garcia!" a chubby bald guy yelled at me. Everyone started laughing and I nervously walked out of my bunk towards a metal table where most of the guys were playing cards. Everyone loves a hippie.

"I bet you're in here for pot, huh?" he said. I nodded and everyone laughed again. A tall, semi-crazy looking black dude asked me where I was from, and then asked me how much I pay for pot.

"You think you could get me ten pounds, man?" I said I hadn't seen more than a pound in my life, and he lost interest in me. I watched everyone play cards and kept glancing at the phone. An enormous motherfucker was talking on it, and I wasn't about to interrupt him. I didn't even know who to call, and the black dude told me you couldn't call cell phones from jail since it's a collect call. I knew I wasn't going to call my parents, and all of my numbers are in my cell phone, but one home number popped into my head. My friend's grandma.

To my chagrin the pre-recorded message didn't start out "Here's a collect call from so-and-so," instead it says, "this a collect call from a corrections institute in Indiana from 'OhmygodthisisRon'sfriendMoandI'minjailandIneedtotalktoyouit'sanemergency'."

She accepted the charges, and my bogus explanation of driving without a registration. I gave her my Indy friend's cell phone number, and whiled away the time watching basic cable, eating a decent chicken sandwich, and getting to know the huge motherfucker who had been on the phone. His name was Ron, and he played for a softball team from Eaton. He had done "one little line of coke" and got tested while on probation for assault. The way he subconsciously rubbed his nose over and over as he told me the story made me doubt how little the line was.

After eight fun-filled hours of That 70s Show, the Simpsons, an impromptu dirty joke contest and trying to play 'Go Fish' in Spanish with a shiftless Mexican immigrant I was released.

Some people have told me that I was stupid for admitting my crime. Every pothead concocted an air-tight legal strategy like, "I'd tell him to get a fuckin' warrant!" or, the classic mace-me line "I know my rights!" Well, rather than waste his time, my time, the dog's time and a judge's time on the inevitable search of a car that reeked like weed, I admitted, acted polite, and hoped all the episodes of "Cops" I'd watched where the cooperative people get treated decently were true. It turns out they were, and in the end I received a $25 fine and a six-month license suspension for my crime. I could still be in jail at the time of this publication. The lesson? Stop to piss, damnit.