Dad and I walked through the parking lot of the Greenville County Detention Center, where I had been for the last nineteen hours, sometime just before midnight. We were silent. A gang of moths swarmed the flickering streetlight above his car. A silver-and-black storm trooper drove by. The cop lifted his left hand from the wheel and gave Dad a lazy wave, white guy to white guy, blanco a blanco.
Even though I was in deep shit, I was proud that I did not command such respect from cops. Quite the opposite.
“I hope you’ve learned something,” Dad said.
“I did,” I said. “The guys in my cell—”
“You were in a cell?” Dad asked, wincing a bit as he used the key to unlock his car.
“Drunk tank last night,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, as if this were a world I now knew. “They moved me to a cell this morning with these two really cool guys, and when I told them what happened they both said there’s no way the charge would stick because it was totally illegal.”
“Your cellmates were really cool guys?” Dad said with a weary sense of wonder.
“Yeah,” I said. “I learned so much and can’t wait to get home and write it in my journal.”
Dad shook his head. He turned down the talk radio station.
“So what exactly did happen?” Dad asked.
Another storm trooper pulled into the parking lot as we waited to pull out.
“Last week, we were all at my friend Tom’s house after work,” I started. “A cop stopped me in the apartment complex. Everyone else was drinking but I wasn’t, and he searched me and I didn’t have anything. He told me if he ever saw me on that side of town again, I was going to jail. So then tonight, uh, last night, we got hungry and went to the store—”
“Hold on,” Dad said. “It was what, after two in the morning, and you go right to the place that a police officer warned you not to go?”
“He can’t tell me to stay out of half the city,” I said. “I don’t even know what part of town he meant.”
Dad sighed.
“We’re allowed to get snacks,” I said.
My friends, Glenn and Allen, were actually trying to buy more beer inside the store. But since they hadn’t been successful, I didn’t need to tell him that.
“Not if you have pot in the goddamn car,” Dad said, his fury boiling over as headlights flashed across his face. “Or if you’re drunk, then you stay away.”
“But see, I was just sitting in the back of the car. I wasn’t driving, and I didn’t even get out. There was no way for him to know if I was drinking,” I said. “One of the guys in my cell said it’s called probable cause.”
“But if you weren’t there in the first place you wouldn’t have been in a cell, and I wouldn’t have to pay a damned lawyer to argue about probable cause,” he said.
We drove in silence through the quiet city streets late that Sunday night.
“So he just pulled you out of the car?” Dad asked after a few minutes.
“Yes,” I said, mimicking the action of grabbing someone by the collar. “I swear I was just sitting there, and all of a sudden, the door opened, and my face was pressed against the hot hood of the cop car with my arm twisted behind my back.”
“Where was the pot?”
“In the car.”
“Were you alone?”
“I was with Zooey,” I said.
Zooey was my new girlfriend. When she started hanging around with us after her dad moved into an apartment complex between my house and Glenn’s, everyone immediately fell in love with her. She had a smile that radiated like some kind of wild sunshine, illuminating her long, straight brown hair, her chestnut-brown eyes, and her coppery skin. She wore long, flowing dresses, wraps in her hair, and bells around her ankles that tinkled above her Birkenstocks everywhere she traipsed.
It seemed inevitable that someone would end up dating her, but for what felt like ages, she just hung around the Grubs as a friend, unattached to any guy. Zooey, Bo, and I would take acid and dance around naked to Grateful Dead songs. I’d never been around a naked girl in a nonsexual context and was impressed with myself when I didn’t get an erection.
But I was even more impressed when I was the person she chose to be with. Knowing that the girl everyone wanted had chosen me allowed me to see myself for the first time as something other than an outcast even among outcasts. But it made me even more arrogant at home, certain that I was the only one with all the answers. I couldn’t handle the self-confidence that being with her gave me. And it made me careless out in public, sitting there at 3:00 a.m., drunk and high, rambling on about how great Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was, oblivious to my surroundings, even though, as Dad pointed out, I was less than a mile from the parking lot where the cop had said that if he ever saw me again, I would go to jail.
“And it was the other boy’s car,” Dad said as we drove toward home. I could see his mind working as he realized that my new jailhouse advisers might be right. And we both knew that I needed very much to call the arrest into question.
When we pulled into the driveway, he did not turn off the car. Neither of us moved.
“Remember when you were little and I’d spank you, and I’d tell you that it hurt me worse than it hurt you?” he asked. “Well, leaving you in jail all this time really was harder for me.”
“I was the one in jail, remember?” I said.
“Sounds like you had a pretty good time,” he said.
“It’s not great when they make you bend over and spread your butt cheeks and shine a flashlight up your ass,” I said.
Initially I had tried to downplay the experience of being locked up. But I didn’t want him to do it.
“Or sleeping by somebody’s vomit in the drunk tank,” I added for extra effect. “There were like fifteen people crammed into one room with no beds, and it was cold.”
“Well, wanna talk about cold. I was with your mother,” he said. “She called me every name she could think of. She called me cruel and callous for keeping you in jail. She wanted to come and get you right then.”
“She was right,” I said with a touch of affection in my smile.
“It really was the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make,” he said. “But I had to try something. You could end up in prison. And you might have thought that a night in county was cool, but I’ll guarantee you that prison is not. You don’t want some big Black guy who’s doing a life sentence to take out all his frustration on you.”
He paused. I said nothing.
“This is your second drug arrest,” he said. “You really could get sentenced to some serious time.”
The first time, I’d gotten busted with a quarter bag at school. When they handcuffed me in the parking lot, with the whole school outside at lunch, one of the cops took out a megaphone. “Everyone, look at your friend. Look at your peer, see what drugs will do to you,” he said as his partner pushed down my head and lowered me into the car. That should have clued me in that the deputies really wanted to turn my arrest at what was supposed to be one of the best high schools in town into something bigger, like some big-time Eastside Drug Ring or something.
No one put me in a cell that day. But I sat handcuffed at a desk while the deputy who’d arrested me asked me questions.
“Where’d you get the reefer?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and cleaning his eyeglasses with a handkerchief.
“I found it,” I said.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, leaning forward, holding his glasses out between his fingers. “If you don’t level with me, then I’m going to make this harder for you. People don’t just find illicit substances—”
“Maybe someone threw it out when they saw you?” I said.
“Jim,” the cop called to his colleague. “Let’s just go ahead and put this guy in county. I think he was trying to sell that grass.”
The colleague approached us. The first cop put his glasses back on.
“I wasn’t trying to sell anything,” I said.
“But you didn’t find it,” he said.
“No,” I admitted.
“Who did you get it from?”
“Just some guy off the street.”
I’d never bought weed off the street.
“What street?” he asked.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “On the Southside.”
That was the Black part of town. I’d actually bought it from a preppy white kid at my school.
“Did you know the guy?”
“No,” I said.
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He was just a Black guy.”
I was not going to snitch on anyone real, and I was betting that they would not expect me to be able to distinguish one Black person from another and would stop asking me questions. I didn’t see the role I was playing, giving them another excuse to target Black people on the Southside for selling weed to a “good white kid” like me.
The second deputy walked away. The one at whose desk I was sitting typed something on a form.
“You better be careful,” he said after a minute. “You go over there messing around and you’re gonna get robbed, or worse. You could be getting PCP. You don’t know what you’re getting. And if you think it’s bad there, wait till you go to jail. You’ll be some big Black buck’s bitch.”
After that arrest, I considered myself a victim of America’s police state, and I thought I was as oppressed as any Black person could possibly be. I understood what Eazy-E was talking about. I told my friends I was going to demand to be treated as a prisoner of war according to the Geneva Convention since I had been captured as part of the war on drugs.
What actually happened was that I got diverted into pretrial intervention (PTI) and state-mandated drug counseling. And I hadn’t finished it by the time of this second arrest, which could mean I’d be booted from the program and face both charges at the same time.
“What’s the status of your PTI?” Dad asked as we slowly got out of the car, both reluctant to walk into Mom’s emotional storm after our surprisingly quiet ride.
“I’m going to call first thing in the morning,” I said. “They’re supposed to sign off on my completion this week. So I think I can rush that through and they might not notice this.”
“Good Lord, Son,” Dad said. “How stupid can you be?”
I was stupid, but I was also lucky, and white.
“You should go in there in person,” Dad said. “This is too serious for a phone call.”
My PTI officer was a short Black man with light skin, a bald pate, and a thin mustache. As long as I passed my drug tests, he didn’t show much interest in me or my case. I had passed one piss test, using someone else’s urine in a travel-size shampoo bottle duct-taped to my leg. But I had also failed one. Someone had told me that if I put bleach on the cotton part of a Band-Aid and put it on my finger and then unwrapped it and peed on the cotton and into the cup, the pee would come up clean. It hadn’t. And the officer had been, well, pissed.
“Do you want to go to jail?” he asked me. “Do you know what people will do to you with that long, pretty hair of yours if you end up in jail? Now you need to get it together, Son. You don’t want to end up a blushing bride before you’ve even finished high school.”
For community service, I was supposed to alphabetize the files of other people who had been through the program, but I spent most of my time reading over their cases. I’d thought PTI was supposed to destroy any records if you completed the program, but here they all were. I even managed to find a few friends. And after looking at hundreds of these files, I couldn’t recall a single Black person who had been through PTI.
I had finally finished my hours and just needed someone to sign off—before they found out about my new arrest. The main requirement to get your record cleared was not getting in trouble again.
So the morning after Dad got me out of jail, I skipped school and walked into the PTI office with an exaggerated confidence as soon as it opened.
“Can I help you?” asked a Black woman wearing a purple dress as she looked up from her clipboard and over the tops of her reading glasses at me.
“I was supposed to come by and have y’all sign my final paperwork for release today,” I said.
“Hold on,” she said, and stood, still holding the clipboard from which she had been reading when I interrupted.
The office was cramped and hot. There were two wooden chairs in a small waiting area with brown carpet, and I sat down. The lights hummed. I started to sweat. Maybe my PTI officer was reading a report about this weekend’s arrest right now and it would jeopardize my completion of the program and I would be facing two drug charges at once. Maybe Dad was right and I would go to prison. I wanted a cigarette. I put my hand in my pocket and fingered the opening at the top of the cigarette pack anxiously.
A few minutes later, the receptionist came back, still holding the clipboard. But nothing else.
“He is busy right now,” she said.
I was stuck in a state of suspension there in the state office building, not knowing whether my first drug charge would be erased or my second discovered. Maybe the woman was stalling me while my PTI officer called a deputy to come arrest me right now.
“So he just went ahead and signed the papers,” the woman said, pulling three sheets from the clipboard and handing them to me.
My hand lurched forward, hungry for the documents.
She looked at me, surprised, and then laughed.
“You’re ready to be done,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
“Good luck to you,” she said.
As I walked out the door, I felt like a free man, even though I was still facing a fresh charge of simple possession of marijuana.
I was a fuckup and I was oblivious to a lot, but even then it struck me how whenever authority figures, from the cops to my PTI officer to my parents, mentioned jail or prison, they always acted as if it was the Black men I would encounter who would be the worst part of the experience. Even if the PTI officer didn’t actually use the word Black, it was implied. The culture insisted that my mind fill in the blank. I heard this trope all the time in the jokes that comedians told about dropping your soap in the shower or whatever. And it was always a big Black man on the other end of the assault.
The representatives of the state assumed that I was racist, that I feared imprisoned Black men, and they used that fear to make it seem as if the system were actually protecting me rather than taking away my freedom. In the day and a half that Dad had left me locked up, one of my cell mates had been Black and the other one white. And I’d learned that the inmates weren’t the problem with jail, jail was the problem with jail.
The whole damn enterprise of “justice” felt duplicitous and cynical, but I was still afraid of being sent to prison and sexually assaulted—raped up the ass, as my friends usually put it—by a big Black guy, even if the guys I’d been in lockup with in the county were cool. They were not the kinds of murderers or rapists who went to prison. And I still thought of those people primarily as Black.
The close calls didn’t make me adjust my attitude and conform. They pissed me off more and made the lie behind our world seem even more obvious and egregious. I felt as if dropping out of this hopeless and corrupt society really might be the best way to do it, as the hippies said. I’d tuned in and turned on. And I felt pretty goddamn ready to drop out.
My parents had always told me that success would allow me to be free—but I began to suspect that choosing failure was a far better route to freedom.
And time would show that my whiteness allowed me to fuck up without consequence.