My Brush with the Law

The other day, my mom suggested that I write a blog entry about the time that I got in trouble with the law. This was surprising to me because the last time we talked about it (when it actually happened) she didn't seem to have a sense of humor about it. Apparently six years have changed her outlook somewhat.

First, let me explain that we drove a big white suburban when I was in high school. It had running boards and sometimes my parents would have us all stand on the running boards on the outside of the suburban, hanging on through windows, as they drove. I remember one particular time that my dad did this---he drove past my friends and me as we were walking home from the store and he offered us a ride on the outside of the vehicle. We accepted and rode the several blocks home. Near the end, he started to joke around a bit by stopping suddenly and accelerating just as suddenly. I fell off the suburban and remember distinctly hearing the 7-Up bottles I had been carrying burst on impact. Only I found out about twenty minutes later that they hadn't burst at all and the noise I heard was actually my head on impact.

Apparently my parents decided at that point never to allow people to ride on the outside of the suburban again. They should have told us kids that.

I worked at Wendy's during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at BYU. One night, The Boy came to pick me up after my shift. It was about 1:00 a.m. I had a friend, Jen, who was waiting for a ride with me. I invited her to hop on the outside of the suburban with me for a quick ride around the block. She did. And unfortunately, we found the longest, largest block in my whole entire city. I swear. It never ended. We were stuck on a large street with no place to turn off. As soon as we found a street to turn onto, we turned and got off of the car. And about two seconds later, the police pulled up behind us.

So the officer (he was alone) started lecturing us about reckless driving. He was trying to decide what the appropriate punishment for us would be and indicated that he could permanently revoke The Boy's driver's license. He brought us all into the back of his cruiser. Jen was crying. The officer talked about telling our parents about what had happened. Jen said, "Please! Not that! Please! I'll pay anything!"

The cop got really mad and said, "NEVER offer a bribe to a police officer!"

I spoke up in Jen's defense: "Sir, I think that she meant that she'd rather pay a ticket than have her parents find out."

Then the officer started to talk about tickets, saying that he could give us each a $90 ticket. I told him that I'd been working all summer to save for college, and I'd be losing half the money on the American exchange and that I couldn't possibly afford a $90 ticket.

His final solution was that he would take our information. And he would give us his information. And he would expect a phone call from my father (Jen got off with no punishment) in the morning, telling him that we had told him everything that had happened. If he didn't receive this phone call, he'd use our information to issue us tickets.

We went home and as I mentioned, my parents had no sense of humor about the situation. They were pretty mad about it. I'll admit, I thought it was interesting that they'd be so mad about us doing something that they had done on a regular basis. But whatever.

Possibly the best part of this story was The Boy's and my punishments. The Boy was grounded for a week. They said that he was responsible for what had happened because he was the driver. My punishment? My punishment was the guilt that I would obviously feel knowing that my brother was punished for carrying out my idea while I received no official punishment.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Too bad I had no conscience.