As with a lot of people I know, I get nervous around police officers. It doesn’t have anything to do with any past crimes or illicit secrets; my life, if it were used as the basis for a cop movie, would be entirely boring and would not make any money at the box office. In essence, I’m a boring person. And while I’ve never done anything that would warrant their tackling me in a crowded department store or chasing me down on a high-speed getaway, I still feel like I’ve done something wrong, that I’m guilty.
When I come across a police officer out in public, I’ll wonder what he’s doing or looking for. Most of the time, I’ll see him pick up mouthwash or a snack food of some kind, but still I wonder if he might be on the lookout for someone. An arsonist. A murderer. Thieves with their pockets loaded. And I’ll steer clear, imagining a scenario in which I’m mistaken for the culprit and brought down face-first for a meeting with the floor. Worse still is the mysterious notion I sometimes have that I’ve actually done something wrong and simply don’t know it. There are chunks of time I simply cannot recall — they’re hazy, translucent like a thick sheet of plastic — and I wonder, Was I sitting at home on the Internet, or was I out robbing elderly shopkeepers?
Part of my fear, I suppose, stems from the fact that I’ve already broken the law, so maybe I’m predisposed to criminality. What else am I capable of? I have to wonder. The other part comes from the various encounters I’ve had with men in uniform.
My earliest recollection of a police officer comes from a time, one afternoon, when I was with a few of the kids my mother watched as part of her in-home daycare. I was maybe nine or ten, and the kids I was with were around the same age. We were sitting in the car, waiting for my mother to pick up a few things from Venture, a now-defunct department store chain. She’d told me she’d be right back, and we’d been sitting in the car for no more than ten minutes when, in the middle of a bout of rowdiness, a police officer drove by and saw us sitting in the back seat. Less than five minutes later, the officer was standing at the window and asking where my mother was. Nervous, I told him that she was inside, and when he then asked how long she’d been gone, my sense of time vanished, and I had to think. I suppose in saying, “Um, thirty minutes?” I was slightly overestimating, and I realized this as the officer’s face tightened.
“That long?” he said.
He left for the building, and when my mother came back a few minutes later she was flustered and agitated. “When we get home, your dad isn’t going to hear a word of this,” she said, her eyes slits in the rearview mirror as she started the car.
Years later, when I was a teenager, my high school had a police offer that would stay on full-time to patrol the building and keep everyone in line. This was not long after the school shootings at Columbine and Jonesboro, and so not only did we students have the underlying fear that our small-town school might be next, we had a disgruntled, stone-faced man with a gun roaming our halls.
Even then, I felt awkward. Passing by Officer Ewing on the way to lunch or science class, I’d look at the floor, thinking that if we made eye contact he would maybe slam me into my locker before searching it. I imagined him calling me “Punk” or “Scumbag” or any of those other TV cop names for criminals. Although I had nothing to hide, and no secrets to keep except my brewing desire for any number of the varsity basketball players, I felt just as edgy as if I’d lent my locker to a known terrorist or drug kingpin, and whatever unseemly items they’d stored in there would be pinned on me in the next unannounced round of drug-sniffing dogs.
In reality, my run-ins with police officers would come later, once I planted myself in the driver’s seat. When practicing with my mother, it was my tendency to drive slow enough that I might simply step out of the car should something happen. The needle on the speedometer skirted the number twenty like a prom queen avoiding a member of the math club, and I sat hunched forward, my eyes always on the lookout for the loose dog or toddler I was sure I’d run down. Once I had graduated from practicing and bought a sportier car, the tendency to play it safe fell away, and, animals and children be damned, I would fly down the streets, passing cars as if I actually had somewhere to be.
Maybe the change had to do with my mother no longer being in the car with me, but regardless of her absence, whenever I would eventually have a close call with disaster — choosing the wrong moment to try and pass a car on a two-lane highway; misjudging the time I had to pull out in front of an oncoming truck — I’d fight the feeling that had plagued me when I was sixteen. I’d do my best to ignore the unsettling feeling at the pit of my stomach until I more or less forgot about it. Things got worse when I started my first year of college and found myself navigating the highways of a new state whose motto might as well have been, “You’d better keep up.” It took me a short time to acclimate, but once I got into the mindset of a Missouri driver, there was no stopping me. Suddenly, doing seventy-five down country roads was no problem. Changing busy lanes with only inches to spare? I could do it while swapping CDs from the player.
With such a quick rise to mastering the roads, it seems appropriately karmic that I should have been taken down a notch or two just as suddenly. For my twenty-first birthday, my friend Jessica took me out to dinner. At the time, she didn’t have access to a car, and so I drove the two of us over to St. Louis, and when we were done eating we came back to go see a movie. By the time we were done, it was close to eleven o’clock, and on the way home, we passed a parked highway patrolman. I had time to notice the glint of light along the side of his cruiser as we passed by at something close to fifteen miles an hour over the limit, and I watched through the rearview mirror as the point where we’d passed him slowly, eternally shrank into the distance. Just as I was starting to think that I’d somehow skated by unnoticed — maybe he was napping or my speedometer had simply been playing a cruel birthday joke on me — I saw the red glow of taillights, suddenly there on the skin of the darkness like a pair of bright welts.
Even as he pulled onto the road and started toward me, I clung to the notion that he was headed to a burgled department store. One might think that the flashing red and blue lights would have shattered such a notion, but denial can be a powerful thing for a young man who thinks he’s invincible. When I realized that he was coming for me, I slowed down, easing onto the shoulder of the road and wondering what to do. With something like panic I kept my hands on the steering wheel, not wanting the officer to mistake a move for my wallet for a try at a loaded pistol. In my head I went through every episode of Cops I’ve ever seen. I considered all the things that people in these kinds of situations tend to do — throw open the door and bolt out onto the highway; engage in an escalating argument with the officer about the truthfulness of his radar gun; find the most conspicuous place for a nickel bag of pot — and made sure that I did everything to differentiate myself from those people.
Next to me, Jessica groaned. “Aw,” she said. “Happy birthday.” I make a quick glance in her direction, and I noticed upon her face a look of grim solidarity. I’m not usually the kind of person to throw someone under the proverbial bus, but I couldn’t help wondering if there were some way I could pin this whole mess on Jessica.
“Officer, she took me out for my birthday, and I didn’t think I was going to have to drive. It’s been a long night, and I’m so sorry that I didn’t realize the speed limit was so slow through here. We were talking about the great birthday I’m having, you know? And I guess I just couldn’t wait to get back home.”
In the end though, once the officer, a man in his early thirties, took my license and shone his jumbo, cucumber-sized flashlight upon it, any bright ideas I’d come up with about betraying my friend dissolved. The officer considered my license for a second, and after stepping back to his cruiser to, I don’t know, scan a database for my befuddled mugshot or arm-length rap sheet, he returned and handed me my identification back. “Let’s slow it down a little tonight,” he said, in a voice that implied humor was an alien notion, and excuses would not be tolerated. “I’ll let you off with a warning. Consider it a birthday present from me.”
About a year later, I was on my own, driving to work, when I passed a police officer and was promptly pulled over for going something like seventy in a fifty-five mile per hour zone. The irony of the matter is that, that day, I was on schedule and actually had extra time before I had to leave. I’m not sure why I’m consistently late, but when I do manage to be on time, I’m elated and filled with a sense of accomplishment. The extra time came in handy, then, seeing as I would spend what felt like a half hour in my car, idling along the side of a road that seemed all the more popular today. While waiting for the officer to get out of his patrol car, I counted the number of passing vehicles, and once the pairs of eyes glancing over at me tallied up in the twenties, I just sat there and looked down at my lap.
When he tapped on my window, I rolled it down and smiled up at his weathered face with my best what’s-a-guy-to-say? look. He asked me how I was doing today, and I said I was doing fine. Then, like an idiot, I asked him how he was doing; maybe I was just being nice, but more likely I was trying to get on his good side.
“Do you have any idea how fast you were going back there?”
I pretended to think, as if the image of the speedometer hadn’t burned itself into my mind once I realized I’d just shot like a bullet on meth past a cop. “Maybe … um … sixty-five?”
“Can you tell me where you were headed in such a hurry?”
“I was … oh … on my way … to work,” I mumbled, so low that he had to have me repeat myself. I said it again, croaking as if the past ten years had never happened, and I was twelve again. My name tag from work was lying in one of the cupholders, and I retrieved it, kneading it with my fingers and presenting it to the officer like an offering of proof.
“Well,” he said, “I clocked you at about sixty-nine. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to give you a ticket.” And after asking me if I had seventy-five dollars, maybe stashed in the glove box or in one of my canvas sacks branded with money signs, he nodded when I told him I didn’t have enough cash on me to take my license back. Instead, he tucked it into an elongated black pad from which he tore a yellow piece of paper. On it were all the details of my embarrassment: my name; my car; the speed and circumstances of my illegality. After explaining where to go to get my license back and pay my ticket, he left me to the rest of my day, and I drove off feeling off-put and unmoored.
These days, while my nervousness around police officers is as strong as ever, I can say that passing by a parked patrolman is getting easier to do without breaking out into sweat. Anymore, I take to driving like a grandmother. It’s not as exciting as plowing down the highway, but it’s certainly cheaper. Though I’ve worked my way into a slightly better car, I drive it like a conestoga wagon, ambling down the streets and trying to ignore all the sighs, glares, and horn honks that try to push me along.
When I do pass by a cop, going all of thirty miles an hour, I’ll glance over and think, See, I’m obeying the law. I’m being good. As if they don’t have other things to do, bigger criminals to catch. Like the guy who torched the hospital burn ward, or the person stalking rest stops with his hidden switchblade. Or the anxious-looking man behind the wheel of a car, shambling along the highways with the continuous, pestering thought, Did I do that?
