Here Endeth The Lesson

It still sticks in my craw, 16 or 17 years after the event. I can feel my cheeks turning red as I write this. But it happened, and I am here to tell you about it.

I had taken one of my daughters out for a birthday dinner, and was returning her home to her mother. I was probably no more than two miles from her house in DeKalb County, when I made the left turn that took me past the liquor store, a fairly busy place just off a road with a 45 miles per hour speed limit. The 1980s model car with Gwinnett County plates pulled out in front of me, from the parking lot of the liquor store, and proceeded to move at the amazing speed of about 15 miles per hour. I’ve seen that move before: I’ve used that move before. Drink a little too much, and you worry about getting pulled over, so your natural reaction is to drive slowly and carefully. But your perception is warped, so you find yourself pulled over because you are driving 30 miles per hour below the speed limit. “Oh, great,” I thought, “I’ve got to follow this drunk for the next couple of miles?”

I did what I normally did in that situation (which, by the way, I no longer do): I pulled up close to the car’s back end, hoping that having me on his tail would encourage him to pick up the pace a bit. It didn’t work. A short space up the road, I needed take a right hand turn. I thought that maybe, just maybe, he would go straight. He didn’t. He slowed down to make the right hand turn, then came to a complete stop in the middle of the road. I nearly ended up in his back seat. I’m not sure how I managed not to rear-end him.

His driver’s side door opened, and I began mentally kicking myself for having removed the baseball bat from the back seat floor of the car. Then I saw the gun on his hip.

The gun was like an eye-magnet. I was focused on that pistol like a radar beam focused on an airplane. It was only a second later that I saw the police uniform. The fellow in front of me, who had pulled out of the liquor store parking lot and was driving slowly, like a drunk, was an off-duty DeKalb County policeman, on his way home to Gwinnett County. He closed his door and moved slowly back to my car.

This was not my idea of a good end to a very nice evening. I kept trying to figure out what to do. It was apparent he had been drinking. Should I call 911 for another police officer? Would another police officer uphold the law, or protect his brother? And what about my daughter, sitting in the passenger seat? What lesson would I be teaching her? And did I really want her to see her father taken away in handcuffs?

In the end, I did nothing. As I recall, he did not ask for my license, a good move as he was off-duty and a bit under the weather. He gave me a very hard time about following him too closely. He berated me and generally made me feel about two inches tall. It was humiliating, especially occurring as it did in front of my daughter. I wanted to ask him if he had witnessed a car driven like his, suddenly hitting the brakes in an effort to cause an accident, would he have given that driver a ticket? But I didn’t. Discretion was the better part of valor.

Eventually he returned to his car and drove off slowly. I gave him plenty of room. I didn’t want him to see where my daughter lived, so I sat there for awhile before returning her to her home.

That man had issues.

Three or four months later, I heard a radio newscast that described a DeKalb County policeman who had been arrested in a mall parking lot. Apparently he lost his temper with someone in the parking lot, and proceeded to damage the other fellow’s car. I really would like to think that it was my off-duty, tipsy policeman from that night a few months earlier. I will never know, of course, but I think that if he lost his job and his pension, it would only be his just desserts.

But, as the title of this post suggests, there is a lesson here. I am writing this, still feeling somewhat humiliated, 16 or 17 years after the fact. I can write this because I did not die that evening. I wanted to castigate that officer, I wanted another policeman present to give him a field sobriety test, I wanted to do something. The fact that I didn’t do anything that I wanted to do means he did not have the excuse to pull out a baton, or a Taser, or, the worst in my book, his service pistol. And so I lived.

I don’t give advice, but I will share with you my rules, which have never failed. Never try to hit or otherwise attack a policeman. Never talk back to a policeman. Never try to run from a policeman. Never, never, never make a move in front of a policeman that even remotely resembles pulling a weapon. Just shut up and take it. You can always file a civil suit and try to get justice in a court of law.

You can then look forward to the rest of your life on earth, even if it is tinged with occasional bouts of remembered humiliation.