Taco Bell
Akron, OH
Drunk driving is a terrible scourge, killing over 10,000 Americans a year. To put that number in perspective, it would take hurricanes almost 600 years to kill as many Americans as drunk drivers do in twelve months. Yet we are so terrified of hurricanes that we name each one and track it in real time like a marauder from outer space, even though hurricanes kill fewer Americans (about seventeen per year) than the average sauced-up bowling team does after getting behind the wheel.
Which leads me to the following unpopular opinions:
In the great horror of drinking and driving, there are three villains: the car, the booze, and the driver. And History will judge the greatest of those villains to be the car.
Humans have consumed alcohol since day one. In fact, it’s been suggested that we began consuming booze (as rotting fruit that had fermented) even before we evolved into humans; back when “we” were chimps. And we—that is to say, the branch of primates that eventually gave rise to the beer-swilling, Chevy-operating homo sorta-erectus you see before you today—will continue to consume alcohol until our last day. When the asteroid finally hits, or robots become conscious and attack, we will be drinking a margarita at the mall—our final words being, as doom descends upon us, “I prefer mine with more salt.” But the car—by which I mean the motorized vehicle that we steer—will probably only last three, four, maybe five generations?
I am of the even rarer opinion that not only will the car be viewed as the worst culprit in the driver/booze/ vehicle pyramid, but children in the future will hear our stories of driving sober and be amazed any of this was ever considered a societal norm:
“You actually drove the car, grandpa?”
“Oh yeah, sometimes, we had to drive it into the setting sun—it was blinding and you couldn’t see anything—but we just accelerated. You didn’t want to hold up traffic. Some people were drunk.”
“Was it safe?”
“Mostly. See, we were so bad at driving, we had safety belts all around our bodies. Kids were strapped in—like astronauts—and accidents happened so often every car had giant balloons that inflated once you hit a wall or tree. When you destroyed the car, you barely felt it.”
“Destroyed the car? How–”
“Oh we destroyed them all the time! Half the businesses in my neighborhood were shops for fixing damaged cars. We got in so many accidents, little buddy, you had to purchase this paper called ‘auto insurance’ that basically said, ‘When I shatter someone else’s car, this company will buy them a new one.’ It was illegal to drive without it.”
“That sounds so dangerous. Not like today at all.”
“I suppose you’re right, little buddy…Now go tell that robot of yours to make me another margarita. And not to forget the salt this time!”
Technology I Like:
Self-Driving Cars
When we think of a world with self-driving cars we tend to think of a business Xanadu, where the car picks us up outside the front door and drives us into work, while we relax with the morning news or get a head start on today’s reports. The self-driving cars move like a flock of birds, crowded, but with no congestion and delays. And, though that sounds optimistic, we overlook the real, life-improving advance: The car can now pick us up outside of any bar and even though we don’t remember our name or where we live, will get us home safe.
Like all new, far-reaching technologies, we know the industries that self-driving cars will disrupt—delivery drivers and auto body repair specialists, who will be put out of a job—before we see the industries it will help. We are gonna sell a fuck-ton of booze if these things ever take off.
A 2017 study by Morgan Stanley estimated that self-driving vehicles would lead to an additional $100 billion in alcohol sales a year, if current drivers just had one more beer a week! Which I find hilarious, that the New York millionaires who work at Morgan Stanley think drivers in Wisconsin will just have four more beers a month if they don’t need to worry about DUIs. The global market size for all alcohol sales, according to the same Morgan Stanley study, is $1.5 trillion and, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wisconsin and Illinois alone doubled that $1.5 trillion if DUIs are off the table. Ya know: a fuck ton.
And the alcohol industry knows this. In 2018 the liquor industry’s largest lobbying group joined The Coalition for Future Mobility, the largest lobbying group for self-driving vehicles, which must have been an amazing call:
“Coalition for Future Mobility, how may I help you?”
“Hi. Id like to join” [The sound of rock ice clinking within a glass is heard]
“We’re flattered to hear that but we have the top leaders from the automotive and software industries. At this point, we are not accepting new members. We have all the leadership we need, to show how great this product is to both federal and local leadership.”
“Yeah, you think so? Well, this is Ed Anheuser the Fifth…” [the PHHHSST from a beer bottle being opened is heard] “...and I have forgotten more about buying off politicians than you eggheads will ever learn. And I know how to sell a product that is GOING to be part of Saturday night. So, you might want to think about taking this call”
When self-driving cars finally reach U.S. cities, people assume we will need more engineers and robotic experts but, in reality, it’s mostly bartenders we will need to hire. And there’s already evidence for that, based on how ridesharing apps affect the cities they enter.
A 2019 study from economists from The University of Louisville and Georgia State University showed that, when Uber enters a city, binge drinking increases and it corresponds to a higher demand for bartenders. But ride-sharing apps reduce drunk driving incidents so greatly that we don’t complain about the increased binge drinking.
This why self-driving cars are so important to the alcohol industry: they would not only increase sales, but also absolve them of the sin of drunk driving.
When Uber returned to Portland after a four-month absence in 2015, alcohol-related car accidents fell by 62 percent! The same year, the San Francisco police department made only two DUI arrests on New Year’s Eve, due to the popularity of ride-sharing. Imagine living in the second-most densely populated city in the U.S. and getting arrested for drunk driving, probably assuming you are one of countless, anonymous culprits, only to find out it’s just you and Walter.
And, as much as I love to hear that only Walter and one other asshole were arrested on NYE in San Francisco, that does pretty definitely show which person has the most to lose by self-driving cars: The Shady DUI Lawyer. Auto body repair technicians, they can learn to repair the computers or batteries on self-driving cars. Auto Insurance companies can move into new risk areas: maybe rideshare liabilities? But Joseph Battilga, a successful DUI lawyer in Trenton— whose motto is “Don’t Blow: Call Joe!”—he can’t just start working for the Justice Department. Where are these shady lawyers going to go?
The good news is that most of those shady lawyers will probably make great bartenders.
About twenty years ago, I was in Akron, Ohio for a wedding.
This is one of those stories that when I tell in it person, my wife interrupts with, “This was before he and I were together!” When you are married, your wife divides your stories between the ones that happened before you were with her and the ones after you were with her; much as we do with the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Your wife wants to clearly delineate the two periods so as if to say: This bullshit did not happen under my watch. Or maybe she is avowing: Believe me, I would not have said “yes” if I saw any of this bullshit.
The bullshit in question was: me and half the wedding party were nearly arrested after we breached, without a great deal of dexterity, a police barricade. In our defense, the police were barricading something one cannot resist after ten rum-and-cokes: A Taco Bell.
One must understand, back then, leaving a wedding presented two challenges that have diminished with time:
a) It was extremely difficult to get a ride home and
b) Small towns only had a single option for late night food: Taco Bell.
When I was in college, Taco Bell after midnight was the closest thing I got to entering a bar like the ones in a John Wayne Western: open, rolling fights; people dancing on tables; drunks passed out in corners. It was chaos, mainly because every customer was blind, raging drunk, yet the place was staffed like a deli.
Imagine pitching that shift to a bartender: “You are going to work the one venue in town that’s open after last call and your patrons will be—exclusively—people that were thrown out of other bars.” That bartender would insist you pay him more than the town sheriff and never schedule less than fifteen bouncers. Yet Taco Bell manages that same situation with three employees, all making minimum wage.
Which is why, in about one out of every three late night visits to Taco Bell, I saw an employee quit publicly, so he could fight a customer. The (ex) employee-vs.-customer boxing match was the highlight of any late-night Ohio Taco Bell visit because, first of all, you got to see someone quit a job they hate, which is always invigorating.
Every day we go to work and promise ourselves, today is the day we quit; we even tell our buddies on the job: “I swear to Christ, if Bert asks me to do Kenny’s job again, because Kenny is too fucking stupid to do anything right, I’m quitting on the spot! I’m tired of doing two jobs for the pay of one!” And, sure enough, Bert’s first words are: “I need you to go help Kenny, he’s struggling with a customer install,” and you never quit. When you are young, you dream of being a rock singer or astronaut but then you get older and you only dream of quitting your job and, the tragedy of it is, quitting your job is, for an adult, as unrealistic as becoming an astronaut is for a kid.
So, when you see a Taco Bell employee—at the height of the store’s busiest period—quit in front of all the staff and patrons so he can punch a customer in the jaw, it’s vitalizing. It’s life-affirming. It’s the nearest I’ll come to witnessing an Oscar acceptance speech, in terms of sheer awe of personality and daring.
And the way that employee quits, throwing their cap and name tag into the ground as hard as possible, before they turn the corner and tussle, is great. I miss jobs where you could formally submit your resignation by chucking your hat across the counter violently.
And on this particular night, after this particular wedding, at this particular Taco Bell, things were particularly tumultuous. We had left the reception and made it to Taco Bell to find two police cars blocking the entrance, with their sirens on, with additional cruisers and additional sirens collected in the back. At any other restaurant and at any other time, this would have been considered a deal breaker and you would move on to find different food. Rarely, when you approach a dining establishment and notice a loud, active crime scene in its parking lot, do you say “Well, let’s see if they are still open?” But this was Taco Bell at one in the morning in small town Ohio, which meant it was officially The Only Game in Town.
After you have been drinking, all greasy food tastes amazing but there are two meals that, in my experience, have a magical pull when drunk: burritos and gyros. You begin to crave them at a subconscious level. Some ineffable force compels you to find them, the way a bird is told to fly south when the weather cools.
And that voice, the voice that controls everything from bird migrations to the compulsions of your stomach, found its way to that Taco Bell parking lot and whispered in our collective ear: “You can fit your car between the two police cruisers attempting to block the entrance.” Someone at the front of the car asked: “How much have you had to drink?”
“I think I’d pass a sobriety test,” answered our driver. Everyone nodded in agreement, so the driver let off the brake and we started to weave between the two police cruisers. The police cruisers were at an angle, splaying out so as to obstruct any attempted ingress, but they were not well-aligned; they more suggested that you should not enter, rather than being close enough to formally prevent it. We slipped between them slowly, correcting every few inches so as not to bruise the wing mirrors. Our driver was employing the kind of slow precision seen during a space station docking. Eventually we reached the other side of this hazard and, in the parking lot, saw the full scope of the problem: a car was flipped over at the bend in the drive-through lane.
One of the police officers noticed us nearing the accident, so the officer began walking toward our car, clearly annoyed. After a step or two his annoyance gave way to dejection and he forcefully spiked his hat into the ground—a classic from the old “I QUIT!” playbook—and screamed, “God Damn It!” into the air. That’s when we noticed that five more cars had also completed the vehicular Khyber Pass and were now behind us in the parking lot.
I exited the vehicle from the back and the cop yelled at me to stay in the car.
“Exercising my Constitutional Right to a burrito, officer,” I said and gestured toward the restaurant to indicate that it was still open and serving. I was still at that young age, an age some (white) men never outgrow, where you think that if you add the word “Constitution” to any sentence, no officer will dare stop you.
He waved me past—he had bigger problems to worry about—so I entered the restaurant, ordered and ate a burrito. I exited a few minutes later only to encounter a fresh new obstacle: several of the doors to our car were open and, at the rear of the vehicle, a cop was banging hard on the trunk.
As I got closer to the vehicle one of my buddies stopped me:
“We have a real problem.”
“What?” I asked.
“We have no ride home. No driver.”
“What?”
“The driver is gone.”
Another member of our group stepped in to give me more detail: “Locked himself in the trunk of his own car.”
“What?”
“Trying to get out of DUI.”
“But…”
“He thinks they need a warrant to open the trunk.”
I could hear loud banging from the police and demands to “exit the vehicle” followed by our driver’s muffled reply (from inside the drunk of his own car) : “Affecting my constitutional right to domicile, officer!”
The good ol’ Constitution.
I have seen guys (again, to be clear: white guys barely out of college) surrounded by bouncers, being told they need to leave the bar and how do they invariably respond? “The Constitution says I don’t have to go anywhere.”
Bouncers usually pick the guy up and throw him to the sidewalk, but, just once, I want to see a bartender respond:
“Which Amendment?”
“What?”
“Which Amendment to The Constitution affords you the right to stay inside a bar for as long as you want, no matter how drunk you are? When did we ratify the right to not be ejected?”
(Though it would have been badass if, when America decided Prohibition was not working, rather than passing the 21st Amendment as a straight-forward repeal of the 18th Amendment, it instead guaranteed THE RIGHT TO GET SHIT-HOUSED.)
“Open the trunk!” the cop yelled again. His partner approached the driver’s side door and snapped at our friend in the passenger seat: “Release the trunk!”
“What?” came the reply.
“The trunk! Passenger! Citizen! There should be a lever to the left of the driver’s seat to open the trunk!”
The moment he said “citizen” half the people in the vehicle laughed, but at least one person was composed enough to say:
“Officer, this is a 1985 Toronado. I don’t think it has modern features like ‘trunk release.’”
At which point we heard our driver’s voice exclaim, indistinctly, from the rear of the car: “I got both sets of keys in here.”
Under Ohio laws—possibly under all state laws, I don’t know, the Constitution—a tow truck cannot tow a vehicle with passengers in it. Even if those passengers are in the trunk, refusing to exit. So our problem was not going to be solved easily. The police announced they were getting a crowbar to force it open, which once again, elicited laughs from my group. Not that we didn’t think it was a legitimate threat; rather we had information that the police did not. For example, we knew that opening that trunk would reveal there were at least four people in there.
Why four? One, because we were the last car leaving a wedding, which meant other people packed into that car like it was the last convoy out of town before a hurricane hits and, two, a 1985 Oldsmobile Toronado is about the size of a modern jet. The trunk was so huge we were able to fit four people inside it and I’m convinced that was mostly due to how big the mafia was back then. The Toronado was a two-door, seventeen foot long vehicle with a trunk that’s nearly as big as the passenger compartment; those dimensions make no sense for a car, unless you believe that a sizable part of the economy is devoted to hiding bodies.
The cop walked away to get a crowbar when someone yelled, helpfully, “Wait, officer, the rear speakers in this car pop out! What if we remove the speakers and he hands the keys to us, from the trunk, through the speaker hole?”
The cop turned, performatively set a timer on his watch, and replied:
“You have exactly two minutes to get those keys out; otherwise I crowbar it open.”
Which, frankly, was a pretty sizable conciliation from a cop. Usually you don’t get to propose a “plan B” to the police. The only way I can think to explain it is that the cop was a father, who realized that the car in question probably belonged to one of our dads, and thus he was bound by the unspoken covenant that unites all American dads, no matter their line of work: “Thou shalt not affect the resale value of another dad’s car.”
A couple of people from our group pulled the speakers out and squeezed their fingers into the tiny hole left behind, shouting: “Get the keys to my fingers! Work together!”
The police likely found that an odd way to instruct a single person to hand you the keys.
This was also the point at which my parents showed up.
WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?
Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.
This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.
Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.
Purchase Full Book:
Digital
$4.99
Paperback
$14.99
Audio
$19.99This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.
I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.
—S. B-F
A t some point prior it had occurred to me (to a few of us, in fact) that we would be not getting home from this Taco Bell in the same car in which we had arrived. Our driver was in the trunk, furiously and incorrectly quoting the Bill of Rights and, even if we were somehow to get the keys back and arrange an alternate driver, ahead of us was a car stuck upside down and behind us was a stalled caravan, honking rapaciously for tacos. So, this, again, being before rideshare services or even—given the hour and area—taxis, I called my parents.
When I was a teenager, I would stand in the hall, waiting for friends to come pick me up for a Friday night out, and my parents would dutifully issue the same speech, time and time again:
“We do not want you drinking, nor do we want your friends drinking. But, if something happens where you can’t get home safely, if you or your driver is drunk: You can always call us and we will come pick you up. We will always give you a safe ride home. No questions asked. We won’t be mad. You can call us and we won’t be mad.”
My friends and my siblings—almost everyone I knew growing up—received some version of this speech, and we were all skeptical. I could never picture my parents, after being woken up at 3 a.m., dressing quickly and then saying goodbye to the other (one of them would have had to stay home due to the other five kids still sleeping in the house) leaving with: “I’m so happy he called! This is a really proud moment for us!”
But, on the other side, I don’t think our parents expected us to make that phone call at thirty years of age:
[*RING RING*]
“Umm, uggh, hello?”
“Mom?”
“Sean? It’s 3 a.m.”
“Yes, sorry. I think I need a ride home.” [Long pause]
“Sean. You live in Chicago.”
“Yeah, I came home for a wedding. Remember how I said I’d be home in three weeks for my buddy’s wedding? I was wrong; it was today. I screwed up the dates and had to catch a last-second flight.”
“Where are you? The airport?”
“No, I’m at Taco Bell.” [Another long pause]
“Our driver,” I elaborated. “He can’t drive home.”
“Is he drunk?”
I took a second and thought about how to explain that our driver was in the trunk of the car, with three bodies between him and the hole in the speaker we needed him to reach to free the keys.
“At this point, I don’t even know if it matters,” I answered.
M y folks did not live far from the Taco Bell, so they arrived quickly. Due to the chaos in the parking lot, they parked on the street and walked into the lot to find us, which—upon locating us—is when my mom pretty clearly invalidated their earlier speeches from my teenage years: “I have never been more mad at you in my life!”
“Mom!” I screamed back. “What are you yelling at me for? I’m not the guy in the trunk!” “Oh! Thank God I raised the smart one!” my mom snapped back ironically.
“Got it!” someone screamed buoyantly from inside the car. The keys were successfully passed back. A buddy exited the car, ran around to the rear and triumphantly showed the officers that the crowbar would not be necessary.
The lead officer took the key and went to open the trunk.
“What’s going on here?” my dad asked.
“Dad,” I replied, “I believe this is what magicians call ‘the prestige.’”
The cop popped open the trunk and four, distinct humans were now waving at him.
“Hello,” they said, in a kind of unison.
“What the fuck?” another cop exclaimed.
“Why didn’t you tell us there were four people in the goddamn trunk?!” screamed the leading officer.
“Constitution says we don’t have to,” someone replied.
“Which of you is the driver?” yelled the officer as the quartet began climbing out of the trunk.
“Legally, there’s no way to prove that,” someone answers.
My dad, watching all of this by my side, leaned in and whispered to me confidentially and confidently: “Not a good idea.”
The cop in charge exploded.
“Do you shits honestly think we don’t know who this car is registered to? And do you morons honestly think after we breathalyze him and he fails, he won’t tell us exactly who was actually driving?”
That must have gotten through, because our driver stepped forward and said: “Officer, this is my car and I was the driver.”
“YES” to Bars, “NO” to Cars:
A History of Drunk Driving Laws.
In January of 1897 the Daimler Motor Company began selling cars in London. A few months later, George Smith, a twenty-five-year-old taxi driver, was fined twenty-five shillings for drunkenly driving into a building. It was the first DUI in recorded history.
I wonder how drunk you have to be, to get a DUI in London in the 19th century? This is a city where people drink seventeen bitters for lunch, then ride a horse into a river. For you to be so drunk that a London copper shows up and invents a new crime on the scene, I don’t think merely hitting a building is sufficient. I suspect that George Smith was not only the first drunk driver but also one of the very drunkest ever and, like most drunks put into a tractable situation, he talked his way into jail:
“Ah ha! What do we have here?!” asks the first officer on the scene.
“Fuck you! You stupid bobbie! This motorwagon costs more than you make in a year!!”
And, with that greeting, the charge of Driving Under The Influence was born.
A few decades later the state of New Jersey made drunk driving illegal, in 1906. It was the first U.S. state with such a law, but many states followed, with some fining as high as $1,000 for a violation (equivalent to $25,000 in today’s money).
Everyone agreed drunk people should not drive and, if they caused accidents, should be prosecuted more aggressively but it was difficult to prove a driver was inebriated. Convictions relied upon eye-witnesses testimony—bar patrons who recalled the driver ordering so many whiskeys—or anecdotal police tests, where the officers challenged the driver to stand on one leg or say tongue-twisting phrases correctly. Juries often acquitted, feeling there was no hard evidence against the driver.
In 1919 only about one in every three households owned a car. Then came Prohibition, so, even though—during the 1920s—car ownership grew by over fifty percent, DUIs were not a major concern because the entire U.S. societal stack was pretending that drinking did not exist.
But, in 1930, the 21st Amendment was passed (THE RIGHT TO GET SHIT-HOUSED), Prohibition was repealed, and suddenly America was concerned about the 31,000 people that were dying in car accidents. Luckily for prosecutors across this great country, a chemist at Indiana University, Dr. Rolla Harger, developed a portable test where suspected drunk drivers blew into a balloon-like device and it flashed if they were drunk or not. That device permanently changed DUI convictions by providing police with on-site, scientific proof the driver was drunk and, yes, you are completing the sentence in your head, assuming Harger’s invention is the breathalyzer, but, no, amazingly (and hilariously) Harger called it “THE DRUNK-O-METER.”
When one looks at all the phraseology choices America made—the terms that were lost to the sands of time—none seem more tragic than our decision to call the device that arrests drunk people “The Breathalyzer” rather than “The Drunk-o-meter.” Imagine a world where a friend says they were arrested for a DUI and you ask, “What did you drunk-o-meter?”
The Breathalyzer came to replace the Drunk-o-meter a few years later in 1936, when an Indiana State Police Officer, Robert Borkenstein, worked with Harger to improve the drunk-o-meter so it was smaller and more portable. The new, cheaper and easier-to-use test was called the breathalyzer and was quickly adopted by law enforcement across the country. The device became so common that states could legislate DUI laws based on BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) figures rather than vague standards of inebriation.
Based on advice from the American Medical Associate and the National Safety Council, most states declared the legal limit for drunk driving was 0.15 BAC which, when read today, is amazing. That is almost twice the current, legal limit. In fact, if you blew 0.15 today, you would qualify for “High BAC” charges in most states, meaning you are to be charged less like you were driving a car around town drunk and more like you were riding a missile around town drunk.
This is what happens to the human body at 0.15 BAC: your sense of balance has mostly failed and your brain struggles to responsively control muscles. Vomiting is common. At my weight, I can have seven shots of whiskey and pass a 0.15 BAC, which is amazing to consider that, in 1938, Id be one of the safer drivers on the road.
America’s response to drinking and driving remained, on sum, unchanged for almost half a century until in 1980 when a chronic drunk driver killed a 13-year-old girl, Cari Lightner, in a hit-and-run in Fair Oaks California. Cari’s mother, Candy Lightner, created Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) in her daughter’s memory and that movement did more to reduce drunk driving fatalities than the previous century’s worth of breath inventions or legislation.
MADD was so successful in changing the dialogue around drinking and driving—in recognizing the scope of its danger—that, when you look for tables on DUI deaths in America, usually the numbers and graphs start in 1980, when MADD made it a priority. And, in that year (1980) about 26,000 Americans died in car accidents caused by drunk drivers; it was the leading cause of death for people under thirty-four years of age. Over the next decade, due mostly to the successful lobbying efforts of MADD, those numbers were nearly halved. MADD was instrumental in:
» Raising the minimum drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one
» Lowering BAC standards for a DUI to 0.1 from .15 (and then lowering it further to .08 in 2000).
» Disallowing open alcohol containers in a car.
» Deploying sobriety checkpoints across the U.S.
» Rebranding “The Breathalyzer” back to its old name, “The Drunk-O-Meter.”
Alas, if only that final point were true.
O
ur driver agreed to a breathalyzer and blew a 0.07.
In all my years of watching sports in Cleveland, in seeing fans dejected by fumbles and interceptions and bad pitches, I don’t believe I have ever heard a more crestfallen sigh than the ones those cops emitted when they realized our driver was legally allowed to go home.
“Ugggh…You’re kidding me,” the officer administering the test whined, after reading the device’s final verdict.
“What’s the problem?” asked the lead officer.
“Point! Zero! Seven! Sir”
“What?” asked the lead officer, puzzled. “Why didn’t you just come out of the vehicle if you’re sober?!”
Our driver shrugged.
“It was surprisingly dark and crowded in there,” one of the trunk pilgrims added.
“So...I guess we will be on our way,” another trunk denizen suggested. My friends and I used that phrase often back then—“I guess I will be on my way”—as a kind of détente, after we broke glassware or walked through a screen door; a proposal that suggested that if we were leave now, in that moment, perhaps we could consider this incident closed? A lawyer later told me that phrase, while maybe problematic at social gatherings, is perfect for dealing with police: always propose that you should leave and see how they react.
Everyone filed back into the car, except for me of course. I gave some hugs and goodbyes and explained that I should probably drive home with my parents, what with them waking up and traveling down to Taco Bell in their night robes.
My folks (they obeyed the police barricade) parked on the street. We were walking to my parents’ car, when I saw my friends leaving. Two police vehicles parted, to allow my friends to pass from the rear blockade. My friends passed between the cruisers, exiting to the intersecting road.
As they departed, a new car rushed into the parking lot before the two police cruisers could reclose the bulwark. The cruisers honked and ran their sirens, but the new vehicle entered where our car just left, creating a brand new problem. The lead officer throws his hat to the ground. A passenger in the car, fell out of the rear window and ran into Taco Bell while the police descended on the vehicle.
“They should pay those people more,” my dad said while pulling into traffic.
“Police?” my mom wondered. “I think they are paid pretty well by Akron, honey.”
“No,” my dad responded, “Taco Bell employees. They oughta make more than astronauts.”