You’re Free To Go, by Nils Parker

This is the fifth installment in Nils’s Cloyne Court series. To peruse the first four, click here.
I woke up alone in a cement box. My eyes stung and my face was numb from the hours pressed unconscious against the cold, dirty floor. A stainless steel bench ringed the room, interrupted only where it met the door in one corner and the metal toilet and sink in the opposite corner. I pushed myself up onto the bench and leaned my greasy hair against the wall. The butterscotch yellow paint was dingy and cracking and covered in miniature graffiti. The cell’s walls had seen years of wear from countless lawbreakers waiting to be charged, arraigned, or bailed out. And now I was one of them.

What the hell have I done?! Four months earlier, I’d told Vic I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. Now all I could think of was how I’d just ruined my chances of getting into a good law school. I pictured Vic in his office, opening his mail, reading over my expulsion notice, and then casually deleting my file from his computer. I could see my mother replacing the pictures of me in her office with pictures of her dog. As I searched for answers that didn’t come, the question transformed into something far more concrete.

What the hell did I do?! Literally. What did I do to land myself in jail? Still, no answers. Maybe I was making too big a deal out of this whole ordeal. Plenty of people get arrested and go on to lead successful lives. Look at the NFL. Panic and despair melted into anger as I started to rationalize my way out of culpability for whatever it was I did that I couldn’t remember. If I couldn’t remember doing anything wrong, then maybe I didn’t do anything wrong to begin with. Therefore, I was being illegally and unjustly detained. I went to the tempered glass window and started banging furiously, demanding my release or my phone call. I had to be at work by 8am and they would be hearing from my boss if I didn’t make it on time.

At 31 and calloused by several subsequent scrapes with the law, I cannot begin to describe how embarrassing it is to admit I actually did that. Everyone knows you say as little as possible, be cooperative and respectful, then call an attorney. Sure, at the time I was 21, scared, and probably still drunk, but these details do nothing to excuse my little tango of ignorance and arrogance. I wanted to blame Law & Order and Red Bull.

Fed up from my belligerent tirade, the desk sergeant finally came from behind the counter and opened the cell door.

“Shut the fuck up!” I couldn’t tell if he was on the back end or the front end of his shift, but neither is the end in which you want to piss off the guy holding the keys to your freedom. I’d been up five minutes and already made a new friend. How wonderful! “You’ll be out in an hour, so just chill the fuck out.”

As my jailer closed the door, I snuck a peek at the wall clock around the corner. 6am. Just like the alarm clock in my room back at Cloyne. I’ve been waking up five minutes before my alarm since 7th grade, when I got my first real job sweeping the aisles and parking lot of the neighborhood market every morning before school. It was comforting to know that this aspect of my internal clock would go undisturbed even if, to my Vic’s and my mother’s chagrins, I rarely employed it for school-related matters.

I spent the next hour breathing through my mouth, trying not to smell myself. Dirt and garbage and sweat and vomit are not all that pleasant by themselves. Combined, they are a Molotov cocktail of feculence. Stewing in my own filthy juices, I’d never felt worse about myself. I closed my eyes and pressed my hands against my eyelids, doing my best to shut out the fluorescent lighting that pulsed down on me from the high ceiling. I’d been both too smart for my own good and not nearly as smart as I thought I was for far too long; ever since I learned how to lie and get away with it. I’d spent the years between those early days and the previous night in a cell building on that foundation. I flaunted responsibility. I avoided accountability. I circumvented authority. I pushed boundaries and made excuses. I bent rules I didn’t like and broke those I thought didn’t matter. I cut so many corners, my life looked like a set of Dungeons & Dragons dice. By the time I reached college, my ability to escape the real world and fabricate an existence where rules weren’t ever really rules was so developed that I even managed to find a place to live—Cloyne—where others practiced those same dark arts.

Cloyne was a student-run, self-governing co-operative filled with people in their late teens and early twenties who didn’t fit into the Greek lifestyle, couldn’t afford the dorm lifestyle, and weren’t grown up enough to have their own apartments. It provided a soft landing for those in danger of taking a hard fall through the cracks of public higher education. Cloyne offered something akin to training wheels for adulthood. It offered me a place to do whatever I wanted without fear of people taking notice. After all, getting drunk, missing class, and burning shit, do not ping loudly on the radar screen when your house has seven grow-rooms full of pot plants and was once shutdown because a meth lab exploded in the basement.

What I didn’t notice—that other, past Clones who went on to do important, cool things had—was that the longer you stayed in Cloyne and the closer you got to graduation, the more those training wheels melted away and molded into a crucible for your future. The warm appeal of communal, carefree hedonism grew into an intense heat that sloshed up against the cold, hard immovability of responsibilities and requirements. You would either succumb to the former and melt into the fabric of your environment or you would respond to the latter and emerge forged from adversity ready for adulthood.

Through the first half of my final year in school, I’d withstood the intense pressure. On that Tuesday in December, cracks began to show. The next day, I faced the hardest, hottest trial by fire yet. How would I ever respond to having a once-bright future (I won several spelling bees in grade school) thrown into turmoil by my own arrogance and stupidity? They were gonna throw the book at me, I knew it. Most people don’t come back from something like that. This is how long-haul truck drivers are born. Panic set back in.

This was the bad position Vic was talking about.

My mind worked frantically to figure out what to do next, but came up with nothing. All I could focus on was getting out of that holding cell. The inability to do anything about it sent me into an emotional freefall. I went through the five stages of grief. I went through self-loathing and self-pity. I played the blame game. I even tried to convince myself it was all an elaborate prank. I landed on acceptance and relief as the hour broke, the cell door opened, and my name was called. Finally, these fucking games I was playing were coming to an end. The rubber had finally met the road and I would be forced to grow the fuck up.

The desk sergeant flopped a large sealed plastic bag on the counter in front of me. It held everything I came to the station with. He ripped it open and, with me as a witness, inventoried it to verify nothing had been lost or gone missing. Everything but my dignity was there. I signed for my effects and waited for the sergeant to tell me what was going to happen and where I was supposed to go. Instead, he took my signed inventory sheet and disappeared.

I looked around for some sort of clue. I could see only one other officer.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Hold on. I’m finishing your incident report.” I looked closer at him. It was Officer Ruiz, the younger of the two patrolmen from the night before. “Gimme a couple minutes.” I stood by anxiously. I was quiet but my body shivered uncontrollably from the adrenaline of my freedom and the excitement of looming consequences. What were they going to charge me with? How much was this going to cost me? Would I be expelled? What would I do now? Where could I go?

Two minutes felt like two hours. Finally, Officer Ruiz reached the bottom of the sheet and finished with an emphatic dotting of the ‘i’ and a flourish for the ‘z’. The desk sergeant returned to his post from somewhere and took the report from Ruiz, who left without a word. He tore out the various carbon copy sheets and took them to the opposite end of the counter where he placed them in wire baskets that contained piles of sheets in corresponding colors. I got the pink one.

I scanned my copy quickly, then slowly, then a third time word by word. Nowhere on the sheet could I find what they were charging me with.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“What?” the desk sergeant asked gruffly.

“What am I being charged with?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nothing?!”

“Yeah, nothin’.”

“Seriously?!” I could tell the desk sergeant was starting to get annoyed with my incredulity. I was being given my freedom. Be fucking grateful and get the hell out of there already.

“Yeah. They just threw you in here to let you sleep it off. You snore like a motherfucker. Did you know that?” I could hear you through the concrete.” The desk sergeant’s tone was uncomfortably casual and familiar.

“So I’m not being charged with anything?”

“Nope. No charges. You’re free to go.”

It was the worst thing they could have ever done for me. Actions are supposed to have consequences. For once, I wanted that. A government-subsidized slumber party hardly counts. It doesn’t even count as rehabilitative. It’s borderline negligent.

“How do I get out of here?”

“Just follow the arrows painted on the floor. They’ll lead you out.”

“Okay.” My bleary eyes found the painted arrow on the floor, figured out which direction it was pointing, and prepared themselves for the burst of natural sunlight they would shortly face.

“Oh, and do me a favor. Tell your buddies that calling a police station and impersonating someone is a felony and will land them in jail next time they try it.”

“Sure thing.” I didn’t have the first clue what he was talking about and I had no desire to stick around to find out.

“Take it easy,” he said.

Take it easy?!

I don’t know what it was about them, but those three little words erased every second of the come-to-Jesus moment I had while freaking out in the holding cell. Any lesson I may have learned evaporated from my short-term memory. The weight of my responsibility for following through on the rest of the year lifted. The concern I had about being prepared for the real world and the next step washed away. I was already ready. At 21, how could I not feel that way? I’d crushed the semester, I was going to write my thesis on baseball the following spring, and now I was walking out unscathed on a prospective Drunk-and-Disorderly charge as well as one for vandalism and maybe even one for attempted larceny.

What was I worried about? I thought to myself as I followed the twisting, turning path to freedom. Just keep doin’ what you’re doin’. The arrows took me, unnecessarily, past nearly every office on the floor. It seems to be working. Like an enormous walk of shame that I was in no way ashamed to be doing. Who needs to grow up?

Ten years later, I look back on that moment and scream “MEEEEE!!” inside my head. I needed to grow up. That arrest should have been a wake-up call and a turning point in my young adult life. It should have begun the process of forging a new, better path. The fallout from a guilty plea to a handful of misdemeanor charges would have forced me to re-evaluate…well…everything. What my priorities were. How I made decisions. What I wanted out of my life in the short-term and the long-term. It probably would have compelled me to move out of Cloyne and admit I wasn’t quite equipped for what it required; wasn’t strong enough to withstand the heat and the pressure it applied.

Instead, they let me go like nothing ever happened and I left having taken nothing meaningful away from what we’d done. Little did I know, I was firmly planted on a path that would lead toward several encounters of increasing ridiculousness with law enforcement and away from pretty much everything I’d envisioned for myself before I moved into Cloyne.

I emerged from the stale, over-heated Berkeley City Police Department to find Andy, Maarten, and Fritz perched on the hood of Andy’s Volvo wagon. They were bright-eyed and full of energy. They looked like they’d had a full night’s sleep and I hated them for it.

“So what’s the deal?” Andy asked.

“What do you mean, ‘what’s the deal?’ I spent the fucking night in jail! That’s the deal.”

“Yeah, we tried to get you out.” Maarten said. “We did a bunch of blow and had Fritz call the station pretending to be your well-connected international financier father away on business in Zurich.”

“My dad’s a paralegal.”

“They don’t know that!” Fritz exclaimed, still coked-up.

“What’d they charge you with?” Andy broke in.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Really?!” Maarten asked, intrigued. If you listened closely, you could hear the drug-dealing hamster in his brain setting a land speed record on his pot-flavored hamster wheel.

“Yep, nothing.”

Their whistles and whoops and cheers shocked my senses with the same sharpness as the winter air we were breathing and the unbelievable news we were basking in. As Pillager of the Hour, my Viking compatriots ceded the front seat to me. Andy flipped on the seat warmers and Maarten cracked four beers.

“Can I borrow your phone for a minute?” I asked Andy.

“Sure, what for?” he asked.

“I have to call my boss and make up some excuse for why I’m not coming in today.”

“Tell him you had to bail your friend out of jail.” Maarten offered, laughing. “It’d be ironic.”

“He’s gonna be pretty pissed,” Andy said.

I thought about it for a second and took a long pull from the cold beer, putting the pounding headache and the creeping hangover on the backburner for a brief moment.

“It’ll be fine.”