| | NEW YEAR IN OHIO - Part One
"This is an Ontario driver’s licence?"
"Is that a question or a statement, officer?"
He looked back and forth from the licence to me at least five times before he spoke again. "If you’re from Ontario, then what b’ness do you got here in Ohio?"
I’d been asking myself that question all day, especially while standing at the side of a dimly lit highway beside a man wearing a gun at his side. Sure, he was (supposedly) a State Trooper, but just looking into his somewhat lost eyes, you could tell he had had one too many lover’s spats with his sister about their children over the years.
"Like I said, I’m heading to Massillon (pronounced mass-uh-lawn) to meet a friend."
"And how does someone from Canada come to know someone in Massillon (pronounced mazz-lynn) Ohio?"
I rolled the word over in my head a few times. It seemed strange that it would be pronounced that way, but in all my English classes in highschool and university, we never studied mid-southern Ohio dialect. It didn’t surprise me since the trooper was pronouncing Ontario, On-tear-ee-aw. I laughed a little at the thought.
"Sumpin' funny?"
Shit. The laugh escaped a little. I didn’t want this guy to have any other reason to look closely at me. I looked like hell, having driven for more than six hours at that point. I’d had two real coffees (double-doubles) from Tim Hortons in Canada before crossing into the ever-so upscale world of coffee connoisseurs in the United States. After a few Starbucks confrontations in which I couldn’t understand why the mouth-breather behind the counter couldn’t grasp that all I wanted was a large coffee with two creams and two sugars, I ended up with a ‘tall, slim half-fat mocha-latte upended’.
I walked out to the parking lot, took one sip before climbing in the car and poured it out on the ground. My first thought was their President. If ordering coffee was this much of a task here, how the hell does he make it through day by day? Sure, most of the time we don’t know who our Prime Minister even is, but being able to order a double-double without having to have a Buck Rogers Rocketship Decoder Ring on is somewhat of a thing of national pride back home. I’m amazed Bush’s first order as commander in chief wasn’t to close down any establishment that confused him, but all that would be left would be the zoo and a Piggly Wiggly on every corner.
"Your eyes is a little red, son"
I closed my eyes, then opened them again slowly, hoping the red would go away with that one cleansing blink. I also hoped this guy wasn’t bright enough to know that I had more than just caffeine running through my veins.
"Not enough sleep and too much coffee."
The truth was I had been flying high since the top of the Bluewater bridge outside of Sarnia. I’d had my arm caught between two five pound plates the day before at work, and although nothing was broken, they still drugged me up. A pretend allergy to codeine usually got you something a little stronger, and when the guy laying in the bed beside you passed out waiting to have his shoulder put back into place by the ever-so speedy Canadian health care system, pocketing his bottle of percacets with my good hand was an easy thing to do. His drugs mixed with mine should do the trick if things go bad south of the border.
Two percs combined with about one litre of sugar laced coffee, topped off by some duty free Bailey’s for the road and I felt like I was in the most relaxed state of awareness I had ever experienced. The buzz was starting to wear off, and this cop was really killing the mood.
"You knows why I pulled ya'll over?"
I looked around to see if there was any one else with me that I didn’t notice. Not a person in sight, so I figured I was the ‘ya'll’ he was referring to."
I had a few guesses as to why I had been pulled over, but the only thing going through my mind was quick flashes of poor Ned Beatty in Deliverance. If the word ‘panties’ escaped this man’s mouth at any point in the conversation, he’d have to shoot me to stop me from running.
"Not a clue, sir."
His eyes perked up a little at hearing the word sir. It was a small word, but not one I figured was used much in this neck of the States.
"Headlights."
"Headlights, sir?"
"Now you can just cut out that sir stuff. My daddy goes by sir, you can just call…"
He kept talking but my mind began to wander. I imagined this man, dressed up in his Sunday best, heading over to his parents house on a Sunday afternoon for some football and a home-cooked meal, still calling his aged parents momma and daddy. It must be so much easier to live such a simple life. No real worries except remembering to wear underwear to work.
"Son?"
"Yeah!"
"So you have some?"
"What? Um… yeah. Sure."
"I can help. Just pop the trunk."
I froze. I had no idea what he was looking for, but there was no way I wanted him going into my trunk. I had stocked up with three cases of beer (Moosehead, Alexander Keiths and Rickard’s Red), a few random duty free bottles, ten rolled joints with enough loose pot for at least twenty more in a cigar box, a vitamin bottle filled with painkillers ranging from Tylenol to Demerol , two vials of hash oil and a Tupperware container of ‘shrooms I planned to use for wither recreational use, or as a part of my cleaver escape if need be from the backwoods of Massillon.
The trooper stopped at my trunk and turned to me with a small smile. Paranoia hit. He must have already known… he could smell it like a bloodhound. It was like a blind person all of a sudden having super-human hearing. This man was inbred so many times that his nose worked at a superhuman level to make up for his oatmeal brain.
"Keys?"
"Um…" I had to think. What the hell was this guy looking for? "I… don’t think it’s in the trunk."
He looked at me like I was talking in a foreign language. Well, I was speaking proper English, so that may have been part of the confusion.
"I think it’s in the back seat…" I said, trying to cover. I looked into the backseat, trying to figure out what I was looking for when I saw it. The bottle of percs was sitting on the backseat and the Bailey’s bottle was sticking out from under the driver’s side seat.
"Ya'll know if that stuff spills on your seats, it’s a son bitch to clean out."
"What is?" I didn’t take my eyes off the pills.
"Window washer fluid. What we’ve been talking about."
Washer fluid? I was confused and just wanted to get the initial meeting with this girl over and done with. Why the hell did this cop want my washer fluid? It was probably the only substance in the car that wasn’t illegal.
"Shit… um. I don’t have any. I just remembered."
The trooper was right in front of me. All he had to do was turn his head to the right and he’d see the pills and booze in the backseat. He had a strange look on his face, as if he was thinking and it hurt a little more then usual, then he said ‘hold on’ and walked quickly to his car.
He rifled through the trunk for a second or two, moving what looked like a shotgun out of his way, then he turned back to me, a rag in one hand and a bottle of washer fluid in another. As he walked back towards me he unscrewed the cap of the fluid and poured it onto the rag. He held the rag up as he walked and all I could picture was the soaked cloth being forced over my face, making me pass out only to wake up a few days later tied up in a shed, shaved from head to toe, wearing a dress and a gag. There was no way this was going to happen.
"What the fuck are you doing?" I yelled. I walked backward with each step he took toward me. When he reached the front of the car I was just about ready to run when he knelt down and began wiping the cloth on the headlights of my car.
As he moved from the first set to the other side of the car, he looked over the hood at me and spoke. "Once it gets dark, ya’ll gonna need to see. There’s a lot of shit caked on here."
My heart was racing and I could taste the coffee and Irish Cream in the back of my throat. I was sweating like it was July and must have looked like a kid who just walked through his first haunted house in a carnival. The trooper finished cleaning off the headlights and showed me the difference, then wished me a happy New Year and was on his way.
I stood by my car, trying to gain my composure. The sun was just going down, it was two days before New Years Eve and I was standing in the middle of nowhere in Ohio, heading to meet a girl I had talked to for about a month that I met online. There was no rhyme or reason to what I was doing. I had walked away from a purely physical relationship with a girl ten minutes from my place to risk meeting a girl seven hours, five hundred kilometers, three states and one country away from me.
A few cars rushed past, heading to God knows where, but I had to laugh since in my mind, that’s exactly where I was headed. From what I knew of the place, it was just a few years ago that they finally took down the Buttfucknowhere sign and actually gave the town a name… Massillon, Ohio.
I looked around me twice, as if I may have missed the serial killer convention going on ten feet away, then I popped the trunk. I pulled out the cigar box, rummaged through the baggie of loose weed and found a small piece of bud, about the size of an M&M. I put everything else back in the cigar box, then pulled a blue pill from the cavalcade of colors in the Vitamin C container. I was pretty sure the blue ones were either Demerol or Codeine, so I popped the blue pill and the bud into my mouth and washed it down with a huge swig from one of the cold, green Moosehead bottles. I had no time to smoke since she was already waiting for me to show up, so I had to settle for the body buzz the weed would give me when it started to digest. It would have a more long term effect this way, probably kicking in at the same time as the pill. I highly recommend this type of intoxication, especially if you’re on your way to meet a girl in Ohio and spend five days together for your first date.
Hell, I recommend drugs and alcohol for just about anything that pertains to being in Ohio for an extended period of time.
To be continued…
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| | Posted 1/8/2006 8:34 AM - 1 view - 5 comments
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