Mark Tufo - A Plague Upon Your Family

“Twenty one.” As I gulped down what I had just drank.

“Got any ID to that affect?”

Five minutes later I was handcuffed and in the cruiser. Minor in possession.

Talbot – 1, Cops - 2

TALBOTSODE #4

Alright so you are starting to get a recurring theme. Talbot plus alcohol, bad. It was freshman year at college. My buddy Paul and I were hanging out in the common grounds of our new school just partying it up with some other people. We were having a good time playing Frisbee. Holy shit now that I’m writing this down, maybe it’s the Frisbee that attracts the trouble, food for thought.

Eventually Campus 5-0 shows up. They’re about as intimidating as mall cops.

They tell us we need to get rid of our beer. My friends all start pouring their beers on the ground, like we had done so many times before with local cops. But see that’s not what I heard. I took the literal translation. I started pounding my beers down. I was two beers down and going for my third before the shocked cop could even begin to react. I just think he was so amazed that somebody wasn’t complying with him, but in my defense I feel that I was. He said, ‘Get rid of those beers.’ He never once said how and that’s what I told him.

He was effen pissed as he slapped the bottle out of my hand and maybe a little amused. He chewed me a new one for a minute or two but didn’t give me a ticket. So I figure that’s a win for me because up until the day the zombies came that was still a source of amusement among me and my friends.

“Oh dude, you remember that time. That cop told us to get rid of our beers and you just started drinking all of yours?”

Of course I do, that shits hilarious!

Talbot – 2, Cops – 2

TALBOTSODE #5

This next story once again does involve alcohol. It was my first foray into a more serious realm of difficulty and more importantly I now had a record. It started off innocently enough as most things like this do. It was the summer after freshman year and I had gone to one of my high school buddies house for a party. He used to live in an awesome house right next to a lake. You could literally walk off his backyard and into the water.

The party went as you would expect most parties to go, there was beer drinking, much raucous noise, loud music and the occasional couple necking in discreet corners. Chris Walsh changed all this when he committed the most heinous of party fouls. He passed out first. I’m not much into what happened to him next, but if you pass out first, it’s pretty much an unwritten rule you’re going to get fucked with. He got the typical sharpie treatment to the face, you know ‘Insert Penis Here’ and then someone drew an actually pretty good replica of a penis next to the message. I came back later to find out that someone had busted open some make-up and applied some liberal amounts of eye shadow and rouge. He was the ugliest hooker I had ever seen.

When it became evident that these small time measures were not going to awaken Sleeping Beauty, the ringleaders upped the ante. They wrapped him up in a blanket, walked him through a cheering crowd in the backyard, I might have been one of them, to the end of the pier and then unceremoniously threw him and the blanket into the water. At the end of the pier the water is somewhere in the 3 foot range, entirely too shallow to drown in, under normal circumstances. But when you are passed out drunk and wrapped tightly in a blanket the equation changes a bit.

The trio that had carried Chris and then dropped him in the water had walked off the pier and were busy high-fiving themselves. A few party goers, myself included were beginning to become concerned when Chris didn’t immediately surface spitting out lake water. This girl Maureen was the first into the water. Her friend Sandra was next, followed almost immediately by myself. By the time I got in the water the party was quiet. Someone had even lowered the music to a dull whisper. Maureen had grabbed the soaked blanket and was dragging it ashore, Sandra and myself quickly aided her.

Within a few seconds, we had the frantically thrashing about Chris on the shore. He looked like a butterfly trying to shake its cocoon. He wasn’t having much luck. He had been moving so violently to get free that he cracked Maureen in the side of the head with his fist as she helped him. She fell to the ground with a solid thump. Chris was enraged as he stood, screaming at the now cowering Maureen.

Everything seemed to slow down as he picked up a fist-sized rock. He raised it high over his head and was threatening Maureen. Terror showed in the whites of her eyes. If he brought that rock down it would be all over for her. Nobody moved. It seemed like the moment was frozen in time. I didn’t think, I reacted. In the four steps it took me to get to him I was going full speed. It’s amazing what adrenaline can do for you. I didn’t punch him, I didn’t tackle him, I didn’t try to swat the rock out of his hand, I just full on slammed into him, right into his back. Maureen scrambled out of the way as the both of us toppled like cut trees in a forest. Chris had brought his hands in to brace for the fall, unfortunately one of them was still clutching the rock. The force of me landing on him drove his face and chin into the stone. The horrifying crack that resounded from the rock shattering his teeth and jaw was ear splitting. When I got off of Chris and he rolled over I thought he was wearing a mask. What remained of his jaw line was two inches left of center. Seven teeth had been shattered and blood poured profusely through his nose and mouth. More than one person came up to help only to walk away retching. I stumbled away stunned. I hadn’t made it more than three steps before Chris’ mournful wailing began. If I thought the bones breaking was bad, this was horrible. An ambulance showed up within minutes, the cops a minute or two after that. They found me sitting in the living room, drinking a beer. They let me finish it before they arrested me. I was charged with attempted manslaughter. It was dropped down to assault after the police figured out that I had nothing to do with the initial near drowning.

Talbot 2 – Cops 3

TALBOTSODE #6

This final encounter with the police is what saved me and my family’s life. When I was a kid, nineteen, I used to work for a small Paving Company. We were working in downtown Boston and if you work on any street in Boston you have to have a police detail for traffic. So its high summer, it had to have been 90 degrees and 90% humidity. Crappy combination to begin with. Then you throw on top of that the 375 degrees of the material we are working with and you have a recipe, not so much for disaster but definitely for flaring tempers. My job that day was to operate the 10 ton street roller. As the paving spreader machine lays down roadway it is my job to follow behind and compact the material down.

Before the asphalt is rolled it is a very soft and pliable material so much so that a man walking across it can mar the new surface up to two inches deep, not to mention what a car can do to this new material. Well our traffic detail cop decided that he was going to let crossing traffic go across the new hot top. I asked him for just two minutes so that I could get the roadway rolled and at least reasonably ready to withstand traffic. He didn’t listen. What happens to cops that they get such an arrogant attitude about them? I know they deal daily with some of the scummiest people on the planet but to become so jaded to the rest of us doesn’t make any sense. You would think that they would want to cling to those people that are the reason they do the job in the first place. Somewhere along the way they must have lost their people GPS.

In a nutshell he basically tells me to ‘Go fuck myself’. No matter that this cop is the dick that lets the traffic cross over, I’m going to be the one blamed for letting the pavement get ruined. so I gunned the engine on the roller and was now traveling somewhere in the whopping 4 mph range. I was going to try to get at least one roll through before the cars started across. All the cop could see was this giant machine bearing down on him. So even though he could have made himself a sandwich and half finished it before I got to him I was charged with intent to commit harm with a deadly weapon. Are you kidding me? A toddler could have outdistanced me, but this fat, doughnut eating, cynical prick was just pissed off that I held up the traffic. The life I was living came to an abrupt halt as I stood in that court room.