It began, as it always does, with beer. It was my first trip to New Orleans, in October 2004, to see Voodoo Fest with my girlfriend Melissa. We had checked into our hotel and caught a cab to City Park, tickled by the novelty of legally drinking beer in a moving vehicle. But as we walked into the festival, those two beers and hours on the road caught up with me. I needed immediate bladder relief.
Two hundred yards into the park, we came to a porta-pottie—one porta-pottie with a line 25 people long. Fortunately, this was a park, and there were heavy bushes not far from the porta-pottie. I have no problem urinating amid nature's grandeur, but I'm not an exhibitionist. I looked around carefully to be sure I was unobserved and got down to business.
As I finished, a New Orleans police cruiser slid to a stop on the other side of the bushes, gravel flying from the wheels. Two officers, a short black woman and a white man with sunglasses and a buzz cut, jumped out and ran around the bushes. In seconds, they had clamped the cuffs down so hard on my wrists that they held the mark for hours. You can't take any risks with a pee terrorist.
Buzz-cut studied my Wisconsin driver's license. "You pee outside in Wisconsin, boy?"
"Yes sir," I answered.
"Then you're stupid everywhere."
They pulled me over to the cruiser, and that's when I realized I had been caught by a pee sting. A group of officers was standing about 200 yards away from the lone porta-pottie, observing it with binoculars, waiting for desperation to lure tourists over to the bushes.
As they shoved me down into the cruiser, with Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation" booming across the park, Melissa ran up to the car. "What did he do?" she asked. "Where are you taking him?"
"Step away from the car, ma'am," the black woman said.
Melissa asked again and was ignored, so adopting her thickest Mississippi accent, she said, "I guess this is why New Orleans cops have the reputation they do."
That was all it took. Buzz-cut hopped out of the car and cuffed her, too. She was charged with public intoxication, though they never tested her, and resisting arrest, though she held her wrists out for the cuffs.
They took us to the dilapidated, filthy Orleans Parish Prison, the envy of Guatemalan jailers. The benches in the holding cells were crowded with African American men in tattered clothing. The walls were smeared with blood and filth. When a jailer in a stiff brown uniform passed, I asked how I could post bail. He yelled at me to keep my mouth shut.
There were men foaming at the mouth, going through withdrawal, laying on the floor. I had a yellow bracelet, while other men had orange or red. An old man who seemed to go to jail a lot told me that the yellow band was the best kind. One man in an orange prison jumper kept lifting up his pant leg to look at a huge roll of gauze on his thigh seeping through with blood. He had been shot through the leg, and he was wearing a red bracelet.
"You gonna be outta here in no time," the men reassured me with a hint of envy.
Hours passed. Sometimes the jailers would herd us together into a new cell so they could hose out the old one for new arrivals. When the jailers ignored our pleas for a man convulsing on the floor, one of the older prisoners remarked, "They can do what they want to an old man like me, but the youngsters, they hit 'em with a fitty caliber."
Eventually, I learned that my bail was $800, though no one explained how I could pay it. I kept waiting for the moment when an officer would sit me down at a desk and say: "Here are the charges, and here are your options. You can either post bail, hire a bail bondsman or spend the night in jail. Which will it be?" That moment never came.
At midnight, the jailer in charge unlocked our door and herded us over toward property holding. Men began to hand over their wallets and other valuables. I realized with dread that they were going to send us to jail. They started to issue plastic bags for street clothes along with the orange pajamas printed OPP.
My name was called. I went to the desk. There was a middle-aged African American woman, her hair tightly braided.
"How do I post bail?" I asked softly. "I have money. I can pay my bond with this."
I held out a credit card. She gave a nervous glance to the head jailer and told me they didn't take cards. I could call a bondsman who might. With her permission, I hurried over to a phone and was told that as long as my card cleared, I'd be out in 45 minutes. When the head jailer heard I'd posted bond, he yelled at the woman who had helped me because, he said, my form was already in back. He showed me a plastic bag with my name on it and shook his head. I was released two hours later, at 2 a.m.
When I stepped outside, I was so full of joy that I gave a friendly crackhead $10—obviously, my karma needed work. Melissa's mother had already wired money for her release, but the jailers said it had not come. I asked them what would happen if it came through after I paid, and they assured me that the system would automatically reject two payments. I posted her bail, and they kept the extra $615 from Melissa's mother for more than a month.
Melissa had already been put in orange and transferred to the jail, but they kept her another four hours after she was back in her clothes. She was released at 6 a.m.
Two days later, we went before a judge. I pled no contest, but when Melissa tried to do the same, the judge refused her plea. He could not believe that this pretty girl from Mississippi had resisted arrest, so he made her plead innocent. Altogether, the adventure cost us $600.
As we sat in court, hundreds of black men were sentenced to months in jail for petty offenses. Hundreds of New Orleans officers abandoned their posts after Katrina, and others were arrested for looting. Thousands of men and women were abandoned in the OPP during the storm, left locked in cells with water up to their chests for days. Every year, officers are indicted for police brutality, corruption or even murder, and the FBI never seems done investigating the NOPD.
If you're headed to Voodoo Fest this weekend, by all means, have a good time, but take this friendly word of advice. Whatever you do, don't pee on a bush.
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