Call me Atticus Kodiak

Well, no. No really.

It was funny though, I had to play bodyguard for a friend.

She had a little DUI issue a while back, and it was time to pay the piper. Community service.

It turns out that, at least here, in the Santa Clara Valley, the way they administer this program requires that you show up down town across the street from county jail. You wait with 200 other imperfectly law abiding citizens (there on the group W bench) until they call you in for processing.

Now this friend is a 50-something career woman/housewife type. Educated, east-coasty. She went to one of those big east coast lesbians and liberals schools like bryn mawr or wellesley or something. She’s as white as white chicks get.

So she had the image of herself, and 200 of the biggest, scariest un-jailed felons you’ve ever seen (Mother Rapers! Father Stabbers!).

So what’s a lady gonna do? Simple. Bring the scariest person she knows to babysit her.

I must admit, even though it meant I had to get up two hours early and head downtown with a too-many-martinis hangover on a saturday morning, that I liked the idea of being a bodyguard.

Turns out the scene could not have looked much less threatening. Yeah, there were a lot of mexican guys standing around, but they’re all as sleepy and hung over as I am. Honestly, most of these guys sort of got out of my way. I was in motorcycle leathers and had my helmet in my hand (and a motorcycle helmet doubles as a weapon in a pinch), and for the most part I didn’t get any jail-house attitude from anyone. The fact that there were armed sheriffs and guards as far as the eye could see helped with this I’m sure.

My poor friend though, all she could see was that she seemed to be the only white woman there (latina gang chicks aplenty though), and that this was really, really not her universe.

There were sheriffs busses lined up out front.

“Oh my god Karl, am I going to have to get on a bus?”

“Think of it as a field trip like at school”

“Oh. A field trip… It’s a field trip…”

She was lucky enough that they started calling people in soon as we got there. She never had a chance to panic.

You’d think I’d have been through this process, wouldn’t you? I mean, all the stupid things I did in my twenties. And it’s not like I’ve never seen the inside of a police car and never arrived at a jail in handcuffs. But some reason I never got this part of it. I’m taking notes about the whole experience though. Authors can use this sort of material.

“I had to pay fifty dollars and pick up the garbage in the snow…”