I lived at the Pioneer Hall dormitory on campus at the University of Minnesota for my first two years of college, from September of 1984 through May of 1986. While there I had a few run-ins with the cops. One notable time was during my first year there. Our dorm was attached by an underground tunnel to the dorm next door called Frontier Hall, and we shared a basement cafeteria with them. One night I was in my friend Ron Bronson’s room in Frontier Hall with Ron, his roommate Paul, Rinehart Simpson who lived across the hall, and one or two other guys. Paul was a rich kid from Colorado who had an expensive high school cocaine habit. He had pretty much quit doing blow when he got to college, but occasionally he would still splurge and have some fun. This was one of those nights. While we were all sitting around smoking pot he suddenly pulled out a 12”x12” Van Halen carnival mirror and dumped a gram of coke on it. Yay! Coke is a pretty crappy drug for many reasons but it was fun every once in awhile, especially if you did not have to pay for it.
We had been having a heated
discussion about the breakup of Pink Floyd and which one is ‘Pink’…Roger Waters
or David Gilmour. I love Gilmour, but I have always been more in the Rogers
Waters camp. I was going to help prove
my case by having the group listen to a kickass Roger Waters bootleg cassette I
had of a recent concert at Madison Square Garden. In the dorms we had been warned many times
about smoking pot so we were very careful about SLT’ing (Shut/Lock/Towel
the bottom of) the door whenever we smoked.
I removed the towel covering the bottom of Ron’s door and left to run
over to my dorm room and get the Waters tape.
Ron’s room was the very last room at the end of a hallway, and on the third
floor. I walked the length of the
hallway and turned left to get on the elevator to go down to the basement
tunnel to my dorm. As I turned the
corner I literally ran smack into the dorm’s Resident Assistant (RA) and a cop! After bouncing off his belly, the RA gave me
a sad but stern look and wordlessly they made the turn heading for what I was
sure was Ron’s room. Despite our precautions,
the RA must have smelled the pot and called the cops.
My first thought was huge
relief that I was no longer in that room.
My second thought was “Oh sh*t, the coke!” Pot was bad enough, but if my friends opened
the door thinking it was just me
coming back and they had the mirror sitting out it would be big trouble. As soon as the cop/RA turned the corner I ran
past the elevator to the adjacent stairwell and ran down the three flights of
stairs as fast as I could. When I got
down to the lobby a few precious seconds later I grabbed one of the two lobby phones
and called Ron’s room. He picked up and
said “Hi.” and in the background I could hear loud knocking on their door. “Cops, ditch everything! Cops ditch everything!!” I yelled. Then in order to make my point and hopefully get
him moving instantly, I slammed the receiver down loudly as I hung up. I walked over to my dorm, drank a beer in my
room and hoped for the best.
I waited about a half-hour
and then called the room. Ron answered, gave
a weak laugh and said: “God, thank you
man, come over.” When I got there the
gang was hanging out talking about what happened, while Paul was sitting on the
corner of his bed looking in the Van Halen mirror and making strange faces with
his mouth. Ron told me that the second I
hung up he motioned for everyone to hide the drugs. Somebody stashed the weed under a mattress
while Paul grabbed the mirror. He did not
want to dump $100 worth of drugs on the floor, but he did not want to risk being
caught with it either. So he quickly huffed
the entire pile of coke into his mouth!
Then he licked the mirror clean and slid it under a pile of junk. When everything looked cool Ron answered the door
and let the cop and the RA in.
Luckily they did not search
the place, but they had smelled the weed and my friends got a written warning from the RA and a stern lecture
from the cop about the evils of marijuana…how it is leading them down a dark
path, that the next time they will bring a warrant and search the rooms and
they will all end up in jail. The cop
questioned each guy in there if they were smoking pot and if there was any in
the room. Everyone denied it vehemently,
but when they got to poor Paul he could barely talk. Not only was he nervous and getting all
jacked up from the instant ingestion of an entire gram of cocaine, but his mouth
was completely insanely numb from it. Imagine
getting a dozen shots of Novocain in your upper/lower gums and your
tongue. He was all mush-mouthed and doing
his best to keep from drooling while answering the cop’s questions. “No thir…I havth nod been thmoking weed.” The cop looked at him curiously and asked
what was wrong with him, but Paul told him he had a really bad cold and the cop
left him alone.
All’s well that ends well,
but remember kids…don’t do drugs, and stay in school.
