It was the spring of 1986. I was a sophomore at the University of Minnesota and this was my second year of living on campus at the Pioneer Hall dormitory in Minneapolis. I lived with my high school best friend Mark Smith. Instead of sharing a normal single dorm room, we had a sweet suite, one of the few in the building. We each had a small bedroom equipped with a bed, a dresser, a closet and a door leading to a good-sized living room area in the middle. The living room had our desks, a fridge, the TV and a real couch perched on top of beer-case couch that we had made from the leftovers of our numerous beer parties. It was a double-decker couch, much like the one Emmet had thought up in ‘The Lego Movie’. There were no pets allowed in the dorm but we had a 5-foot Ball Python named Damian, a stray cat for part of the year, a dog for a little while, a hermit crab named Jzero, some chameleons that roamed free and a small garter snake named Floyd. (Poor Floyd met an untimely demise one night when he escaped into the hallway where somebody accidentally stepped on him enough to injure him but not to kill him. We never bothered locking our door so the person put Floyd back in his 5-gallon tank where he lived with Jzero. When we got home we were saddened to discover that Jzero had eaten Floyd’s head clean off.) Anyways, it was a great room but it was getting near the end of my second year there and we were thinking it might be time to move out and get actual big-boy apartments.
One day I got mysteriously
called down to the dorm director’s office.
Uh oh…this cannot be good. When I
got there he looked sad, and not sure how to go about saying what he had to
say. He explained that it had been a
tumultuous year for Mark and I with numerous warnings about parties and pot and
noise and whatnot. He then hesitantly
went on to say that with the thin walls, people hear things…things that we do not want them to hear. I mistakenly thought I was just getting a
lecture about our loud parties bothering people. He even went on to say that we should not be
surprised if one day soon the cops showed up…and that we had better be extra
super careful and clean up our act.
Fine, okay, fine…we will keep the noise down I thought to myself. There was less than a month left in the
school year, and then we would definitely be moving out for good I decided.
What I stupidly did not
realize was that this kind man was trying to warn me that the cops were
actually planning a full-blown raid on our dorm room and that we should empty
it of any incriminating evidence. Now
that I think about, he all but told me exactly
that, but I chose not get the message.
That past winter I had scored a grow-light from a friend named Humper
who lived in a frat. He owed me money
and he gave me the light as payment instead.
So naturally we cleared all the stuff out of the closet in my bedroom
and used it to grow pot. We had 18 pot
plants crammed in there which made it a bit difficult for me to sleep because
we kept the bright light on 24 hours/day.
But it would be worth it as we thought of the sweet harvest we had
envisioned for ourselves at the end of the school year. In addition to the plants, Mark also had a
sheet of paper acid (100 hits) that we would eat on the weekends or give to
friends.
It was on Friday, May 30th,
1986 when Mark and I jumped on a Greyhound for the 5-hour bus ride to our
hometown of Waukesha, WI. We left that
Friday morning and planned on coming back Sunday night. Mark had tickets for the Aerosmith concert at
Alpine Valley that night, and I was looking forward to spending the weekend
with my girlfriend Lona who was a senior at Waukesha North. I was at Lona’s parents house Friday night
when I got a frantic call from Mark’s girlfriend Mindy in Minneapolis…the cops
had raided our place that day! I was
panicked…what the hell were we going to do?
I could not even tell Mark about it because he was at the concert. This was way before cell phones or email so
the sketchy reports I was getting from friends in Minneapolis were of little
use. All I could find out was that they
cops were there the entire afternoon and had completely destroyed our place.
I started going over in my
mind all the things that they would find.
The pot…the acid…and oh no, the ‘Stolen Goods Report’. Oh god I hoped Mark had hidden that or took
it with him. Yes, this is embarrassing
to admit, but like stupid sophomore college idiots we had gotten into shoplifting. It was mostly little things like blank
cassette tapes and record albums from the local record shop, but Mark also had
swiped a wheel chair from the hospital a couple blocks away. We had both gotten incredibly proficient at
riding that thing all over the dorm on just the two back wheels and it was a
lot of fun. Eventually the shoplifting
had become somewhat of a competition between Mark and I, so we decided to keep
track in a journal of what we had each taken.
So in the ‘Stolen Goods Report’ we had carefully and painstakingly
documented every single item we took, when, from where, and how much the item
cost. We had one column for Mark, and
one for me. The idea was to tally up at
the end of the year to see who had gotten the most. I got no sleep that Friday night and when I
finally got a hold of Mark the next day he told me that he think he left the
notebook in his room. We were scared
shitless, dreading whatever was waiting for us when we got back to
Minneapolis.
As it turns out, the cops
initially had only been there to bust us for the pot and the acid. They drove a big police van onto the sidewalk
and backed it right up to the front door of the lobby in the picture above. Then they hauled out all 18 pot plants and
loaded them onto the van. From accounts
of friends who were there, it was a very hot day and the overweight cops were
sweating bullets climbing up and down the three flights of stairs lugging all
of our stuff. Then the tedious work
began…looking for the acid which was by now only a half sheet, a piece of paper
maybe 2” by 3”. Between us Mark and I
owned literally hundreds and hundreds of cassette tapes (mostly Grateful Dead
concerts) and many more albums and books and stuff for them to look
through. While looking for the acid one
of the cops happened to spot a notebook sitting on Mark’s desk with ‘STOLEN
GOODS REPORT’ proudly written in large block letters on the cover. Oh my god those cops must have gotten the
biggest laugh when they opened that thing up and passed it around. Yes, every single theft we had ever committed
that year written down in great detail for them. I have never stolen anything in my life since
then.
Luckily we were out of town
when the raid went down which kept us out of jail. But now what?
We got back Sunday night and stayed at Mindy’s house. We waited until 2 am and then snuck back into
the dorm and up to our 3rd floor room to assess the damage. It was horrific. Every single cassette and album had been
opened up a dumped out. Our beds turned
over, all of our dresser drawers taken out and dumped. The dorm room fridge was open, tipped over on
its side, and all the contents strewn about the floor. Other than the Stolen Goods Report (which was
not there so of course the cops had found it) the thing we had been most
worried about was Mark’s acid. Pot was
one thing, but acid was a major felony.
As I surveyed the carnage, Mark ran over to the fridge, tipped it back
upright and HOLY SH*T! There was the acid! Mark kept the paper acid in the fridge to
keep it fresh. The cops had emptied
every single beer can, old piece of pizza, ketchup packet and whatever else was
in there…they had completely emptied it clean except the acid. Mark yelled
to me and I came running over and I looked to where he was pointing. There alone in the fridge proudly sat the
little sheet of acid. PHEWWW! We grabbed the acid, some clean clothes, our
schoolbooks and got the hell out of there.
With the acid problem off the
table, now we just had to face the music of the pot plants and the stolen
stuff. We stayed at Mindy’s apartment
for about a week trying to figure out what to do. We had so many questions. Were the cops looking for us? Were they staking out the dorm or our classes
or friends? Who had turned us in? Were we facing serious jail time? We still had another week of school and
finals to get through, but we did not go to the dorm for fear of being caught
and we were equally nervous about going to our classes. We were officially ‘on the lam’. We could not afford a lawyer so we had Mindy
make an anonymous call to the cops from a pay phone. She told them that we were in town and we
wanted to know what was next. The head
detective was a nice lady and said that a warrant had not been issued yet, but
would be soon unless we came in to talk to her.
We had Mindy call her back with a time to meet and with the condition
that we would not be tossed into jail.
She agreed. We would be booked,
but not jailed.
So we nervously went down to
the cop-shop and were led to her office.
She was an incredibly nice lady who had done her homework on us. We were both good students who were smart in
school but f*cking dumbasses otherwise.
She showed us the evidence room where the 18 plants were slowly dying
and she said she felt bad about that.
Then she laughingly pulled out the Stolen Good Report, plopped it on the
table in front of us and shook her head at how easy we had made her job. But then she grabbed Mark’s shirt with two
hands, jokingly shook him around and said:
“Off the record…WHERE WAS THE ACID?!
I was there all day opening every single goddamn cassette tape looking
for that sh*t! Was it in the snake cage? I opened the cover to the wooden box, took
one look inside and slammed it shut. You
could have had a pound of heroin, I was not going in there.” Now it was our turn
to laugh. Still grinning Mark explained
to her that it was in the fridge…that it was the only thing left in there after they had emptied it. “Dammit!!” she yelled. But she got it over it. They had plenty to bust us with. Apparently the dorm RA had heard us talking
about drugs in our room and that was enough for the cops to get a warrant and
raid us. If only I had heeded the dorm
director’s ominous warning about the impending raid.
This has gotten long enough
so I will save the rest. I will explain
in the next blog entry how our court dates went, our punishment, and how we got
through all of that mess. Until then remember,
don’t do drugs and stay in school.
