In the last blog entry I told you about my dorm room getting raided on May 30th, 1986. How my roommate Mark and I got busted for growing 18 pot plants, as well as for theft due to the cops finding our ‘Stolen Goods Report’ carefully detailing all of the stuff we had shoplifted over the school year. After being on the lam for about a week, Mark’s girlfriend Mindy made an arrangement with the cops for us to turn ourselves in on the condition that we would not be immediately jailed. After meeting with the friendly female detective in charge of our case, our next step was to go to court.
I got charged with possession
of marijuana which was a misdemeanor, and theft of goods totaling less than
$400 which was also a misdemeanor. Mark was actually facing much more
trouble than me, because he had been ‘winning’ the stealing competition.
The wheelchair he had stolen was worth close to $400, and with the addition of
the dozens of other littler items he had stolen his total was well over the
$400 felony threshold. He would have been facing felony theft charges
except for the incredible coolness of our understanding detective.
Recognizing that we were a couple of idiot college students with a future if we
stayed out of trouble, not a pair of lifelong master criminals, she charged
Mark with something like 25 counts of misdemeanor theft. Instead of
totaling all of the goods and charging him with a felony, she broke it down to
a misdemeanor theft charge for each individual item. Apparently a ton of
misdemeanors is better than even just one felony.
In addition to that bit of
kindness, the detective made recommendations to the court that we do no jail
time, that we complete a large number of community service hours, and that
after our probationary period our records would be wiped clean. No adult
criminal record. Holy crap. Would
it fly? The judge sat up in his bench for about 10 minutes reading over
our case. I anxiously watched his face.
Sometimes he furrowed his brow in disgust, sometimes it wrinkled with
laughter, and then his brow raised in surprise.
Really? The cops were
recommending community service and then a clean record? He conferred with
our public defender and with the prosecutor for a bit and then he finally brought
forth his judgment. We pleaded guilty to all of our misdemeanors, and in
turn he sentenced me to 150 hours of community service for my 2 charges, and
Mark to 200 hours of community service for his pile of charges. We would
be on probation for 1 year, and then if we remained out of trouble during that
time the charges would be wiped from our records. The University of
Minnesota had also put us on probation, so we were currently on probation from
the State of Minnesota, the U of M, and the State of Wisconsin (see the ‘Busted
In Trempealeau, Parts I-IV’ blog posts dated 9/9/11-9/16/11).
So no jail time, but now we
had to deal with what seemed like a million hours of working for free.
They let us both leave to go to our parents’ homes in Waukesha, WI for the
summer, but in the fall when we returned to college we would have to start
knocking off our community service hours. So that September we went back
to the cop shop and were shown a list of places that we could work at. We told them where we lived and our school
schedules and what days and times were best for us, and they picked the places
for us to work. Mark ended up being assigned to the police station doing
filing work, while I got sentenced to a crazy holy place. I cannot
remember the name of it, but it was in a street-level office building on E.
Hennepin Avenue near the St. Anthony Main area.
The location was great because it was only a few blocks from my
apartment off 4th street, and it was right across the street from my
favorite place in the whole world, Surdyk’s Liquor.
The first time I went in to
start working my hours, I stopped by Surdyk’s beforehand to pick up some wine
for later that night. They were simply
appalled and many eyebrows were raised when I walked in carrying a bag full of
the devil’s elixir. The place was a
fundamental super-religious sect that took the bible extremely seriously. Their world had no room or tolerance for
booze and they made sure I was aware of that with a lecture on the evils of
alcohol. I promised to never drink again
and then my training commenced. Mostly I
would just be stuffing envelopes with fliers to send to their members to raise
money. They also made money by selling
cassette tapes of their teachings. They
had a huge old cassette duplicator thing that was as a big as a stacked
washer/dryer and sometimes they would let me make tapes. That was fun because I was way into making
Grateful Dead tapes at the time. I
thought about bringing some in so I could mass produce like 20 copies of a show
at a time, but I was pretty sure they would frown upon anything related to the
Grateful Dead.
One time I went in there with
a slight limp. I cannot remember why, probably
a sprained ankle playing soccer. So one
of the guys asked me what was wrong and I told them that my right leg is
slightly longer than my left (which is true) so I limp sometimes. Before I knew what was happening he had
grabbed me and thrown me up on a table and told me to lie down. Then he called everyone in the building over
to the table and they started chanting and ‘laying hands’ on me. What the f*ck?! I was a little freaked out at first but I
decided to go with it. While about 5 or
6 of these people laid their hands on various parts of my body and chanted, the
head weirdo started tugging on my left leg while beseeching the lord to: “Make this boy’s leg grow in the name of
Jesus!” After three or four times
yelling at Jesus he started to look worried and I felt bad, so I suddenly
jerked my left leg forward just a little bit.
“Sweet precious lord it’s a miracle!!”
they all shouted over and over again.
After yelling for awhile and some high fives around the table, they all
dissipated back to whatever they were doing and left me alone to stuff
envelopes.
They seemed like pretty happy
people which I am all for, but I received a few lectures during my times there
about the dark path I had chosen. Whatever
happened to separation of church and state?
I found it very hard to believe I was sentenced by the state to work for this wacked out church place. I resented the lectures and having their
views thrust on me, but mostly I just let it go and tried not to rock the boat
because as it turned out they were also a very trusting people. This worked to my advantage because they let me be in charge of my work log. I would go in on say a Friday for the first
time in two weeks, and log that I had been there that Monday and Wednesday, and
3 days the prior week as well. I would
go in for 2 hours and log about 20 hours.
Nobody seemed to catch on or care when I came or went, so out of the 150
hours of my sentence I probably put in about 20 or 25 at most. Mark was jealous and a little bit pissed off
because he certainly had to do his full 200 hours…he was not going to get away
with fudging the numbers at the police station.
I finished my community
service hours in a couple months, and after a year when the probation ended it
was all over. It was scary at times but
I learned a few things. I learned not to
steal things. I learned not to grow pot
in dorm rooms. I learned that Thomas
Jefferson’s separation of church and state theory does not apply to stupid
college sophomores. And I learned that
not all cops are created equal. Some of
them are people too and can be pretty cool.
Probably most of them, but I would not know because I try to avoid them. I have not always succeed as you may have
read in past entries, and maybe in some future ones as well.
