I love walking. It is, hands down, the best possible means of getting from point A (here defined as the place where you currently find yourself) to point B (here defined as that place where you wish to be); provided of course you don’t have to keep perambulating for more than thirty minutes, and that you don’t have too much stuff to carry.

I have a long history of bipedal locomotion. That said I present for your consideration . . . my two most unfortunate walks. {car crashes and time spent in jail present in this post}

I used to live in Connecticut; one night I was attending a party at a college campus. Drunk is just a word, there are moments when inebriation reaches heights unknowable to all but the determined few, perhaps unfortunate, persons who have been there.

At any rate, I am rumoured to have been funneling beers all evening and have simply disappeared from the ’scene’ occupied by the people I knew. I know that I had a number of beers in my backpack when I was suddenly confronted by a campus rent-a-cop who wanted to know who it was that I knew on the campus. Since I didn’t want this authority figure venturing anywhere near my compatriots (after all I knew what they were up to) I refused to answer the question.

No-one reading this should be surprised to learn that this answer didn’t go over so terribly well, nor will it come as a surprise that I wound up performing public service as a result of this evening.

Fact of the matter is that I wound up hand-cuffed, although at one point I did succeed in standing up off the space of grassland that I had been placed upon, and stating that since I was not being informed why I was hand-cuffed, obviously I was not under arrest and therefore free to go, (you can still see the scars from this particular piece of obstinacy on my wrists).

I’d never ridden in a paddy-wagon before, (for those of you who have never had the pleasure, it’s not terrible comfortable, however the conversation tends towards interesting: I think here of the gentleman in the bathrobe who would not stop lamenting the fact that he answered the door in the first-place, nevermind the fact that he’d done so with paraphernalia in his hand), nor had I spent the night in jail. My final thought would be that the food sucks, and anytime that you cannot have your shoe-laces providing their much-needed and generally unappreciated function; many other things about your present status suck as well.

My firmest memory of the drunk-tank is of refusing to take the little numbered board away from my face unless they provided me with a copy of my mug-shot. I certainly remember saying . . . “What, don’t you guys have a gift shop?”

Drink enough and you’ll pass out anywhere, even the unforgiving wood-slabs that pass as a bed in a holding cell.

I also know that every piece of paper that was pushed in front of me was signed ‘Jesus Christ’, which might explain why, upon my release, the cans of beer I had in my backpack had all been punctured and left to marinate with my wallet, shoelaces, and every other personal possession I had about me in the large plastic bag that I was presented with when at last I was turned loose into the incredibly painful sunshine.

I had no money on me, and having lived in Connecticut for less than a year, had no real idea of where I was. I scanned to horizon for large buildings, figured that they must mean Hartford, and decided to head there.

When I pulled my possessions out of the plastic bag, everything dripped and stank of beer. I walked for hours, I hadn’t been able to put my shoe-laces back into my shoes and I know I looked terrible by the time I hit downtown Hartford. We all like to believe that we can appear suave despite our circumstances, but people were making sudden, alarmed movements toward the opposite side of the street as I approached.

Unfortunate walk number one, I will never forget shuffling through downtown Hartford without shoe-laces, in the grip of an intensely painful hangover, trying to find my bearings, and reeking of booze. It took me about four hours to get back to my apartment.

The second was a few years later, living in Florida at this point and beginning to train for that dream of profound absurdity described previously in History. There I am on my mountain bike, working up a good sweat, gliding along a lovely bike-trail in Miami when all of a sudden I come across a drive-way, and here approaches a truck which (in what I can only describe as a sequence of slow-evolving revelations) I realize is not going to stop at the lovely white lines which denote my bike path.

In real time it’s only an instant between visual awareness of a beat-up old pickup and physical awareness of hood and then windshield underneath my flesh as the bike went one way, and I another. Grateful for not being seriously wounded I found my way off the vehicle and was in a deeply stunned state when the driver of said pickup, which had only moments ago served as a sort of couch for me, began screaming at me in Spanish.

I admit that the vast majority of the time it took to make unfortunate walk number two was spent dreaming up proper responses to the situation I’d found myself in, plumbing the depths of my limited understand of Spanish for those couple of curse words I knew and trying to insert them into coherent sentences that I would never get the chance to use. At the moment itself, I just sort of stared at the guy, stunned with both physical impact and utter disbelief.

In the time it took to get my hands on my bike, my antagonist was in his truck and gone. The bike hadn’t suffered excessively, ultimately it just needed a good tune-up; and a new front wheel, mine was bent. No riding back for me; a good hour and a half to refine my insults, feel the slow bloom of bruises and the onset of stiffness around the knee that had taken the brunt of impact, bike up on its back wheel being pushed in front of me.

I was just thinking about this one the other day, out walking and was almost struck by an incredibly impatient mini-van at an intersection. Flashed me right back to Florida; walking through the heat, at least as irate as I’ve ever been. Which led naturally to the walk back from custody, and I had a marvelous time reminiscing to the beat laid out as my feet took me towards that point known as B, (defined again as that place where you wish to be) which awaited me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 9:22 pm and is filed under indiscriminate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.