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Don’t do the right thing; it pays no dividends. I did the right thing once, back in ’96. We were shooting a film out by the state line. On the California side, there’s a little desert town by the name of Nipton. Not much of a town, really. It’s the intersection of two-lane blacktop and train tracks, with a few rusting buildings that earn it a name like Nipton.
We thought it would be great to party at the casinos on the Nevada side all night, then drive out to the railroad crossing to shoot our film during the day. We’d make a weekend of it. We were film students, having a good time.
It all went south on the afternoon of the first day of the shoot, when the train came.
We were in between takes, the actors were working out the next scene with the director, and when I saw that freight train rolling toward us from a few miles off, I had an idea.
Wouldn’t a shot of the train coming straight on look great? So I grabbed the camera, squatted down on the tracks, zoomed through the rising heat of the day to the mirage-like image of the approaching diesel engine, and rolled film. One, two, three, then four seconds and I was back off the tracks just as the irate horn of the locomotive began its incessant scream.
I was back with the rest of the crew as we watched the conductor pass us by, hanging out his window, shaking his fist in rage and hollering almost loud enough to be heard over the screeching of the brakes.
It was then, when we realized this mile-long freighter was coming to a stop, with an apoplectic engineer at its helm, because of me, that we decided it was time to leave. We hurriedly threw the gear into the cars and the production team vanished back to the safety of Whiskey Pete’s Hotel & Casino.
To my later regret, this is where I made the mistake of doing what I thought was the right thing. I stayed behind to accept the responsibility for this inexplicably escalating situation.
A mile-long train takes some time to come to a complete stop, and once it did, the train driver had a quarter mile to stomp back to me, all the while madly gesticulating and ejaculating, “YougoddamnedstupidsonuvabtichferChristssakeIcouldakilledya!” I had a rapidly diminishing time and distance to avoid the physical throttling that was storming at me, but with a steady delivery of sincere apologies and obsequious yessirs, I cooled his hot head, and soon enough we were the best of friends.
It was too bad that he had radioed for the police while he was stopping the train, and he apologized to me for that, but here they came anyway.
You wouldn’t figure that there’d be a prompt police response to the middle of nowhere, but coincidentally enough, the Union Pacific Police – who knew? Train cops! – were conducting a sting operation on boxcar theft in the area, and so within minutes eight officers and a K-9 unit roared up on us with flashing lights and blaring sirens. Lengthy interrogations, a group chuckle over the absurdity of the whole affair, and a friendly goodbye to the engineer preceded my misdemeanor citation for trespassing on railroad property.
The next three months, awaiting my trial date, were miserably apprehensive. I wrote a letter to the good people of Union Pacific explaining my transgression, apologizing again for my youthful indiscretion, and asking for their legal forgiveness.
The reply was understanding, consoling, and unyielding. I would be going to trial.
The dread of my impending day in court was only exacerbated by the location of the courthouse, in Barstow - a three hour drive from my home in San Diego. You can only feel one of two ways about a place like Barstow: indifference or hatred. I now transitioned from the former to the latter. Barstow apparently holds jurisdiction over the middle of nowhere, and appropriately so, as it’s just down the I-15 from there.
Barstow. If your meth habit has priced you out of Victorville, to the west, or the World’s Tallest Thermometer in Baker, to the east, is excessively exotic, you live in Barstow. While the Inuit may have seven words to describe snow, there’s not enough variants of dull in the English language to faithfully depict Barstow. I got food poisoning in Barstow once, and that’s the best thing that ever happened to me there.
But once those three excruciating months had passed, I made that miserable drive, prepared to receive a sentence worthy of my crime. The fact that I showed up on the appointed day, at the appointed time, made it all the more infuriating for me when the clerk explained that, due to an error of paperwork, I’d have to reschedule my appearance before the judge.
“Come back in three months.” Oh, I fucking hate Barstow.
And so I drove three hours back home, passed three more months, intimidation replaced by irritation, and once more made that interminable drive back to Barstow. This time, I was gratefully relieved to plead my guilt.
Real court is no Law & Order. It’s much more like Welcome Back, Kotter with cheap suits and no humour. There’s the addicts, the deadbeats, the delinquents, and me. The magistrate passed his judgments and banged his gavel right down the line until he got to me.
My explanations followed his questions, there was more mutual amusement over the absurdity of the whole affair, he let me know that he understood I was just a dumb kid who’d done a dumb kid thing, and then he fined me four hundred bucks and gave me three years’ probation.
So now I was $400 poorer, and if I crossed the Law in any way for the next three years, I’d go to jail for six months, period. This made the rest of my college career, at one of the nation’s top-ranked party schools, an unnecessarily stressful era.
I made it, though - didn’t screw up once the whole time. In fact, I’ve remained a reasonably upstanding citizen ever since. It wasn’t until recently, more than a decade later, that I was reminded that I still have a criminal record. And being the upstanding citizen that I now am, I decided that I should have it expunged.
This was the second mistake I made.
When you fight the Law, and the Law invariably wins, there’ll be another price to pay, above and beyond whatever fine, jail time, or probationary period is handed down to you. The hidden penalty, the one you don’t even consider until, say, a decade after your transgression is this: you are now part of the System.
And once you’re a part of the System, there’s no getting out.
Having been convicted in California, I assumed (and who does that make an ass of?) that I could go to any courthouse in the state, file the obligatory, abundant forms, and be free and clear of my criminal history.
Nope. While I did enjoy waiting in line at the clerk’s office, which is not surprisingly like being at a casting call for COPS, I was not at all pleased to hear what the lady behind the counter had to say once I reached the counter.
“You can’t file those papers here. You’ll have to go to Barstow for that.”
You know what? I like my juvenile delinquency. It was a comedic crime with a good story, and I’d rather carry it around with me for the rest of my well-behaved life than go back to Barstow. Fuck Barstow.
2 Comments
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I love the description “Two-Lane Blacktop.” So did the guys who made the movie…
this is great. and fun writing. thanks york.