I was twenty, twenty-one, maybe. So we're talking twenty-five years ago. I was not in a good place. I was two years into a three year relationship that was doomed. We fought all the time, and it wasn't always her fault. We were both emotional basket cases. I was a community college dropout, working as a nanny. I'd been out on my own for a couple of years after my mom had kicked me out of the house for fucking up in school. Barely an adult myself, I had developed a deep hatred of authority figures after spending my adolescence fighting with my asshole father. One of my shrinks tried to tell me I had bipolar disorder and put me on Lithium, but it made me feel like a zombie. At least Angry Becky got shit done. Zombie Becky was worthless and there was NO fucking way I was going to rely on Mom and Dad to support me. I had to make it on my own.
It was winter. My girlfriend and I lived in midtown Kansas City because it was cheap and, at that time, it was the only place in the Greater Kansas City area where gays and lesbians felt safe, or at least safe-ish. The family that I nannied for lived in southern Johnson County, about a thirty minute drive on a good day. This was not a good day. It had snowed the night before, and I was running late, for no other reason than I was a worthless piece of shit who'd stayed up too late the night before, probably writing in my diary or working on my stupid fucking unpublishable novel or some such shit.
I was supposed to be at my bosses' house by 7:00am so that they could leave for their upstanding citizen jobs. He was a lawyer, she was a paralegal. They had a twelve-year-old, a two-year-old, and a newborn. She was one of those supermom types, left over from the eighties. Mall bangs and everything. I'm not shitting you: after she gave birth and returned from the hospital, she was up early the very next day exercising to some celebrity workout video in their home gym. I was like some fat fucking babushka over in the corner of their "hearth room" balancing the new baby on my belly as I fed her a bottle and sang Frère Jacques "again, again!" to keep the two-year-old occupied long enough to stay out of her mom's frosted hair.
It had snowed heavily overnight and many of the streets were still unplowed. Even though it was freezing outside, I had the driver's side window to my Ford Festiva cracked to help the windshield from completely fogging up. There were streaks everywhere from my gloved hand trying to wipe away the condensation. The heater/defrost on my tin-box car barely worked. I guess they don't need 'em much in Mexico in the factory where it was made. I'd spent a whole two minutes of what should have been a twenty minute job scraping the snow and ice off my windows because I was in such a hurry to get to work.
I was about ten minutes from their house when I noticed red lights flashing through the four-inch section of my back window that I'd managed to scrape off. I slowed down and pulled over as far to the right as I could manage on the snow-covered street to give the cop some room to pass me on his way to wherever the hell he was going. As far as I knew, there weren't too many criminals in this affluent neck of the woods. At least not the kind that got caught.
It took me a moment to realize he wasn't going to pass me.
"Nooooooooooooo!" I shouted.
He was after me.
"What the hell did I do?!" I pulled over on a side street where the snow was even deeper. My pathetic car could barely make it. I put the gear shift into neutral, pulled the emergency break, and killed the engine. I could feel sweat developing under my wool cap. No matter how cold it is, I always get sweaty when I get upset.
The cop knocked on the driver's side window.
I didn't even bother to roll it down any further. I was so pissed this guy was going to make me even later to my job than I already was. "What did I do?" I shouted through the three-inch crack.
"Umm, could you roll down your window, please?" the cop asked. He sounded a bit taken aback. Like he wasn't expecting to encounter any shrieking banshees in this neighborhood. This guy had no idea.
"Why? What did I do?" I asked. I could feel my face flush like it did whenever my dad would start in on me.
"Umm, well," he paused and began using an ice scraper on my window.
"What are you DOING? I NEED TO GET TO WORK?!" I shouted.
"Hold up, now. Lemme get some of this ice off your window..."
I cut him off, "Man, I NEED to get to work. My boss is gonna yell at me. Can you just tell me what I did?!"
He chuckled a little and then proceeded to begin scraping my front windshield. He raised his voice, not in anger, but so I could hear him through my still barely cracked window.
"You do realize that I could give you a ticket for driving this thing in such hazardous circumstances, don't you?" he said. "Did you even bother to scrape your windows before you headed out?"
Great, now I'm getting fucking lectured from a cop.
"YES, I DID," I gritted my teeth. "But I'm in a hurry and my defroster doesn't work very good."
"OK. OK," he said, shooing his hand at me like I was some annoying fly. He'd scraped off my entire front windshield by then and was working around to the passenger's side.
I sat there and fumed as he finished up the back. Thinking back on it now, what an ungrateful, spoiled brat. Here I was, sitting there like a pissy bitch while Officer Friendly made sure that my car was road safe.
"OK," he said when he made his way back to the driver's side. "That oughtta do it." He thumped my roof and said, "be careful out there" as he stepped away from my car.
I didn't even thank him.
I rolled up my window and made a big dramatic exit, my spinning tires flicking grey snow all over the officer as I maneuvered my car back onto the main road and sped up to make up for lost time.
There's been a lot of incidents in the news lately of young black men getting pulled over for minor traffic violations and ending up dead, shot by yet another bad cop. Maybe they were disrespectful. Maybe they were uncooperative, although most of the video evidence I've watched shows otherwise. If I had lived in an era of constant video surveillance I have a feeling my video evidence could have been used against me in court, or at least the court of public opinion. I was an ungrateful, spoiled brat. I didn't even get a ticket, let alone shot and killed. Despite my horrible behavior, my cop did his job helping me out, making me safe. Even if some would argue I didn't deserve it.
Maybe the cop who helped me on that shitty, snowy day was a good cop, and he would have treated anybody the same as he did me. Or maybe he would have treated me differently if, when first peering through the crack in the driver's side window, he had seen a black face instead of my white face.
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