August 9, 2007
Tour Blog: Get Myself Arrested
Written by Girth McDürchstein on August 9, 2007 11:43 AM
Permalink |
Splitcock Tour -- Europe & Japan '07
| Digg It
I shuffled along the EconoLodge breezeway toward the vending machines. Around the corner, squeezed close together, was an ice machine, a snack machine, a soda machine, and a cigarette machine. I popped two €2 coins into the cigarette machine and pulled the tab for a pack of Kools. Out of nowhere, I heard shouting in French, followed by the stealthy but still slightly clanky (thanks mostly to the high-powered assault weapons they carried) running, growing louder, louder—
Until I was tackled and thrown onto the concrete by a man twice my size. He shoved me around onto my stomach. All I really remembered was that weird, kinda spiky feel of the concrete digging into the skin of my arms and legs, and even my gut through my t-shirt. It reminded me a lot of junior high. The man who sat on top of my ass, doubtless considering going tongue-wild back there, yanked my arms around my back, held my wrists together, and slipped one of those annoying plastic ties around it. He cinched it far tighter than he needed to; within minutes, I lost circulation.
It took a few moments to realize I had just been arrested. The cigarette-machine ruse must be a pretty common occurrence—something we’d witnessed at least five times since coming to Europe—but it still distressed me. Why had I been arrested? Who, other than me, had witnessed the nature of my crimes?
I received my answer much faster than I thought I would. The man sitting on me, his duty done, leaped off and twisted me back around. A lanky man with a narrow mustache and sad, puppy-dog eyes stood before me. He tossed a well-worn cigarette onto the cold concrete and, for some reason, rubbed intensely at the chest of his black trenchcoat. “Monsieur McDürchstein,” the man grinned. He spoke with an odd combination of an educated London accent and a buried, Jean-Claude Van Damme-esque Belgian accent. “I have waited for quite some time to meet you.”
“Who are you?” I groaned.
“My name is legendary inspector Gillaume Pinafore,” the man said, his grin growing wider. “I hereby place you under arrest by the authority invested in me by Europol.”
“Europol? The fuck is that?”
“It is like the Interpol, but for European Union countries only,” Inspector Pinafore replied.
“Very exclusive,” I muttered. “But why are you arresting me? What did I do wrong?”
Inspector Pinafore giggled in a surprising, girlish way—tittered, in fact. He said, “Monsieur, it would take less time to list the things you haven’t done wrong.”
Several of the Europol officers, who had mostly gathered around Pinafore and watched with amusement as I lay there at their feet, laughed at this remark. My first thought was that joke was so old, Gallagher rejected it as being too corny and out-of-date. Then I remembered I was in the wasteland—it was probably a fresh joke here, or possibly one swiped from a Jerry Lewis movie.
The officer who had restrained me attempted in vain to pull me to my feet. After struggling for 30 seconds, he nodded for another officer to help. In the end, it took three of them to list me. I know I’ve put on a little weight, and I’ve let my formerly svelte and sexy rock-star body get a little doughy around the middle, but the number of men required just to get me upright embarrassed me more than you’ll ever know.
They stuck me into the back of a black van. The three officers who helped me up sat in the back with me. They stared grimly, as if I were a dangerous enemy of the state. For the first time, I wondered if they had the wrong man.
The Grenoble police station made me very uncomfortable. Poor lighting, the distant wails of anguished prisoners, smears of dried blood staining the walls a dullish brown—this wasn’t anything like America. Inspector Pinafore personally led me through the booking process, overseeing as they took my prints, logged me in, snapped my mugshots, and finally led me into an interrogation room. Pinafore alone followed me inside. He turned on a too-bright overhead lamp, which threw a pool of light around us while casting heavy shadows around the rest of the room.
“Well, Monsieur McDürchstein,” Pinafore said. He paused to light a cigarette. He took a drag and continued, blowing the intoxicating tobacco smoke into my face: “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I’d like to call my lawyer,” I snapped.
“Ah, Monsieur,” Pinafore breathed. “We are not in your American-style movies. You do not receive one phone call, you do not retain your lawyer—not until I say so. Now…let us try again. What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I’d like to see a list of charges.”
“You will see nothing, but I shall meet you halfway. You have led a masterful criminal syndicate to commit the following crimes on EU soil: murder, assault with a deadly weapon, financing a terrorist organization, attempted murder, accessory after the fact to a ring of car thieves, consorting with criminals, solicitation—that is for prostitution, if you did not know—breaking in entering, fraud, following the Church of Rafelman—”
“But—”
“—which has been illegal in Norway and Sweden since 1989, loss of identity which has been illegal in Sweden since 1966, international mail fraud, indecent exposure, and filing nuisance lawsuits.” Pinafore took another drag. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Prove it.”
Pinafore tittered again, then threw a manila envelope onto the table. He slid it haphazardly over to me. I pulled it open and started to read:
After a solid of rehearsals, we are back with a vengeance! We got all our shit loaded up and a private jet booked for Turku, and let me tell you motherfuckers we’re stoked!“Oh,” I said softly. They planned to use my own blog against me, a list of virtual crimes I had supposedly admitted to committing. I silently damned my honesty and ignorance of the law.
Suddenly, I got an idea: “But I didn’t commit all those crimes.”
“I did not say you did,” Inspector Pinafore said. “I said you masterminded a criminal syndicate of innocent pawns to do your illegal bidding for you. Is that not true?”
“Not entirely,” I said. “I didn’t know any of that stuff was illegal.”
“You did not know that murder is against the law?”
“I don’t remember murdering anyone recently,” I said, dumbfounded.
“Do you recall an awful, effete DJ at a successful Cornwall nightspot?”
I sighed. “She said he probably wasn’t dead.”
“‘Probably’ is nine-tenths of the law. I am the other one-tenth,” Pinafore sneered, increasing his Van Damme-ness by ten-tenths. “Incidentally, I qualify that which you just said as confession. And we have it on videotape.”
“Shit,” I muttered.
Pinafore and two guards led me through what I will now define as the “modern” section of the police station—dimly lit, damp, musty, and reeking of the souls and stenches of a thousand wrongly imprisoned frogs. It only went downhill from there, as we pushed through a pair of wooden doors supported with wrought-iron into a cavernous, stone-walled cellblock. Much larger than I assumed a small city jail would be, and much more vile. The place was lit solely by the dewy dawn light streaming through the narrow slits they called windows, 60 feet above us. A few fiery torches clung to the walls to throw a bit more light. As we moved, I heard the moans and cries of prisoners. Just short of reaching another wood-and-iron door on the other end of the block, they led me through an open cell door.
The place was small—ceiling barely tall enough for me to stand up straight, otherwise barely the width and depth of a fair-sized elevator. A hard cot occupied nearly half the cell. The “toilet” consider of an oddly shaped hole in the stone floor, next to which a variety of leaves and pine cones were piled.
“We have furnished you with a private cell due to your celebrity status,” Pinafore murmured. “We do not consider this special treatment; it has much more to do with your professed love of anal fornication and your group’s alarming popularity among French prisoners.”
“Why are there so many people in here?” I asked. “It’s just a city jail.”
For the first time Pinafore didn’t titter—he gushed with uproarious laughter, echoing through the enormous cellblock and causing many prisoners to shout foreign obscenities. “In Europe, Monsieur McDürchstein, no prison is just a city jail.”
They slammed the solid iron door shut. Pinafore slid open a steel-mesh covering, revealing a narrow slit in the door at around eye-level. He whispered, “Enjoy your stay,” then tittered and slammed the covering shut. I rushed to the door and watched through the mesh as their blurry forms disappeared into the darkness.
It’s amazing how quickly one’s mind becomes inured to the horrors of prison life. It had been just short of 24 hours, and yet my brain had already rewired itself in some sort of animalistic, Pavlovian response to that steel-mesh covering opening. The first time it occurred after Pinafore left yesterday morning, a deep-welled ladle slipped through the gap, twisted around to drop a fair amount of some sort of soup or slop or something onto the stone floor. I was starving, so although I didn’t know and couldn’t see what it was, I ate off the dirty, urine-stained floor like a cat scavenging in an alley.
When that covering opened again twelve hours later, I was ready for it. As soon as I heard the sound, I ran to the door in time for the twisting of the ladle, and much of it fell into my open mouth and outstretched, greedy hands. I licked them up, along with what spattered on the door and floor, with aplomb.
The covering didn’t open again until Wednesday morning, and again I was ready. When it opened a third time, at 7:30 that evening, I had no idea what time it was—but I knew how to respond. I rushed, pressing my tremendous gut and girth against the wall and drooling like a rabid dog, and then the door surprised me by yanking open. I fell flat on my face onto the stone floor of the cellblock corridor. When a guard struggled in vain to pull me to my feet, and another guard helped, and then finally Pinafore and another man I could not see from my position on the floor finally got me standing, I realized who the mystery man was—
Harcourt Abimelech Feinstein, attorney-at-law. In the abundant flesh and awkward toupee.
“God fuckin’ dammit, McDürchstein, what have you got yourself into?!” he snapped immediately.
“Monsieur,” Pinafore tittered, “you have a visitor.”
They put us up in an interrogation room, where they were undoubtedly videotaping our entire conversation for illegal use against us in some sort of Europol sham court. “I knew this blog thing was a bad idea from the start. It’s just—face it, Girth, you’re a moron—”
“But—”
“No!” Feinstein snapped, aiming a fat index finger at me. “You shut up while I’m talking, motherfucker. You think I want to come to France? You think I want to try to defend against allegations that you’ve already confessed to on some Internet website? Do you have even an inkling of how difficult this is going to be on me? I already ran through all my ulcer medication on the plane, and this fucking country doesn’t have a pharmacy. They have these, uh…whaddayacallit, apothecaries. What am I gonna do with toad hearts and eye of newt, right?”
“Sorry, Herc… Look, it wasn’t even really my fault. It was Lacey Greenwood. She badgered us to keep up with the blogging as much as humanly possible, so I… What am I gonna do, tell her to fuck right off?”
Feinstein shrugged. “Yeah?”
“We had to listen, man. She’s trying to change the public’s perception of us as rowdy, angst-ridden criminals who will do literally anything for money and fame.”
“But aren’t all those things true?”
“Yeah.”
Feinstein groaned. He took out a notepad and started to write. As he did, he spoke. “I’m going to bill you for every goddamn second I spend in this God-forsaken wasteland. Every expense, no matter how small, every hour will be marked billable, and when I get back to Los Angeles, I expect to see a big fat cashier’s check for all my time spent, plus all the money you owe me for the past three years. Am I clear?”
“Crystal.”
Feinstein tore the top sheet off the notepad, folded it into fourths, then slid it across the table. I unfolded it and read it quickly. It said something along the lines of: Everything they got is circumstantial. If they’re too stupid or too incompetent to find any witnesses, you’ll get off faster than your mom did with Carl Davenport.
“You shut up about my mother,” I said aloud.
Feinstein grinned like an asshole lawyer and snatched the note back. He slid it into a pocket, stood, shook my hand, and roared, “Coming out!” Nobody opened the door. He realized we’re in the wasteland, where they stick us into public interrogation rooms instead of the privacy of lawyer-visitation cells. Nobody would be coming to open that door, because it was unlocked. Feinstein sighed and yanked the door open. After a minute or two, Inspector Pinafore returned with two guards.
“What did that note say?” he demanded.
“It said, All Frenchmen are total gayrods so watch your ass&mdashliterally,” I said quickly.
Pinafore glanced at one of the guards, who nodded with seeming reluctance. Pinafore nodded back in apparent agreement, and they dragged me back to my cell.
On my way back to the cell, I swiped a fancy-looking pen off the desk of a desk sergeant (or whatever the hell they call them here), and I spent the next day using it to dig through the stone wall of my cell. It had a marginal effect. I was able to fashion a rough, eye-sized hole after a day’s work. Not exactly escape-worthy, but at least I could keep track of the hours and, once in awhile, gaze out at the bleak French countryside. Psychologically, it comforted me a bit more than sitting in blackness nearly 24 hours a day.
It was just shy of midnight, as I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. I heard something—talking, running, occasional shouting, and eventually chanting. The roar of a bonfire, a few explosions, gunfire—what the hell was going on outside?
I peered through my peephole and saw, surrounding the prison, what appeared to be hundreds of French and French-Arabian 20-somethings, a sea of people cascading through a litter still-flaming carcasses of tiny European cars, screaming and shooting at police in riot gear, and storming the jail. What were they chanting? To my ears, it sounded like, “Free McDürchstein.”
My God, I thought. All those fans—all those Abysmal supporters, come out to aid me. I wondered how the press was handling this on the outside world, how Lacey Greenwood was spinning it to make me into a Johnny Cash-esque folk hero. I smiled and started to rub myself off when I began to hear more explosions—closer, shaking the walls and vibrating through the floor. About five minutes later, sweaty and panting, I noticed acrid smoke drifting through the steel mesh covering, and then—
A wild explosion, so close it sounded like someone had blown up the wall directly across from my cell. I backed against the opposite wall, unable to hear anything except a high-pitched whistle. I thought maybe the smoke was making me hallucinate when I saw a sudden shower of sparks burst from the top of the door. The sparks gradually circled the iron door, leaving a white-hot trail in their wake, and when the circle completed, I heard a familiar voice—Margo?!—screech, “Back up, Girthy!”
I was already against the wall, so I just quivered and quaked as she kicked in the hole, knocking the soft, malleable metal onto the cell floor. Margo looked hot even with the gas mask shoved over her head. For some reason, she was dressed in nothing but a red, gauzy teddy. I lunged forward, arms extending and johnson bulging, and just as I prepared to enter her, she slammed a gas mask over my head and said through the tinny mouth-hole, “Later, Girth…”
She dragged me across the hall. With the heavy smoke and awful lighting, I had a hard time seeing what was going on, but I could feel and hear the hot roar of rioting students—they’d penetrated the prison, taken down the guards, and were in the process of releasing prisoners, who tossed flaming mattresses and leaves down from the upper floors. The echoing cacophony disoriented me, but fortunately I had Margo. She yanked me through a huge, rubble-littered hole in the wall. We shoved our way through a thick, rippling ocean of foul-smelling Frenchies (unfortunately, the gas mask didn’t seem to filter out the stench of cigarettes and Youth Dew for Men™) toward a helicopter whose rotors roared as it lay waiting. Someone had painted the chopper’s side with a huge mural and logo of Abysmal Crucifix, featuring each of its member in various states that have become our band’s clichés: Margo, nude and bent over on all fours, with me in my cowboy hat behind her in the throes of ecstasy; Riffs surrounded by a harem of 12-year-old girls; Mikey Parker sitting on a Brooklyn stoop, sneering; and Carl Davenport, eyes wide and shiny as a new penny, rubbing the sagging breasts of a middle-aged woman (fortunately not drawn to resemble my mother in the slightest). Margo launched me up the metal steps into the chopper, then leaped in behind me.
“Go!” she shouted to the pilot, who nodded. The chopper started its ascent, whirling a bit in the wind generated by its own rotors, then straightening out and taking to the sky. The chilly wind ripped through the open door. Margo looked out at the crowd below. I screamed, “What are you doing?!” but she either didn’t hear me or ignored me. Instead, she ripped off her gas mask and threw it on the metal floor behind her.
And then, with terrifying abruptness, the chopper’s PA system blasted “Put It Where It Doesn’t Belong,” a pro-immigration song often misinterpreted as an ode to anal sex (I don’t know why people think we’d need more than one of those). The song caught the attention of both the disgruntled cops and the students. Several of them began to shriek, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I assume it was something along the lines of, “Hooray for Abysmal Crucifix!”
Margo lifted a huge rifle, aimed it down at the crowd, and fired. She razed an entire row of police, piercing their riot gear with whatever frightening, undoubtedly Russian bullets she was using. She kept firing until we were too high and far for her to aim properly, then she set down the assault rifle and shut the door. The song faded out.
I took off the gas mask. “Where are we going?” I shouted over the helicopter.
“Algeria,” Margo said. “We helped stage this riot against the wrongful imprisonment of car-torching Arabs, so they’re giving us immunity until we go to Japan.”
“Where’d you get the chopper?”
“Hijacked it.”
“Ah. And the band?”
“They left for Tunisia last night. They ought to arrive around the same time we do.”
“And we can take a helicopter all the way there?”
“We’re gonna need to ditch it in Marseilles. There’s a boat waiting.”
“You got it all figured out, don’t you?”
“Don’t I always?”
I grinned. “You sure do, baby. You sure do.”
Post a Comment
Powered by Ajax Comments