Gas Meter

Or, How I Learned the Police Were Not My Friends

Considering how the last two weeks have gone for me (you can read all about that in this week’s Powder Blue Nostalgia post) and the explosive nature of tomorrow’s Fourth of July holiday, it felt like the perfect time to share this story. Before we get going, let me remind you that my debut crime fiction, country noir novel, Shivering in Hell, is available for pre-order now. Click on the link to make sure you get your copy on September 1, and enjoy today’s story.

Pre-order Shivering in Hell on Kindle or in paperback

The cops in this town have a raging hard-on for us. Especially Deputy Gant. The way he looks at us makes me understand how genocide can happen. I’m not even exaggerating. We’re just a bunch of punk kids in a small town, and he’s a glorified henchman for the Stinton Sheriff’s Department, but we don’t fit into his view of how the world should be, so he’s made it his mission to make our lives miserable.

I’m not sure why he finds us so objectionable. We don’t cause much trouble, and we mostly stick to ourselves. Maybe it’s because we listen to heavy metal, or our hair is too long. Smoking pot is definitely a big part of it, but what the hell else are we supposed to do in a place called Stinkton? Thirty years from now, Jeff Gant will rise through the ranks and become the top cop in El Paso, harassing and punishing lowly immigrants for having the gall to cross an imaginary line in search of a better life, but in the meantime, he has no choice but to hone his skills on a group of white boy stoners in rural Kansas.

Smalls is his primary target. Gant and his cop buddies identify him as our leader, and maybe he is. I don’t look at him that way, but he does have the nicest car, so he’s usually behind the wheel, which gives him an outsized say in what we do on any given night.

Smalls gets his ironic nickname because of his size and a childhood obsession with The Sandlot, and his fall from grace is the stuff of lore in our hometown. He sets every record imaginable in middle school sports, and the town dreams of state championships galore as he enters high school. There’s no denying he’s a talented athlete, though I think there’s a good chance his dominance will diminish as the rest of his peers hit their growth spurts and catch up to him. For better or worse, we’ll never know for sure.

Smalls’s heart is never in it, and he quits football halfway through his sophomore season. He drops out of school entirely the next year, taking any hopes of gridiron glory with him as he goes. One more reason for someone like Deputy Gant to put a target on his back.

Not that Smalls doesn’t bring a lot of it on himself. He’s cocky as hell, and makes a show of his rebellion, running his mouth off to anyone who attempts to assert authority over him, including his overwhelmed parents. Smalls goes wherever and does whatever he wants, and even though he’s not technically allowed on school grounds, he waits for us in the parking lot every day at final bell with a joint ready to burn.

Everyone in town knows he smokes bud constantly, and it isn’t long before the cops are salivating at the prospect of putting him in cuffs. We spend a lot of time cruising the streets of Stinton and the blacktop that runs through the surrounding countryside, and more often than not, we have a police escort. They follow us almost everywhere, looking for the slightest excuse to flip on their lights and pull us over.

Rolling stop? Cue the sirens. Flickering tag light? Side of the road, pal. One mile per hour over the speed limit? Time for a sobriety test. Tire looks low? Better stop ‘em for a welfare check, and now that I have you boys pulled over, is that reefer I smell? Everybody out of the car while I call in the drug dog.

The whole thing quickly devolves into a twisted game, and Smalls is only too eager to play. His idea of a good time is to clean all the paraphernalia out of his car and drive around with the intention of getting pulled over. He wants them to drag us out of the car and pat us down, and then call in the drug dog to sniff every square inch of his vehicle, because he knows they won’t find anything and he’ll get the last laugh.

He talks shit through the whole process, especially if Gant is the one doing the searching, which is usually the case. Smalls and Gant act like they’re Pacino and De Niro in Heat, but it’s way more pathetic than that, and way fucking longer than the movie. Every other night is a sequel too, and the rest of us are tired of greenlighting it and getting caught up in their pissing match. We want to smoke a joint and actually enjoy our buzz. I’d much rather spend my evenings with a girl than a deputy, and if I am in the mood to watch Heat, I own the VHS. The whole song-and-dance is extremely tiresome.

For the most part, they leave the rest of us alone if Smalls isn’t around. At least, that’s how it is at first, but even that doesn’t last. It doesn’t take long for all of us to get dragged into Smalls’s fight, whether we want it or not. And compared to Smalls, I’m a model citizen. I might play my music too loud on my crappy car stereo, and I certainly partake of the wacky tobacky with my friends, but on my own, I’m practically Archie from the comics.

I get good grades and have a part-time job at the Royal Theatre. I spend most of my free time watching movies or filling notebooks with journals I hope will one day bloom into my breakthrough novel, cementing my literary legacy and carrying me as far as fucking possible from Stinton, Kansas. I don’t even buy my own pot, which means I never have a bag stashed on my person.

This isn’t because I’m cheap, though that might be part of it. I’m saving for college so I can get out of town, and I don’t want to risk becoming a burnout. Most of my friends understand this, and so long as I kick in gas money from time to time or buy them a burger when they’re broke, they’re fine with smoking their weed with me. Nevertheless, I’m late for work three times in two weeks because the cops pull me over.

Gant, himself, does it the last time, and he invites me to sit in the back seat of his car while he calls in the K-9 unit. He’s disappointed when the dog shows no interest in my ’81 Skylark, but he can’t let me go without warning me that Smalls is bad news. “He’s gonna bring you down with him,” he says. Unlike Smalls, I don’t talk back. I keep my mouth shut, only answering yes/no questions, and he cuts me loose.

We’re not always so lucky. We pile into my cousin Wayne’s car on a Friday night. Arnold rides shotgun, and I squeeze into the back with Koopa and Wayne’s brother, Hoagie. Our plan is to head out to Madora’s Grove, an out-of-use pioneer cemetery hidden in the depths of the Stinton countryside.

The cemetery is isolated and difficult to get to, and this is the first time we’ve tried since the previous fall, before the police shadowing ratcheted up. The dirt roads leading to it are not maintained by the county, and are practically impassable during the winter or whenever it rains. As it is, Madora’s Grove is our spring and summer sanctuary, one of the last places we can go to be left in peace, free from prying eyes and police harassment.

The cows who graze in the pasture across the road can be unsettling if you’ve smoked too much, but otherwise, it is place of peace and relaxation for our clique. We have enough bud to smoke a joint and lay in the grass, staring up at the stars and conversing about the important topics that really matter to us, like the meaning of specific Tool lyrics or seeing who can reel off the most Kids in the Hall quotes. This isn’t the kind of stuff we can do with Smalls anyway, as he is incapable of simply taking it easy.

He always has to be doing something, and even relatively shallow introspection is less preferable to him than a police interrogation. The more time he spends with the girl he’s been seeing lately, the more I realize I’ve outgrown him as a friend. The rest of my friends haven’t quite come to that realization yet, but they’re getting there. Unfortunately, whether Smalls is with us or not, we can’t escape his fallout. The cops don’t know about the cemetery, but we don’t even make it to the city limits before we’re pulled over.

Arnold swallows the little bit of weed in our possession as soon as he sees the cherries flashing in the rearview, along with his last paper. The deputy asks for Wayne’s license and registration, and tells him he pulled us over because the license plate is obstructed. He says it’s too dirty, making the number hard to read, which is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. But before we can protest, he is joined by three more cruisers. One of them belongs to Gant, and he promptly takes charge of the scene. “Seems like a whole lot of cops for a little mud on a license plate,” Koopa says. Gant tells him to shut up and orders everyone to get out of the car.

The cops spend the next ninety minutes tearing apart Wayne’s Topaz. And when I say tearing apart, I mean literally tearing it apart. They start by making us turn out pockets out and remove our shoes. I’m relieved they don’t make us strip, but they do give us an aggressive pat-down. We’re saved from any further humiliation when the drug dog shows up and they turn their attention to the car, which is probably a good thing, because they might have gotten a hit if the dog sniffed Arnold’s belly.

They force the poor dog to go over the car four times, and then they really get to work. Two cops take out the back seats, and since the seats in Wayne’s car are not removable, they cut them out with giant Rambo knives. I want to ask why a Stinton County deputy would need such a big knife, but I decide it’s probably better to keep my mouth shut. I don’t want to give Gant any motivation to turn it in my direction.

Then they pop the trunk and slice open Wayne’s donut. Luckily, they leave the tires that are actually on the car alone, but it really is like something out of Scarface or a Cheech and Chong movie. Hoagie must be thinking the same thing, because he whispers, “Nobody tell them the car is made out of weed.” A peel of laughter ripples through us on the curb, which only makes the cops angrier. They step up their efforts, if that’s even possible.

In the end, all they find is an empty pack of papers and a pair of hemostats buried in the bottom of the glove box. The hemostats have some kind of substance on the clip that might be resin, so it’s hardly the bust of the century, but it’s enough for them. The motherfuckers actually high five when one of them lifts the clips triumphantly out of the car. This is followed by victorious hoots and celebrating.

Gant is practically dancing in the street. He orders Wayne to stand up and slaps the cuffs on him. “Are you serious with this shit?” Wayne asks, but Gant ignores him and reads him his rights. They have nothing on the rest of us, so they have no choice but to let us go. Wayne gives Hoagie his keys, and he drives us back to their house. The drive back is uncomfortable, sitting on the scraps of what used to be Wayne’s back seat, but nowhere near as uncomfortable as explaining to my aunt and uncle why Wayne is in jail.

This time Gant really has pushed his luck too far. My aunt Kat is the city clerk, which means she holds a certain amount of sway. She’s made minor complaints to the sheriff before about his deputy harassing her sons, but there’s only so much the sheriff can do when we’re hanging around with Smalls. But this time Smalls wasn’t with us, and even an asshole like Gant has to know Wayne’s roach clips are hardly a smoking gun.

It’s a sloppy mistake by Wayne to leave them in his car, especially when he’s fully aware of how much police attention we attract, but it’s not going to hold up in court. What are they going to do? Send the hemostats to the lab in Topeka for analysis? Even if the substance is resin, and it probably is, there might not even be enough to take a proper sample. All of this has been a colossal waste of time, and Kat is going to make sure the sheriff hears about it.

She calls him in the middle of the night, waking him from his beauty sleep, and reads him the riot act. “This bullshit has gone way too far,” she shouts into the phone. “These boys may not be perfect angels, Jim, but I’m tired of them being treated like they’re Al Capone. If your deputies can’t be the adults in the room, then I guess I’ll have to be. I don’t want to, but I’ll go over your head, Jim. I’ll call the county commissioner and go all the way to Topeka if I have to. I’ll call for an independent review of the Sheriff’s Department to investigate police harassment if you can’t get your employees in line.” Then she hangs up the phone, slamming it back on the cradle, and grabs her checkbook to bail Wayne out.

The message resonates loud and clear. Sheriff Hunter calls Gant into his office the next morning for a powwow with my aunt. She gives us the details later, and I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. Gant acts like a defensive teenage bully, whining and making excuses now that he’s been sent to detention. He doesn’t like the sheriff much, and clearly doesn’t respect him.

Sheriff Hunter is a Democrat and a roly-poly of a man with surprising agility in the field, who spends most of his time doing paperwork and delegating patrol duty to his deputies. But Hunter is a canny politician and popular with the public, despite the fact that Stinton leans heavily Republican, and he’s been elected to four straight terms. The sheriff is his boss, so no matter how much Gant bristles at his orders, he has no choice but to follow them. And the sheriff is telling him to lay off us. The charges against Wayne are dropped, and the sheriff even pays Kat back for Wayne’s bail money out of Gant’s paycheck.

My aunt is not one of those “cool” parents that high school kids love and other parents dread. She isn’t the kind of parent who believes kids are going to drink and do drugs no matter what, so she’d rather have them doing it at her house where she can keep an eye on them instead of being unsupervised. That’s not her vibe at all. She’s got functioning eyes, so she has a pretty good idea of what we’re up to on a regular basis, and in her own way, she probably hates it as much as Deputy Gant.

But she’s also reasonable enough to conclude that kids will be kids, and they’re going to do stupid things, no matter how well you teach them right from wrong. The goal should be to help them learn from their mistakes when they slip up, not bully them. Or throw them into a gulag over a little natural teen rebellion, which is what Gant would have done if he had his way. So she isn’t giving us a free pass, but in the weeks that follow Wayne’s arrest, she advises us to stick close to the house and generally turns a blind eye toward our misdemeanors.

This isn’t difficult to do, since we kill a lot of time on my cousins’ porch anyway. I live out in the country, and Koopa’s home-life situation is always in flux, but my cousins live in town, making their house a central and logical HQ. Arnold lives right across the street, and his mom actually is one of those “cool” parents, which can be nice, but more often than not, it’s annoying. Instead of letting us be, she always wants to be a part of what we’re doing. That gets awkward fast, especially for Arnold. So we all naturally gravitate toward my cousins’ house on the first Monday night of April without ever making a formal plan.

Wayne, the older brother, isn’t usually the hosting type, but he’s running the show tonight. His best friend, Danny, is there too, along with some girl he’s trying to nail. Danny is a horndog with questionable standards, but this girl isn’t too bad. They’re “partying” in the back yard, which is what Wayne labels any gathering of three or more people, even if all they’re doing is silently staring at the wall. Danny backs his truck into the alley, and he sits on his tailgate with his date.

Wayne, Arnold, and Koopa sit on lawn chairs, along with a couple of girls from Koopa and Hoagie’s grade, who Koopa invited over. Koopa, like Danny, has a way with the fairer sex, while Arnold is desperate to lose his virginity and never fails to come on too strong and scare every girl away. So far, he’s doing a commendable job of restraining himself, and Wayne is simply along for the ride. Wayne cares more about drugs than pussy, a position that absolutely boggles Danny’s mind, and this will eventually come between them, but for now, Wayne’s in good spirits. He smoked his last joint with me and Hoagie before everyone else showed up, though once it wears off, I fully expect him to retreat inside.

Hoagie and I are already going back and forth. The NCAA basketball championship game is taking place on channel 5, and we have a friendly bet on the outcome. I got five bucks riding on Kentucky, while he’s taking Arizona. Kat has it on in the living room, and he and I are more interested in the game than what’s going on in the backyard, though we pop out during halftime and commercial breaks to see what’s shakin’ and allow Hoagie to smoke a cigarette.

The scene is very mellow. Danny is one of the most paranoid people I’ve ever known, which makes him unbearable to be around when he’s high, but he’s the life of the party when all he’s had is a few drinks. We haven’t seen him much lately because he’s too rattled by our ongoing battle with the Sheriff’s Department. He wanted no part of that, so he wisely kept his distance, but now that things are returning to normal, he’s easing back into our social circle.

None of us are holding, and we don’t even have any alcohol tonight, so Danny is free to relax. He’s making out with his girlfriend in the bed of his truck, and they’ve gone from vertical to horizontal since our last smoke break. I don’t know how far he’ll take it in front of everyone, but I’m not counting on his modesty, so I nudge Hoagie with my elbow and suggest we go back in to watch the end of the game.

The following sequence plays out fast. I’m watching my five bucks slide through my fingers as Kentucky chokes away the end of the game. Hoagie gloats as the final seconds tick down, and Wayne comes inside. His high must be fading. He says he’s going to get something to eat and call it a night. We hear him preheating the oven and I reluctantly hand Hoagie a five-dollar bill, just before Wayne runs into the living room. His tone is panicked as he describes what he just witnessed through the kitchen window. “Danny just took out the gas meter with his truck!”

I hear the alarm in his voice, and I have a basic understanding of the message he’s conveying, but my brain doesn’t fully process the two concepts and it fails to compute. It isn’t until I see my aunt, an overweight woman in the early stages of middle age who doesn’t like to move from her spot once she’s gotten comfortable for the night unless it’s absolutely necessary, bolt into action that I finally grasp the seriousness of the situation.

She throws her blanket aside and leaps to her feet, startling the cat napping on the ottoman beside her. Kat sprints to the front door, grabbing me and Hoagie by the front of our shirts as she goes, pulling us with her because we’re too stunned to move on our own. Wayne follows close behind. My feet kick into action when we reach the porch, even though my brain still hasn’t caught up. I take two steps into the front yard and leap forward with a stupid howl, like I’m Sylvester Stallone in a bad action movie. I feel the ground shake before I hear the noise.

BOOM!

I land a few steps away from where I jumped, and realize I might have been a tad overdramatic. I’m not propelled forward by a gigantic explosion, but I’m not imagining things either. The boom is real, but the whole house doesn’t go up. Only the oven in the kitchen. I don’t know enough about how gas lines work to understand how it could explode because Danny drove over the backyard meter and not cause a chain reaction that destroys the whole house, but that’s how it went down.

The firefighters who arrive on the scene a few minutes later don’t seem too clear on that either. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or not. Whatever the case, we’re extremely lucky no one is hurt. If Wayne hadn’t run out to warn us, he surely would have been killed. As it is, the back of the kitchen is blown out entirely.

The fire spreads before the fire department shows ups, causing major burn damage in the dining room, part of the living room, and Hoagie’s room. It’s a good thing baseball cards from our era are largely worthless, because most of Hoagie’s childhood collection goes up in flames, along with the rest of his closet. Judging by his attire in photos from that time period, this is perhaps not a total tragedy, but I know he’s bummed to lose his modest porn library.

We get the full story from the police report a few days later, but here’s the gist of it. Smalls shows up with the girl he’s been dating about the same time Wayne comes inside. Wayne admits to us this is the real reason he bailed on the party. He didn’t feel like dealing with Smalls, even if there was the possibility he was holding.

Smalls isn’t holding, but he does have a thirty-pack of cheap beer. At the same time as he gets the cooler out of his trunk, Danny gets up from the girl in the back of his truck and goes to the cab to get a condom out of his console and another blanket to put over them. What none of us know is that Deputy Jeff Gant is watching everything that’s happening.

The motherfucker can’t help himself. He’s been watching all night, discreetly parked behind a neighbor’s shed farther down the alley, waiting for someone to slip up. I don’t know what he’s hoping to accomplish. Unless a plane lands in the backyard and some scary-looking Colombians unload a pallet of uncut cocaine, there is nothing going on in my cousins’ yard that warrants this kind of attention. But that’s never stopped Gant before, and he just wants something big enough to stick, so he can wipe the taste of his last humiliating failure out of his mouth.

He gets it when he spots the cooler of beer. Or, at least, he thinks he does. A minor in possession is hardly a capital offense, and isn’t likely to restore his damaged reputation, but he’s grasping at straws. In all likelihood, the idea of taking Smalls away in cuffs, even if the charges don’t stick, is enough to salve his wounded ego. Hell, he knows no one present is twenty-one, so he can haul us all in if he’s feeling ambitious. Maybe he can arrest Kat too, since all these minors are drinking on her property. He has to know his case is pretty flimsy, but he isn’t thinking about the big picture. Gant just wants to make that fat bitch and all these deviant kids suffer.

Before anyone can even crack open a beer, Gant flips on his lights and presses the pedal to the floor, tearing down the alley. Paranoid as ever, Danny sees the lights in his rearview and wigs out. He’s sure of one thing, and it’s that he’s not going to jail tonight. He drops the condom and turns over the ignition of his truck. His date barely has time to sit up before she’s nearly tossed out of the open bed when the truck roars to life and lurches forward.

The tires spin for a moment and find traction, and the truck barrels over the poorly positioned gas meter with a loud metallic clank. Danny hears and feels it, but he doesn’t see what he hit in the dark, and he isn’t stopping for anything. His date hangs on for dear life and screams at the top of her lungs as the truck disappears around the corner. Danny doesn’t slow down until he’s out of town, and only then does he calm down enough to remember the girl in back. Fortunately, she’s okay, but she slaps the shit out of him when he pulls over to check on her. Needless to say, he doesn’t get any action before he drops her off.

Meanwhile, back in the yard, everyone is watching this farce play out in a state of shock. Danny speeds away in one direction, and a police car barrels down on them from the other. In all the chaos, Koopa is the only one who notices the gas meter. He isn’t sure what to expect, but he drops and covers his head just before the back of the house explodes. Everyone else follows suit in the immediate aftermath, and Gant’s worst instincts kick in.

The deputy gets out of his car and pulls his gun, shouting at everyone to lay down on their stomachs. Thankfully, they already are, otherwise it’s highly likely he would have shot someone in his excited state. He tells them to keep their hands visible, warning them not to make any sudden movements. Gant doesn’t seem to know what to do next. He never calls for backup, and he continues to hold them all at gunpoint until the fire department shows up and defuses the situation.

My aunt and uncle sue him for police harassment and creating a culture of fear that directly contributed to the destruction of her home. They win, but it’s only a partial victory. The judge refuses to make Gant pay damages for pain and suffering, but he is ordered to cover the costs of repairing and rebuilding their house. Kat is fine with the decision. She was never out to make a buck, she just wanted Gant to be held accountable for his actions.

To that end, she also initiates an investigation into the sheriff’s department at both the county and state level. Sheriff Hunter isn’t thrilled by the idea of officials digging into every aspect of his operation, but he willingly signs off on the investigation. By this point, Gant and his buddies are more trouble than they’re worth, and the documentation provided by the investigation gives the sheriff all the ammunition he needs to fire them, which he does, the day after the final report is turned in. Unfortunately, no legal charges are filed against Gant.

We take similar, unofficial action against Smalls in our own group. He’s worn out his welcome with us, and we’re no longer on the same page. We don’t need all the drama and headaches he brings to the table. Taking advantage of his deepening relationship with his girlfriend, which monopolizes more of his time, we subtly cut him out. I don’t think he realizes it is happening until it’s already done, and by then, there’s no coming back.

Unfortunately, not everyone we know drops him altogether. Sully’s older brother, Roscoe, continues to deal smoke to him, and it comes back to bite him. Smalls finally gets busted for something real, in this case, stealing checks from his grandparents, and rather than take what’s coming to him, he agrees to set up Roscoe, who ends up doing two years in prison for selling him weed. After that, Smalls is a marked man in Stinton. He has no choice but to pick up sticks and move out of the county to Valley Falls.

Maybe he sees Gant from time to time. It doesn’t take the deputy long to catch on with another police department after he’s let go from Stinton, and he ends up in the same town as his former nemesis. I assume his buddies on the force had similar fates. That’s about the best any of us can hope for in a situation like this. Justice doesn’t apply to cops like it does to regular people.

Corrupt cops are like whack-a-moles. You can knock them down, but they always pop up somewhere else. The same goes with narcs like Smalls. But I do like the idea that they ended up together, more or less, even if just for a short while. I picture them running into each other at the gas station, glaring at each other over the aisles of overpriced snacks.

Does Gant take any satisfaction in knowing Smalls was finally broken, or does it eat at him that he wasn’t the cop to do it? Does Smalls gloat that he’s still standing? Or does he have enough self-awareness to understand what it cost him?

How are they supposed to know who won?

---

Thanks for reading Powder Blue Pulp. It’s been a challenging week on the homefront, full of broken water heaters and small house fires, but any week I’m able to share a story with you can’t be all bad. I hope this story has been able to pick you up in some small way, and if you would like to pick me up in return, the best way is to share this story and help get the word out. Or even better, click on the link and pre-order Shivering in Hell, if you haven’t already done so. Take care of yourselves out there!