Trip to UNH... and another epic cop story.

A few days ago my friend Collin and I decided to visit our good friend Eric up at UNH where he goes to school. Armed with countless bottles of Vitamin water, a case full of spliffs, a half O for emergency bowls, and enough cigarettes to kill a small child (hey, it's a long car ride...) we set forth.

Everything is going well, aside from the fact that my brakes make screeching death noises whenever I press them... maybe we won't die..? About fifty miles in, at around 90mph, I notice an undercover cop off my rear bumper... and by "off my rear bumper", I mean his car is taking my hatchback from behind like one of those lions on the Discovery channel. Well, what do you think I did? Suddenly I'm at 65 like a peaceful Sunday motorist and by some grace of God the blue lights don't come on... but he's still right on my ass. I pull in to the left lane and he blows by me at 100+ mph. We were ecstatic at our luck, but little did we know the karma we lost in that encounter was set in motion to ruin us.

Shaken by our run-in with the 5-0, we decide to get off at an exit in White River Junction, VT, which we soon find out is the single worst town in our state. No grocery stores exist for rejuvenating Arizona and Vitamin Water, just a health food co-op that sold some bullshit Organic Vitamin Water at 2$/bottle. I don't need my water and vitamins organic, you cocksuckers, it can't be that much better for me.

Anyways, White River also happens to be the most impossibly confusing town to exit in the history of time. We start heading South, instead of East like we were supposed to, at the direction of some hooker who told us the worst way to get to NH ever.  We start seeing all sorts of exits for NH, so things are looking up. We keep holding out for the Concord exit, and then we see a big sign up ahead... "Welcome to..." Bitchin', right? "Massachusetts". Jesus fuck. After wandering around in that horrible state for awhile (try putting a gas station within 10 miles of a fucking exit, eh?) we find  a trucker who directs us up to UNH.

We're back on the road, and you can bet the excessive consumption of marijuana and nicotine are continuing at a steady pace, slowly ingraining the marijuana smell into every fiber of my tiny Subaru. 155 miles later we locate campus with bowls in hand, and we begin meandering towards Eric's brother's place as best you can after six hours of unexpected driving without cruise control.

We see the house. Up ahead is a driveway on the left, so I pull in to turn around. My head spins around to check out the back of my car before I reverse, and there's another car waiting to get in to the driveway. I scurry on out of the driveway only to realize that the vehicle did not belong to a homebound soccer mom, but rather to a police officer. The familiar blue lights flicker on 10 feet from the conclusion to our extended journey.

"What are you kids doing?"
"Just trying to visit a friend of ours, it's been a really rough day... got lost up in Vermont, we've been driving for hours. We just saw the house but passed it and had to turn around."
"Oh yeah? Well that right there was unsafe backing."
"You just waited there. We thought you were another car waiting to get into the driveway. If you hadn't stopped there, it wouldn't have been unsafe backing at all."
*Some bullshit small talk...*
"You kids have weed. I can smell it."
"No we don't, officer."
"Well, can I search your car then?"
"No."
"If you don't have anything, why do you care?"
"I wouldn't be a responsible citizen if I let you search my car, sir."
"...What?"
"It's in my rights to withhold permission for you to search my car. I'm just protecting my rights."
"OK, well, I know you guys have weed so I'm going to be calling in an officer with a better nose than me. One second."

Well, fuck. New Hampshire isn't like Vermont where they just threaten to drag dogs in, they actually have mad cruisers that roll with dogs regularly. The next ten minutes are frantic, doing anything we can to cover smells discretely. Collin took the remaining spliffs out of the cigarette box and put them in his rather disgusting shoe, and made a sketchy attempt to remove the weed from the bottom of the box.

The other trooper rolls up... not a canine. Just another fat fuck officer who apparently could smell weed better than the first guy. Idiots... out come the cigarettes and we both start puffing hard and blowing that sweet tobacco smoke all over the inside of the car. The second officer tells us to put away the cigarettes the instant he gets to our window but he knows we fucked  over any chances of him catching an illegal scent. He pulls a small green leaf off of my shirt and claims he can smell that it's marijuana... bullshit, it's a flake the size of a couple grains of salt. I tell him it's probably parsley from my job at an Italian restaurant... they obviously don't believe me.

More threats about dogs if we don't give in from them, and more blank stares and denial from us. We got to witness some heavy good cop/bad cop tactics; one would threaten and the other would come over and try to sympathize with us and get us to "make it easier for everyone". At one point he tells me that he doesn't want to do this, but that they have a lot of reports of drug smuggling up from Vermont so his "hand is forced". The scowl on his face grew to inconceivable levels of fury when I told him with thinly laced sarcasm that I completely understand and fully appreciate his efforts to keep the streets of New Hampshire free of drugs. Fucking pigs.

The second cop finally leaves, and things start looking better. The first one comes to the window and asks to see the two cigarette boxes we blamed the smell on. Shitty. He opens one, and gives a disappointed groan at the sight and smell of Camel Reds. He opens the other one and his face lights up like a kid's on Christmas... there at the bottom is a tiny amount of leaf and a thick, skunky, smell.

"Sir, step out of the car, please."

This is it. I finally pushed it too far and fucked up. I walk slowly back towards his cruiser barely managing to fake confidence.

"What does this smell like to you?"
"Cigarettes, sir."
"And THIS one?"
"Uhm... still cigarettes, sir."
"Oh really?"
"I don't know, I mean I have a cold so maybe I'm not smelling right, but it smells like tobacco to me."
"This is weed. I've smelled it before in my class (like your brown brick weed in class compares whatsoever to what you'd see on an actual person, dumbass)."
"What can I tell you, officer?"
"It's GREEN!"
"I don't know, maybe it's fucked up?"

He releases an angry and frustrated sigh and heads off to Collin's window to try and get something out of him. Collin bullshits like a champ, sending the little piggie into a desperate rage. He literally shouts at us to tell him where the weed is, but we tell him through barely concealed sneers that we don't even smoke weed.

I get cornered up against his cruiser and he tells me that he knows that there's weed in the box and that he could arrest me right there and have it tested back at the station. He tells me I could avoid all that shit if I would just tell him where the weed is. Too bad if I showed you I'd get arrested anyways, dipshit. No bud for you.

It's getting to the breaking point. Things are sort of going my way, but he's absolutely correct... I could be arrested at any point and I'm dancing on thin fucking ice. We play cat and mouse for a little while more, when finally the officer lets out an exasperated squeal that could only have come from a piggie with a very severe migraine. He tells me that he gets off work at 11 (it was 10:50), and he has no desire to deal with us any more. We're off the hook.

My face told him everything I hadn't let slip for the past hour... I got the biggest shit-eating grin and my eyes both lit the hell up pretty much instantaneously. I get into my car, drive to Eric's brother's place, and the celebration begins.

I won't bore you with the details, but later that night when we went to my car to pass out (after Eric drove it blackout drunk, as I later learned) something incredibly shitty happened. Eric was trashed off of some vicious combination of Jack, Captain, Keystone, and indoor. He started kicking the hell out of Collin in the front seat because Collin wouldn't give him a cookie. Collin turned around to retaliate but left his defenses down, so Eric got three kicks to Collin's face, sending his skull into three brutal impacts with my windshield. The whole thing was cracked to hell, leaving a nice little spider with the radius of a pencil in the upper right corner of the glass. Sigh... hopefully insurance will cover it when I tell them it was a baseball... haha.