Drug Searched at the Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn

This past year, all of my friends went to this cultural phenomenon called "Dayglow." I don't know if you've heard of it, but essentially the gist is that a whole bunch of meandering twenty year olds end up in a collective area. They play this thing called "house music." I am still not sure what that means or what it sounds like, but whatever. Then, everyone wears white (which in my neighborhood, that was not something that you did in a public forum) and bumps into each other a lot. Throughout the night, the ceiling spews paint down on top of you, and from what I hear, it's pretty awesome. As I've stated in the past, I don't like bodily fluids, my contacts tend to dry out rather quickly, and I spend enough time bumping into people I don't want to see--this obviously was not the event for me.

Ecstasy is like a mix of those little
tablets you use to dye Easter eggs and
Smarties.

But my friends bought their tickets weeks in advance, waiting for the day that they would go play in paint and experience "young adulthood." Maybe I'm missing the point of young adulthood, but I was on RA duty that night so I just went back to my room and watched Enough with Jennifer Lopez. Apparently the only way the night of paint and sweat could be any more amazing is if you took this little substance called "Molly." If you're a hood-ass gansta like myself, you may know it by it's other aliases: Mandy, ecstasy, X, or MDMA (and yes, I had to wikipedia half of those). After talking to a friend who explained how it released all this dopamine and serotonin, it really didn't sound all that bad. But then she told me about this phenomenon called "Suicide Tuesday" that happens after, which is this depressed, hopeless state you fall into because your body has literally had all the happiness sucked out of it. As a fairly emotional person anyway, it didn't make much sense to purposefully send myself into euphoria and/or depression. I did that on a daily basis anyway. At the end of the day, I stuck with my dad's tried and true saying, Don't take that shit if it didn't come straight out of the ground. Affirmative, Wendell.
So needless to say, I don't dabble in drugs; if I were to ever appear on COPS, it may be for gang violence or domestic assault, but definitely not drugs. After watching cousin after cousin dip their toes in the (heroin, LSD, hydrocodone) water, it just didn't seem like a logical route to take. Call me a hipster, but drugs seemed so mainstream to me. That didn't keep me from straying off the tracks a bit though. After my sophomore year, I took one summer to be a wild child. I made out with a lot of girls, called into work sick sometimes, and occasionally stole meat that was left in an abandoned cooler outside of a restaurant next to campus. Needless to say, I was pretty out of control. I ended the summer by taking the stereotypical step to rebellion: I got a mohawk.

An unfortunate time for everyone.

After I got the mohawk, it was pretty much over. I didn't care about doing anything crazy anymore because A) where do you go once you've hit the top and B) I was bored with it. But speaking on a first hand basis, leaving the scandalous lifestyle I was leading is kind of like quitting a gang: you don't do it. A couple weeks into my junior year, a group of us decided to go to the fraternity party happening off campus. There were too many of us for one car, so we split up: four in mine, two in the other. I'm a bit of an aggressive driver, so I was setting the pace for the rest of the traffic when an officer shot in behind me and turned on his lights. I'm not sure about everyone else, but the two minutes it takes me to get pulled over when a cop gets in behind me is seriously the worst two minutes of driving I will ever do in my life. Naturally, I was in the fast lane, so there's that awkward struggle of getting pulled over and then knowing where the right place is to stop: on this night, it happened to be at the Holiday Inn.
The officer shined a light in my car and asked for everyone's identification and then asked me why I was drag racing with the truck next to me. First and foremost, if it were a drag race, I would have won. Secondly, I wasn't even aware that I was drag racing him, but I suppose it made sense because the truck pulled over with us had a "piss on Ford" sticker and a proud, valiant Dale Earnhardt number 3 in his back window. Dale (three to the sky) and Teresa would have given him mad props. After sticking his head halfway in my window, the officer asked if he could search my vehicle. To my knowledge, all that was in there was at least three Zaxby's bags, enough aluminum Coke cans to power a third world country, and a half dumped container of powder laundry detergent that could have been misconstrued as cocaine if it weren't for the revitalizing blue crystals that make your clothes smell fantastic. Without knowledge that you have the right to decline a drug search of your car, I just accepted it.
All of that rebellion was soon out the window. At first, it all seemed to be just a routine procedure, but three cop cars, half the Texas Roadhouse, a solid number of occupants at the Holiday Inn, and a drug dog later, everything was starting to get out of control. We had all been removed from the car, and the truck we were drag racing with was gone. It wasn't until I was straddled with my hands placed on the hood of the cop car that I really started to fall apart. I looked over at the officer who had just got done frisking me and said, I was valedictorian of my high school. He looked at me half-puzzled, half-knowingly as I continued, I've been on Dean's List every semester... I mean, I'm Vice-President of the Student Body... people like me don't get drug searched. I don't even do drugs. He did his best to ignore my comments, but I continued, and there are people over there taking pictures... and they're only getting me from the side. I look horrible. He knew it. I knew it. Justin was broken. The officer was quite a portly man himself, and what I said must have hit home because he immediately responded, Ah, you don't look bad. You're not even that big! We had a moment, right there in the joint Holiday Inn/Texas Roadhouse parking lot. As the girl in the backseat was being threatened with jail time for having migraine medicine on her person without a prescription, I turned to the officer and said, Really? and he said, Really. I understand.

The german shepherd that arrived on scene was digging through my backseat, which was so messy that it was reminiscent of the final challenge on Double Dare 2000, and all I could do was stand there and talk to my new officer friend until the whole charade was over. The entire escapade lasted about an hour and a half... during which the officer never found in necessary to turn off his flashing lights. If I had been there five more minutes, I probably would have gone into an epileptic seizure. Other than some prescription migraine medicine (which is obviously what all the kids are getting off on these days), there was nothing in my car. By the time we were able to get going to the party, we were sure that freshmen had already crashed the event, which means the more pedophilic upperclassmen were grinding about in a cramped living room while everyone else had vacated. We just decided to go to a friend's house.
But from every situation, there is some kind of takeaway lesson, even if it is a really shitty one: in this case, trying to emulate Nancy Reagan and "just saying no" doesn't always work because the only justification that the officer had for searching my car was that it smelled wanky. Because he was from Alcoa, I decided that the best place to find the definition of wanky was on UrbanDictionary.

Wanky (wah-aye-enn-key): adj. Word used to describe moments of great sexual attraction and sexual tension.

It didn't seem to fit the description that I had in mind. But I think the bigger take away here is that drugs are everywhere, even in places that their not. On this Halloween, I'm reminded of all the times my parents would take my Halloween candy and spread it out on the table inspecting it for drugs, and as a candy-giver-outter myself these days, I suppose that it's very possible. I still suspect that it was no coincidence that all the drug-laden candy just happened to be the Butterfingers and Reeses, but parents that actually love their children and respect the hard door to door plight that is trick or treating probably should search their kid's candy for drugs because you never know when a Smartie will turn up to be a hard hit of ecstasy.