I felt the hand of an officer forcefully push my head down as I ducked into the back of the squad car. While doing so, my throat had neglected to follow me and had thus risen to my throat. Yes, that was my throat, the body part that could use about a gallon of water right now. As I sat, red and blue light struck the rear window and onto the back of my head while my heart battered my ribcage.

The radio cackled with intermittent and almost unintelligible chatter, not that my state of mind allowed me to comprehend what was being said anyway. How would I get myself out of it this time? I closed my eyes, and started to count to ten slowly. One. Two. Three. Four…

A click and a creak interrupted my meditation routine, and the white noise of wind and a crowd filled the cabin of the Crown Victoria while a young officer, Officer Johnny, climbed in. (I don’t remember his real name.) Another click and a creak, and now double the noise. The other officer, an older and more grizzled officer dropped in along with the smell of cigarettes. Let’s call him Officer Everett. It was all Training Day-esque.

“You alright back there?” asked Officer Johnny in the passenger seat.

A raspy voice responded, “No.” I realized that the voice belonged to me.

“Good,” Officer Everett goaded.

The car accelerated away from MLK Blvd. We climbed the onramp to the freeway and promptly encountered traffic. I noticed the clock on the car radio clock about twenty minutes later, at which time my thoughts started becoming more lucid and my head cleared.

“Can I have my cellphone?” I asked.

“Nope,” Officer Everett responded matter-of-factly.

I slowly started to accept my fate, and I sank lower into my seat.

“I need to reach my wife and daughter,” I explained. And after a pause, “Please.”

“Not interested.”

Stop and go. Each jerk forward and backward compressed my lungs and started to make me taste my lunch.

“Yeah, you want your cellphone, huh,” Officer Everett asserted. He had been thinking about my plea for the past five minutes. As he spat words towards the front windshield, my chest tightened. I struggled to suck air in. And then it came. “I don’t get you types. You should have thought about all of this before you neglected to pay your rent.”

That was when my face and ears started to tingle. It was as though pressure had been building up behind rusty, clogged pipes all this time, and they were now ready to burst. It wasn’t that I was denied my cellphone; I expected that. It wasn’t that he had authority over my fate and what I could and couldn’t have or do. It was the casual indifference, the subtle judgement that I should have known better, the careless dismissal of the person rather than the request itself. That is when my heart-rate cranked up from a hundred beats per minute to a thousand beats per second. The cold cavity of uncertainty started to fill with a hot rush of blood flowing through my arteries that got sucked up through my veins.

And before my brain could tug the reins, “You types? Look, you don’t know me. You don’t know why I did what I did. And even if you did, you don’t know who I did it to. All you know is some guy wouldn’t leave his shop and the landlord called the cops. Yeah, I could be the asshole here, but maybe it’s him.”

“Look buddy…”

“Wait, I’m not done yet. Threatening my landlord might’ve been a bad decision. I’ve made plenty of those. But maybe I’ve done worse, and maybe I know a bit more about judgement than you do. Because maybe I saw it from my buddy’s wife when I got my purple heart, and all she got was her husband’s body. I saw it from a stupid kid’s mom when my CO ordered me to shoot him because he was gonna blow us up. A kid not much older than the one who’s waiting for his dad right now…and maybe that’s why I need a phone.”

Sweet release. I could feel the heart beating in the temples of my head begin to dampen and slow. The flood gates had purged their load. And then silence. The traffic lightened. Officer Johnny’s silhoette shielded the sun from my eyes. Officer Everett quietly wrote on a clipboard. My mind no longer to raced. It didn’t matter. None of it did. I closed my eyes.

I felt the belt tighten across my chest, and deducted that the car was decelerating. A police station loomed over us. A complete stop. I opened my eyes. Officer Johnny had already left the car. Officer Everett was blankly staring at me. He had slipped my iPhone through the grating that separated the rear bench from the front.

“You got five minutes. Don’t tell anyone.”

I reached out for the phone and said, “Thank you.”

“No, sir. Thank you.”