I Got Along Better with Cops Before I Was Sober
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I Got Along Better with Cops Before I Was Sober

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got along better with copsOh my God, remember how we used to feel about cops? They were parents, teachers, dictators and overlords all rolled into one power tripping, ridiculously costumed package. They were out to bust our parties, make us paranoid during our rides home from nights out and just generally ruin our good time.

My relationship with these buzz killing masters started early on, when they’d come and shut down the parties I liked to have in high school when my parents were out of town. In they’d come, telling everyone to go home. Thankfully, these cops never seemed interested in busting anyone; they just wanted to help out the neighbors or whoever was complaining so they’d kick everyone out and that would be that.

Then I got my license, and my relationship with the cops happened mostly in my head, as I drove home drunk from wherever I’d been that night and kept imagining I saw their square headlights in my rear view mirror. Do cop cars even have square headlights? Someone told me that and I believed it but I also learned over those years that lots of cars have square headlights and also that when I was drunk it was hard to tell a square from a circle.

But one night after a dance show at my high school, when I was in the back seat of my friend’s car and she was pulled over for not having her lights on, I was busted. Yes, we’d been drinking. We were a bunch of teenagers driving around in a car without lights on drinking and I remember feeling outraged that these f-ing cops were harassing some people just wanting to have a good time. They ended up searching our car and found a can of beer I had in my dance bag. Another friend had a beer in her bag too and so she and I were given citations. Earlier that night, she and I had been wearing poodle skirts in the dance show as we performed to a Big Bopper song. Because, by the time we were pulled over, I was drunk and cold, I had started wearing the poodle skirt as a sort of head scarf wrap. I’ll never forget that on the citation, the cop had to write down what I was wearing and he wrote, “skirt over head.” I secretly thought the poodle skirt on my head is what really got me busted.

But this was Marin, where I don’t think cops know how to process actual crimes since there are so few of them, and so despite the fact that it felt at the time like I was going to be sent to Sing Sing and life as I knew it was over, all that ended up happening is I had to write—hand write because this was the Dark Ages—an essay about why I drank. God knows what I wrote but let’s assume it wasn’t “I’m uncomfortable in my own skin” or “I don’t know how to just be in the moment” or any of the other things I’ve learned since getting sober. Whatever it was, it was good enough to help me avoid getting in actual trouble.

There was another time when I was in San Francisco late one night, with my friend and her older brother and his friends and we had to pull over so I could throw up and a cop came and tapped me on the shoulder. I remember I pushed his arm away and then I saw what and who he was and tried to pretend I had food poisoning. He told my friends to get me home as soon as they could. My trend of cops not actually busting me when I thought they would continued.

Many years passed, I graduated from college and found myself living in LA and just generally running my life into the ground. One night, I was at a party, wasted, and a friend asked if I wanted to go to a late night gathering on Hollywood Boulevard. I did! I grabbed a couple of friends and jumped in my car and drove over, parking on some side street and rushing into the party where we did coke and drank for the next few hours.

And then, around 3 am, my friend and I emerged onto Hollywood Boulevard. We looked around. Where in God’s name had I parked? (I should mention that this kind of thing still happens to me still—this car losing thing—but that night, we were wasted on what seemed like incredibly sketchy part of Hollywood Boulevard.) This was before Uber and there wasn’t a cab in sight (has there ever been a cab in sight in LA?) I was terrified. I was terrified a lot when I was on coke. I was just never terrified of the right things. I thought we were going to be killed. And so when I saw a cop car barreling down the street, I did what I thought was the most logical thing imaginable: I waved it down.

“What are you doing”? My friend asked. “I have coke on me!”

“We’re going to die,” I said. “Jail is better than death.”

“No it’s not!” she hissed as the cop car pulled up. The officer on the passenger side rolled down his window and asked if there was a problem.

“Yes, officer,” I responded, imitating a not drunk and high person as best I could. “I seem to have misplaced my car and am a little concerned that we’re not in the safest area. Would it be possible for you to drive us around to look for my car?”

He looked at his partner, the partner nodded. My friend froze. “Sure,” he said and we jumped in.

It was only when we were in there that I realized how idiotic this was. We reeked of alcohol and I prayed that the fact that we also reeked of cigarettes was masking it. I turned on my sober persona all the more, chatting with these men about the weather, the state of the world, whatever else I could think of. My friend sat unmoving and mute as if she’d been muzzled and taped to the seat.

And then, after a half hour or so, we drove up some side street and I saw my car, innocently parked, oblivious to the drama it had caused. “There it is!” I announced.

“Great!” The cops said.

We got out. We walked to the car. I tried to walk as straight a line as I could as I opened the driver’s door. I guess I succeeded. And that was that. No arrest. No “get your friend home as soon as you can.” No essay to write about why I drank.

Years later, once I was sober, I drove through a DUI checkpoint. I’d never been through one before and I was proud of how incredibly sober I was after all those years of drunk driving but also a little paranoid. Doing coke for so many years has left me a bit paranoid about ridiculous things and so I felt concerned I’d somehow appear drunk despite my 13 years of sobriety. It’s the same way that NO SHOPLIFTING signs always make me feel like I’ve somehow shoved skirts and scarves into my purse. Maybe it’s leftover coke paranoia, maybe it’s delayed guilt over having driven drunk (and tricked my grandmother into shoplifting sunglasses for me as a teenager but that’s a different story). Anyway, I rolled down my window and said, because I actually thought he’d find this interesting, “Not only am I sober now but I’ve been sober for years and am listening to a podcast I host about recovery!” (Embarrassingly, I was.)

The cop didn’t seem impressed. In fact he looked at me like I was a crazy person. It reminded me of the time I was walking into an event at the same time as Larry David and so I turned to him and told him that we had the same last name and so people always asked me if we were related and clearly we weren’t but I did have a second cousin named Larry David who had, last I heard, sold used cars, but no one in the family had heard from him in decades.

Larry David was actually nicer. The cop just gave me a look, a far more disapproving one than any of the cops who’d been around drunken me ever had, and told me to have a nice night. I can only conclude my zeal over my sobriety made him think I was insane.

And I didn’t even have to wear a poodle skirt on my head to convince him.

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About Author

Anna David is the founder and former CEO/Editor-in-Chief of After Party. She hosts the Light Hustler podcast, formerly known as the AfterPartyPod. She's also the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Party Girl and Bought and the non-fiction books Reality Matters, Falling For Me, By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There and True Tales of Lust and Love. She's written for numerous magazines, including Playboy, Cosmo and Details, and appeared repeatedly on the TV shows Attack of the Show, The Today Show and The Talk, among many others.