A Cure for Boredom...

I just watched a high-speed car chase courtesy of OnPatrolLive.  It's a 3 hour ride-along cop show on the Reelz Channel every Friday and Saturday night at 9:00 p.m. EST.  Real buddy buddy, but girls won't be turned off.  Try it, you'll like it.  

Anyway, back to the car chase.  It lasted some 20 minutes and involved about a dozen cop cars.  And a helicopter.  And a K-9 pooch.  And some tazers.  And a "PIT" maneuver at more than 100 mph that destroyed two cars!  These folks would not be denied!  They were serious!  I got the feeling that's why they became cops!  This is like "Grand Theft Auto" for realzies!  

When did this whole thing get so serious?

I remember the good ol' days back in Chillicothe, Missouri.  A town just short of 10,000 in population, but always tried to live bigger than that.  It was the Livingston County seat, so there was a four-story gray concrete block court house smack in the middle of town.  Just like every other Midwest county seat built 100 years ago.  The town was about five miles long, start to finish.  With 5 or 6 stop lights downtown.  Two banks, two pharmacies, one movie theater.  A couple of pool halls.  And the people could not be nicer.  

Growing up there is why, frankly, I'm so damn nice!   That's the answer to the question I'm most often asked, BTW.  Ahem...

So anyway, since there was no Internet back then, nor any late night TV, we'd just turn the AM radio to 640 XERF, Acuna Cuahuila, Meheeeko!  Wolfman Jack was the DJ and he was the best game in town.  So we'd listen to him howl and drive from one end of town to the other, back and forth, nice and slow, windows down, smoking and joking, honking and waving to our friends.  

Who were doing the exact same thing.

This can get a person pretty bored pretty fast.  So some of us car-crazed hooligans resorted to more, umm, exciting ways to spend our evenings.  My preferred way was to find a local cop at the same stoplight as us, but going in the opposite direction.  And then, when the light changed, I'd do a world-class burnout in my Dad's 371 horsepower 1958 Oldsmobile Super 88.  And our donut-friendly cops would do a quick U-turn and head on after us, bubble gum machine turning furiously, siren blaring loudly.  Except I'd keep on going in an effort to outrun these portly civil servants.  

And off we'd go.  I'd go block to block, turning first left then right, always quicker than the 4-door Plymoth cop cars with a teeny little 318 cu. in. motor.  It was frankly unfair, of course, especially with about 600 lbs. of cops on board.  Both of them.  But hey!  Gotta' make your own entertainment sometimes!

So I'd streak on home to my folks' house and use one of those new-fangled (at the time) remote controls to open the garage door just as we arrived.  I'd drive in quickly, close the door behind us, and wait.  Silently.  Before long the cops would arrive, driving by ever so slowly.  Flashing their spot on our house.  Assuring themselves it simply couldn't have been me.  

Except who else had a champagne beige four-door hardtop Olds with a white top?  And four dumbasses on board giving them the finger?  

Me and my buds would laugh our asses off for awhile, have a quart of Falstaff (3 for $1.99 at the time), and then head on out. like a lion on the Serengheti, I'd go looking for the cops again.  To set up my trap, again.  18 year-old boys, looking for a little spice in their lives.  And sometimes, believe it or not, I'd get to the do the exact same thing ONE MORE TIME in the very same evening!  

How?  Why?  Because, you see, we'd learned that a Chillicothe Police Policy stated that unless they could catch you, they couldn't nab you later.  Which fueled our teenage fantasies.  And we took every advantage of it.

Then there was that cold December evening.  It had been snowing all day, lightly, but enough to leave a 2" or 3" covering of white powder everywhere.  Including all over the streets.  

And so about 11:00 p.m., when all normal folks had turned in, we'd strike!  This was perfect for us, 'cause we'd go looking for the cops to get them to chase us, and then outrun them again.  In the snow.  Going about 6 miles per hour.  Slippin' and a' slidin,' as we say.  With gales of laughter filling our car.  The cops were probably laughing too..

It was "American Grafitti" out loud!  And I never got snagged by the fuzz, as they say.  But I always felt that the cops, guys we'd all gone to school with, really didn't want to catch us and ruin all the fun!   

Who knows?  As I said, there was no Internet...