AlphaBeta on Nostr: Storytime! I went to high school in Southern Oregon. For those who know, Oregon has ...
Storytime! I went to high school in Southern Oregon. For those who know, Oregon has DEEPLY white supremacist roots, unusually so for a west-coast state, and this is reflected in the way policing is done here.
I was a queer, punk, theatre kid at a peckerwood/redneck high school in a bedroom town called Phoenix. There was a lot of cultural friction for me and my little cadre as we black-swanned through adolescence. Some of us punks were spikier than others, like my very good friend, T.
T was a classically visible punk kid, with a foot-tall mohawk stiffened with furniture lacquer and Unruh patches on his ragged leather jacket. I was a poorly-dressed poet-in-rags type who got in a lot of fistfights with bullies.
One day, T was accused by the school of having set fire to a piece of paper that was taped to a brickwork exterior wall, partially charring it (note: the paper was not incinerated or destroyed, and in fact was still intact according to the pictures submitted as evidence) and of course myself and my ragged, gum-chewing cohorts were hauled into the office and interrogated about it.
The Phoenix police department arrived to question us separately, and none of our parents were notified.
As I sat there in the nursing room with some 26 year-old pig shithead telling me that he KNEW my friend had set the fire and that I had "assisted" him, I told him that I saw no such thing and no one else had either, and I demanded to know who had told them this story.
He said it was T who had confessed. I knew T had about as much respect for authority as I did, so this seemed implausible at best. Not knowing any better, (I was 14, having advanced a grade early) I assumed cops couldn't lie, so I figured there must be some mistake, or that the police had been lied to themselves. I denied everything. They tried to make me write a statement about the incident while they had me locked up, so I stole as many wet-naps as I possibly could fit in my pants and wrote 200 or so words about my aspirations to become a garbage man.
They took the paper and left me there for another 30 minutes or so.
The next person to enter the room was my mother, and she did not come gentle. I heard her before I saw her.
"Where is Alexander?" She bellowed. "Where is my son?"
The door came open and she came in with an officer and the vice principal. She absolutely lost her mind at the sight of me in handcuffs and called the officer -who shrank before her barely five foot height- a "peasant traitor" and got me out of there.
Then we saw T being arrested just outside the office. He said nothing to me at all, but the look on one of my best childhood friend's faces was like a spear of ice through my heart.
The charge they hit him with was ARSON. Their witness? Me.
They had lied to him, telling him that I had sold him out, coercing him into a weak confession.
Ultimately, the charges were reduced and he only had to do community service, but it was a difficult thing to mend our friendship. We figured out what had happened pretty quickly, but to a 14 year old, two weeks of believing in a betrayal from your best friend is an eternity.
FUCK the police.
I was a queer, punk, theatre kid at a peckerwood/redneck high school in a bedroom town called Phoenix. There was a lot of cultural friction for me and my little cadre as we black-swanned through adolescence. Some of us punks were spikier than others, like my very good friend, T.
T was a classically visible punk kid, with a foot-tall mohawk stiffened with furniture lacquer and Unruh patches on his ragged leather jacket. I was a poorly-dressed poet-in-rags type who got in a lot of fistfights with bullies.
One day, T was accused by the school of having set fire to a piece of paper that was taped to a brickwork exterior wall, partially charring it (note: the paper was not incinerated or destroyed, and in fact was still intact according to the pictures submitted as evidence) and of course myself and my ragged, gum-chewing cohorts were hauled into the office and interrogated about it.
The Phoenix police department arrived to question us separately, and none of our parents were notified.
As I sat there in the nursing room with some 26 year-old pig shithead telling me that he KNEW my friend had set the fire and that I had "assisted" him, I told him that I saw no such thing and no one else had either, and I demanded to know who had told them this story.
He said it was T who had confessed. I knew T had about as much respect for authority as I did, so this seemed implausible at best. Not knowing any better, (I was 14, having advanced a grade early) I assumed cops couldn't lie, so I figured there must be some mistake, or that the police had been lied to themselves. I denied everything. They tried to make me write a statement about the incident while they had me locked up, so I stole as many wet-naps as I possibly could fit in my pants and wrote 200 or so words about my aspirations to become a garbage man.
They took the paper and left me there for another 30 minutes or so.
The next person to enter the room was my mother, and she did not come gentle. I heard her before I saw her.
"Where is Alexander?" She bellowed. "Where is my son?"
The door came open and she came in with an officer and the vice principal. She absolutely lost her mind at the sight of me in handcuffs and called the officer -who shrank before her barely five foot height- a "peasant traitor" and got me out of there.
Then we saw T being arrested just outside the office. He said nothing to me at all, but the look on one of my best childhood friend's faces was like a spear of ice through my heart.
The charge they hit him with was ARSON. Their witness? Me.
They had lied to him, telling him that I had sold him out, coercing him into a weak confession.
Ultimately, the charges were reduced and he only had to do community service, but it was a difficult thing to mend our friendship. We figured out what had happened pretty quickly, but to a 14 year old, two weeks of believing in a betrayal from your best friend is an eternity.
FUCK the police.