Cain

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[Stand still 5-10 seconds, small movement, nods] Just getting comfy. Alright. I’ll wait. That’s how all the teachers in 8th grade would start class. Didn’t work. “I’ll wait.” So, in our 14 year old hivemind we took that to mean, if we didn’t stop talking, we didn’t have to do anything. Not as effective as the oldschool technique where the teacher walks in “Alright, shut the fuck up. I wanna talk about math.”

The first one doesn’t work for me, either. [pause] ‘I’ll wait. Guys I’ve got 3 minutes, I can ruin the rhythm for the whole night.’ Don’t… test me.
—- 45 sec

I’m 18, and that’s tough for me up here, because I’ve been to McCurdy’s a few times, and I see you folks, and some of you have kids that are my age, or older. And that puts a lot of pressure on me because this is my last chance, to get adopted.
—- 58 sec total

I’ve done a lot of stupid things. I think a lot of teenagers do stupid things, and I don’t think any of you haven’t, so let’s not judge me.

I’m going to tell you the story of the stupidest thing I’ve ever done; it was the first time I got a ticket. And it wasn’t a ticket, it was three tickets. And I could have gone to jail had I not been such a smooth talker.

I had just gotten my first car, I don’t mean to brag, but it was a 2001 Saturn.
—- 1 min, 24 sec

My father had helped me get the car, because he works at a dealership in Minnesota. The car had to be shipped from the dealership, and I bought it in October. I didn’t have the license plate, but I had the registration then. Because snow birds make a point to ruin every mother tit-fucking thing for the rest of us, I couldn’t ship my car, because they were shipping their cars, so a service that would have been two-hundred dollars, was about a thousand dollars. So I got it in March. By then the registration had expired, and it was a Friday afternoon, so the DMV wasn’t open until Monday, and I really wanted to drive my new, quote-unquote ‘new’, car.

So I used the best excuse I had to drive around town, which was to go job hunting. It was eight o’clock in the evening.
—- 2 min, 3 sec

I went to a few places, most memorably the Taco Bell on 41 and Bahia Vista, which very fortunately was having a meeting of all its managers, oddly enough they had four, and everyone was a manager of something. They were very eager to take me on as their new ‘Cleaning Captain’ [tilt back by the hips, air-quotes]. I don’t know if Cleaning Captain is quite the right title, because I didn’t have a Cleaning Lieutenant OR a Cleaning Sergeant or even just janitors who I had authority over, but I gave them my resume and went on my way.

Side story, I noticed three months later that the phone number on all of the resumes I’d handed out was wrong. And damned if that isn’t funny all by itself.
—- 2 min, 40 sec

The next place I went was Hollywood 21 at the end of Main Street. Main Street is my favorite place in the city, especially at night, so I was very excited to drive around there. While I was pulling away from Hollywood 21 I reached over, grabbed my seat belt and let go, and said to myself, “I’ll be fine.” I was just going to the other end of Main Street, after all. Halfway there I passed two squad cars, and the guy in the first one made eye contact. This was March, Click-it-or-Ticket month, and I knew what was about to go down.

My fears were confirmed when I looked in the rearview and he was making a sharp U-Turn. It just so happens that I know the layout of Main Street very well, and it just so happens I was going by an alley that I knew emptied out onto 1st street, right next to a private but not closed off parking lot. And it just so happens that I thought the universe was giving me a sign. And maybe it was. But when I sharply veered into the alley and made a number of tight turns that I thought at the time probably looked very bad-ass, and then turned onto 1st Street and into the parking lot and two squad cars lit up right behind me, I bet the universe was saying ‘Dude. I meant [emphasize each word] pull over there. [Stop] When I parked the car and rolled down the window, the officer attending said “Now that you’ve got me nice and pissed off, how about you step the fuck out of the vehicle.” I don’t know why he took it so personally either.
—- 3 min, 54 sec

[Pause] ‘Officer I don’t know what you think is going on but this is the parking lot I was trying to get to and I had to go through that alley way to get here, otherwise I’d have to drive a half mile out of the way going by the park and library to get here. I realized I was about to miss my turn and that’s why I pulled so sharply into the alley. You didn’t have your lights on so I didn’t realize that I was about to be pulled over, and I think that’s where the confusion lies.’

The bit about the lights was true, and I think part of me knew that that was my ticket out of being arrested. The rest of it was total bullshit, and also not what I said.
What I said was something like ‘Ye… yeaaaaaah…’
—- 4 min, 30 sec

So the next thirty minutes was spent with him searching my car and his more level headed partner asking me about the CD albums in my backseat. Classic good cop, dick.

The evening ended with them giving me a seatbelt ticket, a no-proof-of-insurance ticket, and a ticket for driving an unregistered vehicle, which is a criminal offense. Then I had to call my mother and have her pick me up. Yeah.

I’m sure you all can guess, that even though everything up to that had gone poorly, the rest of my evening was just great.

Thank you guys, I’m Michael Cain.
—- 5 min, 3 sec