Our Carpartment — with some ADHD and Coors
A turning point on the back of a police car
I always lose my license, so one day I figured I’d get ahead of the problem, and memorize my license number. Turns out, it impresses cops.
I once decided I need a mansion to lose less stuff. A room for my shoes. A room for my wallet. A room for my car. Hell, even a garage. I used to have this girlfriend, I admired her system greatly. “I have seven surfaces in my house and all my stuff will be on one of those surfaces.” I have too many surfaces to count. Need that mansion.
As a kid, I was a terror. My friends’ parents didn’t like me. I never had any manners. My grandma used to snipe at us “God didn’t give you forks, he gave you fingers.”
My best friend’s parents pressured my parents to make me take Cotillion. “We think your child doesn’t respect our authority as adult strangers enough, send him to silverware boot camp.” A common theme was developing, as my fourth-grade teacher put it… “Kristofer just doesn’t fit my vision for the classroom.”
Being in a friendship, relationship with someone with ADHD is a bitch
I told a friend that I had sex. Instead of the “cool man” I was expecting, he hit me with “oh so you cleaned your room.” I was glad that was a statement and not a question, it meant he had a little faith in me, at least.
A girlfriend, with whom I lived, best described what it was like to be with me when she said ”What?! You’ve moved to a car in LA? To act?” So that didn’t work out with her. Or my car mate.
It didn’t work out with my car mate because, well, when you are on a roll with great impulsive decisions, sometimes you get sad, and sometimes you get really sad and you start drinking lots of cans of Coors. Because depressants make you un-depressed. Anyway, you get on a roll with such decision making, and you might find yourself “insobriently” driving your buddy’s car over to the neighborhoods below Universal City.
I parked the car in said neighborhoods, and not too bad, for a drunk, at least as far as I can remember.
As I started walking up to Universal City (a big, sobering hill) the thought occurs to me… “oh I’m a little spinny, where did I park the car?” I search. After an hour, I didn’t find it. So now that I’ve lost his car, that we both live in, I walk on up to Universal and break the news. This poor guy was just finishing up an early morning shift as a bouncer, and now he’s gotta deal with my bullshit. But, ya know, he lives in a car with me. He knows me. This isn’t the most unexpected thing in the world, so we rouse a gang of bouncers and search for the car. After an hour, we didn’t find it. At 4 am, my car mate calls the cops.
“It must’ve been stolen, right?” Wrong.
Which was too bad. In both of our minds, we figured the insurance from a stolen car would certainly be enough money for an apartment. Exhausted, bleary-eyed, still searching but ready to give up, we found the car about half an hour after he hung up with dispatch.
You might think the thought that finding the car would produce relief. Nope.
Just tired anger. The thing with tired anger, is stupid thoughts occur such as… “It’s 4:30 in the morning, LAPD’s gotta be closed by now, I’ll let them know we found the car in the morning.”
Plot twist —
LAPD is a 24 hours, 7 days a week kind of operation.
We don’t even move our car to our normal haunts that night. We just passed the fuck out. Got the car at 4:30, asleep at 4:31. Eight squad cars were there at 4:55. A knee was in my buddy’s kidney at 4:56. When the cops showed up, he woke up. I didn’t. So they apparently had to rip me outta the car.
I woke up at 4:57 face down, on the back of a squad car. I kinda start coming to and one of the cops asked, “hey, so do you know why we’re here?” I don’t. I was drunk, and then I was asleep, and then I was awake. And cops? Then I remember, and I start laughing and say “oh, we never called you guys back!” Dude laughs, keeps me in cuffs but lets me kinda find my own posture again. He asked for my license. I felt as if this was possibly the worst time to not have my wallet. So I popped off with “GA 0318…”. Luckily, he laughed and went on with checking the system to make sure I wasn’t the shoe bomber.
Anyway, that was about the breaking point, the time where I started throwing around the idea of not doing stupid shit. So that whole LA thing didn’t work out. My re-education would begin within a few months.
