It is a gray, horrible day, and I don't want to do anything. Also I haven't blogged in a long, long time. So I drank a bunch of tea and wrote about this thing that happened to me recently.
So, no shit, there I was, rural Wisconsin. That's right, the same place in rural Wisconsin where Bess and I had the encounter with the angry drunk bigot and the non-existant bears, and where we had the encounter with the snowbank and a lot of embarrasment. I was there with my family this time, and all was well. Well, I say all was well. All was well in Wisconsin. In New York, where I currently actually live, all was decidedly unwell, because there was, I don't know if you heard, a huge fuck-off hurricane called Irene coming. I was scheduled to fly home on the day that Irene was supposed to hit the city mega-bad. At this point I realized I had two choices. I could stay where I was, in rural Wisconsin, and go back to New York whenever the city settled down, or I could try as hard as I could to get in BEFORE the hurricane hit, and thus avoid both being stuck in Wisconsin for an indefinite period of time, and also being called a pussy by all my friends for being in the Midwest while they were going through a hurricane-apocalypse.
So I called the airline, spent four hours on hold, rescheduled my flight to the LAST FLIGHT TO NEW YORK which would be out of O'Hare, and which would happen in about twelve hours. Now, how to get from Ruralsville, Wisconsin to O'Hare? There weren't a lot of options. My dad drove me to Green Bay, where I rented a car, and proceeded to drive Chicago-wards. I was caffeinating and eating sour gummy worms, since I knew I was going to end up driving well into the night, and I find that coffee, Diet Coke, and sour gummy worms are pretty much all I need to stay up late. Well, that and good music. I was unfortunately unable to find good music, as at least two thirds of the radio stations in rural Wisconsin turned out to be Christian, and even when they stopped talking about God n' Stuff, they played the Worst. Music. Ever. Seriously, I am aware that some Christian music can be really good (that Handel guy had something going for him, I thought) but Christian radio stations are the worst. Anyway, finally while I was circling the radio dial desperately listening for something that didn't suck (for some reason, all I wanted to listen to by then was Bob Dylan. You ever get like that? I would've given a year of my life for a radio station that was just willing to play Blood on the Tracks on loop) when finally I heard the opening strains of American Pie, and decided fuck it, this is as close as I'm going to get. Unfortunately, that was the last half-way decent song that 60s and 70s radio station played for the next hour. I listened to Lean on Me. I LISTENED TO LEAN ON ME. God, that song is annoying. I nearly turned back to the Christian stations.
Anyway.
The road trip was going pretty much like that when I got a call from a friend saying "hope you're not driving hell-bent across rural Wisconsin, because they just canceled all the flights into anywhere near New York, as of right now." I was thwarted. And, as it turned out when I took a look at the nearest road sign, I was thwarted in Sheboygan.
Thwarted in Sheboygan is the name of my rock band.
Anyway, it was around midnight. No point going on to Chicago, and no point going back to Green Bay, as the car rental place would be too closed to let me return the car, and oh yeah, no way was my dad driving down from Ruralsville to get me from Green Bay at that time of night, so I decided to just stay the night in Sheboygan. I found a motel at the center of town, and was mildly perturbed by the sheer number of police I saw out. Seriously, I passed about ten police cars, all around the center of Sheboygan. Was crime so rife in this sleepy little Midwestern town, I wondered? Whatever. I booked a room in the motel, and promptly realized that what with the coffee, Diet Coke, and gummy worms, there was no way I was going to get to sleep any time soon. So I walked out of the motel, which was conventiently situated right on the Sheboygan town square (Sheboygan has a town square) and walked into the first bar I saw.
It turned out to be a strip club. I walked back out.
The second place, though, turned out to be a nice little localish bar with about ten micro-brews on tap. Sweet, I thought, and sat down at the bar. At this point I began to rock the New-Yorker-Stuck-In-A-Small-Town stereotype so hard it was embarrasing. If this had been a movie, I would've ended up married to a farmer and learning the value of slowing down and taking life as it comes. But then, I also probably would've been an ad executive or a high-powered lawyer (what the hell is a high-powered lawyer? Is that a special kind of lawyer, or does it just denote the fact that they are very important?) or something. But I was rocking the stereotype in that 1) I was weaaring a black dress, in a place where no one else was wearing black, or dresses. 2) I have purple hair. That's not really a thing in Sheboygan, I soon learned. 3) I tipped a dollar on my drink. That's also not a thing in Sheboygan.
In fact, it was so not a thing that the bartender's eyes got all big and he asked me where I was from. I told him, and insisted on tipping. I told him it was the custom among my people. I don't know what I meant by that, but he seemed happy with it, and he called over a regular to come and talk to this crazy chick from New York, which was cool. My backup plan had been to read Clash of Kings on my Kindle, but I ended up talking to the regular instead. He was a professional golf caddy. Apparently golf is big in Sheboygan.
An hour or so passed like that. The bartender decided my third drink was on him, and had just poured it when he suddenly came over and announced that, shit, the bar was closing.
The regular and I (by then the only two people in there) were puzzled. It was 1:30 am, hardly the time for a mandatory bar-closing time. But no, the bartender explained as he locked up. He had to close because he had to go. And he had to go because his girlfriend was in jail, and he had to go get her.
The regular seemed not at all surprised or perturbed. "I'll drive you," he volunteered. Then he turned to me. "You want to come?" he asked.
Have any of you met me? If so, you know what I said. Hell YES I wanted to go.
So that's how I ended up riding shotgun to the Sheboygan jail.
Riding Shotgun to the Sheboygan Jail is the name of my rockband's first album. Or my 700 page introspective novel. I'm not sure yet.
Anyway, we found the jail, which was actually kind of hard. Eventually we located it by looking for the building with the most flags. Once there we found Bartender's Girlfriend, who was standing around eating an apple as though that apple had insulted her mother. She was going seriuosly vindictive on this apple; just ripping chunk after chunk out of it with her teeth. Turns out, you see, that she had been arrested on marijuana charges. That apple had been the device she and her friend had been about to smoke out of. Once released, the cops had given her her apple back, and she had decided, with the flawless logic of one who has just been Fucked by the System that fuck you, the Man, she was going to eat the HELL out of this weed-apple.
She got in the car, was introduced to me (if she thought it was weird that her boyfriend and some guy from his bar, and also this girl she didn't know had just arrived to pick her up from jail, she didn't mention it) and told us the rest of her story. She had takent the heat for her friend, who was a school teacher. Quite noble and self-sacrificing of her, we all thought, so we told her what a great person she was, how little of a deal getting arrested one time on a minor drug misdeameanor charge is, and drove back to the bar, where the bartender let us in through the back and poured out more drinks so we could toast to his girlfriend being not in jail anymore. They were all very cool people, as it turned out, and I didn't end up learning any lessons or marrying any farmers.
At the end of the night, the regular walked me back to my motel in a most gentlemanly fashion. And that is the story of how Irene resulted in me visiting the Sheboygan jail.
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