Occurred, June 1996
It is the last day of my freshman year in college, and my dorm is having a huge party. Well, sort of. About ten of us, pretty much the only ones left after finals, are getting really drunk because we are all leaving for the summer the next day, and we want to drink all the alcohol we have left in our respective mini-fridges.
Like most college dorms, the liquor that is left at the end of the year is an odd menagerie of the drinkable, the tolerable, and the barely even potable. We started by drinking normal drinks, like Absolut and cranberry. We ended up finishing with unspeakable concoctions: Triple Sec and E & J. Triple Sec was too sweet for one kid so he stuck with something more conventional—sweet vermouth. Straight. Try that one time; see if you can finish a sip without wanting to set your tongue on fire.
Of course the night descends into inebriated debauchery, replete with everything that happens when 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds get drunk: people throw up, furniture gets broken, food gets thrown everywhere, more people throw up, urination occurs in inappropriate places (closet, empty mini-fridge), people hook up who would ordinarily not even talk to each other when they are sober. By the time we were finished, our dorm looked like a tornado had blown through a Wal-Mart.
At about 4am, I decide that there is no reason for me to sleep, because I have a 2pm flight out of O’Hare. So I continue to drink, with reckless abandon, and continue the standard Tucker Max drunk act (e.g., urinating on inappropriate surfaces). At about 7am, after everyone else is either passed out or knocked out, I decide to head for the airport, figuring I’ll sober up there.
I make it to O’Hare Airport at 8am. The airport is just beginning to come alive, and the ridiculously long lines for everything at O’Hare won’t begin for another hour or so. I check my three bags at the curb and proceed directly to security. My body is craving coffee and food and death. I get to the checkpoint, place my backpack and my carry-on on the conveyor belt, and walk through the metal detector.
I stand there, drunker than Hemingway, waiting for my bags to come out, not noticing the conveyor belt had stopped and the federal rent-a-cops were all tripping over themselves, frantically running around. I was occu- pied with this really hot girl walking by, trying to think of a way to get her attention. Little did I know.
That’s when I felt the first of what would be many violent blows to my skull. A large, angry Chicago policeman had given me a forearm shiver from behind, and was on top of me, beating me like I was Rodney King. As if this force weren’t enough to restrain a drunk 170-pound college freshman, three to five other CPD joined in the fun, all of them vent- ing every bit of their working class, ugly wife-having frustration upon my drunk, pronated body. Then the group of them picked me up and began dragging me through this maze of doors and tunnels leading into the bowels of O’Hare airport. I’m pretty sure this is how Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.
It was at that point I started to cry.
You have to remember, in a matter of eight seconds, I went from drunk, erotic fantasies of me doing naughty things with an anonymous hot girl, to having my head driven into a marble floor and the shit kicked out of me in front of hundreds of people. For no reason I could discern. So I start bawling. Crying like Jimmy Swaggart. It was a complete joke.
The only thing I can think of, being drunk and not yet 21, is that I had a bottle of half-full Ron Llave rum in my backpack (don’t ask me what I was going to do with it). So I start yelling, “It’s just rum!! It’s just rum!! For the love of God, why are you doing this??” I was scared shitless, bleeding, in serious pain, with no idea what the fuck was going on.
Ignoring my lamentations, and without saying a word, the cops tossed me into a holding cell somewhere deep inside the airport and far away from passengers who could hear my screams. They put me into what amounted to a broom closet with bars, and told me to shut up. Of course, that advice didn’t work. The adrenaline had at this point kicked my drunk- enness, and I was pissed.
Why the fuck was this happening? I was screaming like a banshee until one of the cops finally told me why I had been detained—I HAD A PISTOL IN MY BACKPACK! Ohhhhhhhh, riiiiggghttt, the pistol. WTF?!?! Who did he think I was, Terry Cummings?! Then it hit me. Had I not been bleeding and in a jail, I would have laughed. Here’s the deal:
Two months earlier, I was helping a friend of mine clean out his basement, and we found a starter pistol. It looked, felt, and weighed the same as any other .38, except that it only shot blanks. He gave it to me, and I stuck in one of the numerous mini-compartments on my backpack, and never thought about it again.
As I am contemplating the delicious ironies of life, they bring in my luggage and begin to go through it, unpacking and hurling everything I brought until it’s all strewn about the floor of this quasi-holding pen.
So I begin to cry. Again. A few minutes later I stop. I start to yell. Then I get angry. Then I cry again. Then I beg them to use their brains. Then I cry again.
At this point, they begin to put things together. I am a white, 18-year- old college student, with nothing except a starter pistol in his backpack, who has broken down in tears multiple times since he was apprehended. Does this sound like a standard terrorist profile to you?
They interviewed me three times in the next four hours, each time asking me the most moronic questions imaginable.
“Are you a terrorist?”
“Who else were you working for?”
“Are any of your relatives Arab?”
I’m serious. About noon, after I had spent much of the previous four hours crying, yelling, sobbing, and even fainting once (I maintain it was from low blood sugar), they realized what had happened. So they told me I could go.
Of course, this was before I saw that all my clothes were still on the floor, and I was the one who got to pick them up, and repack them. And the kicker: as I left the room, one of the cops HANDED ME THE STARTER PISTOL!
Cop “Here, we can’t keep this; you take it.”
So I had to go pack it in a separate box and check it through to my final destination. They wouldn’t even let me throw it away.
Unbelievable.
I’ve gathered from people well-versed in airport security since that time, that these “police” violated several FAA rules when they let me go. Supposedly, I am required to be booked and arraigned, etc., etc. You have to remember, this was LONG before 9/11. Had this happened post-9/11, no doubt I’d still be in jail. That time, I think maybe my tears got the best of procedure in this case.
Whatever the case, I ended up just barely making my 2pm flight.