I spent Wednesday night in downtown Vegas visiting Ronnie at Aardvark Bail Bonds. Lots of shee-ite going on right now and I can’t seem to get out of the picture. I hate it! I believe we need law enforcement but I also believe some of them turn into a dog pack at times and it becomes totally ridiculous. After the arrest and ugliness of almost two weeks ago, the cop-o-rillas came back and arrested the person again. This time charging child endangerment and I, and others, believe the main reason it’s an ongoing bludgeoning of arrests is because the cop-o-rillas are trying to break the person down and force them to rat out other people. Hell NO, I’m not even going to get into what is going on. Read the book someday.

In a few months, my Wednesday night might be funny, right now I have absolutely no sense of humor about any of it. This is how it came down. About 7 p.m. I get the phone call that the arrest is taking place…tense conversations between me and the caller. I wait. Isn’t that the way life is…hurry up and wait.

Depression to the max for me because I could imagine what the arrested person is going through. I wanted to cry. Crying seemed like a good thing but I just couldn’t quite get there. I do believe in crying, it’s good for the soul, but I don’t believe in being a cry baby…big dif.

Somewhere around 1 a.m. I get another phone call from the original caller – the caller started the ball rolling with Ronnie at Aardvark – no paperwork had been found yet by Ronnie and I’d get a call when there’s more news. Around 2 a.m. I decided it was time to see if I could sleep a few hours. BINGO! It’s magic. My eyes had just shut and the phone went off. I was up and on my way within 20 minutes. It was a balmy 34 degrees and I was free-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-ing my ass off.

I’m not a big fan of downtown, even in daylight, I was even less a fan of it on this occasion. I went in and took care of the $$ and signed my life on the line, Ronnie needed $X from me and I had some cash but the odd amount left me $1 short of his total. I had $100 bills but he didn’t have change. We went through taking a CC and even though I kind of wanted to do that so I had some change in my pocket, he seemed to want the cash…ok. The problem now was that he had no runner to deliver the bond so I was going to do that…WHOOPEEEE!

No big deal, just drive down to Lewis St. – take a left – you’ll dead end into the Detention Center, there’s plenty of free parking, blah, blah, blah.

I couldn’t find any free parking, I saw the Courthouse Parking garage and pulled in. I had to take a ticket at the turnstile and I was cursing at myself for not driving around for a moment and looking at more parking options…after all, the person I was there to rescue would not be out until sometime late afternoon or evening no matter what I did.

I shiver my way across the street, enter the building, am directed by a guard to go through the door and down the hallway to the end, go through another door. Kee-rist I hate these places. A woman comes out of a back office area and greets me through a glass window with a slot for me to push the paperwork through. She tells me it will take a few minutes because she has to write it up by hand, the computer system is down. OK!

All that’s running through my mind right now is how the hell I’m going to find $2 to pay that stupid parking garage ticket so I can get my truck out of lockup. I know I have to pay the $40 filing fee for the bond, but they will take a CC.

Then the best news happens. The woman is rummaging through file folder after file folder in the portable hanging file compartment in front of her. She can’t find the paperwork. Nothing she can do about it, she can’t take the bond – she can’t find the paperwork. I ask why it is that the bail bondsman could find everything and get the reply that he must have found it before the system went down…and their system goes down every Thursday a.m. til about 6 a.m.

I said, “Wonderful!” I’m sure the floor began to dissolve from the acid drip.
I wanted to ask her to just jump out the window and run down the street screaming, because that’s what I felt like doing and I was sure I’d feel better about it if she had to do it instead of me.

She wasn’t rude – and I can understand where she’s coming from – but I hate their whole lack of interest, go fuck yourself attitude. She grabbed a piece of paper and pen and told me that she’d give me the # and I could keep calling back to find out what time the computer came back up and I could deliver the bond. GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! I told her not to bother, I wasn’t going to spend the next four hours hanging by the phone so I could drive back down town. She said, “OK!” and gave me back the bond.

As I huffed out the door, with every ounce of sarcasm I could find, I said, “Everything is so convenient.”

She probably flipped me off when I was out of sight and said something like, “Another intelligent asshole bites the dust.” I would have if I’d been in her shoes anyway.

I was back out on the street. I walked up to the 2nd floor (where I was parked, and looked at the arm of the turnstile about 35 feet from me. I needed $2 to pay my way out of truck jail. A handy little cash eating machine on street level would take my parking ticket and my $ and spit out a paid parking ticket that would allow me to exit. Problem was it would only take cash and wouldn’t give change for anything over a $20. I could see a big drum and two red cones blocking one of the exit turnstiles that the arm was up on. Don’t think I didn’t wonder if they had cameras in there because my brain was spinning through just moving that crap out of the way and driving out. I wish I had tried it. I would have figured something out that I found out a half hour later after my freezing ass.

The Golden Nugget was just down the street – a city block in Vegas is kind of hard to describe. I started walking, it’s almost 4 a.m. in one of my most unfavorite parts of Vegas, and it’s cold. There’s a small church just kitty corner off the detention center and some street soul was asleep under some kind of blankets/rags – in the entrance to the door. A McDonald’s bag sat a foot or so from the blankets and the huddled form. The bag was the cleanest looking part of the whole situation. I don’t know how anyone could sleep on the sidewalk in that temperature – even with blankets and cardboard underneath them. Ugh!

I made it to the Golden Nugget, wondering how the hell I ever lived in MT and other places where it’s colder than a well digger’s ass, and went in to get change for a $100. The people sitting at pit tables and slot machines were dotted around the landscape, the dealers looked like they were dying and I couldn’t help but think how great it was that I wasn’t tied to a casino atmosphere for a living.

Change in pocket, I was back out in the cold night air. I paid the greedy machine and got my escape ticket for the Steed, climbed the stairs and jumped in, really thankful for the refuge from the cold night air and wondered about the person that was laying about 200 yards down the street. I hit the turnstile and found the one in the middle had the arm up and I didn’t even need the damn ticket…jokes on me. I went back to Aardvark and chatted with Ronnie for a moment, leaving the bond papers with him as he promised to lock up the office for a few moments and deliver the papers himself around 6 a.m., I headed for the comforts of the coach and sleep.

Sometimes, as I ponder life and where I’ve been, I don’t always know where i want to go or what i want to be. A few things i do know, I don’t want to fall asleep in the entry to a church, on cold concrete, in a city that’s structured around the $$ and I don’t want to fall asleep on the floor underneath a bench in lock-up.