"They'll fuck you then kick your ass."
(Philidelphia, PA. 1991)

What started out being a small trip to Delaware to watch a band make a video turned out to hold one of the more amusing stories of my travels.

Kix was (they're broken up now) a local Washington / Baltimore band that sort of made it national. They were on Atlantic records, and had one top forty hit, 'Don't Close Your Eyes', in 1989. In 1991 they were making the video for the song 'Plain Jane' from the follow up album to the mildly successful 'Blow My Fuse' album that included the forementioned 'Don't Close Your Eyes'. It was a Friday night and the shoot was taking place in a club in Delaware, about a 2 hour drive away.

So Dave and I went. The video shoot wasn't all that memorable. Pretty much the band just lip sinking the song over and over and over again. When we left we realized that Philadelphia was only and hour away. Dave had never been to Philadelphia, and I had only been there twice but for short periods. In 1987 when Pink Floyd first announced they're comeback 'Momentary Lapse of Reason' tour, they only announced 4 cities; L.A., Toronto, one other and Phili. I was not going to miss that. So some friends and I drove up to Phili the night the tickets went on sale, and then of course we went back for the show itself. I saw the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall area then, but not much else. So with else nothing planned that weekend Dave and I decided to go see Philadelphia.

We arrived real late, well after midnight, and all we really cared about was finding a safe place to park the car so we could sleep for the night. We were driving around pretty aimlessly in the suburbs when we finally came across Beaver College. Now a college seemed a good place to crash, relatively safe with out of the way places to park. We soon discovered, however, that Beaver College was an all girl’s school. While this is normally a positive, we realized that two, out of state, unshowered, 20 something guys sleeping on the grounds of an all girls school would probably get arrested if found. So we left, thinking that whoever named an all girls school 'Beaver College' had either a good sense of humor or wanted to torture the girls. I'll leave it up to the reader’s imagination to think up some of what must be millions of jokes about that place. By this time we were exhausted and just drove around some regular looking suburbs until we finally just gave up, parked on the street and went to sleep.

We awoke early the next morning to the knocking on the windows of two uniformed police officers. They, of course, wanted to know why two, out of state, unshowered, 20 something guys were sleeping in their car parked in the middle of an upper middle class neighborhood. Now at this point I should probably explain my car a little. Though my Ford Escort was fairly new, I have never been one to keep my car very neat. Litter of all types; papers, beer cans, Mc Donalds bags etc... were strewn all over, and this probably added to the cops suspicions. We got out of the car and they asked if they could search the car. Not thinking that I had anything to hide I said yes, after all we were not really doing anything illegal.

They seemed, for some reason, to be most concerned with finding out if we had any stolen goods. Maybe there had been a rash of crimes in the area, I do not know, but they kept asking us that over and over again as they found stuff in my car. The open bottles of rum and vodka were the first interesting thing they found, but instead of pouring them out like usual, they only wanted to know if we stole them. I assured them we did not, as I assured them we did not steal the rifle (with bullets) and World War II German bayonet in my trunk.

Why did I have a rifle in my car you ask? Well, my friend West's father had a cabin out in West Virginia. The weekend before a bunch of us went up there to spend the night. My friend Steve Hutchings and I each brought our .22 caliber rifles so we could do some target shooting at cans etc... There just aren't too many places in suburban Fairfax county where I live where you can shoot a gun. As I usually did, I just left the gun in the trunk and forgot about it. Why the World War II German bayonet was in there is beyond me. But once I convinced the cops I hadn't stolen them they did not seem to care about them.

Back to the car. Like a scene from a bad movie, One of the policeman opened my glove compartment and asked me if there were any drugs in the car.

"No", I said as he pulled out my used bowl that I had totally forgot about, "except that." (what timing) Fortunately I had no marijuana at the time, and the cop gave me my bowl back! (what nice police!)

They, of course, asked us what we were doing there, and we decided that nothing would explain it better then the truth. So we told them the truth, and they seemed to identify with it, remarking that they did that kind of stuff when there were college age. We ended up swapping stories and getting along just fine. We told them about coming across Beaver College and finding that it was an all girl’s school.

"Oh, Beaver College," one of the cops said, "They're all dykes there, they'll fuck you then kick your ass."

This was too much for us and we burst out laughing.

The police ran a check on us, which came back clean, and soon realized we weren't running a fencing operation but were telling the truth. Not caring that they found open liquor bottles, a gun, bayonet, and a bowl, they pronounced us free to go. Hey, we weren't arguing it! The only problem was that when we drove in the night before we did not pay attention to where we were driving. We were totally lost in the subdivision and had no idea how to get out. But the police nicely told us to follow them, and they led us out.

We spent the rest of the day taking in the various sights of Philadelphia, a place I have been back to many times since then, but I will always remember it fondly as the funniest of my run-ins with the police.