THREE DRUNKS AND TWO COPS

by David W. Berner

The car was dead. It must have sucked up the last drop of gasoline when I pulled in and parked it in the space across the street from the bar, because when I returned four hours later it wouldn’t turn over no matter how many times I cranked the ignition. My wife and I had just moved to Chicago, my sister was in town for a visit, and the three of us had spent the evening at a few taverns. So now, there we were, at two in the morning with plenty of beer in our bellies, and a car with nothing in the tank.

“There’s a cop,” I said. A squad car idled just up the block. “Maybe he can help.”

“You think that’s a good idea,” My sister wondered. “We’re drunk.”

“Officer?” I asked. “Can you give us a hand?”

It was a warm spring night and the officer behind the wheel had his cap off, the window of the squad rolled all the way down, and his left arm dangled out through the opening. His partner sat beside him, reading a newspaper and ignoring my question.

“What’s up?” the first office responded.

“I think we ran out of gas, and I wondered if…”

“You THINK you ran out of gas, or you DID run out of gas?” he asked gruffly, in that big city cop sort of way.

“Well it won’t start and…”

“Get in,” he said.

“Get in?”

“Yeah, come on.” I waved to my wife and sister who were leaning against my car, watching my exchange with the officer from a half-a-block away.

“Come on,” I shouted. “He’s going to help.”

The two of them looked at each other like two kids standing at the edge of a swimming pool just before jumping in to the deep end for the very first time.

“Really?” my wife said, surprised this police officer was willing to be our Triple-A Motor Club for the night.

“This is not good,” my sister grumbled. She had had more beers than any of us and getting into a police car brought back bad memories. A year ago on St. Patrick’s Day night she was in an accident. A drunk driver sideswiped her car. Even though it was not my sister’s fault, the officers at the scene insisted on a sobriety test. She, just like the other driver, was slapped with a DUI.

The three of us - the stale smell of the bar emanating from the fabric of our clothes - squeezed into the rear seat of the squad car.

The cop at the wheel had one of those great Chicago accents, like in the “Super Fans” skit from Saturday Night Live. And he radiated energy, the kind of guy who couldn’t sit still, always talking with his hands. “So you guys all from Chicago?” he asked.

“Just moved here,” I said. “My wife and I are showing my sister the city.”

“You seen Wrigley Field yet?” he asked excitedly.

“Well, I have but…”

“No,” my sister quickly answered. She was the big baseball fan.

“Oh, you gotta see Wrigley,” the cop said, as if part of his paycheck came from the tourism bureau. He turned his head toward his partner in the passenger seat and said, “They gotta see Wrigley, right?”

His partner, as deadpan as he was animated, responded far less enthusiastically. “Yep,” he said.

The officer at the wheel turned on the squad’s flashing lights and made a u-turn in the middle of the street. My wife looked at me with an uncertain smile, lifted her eyebrows upward, and shrugged her shoulders. My sister leaned forward in her seat. “Really?” she questioned. “You’re taking us to Wrigley?”

The squad car sped its way through a number of residential streets, making quick turns and slowing only slightly through intersections until we were on Clark Street just a block from the ball field. The officer turned off the flashing reds and said proudly, “There it is, my friends.”

“It’s in the middle of a neighborhood,” my sister said.

“That’s the beauty of it,” the officer said. Then he turned and asked his partner, “That’s the beauty, right?”

“Yep, the beauty,” said the partner.

The officer then pulled the squad into the parking lot of the McDonalds across the street from Gate-F and the big red sign announcing The Home of the Chicago Cubs. “Now that’s a freakin’ ball field,” the officer said.

For the next 20 minutes we sat in the idling squad listening to him passionately tell us about his brother’s season tickets, how he gets to go to home games whenever he wants, how pitching is the key to everything, and how Wrigley’s hotdogs are the best in baseball.

“Got to have two, right?” he said to his partner.

“Yep. Two,” the partner said.

“He never gets all that excited,” the cop said, nodding in the direction of his partner. “When we were first together, I thought he was a freakin’ White Sox fan,” he said laughing. “You’re not, right?”

“Nope,” said the partner. “Not a Sox fan.”

“Found out later he doesn’t like baseball. How can you not like baseball?”

“I like football,” said the partner.

“Yeah, love my Steelers,” my sister said from the rear seat. The lively, likeable cop and all the sports talk had erased her anxieties about police and the old DUI. “So what do you think the Bears will do this year?” she asked.

I looked at my watch. It was 3am. I needed to step in and break this up.

“Hey, thanks for showing us Wrigley and all,” I said, interrupting, “but, about that gasoline?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the cop said, “I know a guy.”

We drove through a labyrinth of streets on the city’s Northside, as the officer continued to chat-up the Cubs, ask whether we had been to the top of the Sears Tower, any of the museums, done that Al Capone tour that takes you to the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. “Gangsters, you know, that’s part of Chicago.”

Then, just as we pulled up to a stop sign along inner Lake Shore Drive, a car in the right hand lane whizzed by us, straight through the intersection.

“Did you see that?” the cop said to this partner.

“Yep,” the partner said.

“What the hell was that?”

“No idea.”

“What you think we should do about it?”

“I think we need to ask some questions.”

The officer sped up to the next intersection where the driver of the car was waiting at a stoplight. The partner rolled down his window and the cop behind the wheel yelled across the seats, “Hey, lady!”

The woman appeared to be in her mid-50s and wore blue hospital scrubs. She turned to look toward the police car and said politely, “Yes.”

“What the hell you doing back there?” the officer asked sternly.

“Well, sorry, but, you see, I’m a doctor,” she said sheepishly.

“Oh,” the officer said. “You’re a doctor.” He looked his partner. “She’s a doctor.”

“Yep. A doctor,” said the partner.

“Well then, if you’re a doctor, I have a question for you,” the officer smirked.

“Okay,” said the woman.

“What’s an epiglottis?”

“Well,” she said, pointing to her neck, “it’s that flap, that membrane, right at the entrance to you larynx.”

The officer turned to ask his partner, “What you think? She a doctor?”

The partner shrugged his shoulders.

“Okay, You’re a doctor,” the officer said to the woman. “But come on, be careful out here, lady.”

Just as she began to apologize, the light changed from red to green.

“Stop means stop,” the officer shouted out the window as her car left the intersection.

It was beginning to feel as if we had been kidnapped. These cops were in absolutely no hurry to get us the gasoline and send us on our way. They seemed to relish our company, as if we were the audience for their show, a stage play with one more final scene.

The policeman turned his squad into an all-night gas station; one of those big ones with a service center attached and pulled the car up to the door.

“Look, I know the guy inside,” the officer said, whispering. “Do me a favor.”

I moved forward in my seat to hear more clearly.

“When you go inside, before you ask for gas,” he said, pointing through the window toward an old man behind the counter in a greasy Led Zeppelin tee-shirt and shoulder-length, thinning gray hair, “tell the guy it’s a stick up.”

Absolutely nothing about this seemed like a good idea.

“You’re serious?” I asked.

“Yeah, tell him you have a shotgun.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Oh come on,” the officer said, laughing. “He’ll think it’s hilarious.”

Despite the night dragging on far longer than we had expected, the three of us would have surely admitted that we had come to like these cops. They seemed like decent guys, ambassadors for the city. But now one of them wanted me to stage a fake robbery at a gas station in the middle of the night. My sister dropped her head in her hands, trying to stifle a laugh. And my wife pursed her lips, shook her head back-and-forth in hummingbird-like rapidity, and mouthed don’t do it.

“I really think this might not be such a good plan,” I said, answering the cop’s request.

“Ah, come on,” the cop said, dismissing me. “Nothin’ is gonna happen. Let’s have a little fun.”

“Yep, little fun,” said the partner, smiling for the first time that night.

I stepped from the police car and started walking toward the gas station’s front door.

“Don’t forget,” the officer said through the open window, “tell him you have a shotgun.”

The glass front door was covered with advertisements touting 99-cent coffee and $1 hotdogs, and applications for gas credit cards. But in the far upper left corner was a sign that most stood out at that moment: THE EMPLOYEE HAS NO KEY TO THE SAFE. The jingly bell sounded, signaling the door had opened, and the old man, sitting on a stool behind the counter, looked up from his newspaper and over his reading glasses. He glanced past me to the police car and back at me and said matter-of-factly, “Don’t tell me, you’ve got a shotgun and you’re going to rob the place?”

I immediately turned around and looked at the squad. Everyone was laughing, even the partner.

“He does that all the time,” said the old man. “Let me guess, you ran out of gas?” He smiled and shook his head. “It’s either that or someone’s lost or had too much to drink or whatever. If he gets someone in his squad, he sends them in here to rob me.” The old man looked back down at his newspaper. “I know the joke, happens all the time. But you know what?” he asked aloud, “It’s still fucking funny.”

I bought one of those gasoline cans with a spout and filled it up with regular unleaded. The officers drove us back to our car, dropped us off, and watched as I poured the petrol into the tank. As I turned the ignition and the car roared awake, the squad car rolled slowly past, the officer at the wheel calling out from his window, “Hey, don’t forget now, tell everyone you got to see the famous Wrigley Field!”