Welcome to the State

The Radicalization of Us

Chapter 1: Welcome to the State
Skip to Chapter 2

“My one purpose in writing is simply to provide a catharsis for my own thoughts. They worry me until they are set forth in words.” – H.L. Mencken

The vast majority of people you meet aren’t going to beat the shit out of you, but the ones who do usually leave an impression.  I can almost guarantee that image will be branded into your brain the rest of your life.  In my case, I was standing in a dimly lit parking lot in Minneapolis, without the faintest idea that someone might be behind me.

My arms were suddenly locked behind my back and a great weight physically forced me to the ground.  All it took was the simple mention of a weapon to force me into submitting both physically and mentally.  “Don’t move or I’ll fucking shank you.”

Before my knees hit the pavement – before I heard his words even, the first blow came.  His friend was in front of me, punching my head repeatedly, as if it were one of those basketball sized punching bags that boxers use to improve their speed.  His first swing hit me in the forehead, but since I was being dragged to the ground, the angle changed, directing his alternating fists to the top of my head.

It was clear they were after my wallet and my phone, so I scrambled to follow their orders and empty my pockets.  My compliance was enough to end the punching, but it wasn’t enough to ensure my freedom.  They wanted more.

“Take off your shoes.”  My shoes?  The joke’s on them, I thought to myself.  Those shoes were already years old and in their prime retailed for less than 20 bucks at Walmart.  But my socks were next, followed by a request for my shirt.  Now I knew they were just fucking with me.

As I stood up and pulled the shirt over my head, I turned to face them.  This first glimpse of my surroundings filled me with relief.  There was no knife.  I was not going to get shanked.  My life was not going to end that night.

The moment that shirt was off my head, I sent it flying through the air toward their faces.  I was already moving even faster in the opposite direction, running as hard as I could.  They probably could have caught me, but they already had what they wanted.  They went their way and I went mine.

But what way was my way?  I lived in Iowa, but there I was, suddenly walking barefoot and shirtless in the middle of a Minnesota winter somewhere near Hennepin.  Far more important than the weather was my realization that I no longer had a phone.  My life had reverted back to caveman times, when your method for meeting up with someone was either lighting a smoke signal or walking aimlessly until you found them.  Fortunately for me, people from Iowa stick out, especially when they’re half naked.

My friends saw me walk by from the warmth of a packed pizza place.  I can only imagine the thoughts and questions they had.  “Was that Jimmy?”  “Where the fuck are his clothes?”  They ran out after me in search of answers, but my head was pounding and all I wanted was to be asleep on Jake Dilley’s couch, a short drive away.

We called the police when we got to his place, and they put out my story over the scanners.  I was told we would have to file a report in person in the morning.

—–

The officer in front of me was not happy that I actually came in.  He was skeptical to say the least.  “Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” he demanded.

“I didn’t need an ambulance.  My friends had a car, and I don’t pay for insurance.”

He snapped back, “Then why did you leave city limits instead of coming to the police station?”  Look, it’s not like I thought they were going to run these guys down.  My description of two black teenagers in puffy coats wasn’t leading anybody to the people who did this.  I just felt violated and wanted some sort of record to reflect that.  But this cop wasn’t having it.  In my eyes, I walked into that police station a victim, but in his, I was a suspected criminal.  I was the one being questioned.

With as much effort as was spent looking into me, the actual criminals could have been caught.  Instead of telling all their cops to look around for people in puffy coats, they could have just asked Discover.  The $40 in my wallet wasn’t traceable, but my credit card was.  They had beaten the shit out of me to order $3,000 worth of product from www.hatworld.com.  But the purchase never went through.  Discover didn’t think I wanted that many hats, I guess.  The police couldn’t be bothered to look into this.  Apparently checking the shipping address these masterminds personally filled out was too much work.  It seemed that that would be the end of the case for the cop and for me.

I went back to Iowa with a story to tell, and tell it, I did.  Brady Manriquez was one of the first to hear it.  He passed the story on to his parents, who then mentioned it to his grandma.  She was not happy to hear that someone would be treated that way so soon after experiencing such a traumatic event.  She told Brady’s uncle that this was unacceptable.

What was he supposed to do about it, you might ask?  Well he worked directly with the Mayor of Minneapolis, and once a month, that Mayor met with the Police Chief.  Just a few weeks later, my case saw the light of day.  I don’t know what was said in that meeting, or what that Police Chief went on to say to that cop, but I have come to know how rare it is for a government official to be held accountable, so this is one moment I’m going to savor.

—–

Less than a week later, we were back in Muscatine, Iowa, where I lived among 22,999 other people.  For some reason, the population seems to have always been around 23,000.  That part never changed.  The town had transformed from a lumber hub on the Mississippi River to the pearl button capital of the world to the handful of Fortune 500 companies still there today, but from beginning to end, there were 23,000 people hanging around.  These aren’t the same people mind you.  They do allow new ones to come and old ones to go.  There’s no wall or anything.

But anyway, a week after getting back in town, we had just enjoyed the atmosphere of a campfire in Blake Daly’s backyard.  A short walk to the car and a 5-minute drive was all that was between us and whatever video game we were into at the time.  Or so we thought.

My recent beating had left me thinking a lot about the random strangers we meet in our day to day lives and how much trust we put in them, even with something as simple as just walking by.  Up to that point, I had always tried to take the Jonathan Kent approach of assuming each person I came across was good.  After I was attacked, it wasn’t that I judged each new stranger for something they had nothing to do with, it was that it now required a conscious effort not to.  No one wants to live their lives in fear, assuming every dimly lit person they come across is a potential threat.  But at that very moment, a stranger was looking at me, and they had already judged me to be a threat.

You see, Muscatine has curfew laws, and even though I was 20 or 21 at the time, I have a condition that some people might call “baby-face.”  It means that regardless of my age, if I cut my hair even relatively short, I look like a 14-year-old.  This would be a great asset if I were an actor, but instead, I was someone walking down a street in Muscatine, Iowa after midnight, which made it a huge liability.  I once had a cop enter a gas station, walk directly up to me, and then detain me until he had called in my information to check for warrants.  This was all justified by their curfew law for the real baby-faces.

So even though we were just walking down the street, a couple cops pulled over and told us we weren’t free to keep walking.  After the typical questions about where we’d been and where we were going, they lined us up in front of the SUV.  “Hands on the hood.  Spread your legs.”

We weren’t minors.  The curfew law wasn’t even supposed to apply to us, but there we were, being extensively searched in the middle of the street.  I was snapped back to the week before, when I was being held to the ground, trying to follow every order I could to keep the situation from escalating.  As the cop searched me, my body began to shake.  This only made him more suspicious.  He made his way down to my feet, not only sliding his hand around in my shoe, but then taking a 2^nd pass to check under my sock.

I lost it.  I couldn’t take it anymore.  In all the times I’d gotten speeding tickets, I had always been overly polite to the police.  After all, they were just doing their jobs.  Following orders.  But I had JUST been mugged and my ego hurt even more than my body.  I was supposed to feel safe once I was back in my hometown, but there I stood, my socks, once again under siege.  They had no reason for searching me.  There was no just cause.

“Fine!” I snapped.  Take my shoes!  You want my socks too?”  When their quest came up with nothing, they were forced to let me go, despite my rants about probable cause and the type of person that bullies people in the street.

—–

I woke up suspended in midair – only I wasn’t suspended.  It was everything around me that was suspended.  My body was flying forward.  My head smoked the headrest in front of me and I can only assume I fell back into the seat.  My brother Tommy and an exchange student from a country I can’t recall were all on our way to Purdue University.  The Iowa Hawkeyes were playing the makers of boilers in football, and we had developed quite the habit of devoting our weekends to travelling to away games.  This habit would grow into a 5-year period where I only missed one game each year, home or away.

So after 5 hours of early morning driving, Tommy’s Saturn hit another car as we pulled into West Lafayette, Indiana.  The car was towed to a dealership in East Lafayette, leaving us with nothing to do but go watch the game.  The last time we’d been to Purdue, we were in the front row of the end zone, with the entire section behind us filled with black and gold Hawkeye fans.  Those being the colors of our team, not of their skin tone.

To our left, there was another section of Iowa fans filling the west stands, including a lot of the players’ parents.  We shouted cheers back and forth and led both sections in creating the loudest environment we could.  But what really singled us out in the crowd was the metal sign attached to the railing in front of us.  The sign warned fans to stay off the field, before, during, and after the game, but we repurposed it by slamming our fists against it for 3 and a half hours, reverberating metallic bangs throughout the entire stadium.  The TV broadcast was filled with that obnoxious noise from start to finish.

Although Iowa lost that game and more importantly lost receiver Ed Hinkle for a few weeks to a broken arm, we did win over one recruit that was in attendance.  AJ Edds was on an official visit with Purdue, having grown up watching them play in his home state of Indiana.  After the game, he told the media he couldn’t believe how loud the Iowa fans were, and he committed to sign with the Hawks on the spot.  He would develop into an all-Big Ten linebacker and play in the NFL.  Never let anyone tell you that you can’t make a difference, especially when you use all your available resources.

But 2 years later, we were stranded at Purdue with no car.  Tommy had a baby on the way, which made getting home a priority.  Plus, we had lost the game and every time Iowa lost an away game, we immediately got out of the state as soon as we could.  Despite being 7 months pregnant, Makayla rode to Indiana and got us safely out and back to Iowa.

Our plan was to head back the next weekend, when we had more time to fix the Saturn.  It’d be perfect.  That next Saturday, Iowa had to play at Northwestern.  We could drive 3 and a half hours to Evanston in Chicago, then drive a few hours to East Lafayette, fix the car, and then drive the 5 hours back to Iowa City.  Not a bad Saturday.

—–

We got to East Lafayette early in the evening.  My brother was finishing up his senior year in Mechanical Engineering and was the head of the student group SAE, the Society of Automotive Engineers.  They built small engines to race against other schools.  So replacing the radiator on a Saturn was no problem for him.  Every time he did something like this, I would help get wrenches and sockets while he explained everything he was doing and why he was doing it.  He’d elaborate on each part and how they fit into the greater scheme of a properly tuned engine.

His usual method of fixing something was just taking shit off until you find something that looks broken.  Then he’d replace that part, put everything back together again and hope that it wasn’t something else or we’d be back doing all the same work over again, and then some.

Although he had smashed up his bumper and grill, all he cared about on this day was replacing the busted-up radiator.  No coolant would be running through those pipes anytime soon, and any that used to be in there had long since evaporated from the street where he crashed.  Tommy might continue this explanation, elaborating on why the engine needed us to replace this part, but at this point, I’ll let you venture to guess what “coolant” does in the grander scheme of an engine.

It was dark by the time we got the old radiator out, but the parking lot’s lights made it easy to get the new one installed.  We just had to add coolant and we’d be-

“GET ON THE FUCKING GROUND!  NOW!”

Tommy and I swung around in the direction of the shouting.  Two cops had come around the corner of the dealership, with their guns not only drawn, but pointed right at us.  One of the cops continued his shouting, charging forward along his line of sight toward Tommy.  The other cop came straight to me, as we both dropped to our knees.

“HANDS IN THE FUCKING AIR!  GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD!”  Look, I am all for using words that society deems to be dirty or bad, but this guy lacked the style needed to pull them off.  He just attached it as an adjective to practically everything he could think of.  Fucking air.  Fucking hands.  There was no variation.  No class.  His dialogue was worse than a poorly produced cop show.

My cop was much more polite.  Yes, he was pointing a gun at my head, but at least he was taking the time to explain to me why he thought this might be considered normal, acceptable behavior.  “We are just detaining you until we can figure out what is going on.  Lower your hands behind your back.”

Once he had me handcuffed, he began to search me.  I was on my knees just like my brother was, but the experience I witnessed him going through numbed me to the hands that were forcing themselves along my body.  Tommy got no polite explanation.  He had complied just like I did when they charged us.  He fell to his knees, put his hands behind his head and stared at the ground.  But this cop never let up.  With each “fucking” that he shouted, the gun got closer and closer until it was point blank against the expecting father’s head.

There was nothing else for him to do.  He’d done everything he’d been told, but the entire time I was being searched, this cop held the barrel of his gun to my brother’s temple.  I hoped and prayed that his finger wouldn’t somehow slip.  “PUT YOUR FUCKING HANDS DOWN!  BEHIND YOUR FUCKING BACK!”

My search was over, and it was time for Tommy’s to begin.  Relief rushed through my body as I watched the cop pull his gun away from my brother’s head, even though he was switching it out for the metal shackles they have gotten so used to using every day.  As bad as being in chains is, most people would take that over a bullet in the head even on one of their worst days.

They sat us down against a brick wall, with our hands still cuffed behind our backs.  We started to piece together what the cops had been thinking.  They thought we were stealing the car, despite it being a decade old and its mangled radiator clearly displayed on the ground.   That would definitely be the first case where the thief took the time to replace a radiator before taking off with their loot.

Tommy pointed the cops to the title of the vehicle in the glove box, his name printed on the document, as well as his name on the up to date registration.  But even as the facts of the case became clear, these cops refused to accept defeat.  “I’m going to charge you with grand theft auto if we can’t get ahold of the owner of this car dealership.  Why didn’t you fix the vehicle this morning?”

After learning we went to Chicago for a football game, he lectured us repeatedly, insisting we were wrong to have gone to the game.  “I don’t know how things work in Iowa, but here you pay and get your vehicle during normal business hours.”  Tommy politely reminded him he had permission from the dealer to be there.  I don’t know how he kept his cool the whole time.  I just sat there, silent.  He was handling the situation and there was nothing I had to say that was of any benefit.

But all agonizing experiences do come to an end.  This one came when the cops finally got ahold of the dealer’s home phone number.  From what I understand, the guy was pissed that they even called.  The ordeal had taken us late into the night, and most people were just trying to sleep in peace.  He didn’t want to be harassed by the cops either, especially about some $500 car.

The cops had no choice.  They had to let us go, but not without another lecture about how next time, we better not go to the game.  God forbid they backed off or admitted any amount of wrongdoing.  We left for the closest gas station, stopping to make sure we were both able to drive the 5 hours back to Iowa City, and just to take a moment to acknowledge what just happened.

We each took a 5 hour energy, one of only 2 times in my life I’ve done so, and we headed home, without reporting the acts of aggression that occurred.  Like I mentioned, Tommy had a baby on the way and the last thing a pregnant woman needs to deal with is a trial in another state because some cop put a gun to the father of her child’s head.  After all, this happens every day.

—–

Go to Chapter 2: Let me be honest

Written by Jimmy Morrison