The Magnolia Story(25)
Jo’s the most conservative girl in the world. She had never even been late for school. I mean, this girl was straitlaced. So now we realize there’s a citywide warrant out for her arrest, and we’re like, “Oh, crap.” In her defense, Jo had wanted to pay those tickets off all along, and I was the one saying, “No way. I’m not paying these tickets.” So we decided to try to make it right. We called the judge, and the court clerk told us, “Okay, you have an appointment at three in the afternoon to discuss the tickets. See you then.” We wanted to ask the judge if he could remove a few of them for us. The fines for our dogs “running at large” on our front porch just seemed a bit excessive.
We arrived at the courthouse, and Chip was carrying Drake in his car seat. I couldn’t carry it because I was still recovering from Drake’s delivery. We got inside and spoke to a clerk. They looked at the circumstances and decided to switch all the tickets into Chip’s name.
Those dogs were basically mine, and it didn’t make sense to have the tickets in her name. But as soon as they did that, this police officer walked over and said, “Hey, do you mind emptying out all of your pockets?”
I got up and cooperated. “Absolutely. Yep,” I said. I figured it was just procedure before we went in to see the judge.
Then he said, “Yeah, you mind taking off your belt?”
I thought, That’s a little weird.
Then he said, “Do you mind turning around and putting your hands behind your back?”
They weren’t going to let us talk to the judge at all. The whole thing was just a sting to get us to come down there and be arrested. They arrested Chip on the spot. And I’m sitting there saying, “I can’t carry this baby in his car seat. What am I supposed to do?”
I started bawling. “You can’t take him!” I cried. But they did. They took him right outside and put him in the back of a police car.
Now I feel like the biggest loser in the world. I’m in the back of a police car as my crying wife comes out holding our week-old baby.
I’m walking out, limping, and waving to him as they drive away.
And I can’t even wave because my hands are cuffed behind my back. So here I am awkwardly trying to make a waving motion with my shoulder and squinching my face just to try to make Jo feel better.
It was just the most comical thing, honestly. A total joke. To take a man to jail because his dogs liked to walk around a neighborhood, half of which he owns? But it sure wasn’t funny at the time. I was flooded with hormones and just could not stop crying. They told me they were taking my husband to the county jail.
Luckily we had a buddy who was an attorney, so I called him. I was clueless. “I’ve never dated a guy that’s been in trouble, and now I’ve got a husband that’s in jail. What do I do? What’s the first step here?” I asked. He made some calls, and he told me that I could get Chip out with a bail bond for eight hundred dollars.
It couldn’t be done with a personal check, and we didn’t have eight hundred dollars in the bank anyway. I needed eight hundred dollars in cash to go buy a money order at the gas station near the facility in order to get Chip out of jail, and I didn’t have the money to do it. My parents or his parents would have given us that money in a heartbeat, I’m sure, but I was too embarrassed. I didn’t want our parents to know we didn’t have eight hundred dollars between us, and I certainly didn’t want them knowing Chip was in the slammer.
Thankfully, I had my shop. I went and I emptied out both the cash register and the safe in the back. I didn’t know how I’d make change the next day, and I had no idea how we’d make up for that loss when it came time to pay the bills. But I had no choice. It was the only money I had.
Off I went to the gas station. Then I went to the jail with my week-old son strapped to my chest in his BabyBj?rn and waited. And waited. Chip had been in there for a few very long hours. I had all kinds of awful thoughts about what might have happened to him in there. What if he’d been roughed up? Strip-searched? Who knows what awful things could have happened in a place like that? I saw scary-looking characters come and go as I sat in that cold, concrete lobby, trying to make myself invisible.
Finally, out came Chip.
“Hi, baby. Thanks for bailing me out,” he said.
He sounded almost chipper.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah! You’ll never guess who I saw in there. Alfonzo! Remember the lawn guy who used to work for me? We had a good time catching up.”
Only Chip could go to prison and come out talking about all the friends he’d run into there.
I came out and I was like, “Whoa! That was awesome. Jo, I met this guy. He did this thing. You know this old guy that I used to tell you about—he and I used to work together? He’s doing great. Well, he’s in jail, but things are really good otherwise.”
Two of the policemen were also buddies of mine. These guys were literally standing on the other side of these bars going, “Why are you here? What’s the deal?” We had this endearing conversation right there, while I was in a jail cell.
I used to live out in the boonies when I was in college, and I had mowed this one guy’s grass. So I told him what I was in for. “Long story short, I got these dogs running around.” And he was like, “Oh, dude, you’ll be fine. I’m sure they’ll get you right out of here.”