Body Piercings And Bad Decisions

If you have a restraining order against you and you also have a particular body piercing, don’t violate the order and then hide from the cops. It won’t work out well for you — just saying.

The Proverbial Onion

The Ginger Giants and I arrived together at the inner city apartment after responding for a restraining order violation. Not only do the Ginger Giants sport fiery red hair — hence the term of endearment — but they are also hilarious. Plus, they are big dudes and wicked strong making them the perfect cops to go to calls with, and I loved working with them.

After arriving, we peeled back the layers of the proverbial onion one by one, which like many calls, don’t turn out to be what they seemed from the beginning. When we got down into it we learned that the lady who called had actually created this dilemma that we now had to do something about. Our hands were tied. The law did not give us any leeway when it came to domestic violence or protective order violations, and we had both.

Trump Card

As it turns out, this woman had a boyfriend for who knows how long, and when things didn’t work out she had the habit of using the courts to do her bidding in an effort to control her boyfriend. After she taught him a lesson with the restraining order that got him kicked out of the apartment, they at some point patched things up and got back together in violation of the very order that she had obtained. Her and her boyfriend had spent a lovely evening together all the way up until the point that it wasn’t. They got into an argument and couldn’t work it out on their own, which was par for the course. So she pulled out her trusty trump card, also known as the restraining order.

Using the police as a pawn in her chess match of a relationship, she called us to have her boyfriend arrested for violating the order after she had invited him over in the first place (though he was dumb enough to show up). This may seem shocking to some of you but this is a common occurrence in the world of dysfunctional relationships. Courts hand out restraining orders like candy and people violate them like clockwork. Sometimes they are so efficient that they get arrested and get back together all in the same day. When things are good, they act like the order doesn’t exist, but when things aren’t going so well, suddenly they are afraid for their life again.

Hide And Seek

We stood in her kitchen and listened to her cockamamie story. Not only had she prompted the violation of her own order and got back together with her boyfriend, but now he was on the hook. Her story began to break down and it became  apparent that between the time she called and the time we got there she was having second thoughts. She told us that he had taken off and didn’t know where he was, which wasn’t exactly true, as in, she totally lied to our faces. But like good cops we listened to our Spidey-senses and did our due diligence by clearing the apartment before we left. One of the Ginger Giants and I cleared the apartment while the other stayed with the “victim” who was secretly hoping we wouldn’t find her loser-of-a boyfriend.

It was the middle of the night and the apartment was mostly in darkness. The kitchen lights were the only ones on, allowing some ambient light to bleed into the adjacent rooms. We searched the apartment by flashlight until I found myself staring down the gaping doorway of the closet in the bedroom. The closet was spilling over with clothes and looked like Jonah Hill’s dinner plate at a buffet line.

I covered down on the closet, focusing my gun and flashlight beam on it while one of the gingers checked the rest of the room. But before he could finish I spotted a couple of fingers sticking out from underneath a pile of clothes in the deep right-hand corner of the closet. The boyfriend had somehow wedged his six-foot-three frame in there and then pulled a pile of clothes on top of himself in an effort to win our little game of hide and seek.

Lava In A Can

I focused the beam from my Streamlight onto the hand that I could see and called out to him so that both he and my partner knew that I had found him. The game was over. I ordered him out of the closet but he was apparently either in some form of denial or thought he was calling my bluff. He acted like he was invisible and didn’t budge, so it was time to up the ante.

After a couple more chances to come out I told him that if he didn’t, then he was going to get pepper sprayed, and it was going to hurt. Again, no response. So as promised, he got a healthy dose of Oleoreisn Cacpsicum. With a shake of the can and a press of the button I delivered an orange stream of lava, sending 3 million Scoville Heat Units into the closet to where his face should be. A few seconds later he started coughing and gagging, then crawled out on his hands and knees whimpering. My unhappy partner (he hates pepper spray and was so mad that I used it) and I, both coughing ourselves, took Mr. Boyfriend into custody without any more trouble.

Boogie Rag?

He was big and tall and dressed like a biker. He had a shaved head and was wearing a leather vest, sleeveless shirt, and was tattooed from head to toe with the scary kinds of tattoos — all skulls and flames and stuff — and he had more piercings than a squad of middle school cheerleaders at a buy-one-get-one sale at Piercing Pagoda.

You’d think a guy who looked like that would be kind of tough, but no, his demeanor did not match his persona. He was a blubbering, crying, whining mess of a baby, apparently mistaking us for his mother when he asked us in a toddler-voice for (and I quote) a “boogie rag.” He wanted us to wipe his nose like he was a five year old home sick from kindergarten with a cold. Ummm, no.

People Are Gross

We opted not to wipe his nose but instead walked his crying self out of the apartment and put him in the Wagon. I finished up with the victim and then drove to the station where I met back up with him in Booking. I unhooked him from the bench and brought him up to the Booking counter where I removed the handcuffs. His hands went straight to his face as soon as they were free, contaminating them with the orange pepper spray that coated his face like a hive of angry bees.

During the booking process the prisoners are thoroughly searched and things like shoes, belts, jewelry and piercings are removed before they can go into a cell. And that’s where this guy’s problems really started.

Because people are gross I try to touch them as little as humanly possible, so I have them remove their things themselves, especially piercings. Clink! Clank! Clunk! sounded as he dropped one giant stud or hoop after another into the stainless steel property bin. After he finished taking out all the piercings that we could see, we asked the next obvious question: Do you have any more? The answer, unfortunately, was yes. He had one more, and it was a doozy.

Zero Gauge, Zero Brains

Like I said before, when the handcuffs came off his hands went straight to his face, which is a very normal human reaction to being pepper sprayed. But what happens is as soon as someone touches their marinated face with their hands, the pepper spray transfers from their face to their hands, and their hands, in turn, transfer the pepper spray to whatever they touch next.

And so, to remove his last piercing, he had to reach down into his nether-regions where a giant, zero-gauge bull ring that could set off a metal detector from a mile away, hung in the balance.

Horrible, Painful, And … Funny

Without thinking, he reached down with both hands to remove the final piercing. After a brief moment of effort, a sudden change came over him. It took until about the count of three for the pepper spray on his hands to take effect and then for the pain signal to travel from where the-sun-don’t-shine up to his brain. When it happened, it was as if a switch had been flipped. He screamed like a member of the Vienna Boys Choir after being punched in the pants, practically folded in half, and instantly dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

As horrible and painful as it must have been for him, it was equally as hilarious to us. The Booking Officer and I literally laughed out loud and completely lost all sense of decorum and professionalism. I honestly laughed until I cried. It was one of the funniest things I had witnessed in a very long time. For him on the other hand, no so much.

Life Lessons

And so, kids, there are a number of important lessons we can learn from this story:

1. When someone gets a restraining order against you, consider that tantamount to a break-up. That relationship thing you had, well, it’s over.
2. When that same someone invites you back over to get together and the restraining order is still in effect, for the love of all that is sacred, don’t go! It’s a trap.
3. If you failed to follow Lessons 1 and 2 and find yourself hiding in a closet after the cops show up looking for you, just come out, and be like, “Hey guys, I’m right here.” Simple.
4. If at some point in your life you find yourself with a hankering for a 37th body piercing — don’t. But if you do, put it anywhere but there.

If you learn from these simple lessons you’ll be one step closer to winning at life instead of lying crumpled on the floor of a jail writhing in pain and praying for death.

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