This Isn’t Brisbane, Mate

Nothing says intoxicated like staggering down the middle of a main road at 4:00 a.m.

Our cruisers had been carefully docked alongside one another like doctoral students in a library comparing notes. I was up to my closed eyelids in department SOPs when the call came in. It was that annoying call when nothing else is going on in the world but for some inexplicable reason this one guy just has to ruin my study time by playing the role of human traffic cone. I grudgingly acknowledged the call and quietly drove away so as not to disturb the others’ concentration.

Check Area

The stretch of road where my drunk friend had been walking was an undivided highway with a 50 mph speed limit suggestion — meaning that if a person really was in the road and got hit, you’d need a mop and a bucket to clean up after it. During my drive over there Dispatch said he was last reported to be in the area of the Spread Eagle Motel. I checked the area and spotted him sitting in a white plastic dollar store patio chair under the motel overhang.

I parked my cruiser, got out, and approached him. He was a burly fellow in a broad-striped, collared shirt with cauliflower ears and a neck like a tree stump. I could smell the booze billowing from his breath and escaping through his pores the moment I stepped out into the night air. His shaved head was slumped forward, his sausage fingers were clasped in front of him, and he was snoring like an enthusiastic lumberjack sawing wood.

Down Under

After some effort rousing him he slowly came to, but seemed skittish and evasive. Besides his rugged stature and the stench of booze, the most obvious thing about him was his accent. As much as I love the accent, I think Australians can be hard to understand at times. Add to that a blood-alcohol content rivaling rocket fuel, I faced the almost impossible feat of understanding this gorilla from Down Under.

Beginning with the usual questions of What’s your name? Where are you coming from? and Where are you going? I launched my investigation into this early morning interruption of my study time. The name he gave me wasn’t coming back to anything, so I felt fairly certain he was lying about it. When I asked him for the third time where he was coming from he replied in his heavy, slurred Australian accent, “The other side of the Brisbane River, mate!”

“What?”

“The other side of the Brisbane River!”

Either he’s a terrible liar or his command of geography was far worse. By my calculation the Brisbane River was 10,000 miles away in Australia and there was an ocean between here and there, so his story seemed hard to believe.

Nowhere Fast

After several trips around his circular logic I realized I was getting nowhere fast. Because of his extreme drunken state I took him into protective custody so he could safely sleep it off and we wouldn’t have to worry about him getting hit by a car resulting in a massive clean up in Aisle 5. I drove him back to the station and started booking him.

The ride in must have sobered him up a bit because he realized he wasn’t in Australia anymore and came around with the real story. As it turned out, he was a professional rugby player from Australia who had signed a contract with a local club. It was his first week practicing with the team and as part of their tradition he had the privilege of enduring some hazing — which involved getting him black-out drunk and then dropping him on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, scores of miles from the city he played in. In this case, nowhere happened to be in my route. But that actually makes perfect sense because nowhere was the only place we were getting when I first found him.

A Funny Thing

Instead of babysitting him for the rest of the night I made some phone calls and eventually got him reunited with his team. His teammates had a laugh, he had a story to tell, and I still had some SOPs to study.

One thing I will say about this job is that you never know what you will encounter or who you will meet; there’s no way to predict what your shift will bring. In this case it was a hazed and confused professional rugby player from half a world away.  Happenstance is a funny thing.

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