Sunday night one of my best friends (and former roommates) was visiting LA on a layover from work. He’s a flight attendant and was in just for Sunday night. I haven’t seen him since last summer and was really happy that we got to meet up even just for a few hours. We ended up hanging out in West Hollywood and went to a really fun party at a place called HERE. The music was great – a lot better then what I hear at the local bear bar parties I’ve been attending in Long Beach that’s for sure. We ended talking about how much we did and DIDN’T miss that whole scene from DC. It was more of a social thing that we missed than the actual ‘partying’ per se. Either way, we just had a couple of light beers and I was really digging the music. That’s what I really missed most from that time. I danced and jumped around regardless. Maybe it’s time to actually make the effort and not just hide out at home, huh? Oh well – it was a relatively early night for the both of us since we both had to be at work the next morning. I ended up dropping him off at his hotel clear across town by the beach. On the way back home, lo and behold, I get pulled over by the Redondo Beach police! Apparently it was because of my suspicious turn into the driveway, immediate exit, AND busted left tail-light! Wow – of course I’m not driving a car in my name (it’s my aunt’s that I’m living with)! Of course I appear to have somewhat slurred and hesitant speech (I was tired – it was 1:00am and have been awake since 7 the morning before)! Of course, my driver’s license is still from Washington, DC (technically by law, I should have changed it over to California after 90 days of claiming residency). Of course I appeared to smell of alcohol and cigarettes (from the visit to the bar the hour before)! We then proceeded to do standard simple sobriety tests like following the officer’s finger from left to right without moving my head. As they were running the check on my driver’s license, the officer interviewing me just wasn’t convinced that I was okay to drive. “If I ever had a dollar for everyone telling me they just had one drink…” I was asked to get out of the vehicle and stand straight up and do the same visual test. It still wasn’t good enough. I then had to stand still, tilt my head back, and then count to 30. Of course I wasn’t drunk, but I was scared shitless at this point. Luckily I managed to keep my cool. Things just got a little surreal as the other officer was writing me a ‘Fix-it’ citation for the vehicle. The original interviewing officer started talking to me about the weather, life in DC, whether or not he should go visit, and me enjoying my ‘new’ move to California. It was just beyond words at that moment. Stuff like this never happens to me and it just brought back some crazy memories of the last time I got pulled over a few years back. For the sake of argument and being a whole other topic – I won’t go into ‘that’ moment right now. It all ended well. They told me that the stop was for my own safety, yadda, yadda, yadda. I was thinking they were just bored. Of course they were cute too, so while I’m just sitting there on the curb for the whole thing to get over with, the cop fantasies were just going full force. Would I have put out? OF COURSE! ;-)
