The Midnight Train Going Anywhere

Five Day Occupation

Those cops in Bethlehem were jerks!

It was Tuesday morning.

I decided to wait until the lunch hour in order to go to the Big Clock Spot and play.

I got there right about noon and played for only about 20 minutes until two officers of the law showed up.

It was a Lieutenant and a female corporal.

They stood in front of me and the Lieutenant said, in a firm voice "What are you doing?!?"

I said "Golden Slumbers, by The Beatles, off of Abbey Road, sir."

At first, he seemed to think that I was actually naive, but then decided that I was being a smart ass and laid into me with all kinds of accusations about loitering  and entertaining without a license and skirting the panhandling laws by using a guitar, etc. plus the usual cliches "You're not going to win that battle!" (on challenging him on any point of the law at all)

He said that he was the new guy in charge of downtown Mobile (the last one committed suicide) and that there would be no such thing as busking there from then on.

He asked me for ID and then, I won't go into all the details about how he said that my blatant disrespect for his uniform led him to infer that I would have no respect for the law in general, and on and on....
The same old warrants from other places that don't want to extradite me showed up.

He threatened to lock me up in the jail, in order to hold me to see if those other places wanted to come and pick me up.

Common sense would tell him that Saint Augustine, Florida wouldn't want to pay officers hazard rates so that they could burn all kinds of gas to transport me back there to face an open container charge and spend 20 days in jail, but, he could have played ignorant and locked me up, "just in case" they did.

It was a clear case of the city working to reduce the number of homeless people by giving them "homes" in jail; and a case of the police abusing their power against people who have not the resources to bond themselves out and hire an attorney then embarrass the officers in a court of law...Did you really think that Saint Augustine was going to drive 500 miles to pick this guy up for an open can of beer?!?

And, so I told the officer that I would be out of town within 24 hours, whereupon he gave me a thumbs up and they left.
There was to be a big Christmas pageant the coming Friday and the officers didn't want anyone on the streets who even vaguely resembled Joseph and Mary, who didn't have enough money for an inn, and who thus slept in a manger.
5 Days
It took Howard and I 5 days to hop a train out of there.
The trains seemed to have mysteriously stopped running after that, except for a bunch of them headed in the opposite direction of New Orleans.
We finally got one, early this (Sunday) morning.
Howard drove me crazy with stupid questions; something which I think is spawned out of his nervousness about traveling in general....
I will have to catch up on the recap, because it is time to watch football on any one of the many TVs here in New Orleans that can be watched for free....