I must have some kind of an air about me

that seems to draw me into the damnedest situations.

My whole life has been an improbable mess since the time I got hauled in as a possible suspect for robbing a convenience store back in '69.

It seems like every decade something dopey happens. I come close to getting carted off to the Big House for something.

Now, it was the summer of '69 and yours truly was booting alone with another cronie in my spiffy '63 MGB that I had gotten a pretty good deal on. Believe it or not, I scored a '63 MGB for $200 because the guy that bought it for his darling daughter and then took it away from her for stupidity. In a fit of pique, he offered it to me for $200 and I had the money to him in less than an hour.

Anyway, I was booting along in the damned thing on Cape Cod and we got pulled over and hauled in because some thug robbed a convenience store and got away driving none other than an MGB of the same color.

Of course, when they put us in the police line-up, the victim got pretty hot because the robber was about fifteen years older than I was and looked totally different than I did. The police looked pretty foolish and started digging around for SOMETHING to bust us for. They went through the MG with a fine-toothed comb and found nothing when all was well and done.

I think they tried to accuse me of posession of drug paraphenalia becase a test light lead had an alligator clip on it and there were a couple of brass fittings in the trunk. With no residue on any of it, it was pretty obvious and besides, a call to my hometown police department netted only a report that I was a pretty good kid with no history of narcotic use.

I spent the night in the cooler and the next day I went off on my merry way. No charges, no record.

About a decade later I was briefly investigated for a murder when I was in Alaska. I was on the very long list of people the victim had crossed swords with, but it was a bad joke. I told the officer that I was a fisherman then and fisherman let their victims sleep with the fishes. He didn't care for my sarcasm.

I had a pretty good alibi for that one. On the evening in question I was in the Kodiak jail as an overnight visitor. I had run out of propane on the night in question and the cop who saw me heading downtown carrying the bottle offered me the hospitality of the jail and told me it would be a whole lot easier than getting any propane at that hour. I accepted the offer.

One of the two cops in the room where I was questioned was an idiot.

When he found out that I was in the local pokey on the night in question, he looked at the other officer and said, "That's the third suspect that has used being in our jail as an alibi. Maybe we should stop letting criminals use our jail for alibis."

The other cop and I laughed ourselves silly and when the nitwit realized what he said, he turned purple and told me to leave. He didn't have to tell me twice.

(Eventually someone got smart. With three gunshot wounds in the head, the death was ruled suicide. Go figure.)

The most recent time was about 10 years ago or so.

Some boob shot his girlfriend and an hour later he exchanged about 40 shots with local police at a range of 10 feet and nobody got hit. He escaped and an APB had him wearing a green shirt headed south on Highway 26 in a gray Toyota pickup.

You got it. Shortly thereafter I was southbound on Highway 26 and I got pulled over in my gray Toyota while wearing a green shirt.

It wasn't very comfortable looking down the bore of a police shotgun and the fact that fuzz-nutted rookie was holding the shotgun made it a whole lot worse. I politely told the older officer that it might be a good idea to have the rookie put the shotgun on 'safe' or at least take his finger off of the trigger. The older officer took the shotgun and pointed it in a safe direction and had the rookie search me. The rookie announced that I was clean.

They took my driver's license and ran it and I came up clean.

The rookie started to give me some kind of dopey lecture and I looked over at the older cop and reached into my wallet and handed him my carry permit. The cop looked at me suspiciously and asked me whay I was showing him my permit.

I opened my shirt and told the rookie to spare me the lecture and that if I really was the guy he was looking for, there would have already been a shoot-out. Both officers turned ashen, but for different reasons. The younger one realized he had screwed up and the older one realized he couldn't trust the rookie.

I was summarily dismissed and I took off.

The reason I wrote this is because it has been about ten years since this happened and it looks like I'm due for something else dopey to happen to me along these lines.

Or maybe things just come in threes and I'm off the hook for a long while. Then again, maybe I'll be questioned over something outrageous like being a hatchet murderer of some kind. Who knows?

Time will tell.



my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/