Great Zinger, No Witnesses

On a quick trip back to Tennessee a couple of years back, I had the chance to visit for a short time with a little lady I always called my "favoritest" aunt in the world, my Aunt Carol. What a sweetie! If you could meet her, I know she’d be one of your favoritest people too.

We were just talking over old times when she commented on how remarkable it had always seemed to her that I had started out being such a mischievous little kid and grew up to eventually be a police officer (which I was for a number of years). I told her that I personally knew lots of examples of that happening. For all I know, it might even be the rule instead of the exception. No offense, officers!

Like most cops and ex-cops, I have my own bank of “war stories”, some hilarious, some not at all funny. I was telling her about this one instance in which we got a 2 AM call from a local convenience store, stating that a man had been in there talking so incoherently that it scared the stuffing out of the little girl working there. At the time, the Police Department’s night shift only utilized 2 officers, and we both arrived at the store within a couple of minutes.

When we got there, we saw this old guy out in the parking lot, looking under the hood of his raggedy old Rambler station wagon. It was freezing cold, but he didn’t seem to notice that or us. After we approached him and started talking to him, I finally asked his name. He replied, “Son, gangsters stole my name in 1930, and the same bunch killed your mama.”

“Oh.” I said.

You can get some idea from this of what we were dealing with. He’d apparently been living in this old car for a while, and he had no idea where he was or where he was from. For his own protection, we decided to take him down to the station and try to track down where he might have belonged.

We had computers back then, but not nearly to the degree of sophistication they have now. A lot of investigation was still done, at that time, by long, diligent phone work. My partner wisely volunteered to handle that end of things while I stayed in the booking room with the guy and talked with him. Let me tell you, all sorts of interesting conversation ensued during that next hour or so.

Due to departmental policy, we had patted the old guy down before putting him into one of our cruisers, so we knew he didn’t have any weapons. Still, as I talked to him, I noticed he would reach into his pockets every so often, and several times, I saw him sniff his hands afterwards.

“What’s in your pockets?” I asked him.
“Coffee”, he said matter-of-factly. Skeptical, I decided to have him turn his pockets inside out, and sure enough, when he did, old dry coffee tumbled out of both front ones.
“Why do you have coffee in your pockets?” I asked.
“I worship coffee!” he answered haughtily.

Now, I personally think that it’s ever-so-cool that I can look back at this one moment, point to it, and identify it as the moment of what I feel to be the best wisecrack I ever made in my entire smart-aleck career:
“On what grounds?” I asked.

I was so proud! I felt like Babe Ruth must have felt after hitting that homer at Wrigley, moments after pointing to where he was going to hit it. I looked all around the room for witnesses to this world-class zinger, but no one else was there. It was just him and me, and, of course, he didn’t get it.

I realized that it was the perfect humor analog to the old question of whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one’s there to hear it. If no one’s there to hear a wisecrack and get the joke, it’s like it never happened. In that moment, I was instantly relegated to unsung-hero status in the annals of smart-aleckdom.

In the end, the old guy was fine. We learned that he had run away from a VA hospital about 100 miles away, and the old car was actually his. We put the car in our impound lot temporarily, and, of course, I got the privilege of driving our buddy back to the safety of the VA hospital. He fell asleep in the back seat, but occasionally, he’d wake up and ask the same question I kept asking myself on whether I’d ever be acknowledged as a skilled jokester:

“Are we there yet?”