Cuffed and Stuffed

Handcuffs and fingerprints

I was arrested for hitchhiking in 1970, outside of Redding, California.

I was a skinny hippie with a rucksack. The beefy, crew cut highway patrolman, outweighing me by 100 pounds, slammed the steel handcuffs onto my wrists, behind me, with a blow from the heel of his hand. Both wrists were burning as he guided my head into the back seat of his prowl car. Buckling the seat belt over me, he grasped the strap with both hands and braced his foot against the door frame. With a violent jerk, he tightened the belt, pressing my body against my manacled arms trapped behind my back.

On the drive to jail, he made a big show about accelerating over potholes and bumps. Each jolt was agonizing, the hard edges of the steel bracelets cutting into my skin. He grinned at me in the rearview mirror, obviously enjoying himself.

Nothing he did was against regulations, but the intent and effect was to torture.

Why?

Because I was in his power. I was on the other side of the law, and he was a sadist.

From Lightbulb Coffee

Back in 1970, I had shoulder-length hair and wore a western shirt, ragged Levis, and worn out hiking boots. This obviously signaled the state trooper that I was an undesirable, like a Mexican, an Indian, or a Black.

The real reason he hauled me in was because I didn’t have my draft card on me. This was during the War against the Vietnamese, and the culture wars were already raging in The States. The military and the police were opposed to black, white, and brown people who demonstrated against the unjust war.

I had burned my draft card the previous year in a bonfire outside a Methodist church in Berkeley. In retrospect, this was an unwise move. My draft classification was 4-F, unsuitable for military service, but I was so passionately opposed to the Invasion of Vietnam that I had to do something. My Naval officer father, in uniform, had physically dragged me into the Selective Service office on my eighteenth birthday. He knew that left to my own devices, I would never register for the draft.

Since my father’s job had consisted of ferrying fresh troops to Cam Rahn bay, he was horrified that I was a draft resister. On the day I dropped out of high school and left home, he talked to me. “John Mark,” he said with a catch in his voice, “I would rather you had been killed fighting with the Marines in Vietnam than be involved with this bizarre life you’ve chosen.” He had tears in his eyes.

Thanks, Dad.

The militaristic response to the Black Lives Matter protests of today drags me back to those protest days of the sixties and early seventies. These days, policemen dressed in black stormtrooper gear break heads, toss tear gas bombs, and shoot young girls in the face with rubber bullets.

Sadistic police officers, always male, are torturing unarmed black men to death for crimes such as selling single cigarettes, or trying to pass a phony $20 bill. Handcuffs and seatbelts can be used as torture devices as well, as I learned back in the seventies.

The culture wars drag on, with no end in sight.

Check out my Memoir, Lightbulb Coffee, Available at: Amazon, Books, Inc., and Barnes & Noble.
(just click on the dealer that you prefer)