From the Washington Examiner today: " Former President Donald Trump fired off a series of Truth Social posts on Thursday ahead of his commute to Washington, D.C., for his third arraignment this year, saying, "I am being arrested for you.”
I gave thanks to Trump. (Can someone else be arrested for a crime you’ve committed?) If he was arrested for me, then I must have committed a crime that escaped the authorities’ attention. I went back to my past and came up with a few:
1) Sixty-eight years ago I kept returning the same empty soft drink bottles to a pony keg on Montgomery Road. They would give me $.03 for each bottle, then carry them outside to the back of the pony keg. I would climb over a fence, take the same bottles, then return them again and collect the money. I was saving up to buy a WeeGee squirt gun, but I was caught. Not arrested, and I did give the money back.
2) A year later I held up the Pleasant Ridge PO with a Mattel burp gun, the kind that took roll caps. There were two doors at either end of the post office. I ran in one, fired at the clerks behind the counter and ran out the other. I was never arrested for that, either.
3) I snuck out of my house one night with my cousin, went to the Gayety Theater, and saw a burlesque show when I was twelve or thirteen. “How old are you?” the ticket seller asked. “Eighteen,” I replied in early-teen falsetto voice. I lied, yes, but escaped arrest.
4) I filled a mailbox on Grand Vista Avenue with leaves, then threw in a match, fanning the flames with the little door that’s still common to those mailboxes. Got away with that one, too. a federal offense.
5) At sixteen I unscrewed some Christmas lightbulbs on the hedge in front of GIBSON CARDS off Section road, so that by unplugging the G, I, and B, I could leave the S intact. Unscrewing the top bulbs in the O turned it into a U. I left the C. Unscrewing the bulbs at the top of the R turned it into a K. I unplugged the D and the S, so for one Christmas Gibson Cards' message was SUCK, not Gibson Cards. The next year a new spiffy cyclone fence made it impossible. I’m confessing this today, thinking that the statute of limitations might have passed in more than sixty years. Trespassing?
I’m sure there are more, but it’s gratifying to know that someone else is taking the fall for these. Knowing that Trump’s arrest prevents me from heading to the slammer, although in this spirit of confessing, I once went to the slammer on purpose. As a freshman at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, I climbed over the outer wall of the Washington State Penitentiary and stole the hand-painted sign that read, “Inmate Curio Shop. Open Daily.” Got away with that one, too. I wish I still had it.
Currently living anonymously in the Witness Protection Program at 330 Rugby Avenue, Kensington, CA 94708.