When Tradition Can Get You Arrested

Tradition is a huge part of society today. But it can also lead to trouble if the people around you are uptight pricks with no sense of humor. Those were the types of traditions my friends and I had. I spent a while in my early years of college playing rugby, so I had a pretty solid background in doing things just because the veterans and older players said so. It's pretty much hazing, but since we do it to the rookies every year, we can call it tradition. We weren't the only team doing these things either, so we were never singled out for any trouble. But when you've stripped naked in a crowded bar on the busiest night of the week in a huge college town and run around the bar taking shots at different points like a streaker relay race, you have a good sense of just how great and ridiculous traditions can be. My friends and I didn't have quite as many as the rugby team, but one in particular that we took down to the beach with us almost landed a few of us in prison.
It was a few days after Christmas, about the time that people who aren't slackers start taking down their decorations, and right about the time that the members of our group who had gone home for the holidays were starting to trickle back into the beach house for the last few weeks of freedom before school started back up. I chose to milk my vacation for every last second I could, so I stayed at the beach over the holidays along with Joe and Derek while Sean and Blake and the girls went home to see their families. Everyone ended up back together on December 30th, New Year's Eve.....eve. We threw ourselves a little get-together and all got hammered, as was customary for friday nights at the house. It was only after the majority of us were wasted that the topic of our tradition came up. The first part was already taken care of, which included getting hammered, driving around picking up discarded Christmas trees and bringing them back for a bonfire later. Imagine the sight of 5 guys piled into a pickup truck, hanging off the back and out the windows dragging no less than 3 trees down the middle of the road while the truck was swerving, trying to keep control. We usually did it in our own neighborhoods back home, so we knew we weren't gonna be in any trouble, but this wasn't our neighborhood. We did this around 1 or so in the morning, and a few people saw us and cheered us on. We finally got back to the house and dropped off our firewood and that's when the darker side of the traidition began. None of us remembers how it started, but sometime in the past few years, on one of the runs to grab the trees from the curb, one of us had grabbed a wreath, and then another grabbed a candy cane, until we had all grabbed a souvenir Christmas decoration from someone's front yard. This year started as soon as we made our next run. Joe leaned out of the passenger side to grab a light up candy cane, and to his surprise ended up with an entire thirty foot length of interconnected candy canes popping out of the ground on after another, dragging behind the truck until he had time to reel them in with his arms and shut the door. At a stop sign, Blake hopped out and grabbed a light up reindeer. Sean was driving, but still got a prize when he instructed Joe to grab another reindeer a few moments later. For his part, Lee hopped out of the back without us even noticing he was gone and took a plastic snowman from RIGHT NEXT to someone's front door. Not to be outdone, I took a plastic Santa and we tore off down the street with our new decorations.
After getting back to the house to compare our loot, everyone got the itch and decided on what our next run would bring. It looked like a bounty hunter's hit list. Joe wanted a wreath. Lee and Blake both wanted giant tree ornaments that they had seen earlier. Sean was freelancing, looking for a target of opportunity that would beat all other takes for the night. My prize was possibly the most ambitious, and also reserved my cabin in hell. I wanted a baby Jesus from a manger scene. We split up into two cars, Sean and I in one, and the rest in the other. We passed them only about a half mile down the street, two of the three bounties already found, but we kept going right past. Sean and I weren't satisfied with this pussy shit. We wanted to go bigger. We ended up driving around looking for our bounties for so long that the other car found what they'd wanted and headed back to the house to close out the night.
By the time we found the perfect house to collect BOTH of our rare prizes, it was late and we were so drunk anything was a good excuse to head back home for the night. We had decided we weren't going back home empty handed, and that proved to be our downfall. We should have been back at the house, asleep and safe, hours ago. The house was absolutely perfect except for one small problem: the resident. It belonged to a prominent politician (whom I will not name, of course) which meant 24/7 police presence in the driveway, and a twelve foot wrought iron fence surrounding the entire property. But aside from those two things, it had everything. Sean set his sights on a six foot inflatable light up bear that looked a lot like a CocaCola bear, and I saw a manger scene with an even better prize, a little black baby Jesus. Now Sean was used to free-running and climbing shit, apparently that's what they did all day every day growing up in California, and I wasn't in BAD shape, but neither one of us was in any condition to be climbing a fence, much less holding our bounties. But we were determined. We parked down the street and headed toward the darkest corner of the yard.
When we got to the fence, it looked even taller than it had when we'd driven by. The only way we were gonna get into the yard was to use the trees that were growing next to the fence. Sean first and then me; We climbed up the tree and hoisted ourselves over the fence and dropped into the shadows. Twelve feet might not seem like much, but when you've been drinking for a few hours, it is a hellacious distance to free fall and land awkwardly. It took me a minute of regaining my composure and massaging out my now possibly shattered ankle before I got my bearings and got back to the mission at hand.
We were just inside the fence, about 100 yards from Sean's bear. My manger scene was a little more than halfway between us and the bear, so we decided that would be our first stopping point. We kept our heads low and basically crawled to the manger. I snagged my baby Jesus and hid behind the scene while Sean crawled in the shadows to his bear. It looked like it was hollow and light, but it was also huge and obviously awkward to carry. Sean tried several times to get a good grip and lift it, all while keeping low and out of sight and not drawing attention from the cop sitting in his car just about 50 yards away from the bear. Eventually he decided the best choice was to just drag the bear and he got about halfway to where I was hiding when all hell broke loose.
I was crouched behind the manger with the baby Jesus in my arm like a football when I saw the spotlight from the cop car start to sweep across the yard. I immediately dropped flat on my belly as low to the ground as I could get behind the manger scene. The light passed over me without slowing down, and continued sweeping toward where Sean was dragging the bear. I whistled to Sean and when he turned and saw the light coming toward him he did the absolute worst thing possible, he froze. As soon as the spotlight landed on him, his senses came back to him and he took off like an olympic sprinter dragging an inflatable bear behind him the whole way. Figuring our cover had been blown, I popped up and took off toward the corner of the fence where we had climbed in. My baby Jesus was much easier to carry and I passed Sean just about 20 yards in front of the fence. I didn't bother to look back as I hurled the plastic baby over the fence and vaulted myself up onto it as far as I could get. It became instantly clear to me that we hadn't planned very well, and that the trees we'd used to get into the yard weren't reachable to use to get back out. I started scrambling up the fence and felt it shake as Sean slammed into it from a full sprint and began climbing next to me. He was almost at the top when I saw him wrench violently backward and fall off the fence. I looked back just as the cop grabbed my ankle and jerked me free of the iron bars and I fell. I hit the ground hard and the air was knocked out of my lungs. As I was gasping for breath and writhing on the ground trying to stretch my diaphragm back out so I could get some air into my lungs, I saw the cop put his knee into Sean's back and start to handcuff him. I thought about getting up and running away but the cop must have seen the look in my eyes and pulled his tazer and pointed it directly at me.
"Do not FUCKING move!" he yelled at me. Being tased once sucks, and I didn't want to find out if it felt the same the second time around. I rolled back onto my stomach and just as I felt my air coming back, a set of rough hands pulled my arms behind my back and I felt a plastic zip tie close around my wrists.
He sat us up, searched us and found nothing, took our IDs and found no warrants, and just as he began yelling at us and calling us stupid, a porch light of the house turned on, and a man came walking down the stairs toward us wearing a robe and house slippers.
"Well goddamn! I never seen you run so fast in your life, Murph!" he joked with the cop, who's name tag said Sergeant Murphy, "I'd have never guessed you could outrun the long-haired, skinny one." He meant Sean. He turned to us.
"You boys been drinking?"
"Yes, sir" Sean told him.
"Haha, I like honesty, boy. Well if you haven't figured out by now, this is my house. I'm the [political office] of this state and Murph here is assigned to guard my house from criminals and intruders," he told us. The man was a born politician. Here we were probably going to jail for trespassing on what was possibly the worst house in the entire southeast to trespass, and I still felt like the guy was talking to me like we were fishing buddies.
"I guess what I want to know is, what the hell are you dipshits doing running around my lawn at 4am?" he asked. We explained that we were just drunk and doing a prank involving stealing the bear from his lawn when he started laughing, hard.
"You mean to tell me the only thing you came for was that God awful bear my wife makes the landscaper put up every year?" We both nodded. "Well, shit, take the damn thing! I hate it." He turned to Sergeant Murphy and told him to cut us loose and write it up as a harmless prank. Murphy didn't seem very happy but he obliged the politician and took off our cuffs and zip tie. The politician offered to get someone to drive us home but we lied and said we had a driver waiting by the car. We were 'escorted' out the front gate and made the quarter mile walk around the premises to get back to where we were parked. The baby Jesus was lying on the ground next to the tree we'd climbed to get in, and I quickly picked it up and stuffed it into the backseat under a few beach towels. Murphy wouldn't let Sean keep the bear, but we didn't end up going to jail and nothing was ever mentioned in the newspapers or on TV about the incident. I'm not sure if they even noticed the baby Jesus was missing, but they surely would when it was time to take down the Christmas decorations when the season was over. Lucky for us, the politician had a sense of humor about the whole thing, no doubt from a mischeivous past of his own that lent us a little leniency in his eyes. I made up my mind that night that if I ever end up living in an area where I'm eligible, I will vote for that man in any election he enters without question. Unless he asks for my baby Jesus back.