My Life of Crime

Barry Maher
Tue, 03 Feb 2026 10:10:53 -0800
Opinion

It was the fries that got me arrested the first time. Ken had finished eating and I'd polished off my hamburger. I was lingering over the fries when the cop grabbed me. "He didn't do anything," Ken said. We'd been there earlier and a drunken friend, another freshman, had gotten into an argument with the manager and knocked over a trash barrel. We'd taken him back to campus, then returned for a burger. And fries. The cop turned to Ken. "Do you want to go too?"

"No," said Ken. "But he didn't do anything." Wrong answer. Ken and I got separate cells. No mattress, no blanket, no pillow. They took our belts and shoelaces. But we each had our own bare metal bed. Nice. Eventually, we were tried for disturbing the peace — maybe we'd been chewing too loudly — and loitering. Not eating fast enough? The cop and the restaurant manager told conflicting lies. The judge yawned, dropped one charge and reduced the other and found us both guilty "on general principles" of aiding and abetting an unspecified loiterer.

My next conviction, I was actually guilty. At 3 a.m., with nobody in sight, I realized I was stopped at the wrong entrance to the freeway. Rather than driving miles out of my way, I flipped on my signal, made sure there was no traffic within a 500-mile radius and turned out of the lane. I immediately got myself a ticket from the motorcycle cop hidden behind the bushes. He thought it was hilarious.
Updated: Tue Feb 03, 2026

It was the fries that got me arrested the first time. Ken had finished eating and I'd polished off my hamburger. I was lingering over the fries when the cop grabbed me. "He didn't do anything," Ken said. We'd been there earlier and a drunken friend, another freshman, had gotten into an argument with the manager and knocked over a trash barrel. We'd taken him back to campus, then returned for a burger. And fries. The cop turned to Ken. "Do you want to go too?"

"No," said Ken. "But he didn't do anything." Wrong answer. Ken and I got separate cells. No mattress, no blanket, no pillow. They took our belts and shoelaces. But we each had our own bare metal bed. Nice. Eventually, we were tried for disturbing the peace — maybe we'd been chewing too loudly — and loitering. Not eating fast enough? The cop and the restaurant manager told conflicting lies. The judge yawned, dropped one charge and reduced the other and found us both guilty "on general principles" of aiding and abetting an unspecified loiterer.

My next conviction, I was actually guilty. At 3 a.m., with nobody in sight, I realized I was stopped at the wrong entrance to the freeway. Rather than driving miles out of my way, I flipped on my signal, made sure there was no traffic within a 500-mile radius and turned out of the lane. I immediately got myself a ticket from the motorcycle cop hidden behind the bushes. He thought it was hilarious.

Just out of college, basically broke, I decided to go to court, plead "guilty with an explanation" and hope for a reduced fine. Except when I finished my impassioned, persuasive, even touching — I thought—explanation, the judge responded, "Remanded to the custody of the county jail. Next case."

What? So much for my belief that I would have made a great attorney. I was going to jail for not making a left turn out of a left-turn lane. If it had been an actual crime, say, littering, I might have lawyered my way onto Death Row.

"Substitute traffic judge," the bailiff chuckled as he took me to a holding cell. "Thinks he's Judge Roy Bean, cleaning up the streets." I was really making my way in the world. Barely out of college, I was already something that needed to be scrubbed from the pavement.

I was shackled in handcuffs and leg irons and given an armed escort — one driver, two guards, one me — for the bus ride to the county jail. Clearly, I was as desperate a traffic violator as ever seen in these parts. When I explained the vile deed that had brought me to this lowly state, my chaperones thought I was joking.

At the jail, the jailers removed the restraints and processed me in. Photos, fingerprints. Fortunately, no de-lousing. We all shared a few cracks about "Maximum Mike" and "the hanging judge." Fortunately, everyone was just as unwilling to perform the threatened body cavity search as I was to receive it. They locked me in with a convivial group, collectively representing two stolen cars, three break-ins, a bank robbery, an assault with a deadly can opener, a homicide (manslaughter) and well, no one was quite sure just exactly the crime I'd been convicted of.

Whatever it was, at first it seemed embarrassingly feeble. But strangely, the others seemed more outraged about my story than anyone else's. It was actually frightening how angry the can opener guys got about it. Luckily, about then, a dentist joined us, still in blue scrubs. All he'd done was write a message on his neighbor's beautiful new lawn. A huge, very obscene message. Written in weed killer. It was a fun group.

That's when one of the jailers discovered that I'd been sentenced to the maximum possible sentence for my infraction. Which turned out to mean that as soon as they fed me a dry American cheese on white bread sandwich, it was time to start processing me out. My debt to society — and my traffic ticket — paid. All in all, I've been to any number of parties that were longer and less entertaining.

Barry Maher's dark humor supernatural thriller, "The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon," has just been released. Contact him and/or sign up for his newsletter at www.barrymaher.com.