I had COPs tonight. That’s “Citizens On Patrol”. Its a service the local sheriff has organized in my community, where local citizens put on an official-looking police uniform shirt and baseball hat and drive around the ‘hood. The idea is to discourage prowlers and burglars, give the seniors who live in my development a sense of security, and help out with folks looking for an address, locating lost pets, even finding the occasional Alzheimer’s runaway. (I’ve rescued two so far!). We are not armed and we have no arrest powers, and if we run into trouble we have cell phones, but it is felt our presence is a valuable aid to the police force and other responders.

I do this for an hour and a half, twice a month, and my partner ( a retired New York accountant originally from Nigeria) and I ride around in a marked surplus police vehicle. Alas, the sirens and flashing lights are disconnected, but our prowler has a killer FM radio and I have turned on my partner to the joys of classic rock. Our shift tonight pretty much coincided with the Led Zeppelin Hour. Its a service to the community kind of thing. I’ve been doing this since I moved into this neighborhood.

Tonight, close to the end of our patrol, a combination of old shocks, bad roads and prostate issues gave me a desperate urge to take a leak. I pulled into a construction site and drove the vehicle to a dark spot where it couldn’t be seen from the main road. I’m familiar with the place, it used to be the community golf course but the land is now being converted to town houses. l am familiar with the layout because I often ride my bike there during daylight hours.

So I stop the prowler, turn off the headlights, and go behind a hedge to do my thing, when out of the corner of my eye I see the vehicle slowly start moving down the street, gently but undeniably picking up speed. I know my partner is strapped into the passenger seat, he can’t reach the controls, and he is 80 years old. No one’s at the helm, and I’m on the passenger side of the car.

I interrupt my activities, and with my pants threatening to fall off my ass, go running after the car. I’m afraid to run across the front (I might get run over) and I know if I cut across the back the car will be moving too fast for me to reach the driver’s door before it gets to the intersection ahead, crosses the street, and plows into the shell of an unfinished building dead ahead.

I pound on the passenger window with my left hand (my right is trying to keep my pants from falling off) trying to get Sam’s attention, but I have no idea if he can hear me, its too dark for me to see inside the vehicle. Suddenly, the car makes an extreme right turn; by now its in the middle of the intersection. Unbeknownst to me, Sam realized the car had popped into gear (or maybe I just forgot to put it in PARK) but he was afraid to stab his foot on the brake (it might hit the gas, instead). He didn’t want to mess with the shifter (on the steering column) because it might just make things worse. It never occurred to him to just pull the keys out of the ignition, but he did turn the wheel to keep the car from driving into the garage of the half-finished town house dead ahead.

That was good, but now the car is in the middle of a straight road that I know goes for about a quarter mile, and that everything there has been bulldozed flat. And it is now moving too
fast for me to catch it on foot. There’s also a couple of borrow pits along that road, where the contractors pull out any fill they may need, and dump construction debris they don’t. They will eventually become decorative ponds, part of the landscaping, and they are already filled with water. I have a brief nightmare vision of poor Sam drowning, strapped to his bucket seat, while I’m running down a dark road trying to find him, my pants twisted down around my ankles.

The car edged to the side of the street and ran into a bundle of rebar that had been laid down by the side of the road. The engine was still idling, but it wasn’t turning over fast enough to get the tires over the obstacle. The car stopped until I was able to catch up and shut it down.

Anyway, there was no damage, and no evidence remained of our little misadventure, so everything turned out all right, except I pissed in my pants. I figured I’d tell you guys about it, write the whole episode out of my system, so maybe I won’t have nightmares about it tonight.

I hate automatics. None of this would have happened if I had been driving a standard shift.