Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 26    followed by the police
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I noticed the police looking at me so I took what few stolen items were in my apartment, including a big ‘ol electric typewriter, and threw everything out in the country. Then in a voice reminiscent of Bones, I swore that was the end of screwing around for me.

From then on, my real self would be honest, which was actually true, and I decided to change my boundaries within society and no longer violate property rights. And I kept that pledge, for the most part, which most people manage to make unaided at a much earlier age.

A few interesting stories arose from the police scrutiny … and the observations would help my work as a bike activist.

The first was a laughable folly when Det Larry walked into McDonald’s where I was sitting and talking with a guy. Larry spotted a friend of his. He smiled and was ready to wave, except he suddenly saw me and realized his friend was ‘secretly’ spying on my conversation.

Alerting on Larry’s reaction, I immediately turned and looked at the innocuous middle-age guy sitting at the table five feet away … and realized the police will sit next to you in restaurants and listen to your conversations. Crimney ... what an educational opportunity.

The plainclothes guy got up and casually disappeared out the door, but never drove out of the parking lot. He was state police, which I deduced by his clumsy refusal to glance back when I looked through the side of his eye plus his general build and demeanor as he walked away. He was very aware of everything yet pretended to be ordinary. Too ordinary and that’s how I knew.

The state police: that’s who sits in the restaurant and listens.
 
Yep the state police. Pillars of integrity. The same guys who have to be asked four times by a defendant’s lawyer before someone can find the ‘lost’ crime kit (10 years after the first request) so it can be re-tested for DNA.

Over the next months I noticed a car with two younger men following behind me. How many times were those same guys going to pop up in my rearview mirror I wondered? The next time they appeared, I slowed down so they’d have to pass my truck and let me see their faces, but they turned off after an awkward double-lane change, and that was the last time they followed me that way.

I saw another car too, but I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so why worry. In a way, it was fun learning what they were doing. Besides, the surveillance told me they had nothing to make a charge, and what were they going to find anyway? A dumb ass contractor who smoked dope and could barely paint a house? My days of rambling criminality were over. I was more talk and bluster than criminal ... I just liked the challenge.

Today the police follow people using GPS, so you don’t see anybody directly behind you, but they show up shortly after you arrive someplace. Just the other day a vehicle was cruising around my neighborhood, and a minute later an unmarked police car signaled him to pull over … but the officer spoke into the guy’s window without taking any identification … so they were shooing him away, and not asking for identification let him know he was being watched.

I was followed by GPS from 1999 through 2003 because of my bicycle activism … the police made the erroneous public claim that I was violent, and a danger to the public, a terrorist and a sex offender … plus they made the truly merited claim that I didn’t know how to act. Of course a bicycle activist doesn’t know how to act for christ’s sake, it’s the definition of activism; not acting like you’re supposed to act. Rosa Parks didn’t act right when she refused to sit in the back of the bus. I didn’t act right either when I demanded equal protection under the law and took the full lane for my bicycle.
 
Continuing the surveillance story from 1974: One night I called a customer, who hired me to build a cabinet and do some painting, and asked if I could come over and pick up my level. I needed a level to build a shelf in my apartment that night. The customer agreed and I decided to walk the two miles instead of driving. I was a walker.

Once past campus, I turned and noticed a guy half running behind me, but he quickly slowed to a regular pace. He had strong heavy legs, and suddenly I knew him: he was in that car that followed me. I also knew intuitively that his friend was somewhere off my flank. Those people don’t travel alone, but I lost them a quarter mile later after topping over a hill and entering my customer’s house.

As soon as I stepped back outside the customer’s door, I saw the guy looking around for me at the lit intersection below, so I gave my client an extra loud ‘see ya tomorrow,’ and the guy immediately walked out of view. It was the last time I saw the followers that way. But it wasn’t over.
 
It was about this time I added things up and confronted Dan about being an informer. It happened because Steve batted my rear-view mirror down after I kept looking back to see if we were being followed. Steve’s action inadvertently told me they weren’t watching me like that, which meant he knew who was watching, which narrowed it to Dan.

So this is what I learned: the police will encourage others to inform on you to help in their surveillance. They will plant friends, and use your trusted friends or use anybody near you to glean information. And believe me, your neighbors will gleefully notify investigators when they see you pee in the back yard at night … and just like cows, your friends and neighbors want the other guy to get caught and be eaten by the lions because it makes them stronger. It’s a powerful primitive emotion … people are charged-up socially by actions that separate someone from the herd, as long as it’s not them … it’s fundamental eugenics … it’s about reproductive purity … it’s the entire intent of every boner-inspired Biblical story.

Still it was a month or so before I thought back and realized Steve’s phone call led to my arrest. Further consideration let me think it was reasonable that Steve was planted next door as an informer … he was, after all, in graduate school studying to become a criminal psychologist … which of course is why he whistled like a pirate bird, wore mismatched socks and rolled a pair of dice each morning to see how the day would turn out. Steve was entertaining.

I also figured out Steve tipped the police where we were going to be one other night. That night two plain-clothes police, a man and a woman showed up at the record-store and examined me. I saw the police that night, but it didn’t matter, and I kept my friends anyway. Three days in jail is not thirty years, but years later when Steve became a working criminal psychologist, he confided that his clients made him nervous … and that revelation made me want to call, pretending to be a patient, and tell him I just got out of prison and was standing outside his house. LOL. I never did it though. We lost contact since.
Chapter 27) A rape trap
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