GPS Failed
Or: how keeping my weed and my insurance card and registration in different places probably saved my ass, among other things
It was a nice June afternoon in 2014 and I was driving from my boyfriend's house in Saint Paul to my house in South Minneapolis. I didn’t stay there a ton, spending most nights at my boyfriend’s place who lived much closer to work, but rent was due and I needed to get it to my friend who owned the house in which I was renting a room.
And then everything took a, shall we say, turn for the worse.
My tabs were expired and I was having ongoing car troubles, the car dying at random times as I drove. It was the oxygen sensor and I was too broke or lazy or both to get it fixed. Because of this, I decided to check non-highway routes on Google Maps on my phone to get home, figuring it’d be safer for a car to suddenly stop working on a 30mph parkway than on I-94 during rush hour.
I grew up in Minneapolis and was not terribly familiar with Saint Paul despite the cities being literally right next to each other. (The Twin Cities are in an ongoing, probably millennia-long passive-aggressive rivalry and both factions complain endlessly about crossing the river to come in contact with the other so, yes, it totally makes sense that I was so unfamiliar with the city directly abutting my own hometown.) As a result, I was closely following my phone's GPS.
Naturally, my phone's battery was also nearly dead, and I had just taken a wrong turn when my phone decided to announce that its GPS signal was lost, because of course it was. Me, as lost as the GPS signal always seemed to be in Saint Paul for some reason (because I was from Minneapolis, probably, because it’s a millennia-long war of passive aggression, probably), I thought the best thing to do was to pull into the empty parking lot of the gas station I was coming up to and let my phone charge while I tried to see if I could figure out where I was. I pulled into a parking spot near the perimeter so that I could be out of the way of actual customers and sit there and hold my phone at the precise angle it demanded in order to collect a charge from the ancient charging cable I had in the car.
Because everything wrong that can happen will, I realize I am also running out of gas and probably minutes away from idling myself to empty. I need gas not only to get home, but to keep the car running to charge my phone with that stupid broken charger so that the phone could tell me how to get there in the first place. I back out of my parking spot and move over to the nearest gas pump behind me and stick my card in.
As I’m pumping my gas, a child approaches me from some wooded area behind the station, like a disheveled deer in a dirty dress. She asks me if I want to buy a friendship bracelet from her. I give her $0.50 or whatever she asked for and she scampers back to wherever she came from. I deposit the sparsely-beaded, colored string into a cup holder in my car and immediately forget about it.
Done pumping my gas, I return to my parking spot at the edge of the parking lot, turn off my car, and go inside the gas station, where I figure now is as good a time as any to pull out the $300 from the ATM to give to my roommate for rent and maybe get a snack since I was probably going to be sitting there awhile. I am the only customer in the cramped convenience store, and I wander around it aimlessly in a half-hearted attempt at finding something to eat or drink, already bored.
The cashier, meanwhile, is muttering things under his breath that I could swear sound like "stupid whore" and other delightfully similar phrases. I can’t help but assume he’s talking about me, as I am the only person in there with him, but who knows, he could just be a little nuts. I continue looking for snacks as he walks past me, continuing to mutter insulting things about my gender and presumed sexual behaviors. I turn to him, smile, and ask, “What was that? I didn’t hear you.” He smiles back as though he hasn’t just been acting like a misogynistic creep with a muttering problem. “Oh, nothing,” he declares in a frighteningly sane tone of voice before he continues his march around the tiny store, muttering psychotically again. I decide to get the hell out of there, snacks be damned.
…Of course, the damn car won't start up again. I use some of my remaining phone battery to text my boyfriend to see if he can meet me there after he gets off work, help me get the car working again, and follow me back home. I tell him what road I’m on and describe the area as best as I can. I figure I’ll let it sit for a few minutes and try to start it again.
Next thing I know, two black SUVs with tinted windows race into the parking lot and surround my car. Four Saint Paul Police officers are now out of their vehicles and on both sides of mine. I roll down my windows, surprised, and the cop standing in front of mine asks me, almost sarcastically, if I'm having car troubles. I say yes and I try to explain the problem it's having while I'm fiddling with my wallet to get my license out, my hands shaking because I am surrounded by angry police officers and have no idea why. He probes a bit more and asks me if I noticed anyone watching me, and if I thought that maybe I was acting pretty suspicious. I have no idea what he’s talking about. He goes on, like maybe I’m getting ready to meet someone to buy drugs…?
I realize in that moment everything I had just gotten done doing — sitting in the parking spot with the car on like I was waiting for something, moving a few feet to get gas, exchanging literal currency with a random feral-looking child, moving the car again, going in the store and not buying anything — oh, god, the cash from the ATM... and that cashier! The things he was muttering! He must have been watching me the whole time and thinking I was in the middle of a drug deal and called the cops on me himself.
I hand the officer my license that I pull from the wallet visibly containing the $300, and with a sinking feeling of dread settling into my gut, I start to explain the fresh wad of $20 bills. I tell him it's for rent, that's where I'm headed right now, I just needed gas, and my car kept dying, and then my phone was dying, and I was texting my boyfriend to come get me... I show him the text I sent, and his reply that he'd meet me up there, point out my red 5% battery icon to further drive home the fact that I’m telling the truth and that this is all one big, hilarious misunderstanding.
He’s waiting for the rest of the documents he asked me for. I open my glove box to get my insurance card out, my heart racing, as it’s at that moment that I remember that I actually have an eighth ounce of weed in the center console that I bought from a friend a day or two ago, completely unrelated to this innocent and cursed gas station detour, silently congratulating myself for at least having the good sense not to store the insurance card and registration papers in the same place as the drugs — but terrified that, given the situation, I'll have to open it anyway and will surely be arrested, as it is 2014 and weed will not be legal in Minnesota for another decade and it’s only been seven years since I was last arrested in that very county and surely they see me as a violent drug offender now, no matter how professionally I’m suddenly grateful to have chosen to have dressed myself that day.
As I open the glove box, another absurdly suspicious-looking item I’d completely forgotten about becomes immediately apparent: a giant Ziploc bag full of cloudy, scented, homemade bath salts that my coworker had made for me. I realize instantly how bad this looks and I pathetically try to explain: "…really, those are bath salts, my friend made them for me…" I'm trying to explain that it's not crack, but I guess I'm not up on my drug lingo because I forget “bath salts” are actually a drug now. I hand the bag to the officer at my window as the one at the passenger window looks on, amused.
"Smell them," I suggest, stupidly.
"I'm sure you can understand why I'm not going to smell that," he barks. The officer next to him laughs, apparently realizing how silly this whole thing is and that they're not getting the drug bust they were hoping for, and tells him, "they're just bath salts." The officer at my window, not quite ready to accept defeat, lectures me about the dangers of ingesting them, and I assure him I am not intending to do so.
"Is there anything else in the car you think you need to explain to us?" the first officer asked me, apparently finally convinced of my now-apparent oblivious idiocy rather than oblivious drug-kingpinnery. Thinking of the weed mere inches from my right arm and my tabs, months expired at this point, I assure him that there is nothing more, and that my boyfriend will be here soon to escort me home.
They leave, I think.
My boyfriend did show up soon after, dressed in his usual uniform of khakis and a tucked-in, collared, button-down shirt, looking every bit the responsible, preppy part I needed him to look in case the cops were, as I feared, parked somewhere just out of sight, waiting for me to fuck up and out myself as the latest business-casual white girl trying to play Nancy Botwin in real life at a shoddy BP franchise in Saint Paul.
I thought, at the very least, I’d get stuck with a ticket for my expired tabs. I don’t think they even noticed.