The Dirt Field

Caitlin, MJ, and I decided last week to make this past weekend our lengthy celebration of Halloween. We began on Friday night with plans to watch four horror movies and then conduct a seance, plans that disintegrated immediately when we all fell asleep during the first movie, reaffirming my greatest fear – I am getting old and boring. I might as well take up knitting and then just die.

Today, however, we decided to visit an abandoned and condemned mental hospital outside of Philadelphia. We first discovered this particular site while surfing the Internet for good places to crap our pants, and spontaneously decided to make it part of our Weekend of Scary Things. After a long drive, the three of us disembarked from the car and hiked along the road that bordered the hospital. With the decrepit buildings in sight, I hopped the fence onto the property, followed shortly by MJ. Caitlin decided to pass on the experience and opted to hike around the perimeter instead (and she claimed I wasn’t adventurous because I refused to try dipping my Boston Market cornbread in her lemonade).

MJ and I made it across the property and into one of the creepiest buildings with no trouble. The pictures from that building are posted below, although over half of the ones I took were hastily deleted during the events that followed in order to divest myself of incriminating evidence. Yes, the building is condemned and unsafe. Yes, the building is full of asbestos. Yes, we could have been injured/mutilated/killed by angry ghosts. But you only live once.

After exploring the first two floors of the building, we decided to head back to the car. By this point, we were feeling pretty secure in our ability to exit the grounds unmolested, so we strolled casually along the dirt road back to the fence. It was at that point that a blue pick-up truck came screaming down the road and screeched to a halt in front of us. A man in a security jacket leaped out and demanded that we get in the back of the truck. When we hesitated (my biggest concern being that the flatbed was dirty and would soil my jacket), he became rude and abusive and demanded that we comply. We did.

It took an hour of waiting with the Rent-A-Cop for the real police to come, an hour that I spent being a raging, irritable bitch. I started by being polite and respectful, but the security officer was vulgar, mocking, and condescending and I finally reached my breaking point, snapping, “If you have no plans of letting us go, would you mind NOT TALKING ANYMORE?” I couldn’t possibly stand to listen to him bitch about how so many people trespass there with the intention of causing damage (we were completely unarmed and were not every carrying a nail file or a toothpick), and how trespassers like us are so annoying because we waste his and other people’s time (last time I checked, security officers have jobs because of people like me, so theoretically he should be thanking me for giving him a chance to make his $7.29 per hour).

I’ll admit that I also started pulling out every legal piece of bullshit I could invent, a right that is fully mine as a veteran of one month of law school. There is probably no more obnoxious person on the planet than a law student in legal trouble because you combine the desperate desire to save one’s own ass with the arrogant know-it-all attitude of one who has been forced to eat, sleep, and breathe law for days on end. That was me today, to the point that I was snarling at everyone and making every possible attempt to establish that a reasonable person would not have felt free to leave and BY GOD I HAVE RIGHTS, NOW OBSERVE THEM. In the end, I only succeeded in earning myself the nickname “Heinous Bitch”, which surprised me because both of the people detaining us seemed to have a combined IQ of 6, leading me to believe that heinous was not part of their vocabulary.

But I digress.

The cops came and searched us (it was a damn good thing that I was carrying a large, plastic toy ghost ring in my pocket and nothing else), and then cuffed me and put me in the back of the police cruiser. Me. In the back of a police car. In handcuffs. The saddest part was that my biggest concern was that the seats back there were most likely highly unclean, a concern that was only moderately assuaged when the officer assured me that “nobody has pooped in my car, or I’d have thrown them in the trunk.” I know this because I asked. I also asked if we could initiate a traffic stop and pick me up some company (MJ was in another car), but there was no such luck. My kind arresting officer did however inform me that the other inmates at the jail would be happy to make me their bitch and pimp me out. That’s a direct quote.

When I got to the station, I faced more questions and teasing from the officers, who apparently didn’t think the incident was nearly as amusing as I did. They searched me again and then put me in a cell (A CELL. LIKE, WITH BARS. AND A SMALL METAL TOILET THAT WAS EXPOSED TO THE AIR I WAS BREATHING.) and left me there while they wrote up my citation. My first question after being shown to my cell was, “Is it clean?”, a question that was answered with a disdainful no, followed by another officer coming in to mock me for exploring a condemned hospital and then worrying about the sanitary state of my jail cell. I’m sorry, but I KNOW what happens in prison cells. I thought it was a fair question.

I was incarcerated for probably an hour, although I have no way of knowing for sure because evidently jail is unlike the Ritz Carlton in that nobody cares about making your stay enjoyable by providing things like a blankie and a hot chocolate and a clock. I passed the time by sitting, and then picking dirt off my shoes, and then running in place. When the arresting officer came in to get more personal information, I had to show her my tattoos, explain that I was on medication for being crazy, and repeat my personal data at least six thousand times. She then called me anorexic (to which I exclaimed, “I had gummi bears earlier! I am not!”), but did not take offense when I corrected her on the description of my coat (“It’s not black. IT’S TWEED.”) MJ later told me that the officers in the room where she was being held couldn’t stop talking about how ridiculous I was and how terrible it was that I kept laughing. I guess I’m not very popular at the 7th District Station.

In the end, I was given a citation for “Defiant Trespass” and released with a court date and a warning to return or a warrant would be put out for my arrest. MJ was released into Caitlin’s custody (a legal requirement given her status as a minor) with a similar citation. The three of us then had a jolly good laugh discussion of the seriousness of our crime, grabbed dinner, and drove home. When we pulled up to my house, Caitlin climbed out of the car and thanked MJ for driving, to which MJ replied, “Well, thanks for signing me out of jail.”

And that was our weekend.

Okay, so getting arrested isn’t exactly brilliant, but it’s not like I beat up a small child or robbed a homeless man; I trespassed at a mental hospital. (Oh, the irony.) It was a learning experience, sure, but by the same token, I have to stop and laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. I was arrested. I was handcuffed and put in a police car and stuffed in a jail cell. I’ll never forget this weekend, and not because it was bad. I raised hell and got into funny, funny trouble with two of my best friends. And really, how often can you be at a rest stop getting dinner and have your friend say to you, “I’ll bet all these people checking you out have no idea that you just got out of jail”?