I Didn't Bail Him Out

I wrote this submission for the column "LA Affairs" in the Los Angeles Times. It never ran, so I'm running it here. I may post more stories about weird guys in subsequent posts.

I DIDN'T BAIL HIM OUT

“He has a heart condition and we can’t keep him here,” explained the police officer who called me, to ask if I’d bail a certain prisoner out. I had cut off contact with the locked-up guy for longer than I cared to think about. I’d been assuming he was gone for good, at long last, for the last time. I’d broken up with him for the absolute last time perhaps a year or more earlier, but now the police were requesting that I bail the guy out.

Because he had a heart condition, I was told, that I knew nothing about—and the police didn’t have "the equipment to keep him" in the San Pedro facility.

If the guy himself had called to ask, I would have flatly told him, “No,” perhaps sprinkled with some choice words about where he could go and what he could do.

I’d bailed the guy out a couple of years earlier and told him, that was the one and only and last chance he would ever get. I wasn’t spending my hard-earned salary to get his lazy you-know-what out of jail ever again.

Except I couldn’t very well just tell the police that. I had to be courteous to the police, at least. Even though, knowing the guy the way I did, I suspected the mysterious “heart condition” may have conveniently developed just at the very moment when he wanted to get out of the slammer. 

Because I lived in Anaheim at the time, getting to the police station in San Pedro involved literally driving into the next county, in an unreliable old beat-up car, into a scruffy industrial area I didn’t know anything about. This was long before GPS so I had to read a street map, follow scribbled directions, and find my way down an unfamiliar freeway and through the dreary streets to the police station that's near the Port of Los Angeles.

Once I got to the police station, I was told the bail was $500, cash only. My checking account had about $1000 in it—of my money, earned and saved from my employment, and once I paid that bail, I could kiss that $500 good-bye, all for a guy that couldn’t be bothered to get a job and couldn’t even be bothered to stay out of jail.

Those were the days when you could write a check at a local grocery, provided you had a check-cashing card issued by the grocery. I drove around more unfamiliar streets and asked directions until I  found a grocery I had a check-cashing card for. The grocery had a limit of $300 for cashing a check. I needed $500 in cash.

I drove around some more and found a branch of my bank but the bank was closed. The ATM had a limit of $300. To get $500, I'd have to get $300 one way and the remaining $200 another way. Two places, two checks, my money, for a guy I had given up caring about anything that happened to him a long time ago.

I didn’t get the $500 and instead went back to the police station. I don’t remember what I first said to the desk sergeant when I returned, but he somehow appeared to mistake me for someone who was desperate for the welfare of a dear loved one. (As in, “Honey, are you alright?”) Actually the only reason I was going through all this was to be nice to the police, not the guy.

The desk sergeant picked up the desk phone and, in a sympathetic tone of voice, said, “Here, you want to talk to him?”

I picked up the receiver. (This was in the 1980’s, kids, when phones had those receivers you see in old movies and TV shows.) The guy I once did love, fat lot of good that did, on the other end, started in with the same pack of lies I’d heard before and I hadn’t believed the first time. I told him he was the only person who could solve his own problems, nobody else was going to do it for him. I'd told him that before, and a lot of good that did.

He demanded, “Are you going to bail me out?” He said it like a master demanding obedience from a servant.

I couldn’t say he was treating me like an object, because an object, at least, implies some degree of independent existence. I was a mere convenience whose existence began and ended with my usefulness to him. To him, my reason for existing was to be his “Get Out of Jail Free” card, free for him, anyway.

“That’s all you care about, isn’t it?” I asked, returning his demanding coldness with my own.

“Yeah,” he was forced to admit.

I remember I hung up the phone and started to walk out. I remember the desk sergeant protesting, “But we don’t have the equipment to take care of him.”

I turned, smiled, shrugged, and politely answered, “I don’t have the equipment to take care of him either.” Then I added, with as much politeness as I could, “So take him someplace you’ve got the equipment to take care of him, then.”

As I walked out the door I heard the desk sergeant saying something about a prisoner transfer. That was all they had to do. They didn’t have to involve me in any of it.

That was the last I heard from or about the guy. He’d come into my life when I wanted a man who stayed and that was all. Along came a guy whose one lonely virtue was, he stayed. My mother had an expression about such men, “a bad penny that keeps turning up.” Another comparison I’ve heard, is to a bad cold that won’t go away. He was my lesson in, some people, even some you love, you just have to walk away.

Occasionally I Google the guy’s name, not out of any desire or nostalgia, simply to see if the Internet contains any evidence that he ever existed. It doesn’t. Whatever happened to him is beyond the reach of even the Internet, and I’m at peace with that.