Until the handcuffs snapped around my wrists, I still thought I might be dreaming. Ratchet-arm teeth clicking into a receiving pawl make a very distinct sound. Like a pump-action twelve gauge being racked outside your back door, or a tree limb cracking beneath your weight, it is a sound that swiftly wakes you up to the reality of your situation. It is a sound that says:
This was not the first time I’d heard that particular noise, but it was the first time in my forty-one years that I had ever been truly scared by it. The rest were mere speed bumps on the way to my next drink. Laughing with a bunch of filthy punk rockers as we were hauled out of a squat into the rainy San Francisco night, a fine spray of mace shutting us up as it filled the back of the paddy wagon on the way to the station. Dropping my scooter in front of a police station then slurring insults at an officer as he cuffed me three blocks from my house, my jacket full of punctured cans spraying cheap lager like a human beer fountain. Good-natured ribbing with a cop as he waited for my girlfriend to return with a carton of Marlboros before taking me off to Richmond City Jail after failing to do sixty-five community service hours for taking a leak in an alley.
