“Officer, the cuffs are hurtin’ me,” I say as a neckless deputy gives me a brutal shove into the front desk. He tells me to shut up and stop bleeding on the paperwork. While he sorts out the chain of custody with the old smoke-faced cop on the other side of the desk, I take a look over my shoulder, expecting to see nothing new. Every police station looks the same after a while—dull gray linoleum white-washed by racks of humming fluorescent lights, creaky wooden chairs that had survived the Depression, and one stale pot of coffee that does nothing to counteract the moldy aroma of high school locker room and lemons. 

Ordinarily, my ass would scarcely have time enough to catch a splinter before it saw a cell, but tonight Austin central booking is the life of the party. The waiting area is a Woodstock refugee camp, hungover hippies in flex-cuffs covering every available bench, chair, and square foot of floor. When the background chatter becomes too loud for my arresting officer to be heard, the old cop slams his nightstick on the desk and hollers for quiet like an angry librarian. Then it’s just name, rank and serial number. With some uncomfortable contortion I am printed and booked, then shuffled down the hall to a holding tank already overflowing with tie-died rioters. 

Little over an hour ago they were all having the time of their lives at Austin City Limits. Now most sat cross-legged in circles, locked in endless debate about whether the festival’s finale had been the “essence of awesome,” or a heaping spoonful of “lame sauce.” It’s not every year the entire crowd gets arrested because the band did something wrong. Other pissed-off revelers press themselves against the bars, demanding phone calls and screaming incoherent slogans about fascism and oppression, freaking out the handful that sit sweating and wide-eyed in the corners, whispering to themselves as they rock back and forth, wishing they had just one more hit to get them off this trip. Jail is some bad juju on a head full of acid.

Every time the deputy returns with his clipboard I silently pray that my name is on it, so that I might be released or at least moved to a cell far from this dense fog of burnt patchouli and hippie rhetoric. When my name is finally called it is alone; I am led to a different door than the previous winners of this dubious lottery. Behind it is a dull white room with no windows, not even the traditional one-way mirror. Just two metal folding chairs and a wood-patterned plastic table that you buy in three-packs at Home Depot. I am told to sit and wait, a Styrofoam cup of coffee my only company. 

Escape attempt number one fails when the door proves to be locked. The second doesn’t come until a good hour later, when the door is opened from the outside, but my mad dash for freedom is foiled by the mass of fat, sweaty cop-flesh on the other side. I am unceremoniously shoved back into my chair. 

“Whoa there, where’s the fire boy?” Sheriff Richard Mitchell is finally happy to see me, probably because I’m exactly where he wants me: alone in a small, windowless room with a locked door and no witnesses. “Sit n’stay a while. Why, you just got here.”

“With all due respect, Sheriff, I’ve been sitting here for well over an hour. You call that hospitality?” I reply. 

Mitchell has to hold his belt with his good hand as he backs slowly into his chair like a semi in reverse. He points at me with a wad of bloody bandages where his right hand used to be, while the left double-clicks his pen incessantly. “We’re havin’ a busy night out there, case you hadn’t noticed, thanks to your boys in the band.” 

“I’m sure Austin’s finest are up to the challenge, Dick.” 

“Wouldn’t doubt it, wouldn’t doubt it.” Mitchell always repeats himself when he’s lying. He takes a moment to show me how many yellow teeth are still stuck to his gums before he continues. “There’s an awful lot of photos and fingerprints waitin’ to be took out there. Could take all night and a day to process that mess. How will we ever pass the time?” He gives a chuckle and his breath comes thick, wet and wheezing through the scarlet-soaked gauze taped to his nose, like a redneck Darth Vader.  

“I could make a phone call,” I say. He’s been thinking of an answer for that one all day, so I add: “Or we could just talk. How’s the hand?”

The clicking stops and Mitchell’s coffee-stained grin disappears. Cops hate it when you break script. “I’m not in much of a mood for talk at the present,” he says. “There’s hundreds of them stinkin’ hippies clogging every cell in the city right now, and I’d bet dollars to pesos there ain’t a one that matches the description of any member of that outlaw band. You know how mad that makes me?”

“Did I hurt your feelings?” Sometimes I really don’t know when to shut up.

Blood dribbles from his nose down his chins, to patter on the table below. He ignores it, talking on in that familiar tone all authority figures assume when they’re getting serious. 

“What you did was make it possible for five wanted felons to elude the law,” he says. “And now you are going to aid in their capture in any way possible, or you’re going to become the newest resident of the Texas penal system.” Emphasis on the penal.

“Found some evidence to make that stick?” He hasn’t. None he could actually use in court, anyway.

“Never needed it before,” he says. “Besides, it’s not your concern, Creedence. Not your concern at all.”

“It’ll be yours when my story—” I start.

“What should be your utmost fuckin’ concern,” he continues, “is they got away and you didn’t. Only people in this room is you and me. I’d start thinking of ways to cooperate, I was you.” 

“Listen, unless you want to see a book about corrupt lawmen—” I’m interrupted by the screech of the chair across the linoleum. The metals groans with relief as Mitchell stands. 

“I’m done listening for now; got too much to do. Much too much to do.” He shoves a legal pad across the table and drops the pen on top of it. I move to touch neither. “Know you ain’t much for talk anyhow. Figured you’d be more comfortable with pen and paper. You think of anything helpful, just go ahead and jot it down.” As he turns to leave he has to stop and struggle to hitch up his pants. It’s a two-handed job, but somehow he manages. 

“How am I supposed to write with these cuffs on?” I ask. 

Mitchell snorts, which is probably passes for laughter around here. “Just do your best. If that statement and the notes we found on you don’t lead to the capture of our fugitives, well, I’d just get comfortable if I was you.” Another snort. “Just get comfy, Creedence. You ain’t goin’ nowhere.” The door hisses shut, punctuated with a soft click.

Defiant to the end, I sit writing nothing for a long time. My blood boils with impotent anger, the fury of a caged animal. I’m determined to starve to death in that little windowless room before I ever give Dick Mitchell what he wants. I’m sure I can do it. After waiting for what seemed like days, but what was probably closer to an hour, with nothing to occupy my mind but paranoid rage fantasies and obsessive pen-clicking, I finally reach across the table and take the yellow pad.

So here I sit, face to face with every journalist’s worst nightmare. Nothing left to save my skin but the written word. Sweat drops from my forehead to the page, smearing my first feeble scrawls, and I rip them from the pad with savage frustration. I lean back in my chair, take a few deep breaths, sip some stale coffee, and light a cigarette, the only thing they neglected to take from me. After a few moments the red cloud dissipates, leaving only a clear and focused determination for cold, crisp revenge. My enemy may have the long, twisted arm of the law and its many guns behind him, but I would make him regret locking me in here with my greatest weapon. Suddenly I know I have been hurtling toward this moment ever since my journey began, and it is time to prove just how mighty the pen is, to bury Dick Mitchell and our alleged justice system with it.

What follows will most likely be termed a confession in the legal sense, but I write it with a clear conscience—no penitence or guilt stains these pages. The text has been culled from what I wrote on that legal pad, as well as the many notebooks that were confiscated upon my arrest. It is simply a good story about bad men in Fate’s cruel hands, a tale of equal parts redemption and woe.

This story began 600 miles to the west, in El Paso, at a bar called Sue’s…

Read all about the adventures of the Sanchez Penitentiary Band in the novel.