Meatballs and Impounds

Fred was skinny, but then it was the early 70s and everyone was still skinny.  He had long, stringy, black hair that he parted on one side.  Add in some black horn rimmed glasses, well worn jeans and omnipresent jean jacket and you have a reasonable facsimile of Fred.  He came from a fairly well-to-do family, but he was definitely in full blown want-a-be hippie mode. We all were, at least in the crowd with which I ran.

I had just spent a year at the University of Rhode Island, mostly to avoid the Vietnam era draft.  I was not a particularly motivated student; I ended up with a sub 2.0 GPA after my freshman year.  When they had the draft lottery based on your birthday and my number came up 300 plus, I dropped out of college.

I had worked with Fred at a Rhode Island institution, Newport Creamery.  We were both after school dishwashers and busboys.  This was in East Greenwich one town over from where I lived in North Kingstown.  We had both been making a whopping $1.60 an hour which was minimum wage in 1969.  I remember getting a 10 cent raise and thinking I was in tall cotton.

In the year after high school Fred had gone back to the Minneapolis / St. Paul area.  Why?  I never thought to ask.  I just assumed he had a good reason, or wanted to see the city or someone.   It must be a guy thing to not ask, most women I know would have questioned him on why he went.

He had moved back to Rhode Island recently.  He was renting an apartment in on old building in Providence. These apartments were basically one room with maybe a separate kitchenette area.  The bathroom was a shared facility down the hall. Since there were quite a few units on the second floor, it was sometimes problematic getting to the bathroom, especially in the mornings.

I was in need of a place to live for various reasons, and I rented an apartment in the same building.  My unit was on the third floor.  There was a separate room for the kitchen area.  There was on old cast iron gas kitchen stove.  The oven was so small it would have been hard to roast a small chicken.  In order to pass by the stove it was so tight I had to suck in my size 32 stomach and it was still a squeeze. 

The best feature of this apartment was that there was only one other unit on the third floor.   While I still shared a bathroom there was hardly competition for it.  It appeared that the folks on the second floor never explored to the third floor and found this little used bathroom…thankfully.

Fred had a big, black car of unremembered lineage.  It was a family type sedan that he may have been handed down to him.  I do remember it had a back windshield that rolled down electrically which we all thought cool.   I don’t recall seeing this feature on another vehicle that was not a station wagon.

It was probably around late November or early December.  Fred proposed a road trip up to Massachusetts.  A mutual friend, Jeff, from the Newport Creamery days was going to school up there and lived on campus.  Being the days / time of life when things are often done on the spur of the moment, it was off we went. 

I do not know if Fred had failed to communicate or if something else was in the works.  When we got there Jeff was not in his dorm room, and he was not to be found.  With nothing else to do we went to a local restaurant to have a bite and to wait a while.  We were going to try to find Jeff again later.

When we came out of the restaurant and walked over to Fred’s car.  Two police cruisers came at us from opposite directions.  The officers for the most part ignored me.  They quizzed Fred for a while wanting to see his driver’s license and registration.  They, then, gave them back to Fred.

Fred at this point decided he wanted to go back to Rhode Island, and visiting Jeff would have to happen another day.

We were perhaps two or three blocks from the restaurant when blue lights started flashing and we were pulled over.  The police officers got both of us out of the car.  This time they checked my ID which they gave back to me shortly.  Fred on the other hand was handcuffed and put in the back of one the patrol cars.  They impounded his car.

It turned out that Fred had a Minnesota driver’s license that had expired and his car was registered with an expired tag and no inspection.   I discovered later that they upped the ante on all the charges by adding crossing state lines with these violations.  Who knew?

I did not know it at the time, but Jeff was heavy into drugs.  I wondered after the fact if Fred and Jeff and concocted some sort of drug deal.  Jeff may have gotten wind of something and bailed.  Some things came out about Jeff much later that did not leave him in the best of lights.  It is only speculation about the Fred’s motivation though.

I was left by the side of the road in a light pea coat.  It had started snowing.   I was not entirely clear as where I was at, but I did know it had taken us an hour and half to two hours to get there.  I started walking and hitchhiking.  Somehow I managed to find my way back to Providence and my third floor castle.

I’m not exactly sure how Fred was sprung from jail.   I assumed that he may have called his parents to post bail.   He had to be back in Massachusetts in a few weeks for the trial on his charges.  I drove him back up there for the event as the police still had his vehicle impounded.

What I remember most about that day, is the trial before Fred’s.  

Three kids in their late teens or early twenties had broken into a delicatessen.  There was not a whole lot for the kids to take.  They did manage to make off with a pot full of meatballs and the framed dollar bill off the wall.  They were later caught with these same items in their possession.   This was obviously a well planned heist.

As part of the prosecutor’s presentation the owner of the delicatessen was called as a witness.   The prosecutor began to quiz him about the meatballs and why he knew they were his.  He begin to go on about the size of the meatballs, being bigger than average.  About how they were formed so that they were not too dense or too loose, but had just the right texture.  He next began to wax eloquent about the sauce in which the meatballs were floating.  Again it was exceptionally thick so that it went on to sandwiches just right.  He could recognize the combination of herbs and spices, even cold, that gave his sauce that extra something special.

After his testimony, the trial has forever since been etched in my mind as The Great Meatball Caper.  It also helped the prosecutor’s case that the delicatessen owner had recorded the serial number of his first dollar bill that he framed and put on the wall.

Oh yeah, Fred, he went to trial without an attorney.  He was found guilty on all charges and a hefty fine imposed.  They kept his vehicle towards paying off the fine.  He stilled owed a few hundred dollars.  It just did not seem right then or now.

In retrospect, I am glad we did not hook up with Jeff.  I’m not sure what would have happened.