So what does it take for an upstanding-looking, middle-class-looking, white-looking male to get noticed by cops these days? Aren’t authorities learning that we punk kids can be just as much trouble as anyone else?

Especially after all the shootings that have been taking place in suburban neighborhoods where violence is never supposed to happen (I would like to point out that I’m from the Bermuda Triangle of San Diego: the Santee and El Cajon shootings in San Diego border my town in a nice triangle of Rednecksville, Hicksville and Whitetrashville). For all intents and purposes, I could be a fuse waiting to go off.

I’m not really much of a young ruffian, but cops don’t know that. And yet, maybe they do.

I’ve got this sweet little dandy of an internship over by Ontario Mills. In one of my first weeks there, I left my lights on in the parking lot, and someone came back asking about it. It’s not a shitty car by any means (it’s my mom’s), and everyone in the office gave me these funny little looks as I got up to go turn off the lights.

This first embarrassment wasn’t enough for me to learn my lesson. Just this last week I left my lights on again and the battery died. Too jaded from past experience, I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, so I lurked around the office looking for people I didn’t know to give me a jumpstart. Very much on the D.L. Finally, I got someone to help me out.

So I get the car started, but the damned alarm goes off. My cover was blown. The whole Business Park could hear my car squealing for help at the top of its electronic lungs.

I didn’t know how to turn the alarm off, but I figured it was probably like a baby, and if you left it alone long enough, it would eventually get tired of crying. I thanked the Good Samaritan with jumper cables and made off for the freeway.

Cars are much stronger-willed than babies. The alarm wouldn’t go off no matter how much I yelled at it and told it to stop.

I pulled into a gas station, seeking the advice of the Arab sage behind the cash register. He assured me that all I had to do was lock and unlock the door from the outside to reset the alarm. Well, I couldn’t do that, I told him, or the battery would go dead again. He had jumper cables, but not a donor car, so I got in the car and headed off again on good ol’ Interstate 10.

I could handle the other cars driving by and giving me strange looks. The old woman that couldn’t see over the steering wheel gave me a nasty sneer; the two teens cruising by with the music blaring just laughed. But I just slouched down in the driver’s seat and paid them no notice. This could happen to anyone, right?

The clincher was the traffic jam. I was stuck at a snail’s pace for about 20 minutes on the freeway, as everyone else tried to inch by me and get away from the squawking engine. The alarm is really loud.

And then there was a light at the end of the tunnel. A fender bender had clogged up traffic, and there were four cop cars on the scene. Hey, they get paid to protect and serve, right, so I pulled over and asked them to help me.

The cop just looked at me and said, "we’re busy here with this wreck, so just keep on going."

In retrospect, this is probably the best thing that could have happened, because my insurance stickers were expired, but at the time I was furious. A young kid, driving along with a car alarm blaring–hell, even I thought I’d stolen it. And just how many cops does it take to cover a small accident? (How many cops does it take to change a light bulb?…None. It turned itself in!)

So, I made it back to cozy little Claremont, pulled into the first gas station, and let out a sigh of relief (and one that I could finally hear) when the alarm went off and the car started again.

In the meantime, I hope those cops are out having a good cup of coffee at 7-Eleven. When the guy with panty hose on his head comes in with a gun to hold the place up, maybe they might then feel compelled to do their job.