 | A modern day vagabond. |
- Jun 14, 4:43am
- It's been a hectic schedule lately - yesterday I went in early, worked all day, got called back out for a breakdown at 8pm and ended up going to bed about 11pm. I slept for some then had to be back at 1am for a couple hours until I had to start work again at 7am. Long story short, I'm fucking tired.
As tired as I am, though, I just experienced something that is not going to let me go back to sleep.
I'm driving home and merge onto the freeway. I get into the fast lane and see something out of the corner of my eye. I almost literally do a double take as I fly by and think "there's no fucking way."
I go up to the next offramp and backtrack so that I can see if my eyes were deceiving me or not. I slow down, put on my hazards and pull into the center median. I immediately pick up the phone, call 911 and tell them that there's a body in the center median on the 101 North.
I shit you not, a fucking body. If anybody else has seen it, they haven't stopped or called it in.
I get out of the truck while on the phone and start walking back. I yell at the guy and there's no response. 911 asks me to check his breathing and pulse and I oblige (though I won't lie, I'm kinda scared shitless at this point because this is in the middle of the hood and if someone did something to this guy, I don't want them seeing me admiring their handiwork. Oh, and the fact that it was a DEAD BODY).
He's cold. I don't see him breathing and when I touch him there's no response and just a general level of creepiness about the way his body moves. 911 assures me that an ambulance and police are on the way as they ask if there's blood or parts of a vehicle nearby.
They hang up and while it was probably only a couple of minutes before the first police car showed up, it seemed like a fucking eternity. The first unit pulls up and both officers get out and walk up to this random (though well-dressed) body that I found.
The first officer checks for a pulse and doesn't get anything. Shakes him - nothing. The guy is laying on his side and the officer goes to push him over on his back and his eyes open the slightest bit.
I'm watching this from a distance and I can't tell if the dude's alive or if this is just some nerve/muscle thing going on. They end up waking him up and determine that he's just extremely drunk.
Extremely drunk and laying on a freeway in the center divide.
By now, there's literally 8 police cars from the Salinas police and Highway Patrol, a firetruck, and ambulance.
The guy, after waking, decides to start fighting the cops at this point and immediately gets his face shoved into the gravel of the shoulder as they handcuff him. I wanted to yell out "quit resisting" so badly (as an homage to the hundreds of episodes of "Cops" I've seen), but restrained myself quite nicely.
The guy gets up and they start asking him what his name is and where he is. One of the officers starts talking to him in Spanish and she relays that he's going in as John Doe. One of the other cops looks at her and says "you mean Juan Doe, right?" (I acknowledge that has nothing to do with the story but I appreciated the gallows humor at hand)
They wrestle him back to one of the cars and I ask if this happens often. One of them said, you'd actually be surprised how much it does, just not on freeway.
So the guy wasn't dead but it still completely freaked me out - it's just not the sort of thing that you think you'll randomly come upon.
A summary in the form of haiku:
I found a dead guy
He's not dead just really drunk
Refrigerator.
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