This was originally published as a very long thread over on Bluesky where it attracted a fair amount of reposts, likes, comments, and ✨engagement✨
I have pulled it all together into one place for your reading/sharing ease and pleasure. I also fixed most (but not all) of the spelling/grammar/tense mistakes the people from The Internet (who are now muted) were complaining about.
Get a life, folks.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this 100% factually true story.
Escort to Nowhere
By JJW
Road trips can be fun. Road trips with friends: great. Road trips with family: dicey. Road trips with the random crust punk dude from your office who you’ve literally never met IRL before and need to spend 3.5 hours locked in a speeding metal tube with: horrendous. Zero stars. Do not recommend.
I had only ever interacted with this guy — let’s call him Darren because that is his name and I’d be surprised if he was on Bluesky or even on The Internet, and if he is then a) hi Darren and b) fuck you — via email.
It was a surprise when our big big big boss demanded we go on a site visit together to record a video for stakeholders about Darren’s work on an important project, which was way out in the boonies.
Darren said he’d drive and on the day he pulled up outside my house 45 minutes early honking the novelty horn of his deep purple Ford Escort Mk 1.
I only realised it was him when I popped my head out to see who had had a stroke on the steering wheel of their car and was inadvertently blasting the neighbourhood with a MIDI version of La Cucaracha on repeat.
I told Darren I’m going to need 10 minutes, which seemed to calm him down, but he gave the La Cucaracha horn one more blast 9.5 minutes later. He’d been idling the entire time.
As I hopped in, his hands were locked at 10 and 2 and he was staring straight ahead. Without looking at me he said, “My ride. My rules. My music,” as he cranked the stereo to full blast and floored the accelerator, peeling out of my street with a squeal and the stench of burnt rubber.
Every time I tried to talk to Darren, he’d hold up his hand a millimetre away from my face and point at the stereo and start thrashing his head along to the music.
Thanks to the magic of Shazam, I discovered we were listening to Dårligt Selskab, Deviated Instinct, Discharge, Disfear, and Doom. But to be honest, it all sounded like exactly the same song on repeat for 1.5 hours.
That was until he suddenly turned the stereo off and — with a shit-eating grin on his face — asked me how much I loved the music.
“I’m working through all of crust punk alphabetically,” he said, with a glint of pride in his eye, “it’s something I do every year, sometimes twice.”
Ahhh, okay bro. Let’s just concentrate on the driving aspect of this road trip, please, for the love of God because Darren was driving like a 14-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto V for the first time.
We were averaging 25 km/h above the speed limit, zigzagging in and out of traffic, tailgating, brake-checking, aggressively honking La Cucaracha, flipping the bird at everyone, braking randomly, accelerating randomly, not changing gears, and slowing down only when there were no opportunities for other people to pass him — you get the picture.
We must’ve had at least five near-death experiences within the first 30 minutes of driving, and Darren was loving it. He turned the music back on, howled like a dog, and sped up to 145 km/h again.
It was at this point I started hearing the faint murmur of a siren under the ear-bleed-inducing thrashage of the D-beat.
“Fuck me, it’s the fuckin’ pigs,” Darren noted as he adjusted the rear-view with both hands, swerving violently into the path of an oncoming semi only to regain control of the wheel bare nanoseconds before we became human jam in a crumpled Escort.
“I need you cool, are you cool?!” Darren hissed at me as he pulled over into the median, hands locked at 10 and 2 again.
Did he just reference Reservoir Dogs?
“Yeah, I’m cool,” I replied, seriously considering what the cops would do if I ducked and rolled out of the car while it was still moving.
A police officer came over and tapped on the driver side window with his fat hairy knuckle as his partner slowly circled the car, writing notes into a little flip book.
Darren wound down his window very slowly, maintaining his grip on the steering wheel with his other hand and his eyes locked forward to the horizon.
“Do you know why I pulled you over, sir?” the officer asked.
“No.”
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST DARREN ARE YOU ON PCP?!
“Well, sir, we observed you speeding and driving erratically. We also had reports of a deep purple Ford Escort Mk 1 causing multiple near-misses on the M8, and this is the only car which matches that description we’ve seen.”
“Well, that’s a coincidence, isn’t it? I don’t recall us exceeding the speed limit, officer, and unless you have a warrant, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, as I don’t contract with you,” Darren said, a smirk tickling the corner of his lips.
The officer visibly rolled his eyes, sighed deeply, and called to the other officer: “Charlie, we’ve got ourselves a sovereign citizen here.”
“That’s right, I am a sovereign living man and this is not a lawful stop,” Darren screeched.
“You are operating under admiralty law and I refuse to consent. You can send me a notice to default via my attorney, but otherwise me and Chuckles here are going to be off,” Darren said as he went to put the key back into the ignition.
What the fuck is going on am I about to become a statistic?
The officer calmly reached through the window and grabbed the keys from Darren, saying “I’m going to help you make a good decision today, mate.”
Darren, not expecting this move from the cop, was stunned and looked at me with utter disbelief, mouth agog — just sort of gummily opening and closing as if to say did you just see that?
Taking advantage of this shock, the officer opened the door, pulled Darren out by his collar and cuffed him in one smooth, fluid motion. The only struggle Darren put up was accidentally kicking the steering wheel, which set off another round of La Cucaracha.
The other officer had circled around to the passenger side and motioned for me to wind down my window with one hand while his other hand rested on his Taser.
Well fuck.
I held up my hands to make it abundantly clear I am no threat. The cop told me to slowly get out and I started babbling about how I didn’t know what the hell is going on and that Darren had essentially taken me hostage.
The cop just looks at me with a worried expression as he cuffed me and Darren yelled accusingly from the other side of the Escort, “I thought you were cool.”
The officer who cuffed Darren was back in their car, radioing the incident in. The cop who cuffed me was smoking a dart while sitting on the hood. I was sat down, propped up against the front passenger‑side tyre. I could not see Darren, but I could hear him. He seemed to have regained some energy and had started banging his head violently against the fender, yelling: “I DON’T GIVA FUCK. I DON’T GIVA FUCK. HEY PIGS, I DON’T GIVE A FUCK,” over and over.
I just started sobbing into my cuffed hands.
We got taken down the station. Darren doesn’t talk to me the whole 45-minute drive in the back of the cop car, just pouting out the window the whole time humming some Martyrdöd.
I have no fucking clue how to get home from the middle of bumfuck nowhere without a car or the tens of thousands of dollars’ of camera equipment in the back of Darren’s Escort.
Needless to say, we never ended up filming the video our bosses’ bosses’ boss wanted, and I still to this day experience a visceral fear response and immediately start vomiting if I hear La Cucaracha.
I do quite enjoy listening to crust punk now though.
No idea what happened to Darren. His desk was cleared out by People and Culture goons about a fortnight later, the only lasting impression he left on the office was a His Hero Is Gone CD in the break room.
As always with these work stories, the moral is ambiguous. But if you threatened to lock me in a car with a crust punk SovCit to force me to come up with one, it would be something like: some journeys teach you patience, others teach you to update your emergency contact information.
What a ride [insert a mental rimshot here]. As with all my work-related stories this is 100% factually true based on my recollection of events, but you need to understand I huff a lot of solvents so my memory ain’t what it used to be.
Hope my trauma made you smile and maybe even laugh.
Stay safe, stay sane,
<3
JJW
