“One of the few times I ever got in trouble. I wasn’t drunk or pumped up. I had a loaded .44 magnum in the glove compartment, a bottle of Wild Turkey open on the seat beside me, and I said, well, this is a good time to try that advice a hippie lawyer gave me once - to pull down the window just a crack and stick out my driver’s license. So I started to do that. I was just getting it out, when all of a sudden the door on the other side opened. I looked around, and here was a flashlight glaring right in my face, and right beside the flashlight was a big, dirty .57 magnum pointed at me. They didn’t give a f—k about my license. They jerked me out of the car and pushed me up against the side. I said something about my constitutional rights, and they said, “Well, sue us,” or something and kicked my legs. So I gave it up and eventually I paid a $35 fine, because it’s easier than arguing. I had just bought the car. It was as Saab. The night before I had pushed my English Ford off a cliff in Big Sur, 400 feet down to the ocean, to get even with the bastard for all the trouble it caused me. We filled it with gasoline and set it on fire just before it went over the edge.
Ever since then I have made it a point to be polite to the California Highway Patrol. I have a National Rifle Association sticker on the back window of my car, so that any cop on the driver’s side has to pass that and see it. I used to carry a police badge in a wallet, and that helped a lot.”
-Hunter S. Thompson, on being pulled over in the sixties (High Times, 1977)
