Back in college, I was driving a friend of mine to a film shoot I was producing when a boy fell off his bike into traffic on a state route in New Hampshire. Fortunately, I was driving at the speed limit (rare for people out there), and so was able to slam on the brakes and stop about ten feet away. After he got up and picked his bike off the roadway, we continued on. Problem is, someone behind us, who hadn’t seen exactly what had happened, apparently called the state patrol to report that “a couple of longhaired kids in a car with Massachusetts plates” (if you know N.H. in 1975, you’d know that this was strike one AND strike two) had “run over” a young boy. As a result, twenty minutes later, we were stopped at a roadblock (!), ordered from the car at gunpoint (!!), frisked, and put into separate squad cars to be driven back to the “scene of the crime.” During the drive, I was told that I had “broken the boy’s leg,” which, obviously, I hadn’t done in the first place, but still left me puzzled, because, even if it had happened in his fall, how could the kid have gotten up, picked up his bike, and walked it away with a broken leg? In retrospect, it seems obvious that the cop was lying to me, hoping to shock me into a confession.

In the end, we were released, likely after they had tracked down the boy and his friend and gotten the real story, but not before spending about a half-hour informing me that, even if it could be proven that I didn’t run over the kid after all, I was still guilty of “leaving the scene of an accident,” and that I was thus, by my own admission, subject to three-to-five years in the state penitentiary. I’m sure they thought it, too, was “fun” to give this treatment to a “hippie-freak from Massachusetts.” At my age, I was thoroughly traumatized by the event – if I wasn’t thinking suicide, I was definitely thinking I might have to go fugitive and escape to Canada or somewhere.