You know you are in trouble when you are cuffed-up in the back of a police cruiser and the cops are putting your chainsaw in an evidence bag.

Take one small country hometown in which there is nothing to do but drink for drinking’s sake. Add 1 part college kids home for Christmas and 2 parts alcohol. The result is a recipe for stupidity that is hard to match.

I was home for Christmas in my small hometown, hanging out at a buddy from high school’s house and, of course, drinking. This particular buddy is one of my crazier friends (see my story from San Miguel) and when we get together our psychotic tendencies combined with our mutual lack of inhibition and common sense synergistically meld to create a lethal force of unstoppable recklessness. Besides my partner in crime, there were a few other old friends from high school at the party. This setting gave birth to one of the dumbest acts of senseless vandalism that I have ever been a party to. The story goes something like this.

In my town there stands a life-sized statue of a Clydesdale horse on the side of the main highway through the city. This statue is on a hill about 20 feet in height and is illuminated after dark by spotlights on either side. In addition, this horse statue is situated on the side of Highway 290, which is the main corridor from Houston to Austin. In other words, it is on a highly trafficked road in a very visible spot. The Clydesdale horse statue stands as an advertisement for the Anheuser-Busch distributorship in my town.

After several hours of drinking, a couple buddies and I decided that it would be a good idea to decapitate the aforementioned statue, retaining the head as a trophy, to mount on the wall like a 16-point white tail deer.

I volunteer my services as the “saw-man.” I drive to my parents’ house and sneak the chainsaw out of the garage. Thus armed, I return to my buddy’s house and we formulate a plan of action. The plan was pretty simple. My buddy, Harry would drive up to the hill on which the statue sat using the feeder road. I would then scale the hill and chainsaw the head off the statute. A third buddy, Andrew, would help me drag the head down the hill and we would stash the whole mess in the trunk of Harry’s car. Meanwhile three female accomplices would be filming the whole operation from across the highway.

At that moment I notice a car racing down the feeder road toward us. Now the adrenalin is really pumping. Harry is in the driver’s seat, yelling at us to drop the head and get in the car. I slam the trunk shut and dive into the front seat, abandoning the head on the side of the feeder. Andrew dives into the back seat just as Harry floors it. We are racing down the feeder road, head-to-head with the on-coming car. I notice that it is not a cop car, but rather a little red Chevy. I look at Harry. He has a look of stone-cold determination on his face. No jackass vigilante was going to take us down. Not tonight.

It is a classic game of chicken. Thankfully the other guy swerves first and we blow past him. But he pulls a quick U-turn and comes after us. Who the hell is this guy? I tell Harry to head for the back roads. We know these roads by heart from our high school days and I figure we can lose this guy with some GTA-style driving. Sure enough, the red Chevy gives up after a couple miles. We decide to hide out at Andrew’s house and consider our next move. We call the girls and they meet us there. We are sitting in the backyard reliving the whole episode and feeling very lucky. We may not have got the head, but at least we got away. Or so we thought.

Harry’s cell phone rings. It is the cops. Apparently the “vigilante” in the red Chevy was an off-duty cop and had been patrolling the Ford dealership parking lot when he noticed the girls. Then he saw us, gave chase and managed to get Harry’s plates before we lost him. The cops then ran the plates, traced the car to Harry’s parents and called them. Harry’s parents gave the cops his cell phone number.

All the cops said was, “we know it was you, come down to the police station and turn yourselves in.” In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, “I knew I was fu**ed.” Andrew was on probation for a DUI at the time and Harry and I decided to take the heat for the whole mess.

On the way to the station Harry and I went over our story. We would tell the cops that we had just met the girls that night, we didn’t know who they were, and only the 2 of us were involved. That was our story and we agreed to stick to it no matter what. We ditched the chainsaw at Andrew’s house and drove slowly to the police station, sweating bullets the whole way. Once there we were immediately separated and taken to small interrogation rooms where we each sat in a single chair, at a small table, with a dim light hanging over our heads. It was a scene right out of “The Shield.” Cops were yelling at me, demanding to know who the girls were.

They told me that they knew who the girls, so I might as well fess up. I held up under their interrogation and signed a written confession giving a vague account of the night. No mention of the girls, no mention of Andrew.

They told me that Harry had changed his story (not true) and that I should be straight with them if I wanted to help myself. But I stuck to my guns and Harry did the same. The cops needed the saw and one of them drove me to Andrew’s house to get it. I told the cops that we had stashed it there after the chase, and that Andrew never knew about it as he was asleep the whole time. Andrew played his part well, coming out of the house with a sleepy look on his face and acting confused as to what was going on. At Andrew’s house, the cop put the chainsaw into a large plastic bag marked “evidence.”

Back at the station we were printed twice. Why twice? One set was for the FBI. Apparently if you do more than $1,800 worth of damage, it is “felony criminal mischief.” So now we had been arrested for a damn felony. FYI: convicted felons can never vote, nor own guns and every employment application asks if you have been convicted of a felony. Needless to say, this was not good. We had all of this to think about while we sat the night out in the holding cell. Our parents bailed us out the next day.

To say that our respective parents were pissed about the matter would be the mother of all understatements. Mine threatened to pull me out of school but I managed to talk them out of that. In the end, Harry, myself and our lawyer worked a deal with the DA where we would pay for a new statue ($2,500), do lots of community service (about 250 hours each) and go to AA meetings. In exchange, the DA would drop the case. I think that the DA took special pity on us, knowing that to charge us with a felony would screw us for the rest of our life. We even got the arrest expunged from our records. All in all we could not have come out of this cleaner if we had been OJ. But the whole experience taught me that you do not want to f**k with the law, because the law will f**k you back 10 fold.

Harry and I are still walking the wild side, but we are sure to keep our activities in the “legal” spectrum, or at least in the misdemeanor range. It doesn’t take much, just a case of beer and a bad idea, to screw yourself for the rest of your life.