I hate filling in forms. Not only that, I suck at it. I’m a bit dyslexic and astigmatic and I’m always on the wrong line. Not only that, but forms always ask me stuff I don’t know, like how much stock I sold in 1999 or the address of that guy Mike I want to use as a reference or some crap that I have to look up. I very nearly gave up the idea of college at 18, I was that scared of application forms. But the worst, most nightmareish application form that I've ever encountered, because it requires minute information dating back over thirty years, is the "Application for Determination of Moral Character" for the California Bar Association, a form that I have yet to fill in.

Moral character? Me? Not, perhaps, in any classic sense. Oh, I’m honest to a fault, except if I have to make up a traffic jam when I’m late to work. I’m extremely charitable; at least, I give away a lot of money and stuff, though I’m not charitable in the spiritual sense. I make fun of celebrities’ clothes. I often think people are dumb, which is not charitable. I’m generally polite. Mostly. I may not always be nice when people treat me like I’m dumb, when really they’re dumb. But I’m the person most likely to stop and see if you are really dead and not just a passed-out street person lying on the sidewalk. It’s true. My entire Constitutional Law class, on their way to the coffee shop for break time, walked past a guy splayed on the sidewalk and I was the only one who noticed he was actually dying and did something.

But this is not what’s considered moral character by the Bar Association. They don’t want examples of my kindness to strangers, like the time I made my boyfriend stop the car because I saw a dead body by the side of the highway in Arizona, and it was a really, really drunk guy, too drunk to say where he lived, but if we left him out there he would surely have heatstroke and die, and we were on an Indian reservation miles from anywhere, so we drove him to every house and store until someone claimed him. I mean, how could anyone who took such trouble over a stranger cheat widows and orphans out of their inheritance or help gangsters set up alibis? But the Bar doesn’t want to know about all that. The Bar wants to know, have I ever fucked up?

In fact, the Bar wants to know everything I’ve done since I was 18. The Bar has no idea. In fact, I barely do. That’s a lot of years. They want to know if I’ve ever sued anyone, gotten a speeding ticket, gotten arrested, used drugs, gone crazy, set my hair on fire, whatever. I went crying to my husband, who said, let’s make a spreadsheet. So we did, with columns for education, jobs, volunteer work, and lawsuits and arrests. Yes, I’ve been arrested. Once was for illegal hitchhiking. I really did that. One Saturday night around 11:00, back when I was 18, my crazy boyfriend, after smoking, dropping and drinking enough make him forget his reasons for refusing in the first place, exclaimed, "Let’s go to Mendocino!" Not wanting to waste the impulse, we set out immediately, to the felicitations of our friends, none of whom had enough sense to say, "Are you crazy? It’s almost midnight!"

We had no car, so we stuck our thumbs out and got rides as far as Santa Rosa, which is not far at all, and then it was 2:00 a.m. and no cars were going past us, and my boyfriend said, "Let’s just hitchhike on the freeway." I said, "That’s illegal." So see, even though it didn’t look like a freeway, even though it looked more like a country road, I knew all along it was wrong. But he said the cops don’t care, at most they’ll tell you to get off the freeway. So we walked up the on-ramp, stuck our thumbs out, and the very first car to come by was a police car. I glared at my boyfriend, who tried to look innocent.

The police did not believe I was 18. They had no reason to, since back then, in the days before social security cards for babies and state ID cards even for those who didn’t drive, people without driver’s licenses did not carry ID. The cop looked at me very sceptically, since I really did not look a day over 14 while my boyfriend was a very worn-out 26, then he shrugged and threw us in the car. It was no skin off his nose if the bad man was kidnapping a child. I long for those days.

We were taken to a real jail. I imagine prison is worse, based on what I see on TV, but this was bad enough. They practiced a form of torture combined with humiliation. You were made to strip and take an icy shower. The shower did not even have a hot water tap. I got sprayed with lice stuff, too. I was seriously offended because I was a very clean kid and didn’t even wear the same shirt twice without laundering.

Then I was taken to a six-woman cell, and I was the seventh. I was given some kind of minimal pad to put on the floor and a scratchy blanket and I got into bed. I don’t think I got much sleep because the activity in jail starts early. For some reason, perhaps to facilitate moral reform, you’ve got to be awake by 6:00 a.m., which must be hard on the guards, too, which is probably why they are so grumpy.

There was a disheveled young woman who had been brought in on a DUI, who did not look happy to wake up, but she was a ray of sunshine compared to the rest of the inmates. One was really old and clearly crazy. The other four looked meaner than anyone I’d ever seen in my life, and I had hung out with dangerous street thugs in high school. These women were way scarier. They looked hung over (but that was just how they looked--most of them had been in jail for several days) and pissed off and not amused.

They were old, like 30 or 40. They looked like the girls I knew in junior high who liked to fight, but it was 15 years later and most of that time had been spent in bars and getting beaten by their husbands and they still liked to fight. They swore a lot and very crudely, even by my standards, which are very low. I was scared. I’d met one or two Hell’s Angels and I feared and hated the Angels, but I would have preferred a whole posse of motorcycle outlaws to those women. I wished the disheveled young woman and I could be friends, because if I had a friend, maybe those bitches would not kill me.

Back then, everyone smoked. Everyone smoked Marlboros. You could even smoke in jail. Consistent with the icy-shower policy, however, the Santa Rosa jail only allowed rolling tobacco and inferior papers. The ruling white-trash clique of the cell sat around the single table, large enough for six, with a bag of recalcitrant tobacco in the middle, mediocre papers, and a growing pile of failure-to-rolls.

The ladies looked meaner and meaner. The grumbling grew more bitter, and to my ears, more threatening. Surely they would kill the underage-looking hippie chick to work off some of their irritation. It was up to me to save myself. I said in a tiny voice, "I can roll that."

Four very ugly heads swiveled toward the strangled whisper coming from under the hair that sat on the pathetic mat in the corner of the cell. "You can roll this shit?" the largest and meanest asked sternly, with, to me, an unspoken death threat in her voice. "I can roll anything!" I squeaked back.

It was true, in those days, I could roll anything. I had great hands. I got into the habit of rolling joints for my friends because I did not like marijuana. Like Bill Clinton, I wanted to pretend I was doing what everyone else was doing, but I wanted to avoid actually inhaling. Not that I had anything against drugs. I just didn’t care for that particular drug. In those days, some of my friends affected a kind of hobo-hippie persona, which involved smoking Bull Durham. I learned to roll that, too. I began to take pride in my rolling, and in conquering dry flaky tobacco or weed with a lot of stems and seeds in it, which you never see anymore.

Two of the women who had been all spread out on one side of the table scooted over and silently invited me to join them. The woman who appeared to be the boss pushed the fixings across the table at me. They stared at me like serpents. I folded a paper and poured the dusty tobacco in the middle, rolling and using my right index finger to even out the lump, then slightly crimping the ends, not rolling them tightly like a joint. I rolled so hard and tight that the tobacco didn’t fall out.

I handed my masterpiece to the head fury and she lit it. She inhaled. She smiled. The other women smiled. One asked shyly, "Could you roll one for me, too?" I was kept busy rolling cigarettes for the whole cell all morning. The disheveled young woman came over and I saw that she was quite good-looking. A cigarette restored her equanimity. Later, as I was being released, I saw her on her way out too, in her own clothes with her hair combed and makeup on. She was stunning.

Even with useful work, the time passed slowly. I went to the bathroom, which had a real door. Bizarrely, the guards chose that moment to call me and the crazy one answered to my name and was taken to court instead of me. My new friends asked me my last name, and when I told them, they explained what had happened. Eventually, the pissed off female guard came back for me. I had to convince her that I wasn’t trying to escape or fuck with her or anything. I was taken to a courtroom, where I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served. I was released, and my crazy boyfriend was waiting for me in the sunny parking lot of the Santa Rosa county jail. We made it to Mendocino that day.