harry spreads eagle

nmjc is now Good Hang

RS

happy new year harry!

in the spirit of newness, i want to let our readers in on the creative process behind our rebrand from nmjc to Good Hang (peep the new url … goodhang.org).

we finalized the new brand identity in a rooftop hot tub, a stone’s throw away from several thiel-affiliated entities. you could say we felt inspired…

we hope you all like it! and i want to give a big shoutout to friend of the newsletter annie turpin for realizing our vision.

HK 

And yes before you ask there are several freemasonry symbols hidden in the logo. yes, this can be interpreted as Peter theil calling for the cryogenically frozen heads of the American people. Yes he made us go with light blue.

RS

ok anyway for this week we got harry telling us about his new years eve ringing in 2008…

HK

Since New Year’s just happened, one of the most profoundly fraught hang-out days of the year, I wanted to get y

our thoughts on the most insane new years of my life…the time I got detained by SFPD when I was 14. 

Before i even get into what happened I have to say that for me the funniest part of the whole affair is that I was 5’2 when it happened. I’m spoiling the story a bit but eventually, 10-12 SFPD officers will point guns at me (the kind you hold with two hands) and tell me to “spread eagle” (more on this later).

At around 4 pm I met up with 4 of my high school classmates, all of whom were between 13 and 14 years old, somewhere near the corner of Jackson and Fillmore. We had gotten word from a girl who I will call Emma, that she was having a new years party that night. 

Emma is extremely central to this whole event. Emma, at 14, was San Francisco prep school famous, mostly for being ~troubled~ by private middle school standards. She was the type of person about whom rumors that now seem inconceivable were whispered at lunch tables and taken at face value. So to be invited to a party at Emma’s, to even know someone who knew Emma, was thrilling and terrifying to me. 

One of the reasons i was terrified was that now had to lie to my parents. I was not allowed to be at Emma’s house because I was not really allowed to be hanging out with any known beer drinkers or 3rd base go-ers at my age. So instead of telling Sharon and Bob that I was hanging out with four evil 13-year-old boys on our way to Emmas, I told them I was playing basketball at the Jewish Community Center.

I want to stop here and say that this is a totally insane lie to tell. I can’t believe my parents believed me. They thought I was ringing the new year in working on my jumper? That’s so nuts. I guess they believed me because, to that point, I had never told a lie in my life? 

So I had dispatched of the opps and I was ready to party. 

ENTERING EMMAS HOUSE

Emma’s party was not starting for a very long time but she had invited us over early to help her set up. HOWEVER, she was also not going to be home for a while so she had suggested that we “climb through the window” and ‘let ourselves in”

When I tell this story to people in real life, this is usually where they go ‘ooOOoooo’ sort of signifying that I made a really obviously stupid decision. But they are wrong, the decision was not obviously stupid. You are allowed to climb through the window and let yourself in if the person whose house it is says you can do it. That’s not a crazy thing to do. 

So me and four other 9th graders end up on the inside of her house. To my surprise, the house is empty. There is no furniture anywhere. I will later learn that this is because Emma’s family is moving, and this is one of the last weeks her family has the house. 

Another funny part of how small we were is just how little contraband we actually had. We had beer and weed, the first beer and weed I’d ever see. I remember feeling like we had so much beer and weed. In reality, we had about $65 of weed and 6 coronas. 

One of my friends opens up a beer with a lighter, there is no bottle opener in the house because there is nothing of anything in the house. I am not drinking or smoking weed. I have just told my first lie in my life not 45 minutes ago, so drinking and smoking still seems like way too far away. 

The next set of things happen really quickly. From the kitchen, we see flashing police lights. Everyone tightens up and someone whispers, ‘let’s go to the back’. The pac heights house is big, with very small hallways. The type of house you’d need to ask someone exactly where the bathroom is. We run to the backyard. There is a tree in the backyard. We hide behind it.

There is a 2-minute period where nothing happens. Then about 10 cops in full riot gear bust through the hallway and start checking hallways like cops do in cool movies (like Sicario). It was kinda funny how long it took them to find us. They have to do those things where they look into a room and go “clear’..or whatever. That my guess about what took so long. 

They do eventually get to the backyard and it is clear that they are about to find us. I remember feeling very starkly how much less I trusted the 4 people with me than say….i trusted my mom. 

I stepped out and alerted the cops where we were. I was like “hey, we’re here’ or something. What do you say in that situation? 

They did not say “oh thank you for revealing yourself, everything’s all good” 

No, they pointed all their guns and me and were like ‘Get the fuck on the ground’ which obviously I did reflexively. Someone knocks me to the ground as I am getting on my knees and a bunch of people start yelling ‘spread eagle’ to me. At this point, the 4 other 13-year-olds I was with were also caught and being apprehended. One of the guys has the presence of mind to throw 3 mango blunt raps over the backyard fence into the neighbor's roof. I don’t even know if that is a good or a bad idea but it is funny to think about him having the presence of mind to do that. 

So the cops are yelling “spread eagle” to me but I don’t know what that means. I am not spreading eagle because I don’t know what spread eagle means. Eventually, one of them kicks me in the rib and says “Spread eagle’ and i say “ i don’t know what that means”. He then manually spreads me eagle and handcuffes me. 

The next few minutes are blurry but the next thing i really remember is that the 5 of us are handcuffed to chairs and a few of the cops are asking us what we were doing there. I have a vivid memory of one of the cops repeatedly being like ‘we could have shot you’ and i remember thinking ‘that’s a crazy thing to say’ 

The next 2-3 hours were painfully stupid and funny. Ziptied to a chair in a mansion in Pacific Heights, me and the four 13-year-olds explained that we were invited, had Emma corroborate the story, and we were released with no charges so long as our parents picked us up. I called my dad and told him that I was not at the JCC I was grounded for 6 months, including a funny consequence of “no Facebook”

As the ball dropped taking us into the new decade, I listened to Shwayze on my desktop speaker system and thought about why they didn’t put actual handcuffs on us. 

EPILOGUE

Two years later I was at outsidelands. There was a brief micro-controversy at these outside lands where the festival had overlapped with an influx of wasp mating or migration or something in the polo fields, so there were bees everywhere. At only point, I was stung by a wasp. I had never been stung before so i went to the medical tent to make sure I wasn’t having an allergic reaction.

While sitting in the medical tent across from me I see a police officer and realize he is one of the police officers who detained me at Emmas. I go up to him and say ‘Hey this is random but i think you detained me for breaking into this girl’s house in Pacific Heights two years ago’ he looks at me and says “i have no idea what you’re talking about.’