Both of these arrests took place before I was 18 and have been expunged.

I was pretty into computers in 1988. Being somewhat lower middle class my mother could only afford a TRS-80Color Computer II as opposed to a Commodore 64 that everybody else had. I was really into the movie War Games so I tried to emulate everything that David Lightman did, from the clothes he wore to the trouble that he made. One day my friend Paul and I were skateboarding behind a sporting goods store and we eventually got around to going through a dumpster as we usually did (side note: I use to spend HOURS trying to piece together shredded documents from the bank dumpster behind my house). It then hit me that this dumpster was full of credit card carbons, this was back when they had the manual swipers and would toss the black portion of the 3-part carbon straight into the trash. I gathered up a bunch and in a few days hatched the brilliant plan to order a bunch of stuff from The Home Shopping Club. My scheme was to call HSC, claim to be the person whose name was on the carbon, give an address down the street from my house and see what happened. At the time HSC gave you an account number and then allowed you to then order from their automated system, so you really only had to talk to the operator once. After that you could order things simply by entering numbers on a touch tone phone. The first week we stayed up late into the night drinking Cokes and ordering the worst stuff possible: flimsy train sets, crummy jewelry, trinkets, kitchen items, etc. 2 weeks later I actually had the guts to go to the address where all of the stuff was sent to. An older lady answered the door and I explained that my father had ordered some things from The Home Shopping Club but had given the wrong address and came to check if they had been delivered by chance. Strongsville, Ohio being a somewhat wealthy suburb allowed the postal carriers the peace of mind to simply leave packages if a person didn't answer the door during the day, and LEAVE THE PACKAGES THEY DID. I went home with close to 20 packages and went home to open a mountain of garbage. God, was that funny to me. I did this 3 or 4 more times, with even more unnecessary junk. I did get an early version of an IBM laptop computer which I sold in the Tradin' Times (a Cleveland area sales listing newspaper) for $200, which proves that I really was UP TO NO GOOD. Finally I ordered a personal photo copier. I have no idea how big this thing would actually be or why I even was so excited to have one. Paul drove me to the house where it was ordered and waiting in the car, I was met at the door by 2 people, a father and a son. I gave them the usual story, the rest of it went like this:

"Oh yeah, that came last week! It's in the basement, we'll go get it"

At this point we're joined in the foyer by 2 other members of the family, a mother and a younger sister.

"Ok, sorry about the mix up," I answered.

3-5 minutes go by and the brother and son reappear, the father states that the copier is not in the basement and might be in the garage, the younger brother goes to look for it. Then we're joined by another brother and we wait for another 3-5 minutes. I'm in this house facing 4 strangers making small talk waiting for a personal copier from the Home Shopping Club. The son returns empty handed, claiming that it might be somewhere else in the house.

"Maybe I'll just come back for it later," I say, noting that they're obviously stalling.

"NO, YOU'LL STAY HERE NOW!" the father says as he grabs my wrist.

WOW. HOLY SHIT. I'M TOTALLY DEAD MEAT.

I think I may have said something like, "NO" and twisted my way out of his grasp. I ran out onto the front lawn and yelled at Paul to "GO" and ran down the street and into the woods. I ran all of the way home, it had to be 2 miles. By the time I got there my step father was outside of the house ABSOLUTELY FUMING. The cops had already been there, having stopped Paul and getting my address out of him. I was driven to the police station by my step father who had to be wondering what he had gotten himself into, being married to my mother for only 2 months (they got divorced with in the year, natch). So, we get to the police station and all of the cops seem to have a real sense of humor about how old I am and the stuff I was trying to pull. I exonerated Paul right away as it seemed only fair for just one of us to get into trouble, plus I was going to keep the copier for myself, there was no talk of halvsies.

So, I'm sitting in a chair BEYOND TERRIFIED TO DEATH and the officer taking the report is having computer trouble AND HE'S USING A TRS-80. I convince him to let me have a look at it after a few minutes and notice a loose RS-232 cable, VOILA, it's working again. I think that and my intelligent use of the English language somehow bought me a whopping 3 months of "low-risk" probation FOR CREDIT CARD FRAUD. The police even persuaded HSC to take back the copier at no charge to me, so I wasn't liable for any money. None of the past thefts ever even came up. I did have to go to court, but it was a breeze. I had to do 1 day of community service which amounted to cleaning up a VERY BIG public park on the 5th of July, which was totally gross. My mother grounded me for a year but that was quickly reduced to a week as she soon forgot all about what happened while she was drinking her way out of her terrible marriage. I mean, this lady (whom I love dearly) would SNEAK OUT of a window while her husband slept and meet a scrap metal mogul at a sports bar called Sneakers down the street. That's arrest #1, and a pretty good one, I think.

About a year later Paul called me on the telephone excitedly. "You have to call this guy's answering machine, IT'S GREAT!" he exclaimed. My telephone number was 238-1769 at the time and Paul mistakenly dialed 234-1769. I called it and there no way I could have been prepared for what I heard. At first, it was the energetic opening notes of Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor. DUNT DUNT-DUNT-DUNT DUNT-DUNT-DUNT DUNT-DUNT-DUNNNNNNNT. It totally ruled. A few seconds later the most feeble voice in the world spoke over the recording, "hey, this is Dennis!" It sounded like a teenaged girl. "I'm out looking for the eye of the tiger," he continued. "I'll call you back when my journey is through!" HOLY S. This was the best thing I'd ever heard.

So, we called this number. We called it A LOT. We'd laugh every time, it killed us. Then it hit me that because I could call my home answering machine and hear my messages with a simple two digit code, maybe we could do the same with Dennis' machine. So, I figured out the code, it took 30 seconds. We listened to his messages, they were typical boring messages, from family members and stuff. Then I remembered that you could also change the out going message on my machine at home. EUREKA, ABSOLUTE FUN! It took another 30 seconds to learn how to change Dennis' outgoing message and we were off to the races.

We changed Dennis' outgoing message ALL OF THE TIME. We did it at Paul's house in the morning, when we got home, at night. THIS GUY NEVER SEEMED TO ANSWER THE PHONE. We called from friend's houses while at parties, etc. Here's the thing though, we didn't leave goofy messages. WE LEFT HORRIBLY MEAN AND MESSED UP MESSAGES. Things like:

"Hey, this is Dennis! I'm kidnapped some 8 year olds and I'm molesting them in the back of my AMC Gremlin, I'll call you back when I'm done!"

&

"Hey, this is Dennis! I'm raping my grandmother in the bathtub right now, I'll call you when I'm done!"

&

"Hey, this is Dennis! I've jammed a thermometer up my dick hole and broke it off and I'm on my way to the hospital, I'll call you when I get home!"

ETC.

There was no limit to the things we would say. Kids from school started calling the number just to hear the fucked up shit we would leave. It became a thing to do, people would beg us to say their names on the messages. We did this for 2 weeks straight. Then, one morning, it happened:

"Hey, this is Dennis. I'm not home, and if you're one of those kids whose been changing my message, I GOTCHA, and you'll be hearing from the police."

OH FUCK, RIGHT? That day at school was a tough one because I totally knew it wasn't a bluff. I mean, we'd been so stupid, we deserved to get caught. When I got home my already home and there were messages from other furious parents whose phones had called the number. All fingers pointed to Derek Erdman, shit, I would have ratted me out.

That night my mother drove me to the Middleburg Heights Police Department. I was going to meet with the police and explain what I'd done because it didn't make sense at all to anybody. Why was I harassing this guy? Why did I say all of those terrible things? So, here I am in an interrogation room with 3 cops and my mother LISTENING TO A TAPE RECORDING OF ALL OF THE MESSAGES WE HAD LEFT. I am listening to some of the most fucked up shit I'd ever said while writing a report about how I figured out this guy's answering machine code. I started to laugh, probably out of sheer nervousness. I WAS DRAGGED BY MY ARM TO A JAIL CELL BY A GIANT COP! I was 14 years old.

I finish writing the report and my mother takes me home and I'm told I HAVE TO MEET DENNIS the next day at Bob's Big Boy. It turns out that Dennis is a school teacher at a Cleveland Public School and was convinced that somebody was breaking into his house to change the message. He got an alarm system AND A DOBERMAN PINSCHER.

The next day I meet Dennis expecting the worst. He turned out to be a totally nice guy who seemed generally concerned with a troubled youth. He had a copy of the police report that I had written and was impressed that I used the word sequential when explaining how I figured out his code. He dropped all of the charges and bought me a hamburger! I think he went out on a date with my mother too, but I think that was supposed to be a secret. When I went to college a few years later, Dennis wrote me a letter of recommendation.