Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [210]
We were at Papa John’s Basement, I think, a popular place that we had been going to for years whenever we went to Cleveland. So I’m upstairs and eventually everyone leaves, and I’m pretty hammered and I’m one of the only people left up in this back room. And I have to take a leak really bad, so I walk out and see the line is all the way across the bar and up the stairs to go to the men’s room. I say, “No, I’m never going to make it through that.” So I go back, and there was really nobody that I could see upstairs, so I found an empty bottle in the corner and I’m peeing into this bottle, and I finish doing that, and I didn’t really turn around, and these guys grab me and say, “You’re under arrest.” And I said, “Why? What for?” “You just peed out that window onto an off-duty cop.” And I said, “I didn’t pee out of any window.” And so they grab me and wrestle me down the stairs, and there were people who recognized me and were laughing and saying stuff to me. They eventually charged me with aggravated resisting arrest, aggravated disorderly conduct, and public indecency.
So I get down to the station, and it’s like two in the morning. I’m standing there in the bright lights, still in handcuffs, and five cops are just standing there laughing at me. And they’re saying, “Oh, what’s ESPN going to think of this?” They’re just having a good time. Then they empty my pockets and book me. And because I drank a lot back then, to prevent hangovers I had aspirin and Rolaids. So now it’s six in the morning, and I still haven’t gotten out. I’m trying to get Billy to come down and bail me out, and then I’m hearing from the news desk that they’re reporting the thing on AP, including that I had on me “an instrument used for drugs” and “suspected drug residue,” in quotations. So I’m just losing it, going crazy. I got help finding a lawyer, but it was Yom Kippur, so here I am, calling this lawyer on the Saturday of Yom Kippur. Reaching him was almost impossible, but I finally did, and they got me out that afternoon. Billy came to get me. And I’m going, “What in the world is all this drug talk?” That was in USA Today, my hometown paper, and every other paper in the country. I’m going, “Oh, my God.” I’m absolutely humiliated, and scared to death. The so-called “instrument used for drugs” was a toothpick, one of those white, plastic dental picks that you carry around like a permanent toothpick. The “drug residue” turned out to be dust from the Rolaids and aspirin.
I was basically locked in my hotel for the next two days until I was going to be arraignment on that Monday. So I talked to the lawyer and actually we had a pretty good defense ready. I really did have this urination problem from all the drinking days where I had some very famous public urinations, because when I had to go, I had to go. So I had that diagnosed. And I had a bruise I had diagnosed at the Cleveland clinic from the cops’ being aggressive when they arrested me. I agreed with the lawyer when he said, “Let’s just get rid of this thing. If you try it, it’s going to cost you a ton of money. The cops will get their side out, and they’re adamant that you pissed on them. We’ve got one witness that says you didn’t, but they’ve got one witness that says you did.” I just decided that’s enough when I saw in the paper: Gary Miller, forty, and what I was arrested for. I just said, “This is not what I want for the first line of my obituary. This is not what I worked my whole career to be known as.” And I swear to this day, I did not piss out any window. It was a total setup by these cops for whatever reason. I talked to Brian Anderson, who pitched for the Indians, and he said, “Oh, yeah, they did that once to a friend of mine who was visiting town. They just kind