This Week in 1999

Prom Weekend

Columbine occurred on a Tuesday, I went to prom, and the following Monday I was arrested.

I am guilty of being a lifelong newsjunkie.

I received an alert.

On my secret pager.

Yes, I was a high school senior with a secret pager.

I had purposefully enrolled in news alerts.

There had been a school shooting in Colorado. The bombs at Columbine High School were planted during the school's prom party, which took place shortly before the shooting.

I knew the name of the school.

A few years earlier it had been a rival high school in suburban Denver.

Prom Weekend ‘99

I had the means.

Not like you think.

My dad was always really big into photography.

When I was a senior in high school, he’d acquired a state-of-the-art digital printer for photos and software to edit them.

I'm a neophile.

I enjoy the process of learning how to use new stuff.

Along with teaching myself PhotoShop, I used high-quality paper to make a fake ID for myself, and two other kids.

I certainly wasn't doing it for the money.

I didn't need to.

I learn by breaking in new tools and technology,

I’d been working a job doing tech support for dial-up internet, fixing the on-ramp for the information superhighway.

If you couldn't connect to the internet, after I uninstalled and reinstalled Dial-Up Networking, I rolled a truck to fix the copper wire phone line to your house.

Otherwise, I fixed your shit.

I was making $9/hour.

At the time, it was a lot of money.

Since Tennessee did not have a state minimum wage law, the federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour would have applied in 1999.

Inflation-adjusted for 25 years that is more $16/hour.

To put that in perspective, in 2024, the Tennessee minimum wage is currently $7.25.

I was a rich East Tennessee high school worker.

I had the motive.

I was gonna put my hard-earned savings to use and host a raging prom after-party.

I had saved up all year and reserved a suite at the Days Inn next to the Perkins.

At the time, Perkins was a regional “diner” franchise open 24 hours.

They say money can’t buy you class.

Flawed Execution

The plan was perfect.

I spent the Friday evening before prom making runs to both liquor and grocery stores.

With my PhotoShop-altered ID taped to the back of a Coke card, I had spent north of $200 on party favors.

This was a lot of party favors in April 1999.

On Saturday, I remembered a special request.

My prom date had asked for a six-pack of winecoolers: Bartles & Jaymes.

B-E-E-R-R-U-N

I ran to a nearby gas station with a convenience store. This particular BP gas station was close enough, but which I didn't frequent very much. It was on a main thoroughfare, but not directly on the path to school. It was part of a cluster of gas stations, less than 2 miles immediately west of school.

When I reached the BP, I parked next to the market, rather than a pump.

What happened inside was a surreal life experience tattooed in my memory.

After successfully spending months working, weeks planning, days making reservations, and hours acquiring favors to host a post-prom party, my luck was about to change.

I grabbed a six-pack of wine coolers and walked up to the cashier, took out my wallet, ID and card to pay.

The young woman behind the register - whose features I am cursed to never recall - took my ID.

She took one look at me and then shuffled off to check with her manager.

I'd experienced and cleanly passed a "manager check" before.

I later learned this check was a ruse.

The manager returned holding my fake ID.

He held it up and silently pulled back the PhotoShop-altered version printed on digital gloss paper and carefully glued to a plastic card.

He peeled back the paper to reveal the Coke card labeling underneath.

I mirrored his silence, turned on my heel, and walked out of the convenience store, got in my car, and left.

That had never happened before.

In an effort to maintain a hallucinated first principle of authenticity, all the personally identifying information on the paper ID was accurate, except for the birth date.

I told myself it was a minor hiccup, and would be a nothingburger.

Kids got their fake IDs confiscated all the time.

I had missed one detail.

This BP was close to the high school, but since it was out of the way, I never stopped there, went inside, or had the opportunity to notice the cashiers that work there.

My Photoshop-to-glossy-paper operation was a craft hobby.

But even nerdier and more entrepreneurial kids in high school were selling fake IDs as a service.

A lot of them.

And many of those had been confiscated.

Flawless Execution

My memories of prom are hazy for reasons, mostly due to time and distance.

I remember feeling like the perfect plan was executing.

I know what it feels like to peak in high school: cuz it happened to me.

As a rich Tennessee high school worker, I wanted to indulge myself and guests invited to the rager.

Following a late-night meal at Perkins, a posse literally walked to the Days Inn next door.

As the kids used to say, it was on like Donkey Kong.

If your friends from Young Life and Bible study don’t show up for your party at the Days Inn, are you even from East Tennessee?

The party favors were consumed. A good time was had by all.

The Find-Out Times

Prom weekend ended and the find-out times were just beginning.

Monday morning was a week after an traumatizing school shooting. I can only imagine how school officials felt. I don't recall being freaked out.

But school administrators and law enforcement must have felt the need to do...something.

I think the idea was to make everyone practice for an unfathomable emergency under a watchful eye and see what stood out as odd or different.

An excuse to have cops on hand to observe any kids walking around in trenchcoats.

Our first-ever “bomb drill” the first Monday after Columbine was an act of desperation.

I was in journalism class. I know this because I was holding a digital camera that was property of the school.

Around the time the morning bell rang, an alert went off and the entire school population marched to the football practice field to gather in the dewy grass.

It was a nice spring day.

The bomb drill ended and everyone walked back to their respective classrooms.

Detective Work

In retrospect, the young woman at the register in the BP knew who I was.

She had graduated a year before me.

She knew I couldn't have been 21, and that's why she called in the manager to check.

The manager made a call to the police.

The police had reviewed camera footage, tracked my license plate to my actual identity, and deduced I would be on the grounds of the high school.

Not gonna lie, it was some solid detective work.

It helped that there weren't a lot of people in town who looked like me.

Standing outside the door to the classroom were two uniformed officers.

They asked me to confirm my identity, Mirandized me, and placed me under arrest.

I was still holding the digital camera.

Then, I was perp-walked to the parking lot.

It was early on a Monday, and half the student population was still returning, slowly, from the bomb drill exercise in the field.

Everyone saw me. It wasn't the kind of school where that happened regularly.

Word spread quickly.

We took a ride to the police station for booking.

I was fingerprinted and then questioned.

Turns out the state holds a dim view of altering official government identification cards and even less people who are profiting.

In fairness, my workmanship was a craft product, with pixel-perfect editing and high-quality paper. I was not mass-producing nor even selling my services.

The others fake IDs floating around were of much lower quality.

Many had been easily detected and confiscated.

I pieced all this together when I realized that the officer thought I was the mastermind behind a sprawling fake ID operation. I recognized the arresting officer.

A couple of years earlier, the same officer had pulled over my brother for joyriding.

The school and surrounding area must have been part of his patrol.

The officer looked like someone who had also peaked in high school.

My memory of him: he couldn't have been older than late-20's, receding hairline, gaunt, with a porn star mustache.

He seemed like the guy who joined law enforcement for all the wrong reasons.

We finished the booking process, including fingerprinting, and a get-out-of-jail phone call.

Then, I waited in a cell.

Luckily, I had the privilege of getting bailed out by the evening.

It was dark, and the conversation was uncomfortable.

There were a lot of questions and the answers must have been dumb-founding.

This was supposed to be a time to enjoy a case of "senioritis."

Instead it felt like a long, slow, awkward, drawn-out end to high school.

I missed out on Senior Week at the beach.

Meanwhile, my graduation present was bail, the lawyer, the fine, community service, and probation.

Compared to the kids from Columbine, I made it out okay.