Focus and look straight forward

During the olden days of two thousand double-aught seven, I was a missionary in the ward of Lomas Lindas down in México. This was in the heart of México City and my companion was Elder Rodriguez. He was from some island in northern Veracruz or something. Anyways, this guy sold himself as being hard. He kept telling me about how he was all 'hood and his exploits on how he did everything his way. He was my junior companion.

Calm down ladies, notice the flip flops.

Anyways, this one time we have to do splits with our zone leaders. We agree on a place and time where we're going to meet up. And it all went downhill from there.

On that day, we arrive on where we're supposed to be, when we're supposed to and, the other Elders are late. This was back in 2007 and the only people who had cell phones were the zone leaders. We only had a prepaid phone card.

After a while we decide to call them, and they were stuck in traffic. Specifically, they were stuck behind a pilgrimage for La Virgen de Guadalupe and those guys were using the entire road. They were going to take maybe another hour and we had to wait for them. And we were to wait for them by a pedestrian bridge.

My companion, who legitimately thought he was an OG, decides that the best way to pass the time is to literally stare ahead. At what, who knows? And me, well, I had an hour to kill. My mind wandered.

via GIPHY


A couple minutes go by, and this cop looking guy starts walking up to us. While he's getting closer we realize that he's yelling. And he's saying that he caught us looking up girls' skirts on the pedestrian bridge. And that's when my heart sank.

Then it jumped right back to where it was supposed to be because he's yelling at my companion! He's yelling at Mr. Mugshot for supposedly trying to be a pervert. Elder Felipe and I look at each other because we both know it was me who would've been the sketchy one of the two. I'm the one trying to see if my neck can turn around like an owl. We find out this guy is a private security guard, and he's trying to tell us that we're breaking municipal code such and such and we should follow him over to the "station". It was his car over in the parking lot.

It became clear pretty fast that this aspiring mall cop is just looking for a bribe, and so we start arguing with the one-shirt-size-too-small rent-a-cop. But then he calls the real cops on us. We sneak a call to the zone leaders and they're telling us, "don't pay anyone, we'll be there eventually". The situation is slowly escalating to the point that I know I'll have to call my Mission President and explain to him why my companion is in jail.

Fortunately, a member from the ward pulls up in the nick of time and starts berating the fake flatfoot with, "I'm a lawyer and I know these two and you will be fired from your job!" All of it lies. He had been to church maybe twice since I'd been there.

In the end, the sticky gumshoe gave up just as our zone leaders show up.