plaintiff: gwendolyn from detroit, michigan. gwendolyn strolls into the courtroom wearing tight black pinstriped pants topped with a black blazer and crisp white shirt with an enormous collar. also enormous is the strain her heaving bosom is putting on the shirt’s button, which someone in fashion should go to jail for. we’re doing gaping buttons? in the year of our lord 2026?!!?!?! instead of trying to build a rocket to go to mars or wherever somebody should be out here inventing a dress shirt that can comfortably house a fat girl’s titties.
defendant: chantel from detroit, michigan. chantel practically skips into the courtroom outfitted in a corseted (?) white summer dress with an eyelet (?) hem and a stiff cropped bubblegum pink blazer. this is not a good outfit, but she appears to be so thrilled to wear it that by the end of the case i might be convinced otherwise.
the complaint: gwendolyn claims she got a call one night from chantel, who was drunk at a bar and begging to be picked up. gwendolyn says she wishes she’d never responded to the call because chantel eventually drove off with her car while drunk and crashed it into a gas station. she’s suing her former friend for the cost of her car plus impound fees.
what does she want: $2775? what was she driving, a fucking big wheel???
how it went down: gwendolyn says that she and chantel were childhood friends who recently reconnected when chantel called her from the bar and asked her for a ride because she was too drunk to get herself home. wait a minute, what? greg is confused as well and he asks chantel if she and gwendolyn hadn’t spoken since the night in question and chantel says, “that’s not true, your honor. she was the one who called me.” okay fair, but did a decade elapse between the last time you guys talked and the drunk night at the bar? i guess we’ll never know. that said, i’d like to think of myself as the kind of person who would get out of bed to pick up someone i last spoke to in kindergarten who was wasted and stranded at the bar. would i be awake? no! would my ringer be on? also no! but, if i happen to be upright, awake, still clothed, and actively fucking around on my phone you can totally depend on me.
gwendolyn says she wasn’t going to go get chantel at first, but she sounded desperate. she says that when she pulled up to the bar (greg, the king of the D: “what bar?”) chantel was outside, so drunk that she could hardly stand up. chantel says that gwendolyn had actually called her to ask if she knew where she could go to “hook up with a guy for a couple dollars.” the audience full of middle-aged church ladies gasps in horror but like…………so? would “hook up with a guy who just bought her a steak dinner in a nice restaurant” sound better? literally WHAT is the difference??
chantel slurs (is she wasted?) that gewndolyn called her because she “knew [she] was an ex-stripper]” and gwendolyn yells that chantel is a liar and greg interrupts them both to ask if gwendolyn filed this in detroit, at the 36th district where he used to be a judge, before ending up in his courtroom today. gwendolyn nods and says yes, then greg sighs and says, “clearly my former colleagues are trying to punish me.” chantel continues to plead her case saying that she didn’t even have gwendolyn’s number and that when gwendolyn called her to “find somebody to hook up with” she used her government name, which no one in the city of detroit uses, ever. the judge asks, “what do they call you?” and chantel does a little shake of her too-shiny wig and says, smugly, “TANQUERAY.”
fine, i laughed. i also had an emotionally devastating flashback to this night in the early 00s when i took my pants off at a club while fucked up on tanqueray and tonic. i gotta tell y’all that story sometime. the bouncer put me and the nigerian whose tab i was drinking on out in the street, and it took me so long to struggle back into those cheap polyester bell bottoms i’d been wearing because they were sweaty and wet and kept getting bunched up. i was standing at, like, ontario and wells with my entire ass out asking this dude if he wouldn’t mind driving me all the way up to rogers fucking park!!! at 1am on a sunday!!!!!! honestly, considering the similarities in our stories, maybe i should change my fucking name, too.
gwendolyn says that both tanqueray and her unidentified friend got into her car and immediately started arguing with each other as she drove off. sounds like it was just boilerplate drunk arguing: boyfriends, kids, yo mama jokes. gwendolyn says the fighting became physical and they were going at it so bad she had to pull over because she couldn’t see anything in her rearview mirror and she was afraid they were going to cause an accident. a police officer saw all this going down and came over to the car, but gwendolyn says the only reason they didn’t go to jail was because she was sober and dude told her to just get the other girls home safe.
she skipped a part, though. chantel interjects to say that they went to an after hours spot after leaving the first bar, gwendolyn apparently only dressed in a bikini top and booty shorts. she says that she got more intoxicated at that party while gwendolyn looked for someone to bone, and after all that they got back in the car and were stopped by that cop. gwendolyn says that chantel “used the bathroom in [her] car” (please god why didn’t she get specific, some of us would die to know) and after that she pulled into a gas station and told both of them to get the fuck out.
commercial break
-i’m having a lot of fun online playing bootleg pips
-i’m getting really into wraps and burritos lately
-is this a real song? idk but i am obsessed
-every sports doc i’ve watched on netflix is good, including this one about chess
-lowrider stamps??? let me dig out my nice stationery
-jia wrote about the black eyed peas
gwendolyn says she went into the gas station to grab some paper towels to clean up the mess in her car (judge mathis: “paper towels? you shoulda got her some pull ups!”) and when she came back chantel and her friend and the car were gone. gwendolyn says she waited there for forty-five minutes (she assumed that chantel saw the cop again, got scared, and would return to pick her up) until she eventually found someone else to drive her home. she couldn’t get into her house, because ol’ fast and furious had all of her keys, plus gwendolyn’s cell phone was also in the car, so she had to sit on her neighbor’s porch and called her own phone over and over in the hopes that chantel would pick up. HELLO???????
no bullshit, this would jokerfy me. by the time they brought my car back i’d be sitting on my porch in a green wig giggling my ass of while taking a knife to the corners of my mouth, because this is fucking unhinged behavior. after an hour chantel finally picked up gwendolyn’s phone (me, when she answered) and told her they were five minutes away. gwendolyn says she waited seven or eight hours but they never made it.
the ruling: i am going to scream. if this happened to me i would be levitating with rage, especially since michigan is a no fault state so whatever happens to my car is on me??? the next day, after spending the night with her neighbor because oh yeah no car means no fucking house either, gwendolyn calls her friend natasha (here in court today, looking pressed) and they drove around looking for gwendolyn’s car. she figured that maybe chantel et al had maybe pulled over somewhere and passed out, but then they ran into chantel’s nephew and he immediately called his aunt on the phone. chantel answered and got on the phone with gwendolyn, saying, “oh, you didn’t hear? we got into a really bad accident last night and everyone had to be rushed to the hospital.” I WOULD HAVE BLACKED OUT.
okay here’s what happened: chantel was doing ninety down dexter, and when she tried (too late) to stop at a red light she instead crashed into a bus stop. (bad!) the car spun around several times and slid into the gas station. (worse!) then the car burst into flames and she fled the scene, leaving her injured accomplice in the back seat. (worst fucking thing i’ve ever fucking heard on this fucking show!) several bystanders dragged the friend out of the car and away from the scene because they were worried the car was going to explode. i cannot believe this is real life.
the judge asks chantel for her version of events and she flippantly says, “yeah that accident happened” and then goes back to an earlier point in the story when she claims she “paid [gwendolyn’s] way into the after hours spot.” what’s the average cover at a decent club, twenty bucks? i’m gonna say chantel spent no more than ten, because we definitely are not talking about the kind of spot with bathroom attendants and bottle service. is there a universe in which the exchange rate for ten dollars at the door is an exploded car with a human crash test dummy actively dying in the back seat???????
i’m losing it. gwendolyn’s witness stands up to say that gwendolyn was at a party with her and left that party to go pick up chantel. she says the next time she saw her she was picking gwendolyn up to take her to the police station then driving around to see if they could locate her car. the judge is getting visibly bored, and he sighs and points out that chantel has already admitted to crashing the car so let’s move this along. somehow i missed that chantel? is suing gwendolyn??? for harassment????? and that sound you just head was my bottom jaw shattering against my sternum. i’m gonna need to take a beta blocker after this!
“have you stopped drinking yet?” greg asks chantel after she describes gwendolyn’s harassment, which is driving down chantel’s street and knocking on her door one time. we have to wrap this up, i cannot transcribe the legalese of impound and storage fees for a burnt up car because the insane five-year-old inside me who is hyper-fixated on fairness and justice is about to crash out. a $2775 judgment for the plaintiff (of course???) and the gentle suggestion of inpatient rehab for the defendant.
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “have you been drinking today, tanqueray? seems like it!”
bangs gavel
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