Jeremy Fugleberg

It’s 3 a.m. Saturday night. Technically it’s Sunday morning, Nov. 7 and Hobo Day has been over for three hours. But for the four cops on the sidewalk, the night is far from over.

“He kept saying to suck his c**k, and we told him to just walk away,” says one, shaking his head as he watches the freshly-arrested drunk helped into the waiting squad car on Main Avenue.

“He had a NASA identity card on him, though, so maybe he was a rocket scientist,” cracks another officer.

The squad car pulls away, and a blond, female officer nearby gestures toward the ground.

“Did one of you guys lose this tampon?” she asks, to chuckles from the other officers.

Just then a drunk college girl walks by, practically bowing as she bobs by the array of law enforcement.

“I don’t want to get arrested,” she says, feigning fear. “I don’t want to get handcuffed again.”

Deviously she looks at the men.

“Well, handcuffed behind me anyway. Handcuffed in front, I wouldn’t mind.”

A rocket scientist, a tampon and a horny drunk girl.

“Better than usual,” one cop calls it.

And the night is still not over.

The bars are also dealing with the remnants of Hobo Day craziness. From a rugby party to packed-out dance floors, it’s been quite a night.

“There was a guy passed out in the corner for, like, two hours. It was great,” says a worker at one bar.

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says a worker at one bar. “His buddies would come over and kick him, to see if he was okay.”

At Chevy’s, workers vacuum the carpet, sweep the floor and load after load of bottles and trash into the Dumpsters just outside the back door.

Outside in the alley a drunken frat boy wanders by, phone clutched in his right hand and his brain covered with gelled hair.

“Go to those apartments,” he slurs, pointing up the alley.

Why?

“F**ktime?” he answers, with a confused look on his face. A smile mushes across his face, and then back he goes, stumbling across the pavement.

Outside George’s Pizza the cleanup has started – dozens of paper plates line the sidewalk for a block both ways, discarded by hungry pizza eaters.

The pizza place got extra help to feed the starving masses.

“They bring in the relief pitcher,” says Rob Whitaker, a 1993 SDSU grad who works as a hired gun for George’s on busy weekends like this.

He estimated they sell six times the normal amount of pizza on Hobo Day, much of it to tipsy college students.

“Some guys have tried to steal pizza, but nothing too serious,” he says. “You know they’re drunk, you know they’re going to be dicks.”

The police say later that it was a relatively well-behaved Hobo Day.

“I’m not going to say it was a quiet hobo day, because there’s no such thing,” says Jeff Miller, a lieutenant with the Brookings Police Department.

“We had one robbery – hit over head, wallet taken – we had a few vandalisms, but nothing extraordinary.”

Brookings Street Superintendent Koss Delfinis says he was downtown Saturday night, and saw the mess first-hand.

“It was like a landfill, like a dump ground down there,” he says.

But he says he’s proud of how many college students tried to be responsible, even the guy that kept trying to put Subway wrapper into an already-overflowing trashcan.

“Finally he looked at me like, ‘I can’t win for nothing,'” he says.

But between the merchant’s self-policed hard work and his sweepers, the city looks like “a million dollars – nice, clean and beautiful,” by Monday morning, he says.

Until next year, Brookings.

#1.885674:2945034347.jpg:jeremyf -hobo1.jpg::Jeremy Fugleberg