beautiful, funny, sad & true

The first part of this entry is kind of gross; I’m not gonna lie about that.  The good news is that it’s also really funny, and it’s about a joke I played on my brother when I was about fifteen years old.

We shared a big bedroom at Dad’s house.  One day, Brother was lying on his bed doing homework, and I was lying on my own bed reading a book.  He got up to take a break, or watch TV or something, and at the same time I got the urge to pass gas.  Being the older brother, it was my natural impulse to walk over and pass gas into his pillow.   I repeated that action as the need arose, and I thought it would be even funnier if I was able to really stink up his pillow as much as possible, so I took my shoes off and rubbed my smelly socks all over it, inside and out.

A few minutes later, Brother walked back into the room, and I was reading on my bed, as if nothing had changed.  He reclined on his bed, with one elbow on the offending pillow, and returned to his studies.  After a few minutes, he sniffed the air and said, “Do you smell something?  It smells weird over here.”

“Hunh,” I said, as casually as possible.  “I don’t notice anything.  Smells fine here.”  My bed was ten feet away from his.

He turned back to his books for a while, but then curiosity got the better of him again.  “No, really,” he said.  “Are you sure you don’t smell anything?  It’s pretty bad.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, shrugging my shoulder.  “I don’t smell anything weird at all.”

He turned back, determined to find the source of the odor.  He sniffed up and down, then got a really strange look on his face as he looked toward his pillow.  That was the moment I’d been waiting for.  As he brought his nose closer and closer, the realization hit him, and I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

“Gross! What the heck did you do?” he asked, as he pulled off the pillowcase, smelled the pillow itself, and grimaced.

I was still laughing, but I finally pulled myself together enough to give him an answer.  “I might have farted on it a few times.  And I also might have slipped and accidentally rubbed my socks all over it too.  Yeah. . .I might’ve done that.”  I started laughing again.  He did too, as I recall.

A few years ago, I told a girl I was dating about The Pillow Incident, and she was slightly repulsed by it.  She saw the humor, but she also never quite believed that I wouldn’t do that sort of thing again.   I assured her that I wouldn’t, since I was thirty four years old, and she of all people had nothing to worry about.

Why am I telling that story now?  I’m not sure, exactly, but it came up in conversation with a friend the other day, so it had been bopping around in my brain lately, and I figured that I should tell it here too, under the heading of Childhood Stories.  I did learn that I shouldn’t tell that one when I’m on a date.  Not a very sexy story, as it turns out.  Ha ha.

One other funny childhood story (this one’s not gross, don’t worry) that took place in that bedroom was when my brother and I were wrestling one day, and it kept escalating and escalating, like it does sometimes between brothers.  We were joking around, pulling clothes and stuff out of each others’ dressers, and pretty soon we started pulling the blankets off of each others’ beds too.  It was all in fun, as if to say, “So, you wanna start something?  Okay, well, how about THIS?”  We kept one-upping each other, until all of our clothes, blankets, sheets, and mattress pads were strewn around the floor of the big bedroom.  We were laughing like hyenas, and my brother reached for my actual mattress and started to pull it from my bed frame.

That’s when Dad walked in.  He heard the commotion and came over to see what was going on.  His jaw dropped.  “What the hell are you guys doing?” he yelled.  “Clean this crap up now!”  His tone of voice broke the spell of our laughter, and we looked up, somewhat mortified, to see that we had completely destroyed the room.  Our beds were in a gigantic heap in the middle of the floor, and it looked as if a tornado had touched down in our room, but had spared the rest of the house.  He stood and watched us incredulously as we put everything back together.

That house was really great.  It was owned by family friends who went to our church.  Their aging mother lived in the house for decades, and our friends lived in the house up the hill.  She was in her eighties, and was starting to be unable to live alone anymore.  They wanted someone to live in her house, but they wanted it to be someone they knew.  It was a perfect situation.  They kept the rent low for us, and we happily moved in.

The house is over a hundred years old now, and it used to be the only house on the street.  It’s situated on the old Evergreen Highway in Vancouver, which runs right along the Columbia river.  We used to be able to walk down to the waterfront and play down there.  These days, all of the roads are private, and gated, and so far I’ve been unable to find a way down past the railroad tracks to the river.   Our old house is now surrounded by a group of newly built houses, and the wild, wooded hillside is now a sleepy cul-de-sac like a million others.

Such is the way in America, I suppose.  Open spaces don’t last long, particularly in Portland, where the Urban Growth Boundary is strictly enforced, and space is at a premium.  Vancouver doesn’t have a law like that, so urban sprawl is the order of the day, but this house is in a long-developed residential neighborhood, and we felt lucky to have had the opportunity to live there.

It’s probably worth mentioning that our bedroom at the time of these stories was in the bedroom on the back of the house, on the far left side of the picture.  The layout of the house changed sometimes, too, because at another point, we lived in the upstairs room and could look out over the river and the airport.  We even bought an airport radio and would sit up there for hours with binoculars and a notepad, writing down the names and flight numbers of the planes as they landed and took off.

If you’d told me when I started this entry that it would morph from a disgusting tale of pillow desecration into a nostalgic musing, I might not have believed you.  Yet here we are, and I stand by my choices.  For the record, I solemnly swear not to soil any more pillows, and I won’t tell that story on any more dates.  In fact, if I’m on a date, and you hear me start to launch into it, I hereby give you permission to step in and save me from myself.

So.

It’s been a while since I wrote, a fact for which I must apologize, but I had to take a bit of a hiatus to see how everything was going to pan out.  Three weeks later, inertia has settled over me, and I feel like I’m getting too far behind.  I do have other things I want to write about, too, but I feel I should  wrap up this story first.

The DUI was dropped, which was an obvious choice since I wasn’t even impaired.  The related charge of reckless driving was also dropped, but they did decide to charge me with careless driving, which amounts to about the same thing as a speeding ticket.  They cited me for a wide turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, which seems ridiculously trumped up, but they also agreed to lower the price of the ticket from six hundred dollars to two hundred since I had a clean record.  I decided to plead guilty and quit while I was ahead.

A friend took the liberty of finding me in one of those newspapers that publishes mug shots, which I thought was humiliating but also kinda funny.  At least they don’t publish peoples’ names.  I thought it was funny until yesterday, when it occurred to me that while I may not care too much about ephemeral newspapers, I should probably see what’s out there online.  I typed my name, and the first two results featured my mug shot.  My blood turned to ice.  Fucking hell, I thought, that’s the last thing I need. I e-mailed both of the web sites to have them remove the offending pages.  It’s insult to injury, if you ask me.

Let’s hope that’s the end of the story.  I’ll be quite happy when this stupid incident is nothing but a distant memory.

Last night, I was co-hosting my friend’s really cool radio show.  While driving home, I was stopped by the police on suspicion of a DUI.  After being questioned, taken to the station, passing all the various tests, and being kept awake all night, I was cleared and released at ten o’clock this morning.  I got home by eleven and took a nap for an hour and a half.

This afternoon, I sold a keyboard case on Craigslist to a really nice guy who plays bass for churches in West Linn and Vancouver.

This afternoon, a lady came by to try (and hopefully buy) one of the two accordions I’m selling.  She had a third one to look at elsewhere first, so she wanted to try that one before she settled on one of mine.  She told me she’d let me know after she saw that one.  Totally fine.  Let’s hope she buys mine.

This afternoon, I wrote out the complete version of the police story here in BFS&T, in order to capture all the details as best I could remember them.

This evening, I played accordion with PolishCellist and our violinist friend at a swanky downtown venue with a North African theme, as part of a gigantic bellydance event featuring the most famous bellydancer in the world.  She’s so famous that even I know who she is.  The venue was full of elaborately clad dancers, cabaret performers, musicians, photographers, and a host of other interesting people.  It was loud, frenetic, and beautiful, and I’ll remember it for a long time.

Just now, I got home from the bellydance event and wrote down this short synopsis of the day’s  events, in order to capture all the details as best I could remember them.  The ironic, caricatural nature of the day’s highs and lows, and the significance of the juxtaposition between them, was not lost on me.  The whole time I was enjoying the gig I kept laughing to myself and thinking, This morning, I was in jail.

My eyes won’t focus anymore.  I’m finally going to collapse in bed, so that I can be ready for rehearsal at ten o’clock in the morning.

Life is weird.

How was YOUR day?

Once every month or two, I like to co-host my friend John’s radio show. Usually, we like to build a group of songs around a theme, such as Beatlesque or Girls’ Names, or Valentines’ Day. Sometimes, however, we like to just get together and randomly select songs, trying to surprise each other and create a compelling, seamless ‘flow’ from one song into another. Last night’s show was a ‘flow’ kind of show. John texted me to let me know that he was at a nearby pizza place, having a last-minute snack and drink before the show. I told him I’d be right there, and I drove over to the station, parked, and walked over to meet him. He was finishing up his food and drink when I arrived, but we still had plenty of time before the show, so he got a second drink, and I ordered a glass of wine while we talked and joked about what the show would hold.

It turned out to be a particularly good flow show, too, if I do say so myself. I thought we were totally on our game, and we were playing songs that really complemented each other and went together well. At three o’clock in the morning, when the show was over, we gave each other a hug and went our separate ways. We’d been doing the show since midnight, and I’d been out at a dinner/drinks/movie night with a couple other friends earlier in the evening, so I was definitely looking forward to going home to bed.

As soon as I left the station and came to the traffic light at the end of the block, there was a guy in dark clothing who surprised me by walking across the intersection against my green light. I had to swerve a bit in order to avoid him, which sent my heart racing. I turned onto Couch, and then Grand, heading toward home. Around the point where the freeway crosses Grand, a guy was crossing against that light as well. He was slowly pushing a shopping cart across the street, and he was very difficult to see in the darkness. Right before my turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, there was a construction cone in the edge of my lane, so I had to maneuver to avoid hitting it. All of these obstacles turned a normally tranquil late-night drive into a very nerve-wracking event.

As soon as I turned onto Lloyd, I saw police lights come on behind me. I pulled over right away. “Do you know why we stopped you tonight?”

“I don’t, actually.”

Apparently, I had made what appeared to be a wide turn onto Lloyd, and they’d noticed my swerves for ShoppingCartGuy and the construction cone, and assumed that I had been drinking. I had been, yes, but not for many hours, and I hadn’t been home to brush my teeth so it was still on my breath, though the effects had all but worn off. Suffice it to say that my tiredness and nervousness caused me to fail the standing-on-one-foot test, though, so they placed me under arrest and sat me in the back of the police car. They confiscated my laptop and had my car towed.

Speaking of my car, an important tidbit in this story has to do with the fact that the interior smells like marijuana, and it has since long before I owned it. I’m well-known in my social circles for my stance on marijuana. I’ve voted for it to be legalized a number of times, particularly for medical uses, but I don’t smoke it myself, and to this day I still never have. I didn’t know the car smelled like that when I bought it, but whenever the weather is rainy (and this is Portland, after all, so it’s always rainy), the smell is particularly pungent and strong. I’ve tried to scrub the interior, I’ve pulled the panels off and cleaned inside the doors, I’ve pulled up the carpet in the back to clean underneath it, and still the smell persists. I’ve half-joked about taking it to a K-9 police unit and having a dog sniff the car to find the source of the smell, so I can get rid of it, because I don’t like the smell of pot, and I don’t like the impression of me that it gives people when they ride in my car.

One of the officers noticed the smell when he was searching the car, and he walked to the door of the police car, poked his head in and told me, “Hey, your car really smells like marijuana. Are we gonna find something in there? If you take a urine test, are you gonna turn up positive?” I smiled and told them that no, they weren’t and that I don’t smoke, and that’s just the way my car has always smelled. He didn’t believe me; no one ever does. They drove me downtown for processing and further questioning. By this time, it was approximately four in the morning, and I had no idea what was going to happen to me. I answered their questions, and took all of their tests, while they filled in the paperwork. They gave me a breath test, which registered “.00”, which made the two officers very suspicious, so they decided to get a third opinion from their drug specialist. I was ushered into a cement and steel holding cell with a long wooden bench. I sat down and was amazed to see that even in a police holding cell, people will still attempt to carve their initials in a wooden bench.

DrugSpecialist appeared in the doorway, and ushered me to a chair next to his desk. He took my vital signs and blood pressure, and had me perform more stringent variations of the tests I had performed on the street for the two other officers. I had to close my eyes, tip my head back, and touch a finger to my nose repeatedly. I had to walk a straight line. I had to stand on one leg and count the seconds until he told me to stop. Each series of rapid-fire instructions was punctuated with, “Do you understand the question?” I easily passed all of these tests. He gave me a barrage of eye exams and asked me lots of medical- and drug-related questions. I answered all of them truthfully (I’m not on any medications, I don’t use drugs, I don’t intend to harm myself, I’m not suicidal, etc.) and they put me back into the holding cell while they conferred with each other about my mystifying results. It seemed to them that my stories all checked out, and that I was telling the truth; I wasn’t drunk, I was just tired and nervous. At about five-thirty, I think they decided that they were satisfied, and I was not the threat that they had originally perceived. They each made it a point to tell me that nothing like this had ever happened before in their many years of experience. One of them went so far as to sit down and say, “I don’t get it. I don’t know how you ‘blew a zero’, when I could smell alcohol. Your car smells like marijuana, and you say you don’t smoke. I believe you, but we’ll have to wait for your urine test to come back before we know for sure. You’ve been nothing but cooperative, but you have to look at this from our point of view. You’re a one-in-a-million case.”

They somewhat apologetically handcuffed me again, not because they felt they needed to but because the law said they had to, and they led me to a room where a different man frisked me and told to exchange my steel-toed Doc Martens for small, uncomfortable slippers. The original two officers again took me through a maze of electronically locked doors. “Sometimes people run,” one of them said, “but you don’t seem like a runner.”

The other one continued. “Assuming that you’re telling the truth, and your urine test comes back clean (and I’m sure it will), this case against you will disappear. You won’t have anything on your record, and it’ll be like this never happened. Your car’s been towed, so you’ll have to deal with that, but the rest of this. . .” He trailed off. They opened the door to the waiting room, unclasped my handcuffs, and gave me one of the strangest looks I’ve ever encountered. They still couldn’t believe the way this was turning out. I should mention that they were totally cool and respectful with me, and they did a great job, especially considering the bizarre circumstances. I thanked them and walked into the fingerprint room. The fingerprint attendant was a very friendly, almost jovial guy. “Did you know that you have what looks like eczema on your thumb?” I didn’t know that. “It’s not red or anything, but see how you don’t have much of a fingerprint there? That’s a classic sign of eczema.” Interesting. At this point, I thought the whole ordeal would be over soon. The fingerprint guy said, “Okay, looks like we’re done. Only four to six more hours, and you’ll be out of here.” Four to six more hours?

It was six o’clock in the morning now, and I was told to wash my hands and go sit in the waiting room, which reminded me of the old Firesign Theatre joke about the butler ushering a man into his home. He told the man, “You can sit here in the waiting room, or you can wait here in the sitting room.” There was a mens’ side and a womens’ side of the room, which were divided by a short cement wall. The room was gray on gray, with government-green highlights. There were two televisions mounted on the walls, and the sound was only turned up on the mens’ television. Sitting there with me was an assortment of serious drug users and repeat criminals. I kept thinking, BUT I PASSED ALL THE TESTS. I SHOULDN’T EVEN BE HERE. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, while avoiding the burnouts and miscreants I was trapped in there with. On the television was one of Dick Clark’s blooper shows, followed by an ‘urban’ sitcom, followed by Married With Children (a meth-head behind me blurted out, “That’s what I’M talkin’ about,” when MWC came on), followed by an hour-long show about a guy who pretended to be developmentally disabled so that he could run in the Special Olympics and beat their champion, becoming a champion himself and winning a bet for his partner in crime. It was painful.

Around eight o’clock in the morning, they finally called my name. I staggered wearily to the desk and faced another barrage of questions. The woman used the same loud, deliberate tone that they all use, after years of dealing with deadbeats and cretins. “We just need to confirm your identity, okay? Do you understand the question?” You have GOT to be kidding me. Yes. “If you have any friends or family members, we need to call them and talk to them, okay? Do you understand the question?” JESUS CHRIST; I’M NOT ONE OF THESE CRETINS! Yes, I understand the question. The only phone number I know by heart anymore is my mom’s land line, since people rarely have to manually dial phones anymore, so I gave the attendant my mom’s number and name, adding, “This ought to be a nice surprise for her.” The woman told me that it wouldn’t be much longer now. Did I have any questions?

“Yes, actually.” I tried very hard to formulate this sentence in a way that wouldn’t seem flippant. “I passed all of my tests with the officers just now, so I guess I’m wondering why I’m still here.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but you’ve been booked, so you have to follow the procedures just like everybody else.” The phrase ‘just like everybody else’ echoed through my head as I made a quick scan of everybody else in the room. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

I glumly walked back, slumped in my seat, and noticed that Not Just Another Teen Movie was playing on the television now. A staff member went around and provided us with a sack lunch that consisted of a dry bologna sandwich, a piece of dry coffee cake, a hard boiled egg, an orange, and a tiny carton of milk that proclaimed it was “best if used before 04-08.” In my delirium, I thought the date meant April of 2008, and that they were feeding us three-year-old milk. I sniffed the milk nervously before sipping it ever so slowly. With all the recent milk issues my stomach has had, I hoped to God that I wouldn’t explode vomit all over the room. Luckily, I managed to keep it all down. I left the egg and the orange sitting in the bag on the chair next to me, until an attendant wearing a prison-orange jumpsuit took and deposited the bag in the garbage can.

I sat for another two hours, head bowed and eyes closed, barely able to maintain my rapidly declining sense of equilibrium. Suddenly, a little after ten o’clock in the morning, someone came in and announced quietly to the staff, “We have a release.”

“A release?”

“Yeah, for [my last name]. It came in just after you guys showed up the last time.” Incidentally, I should note that ‘the last time’ (the last THREE times, in fact) was for a group of guys who were lining up to have their clothes checked in, so that they could be issued the clothing for their stint in jail. I had been expecting to hear my name each time, and each time it wasn’t called, my nervousness intensified. When they told me I was released, I was too tired to even feel relieved. The man told me to follow the black line, and I was ushered through another maze of electronic doors until I was finally let out to the room where I collected my phone, keys (minus my car key), car insurance card, and debit card.

“I had a laptop, too,” I told the man, “and a bunch of CD’s and a black scarf. Would that stuff be here?”

That stuff turned out to be in the Property Room, which wasn’t the property room I was standing in front of. “You can ask the gentleman over there about the Property Room.” I walked to the gentleman over there, who was seated on a high chair alongside a security checkpoint near the main door to the building. I was almost outside.

“I had a laptop and a few other things in a backpack, and I need to find the Property Room.”

“Oh, that’s not here,” he told me, rattling off a series of rapid-fire directions. “Gooutsideandturnleftandit’sinthissamebuilding, andthengointhedoorandtalktotheguyinthere.”

“Uhhh. . .errr. . .I spent the night here, and I’m a bit sleep-deprived,” I stammered. “So. . .out the door, turn left, and in this building. What’s the department name?” He told me what it was. I thanked him and walked out into the blinding blue morning. After staring at grey and green for the last seven hours, the beauty and color of downtown Portland was overwhelming. I called my mom’s cell phone, but she was unable to answer. I talked to John on the phone for a while, recounting the highlights of the previous hours. I got on the train and headed toward home. Luckily I live close enough that commuting to downtown and back is easy. Mom called back just as I was stepping off the train, and I told her that despite what the call must have sounded like, the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, and that everyone knew I would be cleared of this charge in no time.

I have a court date this week, and I have to get my car and computer and everything back, and those things will surely cost money to resolve. I didn’t need any of this to happen, since I have enough happening already, but I’ll just keep being honest, and I’ll keep doing what I have to do to keep my name clear.

I can’t wait for this ridiculous nightmare to be over.

My older niece is in fifth grade, and every time we talk about school, I feel the need to bite my tongue a bit, because fifth grade was such a rough year for me.  My teacher, Mr. P., was horrendous, and mean, which I suppose is common enough, but that was also the year in which my parents got a divorce, and we were dealing with all that crap at the same time.  School work, naturally, got pushed to the back burner occasionally, as we were shuttled back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s new apartment.  My teacher sent many an angry report card home with me for my mom to acknowledge and sign, but I don’t think she ever saw any of them, because I would forge her signature and dutifully bring the cards right back to school with me the next day.  While I was in Yakima a few months ago for Stepdad’s funeral, Mom gave Brother and me each a box of our childhood stuff.  My box, which I now have here in my basement, was and is crammed full of school papers, drawings, my license plate collection, and even the slightly tattered blue blanket I used to carry around when I was really young.  Sure enough, mixed in with the forgettable mountain of school papers, I found one of those forged report cards.  I find it a bit depressing that with of all the important things I wish I still had (like my cassette tapes, and my toy cars!), that piece of hilarious minutiae somehow managed to survive the intervening decades.

But Niece doesn’t have to know about any of that for quite a while, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t want to burden her with that knowledge, or to use the influence I have over her (as the ‘cool’ uncle) to sway her in that negative direction.  I want her to have the best school experiences she can, for as long as she can.  School’s hard enough without your uncle telling you how crappy it is.  But I do think about it from time to time, and I feel like fifth grade was the first real low point in my life, and that’s when something changed in me forever.

In sixth grade, I had a teacher with the very unfortunate surname of Growcock.  On the first day of school, he would quickly tell the students, “Call me ‘Mister G’.”  Thankfully, he was one of the best, nicest and most memorable teachers I had during elementary school, which helped bring me back from the shell shock of the year before.  He was always quick with a joke, but we knew to take him seriously also.  Each year, he would take the entire sixth-grade class to see a Harlem Globetrotters game in the nearby college town of Ellensburg, which was a tradition that all the younger kids looked forward to.

On Valentines’ Day that year, all of us kids made cards for each other, boys and girls alike.  That was the last year we did that before we all hit puberty the following year, which meant that valentines were out of the question.  One of those valentine folders survived in my childhood box, too, but I’m not sure if it’s the one from fifth or sixth grade.  What I do remember about that day was the folders we all made.  We cut out construction paper and drew a bunch of designs all over it – usually hearts or poems or whatever – and then we taped them to the side of our desks so that people could come around and place cards into them.  One kid, M. Reynolds, wrote a poem on his folder that quoted a popular commercial of the day:  “Reynolds Wrap:  the best wrap around.”  M.’s writing skills were a bit lacking, however, so he misspelled the word ‘wrap’, which meant that his Valentines’ poem was proudly displayed on the side of his desk, in huge bold letters, for all to see.

“REYNOLDS RAPE, THE BEST RAPE AROUND.”

My desk was right next to M.’s, which meant that I got to see that gem in progress before anyone else did, and I knew that it might get him in trouble if anybody else saw it.  I wasn’t necessarily a friend of M.’s, but I felt that I should mention it to Mr. G., and somehow stick up for M. at the same time.  When the bell rang and everyone else, including M., ran outside for recess, I walked up to Mr. G.’s desk and told him I had something to show him.  “I’m sure this is a total accident, since M. isn’t very good at spelling, but I thought you should see this, cause it’s funny.  I don’t want him to get in trouble or anything, though.”  We had a good laugh, and he told me he’d take care of it.  When the class came back inside from recess, M. had crossed out every instance of ‘rape’ and replaced it with the correct word.

Incidentally, I’m sure Mr. G. knew how lucky he was that he taught younger kids, because with the last name Growcock, teaching any older age group would provide decades of ridicule for the poor guy.   Maybe he consciously chose to teach lower grade levels for that very reason.  One of my current friends, who was in Mr. G.’s class at the same time I was, recently joked, “Man, I’d be changing that shit to Smith.“  I couldn’t agree more.  I did a quick search for Mr. G. online, and it seems that he’s still alive and living in central Washington state, although he’s almost eighty years old now.  I hope he continued to enjoy teaching, and I hope he’s had a good life.  I probably owe my sanity that year to him, although I promptly lost it again the next year, as soon as I entered junior high.