See Some ID

-->

See Some ID

Vern was an engineering student, without a penchant for drama, really, except that he lived for Halloween; he always had, and this year was like the rest. His life was boring, full of studying, but he relished the opportunity to get a good costume, go out, and be someone besides himself for a change. This year he’d met a policeman and got the opportunity to borrow a pretty good uniform and hat. The holster wasn’t hard to find, and he even found a gun that was pretty obviously fake to anyone who knew guns. A corner of it shone out from the holster when he wore it, though. He thought it was a great costume, and he worked hard on making the shoes a shiny black. The final thing was that he’d let his hair grow long and let his beard grow out beforehand, but then, on that night, he got a straight buzz-cut and shaved clean and unrecognizable. He had two parties to go to, one given by some engineering buddies, and another by a fraternity associated with his roommate.

Halloween in Minneapolis is always cold, and dark, and often snowing or sleeting. On this night it was clear but there was a cold frost on the grass that made it slippery and shone in the streetlights. Vern was also aware of the stud in his nose; he’d had to decide whether to remove it, try to cover it, or leave it there, a sure sign that he wasn’t truly a policeman. In the end he decided to do nothing about it. It too shone in the light; Vern was always aware of which way it would shine, and who would notice it. What he didn’t know was how many people would be tipped off that it was a costume. Real policemen don’t have nose studs, do they?

He was walking, and noticed that people had a strong reaction to him right from the start. In fact he hadn’t thought out the consequences of what he was doing very carefully, but he did enjoy making people jump, and watching people behave differently after they saw him. You would think the stud would tip them off, but they seemed to be operating more on first impressions; maybe they saw the uniform more clearly from a distance, and the stud only upon getting closer to him. There was a minor commotion as he entered the party in the first house. It was a typical student off-campus party, with lots of people, lots of noise, and rowdiness, but everyone looked at Vern as if waiting for him to tell them to keep it down, or demand a keg permit. Vern had actually thought of some of the things a policeman should say, and was almost ready to try it, but it occurred to him that he knew very few of these people; although a friend had invited him, that friend didn’t seem to be anywhere around.

The person who owned the house came up to him directly and treated him as if he were an officer; he asked if everything was ok, and Vern soon realized that this guy figured out that this was a costume. But then a woman approached him; he recognized her as Karen, from her Chemistry class. She was slightly shorter than Vern, and had long, pretty, light-colored hair, and lively eyes. But she had an off-white dress with blood on it, and smudged makeup on her face, as if she’d been crying or wiping it off. The blood seemed pretty obviously part of the costume; it wasn’t fresh, but the costume was no longer clear; perhaps she’d been a vampire? She looked like she’d been roughed up a little, and when she looked away from him her eyes were no longer twinkling, but rather glancing nervously around the house.

When she got him alone she told him she really needed to get out of this place, and she would appreciate it if he’d walk her down the street. He said that the other party he was going to was down the street, so sure, he’d take her down there whenever she was ready. She was ready. She had her purse, a little hat and a jacket that were all part of her costume, and she got ready quickly; Vern had already put down a glass of wine, but he set it down, and got ready himself. He was vaguely aware that the party was not all friendly; some people were speaking rather harshly in a nearby room. Vern and Karen said goodbye to the host and walked out the door together.

The frost shone again in the streetlights as they walked down the street; they had a little less than a mile to go to get to the other party. Karen told him she’d just broken up with her boyfriend; he was back at that party. They’d gone together for about a year.

“Why did you do it tonight?” he asked her.

“Don’t know, it was time, I guess,” she said. He got a strange feeling, being with her, and he wanted to act like a cop again. On the one hand, Halloween was his opportunity to not be himself. On the other, upon meeting a new, interesting, available woman, the proper thing to do was to be oneself. It was a dilemma.

But she didn’t mind the drama angle of it a bit. A drunken kid, a student, was walking toward them, slipping a little on the frosty sidewalk, and as he got closer she stopped in horror, pointed at him, and said to Vern, “Officer, that’s the man who did it, I’m sure of it!”

The poor student looked at him in horror. Vern got a stern look on his face and grabbed the drunk kid by the arm.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to see some ID,” he said.

The kid blubbered a bit, and searched around in his pants. Then, suddenly, he took a big wide swing at Vern, trying to punch him in the jaw. But he was very drunk, and when Vern ducked the punch, he ended up falling face first into a frosty lawn, not hurt very badly. Vern pushed his shoulders into the grass; Karen looked on.

“Assault of a police officer, resisting arrest, being a dumb idiot,” he said. “You’re guilty. But you know what? Tonight’s your lucky night, because I’m not going to arrest you. I’ve got better things to do.” He gave the guy a small push and they went on their way.

At the second party a similar commotion started the minute he got there. Unbeknownst to him, people were flushing drugs down the toilet just out of his sight, and apparently this had happened in the previous house as well. No wonder they were getting angry! He still didn’t know this, and it somehow hadn’t occurred to him that something like this would happen.

Once again Karen approached a young man and said, to Vern, “That’s the man who did it! I’m sure of it!” This time he was a young guy with an earring, well-dressed, standing against a wall.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to see some ID,” said Vern again, at a loss for words. He was slow on the uptake this time, not as confident in his identity as a cop.

And sure enough, this time the guy just hauled off and hit him in the jaw. The guy was quick; he didn’t give Vern a chance to duck. And when he was down, on the floor, he hit him again, and then left.

Several people took their licks at Vern; it was a sudden, unexpected opportunity to release aggression toward the image of the police, or the aggressive reaction to the feeling that someone in a police uniform could bring to a party. Vern ended up being dragged to someone’s car and taken to the emergency room, though he hadn’t broken any bones. Karen stuck with him, and maintained, in the emergency room, that he was her friend. The hospital nurses cleaned up his cuts and bruises and put him in a room to sleep it off; when he woke up, it was already afternoon of the following day. He was no longer wearing  a uniform of any kind. Karen was in the chair by his bed, sleeping, but with a cup of hospital coffee in her hand. She still had that off-white dress with blood on it, though now she’d cleaned off the make-up. She was pretty in the afternoon light, but she looked worried, perhaps thinking of that ex-boyfriend.

She denied that he would have hurt Vern; he was back at that other party, and clearly, to her, wasn’t part of the group that had just hauled off and hurt Vern. He, too, had a cheesy costume, she said, apologizing for her own. Vern, she said, had the best costume, he won the prize. But what good did it do? If he was lucky, some insurance company would pay the bill, but she had to go, because she had a Physics assignment due in an hour and a half, and of course they had that Chemistry quiz in the morning. Vern had a headache, and rolled over and slept another hour and a half, before finally stumbling out of the place at about dinnertime. He’d lost an entire day. And he’d lost the desire to ever wear another costume, of any kind.

Foul Strike

I was watching my son’s little league game one night, on the bleachers behind home plate, when I saw an old friend, Roger, and went over and sat with him. I knew him from some social experience somewhere in town, and his kid, in this game, was on the other team. He didn’t seem to mind that I supported my son once in a while by saying, “Go Dragons!” and he also would occasionally call out to his own son, who was on the Pirates. The Dragons were all decked out in green, with green caps; the Pirates were in black and yellow, so it was a pretty sight, with all those 9-year-olds running around playing baseball.

I was happy to find out that he agreed with me about one thing, that we should let the kids enjoy the game of baseball as much as possible, without real interference.

The world of parents is divided into those who agree with that statement, and the rest, and most of the fathers tend to be in the second category; they take baseball way too seriously. They tell their kids what to do; they yell at them. They yell at the umps. They shout about perceived unfairness.

Do they really think their kid is going all the way to the pros? Or that one bad call can ruin their kid’s life? It could be hardwired into them to care intensely about fairness in an umpire’s calls, but in some cases the umpires are kids, fifteen or sixteen, or they tend to make mistakes, sometimes several in a row. It doesn’t really help the kids to see their parents accuse the ump of being blind or being an idiot. Just let them play the game.

In this particular game the ump was an older guy with a big white mustache that you could see every time he took of his mask. He called strikes with a kind of song, which is what happens when you do it for many years, and he was unruffled by criticism, or he didn’t show it. There was this one Dragon parent, Roy, sitting down front, giving him a hard time, saying things like “You call that a strike?” or whatever, and the ump would barely look at him. Roy kept it up, too. He’d also criticize his own kid, Jason, who was a friend of my kid’s, and who was the pitcher for the Dragons for much of the game. Nothing Jason did was good enough for Roy. Roy took it personally that the Dragons were losing, though they were only losing by a couple of runs.

I don’t ride the ump, and I’ve come to leave my kid alone, except to say “Go Dragons!” every once in a while. Of course my own situation is colored by the fact that the more I’m involved with the game, or with how my kid is doing, the worse he seems to do, until it seems like opening my mouth is just about the worst thing that can happen to him, or to the team. It’s almost like, to get me to shut up, they tend to play worse the more I yell. Do the other parents experience this? I’m not sure. But I remember clearly, from both soccer and baseball, that even screaming generic, pro-Dragons messages didn’t ever translate into actual better play on the field; this was how I’d come to back off a little to begin with.

I told Roger about one season my kid was on a team that was coached by two highly competitive people, a lawyer and his assistant, and they were constantly harping at the poor umpires until you could see the umpires lose their patience. That whole season was like that, except for one night, when it rained right before the game and lots of parents of one team failed to show up; because it was an automatic win for the other team, they redistributed kids and just played a game that no longer counted. This game was the best of the season, because parents and coaches alike backed off and let the players work out what was fair, and what was foul. That was the night I realized that what I wanted was for the kids to play ball and have fun, and I could only have that by leaving them alone. It was hard to change my ways; I was one of the worst of the yellers. But I was trying.

Roger agreed with most of this, though he pointed out that, in our town at least, football was even worse. It was my claim that soccer was generally better than baseball in this regard, because the parents didn’t know the rules, or couldn’t see clearly enough to truly interfere with the refs. But he told a story about how a local coach was so hard on the ref, that she finally had to call the police and have him escorted off the field. I remembered hearing about an incident like that, I told him, and tried to recall what I did hear; maybe it was from our babysitter, Rachel, who spent whole summers being a ref at the park, and then coming over to our house to babysit our boys. Rachel had mentioned an incident, maybe two months ago, when she had to call the police and have a coach escorted off the field. It had upset her. She was fifteen, and here was this grown man, the coach, mercilessly badgering her and not backing down even when she told him very directly that she’d kick him out if he didn’t. She’d come over to our house shaking and upset, and we had to calm her down with tea and cookies.

That wasn’t the end of the story, according to Roger. The coach had stayed in the parking lot, because he was so mad and because he was unable to let go of the idea that the ref had, according to him, made some unfair call. Also, he was coach of the team, so he was finding it difficult, perhaps, to just walk away, even after he was escorted off the grounds by the police. But he’d made such a disturbance, there in the parking lot, that eventually the police called for backup to help him get on his way. And this time, a policeman arrived that had known him in high school, and didn’t like him, so they were a bit rough in arresting him and putting him into the car. His belligerence was just disrespectful enough, that that was all the excuse they needed, so they gave him a hard push into the police cruiser. I don’t want to make the police sound unnecessarily rough here, but it’s a small town, so the fact that this one guy knew the coach already was the issue that made people talk about it. Was he unnecessarily rough with him because of something that had happened in high school? The coach ended up breaking his nose in the incident, but worse, was asked not to coach the following year.

We were sitting there, directly behind the ump, and we could see that the ump in this league had a kind of wide strike zone; anything anywhere near the plate was a strike. They had a problem with kids just waiting for four balls, and taking the walk, and this happened often enough that the umps became generous in order to call more strikes. I never question the umps, though, and I wouldn’t even be slick enough to warn our kids about what was going on; I just try not to interfere in any way.  The question, of course, was whether this ump was calling more strikes for the Dragons than for the Pirates, which was Roy’s point, but I didn’t believe so; I know you can barely get through these games before some parent like Roy would say that the treatment was unequal. I sat up there in the bleachers getting steadily more aggravated by Roy’s badgering. I didn’t believe Roy was listening in to Roger’s story; he seemed to be intently watching every strike. Now, in a baseball story, you might expect the game to be close, or to rely on some disputed call, or to hinge on some outrageous umpire’s twisted view of reality. But that’s not going to happen here; it was a beautiful spring night; the ump was doing a good job, the best I could figure, and Roy was badgering him anyway. It didn’t help or hurt the Dragons. The Dragons were a couple of runs behind and staying that way.

I continued talking to Roger about the soccer incident, because I was trying to recall Rachel’s side of the story. I remembered her saying that there was a call that could be called controversial; it went against the son of the coach in question, a young kid who had a Mustang and made a lot of noise in the high school parking lot. She tried to be impartial, she said, but she called what she saw, and she felt like he was guilty. When the kid’s father started badgering her, she thought of giving in and changing the call, but instead the father and the son together made her even madder, and she refused to change the call, instead telling them to behave themselves or else. And from there it went downhill. When she’d told the story she’d had her doubts about her own calls and whether they were purely objective. But at that point she hadn’t even heard about the broken nose; it wasn’t part of her story. You’d think, in a town this small, that story would have got around like lightning, as it did with us adults. But she’s fifteen, and they live in an entirely different world. She cares about justice and fairness, and all that, but nobody tells her what just happened in the parking lot, if you know what I mean, or fills her in on what adults do to each other. It was possible she never even knew what happened to that coach, but I hope she didn’t feel guilty about it. As a ref, you call what you call. You don’t want people’s badgering to change your mind.

Now in the baseball game we were watching, as I was saying, there was no bottom-of-the-ninth moment, no tie game, no nail-biting tension.  This was fine with me, since I’m always afraid my kid will strike out, or let down the team, or do something he shouldn’t. Not to worry. The Dragons were still down by three, late in the game, and Roy was harping at the umpire steadily as he’d been, all game. Then, suddenly, though, a Pirates kid hit a foul ball, behind him, and it headed straight for Roy, who was standing behind the backstop. The ball smashed against the fence as Roy backed off, shocked; his fingers, which had been clutching the fence, almost got crushed by the ball. The ball fell to the ground on the other side of the fence as Roy backed off a little, and the ump called out, “Foul strike!” with his song. At that moment I noticed that the ump, mask off, white mustache and all, was actually smiling at Roy with a smile that said, basically, serves you right, I hope you learn your lesson for getting too close. And Roy did back off a little after that.

Roy came over and talked to us for a few minutes, as the game was ending; he’d apparently heard a little of the story of the coach, and knew more about some bad turn of events that happened to the coach in the short time he was being detained. But Roy never related the two events; he may have heard us talking about how parents and coaches should just back off, but it hadn’t occurred to him to do that himself. People like Roy and that coach take every play seriously, and have very strong feelings of injustice. Who knows what’ll happen with his poor kid.

2-2015

Education of Ivan

Ivan was ten years old when his family moved to a large city in the U.S. At first he liked the U.S. because of the nice technology and good weather, but his view was changed by the things that happened soon after he arrived.

 His father had been a surgeon in Russia, but was unhappy in his hospital, and was hoping to get a better life for his family in the U.S. Unfortunately, he couldn't get a job as a surgeon in the U.S., so he worked for a construction company that was improving a sidewalk in the downtown area. He was running the jackhammer, a backbreaking job, and making a lot of noise as well as stirring up unpleasant dust. A storeowner came out, protested that the noise was disrupting her business, and asked Ivan passionately to stop the jackhammering until business hours were over. Ivan's father's English was poor, but he understood the request; still, he couldn't find his boss, had to do his job, and found no alternative besides refusing. The store owner continued insisting, speaking loudly, perhaps assuming he was deaf from the jackhammering.

Finally Ivan's father made a gesture; he ran his finger along the front of his neck, which, in Russia, would mean, "I've had enough." In the U.S. it is more likely to mean "cut" or "you're finished;" of course Ivan's father didn't know this. The woman took it as a threat, called the police, and had Ivan's father arrested.

 Ivan visited his father in jail where things were getting worse for him. The construction company provided a lawyer, but he wasn't a good one, and he seemed to assume that Ivan's father was guilty, since he was upset when they talked about the incident, and seemed to be disrespectful to the woman. Although the lawyer assured Ivan's father that he would be released immediately, he wasn't. To make matters worse, there was an incident in the jail involving another prisoner starting a fight with Ivan's father, and it looked like the father was being accused of starting that fight also. Authorities held Ivan's father in jail because they assumed he was dangerous.

Ivan's mother considered going back to Russia, but she didn't want to abandon her husband. Ivan became unhappy in school and got into a fight himself, because a neighbor boy found out that his father was in jail and teased him in front of the other schoolchildren. His mother started a new job to support the family, but that meant that Ivan was left alone in the afternoons when he came home from school. He became isolated, depressed and angry.

Eventually, the father was released from jail and came back home. He had, after all, been innocent of everything, although it took a while for everyone to figure that out. He apologized to the store owner and got his job back. However, Ivan became an angry teenager, mad at his father, and unable to fit in successfully at school for many years.
~1997

Do Unto

One time I moved my family to a small town for a couple of years. We took them to church right away; we picked a liberal denomination with a large church downtown and a pastor who I kind of liked personally, though my wife suspected he was an alcoholic. But soon after we got there, on a Saturday right before Halloween, a car rear-ended me out near the Wal-Mart where they were having a pumpkin sale, and when I got out of the car to inspect the damage, I realized it was the pastor’s wife who had done it.

She was devastated, an emotional wreck, and the damage to my car was also greater than it seemed, and made me re-evaluate whether I’d gotten whiplash or not. I hadn’t. It was a pure rear-end collision, clearly her fault, and though she was bawling into her hankie she assured me that she would pay for all the damages, and there was no need to call the police, she was good for her word, and all that. She was, after all, the pastor’s wife, and his reputation was at stake, and they were both what, about sixty, considerably older than I was, so I just did as she wished and took the car over to the shop and left it there for a few days. This wasn’t a problem for me; my wife was gone for a few days anyway, so I had access to another car.

But here’s the strange thing: the following Sunday, the pastor assured me, again, that his insurance would take care of all the damage that was done on Monday night. An intense man was with him at the time, and they were both bearing down on me and shaking my hand. Afterward, I thought to myself, wait, that accident happened on Saturday night. But I hadn’t said anything. He was the pastor, after all. Respect is an important part of these relationships.

Now my kids are in their Sunday School, and that’s what I really like about the place; in a small town, you want lots of people to know and love your kids so when they get in trouble, they have someone on their side. I don’t care what they teach them, it’s usually not too bad, and it’s like school, the parents have to help them make sense of it anyway. I tell you this to let you know, I’m not so interested in the whole dogma of it. Places where they are on you about your personal relationship with Jesus Christ, I don’t care for that so much. My personal relationship is mostly listening to whatever the pastor has to say about him. And I mostly go along with it, I don’t have an argument with it, and I’m glad our denomination is a little more easy-going than most, which is to say, people aren’t constantly checking to be sure you have the same relationship they do. I’m not sure I want everyone to be all interested in that anyway; I feel like they have to give you some leeway there and not make you talk about it all the time, so I talk about it as little as possible, and let them teach my children whatever they want. That’s how I look at it.

A few days later I got my bill for the car, and it was quite substantial, and I dropped it off at the church where, again, the pastor maintained that it would all be taken care of, and I wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. Somehow as I looked at that pastor, in his ordinary clothes, as it was a weekday, I got the impression everything wasn’t just normal. But I only knew part of the story, and besides, they came through with the money, fairly quickly too, so that I could get that car back on the road as soon as possible, for after all, my wife was back, and they didn’t want to have me driving some rent-a-car around. The pastor was acting like he wanted me to just be really happy, have a nice fresh rear end on my car, and forget the whole thing as soon as possible. And meanwhile, I didn’t see his wife anywhere; you’d think she’d be there or make a point to communicate with me about how much it was and how it would be paid. No, she was in the background, and everything went through him. The insurance agent, I found out later, was also in the congregation. He wrote the check and I had the car back pretty quickly.

I still went to that church; I went there for a long time, and I’ll tell you why. Sometimes you’re in the hospital, and it’s really scary, like you think you’re going to die or something, and they ask you if there’s a pastor you’d like to contact to come and pray for you as you die or as you’re about to have surgery. At that moment, and this is a moment I think about a lot, even though it’s never happened to me, it’s got to be someone who doesn’t offend you, someone who’s not going to pry about your personal relationship, or at the very least, someone whose prayer isn’t going to seem to you like the epitome of hypocrisy. This one pastor in town, he had a little too much access to young boys, and there was this long and lurid scandal that dragged out for years, and he wasn’t even Catholic, he was from one of those more dogmatic churches, but I sure wouldn’t want him praying over me. It’s unrelated to dogma, really, I think, except that twisted people are actually attracted to those kinds of positions, just because maybe they think they can talk themselves into getting better, who knows? In the Catholic Church in this town, they had saved a few thousand dollars for some trip to the Holy Land, and one of the priests just up and took it, and went there himself, and disappeared, and they had trouble finding him, it took years. I’m not trying to say that all these holy people are actually some kind of crooks or something, they’re human just like the rest of us, and these things happen, and besides in a small town these stories tend to get embellished and you never know quite what to believe. What I’m saying is, you need someone you can believe in, and for the most part they are ok, and you can believe in them, and when the chips are down you have to believe in the one you just most naturally believe in the most anyway. For me, it was still this pastor.

But it wasn’t until I got some of the paperwork later, and signed off on it all, that I realized that they actually had changed the date on the accident, from Saturday to Monday. And there could be only one reason for it, which was that they didn’t have insurance on Saturday, but they did on Monday. They fully expected me to not care, as long as I got my money, and they were basically right, on some level; I took the money and left them alone. But it haunted me for years, because I did care, and I wondered about that insurance agent, and whether he was in on it or not. Sometimes, during a sermon, I’d picture myself dying, and this old pastor would be blessing my soul, and I’d say, it was Saturday, not Monday, and he would just blame it on his wife like it was all some miscommunication or something. But it never got to that point; we left town, eventually, and I never saw him again. Or his wife, for that matter, who I ‘d really never seen all that much to begin with.

The Pickle

The Pickle

Alonzo grew up in Austin, Texas, so the name Charles Whitman was quite well known to him. He was the ex-Marine who got up on the main tower at the University of Texas-Austin and killed sixteen people in one day, back in 1966, and it seemed like everyone knew somebody he had killed, or was related in some way to the havoc he had wreaked. When Alonzo joined the Marines, it was pointed out to him that Charles Whitman had been a Marine, so he felt, in a way, like this guy had cast a shadow over his life. Every time there was a school shooting his name came up again. People had been talking about him while Alonzo was growing up, and they were still talking about him.

When Alonzo came back from the Marines, he lived with another ex-Marine, Ricardo, in an old house in Austin, and prepared to go to graduate school, where he was eventually to get a degree in Anthropology. He and Ricardo went out drinking a lot, as Austin was good for that, and they'd often end up talking about their "demons." They were referring to the nightmares you would get if you had killed people, as both of them had. Ex-Marines worked together to keep from become Charles Whitmans, and fit back into a society that really didn't understand them or what they had been through, and in that regard, Alonzo and Ricardo were good for each other. In a sense, Austin was worse that way than most places, because people were so busy having fun in Austin, ex-Marines like Alonzo and Ricardo risked becoming even more isolated. So they drank a lot, and comforted each other.

In Ricardo's house, which Alonzo was now living in, was a round jar that appeared to have a brain in it. It had a label, and Alonzo swore the label could have read "Whitman" or something like it, though it was faded. It was an old jar, and whatever it was in there, was in formaldehyde, or a strong-smelling substance. Ricardo just referred to it as "the pickle," and invited Alonzo to move it back to the garage, which he did one day; that's when he saw the label. It disturbed him, but he couldn't get much information out of Ricardo. There were some other graduate students who had lived in the house; there were, at one point, a few other jars like it around; most of the jars had gone away as people moved out, but this one didn't. One time Ricardo said to him, well, if it is a brain, how am I supposed to get rid of it? What do you do with a brain? At that point Ricardo was not advocating removing it; he didn't want to deal with it.

Alonzo forgot about the jar, but after Ricardo moved out, he got married and had a son, and his wife would occasionally ask him about that jar in the garage. "Why not just toss it out?" she'd ask. He thought about what Ricardo said, and left it there, probably too long. His wife knew when it was better to drop a subject, and she did. 

Alonzo thought about the demons, occasionally, too. He'd dealt with his, really, by becoming an expert in Mayan archaeology. Those Mayans had secrets, and Alonzo knew them; this made him feel better about having secrets himself. He'd killed people in Iraq, they'd killed people down there in Mexico and Guatemala, and nobody was free of demons. Demons were the psychic wreckage of killing, the memories of the living. Ricardo dealt with his demons by lifting weights fanatically, and breaking glass whenever he had a chance, for example, in bars. Ricardo and Alonzo still went out drinking regularly; they talked about it.

One night Alonzo pressed Ricardo about the jar. Ricardo was really the only one who could know, since he used to live in the house, and he knew something that he wasn't telling. After they'd drunk a few, Alonzo pressed him more. Finally Ricardo got mad. "It is a brain," he said. "The university had them sitting around, and some people took a whole bunch of them right out of the Animal Resources storeroom, and that's why they were in that house. You can go ahead and get rid of it if you want, Alonzo, I'm sure it's useless now. It's been sitting there what, twenty years?"

Alonzo was aware that he, too, was drunk, and was slurring his words, but he said, "You know what's creepy, is that I could swear it said 'Whitman' on the side. I swear I saw it."

"You need to get rid of that jar," said Ricardo. "You want help? I'll help. Let's go." He never even dealt with the Whitman comment; he just basically got Alonzo to get out of his seat and get in his car. Ricardo insisted. They went to Alonzo's house, opened the garage, and found the jar. They looked at the label, which was now too faded to read. Ricardo wrapped it up in a couple of old rags, and put it out in the middle of the back alley, away from the garage. He took an old axe and smashed the jar in pieces, but, because it was wrapped in old rags, the glass shards didn't fly all over the place; after all, there were kids in the neighborhood; they didn't want a kid walking in glass like that. The smell of formaldehyde was strong, but Ricardo, with his massive frame, shielded Alonzo from seeing the gruesome contents, and he walked the whole mess down the alley to a dumpster, and got Alonzo to walk away from it, and go back to the bar. At the bar, Ricardo argued that he'd felt responsible for the jar, since it was in the house that he'd basically handed over to his friend. It was his job, so he got rid of it. He told Alonzo to forget about it, although, when Alonzo got home, his wife mentioned the noise in the back alley. It had waken her up, and disturbed her, as if she'd known. That was back in about 2007.

Fast forward a few years, and there were a few more school shootings. Sometimes it was a Marine, sometimes it was just a school, but it seemed like every time you turned around, people snapped, people killed people, everybody got rattled. Austin's claim to fame, of course, was having the first, and the worst, but now there were many of them, so many that Alonzo wondered what kind of world he was bringing his kid into. When the Virginia Tech shooting came along, Alonzo was actually relieved, because that was the first one that was actually worse than the Charles Whitman shooting. Some guy somewhere would snap, and Ricardo and Alonzo would talk about demons and how that evil stuff would just build up inside you, if you let it, if you didn't work it out. Alonzo felt lucky, actually; he had a wife and kid; he had a job; he had a friend, Ricardo, who understood his demons and helped him when the nightmares got to him too badly. Every time some shooting happened, he basically thanked God it wasn't him that had snapped.

Eventually, Alonzo was able to get a little more out of Ricardo about the jar. There was one graduate student, in particular, Ricardo said, who had gone over the edge. It seemed to Ricardo that each of the students in that house had had a jar, but this guy moved out, and didn't take his jar. Maybe they had stolen the jars together, from the Animal Resources lab, on a dare, but when it came time to move, this guy wasn't going to move his jar, and left it behind. And something bad had happened to him; Ricardo wasn't sure what, because he didn't know the guy well. But he had always associated the jar with that guy. At first, he said, he wouldn't get rid of the jar, because the guy might come back for it, or because it was too hard to get rid of it. But now, he felt differently, and he hadn't hesitated to just smash it when he had the chance. Ricardo was in an ongoing war with his own demons. If he had an axe and a jar, he'd use the axe on the jar. He'd lost his patience with letting things get under his skin.

Just recently, the news came out. Some brains were missing from the UT-Austin; maybe they were in San Antonio. University officials admitted they didn't know exactly what had happened to them. And, word was, that one of them was that of Charles Whitman, who had actually requested an autopsy before he went on his rampage. Nobody in San Antonio had any idea, the trail had gone cold, and they had to admit, they just weren't sure what had happened. They were old, though, they said; they wouldn't do anyone much good. Probably somebody had just thrown them out, because they needed the space. Ricardo, when he heard that, agreed. "That's how things work at a university," he said. "People lose track of stuff, they'll lose it, because they don't even remember what it is or what it means. Unlike those people in Iraq; the people in Iraq, they'll never forget anything." As he said it, I realized that those people, his demons, were right there with him; they'd been right there all along.

(12-12-14)

The Other Guy's Fault

I detest texters who cost you a light, because they're so busy not paying attention that the green light comes and goes and they still haven't finished their text until the very end of the light. So this one time I saw this happening; there was a little red Mustang right in front of me in a left-turn lane, and I really leaned on the horn, right in her face so to speak, because I didn't want to miss another light. People don't usually honk their horns like that in Texas, so she got a little rattled and gunned it, but the problem was, she was in reverse, so she smashed right into me, right in my face, so to speak, and my Caddy started to let out a plume of steam that kind of altered the visibility.

Why would she be in reverse? At first I thought she'd smashed me deliberately, because she didn't like my horn. But no, I found out later, she was in reverse because she'd gone a little too far into the intersection in the first place, and she'd had to back up right before her boyfriend had face-timed her. And it was game day, which around here means more traffic, unusually high anticipation, people in a hurry, people carrying entire kegs to the parking lots over near the stadium, everybody waiting for them, and all this frenzied activity. So people were not happy that we were still in this left-turn lane with a huge plume of steam rising up over us, and some people started honking and becoming visibly impatient.

I was furious, as I've already said. But lo and behold, when I saw her getting out of her car and coming toward me, everything changed. She also was quite upset, trying to imagine what would happen to her insurance, what it would cost to repair her Mustang and my Caddy, whether to call a tow truck or the police, how to get wherever she was going, and all that. Her boyfriend was yelling at her on the cell phone that she held in her hand, going "Victoria! Victoria! Are you there?" Well of course she's here, idiot, where else would she be? I didn't like this guy already. He had heard the crash, I'm sure, and had some idea what was happening. As it turned out, he could also see a little bit, depending on how she held the phone.

Years later these counseling people taught me that they'd asked everyone how they knew they'd met the love of their life, sometimes in a crowd, or in a situation like this, or wherever. People just know this stuff, and there's no accounting for it. That's kind of what I was going through. I could describe her to you, her long red hair and freckles, all the unique characteristics, but it wouldn't matter, it was other things that did it. Maybe it was that she obviously had this jerk of a boyfriend who would demand that they face-time right while she was turning left on a game day, how insensitive! I had to save her from a guy like that. Face-time, as you may know, is like a phone call on your cell-phone, but you can see the other person, which some people don't like, and they can see you. But what's the point? I don't generally need to see people when I call them.

So we stood there in the road, exchanging insurance information, and the police were there relatively quickly, considering the traffic, and now of course the whole intersection was very backed up, cars going back five or ten blocks in every direction while people tried to get past us. But we weren't going anywhere; it was obvious, to me, anyway, that my Caddy would need a tow. Now her boyfriend was screaming at her something about how whenever somebody hits you from behind, it's his fault. If a car runs into a car in front of it, it's that car's fault, no matter what. Yes, buddy, but this wasn't what happened, I was about to tell him, and I felt like grabbing that phone right out of her hand, but I didn't have to, because suddenly she took the phone and threw it hard on the ground near her own car tires, whereupon it smashed and broke, but ended up way under the car somewhere, where we could still hear this boyfriend going on and on about the other guy's fault. Now this was right before the policeman arrived; the policeman got a sense of what had happened, but he didn't see it directly, because his view was blocked by a delivery truck that was unable to get around us successfully. But right after she'd smashed the phone, she was finding her insurance information and giving it to me, and it was kind of like she was giving me her number, the way she was looking at me, and it was also like, smashing that phone was getting rid of the jerk, he was gone, just like that. That's what it was, as it turned out, because he had given her the phone, and he was the one who had insisted on face-timing or having her always answer it, and, she said, she could get another one easily and it wouldn't have to be all set up on his conditions.

Probably the angriest person in the entire situation was this one football fan right behind me, who was so close to the Caddy that he couldn't just get out and go on his way. Now I know he was a football fan because he was dressed in the local red-and-black, but everyone is, I guess, but he also had these flags on his car.  He was mad partly because the person behind him, a young and helpful graduate student, had simply turned off his car, gotten out of it, and started directing traffic. The graduate student was helping the delivery van get through the intersection; everyone was really impatient; but this football fan directly behind that car kept waving his hands at me like I could get him out of this situation. Sorry, man, my Caddy is blocking the intersection, and you're trapped from behind. There's nothing I can do. He starts honking and yelling like somebody's supposed to do something. Maybe he was honking at the graduate student. He's the one who needed to be somewhere. I was beginning to feel like, football game or whatever, I just wanted to stand here with this woman for a little longer. Leave me alone, I'm concentrating.

The policeman finally had to go over and threaten the football fan with arrest if he didn't shut up and let everyone direct traffic and get out of here. The tow-trucks came; she had one too, but they couldn't get anywhere near us because there was so much traffic stuck or moving around us. The boyfriend, whose yelling under the car finally stopped, arrived on the site and was so angry that she told him to go away and leave her alone, but he said no and raised his voice at her. Maybe it was his red Mustang that had been damaged, or maybe he just wanted his phone, or maybe he saw right away that he was losing her and his world was falling apart, but he was pretty steamed up, and it was all I could do to not step between them. But finally the football fan stepped in and started yelling at him, because he couldn't bear watching a young woman being so mistreated. So now these two men, the football fan and the boyfriend, started pushing and punching each other, and this was a little surprising, because there was a policeman right there, although that policeman may have been preoccupied at the time, but what did they think? Eventually the policeman called for backup, they separated the two men, and hauled them both off for assault, because they'd both swung at each other. Victoria tried her best to reason with the boyfriend, whose name was Charles, but he wasn't seeing reason, he kept pushing the idea that it was my fault, that she needed to get the phone, and that she was acting kind of like she liked me. This last one was true, I hoped.

The football fan, for his part, had kind of a hot temper, as I've said, but once he got out of his car he could see that I couldn't move until I was towed away, and besides, the graduate student who had trapped him from behind wasn't maliciously blocking him in just to keep him trapped all afternoon. As it turned out, he owned a business, and this business had put a lot of money into what they called a tailgate, where they barbequed a pig or whatever, in the parking lot, and drank heavily before the game, and all this cost the business thousands. They didn't care; it was a tax write-off, but it all depended on him bringing the proper ingredients at the right time, probably secret barbeque sauce or whatever, so he'd gotten a little mad that this whole thing was being held up by this accident.

So the football fan and Charles were pushing and punching each other, and this was mostly a problem because it was still a busy street and cars were slowing down going each direction to watch these guys get mad at each other. But eventually the policeman got involved and the backup that he called got involved too; this other guy got there by foot which is obviously faster in this situation, and they arrested these two guys for assault. The football fan was asking if there was anything like "justifiable assault" because this sure was a case where this guy deserved a punch or two, but the policeman was explaining that they could sort out right and wrong with the judge, for now they were just getting off the road. And they did. Victoria put up a cursory fight but was actually a little grateful to see that Charles guy hauled off. Maybe things weren't working out so well for him, and surely not for them. When they hauled off her car, it ran over the phone, and she didn't even look at it.

Years later, we were married, Victoria and I, and we saw that football fan at a game. He said something about how that tailgate had become an enormous thing, and we had to stop by sometime before the next game, but I think that he liked her more than me, and I'm not much of a tailgater anyway. I go to the games as a professional journalist, but I learned to let Victoria do other stuff on those days, because she knew way too many people, they would come around and talk, and I couldn't watch, and she didn't care so much about the game itself anyway. You'd think her texting, face-timing in the car, backing up right into me, and throwing the phone right in front of me would all be red flags that said, watch out for this woman, and yes, my friends told me the same thing; she's obviously not one for cool, careful deliberation.  But it all turned out pretty well, and I ended up writing up all that wild behavior to the fact that she was just at the point of breaking up with that Charles guy, and that was a stressful time. Charles turned out to be a real loser, but that is another story; at least she had the good judgment to ditch him when she had the chance. And years later, I'd tease her about how she'd put on the gas without even realizing she was in reverse; she'd tease me about how she had to smash my Caddy just to get my attention. But, as I said, it all worked out in the end.

(12-14)

Not It

I was sitting at the local park, watching my children one Friday afternoon immediately after school; because it was Friday, the children were joyful, and very active, and it was a beautiful day to be out there swinging on the bars, going down the slide, and doing things kids do. Various parents were on the benches around the outside of the play area, myself included. I was still processing an accident I had seen earlier in the day, which I had come upon while out driving; I had called 9-1-1, and the police had come and asked me a number of questions about what I had seen, but I hadn't seen much and I ended up a little set on edge by the officer's attitude. His attitude, it seemed to me, was that I shouldn't call if I hadn't seen enough of it to really help him figure out what had happened. My attitude was, you don't say what you saw, unless you're sure that's what you saw.

Now this park has a walkway around the play structures, and trees around the edges, and the play structures are set on sand so that kids falling off of them are more likely to be ok. There was a variety of children, ranging from five to about eleven, and they were all tearing around screaming shrilly; my two children, ages nine and six, were involved with a couple others and were yelling "one-two-three not-it!" which, as I understand it, is designed to make one of them "it" so they can start a game of tag. Now they all enjoy tag, pretty much, except that the youngest ones sometimes spend more time as "it" and have a harder time catching the older ones. But this game, "one-two-three not-it," which I'm sure the reader may have encountered, requires everyone's permission, and basically assigns you to be "it" if you are the last to say "not-it." If you just claim that the whole process is unfair, however, because you didn't hear it, or because the speaker of course knows when it will happen, then what can they do? They don't have an "it" until someone agrees to be "it." And sometimes that means they don't have an "it."

Now out of the corner of my eye I saw a kind of creepy man who had advanced upon a young boy, about eight or nine, and kind of had him cornered in a creepy way. It's not that there were corners anywhere, there weren't; it was all out in the open, though over in the edge of the park. The man appeared to be trying to get the boy to go with him, perhaps to a car, or somewhere, without forcing him to do it or making it appear that he was taking the boy against his will. The boy, fortunately, had some sense that this was not a good idea, but was beginning to buckle under the pressure, it appeared; it was hard to say what they were saying, because it was over on the edge of the park. This upset me and I began watching them, but my attention was pulled back to my own children.

That is because one of the other children, one of the ones who was not mine, so to speak, became upset about the outcome of "one-two-three not-it" and began pushing my kid, and calling him names, and this looked like it was going to require some intervention. I shifted on my bench to see if I would have to do something. One doesn't want to intervene in these things; we want the children to work it out for themselves if at all possible, but we all know sometimes there are people in this world, people who make it difficult to just work it out or just find someone who is "it" so that kids can just play the game. I am not an officiator concerning who said "not-it" last, but I know when one kid starts pushing my kid, it's already gone too far. You don't want to be "it," ok, go your own way, maybe some other kid will want to play tag. The kids maneuver around on the playground, stretching their muscles, running and screaming, and it's all a corollary of life, a little dance where good kids grow up and live their lives, and the bad kids start getting singled out, yelled at, chewed out by parents, run off from playing with certain kids, etc.  In this case I just got up, walked over by the offending kid, a scruffy mean-looking fellow, who probably got beat at home regularly, and he ran off, probably determined to get my kid again sometime later.

Now in the back of my mind was that kid across the playground: Did he buckle? Did he have parents around? Who was the creepy man? It occurred to me, in that split second or so, that that man represented every parent's eternal nightmare, the evil stranger preying upon our children. Not that I knew that for a fact; I didn't know him, didn't know the kid, didn't even know the kid's parents. I'd seen the kid before, that's all. That was enough to make me worry about him. 

I glanced in that direction and he was still there, the creepy man, desperately trying to convince the kid of something. I couldn't hear their exact words. The kid was wise to stall, I could see that. Then, to my surprise, from behind them, in two different directions, came two policemen, and they approached the man in such a way that he now was trapped. They talked to him for a while, and clearly made him show an ID. At some point the boy wandered off beneath them. Now I was sitting down again, on the bench, free to just watch them as my own children continued to play. And sure enough, after about twenty minutes, they arrested the guy, read him his rights, and took him over to the police car where they drove him away. Before they left I saw the two policemen talking to each other, and one pointed in my direction; I had no idea what that was about, and was confused momentarily, but since they did nothing except take the creepy guy away, I was left to believe they were just talking about me. It was a brief gesture, but it was clear to me anyway, as if one policeman was pointing me out to the other. Yet neither was the one I'd talked to earlier in the day.

My own children now had a lively game of tag going, and this meant that they were running quickly in front of me, going up the slide, taking stairs and play structures in leaps and bounds, and occasionally arguing about whether one had actually touched the other. This is a normal game, life as it should be, kids filling their lungs with fresh October air.  The little kid who had been the subject of the scene across the park, I lost track of; maybe he'd gone home? There were people who lived near the park who just let their kids go out into it; perhaps they would be more careful next time, or, they would never even know what had happened.

I scanned the news for anything about them finding some pedophile, but found nothing. Later, though, at home, I noticed that my phone had made an accidental call to 9-1-1, probably when I'd shifted in my seat. It was set with 9-1-1 as the top call, and had just redialed and called them right around the time of the incident. They had answered the call, no doubt, and they had pointed at me because they had known that it was I who had originated the call. If they had asked, I would have told them that it was accidental. But I'm glad they came, nevertheless. You don't want guys like that hanging around your park, preying on children. Whatever his business was, I'm glad it was intercepted.

10-14