See Some ID

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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.