The DAMM Truth

I’ve had sex.  You know I’ve had it because I have a child, and that child looks like me, my wife, her family and my family.  Babies can be implanted now, and sperm donors are everywhere to be sure, but just take my word for it that the child my wife and I created was crafted using the age-old practice of sexual intercourse.

How dare I mention this?  How dare I sully my wife’s name by inferring that she is not chaste and virginal?  Well, for one thing, when the child was born, nobody started worshiping it as a Messiah from a virgin mother.  That tends to happen when people very much believe that a baby had no human father.  So I don’t think I’m spoiling anyone’s idea of our virginity.

To many, even bringing up the topic of sex is taboo.  That’s my point.  I won’t be going on and on about the ins and outs of sex.  We aren’t going to get down and dirty here.  But it is this feeling of forbidden subject matter that was the cause of much confusion when growing up and very possibly why so many problems around the subject remain today.

My sex education was odd.  I learned about boy parts and girl parts the way many kids do, bathtubs and a little harmless show-and-tell.  I had run across a magazine or two, and had peeked between fingers at inappropriate scenes of movies, but there was no “one source” that put the jumbled mess of imagery together.

Up until the fifth grade, my knowledge of sex was like a big box of Ikea furniture parts that I was slowly emptying onto the living room floor without a set of instructions.  I would think I had the basic structure figured out and then I would pull out two rods with oversized cap thingies and some kind of Allen wrench that didn’t fit into any of the holes.   Eventually I would have all the parts to jam together a couch, but it would be neither comfortable nor aesthetically pleasing.

I new that babies were somehow made using sex, that much was clear from the formula I had studied on the bathroom wall at West Ellensburg Park.   Being from Kittitas, I didn’t get out to that park very often, and when I was there, I had to split my time between the bathroom wall research and the park itself (it was hands down, the coolest park to play in that Ellensburg had to offer, with a big pirate ship wooden structure, and netting, and… I digress).

The formula above the urinal was simple: Jim + Rachel +sex = baby.  So I understood that there were three parts that created a baby.  And I pictured a young man with a t-shirt with the word “Jim” on it and a young woman woman in a slightly better cut t-shirt with “Rachel” written on it, sitting in a plain, well lit room.  On another chair, the word “Sex” sits, spelled out in large three-dimensional block letters.  Then a small puff of smoke erupts on the tiled floor in the middle of the triangle of chairs and a small, diapered baby appears.   Something about that just didn’t seem right.

TSo I scanned the raunchy glyphs around the other disgusting stalls—disgusting in both filthy writing and just plain filth.  I found another interesting etching:  Jenny and Pete are doin’ it.  Beneath that line, with an arrow from “it” in permanent marker was a side drawing of a naked woman with a large protruding belly.  Another, smaller arrow pointed to the belly with the words “baby in there.”

I began doing sexual algebra, solving for the unknown.  Babies came from a boy and a girl with sex.  But babies also came from a boy and a girl “doin’ it.”  The boy, the baby and the girl were all constants, which meant that sex must equal “doin’ it.”  Therefore sex wasn’t a word that just sat in a room making babies.  When sex made a baby, it was some kind of verb, something that was done.  If a boy and a girl do sex, then a baby is drawn inside Jenny’s naked body.  NO!  A baby happens.  That is all.  Babies aren’t cartoons, babies are little people.  I had decoded the mystery.  West Ellensburg Park’s poorly maintained restroom was my repugnant Rosetta Stone.

I had finally put together a major part to a puzzle.  It was frustrating being a kid, wanting to know the answers to questions that parents were too embarrassed to answer.  It was as if the answers to all my sex questions were all around me yet invisible to my mind.  As if sex was everywhere but vanishing whenever questioned—like racism.

Before my formal sex education, I knew only that sex occurred between a man and a woman to make a baby.  Sex required some nudity, some kind of gyrating or thrusting and all this was done during the highly distracting and newly intriguing act of kissing.  I also knew that I liked boobs.

Other than the breast thing and sex being a possible way to access one, or possibly two breasts, I didn’t see the appeal.  I gave up finding out much more, and when the subject came up, I just took the opinion of whoever was talking about it.  I would just nod, or agree that sex was probably pretty good, and that I would probably have sex sometime and have a baby too.  But I wanted neither.  Agreeing just became a way to move the subject along to throwing stars or comic books.

When the time finally came to find out what all the fuss was about, I was ready to fill in the gaps and put this question to rest once and for all.  Permission slips were sent home explaining that we were about to experience sex education, as only a small conservative town could teach it.  And on the off chance that you didn’t want your child to go to hell for viewing what the state deemed necessary to teach, you had the right to keep your child from attending the class.

It was a sunny day at Kittitas Elementary School when all the children were brought inside by the afternoon bell affixed to the charmingly old brick building that housed grades three through six.  The lunch recess discussion of the rest of the day’s schedule had been a flurry of wild speculation.  All the fifth and sixth grade boys and girls would be split up into different rooms.  The girls would be taught by the female teacher’s and the boys would be taught by the one male teacher the elementary school had, Mr. Fields.

By all accounts Dick Fields was a very good man.  He was stern, but fair.  He was kind to the students but didn’t take any crap, and you had best not offer Mr. Fields any crap, because he would simply handle your situation in a way that would make you uncomfortable and never want to do such a thing again.  He was good at his job of teaching a split fifth and sixth grade class of boys and girls.  He was organized, alert and capable of reaching different students with different needs of instruction.  I feel lucky to have had him for a teacher.

My first indication of how Mr. Fields would be at teaching sex education came the morning of the day the afternoon class was to take place.  A girl raised her hand and simply asked if Mr. Fields if he would be teaching her about sex today or would it be a woman.  Everyone perked up to hear the answer because it was a hot topic.  Mr. Fields however, did not perk up.  He perked down.  He looked as if he was about to swallow his tongue and faint right there on the stool he used to address the class with.  Because the other thing Mr. Fields was, was religious.

I had been fairly confident that all my unanswered questions would be crossed off my list that day, but after seeing Mr. Fields reaction to the mere mentioning of sex, I knew that these answers would not come easy, not easy at all.

But on the other hand, Mr. Fields had like five or six kids.  A man like that had to know a thing or two about the birds and the bees.  Thinking back on it now, with all my knowledge of the subject, the only way Mr. Fields couldn’t have the sexual know-how to make five or six children would be that all the children happened by pure chance.  Each child would therefore have needed to have been conceived by incredibly complicated physical accidents inside unbelievably unlikely vortexes of happenstance surrounding both Mr. Fields and his wife, the mother of his children.    He knew about the sex.  He knew plenty about sex but didn’t feel comfortable telling us any of it.

Now it was time for us to receive this knowledge of life-giving sin that was so hotly debated over.  All the boys from the fifth and sixth grades began to file into the old classroom to take seats on the floor, extra desks, the unused radiators or at the seats around the reading tables.  There was a film projector set up in the center of the room with no film in the “ready” position.  All the boys looked around at each other, nervously tapping pencils.

I looked over at my friend Dave, who caught my eye and shrugged.  He looked back at me confidently and gave me the thumbs up, looking like he had been “doin’ it” for years now and he was proud to see his friend finally getting up to speed.  Was it meant to be reassuring?  Was he just putting on a brave face to pump himself up?  Or did Dave possibly have several babies of his own that he wasn’t telling anyone about?

Mr. Fields stood nervously by the door to the classroom, behind two large filing cabinets that shielded him from the rest of the eager audience.  Many of us could see him fidgeting a little, as if he were waiting for something.  It was now one o’clock in the afternoon and he had two hours to pack our heads full of sexual knowledge.  Then it was five after, five minutes later, ten after.  The silent mob was growing internally restless.

The embarrassment in the room was so thick, it was approaching measurable viscosity.  We were at pre-Jell-O levels.  The guilt, shame and general nervous tension in the room was so strong that it would have impeded anyone attempting to flee the room.  The entire class jumped at the sharp two wraps against the classroom door.

Mr. Fields slipped out of the room to address the person who had knocked.  It was another teacher from down the hall where the girl’s class was being held.

“What?!?!” we all heard Mr. Fields exclaim loudly only seconds after stepping outside the door.  Then there was a muffled moan, followed by Mr. Fields stepping back in the classroom and shutting the door.

He took a moment, a solid moment to compose himself.  It didn’t work.  When he finally raised his head to speak, he looked both defeated and as if we were all pointing pistols at him; it was a very complicated facial expression.

“Uh,” Mr. fields began slowly, “the film didn’t come.”  He said it in a way that made me think it was a statement he was repeating to grasp the idea himself rather than to announce it to us.  He looked at the projector and then remembered he was standing in front of about fifty pre-teen boys that needed to know what the hell was about to happen to their bodies, and more importantly, what was going to happen to the bodies of the girls just down the hall.

Mr. Fields, now faced with the very real idea that he would have to walk us all through a subject that he not only didn’t want to talk about but that he believed should not talk about, took a step over to the clean, unmarked slate blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk.   He raised it to the board and touched it to the blackboard.  It looked as if upon contact of the chalk and board, about 400 volts of electricity went through him.  Not the way people on television get shocked, with the flailing and the screaming, but the way someone really gets electrocuted.  The body spasms a little but hunches in on itself quietly.  It looked as if Mr. Fields may have had a small seizure.  He looked up at the board, chalk still resting on the same white, powdery dot that it had been.  He swiveled his head to all of us slowly.  He just needed to write or draw that first thing to get the ball rolling.

Was he about to draw Jenny, with a baby in her belly?  Would the rendering be better/worse/equal to the drawing at West Ellensburg Park?  Or—would the drawing reveal that Mr. Fields was the artist behind the graffiti-gossip message on the dented wall of stall number two?  That was probably a stretch.

It would have been amazing if Mr. Fields had just sucked it up and drew a large cut-away view of a penis and then, next to it, a detailed rendering of a vagina, labeling each area and then gave us a hint at how they connected.  But clearly, that idea was going through his head too and he hastily removed the chalk from the blackboard.

“Does anyone have any questions?” He asked hoping that he had a classroom full of cowards or know-it-alls.  I waited to see if anyone else was going to ask a question, hoping my question would be asked before I had to ask it.  I had about fifteen questions, fifteen, fifteen part questions.  But I looked around the room waiting for someone to ask them for me.  Time felt like it was moving backwards.  I saw the clock on the wall’s minute hand jump back a notch and just stay there.  We all just hung there,  wanting anything to happen, it stayed stone quiet, with nobody breathing too loud, as if an old batch of nitro-glycerin was about to be upset and explode.  It appeared Mr. Fields was about to win our little Sex-Ed standoff—until Kenny Paul raised his hand.

Mr. Fields was terrified.  The rest of us were relieved.  Finally, we were about to get some hot, sexy info courtesy of Kenny “I-talk-about-sexy-things” Paul.  (Before this, he was known as Kenny “I-once-walked-into-the-ocean-in-my-cowboy-boots” Paul.   This new nickname was a blindingly better moniker.)  Mr. Fields called on Kenny with a slight gulp in his throat.

“When a lady has her period, is that the same as a cow going into heat?” Kenny asked in his fake southern accent.

“No,” said Mr. Fields quickly and then scanned the room for other hands, “No other questions?”  He gave half of a beat and then brought his hands together quickly in a very satisfied clap.  “Excellent!  Looks like we’re done a bit early, let’s go play some baseball.”

As much as we all wanted to learn about sex and lady parts and the mysteries of our bodies, sitting in that classroom was like sitting in a pressure cooker.  Nobody complained.  Nobody laughed.  Nobody said a word.  We all simply rose from our seats in unison and filed out the door and onto the baseball diamond for an hour-and-a-half of something we all understood just fine.

As for sex, I just resigned myself to the idea that it was probably going to be something I would really like later and that it would be just another thing for me to mess up and be lousy at.   That summer, I was able to cross off most of my questions by piecing together clues from Three’s Company episodes and an errant partial viewing of Porky’s for which I was punished.

Eventually views lightened up and I was instructed properly on where babies came from and the how’s and the why’s.  It wasn’t nearly as complicated as I had made it out to be in my head—until I started having it, and that’s the Damm truth.

I made a decision this weekend to speak frankly to you, trusted readers, about a very personal issue in my life that may make a few of you out there very uncomfortable. It was a difficult decision, however, this wouldn’t be the Damm Truth if I was afraid to lay a few things on you that might be hard to deal with. I may pay dearly for writing this.

Everyone has skeletons in their closet, things we don’t want to face about ourselves or things we feel we should absolutely be ashamed of but in reality, if we are just honest with ourselves and those of us around us, perhaps the Damm truth wouldn’t be so damn bad.

So gather around and hear the good news. It’s a cautionary tale that bears repeating to everyone you know. I’m going to hip you to some serious stuff that may make your life happier and filled with joy. It certainly has made me happier, healthier and…cleaner.

I’m speaking of course about your lack of dietary fiber.

(Okay, timeout! I’m going to do my best to make this funny without being overly gross, but there will be just a couple well placed, tasteful, poop jokes here. Technically there are no tasteful poop jokes, because we all know, taste is linked to smell. But if I promise that last sentence is the grossest of the bunch, can you promise to read to the end? There really is good info here.)

Why do I feel I must pass on this knowledge of dietary fiber? Because it can make a huge difference in your life balance, your energy level, your cholesterol numbers and your comfort, yes, your comfort. Fiber is “nature’s broom.” I don’t know who first told me that, but I much prefer that term to “Doo-Doo Drano,” or worse, the “Rectal Rooter.” I’m sure I didn’t just make those terms up either (there’s nothing new under the sun).

Fiber moves things along in the body, but it also absorbs things like toxins and bad fat, making room for the good stuff to happen in your body. I’m not a nutritionist, but this is the basic stuff anyone with a little nutritional knowledge can attest to. Fiber is like the responsible clean-up crew that every event needs. In this case an event would just be a meal being digested.

Personally, I found that fiber could help me lower my risk for heart-attack and stroke. Since those two items are waiting for me like a couple bullies at three o’clock by the flag pole, I need to find a way to fight them off. My numbers are down and fiber has helped.

My point is, dietary fiber is the “stop and frisk” bodily law enforcement program that effectively rids the lower intestinal tract of loitering material and toxic elements you find on the way out of town. It’s unpleasant to talk about, but in the end, the area is cleaner and ultimately safer, but in order to have that, you’re going to have to make a sacrifice. You’re going to have to make a conscious effort to eat more fiber.

Let’s all be adults and admit that you’re not getting enough. Well, maybe 1% of you are getting enough, but the rest of us, including me, are not. How could I possibly know that? I just do. You may know you’re getting some, but most of you do not know if you’re getting enough.

Here’s how I know you’re not getting enough fiber. The recommended amount of daily dietary fiber is between twenty-five and thirty grams, some say thirty-five. (Side note: if you know how much 25 to 30 grams weigh and live inside the United States, you may have or had a cocaine problem. Get some help.) Hopefully none of you (In the U.S.) understand metric measures, but it is how our nutrients are displayed on the side of our packaged food thanks to a tragic Rock, Paper, Scissors loss between President Jimmy Carter and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—not the Doonesbury guy.

The average American gets about fourteen grams a day. Now, doing some calculations in my head, that is about half the recommended amount of daily fiber.

Thirty grams of fiber doesn’t seem like that much to ingest in a day, but take a look at the fiber content of the food you eat in a day. I’ll help you out with some.

An eight inch banana has about three grams of fiber in it. That means, and marvel at my math skills here, that you would have to eat ten of those things to get the fiber you need every day. That’s 80 inches of bananas. That’s six feet, eight inches worth of banana.

Some of you are undoubtedly asking the questions: “Wait, how are these eight inches of bananas measured?” “Are we correcting for the banana’s natural curve, like on a Mercator Projection Map? Or are we just measuring from tip to tip? Because when you factor in the arc of the fruit, you technically end up with more banana than eight inches.” The answer is: “Shut up! You’d never eat ten bananas!”

You could eat seven and one half “medium” apples. That means nine large apples in Kansas and six small apples in Washington. Seven-and-a-half apples a day, keeps the gastro-intestinal specialist away; or so the old Civil War era plantation rhyme goes.

You could eat a quart of chopped carrots. That’s the size milk you buy when you are single or are a character on a sitcom. Even spaced out over three meals, that’s a tedious amount of orange to be confronted with ingesting.

You could eat a pint and a quarter of black beans. Not refried, but husky, inconsistently textured black beans. The kind that will inevitably spread out over one of your front teeth at a business lunch, giving the illusion that you are either a meth addict or a member of a fight club.

Or you could face the other, opposite danger, by eating just nine dried figs, just nine. But heed this warning friends: If you start eating dried figs, it is easy to lose count, and if you happen to eat all nine or more in one sitting, they will rumble their way through your small intestine like the boulder that chased Indiana Jones in the opening scene of Raider’s of the Lost Ark. Remember… that boulder stopped short at the exit.

So this is a dilemma! How on Earth do we get enough fiber during a day? It sounds difficult because it is difficult. I have found that my answer lies in a mixture of two pieces.

First, I try to eat fibery foods, I know what foods have lots of fiber and I seek them out: lots of veggies if available, fruits, beans…figs. (Who the heck has figs readily available?) But I know it isn’t enough. The point is, I try to get foods naturally full of fiber somewhere into my daily diet.

The second part is my secret weapon. I use supplements based from crushed up psyllium husk. Psyllium is a plant that produces a fiber filled seed husk that when ground up, can be ingested with water to add that fiber into your diet. It’s the main ingredient in mild fiber laxatives like Citrucel and my personal favorite, Metamucil. It aids in providing excellent soluble fiber that just happens to regulate a healthy bowel movement. There, I said it.

Laxatives like these should not be confused with the more urgent or impatient laxatives that are the subject of practical jokes and used for “quick escapes.” They aren’t the ones used inappropriately for weight lose or in comedy films. They simply move things along in a steady, natural manner.

I have a couple doses a day, spread out to keep an even pace. Sometimes I will send some down ahead of a meal that I know will be particularly greasy or buttery. I’ve found my evenings go much better that way, no pun intended. Holiday dinners are much more enjoyable, AND they help me feel fuller through the day, which helps me control my appetite and leaves me less hungry. I also travel with it, to keep it apart of a daily routine.

I preach on this subject and am proud of it. I feel like people misunderstand the idea and if they just had a little more information, would be willing to try something new. I’m always eager to share some with anyone who will give it a shot.

I have had some instances of social awkwardness with my fiber laxatives. The first one was at the supermarket, when I was picking some up with other odd grocery items.

I know some checkers have to look at what you’re buying and try to make sense of it. If a person buys a loaf of bread, bologna, mayonnaise and a six pack of beer, the checker would naturally think, “overnight babysitter.” But if a person buys two different sized lightbulbs, six onions, a short can of Sprite, aspirin, shoelaces and a box of baking soda, you wouldn’t know what the heck was going on.

I had wandered up to the checkout counter with one of the second group of items. When she got to the big can—I always buy the big can—of Metamucil, she held it up to me with an inquisitive look.

“This is…?” She asked in her medium-thick Ukrainian accent.

“Embarassing,” I thought, “this is…embarrassing.”

“What this is?” she asked before hazarding a pretty good guess, “is drink, Mehbe? Or cleanser?”

“Yep,” I said, “it’s a bit of both.”

She looked at me because she wasn’t putting it together.

“It’s fiber,” I said, making a motion with both hands down the front of my lower digestive tract before reaching the bottom and, realizing how weird my crude sign language was, attempted to recover by spreading my fingers and jetting my hands out quickly before moving them back up in front of my head like jazz hands/spirit fingers. Yes, it was awkward for both of us. But she understood, and now we both were standing there thinking about my colon.

Next up in my basket, tampons and condoms, ask me about those lady. If you thought my sign language was weird before… I didn’t have those other two items.

The next awesome Metamucil moment was when I was returning home from a business trip to Miami. While I was there, I had run out of fiber and had hit the drugstore to replenish. The drugstore didn’t have any of the handy pre-packaged travel pouches that I can add easily to a bottle of water and shake up. But they did have a really big can that was on sale for an excellent price. I could simply buy that and then take it home and use it there. It didn’t have to be travel size, and the dollar to psyllium husk ratio was so excellent, how could I NOT?

The problem came at the security checkpoint. It’s just a bunch of brownish powder in an unassuming half-gallon canister. What could go wrong? At worst, they could think it was anthrax, at best they would mistake it for heroin. Either way, I was clueless as I slid the bag through and then slogged through the metal detector to wait for my bags on the other end.

“What’s this?” hollered a large airport security screener, holding up my huge cylinder of Metamucil for everyone flying Delta, Alaska, and Southwest to see.

Everybody looks when the security line stops. Everybody. Because everyone wants to see if there’s a bomb or a piece of lingerie. So everyone’s head was pointed at the extra-large Orange embarrassment, held aloft as if it was the conclusive evidence of a kangaroo trial. I heard snickers and stifled laughter toward the poor bastard that had his laxative humiliation on display for all to see—soon to be revealed by my raised hand as me.

I heard one mother directly behind me whisper to her college-aged daughter, “Wow, that person must really have to go,” followed by giggling from the both of them.

I seized the moment and caught the mother’s eye and held it with a stone cold face, as I raised my arm beckoning the agent over to me, “Over here, that’s me!” maintaining eye contact, really drilling in the shame to the mother, before breaking it off with a smile and a wink.

When confronted with this situation, I immediately wanted to answer, “Oh, that, yes, well that is colon Kool-Aide.” However, I looked just past the large TSA agent and saw the “absolutely NO JOKING” sign and thought better of saying that. “It’s powdered poop,” I said, thinking it was less funny, but technically true.

“Excuse me?” said the agent, giving me another shot at staying out of airport jail.

“It’s a fiber laxative. It’s technically just a dietary fiber supplement,” turning to the mother and daughter, “everyone here should try it.”

“Oh, alright, well, we’ll just run it through again.”

“So will I,” I thought.

I chatted the security agent up about it. He had questions about the health benefits and I gave him what little I know. “You can have that can if you take it home and give it a shot for a week or two.”

“I’m not allowed to,” he said, though I could tell he was tempted.

“What do you mean?” I asked with a deadpan face, “Are you saying you aren’t allowed to accept an open container of an ingestible laxative as a gift from someone you are screening for nefarious activity?”

“Yeah, that’s about right,” he said.

“What is this world coming to?”

The guard smiled and waved me and my fiber laced carry-on off to my gate.

Just two of the opportunities I’ve had to introduce strangers to the wonders of regularity. There will undoubtedly be more. Who knows? In a few years there will probably be a study that says fiber is what has been killing us all, and we need to try to find a 100% fiber free food. That’s how it always seems to go, but for now, I really am delighted at how a high-fiber diet has made my life better, and that’s the Damm truth.

As we packed up the gear Friday night from our gig at the County Line, Nabil, Martin and I quizzed each other on the surly details and questionable vibe of the evening. We had seen worse things at some of our performances, certainly I had in Okanogan, but the underlying fog of doom that accompanied the decaying establishment was troubling each of us in a different way.

“We need to learn some rap songs,” Martin broke the meditative silence, “you know, so when a person gets out of prison and immediately comes to us to hear one, we don’t get killed.”

“Martin makes a good point,” I agreed, “I think the best remedy for a situation like this would be to learn a hip hop song, country song, real country song, and a death-metal song.” I moved my eyes upwards as if to scan my brain for any other stereo-types that might hurt us for not knowing a genre they requested, “and a Ukrainian song.”

Nabil laughed, “that was weird, wasn’t it? You looked freaked out back there.”

“Yes Nabil,” I nodded, “because I looked into his eyes, and I don’t know what that man did to get into prison: robbery, drugs, forgery, murder, cutting the tags off of mattresses, it didn’t matter. Do you know why it didn’t matter?” I was going to go on whether he nodded back to me or not, “because once in prison this man had to do things to stay alive that compromised what the three of us would feel to be laws of humanity. When I looked into his eyes, I could see what I was to him: currency. I was the type of person that he would trade for cigarettes and toilet wine. Wait, did I say ‘and toilet wine?’ because I meant ‘OR toilet wine.’ When I understood what he was saying to me with his stare, I realized that although I was ‘prison money’ in his world, I wasn’t worth much of it, so he would have to choose between drink and smokes because I wasn’t worth the bundle.”

I was a little edgy after the show especially knowing that we were to play the same gig in just twenty more hours. None of us felt safe, but we had made a commitment to play and cancelling a date, short-notice, because of a “weird vibe” was out of the question. We had to suck it up and come back and play again.

“How was the show?” my wife sleepily asked after I had made it home around 2am. What she wants to hear is “good,” or “not bad,” but what she never heard me say was:

“Dangerous,” I said.

Wendy sat up, “dangerous? What do you mean dangerous?” she was wide awake now, oops.

“Well, we played fine, but I felt like I was in constant peril. The place was…”

“Sketchy?” she finished my sentence.

“Etch A Sketchy,” I added.

“Don’t ever use that again,” Wendy corrected, “how was it dangerous?”

I filled her in on the freshly sprung inmate, the soul-less eyes of the bartender and the general feeling as best she could. She listened as I explained my heightened sense of fear; fear of being stabbed or shot.

Wendy asked the question I had been asking myself the entire way home: Should I play Saturday night at The County Line? I answered her with the logical argument that had gotten me back to feeling alright about returning. The County Line was a functioning bar and business. The “danger” I had worried about would shut a place like that down, and I had simply let my mind get away from me. Me with my overactive imagination and irrational fear of being murdered on matted, beer and tobacco infused carpet.

What I didn’t know was that The County Line had been shut down for precisely that kind of “danger” many times.

I’m not going to lie to you, I looked up how much body armor vests cost on Saturday. I did. The price was around ten times the $200 I stood to make for the drumming.

When I found that discouraging news, I thought maybe I would just take all my cymbals and set them up around me with their flat bottoms facing the direction of any possible on-coming projectiles. Such a setup was ergonomically unacceptable but maybe a night with that configuration would challenge me as a drummer. However, a quick search on Youtube showed me the secret brass alloy that quality percussion cymbals are made of is no match for a 9mm pistol. (Also, Youtube has a video of literally anything you can think of.)

As show-time approached, I started to make my peace with my possible destiny. If I was to fall at the hands of a drunken misanthrope in a misunderstanding over the true lyrics of a Tom Petty song, then so be it. I packed my gear and headed back to the entryway—in all likelihood—to hell.

The Pedro boys were in good spirits. Clearly they had reached the same stage of grief I had over the situation: acceptance. Nabil led us in the back door bravely and without so much as a pause. His strength was inspiring and his professionalism to complete our contracted arrangement made me note that this was the kind of courage seen in battle.

The bartender approached the lit stage area from out of the gloom of the bar with a smile and a bar towel. “You boys played real nice last night,” she said, and it was genuine. “Can we get you some food or drinks?”

Perhaps I had focused too much on the gloom of the situation and should have accepted this hard-working individual as a person who was just a little tired and needed a break. Maybe I had let my own demons get into my head last night and this place wasn’t as bad as I built up in my imagination. I certainly am prone to exaggeration sometimes. Maybe I needed a fresh new attitude to start this gig off right; a fresh attitude and lemonade!

“Thank you ma’am,” I said with a rogue-ish grin, “I would love a lemonade, please.”

I will spare you from the name I was immediately called by the bar-fly that sat nursing the only thing that could keep the tremors away from his hands. He had overheard my request for an un-leaded beverage, judged me to be less than a man, and made his verdict known to me and everyone else in the bar with a shouted insult.

And there it was, the: “no you can’t!” to my: “I can do this!” It was the choke-chain around the neck of this eager Golden Retriever.

“We don’t have lemonade,” said the bartender.

“Of course you don’t,” I mumbled, remembering that lemonade is a life-giving, refreshing nectar capable of bringing sunshine to the most overcast soul. They wouldn’t have ever had it at The County Line. In fact, at that moment, I would have wagered that if I would have gone behind the counter and added sugar to lemon juice and water, the mixture would immediately ferment into some kind of terrible wine. Lemonade can only exist where there is a possibility of happiness—that’s why it is the only product that even the most economically-challenged child can sell—and there is NO happiness at The County Line.

The band set up and began to play. It was a slow night. There were a few in the bar section, again staring at the shiny big screen television. There were also a few couples that wandered in the bandstand area and sat down to listen to us. They dug us, and stayed for the first forty-five minute set.

It’s always great to look out and see people you don’t know really get into what you’re playing. You can’t help but like someone who appreciates what you do. You smile at them, you might pull a funny face, or allow them to come up and sing a tune with you, you become almost friendly with those that watch with admiration the culmination of years of your hard-practiced skilled. It was for that reason, that after every song, as they clapped, I wanted to tell them to go home before something bad happened to them.

“You’re all very kind to come to listen to us, but please, go home quickly, use the emergency exits and get the hell away from this place as fast as you can,” I wanted to say into the microphone. “Take my car if you have to, we don’t all have to die tonight.”

The three of us believed, as was the case the night before, we would probably live through the evening. In this particular case, ‘probably’ equaled about ninety-percent. The ten percent probability of our violent, and in all likelihood Tarantino-esque death, was the fuel that really moved our inner artists to thoroughly and completely lose ourselves into our instruments. You hear how musicians jam? Well we went to the cupboard, pulled down one of mother’s finest, blue-ribbon-winning canned preserves, pushed our paws through the wide mouth and pulled out the sweetest, stickiest, runniest handful of jelly-jam that we could. That’s what a ten percent fear of death can do to a threatened musician. That quartet on the Titanic must have sounded amazing.

It was during one of our longer versions of an already long song that we were treated to the first sad event. The song was “Cortez the Killer” by Neil Young. The song’s original recording off of the Zuma album, recorded by his band, Crazy Horse, was a meandering mess of a beautiful idea. “Cortez’s” original recording sounded like the sound engineer setup a single microphone to record the second rehearsal and then they threw it on the album and shipped it out. Despite its imperfections, the tune is excellent, but that seven-and-a-half minute recording was what we had to start with. Our version was cleaner, better executed and was around twelve minutes long.

During the song, a woman got up to dance. That isn’t odd, it happens all the time, but she was alone and headed out to the completely empty dance floor with purpose. At this point the stage was lit with yellow, red and green cans from the ceiling, but the dance floor was bouncing the beams of two pin-spots off of the rotating mirror-ball, the rest of the dance floor bathed in a black light.

As she started dancing, the black light attached to all the light-colored areas of her clothing. The acid-stained patches of the original 1987 denim pants she had spent an hour squeezing into that night glowed purple, as did the three white scrunchies she had knotted up her greasy-blonde ponytail with about three inches separating them. The soles of her flip-flop sandals were flashing purple with each spin. There was an interrupted line of fluorescent purple just behind both of her ears, about the size of cigarettes… because they were cigarettes.

She danced the way people should dance, with reckless abandon, and it was reckless. There was a substantial amount of real estate and she intended to use all of it.

Anyone could see that she wasn’t built for speed, but try arguing that with physics once momentum took its course. The woman skated around the large dance-floor with surprising grace. She looked like Tonya Harding, but if Tonya’s outsides matched her insides. You know, awful.

Now sweaty with the excessive movement, the rotund woman pranced, then bounded toward the stage. Martin and Nabil, almost completely lost in the progression of the song, quickly calculated what it would take to stop this woman and stepped out of her path. She stopped short and leaned over the front of the stage with surprising control and looked up at the three of us exposing a sly smile revealing several vacancies available for a tooth or three, if any traveling enamel needed a place to stay.

We all wondered what the smile was about, and she quickly shuffled her feet straight back out onto the dance floor, back-pedaling with both hands now grasping the front of her shirt. She hit the center of the floor under the mirror-ball and with dramatic force, ripped her button-up blouse open and then off of her body, revealing a hazy, purple-glowing, over-burdened brassiere.

What a treat.

There was a single “hoot” from the bar but none of the silhouettes turned around for the spectacle. Was this a regular show, not worthy of distraction from whatever reality series was running on the tube? Perhaps the patrons already knew to look away from this spell-binding performance of desperate, exotic dance.

As brutal an image as it was, it certainly was hypnotic. I tried to avert my eyes as one would attempt to avoid staring at a wrecked locomotive with escaping circus animals. It simply could not be done. The scene was like a live-action version of a dancing hippopotamus from Disney’s Fantasia with a hint of the “Pink Elephant” scene in Dumbo.

The dance itself was a mixture of the worst elements of Jazz, Interpretive and Modern styles, certainly tribal, but of what tribe in the world? Her spins were dizzyingly fast, with kicks lashing out from her torso. It was clear now that she had to dance alone. She would have kicked the crap out of any partner, maybe even knocked them out. But still we let her dance.

Nabil figured we should keep the song going, it was sounding good and we were getting a fascinating floor show. My only concern was the integrity of that dirty, sweat stained bra. Would it hold? I was certain that if the maxed out undergarment blew open, or if a breast somehow got loose, results could be cataclysmic. Without the assistance of the restraining power of a strong brassiere, the shirt wouldn’t be able to go back on either. It would take some serious time to pack even one of those floppy suckers back into one of those cups.

Please understand that the horrible nature of the ocular offense was NOT that the woman was too heavy. The size and dancing ability of the woman would have been completely socially acceptable, even graceful and pleasant, had the third important piece of the equation been correct. It was not that the woman who was too big, but the clothes were too small. Had she had clothes that did not require Vaseline and vice-grips to get into, she just would have been another lady dancing… and removing her shirt. Instead we had a dark reminder of where bad choices, bad clothing choices, can land you; and that is the dance floor of The County Line.

She made an ungrateful exit of the dance floor under the veil of some unlucky person’s satin jacket with the help of an annoyed but understanding bar-maid. The struggle was brief, with a short reprise of a double spin by the punching-bag machine, and then she was removed from our sight cooperatively, because you can’t make a woman like that leave anywhere if she doesn’t at least subconsciously want to go—not without a dually pickup truck and a cable winch.

The guys and I hoped that would be the last of our strange occurrences for the evening. But hope is just a wish, a wish is just a dream, and a dream always seems to evaporate away when you open your eyes.

A large group of rowdy young women came in as part of a bachelorette celebration. One of those lucky ladies was getting hitched soon, so they chose to get together at… The County Line.

How a young group of women could have chosen that place for the festivities completely blew my mind. I can only imagine that The County Line was on a dartboard of choices somewhere and the thrower was blindfolded—and impaired in some way. Perhaps it came down to a coin toss for their two choices, The County Line or the ladies restroom at a Greyhound Station and “tails” one. Did the bridesmaids hate the soon-to-be betrothed?

Yes.

They sat far off in the distance, closer to the bar. There were close to ten of them, all decked out in flashy attire and “fun” feather boas. From farther away, we could hear their party getting louder and louder, with high-pitched giggling and squeals turning to shouts and challenges. They were difficult to see, but they began to rumble dangerously close to the limit of public social acceptableness. It was difficult to see all that was going on at their table, but I did see them drunkenly invite two or three sauced men from their well worn grooves in the barstools over to the party table.

The men, later victims, were about twice the ages of the females waiting for them. Though I had not seen one of those men move more than a lifted elbow the entire night, they seemed to come alive in a very jerky, clunky way, like statues that had just been animated from slumber. They were their own victims of atrophied muscles and poor circulation.

The band was coming up on its final set break of the evening and it was a good thing too. Somehow, despite the lack of lemonade, I had to pee, and it certainly wasn’t going to wait until we were done for the night. After a few minutes of silent debate, I made the difficult decision to use the restroom. I really had to go, but I had misgivings about exposing even the slightest amount of flesh to the environment of The County Line.

The restroom was located just beyond the bachelorette party table, through a greasy black swinging door with one of those brass plates, where everyone is invited to place their hand to push the door open. It appeared to have had a hole eaten through it via tarnish or some other communicable evil. (I used my foot.)

As I passed by the table, I heard nothing but the seven words you aren’t supposed to say on television mixed with several new ones and variations on combinations of lot. The ideas being expressed at that table would have made a table full of drunken pirates stand up and leave in a huff. One of them caught my eye and sneered at me as I passed, offering her middle finger as probably the most polite things expressed through all of their separate discussions. The girl with the finger was sitting next to a bleary-eyed drunkard whose unassuming smile was the last thing I saw before I entered the bathroom.

Surprise! The restroom was fine. It was even clean enough, I had decided, for me to wash my hands. Let’s face it, sometimes in a select few establishments, it does more harm than good.

As I exited the restroom, I saw that the Bachelorette table had erupted into “riot level” violence. All were on their feet and attacking the helpless men that they had invited over. It must have happened seconds after I had entered the bathroom, because the fight was in full swing. My first thought was that the women were eating the men, or at least prepping them to be eaten immediately. They were on top of those poor lushy bastards with a fever!

I had seen bottles broken on heads before, but when I saw one of the women pick up a pounder beer glass and smash it over the head of a man, severely lacerating his scalp beneath his under-shampooed curly black locks, I thought to myself, “This is it.”

This was not it. As the blood started to stream down the dazed, drunk’s face, I started to back away from the brawl quickly toward the stage. Somebody yelled, “knife!” and I double timed it to the stage. The bartenders could not get the fight under control and within minutes, every single deputy sheriff in King County was in or around The County Line bar. Every. Single. One.

It must have been a planned ambush between two ancient Southwest Seattle street gangs. The White Center Womyn versus the SODO Jerks over some unsettled score concerning payphone turf, or something chronologically pointless like that. The Womyn went in looking like a bachelorette party and invite the Jerks over for some drinks and an epic beatdown for which sutures would be required.

“Well,” Piped Nabil, “Shows over.”

Martin and I didn’t argue. That many law-enforcement officials meant that the bar would be shut down for the night. We packed up quickly and made for our vehicles outside, getting paid the full amount despite performing one hour set too short. I didn’t feel bad. I can never un-see a glass tearing open a man’s head with purpose so I figured we earned every dime.

We talked behind the place for a few minutes, all debriefing what had happened. We agreed that if The County Line ever re-opened, we wouldn’t play there again. We also agreed that we would play better gigs, gigs that didn’t require us to price out body-armor.

Because good generally triumphs over evil, I’m happy to say that the establishment is no longer open for business. Coincidently since the demise of the establishment, cases of dysentery in the Seattle Metro area are down dramatically. Well, I don’t know if that’s really true, but it is closed. It may have never re-opened after that night. That night may well have been the swan song of a place that should have died out years ago, maybe with those awful aluminum beer-can pull-tabs in the early eighties.
After all, like the sharp, detachable tabs, The County Line had been responsible for some ugly cuts too, and that’s the Damm truth.

 

When people talk about Seattle on television, they always seem to talk about it as an ideal place to visit or escape to, or they make a joke about the rain. It’s considered a city many hold in their mind to be safe, interesting, maybe a little exotic and just out of reach of the world a television writer creates.

Do you have a character that isn’t in the episode because the actor is shooting a movie? “Oh, they are in Seattle for a conference,” or “She’s visiting her sister in Seattle,” or if the show is Grey’s Anatomy, “They’re in Ballard.” People have the idea in their head that it is a city of television limbo. Neither good nor bad will happen there, it’s just where character’s go when they are off screen.

One of the nice things about Seattle is that people view it as a decent place to go or live but usually choose to go someplace else with their vacation dollar. Seattleites are fine with that. But what most people either forget, or do not realize is that Seattle has a seedy underbelly too.

For many years that seedy underbelly made its headquarters at a bar called The County Line. The County Line was located in South West Seattle in the more industrial area of The Emerald City. When I say that the bar was a “seedy underbelly,” understand that I don’t mean that it was where all Seattle crime came from or that it was pure evil. I don’t know if there is such a place. The bar was simply a place that could be counted on, night after night, to have bad things happen. It resembled a social club where the only requirement for membership was that all of your hopes and dreams have been ripped away from you, OR, you had to be dangling from the end of your rope.

I had been playing steadily with my cover band for over a year when we got the call to play The County Line for a rare two-night engagement. The rest of the band had played there on a Thursday night several months earlier when I was booked out of town at another rough bar. That Thursday night I remember that we were trying to one-up each other with who was playing the creepier place. For my part, I sent a picture of a stuffed pheasant next to a skunk pelt. They replied with a simple message, “we still win,” was all it said.

I will be fair and say that when we arrived Friday, the load-in was very easy. There was a back door by the stage, and as I set up, the place didn’t seem so bad. Sure, it was a little run-down, and yes, the place looked as updated as it did right after the re-model in 1981, but many, many bars and clubs are like this. Some are even worse.

It was only going to be Nabil and Martin other than myself playing that night, Jeff being absent for some vague reason. Nabil and Martin were good enough for us to make it happen as a three-piece so we figured we’d take the gigs and the money that came along with it. We figured it would be one of those gigs where there wouldn’t be much going on and we could just relax and play what we wanted to play; this as opposed to the gigs where there is plenty going on and we would just relax and play what we wanted to play.

After setting up, it is proper band etiquette to approach the bar, order something and tip. Maybe you chit-chat with the bartender or a regular and generally give the impression that you respect them and they can look forward to music, good or bad, from a band that is at least friendly. It smoothes the surface and lays the groundwork for getting hired again, as long as both parties agree that the gig was pleasant.

I wouldn’t say that I have a “winning” smile, but on good days I can take third or possibly tie for second place. I wore that smile up to the bar, hoping to catch the bartender, make a joke, order a Coke and then find out what kind of a night we were in for.

One of my better talents is reading people. I can usually put together a fairly accurate story on a person quickly and gauge what kind of joke I should tell, whether I should look them directly in the eye or if they are possibly wanted in six different states. When the bartender turned to face me, I wasn’t prepared for the story I was reading on her face.

She wasn’t disfigured or visually unpleasant in any way, instead, I could see a crippling weight of depression sitting on her shoulders. It was as if she had been instructed to carry a camel around the back of her neck; a camel that was loaded up with all the wares for display at the weekend bazaar. It was all she could do to lift the corners of her mouth into a smile.

“What can I git’ ya, darlin’,” came out of her mouth, like the pre-recorded message on an ancient answering machine tape. Judging from the well worn carpet bags under her eyes, I guessed it had been at least thirty hours since those eyes had been closed for more than twenty minutes. I wondered how many times that phrase had passed through her lips in that thirty-hour stretch, how many people had she called “darlin’?”

“One Coke please,” I managed.

“Pepsi,” she said. It wasn’t a question, like: “Oh, the owner wanted to save eight dollars a month on soda delivery so he went with the crappier choice, so is Pepsi okay?” It was a statement, as in: “You’re getting a Pepsi. You’re not going to say ‘no’ to the sugar and caffeine because look around you, we’re all chemically dependent so you’re going to drink what I give you and that’s Pepsi.”

As she was filling the glass with Pepsi, which had probably only been used to mix drinks since 1992 when the last soft drink in that bar was ordered, I looked to the gentleman hunched over the bar to the left of me. He slowly turned his gaze from the television on the wall behind the bar to meet mine. He was showing me eyes that had seen too much.

My nod and smile was met with no reaction whatsoever, and his head turned back to the unyielding images of the television as slowly as he had turned to look at me. The thought had immediately hit me that this place would be a great metaphor for Purgatory, but then I wondered if perhaps this might actually be a waiting room for someone awaiting judgment on their soul.

What if the gentleman next to me had died and had some kind of legal lien or easement placed on his soul from a deal he had made early on in his life with the devil. Maybe he hadn’t sold his soul, but perhaps pawned it for a carton of filter-less cigarettes in his youth and then couldn’t find his claim ticket, so he was sent to one of these satellite offices of purgatory.

That’s how dark the scene became in the bar in a very short amount of time. The place conjured up images of netherworld damnation that seemed only too possible. It took me a few minutes to attempt walking out the loading door before I finally tried. I worried that if I walked out the door, I would somehow be walking back IN to the The County Line, and further attempts to leave would just put me back inside the building.

Nabil and Martin were chatty as usual, but kept their voices down. The longer we stayed in the bar, the darker the mood became. We all were realizing that we weren’t just playing a dive bar, but an Acapulco-cliff-dive-bar.

Aside from the ample stage, the room was large enough to accommodate a hundred or so people, with a dance floor big enough for at least a dozen couples to shake their butts at the same time without the dangers of accidentally doin’ the Bump. Beyond the dance floor were tippy tables surrounded by uneven, padded, metal framed chairs. There was a bank of old flashing, colored lights above the dance-floor with a genuine disco ball that looked new. Later, I would wonder if the old disco ball was tucked away in some evidence locker with the dried blood still stained upon the mirrors from some horrible dance-floor bludgeoning.

However, when the band began playing, it was just another gig and we worked through several songs, finishing each to the grateful sounds of crickets in the empty audience. Anyone who came in, stuck close to the bar. But we did have one visitor who was over-the-top. I’ll call her Maggie, though I’m sure that isn’t her name.

She had entered the bar and waved at Nabil as she sat down in the closest table to the stage with a beer. I could tell she was watching Nabil closely but I couldn’t figure out if it was a relative or perhaps a co-worker that happened to live nearby, finally fulfilling the unspoken duty to patronize a colleague’s show.

Maggie had quit her job up in Canada and was pulling a camp-trailer around the upper-half of North America on an extended soul searching. Although she hadn’t found that soul yet, she had stayed in Seattle a bit longer after discovering the music styling of the brothers Kausal-Hayes, of whom Nabil is one of. She had been showing up to the brother’s shows for the last few weeks to take in note after intoxicating note of the Kausal-Hayes musical mojo.

Nabil and his brother Justin are both gifted guitar players and singers. Every single time I play with them I am impressed with some aspect of their musicianship. When Nabil isn’t playing with our band, he’s often playing solo acoustic gigs or with Justin, who also plays solo and in no fewer than sixteen bands at a time. On top of being talented minstrels with showmanship and charm, Nabil is tall and ruggedly handsome, while Justin could be described as a “dashing derelict” or “hobo-handsome.” Both types of man proved to be irresistible to a wandering Canadian woman looking for adventure and purpose.

At the break, Nabil tuned his guitar on stage and Maggie approached and waited for him to notice her. It was a little uncomfortable to watch her wait for him to look up for so long, but when he did, she smiled at him and put her arms out for a hug.

Aunt maybe? She pulled Nabil in tight. Favorite aunt, perhaps? Her fingers curled around his body and her eyes rolled back in her head before the lids closed in hungry satisfaction. Definitely not his aunt, I decided as she held the hug just a little too long. It was clear Nabil wasn’t thrilled at the touch of this woman and although he was polite, he immediately began transmitting the vibe that he was unavailable.

Maggie was probably ten to fifteen years Nabil’s senior and not un-attractive. She was clearly a strong hearted woman who was comfortable traveling from town to town, exploring possibilities along the way. I admired her independent spirit and was a tiny-bit jealous of her interesting adventure. She was a woman that knew what she wanted and for the couple of weeks she was in town, she knew she wanted Nabil… or Justin… or both.

“So what is the story on her?” I asked.

“Oh, uh, Maggie is travelling around the region with her camper, seeing shows and site-seeing,” Nabil said, dreading but expecting further questions.

“So did she randomly select this most excellent venue for show seeing, or is she an old friend…?” I hinted that I had no idea what she was there for.

“Yeah, Maggie has been following Justin around town, seeing all his shows in the last week or so, she really has the hots for him,” said Nabil.

“Isn’t Justin playing up at the Celtic Swell tonight?” I asked, knowing full well that Justin was indeed beginning his set at the Celtic Swell pub at that very moment.

“Uh, yeah, he is,” he looked about as uncomfortable as I was trying to make him.

“Well, either she is misinformed on the address or she is here to learn from you the secret to Justin’s heart, but she sure doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get to HIS show,” I said. I held his gaze for a moment, adding, “She wants to be as close to you as possible…naked.”

Nabil blushed before Martin walked over with his knowing, Argentinian laugh. He was less subtle, “Nabilly! Do you think she’s going to let you finish the show before she carries you off to have her way with you? Because it would be nice to get paid for this gig,” Martin and I laughed a bit before Martin looked at Nabil with his big finish, “I don’t think Steve and I can protect you this time.”

That was a lie. Although I didn’t think Martin or I was a match for Maggie on our own, I would have put even money on us as a team. Maggie had determination on her side.

Nabil was a good sport but clearly didn’t want anything to do with Maggie other than for her to enjoy the music and to have safe travels as she left Seattle. For at least another hour, Maggie sat transfixed on the part of the stage where Nabil stood, singing only to her, because she was simply the only other person in the room. It was a little creepy, but more of the sad variety than the scary kind.

After Maggie gave up and left the bar, towing her lonely camp trailer with her, the bar picked up a little. I could see the silhouettes of around six patrons in the glow of the bar’s big-screen TV. A large man and a tiny woman, dressed for a night on the town, shuffled across the dance floor as we played. They stopped and stared at us for a moment. The large, intimidating man cocked his head to the side and soured his face at us a little. Then he took it upon himself to step up on the stage and approached me at the drum set.

Although I’m usually busy back there, moving all my limbs in different rhythmic patterns while both guiding and improvising inside a specific song structure, I welcome people to come to me on stage whenever they wish and shout things at me over the loudest noise in the venue. People, feel free to address drummers wherever you go and ask for things that we could not possibly hear, even if we cared to know what it is you’re saying—we don’t.

However, when a man of this size has a request, no matter how inappropriate a manner in which he requests it, I tend to listen. I value not only my life, but also the way my skin doesn’t naturally open up and bleed or how my teeth have a tendency to stay rooted firmly in my mouth. If I feel that granting a musical request will specifically keep all those things the same then I’m all ears, giant, scary man.

Martin and Nabil continued to play while glancing over to see what was going on with me. I was drumming and concentrating on the words coming out of the man’s mouth, trying to string together a meaning over the din of the music.

“DOHW DJOOO AAAHmm ADDEE EHHP AOHP?” bellowed the man. But decoding the sound was like trying to understand someone under water. The man did not want to have to repeat himself, and I wasn’t about to disappoint him. I smiled and nodded, indicating to the man to wait for a moment for us to wrap up the song.

I moved my head to Nabil as to indicate that we should end the song soon, but he believed I wanted us to take the chord progression around again, which we did. That didn’t make the man terribly happy with us. Finally we made it to the end of the song, and I invited the man to speak.

“I just got out of prison and I need to hear some hip-hop or R&B RIGHT NOW!” he said loudly. But I am paraphrasing. To express that the request was urgent and to be granted to his liking, he added in some fairly graphic language. It wasn’t polite language and it had the desired effect. I did, in fact feel intimidated.

The man left the stage, took his girlfriend by the arm and stepped to the middle of the dance floor in preparation for a song that was to his liking; a song we couldn’t easily play without a sampler, drum machine, turntable or an up-and-coming rap artist to feature during the bridge. We had none of those things.

Nabil asked what it was the guy wanted. I explained that we needed to play a rhythm and blues or hip-hop song immediately or the man may have to go BACK to prison tonight.

“Oh, okay,” Nabil said and launched into a VERY NOT hip-hop version of The Joker, by the Steve Miller band; a tune I think we can all agree is decidedly not either of the desired genres.

The man on the dance floor looked at me like I had betrayed him, made a fool out of him and purposefully disrespected him on the day after he got out of prison—not jail—PRISON. Before we made it to the signature guitar wolf-whistle in the first verse of the song, the man was standing to the side of the stage staring at me like I was wasting his time. He stood there looking at me the whole time.

There was a moment that I looked to the man for validation when Mr. Miller mentions that he is a “midnight toker,” hoping that marijuana would bridge the culture gap between classic rock and hip-hop.

It did not.

When that song finally came to an end, I pleaded with Nabil, “I know you don’t know any of that rap or hip-hop stuff. Don’t you know that I know that? But you see Nabil, that giant man that looks like he has nothing to lose, he came here to listen to some rhythm and blues.” I began to nervously beg, “He JUST got out of Prison, Nabil, and all he wants is for us to play one little hip-hop and/or R&B song. Look at his hands Nabil—prison hands.”

“We don’t really know any as a three-piece,” Nabil began, “maybe if Jeff were here…”

“JEFF ISN’T HERE!” I yelled, “Now use that fancy-ass phone of yours and pull a hip-hop dance track down for us to fake it through, or that man will hurt me and perhaps US.”

As Nabil and Martin put their heads together to find a hip-hop tune, I turned and smiled back at the gentleman impatiently waiting to hear what we couldn’t play. I decided to take matters into my own hands with the only song I could think of. I started up a dance groove and pulled my microphone in closer to sing the lead.

“Whatcha goin’ do with all that junk, all that junk inside that trunk,” I sang from the Black Eyed Peas before switching to Fergie’s part in the same song, “Imo get get get get you drunk, get you love drunk off my hump.” I stole a peak to see if it was working. The man and woman were dancing, but the man was looking at me strangely, possibly because the poor imitation of the song was barely passable—barely recognizable as a hip-hop song.

Nabil and Martin had given up looking for a hip hop song and now were standing to the side of the stage looking at me with confused disgust.

“I met a girl down at the disco, she said hey, hey…” I continued. This was less like a performance and more like watching a bad-guy from an old cowboy movie make some poor goat-herder dance by shooting at his feet. And just like the goat-herder, my performance was built more on desperation and fear than on the technique and craft.

When I had run out of words to sing, I kept the beat going for a minute until the man on the dance floor just shook his head at us and waved us off as he walked away with his lady-friend into the shrouded bar area toward the front door.

By that time, we only had a few more songs to do before we called it a night. As we were packing up, I asked Nabil if it was like this on the Thursday he had played there months before.

“Tonight was dead,” he said, “tomorrow night should be busier.”

“Should I be afraid,” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Will I be in more danger?” I asked.

This time he paused, the kind of pause that would give you the sense that he might not think it would be that bad.

“Definitely,” he said.

He was correct.

 

To be Continued in:

The County Line – Saturday Night

Several years ago, my friend Dan from elementary school delivered to me a very special book.  It wasn’t fancy or a hardcover you could find in a store.  It had no cataloging ISBN number to identify it.  Instead, it had been photocopied together and bound together inside one of the nicer faux-leather (plastic), three-ring style portfolio covers, with a little window for what was usually reserved as the title and author page.  Instead of any words to identify it, there was only a rough drawing of what appeared to be a rifle of unknown manufacturer’s origin.

It was a collection of short stories—very short stories—that were written by, and about several fifth and sixth grade boys.  These stories explored the rich textures of what it was to be transitioning from innocence into life’s experience.  The writing often broached global politics and turmoil, intertwining with the real-life trials and tribulations of adolescent hormones, crushes and took restless youth angst to a whole new level.  These stories were seething with conflict, ego, super ego, super-duper ego and a warped distortion of values that could only be gleaned from the action movie heroes and comic books of the mid 1980’s.

I know what you’re thinking.  “This book sounds Amazing!  How can I get my hands on these fabulous stories?”

You cannot.  They are not available for reading, and here’s why:  As wonderful as they are to me and possibly the five other authors of the stories, they are truly terrible pieces of literature.  In fact, I don’t believe that it can be called literature legally.  I don’t think the stories can really be considered anything more than lengthy discourses linked by ridiculous, superficial ideas.  But at that moment in our combined histories lived a jointly held vision expressed in the only way we knew how; one-or two page stories that would barely pass as a pitch for a movie (though they were still better than several of the Fast and the Furious films).

I don’t know what the catalyst was that ignited the hotbed of action-prose that awakened in Mr. Fields’ split fifth/six classroom, but I can tell you that once the subject took hold of us, it refused to let go.  We grabbed a concept, and we fed off of it together as a team of writers, making our own way and adding to a timeline that had no definite past, present or future.  Stories were simply written into the universe we created and if the characters overlapped awkwardly into other stories that were supposedly taking place, well, that was alright.  Nobody was griping about continuity issues or our exploitation of fundamental rules.

The subject, or subjects, was/were us as extensions of ourselves.  The six of us, Dave, Justin, Barret, Arthur, Dan and myself became heroes in our own collective minds, using our stories to become the people we wanted to be: brave, attractive, smart, deadly ninja-fighting (above all), country defending super soldiers.

The characters we wrote about were kids recruited into an ultra-special forces unit and trained in combat, espionage, martial arts, and intelligence.  The back story was that we had all been trained at summer camps while growing up and we operated as a deadly-first strike team for the United States Government.  Through these characters, we became everything we were not in real life.  This meant we could write ourselves into and out of any ordeal we could think of, mostly saving hostages and killing bad guys.

We chose a clever—not-so-clever— acronym for a name.  We were the Battle Ranking Adolescent Trained Soldiers, or B.R.A.T.S..  Not to be confused with the ugly little female stereo-type reinforcing dolls known as Bratz, or the delicious European sausages, brats, short for bratwurst.  We were neither dolls nor wieners.  Instead we were branding ourselves and our little writer’s collective with a tough name that at once showed the universe we were writing into that we were hardened little kids that always got our way.

These stories were full of death, weapons and gore.  They contained plot points where we had all been shot or stabbed only to turn around and shoot or stab someone else for revenge.   Twisted morality and a warped sense of right and wrong drove what little character development there was inside the stories.  Our imaginations were only limited to what action movies and/or war comics we could mash together to make an “original” story.

Sometimes the story would be a quick rescue operation with one or two B.R.A.T.S. flying into a hot situation, picking up a prisoner, shooting a few bad guys in the face, explaining we were kid soldiers to the disbelieving rescued civilians and then maybe a passionate speech at the end about how “sometimes you have to break the rules to do the right thing.”  We could round that out in about one college-ruled page.

Other stories might take plot points from Top Gun, and combine them with the superior, yet incredibly different Lone Wolf McQuade.  A story like this is created when the author wants to see themselves shooting down a MiG aircraft in an F-14, but also wanting to tie it in to karate-fighting South American drug lords.  That story may take between two-and-a-half to three pages to connect THOSE dots.

Every B.R.A.T.S. story would contain several key parts: heroism, clever and often unoriginal dialogue, specifically named weapons or equipment, known girls from our little school, a favorite rock and roll song playing in the background and bloodletting.  It was a winning formula.

If the over-the-top action hero thing and dialogue wasn’t enough, the use of very specific military equipment added a whole new level of tedious.  We wouldn’t write something like:

“Justin rolled to the ground, picked up a pistol and shot a guard.”

It would read more like:

“Justin rolled to the ground, picked up a .45 ACP, M1911A1 automatic and shot a guard in the face!”

Note the almost redundant detail of stating the caliber of a pistol that any person on the street could tell you is the ONLY caliber the M1911 comes in.  Also, why simply shoot a guard, when you can shoot one in the face?  Also, why shoot a guard in the face, when you can shoot a guard in the face using an exclamation point?

That exclamation point served two purposes, it meant that what happened was a big darn deal and secondly, the exclamation point helped a reader psychologically fill in the details that it would normally take two or three sentences to state.  As a reader of a B.R.A.T.S. story, you could see that exclamation point and understand that the shot was extremely difficult to make.

The exclamation point conjured up a vision that the guard, surprised that he is being attacked, was possibly leveling his weapon at Justin.  Finger groping for his trigger only to be relieved of the desire by a .45 caliber round passing through his upper cheek bone and severing the conscious center and medulla oblongata of the sentry’s brain.  The exclamation point said ALL of that without the words… or not.  That was the beauty of a B.R.A.T.S. story, we empowered the reader to fill in much more than a traditional author would.

Probably the most scrutinized facts being checked in B.R.A.T.S. stories was the use of weaponry.  Why? Why would anyone choose to take into battle with them a simple M-16 when an M-203 with an optional 40mm grenade launcher is available?  It’s the same rifle with the added feature of a grenade launcher underneath.  True, you may never USE the grenade launcher feature.  Lord knows, nobody wants you to have to use it, but what if you are pinned down by the enemy with your M-16 and you find yourself NEEDING that grenade launcher?  The M-203 got lots of play in B.R.A.T.S. stories.

I believe there was one story where it was requested that a change be made due to incompatible rounds being used in two different weapons.  “A 9mm Baretta cannot use the bullets from an AK-47, you’ll simply have to change the AK-47 to something that uses 9mm ammo, like an Uzi machine-pistol or better yet, a Heckler and Koch MP5,” I’m sure one of us eleven-year-olds said, never mind how the entire story is one paragraph and most of the punctuation marks are exclamation points.

Oh, and the girls…  These poor helpless girls we put in our stories.  If only they saw us in real life as the heroes we were to them in our stories.  The truth was, we were far more terrified of talking to these girls in real life than we were in our stories.  In reality, if the girls had witnessed us mowing down thirty bad guys in a hail of gunfire, they would have been far too traumatized to think of us as anything but monsters capable of taking another human life.  But in our minds, killing equaled hero and hero equaled the girl liking you without you having to explain your feelings.  We never took the stories to the next logical step:  you marry each other in the eighth grade and then have thirty babies.  A fairy-tale fit for the hills of Arkansas.

That was the beauty of what we were figuring out as writers, through our pens and pencils we could create anything we wanted to.   If we wanted to shoot a dynamite arrow at a speeding car to impress some curly-haired cutie we saw on the playground in one of our stories, we did it, and we didn’t judge each other for it.  Writing for us was like a very weak form of magic; not terribly impressive, but still, how’d we do that?

Although many times the author’s character took the lead in the story we were writing, each of us was really good about throwing the other member’s on the team a figurative bone.  If Dave had referenced writing about a girl named Andrea, why not show him a little love and put the two together in my story.  Young love was always done tastefully in the B.R.A.T.S. universe if unfortunately full of machismo mistaken for chivalry.  We never leveraged that intimate knowledge against someone or as a way of teasing.  We loved seeing ourselves as the hero, sure, but some of my character’s best moments came out of Dave or Justin’s stories and not so much my own.

Perhaps it was through reading each other’s stories that we learned more not only about the feelings inside each other but also re-affirmed the new emotions, hopes, dreams and doubts we found in ourselves.  “It’s okay for me to feel afraid of being threatened into a deadly game of Russian Roulette because clearly, Dave is uncomfortable with that idea too,” I would determine after finishing one of Dave’s better stories.

Barret’s character was the computer and communications expert.  He was a quieter kid, with a better developed brain than most of us and a penchant for science.  Although he didn’t write many stories, he really enjoyed reading them.  We used one of his family vacations to London as the backdrop to a solo adventure I wrote to really highlight what a great guy we thought he was.  We knew he was moving away soon.  Families from Kittitas don’t vacation in London.  So the writing was on the wall.

Just before he left, he wrote a letter of resignation and handed it to me.  I could see how much it meant for him at that moment.  The rest of us didn’t know what a letter of resignation was, yet here we were, presented with one requesting honorable discharge from a fictitious job that none of us realized required formalized paperwork.  Part of me was curious if Barret carbon-copied the Department of Defense.

It was a passion.  We wrote stories at home by ourselves, or together during free times at school.  We spent hours at each other’s houses thinking up new ideas for stories and sometimes finding a nice corner away from each other during a sleepover to write a few stories.  One of us might start one and another would finish it.  Sometimes a story would have three or more writers, continuity be damned!

My wife, who is in education, tells me how hard it is to get most adolescent boys to practice writing and penmanship.  Our son Zach will do anything to avoid putting pencil to paper if it means communicating a thought to someone else.  But there we were, every fifth grade boy in albeit a small classroom, independently taking it upon them to write out in longhand these twisted testosterone tales of blood and glory.

Despite being rehashed bits of our favorite influencing media, the stories came from inside of us but built on the information we were fed.  Sometimes it was a bit telling of our understanding of global politics and inability to distinguish shades of grey from the black-and-white.  We didn’t need to understand a bad guy’s motivation to understand that they were from a country or culture that was against the United States.  Whatever perceived evil that popped up in the nightly news, if we heard about it enough, would end up as a bad guy in a B.R.A.T.S. story.

This led to too many unfortunate culturally insensitive references in the work.   I can honestly say that after reading some of the passages I wrote about certain enemies in the stories, I would have changed how I addressed them.  I still probably would have killed them in the story, sure, but I would not have disrespected them in such a crude and general way (with an exception of the Neo-Nazis and KKK, I meant what I said about them).

All the misinformed political policy and cultural insensitivity aside, the pieces were still very creative and we were proud of them.  We carefully shared the stories with whoever we thought wouldn’t laugh at us and our tremendous mountain of collective hubris.

Our teacher, the firm but fair Mr. Fields, was impressed with our handiwork.  He addressed one of our pieces, where our tiny, farm-country elementary school was over-run with terrorists with interested amusement.  “You know, sometimes those 500 round bricks of .22 caliber ammunition go on sale at Bi-Mart and I imagine myself holed up in my house, defending it from the advancing Soviet army,” he told Dave and I while handing our story back to us, “but then I get to laughing, thinking, what kind of damage can I do with my little .22?”

“Quite a bit,” I thought to myself, acknowledging that he enjoyed the story, but not appreciating being ripped from our collective fantasy of being able to handle an invasion with such nay-saying.  “A decent marksman with a .22 could probably drop enough men to make someone think twice about taking a man’s house,” I specifically remember thinking.

“If Mr. Fields believed in himself a little more, his family probably wouldn’t have to suffer,” I told Dave a few minutes later.

“What are you talking about?” Dave answered, now at least one story and drawing down the road from our conversation with our teacher.  How could he not be troubled by this?

I let the conversation go, feeling the once strong male role-model we respected, needed more confidence… and probably some target practice.  My respect for the man returned later that winter when some garbage he was burning in his garden ignited a pressurized can near his face, burning off a thin layer of his skin and consuming all of his eyebrow hair.  When he returned to school, I remember admiring his courage to fight through the pain of what would equal a terrible sun burn; but more importantly, to return to the cruel slings and arrows of elementary school children with a permanent look of surprise present on his face.  A look attributed to the lack of the upper-quadrant facial hair that is crucial to reading the emotional expressions on the human head.  And immediately the question was posed:  How could we work that kind of explosion and wound into a story without hurting Mr. Fields’ feelings?

Did I mention the drawings?  They weren’t my forte, but Justin and Dave whipped them out like they were getting paid for them.  Justin worked at such a pace on these stories that I wondered if he was writing stories with his left hand while drawing pictures of the stories he was writing with his right hand simultaneously.  He could pump out two or three stories in an afternoon along with six or seven accompanying illustrations.  Justin’s specialty was inclusion of the entire group in most of his pictures.  He had far-away views of all of us in action against any of our enemies.  Everyone got to kill a bad-guy in Justin’s drawings.

Dave was all about telling the visual story.  He really had a grip of what a Chinese throwing star must look like as it whizzed mid-air toward its target.  It was like he had gone to an illustrator’s workshop on the proper drawing and composure of action martial arts weaponry in pencil.

Barret’s duties in the stories were taken over by another boy from our sixth grade class, Dan, who ended up putting the above mentioned collection together years later.  Dan upped the level of writing and drawing.  He gently spurred us past our writing hang ups and plot holes and helped us bridge suspensions of disbelief with details and realism.  Dan regularly read books that didn’t have pictures in them, thus giving him insight into the mechanics of putting together a coherent story.

It was the drawing that really improved with the arrival of Dan to the collective.  Even at twelve-years-old Dan brought texture to his drawings that any of us would trade all our comic books for, so our pictures got better just from his examples.

It was Dan that posed the question to me:  “Have you ever thought about writing a longer story with more details?”  I hadn’t, but Dan thought I had it in me and so I gave it a go.  I ended up writing a twenty-something page magnum opus that I was very proud of despite knowing how many spelling and grammatical errors were in it.

Our writing got better and better.  I can see subtle tacks back and forth in the stories, moving forward through the foggy haze of character development and perspective.  We took chances, made mistakes and learned from them.  We didn’t know it then, but what we were doing in our free time for fun were the essential exercises we needed to be doing to organize our thinking and communicate our ideas with more clarity.  I have a sinking suspicion that if we were praised too much for the writing we were doing, we would have suspected we were doing extra homework and abandoned the project.

I remember reading a half completed story to my mother one evening while outside on our back patio,  just wondering if the story would pass muster from the adult point of view.  As I read, I would catch mistakes and correct them with the eraser on the end of my preferred writing tool, a trusty Number 2 lead pencil.  Squeezing punctuation in, compressing an extra indefinite article or demonstrative was common and accepted editorializing when rewriting entire passages was out of the question due to space and the impatience of the author.

My mother listened with interest as her son read passages describing himself fantasizing about taking the lives of other human beings with guns, knives, swords and explosives as casually as some kids talk about playing baseball or skiing.  She nodded at each justified killing of a “bad guy” as if her son had to use some excessive force to make an example of a terrorist as a warning to all other enemies of liberty it seemed perfectly fine to her.

“So this is what you’ve been doing in your room the last three hours?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Well, that’s a relief,” she said, lowering her shoulders.  “Keep it up.  It sounds like you are about halfway done.”

Looking back, it is hard to tell if my mother was subtly trying to encourage me to push myself as a writer or if she had been enjoying the three hour break from a son with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  Perhaps she thought by implying that I was in the middle of the story, she might get three more hours of un-interrupted Mom time.  Sharon Damm is clever; upon further reflection I believe my mother knew she could accomplish both goals at the same time.

It doesn’t seem like it was so long ago that we put these stories together, but just as the 1960’s were viewed as different in the 1980’s, the 1980’s seem much more different here in the 2010’s.  This may be just an older man looking back at harmless dreams of fancy through binoculars of information driven perspective, but there are many hard changes to the world around us; some good, some bad.

If the B.R.A.T.S. had been created now instead of in the good-old-days of 1985, it would have been front page local news.

Local Elementary School Students Take Initiative and Start Creative Writing Club – would not have been the headline.

Instead:

Bloodbath Averted as Local Educators Identify Five Psychopathic Elementary School Boys in the Same Classroom

Actually, neither one of those would be a headline because there are too many words, but I’m sure my point is made.  The pictures we were drawing alone would have warranted a trip to a psychologist.  The stories would have had us expelled, no note sent home, no temporary suspension, just an invitation to leave the school and don’t come back.  I’m not saying they would necessarily be wrong to do it either.  I’m saying that some of the stuff we were drawing and writing had all the red flags of a crossing guard supply store.

I would like to point out that none of the B.R.A.T.S. ever landed themselves in jail or prison (outside of the times it happened in the stories, which was often even though the confines were usually in foreign countries and the charges unwarranted).  We all grew up to be semi-decent citizens with kindness in our hearts.

I’ve seen variations on this fantasy story many times as depicted in the movies.  There was The Rescue, Iron Eagle, Toy Soldiers and the most reminiscent of them all Agent Cody Banks, but they weren’t quite B.R.A.T.S. stories.  None of them captured the true spirit of empowered kids with training and weaponry, blowing holes through villains and enemies with such wanton panache.

Please let it be noted that all of those movies appeared AFTER we were pencils down, writing our little grammatically challenged butts off.  We never went after the royalties in court.  I think we are all satisfied with the knowledge that our ideas may have touched others enough to imitate our work.  Besides, how would some hotshot Hollywood producer have heard about these stories anyway?  I mean, even though Kittitas is on one of the main Interstates that crosses America and only two hours from Interstate 5 (that if followed South, leads straight to Los Angeles), it’s hard to believe that some bigwig found one of the dozens of stories at the Kittitas mini-mart (a favorite rest stop of the popular Rock and Roll band KISS) and took it back with him to La-La land.  Also, there’s absolutely no way a kid could have looked up the address of a Hollywood studio and mailed a poorly scribed story to someone that could get a movie made.

I’ve let that bitterness go.

My favorite thing about the collection of stories was that the group created something bigger than any one of us could have done as well on our own.  We built a solid friendship and respect for each other around those stories.  While the stories inside that folder are more about the childish insecurities we wished to hide with a wish to become something MORE than ourselves, the stories that were happening outside those pages with that group of guys are the ones that mean the most to me, and that’s the Damn Truth.

The plan was to sell the Washington house as soon as possible and to spend the month of July with my wife and son who would visit from our other home in Kansas until the beginning of August. After the house was sold in mid July, we would spend the rest of the month bouncing from house to house, relatives to friends until it was time to drive back to Kansas together. Most of our belongings would go into storage that was easily accessible from my place of work in Washington, and after my Kansas visit, I would start another year of bouncing between working in Washington and working remotely from Kansas.

That was the plan.

The plan changed when my wife and son surprised me a week early and showed up on my birthday before the final week of my job’s fiscal year push. It was a good surprise. I had not seen them in almost a month and in the high stress of getting the house ready to transition to the new buyers and my company’s busiest time of the year, it was pretty great to come home to hugs instead of an emptying house that sounded more and more hollow with every Craig’s List sale.

There were to-do lists everywhere during the last week of June. I was working on my accounts for a great job that I had grown to love deeply over the last three years and that meant pushing hard on the email machine from early morning until late at night. In between those spurts of activity after work, I spent my time with my wife getting the house ready for sale. Seriously, there was very little romantic distraction. We were on three time tables, and beside the point, we were saving it all up for our anniversary which we celebrate most years on July first.

The first day of July is a great day in my world. The fiscal year is over, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief and takes a well earned break for a few days. I had put in for the vacation days weeks before-hand. Although my wife and I would be busy during the day feverishly getting details sorted out for the house, at least we would be able to be together and maybe even have a nice dinner to celebrate our eleven years of marriage.

I was awakened on my day off to emails bombarding my phone, then text messages. The chatter was far too loud for the day after the fiscal year end. I got suspicious something bad was happening at work but I wasn’t there to know what it was. Meetings were being called that looked very important. One of my work buddies sent me a text message asking if I was coming in that day. When I replied that I wasn’t, he said that he thought I should. But that’s his sense of humor. It was a joke. Right? Right?

Most of my team had been laid off along with many others as part of a rumored giant reorganization and budget cut. I wasn’t completely surprised because the gig was a contracted, year-to-year position. The mistake I made was thinking I was valuable, that my particular DNA code was the only code that made sense to keep in that position.

Remember the plan I spoke about earlier? This little bump wasn’t in it either. Had the plan been written down on a piece of paper, at this point I would have donned protective goggles, taken the plan out to the middle of our driveway, set it down under a rock and lit it on fire with a blowtorch.

This news was a game changer like no other. With our momentum, this new direction would be like going to watch the Seahawks play the Denver Broncos and right after the coin is flipped, they all just decide to play baseball instead.

Now all that stuff that was going to go into storage needed to be sorted through into what we keep and what we get rid of and we gave ourselves two large shipping crates to fill. After that, it belongs to the world.

The new plan was to sell the house and get back to Kansas as a family, for the rest of our year commitment out there as soon as possible. I would look for work and we would all try and remember what life was like before I became a part time husband and father. In other words losing my job was about to become one of the best things to ever happen to me, for now I didn’t have to ping-pong back and forth between job and family.

There are several aspects to this whole July experience that I would love to share, but since this has been a bit of a drag to read so far, I feel like I need to end with one of my favorite parts of the ordeal, which was the garage sale.

Our house was located in the culturally diverse neighborhood of East Hill in Kent, Washington. There are wonderful people there, who are kind, polite and treat garage sales as a craft they have devoted their lives to. We weren’t ready for this.

My wife Wendy loved the idea of having a garage sale to get rid of a bunch of our stuff as well as make a little money, now that one of us wasn’t currently dragging home sacks of gold from the mine each week. Her sister had told her that the best day to hold a garage sale is on a Friday. I had always heard Saturday, but in this day and age of non-traditional workdays, I figured it was worth a shot. So Thursday night I placed an ad for a garage sale on Craig’s List and that morning we got up very early to set out our items on the driveway.

Wendy was very methodical to how she set it up; like she was merching the display window for Bloomingdale’s. I kept shaking my head. I figured that at the end of the day, we would have 82% of what we had placed out for sale.

“How are we going to price this stuff Wendy?” I asked, wondering if I should start affixing masking tape with low decimal numbers.

“Everything is a buck,” Wendy said to me without a hint of sarcasm.

“Everything is a dollar?” I re-checked.

“Everything,” She said. She was serious. She was absolutely serious.

I looked at the Spider-Man Monopoly game and figured that was about right. It was still shrink wrapped. Then I looked at the two pairs of shrink wrapped downhill skis with the price tags on them saying $200, and something didn’t seem quite right. I had this odd feeling that $1 did not equal $200. I pulled out my iPhone and selected the calculator app. I figured that if I subtracted $1 from $200 and the answer was close to zero, that this would be a fair deal. But if the answer was more than say, $2.75 then perhaps we should revisit the pricing. The answer was $199 and according to my number line is quite a ways away from $2.75, let alone a dollar.

Wendy didn’t like that I kept testing her either.

“How much for that humidifier?”

“A dollar.”

“How much for that shovel?”

“A dollar.”

“How much for this finishing nail?”

“A dollar.”

“A dollar for this finishing nail, seriously?”

She stopped and gave the finishing nail a squinty-eyed appraisal. “Well,” she said as she screwed up her face, “fifty cents?”

“You can get a box of fifty at the hardware store for about three dollars,” I pointed out with as little condescending tone as possible, but there must have been trace levels.

“Fine smart guy, what do you want to price it as? Because I’m not going to be making change for pennies out here, we have stuff to do,” and Wendy was right, time was of the essence.

“So maybe we’ll just price it as we go then?” I asked the obvious.

“Yuh think?” said the doctor in a tone more befitting a cartoon moose.

The ad said the sale started at 9am and by noon it seemed like we were just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, except they weren’t on the Titanic, our deck chairs were holding up some stuffed animals and then we put them over by the mildew re-enforced tent. It made more sense to include them in our “outdoor” selection along with the camp grill and the skis. Picture the worst REI store ever and then set fire to that store. What the firemen retrieve from that store is about what we were selling.

Our neighbor pulled up and asked if we wanted more people to come to our yard sale. We said no. But then immediately after, realizing that the dry sarcasm doesn’t often translate into Ukrainian we said of course we would. She called her father, and that’s when the ball started rolling.

I don’t think our neighbor’s father, who showed up literally five minutes later all smiles and ready to buy SOMETHING, was the catalyst to what happened next but if he was, I suspect it went down like this: He gets a call from his daughter to come to our garage sale. He then tweets to his Garage Sale King twitter account with 6,000 followers that there is a hot sale in Kent. Every single follower gets in the closest vehicle they have and heads to our house.

The truth is that people just started dropping by.

The first vehicle was a late 90’s Toyota Four Runner. The woman driving came out of the vehicle and she was all business. She had four delightful young children with her—seriously—and started pointing to all kinds of items. The kids all picked out some toys and I even went and found a dart for the crossbow the little boy was interested in (suction tipped, but powerful).

By the time she was finished, our driveway had considerably less inventory than before. The woman had purchased both of our large area rugs and matching runner as well as several other bulky items. She had to tie items to the roof. I wondered if she needed us to watch a few of her children while she used the limited space in her vehicle to shuttle her new-to-her crap home. She didn’t. Her kids were all smiles pinned against the windows with their new treasures as the Four Runner bore the fruit of a tremendously successful shopping day and of the driver’s loins.

What surprised me most was what the people wanted to buy, which was anything we had. Random, it seems, has a home and that home is found when purchased from a garage sale. I had three flower pots that just happened to be sitting out decorating the property and was asked how much I wanted for them. When told they could have the pots AND the dirt inside of them for a dollar each, they said “sold” as if they were worried they would be outbid. That group filled their SUV with a large portion of our old clutter, along with some things that we never considered selling.

There was a family that wouldn’t stay out of the part of the garage sectioned off to move and had to be asked several times to remain on the “sale” side of the barrier. That’s a strange concept to grasp. I’m fine with you looking over my items over here, but all you seem to be interested in is the stuff I’m not selling. This family didn’t seem to understand when the sale was over either, as they came by again later in the evening to look over our stuff after it was all put away and then the next day when we didn’t have anything out. They were just wandering through our garage. Boundaries people, boundaries.

One man came with his grandson, who was probably eleven–years-old, to act as the man’s translator. I didn’t see everything go down between Wendy and the Haggle family but it was over our carpet steam cleaner, which had all its pieces and worked properly and was priced at the more-than-reasonable dollar price point. Wendy answered all the questions and then when asked, gave the rock bottom price.

“It’s a dollar,” Wendy said, clearly expecting this to be the end of the conversation.

The boy translates and then gets an earful from his grandfather. The boy then give’s his counter offer, “He asks if you would take fifty cents.”

Wendy, who would like to move on to other things, hears the request and shelves anything she was eager to do next. I could see across the driveway that she was mentally rolling up her sleeves to unload on these two jokers for insulting her highly scientific pricing methodology.

“No,” she began, but reined it in, “It’s a dollar.”

That ‘s the moment when the millenniums old tradition of trade known as bartering and haggling met the “it’s a dollar” law of economics. No “supply and demand” or “Summer Holiday Savings!” That dog-pee tinged, pet stain picker-upper is going to cost you one whole damn dollar.

“Are you sure you won’t take fifty cents,” the kid asked, knowing it will bring his grandfather pleasure. This is what they do to bond you see. The grandfather takes the grandson out on the town Friday afternoons to teach him the traditions of the old-country. They really enjoy winding up the people that don’t understand the fun-and-games of the subtle exchange of power that is the dickering over price.

“Now it’s two dollars,” Wendy said, picking up the steam cleaner.

My attention was diverted and I didn’t see the rest of the exchange. At the end, I saw the boy walk down to the car with the steam cleaner and I know Wendy didn’t take less than a dollar for it. But they weren’t done with us.

This time it was my turn. The boy got my attention and brought me just inside our garage. The man looked at me and then, drawing a hand quickly out from behind his back, poked his finger at a 2 X 4 on the wall of my garage and then quickly brought his hand again to the rear of his body where it had been held by his other hand before. Did he just ask me how much I wanted for one of the framing studs of my garage?

It turned out he was interested in a loose twelve-foot 2 X 4 I had standing next to the stud.

“Uh, that’s a dollar,” I said.

“How about…” began the kid.

“Just take it kid,” I said.

“Fifty cents?” continued the kid.

“You can just have it.”

“A quarter?” asked the kid again, slightly confused.

Not so fun getting messed with inside the haggle, is it kid? I just cut the floor out from under you so you didn’t have any place to go. You come to my house, you’re either going to haggle with Princess Immovable-Object or Captain Cave-in. Your need to gratify yourselves with a game of give-and-take will not be satisfied by either, so take my junk out of my garage for me so I don’t have to pay for a run to the dump. That’s right, I win.

Confused, they took the twelve foot 2 X 4 down to their Corolla and slid it through the two open front-seat windows. This manner of transporting that particular piece of wood would almost guarantee a double beheading on their drive home. They really debated it too. In the end, grandpa drove home with the steam cleaner on the front seat and the boy walked home carrying the giant piece of wood.

At the end of the day, a woman and her husband came and bought a few things, then wanted to have a look at our used paint cans. I had far too much paint leftover for each room in the house. I had a half gallon of serious yellow, and a quart sloshing around in a can of definitely blue. There were two different kinds of sand and three different kinds of white along with a very difficult green and super maroon. None filled an entire gallon can of paint and all were purchased by this woman, who either had lots of tiny rooms to paint, or one big room that she planned to drop acid in.

It was no way to run a garage sale, but the day turned out to be very successful. I would love to do it again just to see what people would buy; to see if I could stretch the limits of what I already know about this garage sale culture.

The sale of the house was crazy and I have a few more stories I may or may not share. I will tell you that we’re free of the house, have made it to our home in Kansas and are incredibly happy to be together as a family again, and that’s the Damm Truth.

Thank you, loyal readers, for your sticking with me through this difficult time.

 

That sounds like someone died.  They didn’t, at least that isn’t what I meant.  People die all the time but that isn’t the reason I haven’t been able to get you a quality piece in the last couple weeks.  Did I say quality?  How presumptuous of me to believe what I type is quality.  It certainly has a quality and that quality is low. 

The difficult time is a simple business, and rather than beat you over the head with details around why I’m too busy to type something up, I’ll just simply give you some general ideas and let you fill in the rest with your incredibly vivid imaginations.

We put our house on the market at the end of May and within two weeks had an offer on it.  The buyers wanted it to close on July 9^th.  Although it is a very exciting time, and we are happy for the new couple to move in to the house, I’m sure they would appreciate it if we weren’t still living here.  For one thing, the paperwork states that we should be out in time for the new owners to move in and we are making a sad attempt to make this happen. 

That means that we have to empty the house of 11 years of stuff, junk and crap.  Stuff stays with us and goes to storage, junk is donated and crap is tossed.  You would think this is a pretty easy process, and it may be if you are but one mind running the task.  However, a team working together may have different opinions of the classifications of questionable items.  George Carlin was right about other people’s belongings being crap while yours is stuff, but I have a variation all my own.

Often, my stuff is considered crap or junk by my wife.  Because stuff is kept and crap is tossed, this can be a touchy subject.  You can object to your partner’s decisions only so many times before a sit-down meeting needs to occur to cover common ground and create guidelines as to the classification system that all will use to determine the future of every single object we own. 

What doesn’t help is that my wife considers most of her belongings crap and junk too, meaning I cannot leverage her crap for my crap.  If I thought her crap was stuff, and she thought her crap was crap, it doesn’t matter because it is going to get tossed.  That means it looks like I’m trying to hold onto much more junk and crap than she is, making it a harder case for me to prove that my crap is actually stuff.

Can I help it if I get wistful?  There’s a difference between being a hoarder and being nostalgic.  It involves bundles of newspapers and my bundles are nicer than a hoarder’s.  I like things such as pictures, books, magazines, records, tapes, CDs, DVDs and memorabilia.  Do I use them much?  No.  Do I believe they will be collectible?  Not really.  Do I own machines that would make records and tapes work so that the music could be enjoyed by all?  Yes I do…  But they don’t work. 

I have two major appliances sitting in my garage that I have placed on Craig’s List.  Craig’s List has been hit and miss with me on some things.  You can put an appliance up for FREE and nobody will contact you for it because it’s too suspicious.  It means that it probably doesn’t work.  So I put $20 on a refrigerator and then in the ad explain that if they ask me nicely to knock the $20 off, I will do it as long as they just came and got it.  WOW!  That was like I ignited a flare beacon for all the local flakes to email me. 

The ad looked Something like this:

Old refrigerator for sale, $20 OBO

I have an old refrigerator that works fine.  It’s a little smelly but could be cleaned up easily.  Freezer top, frig bottom.  If you have something you need to make colder, this box will do it.  I bet if you ask me to drop the price to free that I will be happy to do it if you just came and got it.  Please come and get it.

That was the ad.  Now here are some of the emails I received about the refrigerator.

“Do you picture of refridg?”  No, I not picture.

“Does the frig work?”  Yes, fine.

“What color is it?” Old, the color is old.

“Is it working? Does it get cold?”  Yes, I stick by the statements in the ad.

“How many bodies will it hold?”  I’m just kidding, I didn’t get that email.

“Can I see some pictures?” I don’t have any, but I assure you that this refrigerator looks like a refrigerator.

“Is it plugged in?” No. “Plug it in and if it is cold when I get there, I’ll pick it up.” Okay, I plugged it in and it’s cold.  “Do you have a picture?” No. “What an ass.”

“Can I have it for free?” Yes. “Does it work?” Yes. (Then nothing)

I still have it in my garage, if any of you want it.  It’s amazing how many people want to haggle over a free item. 

Then I posted our furniture set complete with pictures for $1200.  Right away I got a hit. 

“Are you firm on the price?” No, what do you have in mind?  “My name Mary Anderson and I living in North New York State.  I am 50 year old Deaf mother wanting to buy this for a friend living in your area.  It is surprising for him so I will have movers come pick up from you.  I am to pay you with Paypal, I am hoping this is okay and I pay full amount to you.” 

Now maybe Mary Anderson really is a 50-year-old Deaf mother shopping for second hand furniture sets on the other side of the country, willing to hire movers to surprise a friend with just exactly what they wanted: used furniture. But my Spider-sense started to tingle at the lack of helping verbs and indefinite articles in her email.  Question: Could a 50-year old Deaf woman with access to the internet and a Paypal account have made it that far in life writing the way she did?  Or was this a clever ruse to get my financial information?  In the end, I decided to not sell to “Mary” because of her terrible syntax. 

If having to deal with all this stuff wasn’t enough, the home inspector came through our lovingly cared for home and left us with a report that basically said the only reason our home was still standing was because of habit.  It was amazing to the inspector that humans could spend more than five minutes inside the dwelling without being electrocuted, crushed or filled with deadly chemicals.

It was insulting, yet when I spoke to the buyer’s agent after the inspection she said the house did far better than most new construction inspections go.  That made me feel a little better, but the pictures the inspector took made me feel like a private eye had been taking pictures of me with my shirt off on the treadmill and then dropped more pictures in front of me of myself gorging on Cheetos and ice cream cake the very same day.  They were—invasive.

So to make a long story shorter, the inspector made clear that in order to sell the house we had to complete the eleven years of built-up and put-off household projects we were selling the house to get out of doing.  Oh, and if you want this sale to close on time, it would be great if you could have that done in two weeks. 

But we are getting it done.  Slowly but surely, the house is coming together.  We are excited for a new family to take control of a home that has made our family so happy.  We will be moving all of our stuff to storage and then in a year we will find a new place to live.  Where are we living until then?  Well, that’s another story for another time.

Truth be told, I should have been on a ladder, scraping and painting while I wrote this.  I could have finished digging out the well pipes or organizing the stuff, junk and crap in the attic.  The laundry room has a few boxes of stuff worth collecting too and the storage under the stairs…  I guess now you know that I love you readers more than you really knew, OR that it was too damn hot upstairs to do any of that work so I huddled down in the basement for one of the last bits of typing I’ll ever do in this beautiful old house.  I’m going to miss this old place but I’m not going to miss the responsibility and that’s the Damm truth.

There was an episode of the Twilight Zone that terrified me.  Most people may not find it terrifying, but this particular episode illustrated one man’s slipping from the normalcy of the world he lived in to a situation where he was completely helpless.  Over the course of the episode, the man’s perception of English slowly became rearranged.  By the end, the man accepts his madness and opens a child’s picture book to a picture of a dinosaur.  Instead of the large-lettered word reading “dinosaur,” it reads, “Tuesday.”  Terrifying, it really is. 

It’s the idea of all logic and order that you have come to expect becoming upset in a way that makes you feel like you’re losing your grip on reality that is the killer there.  The helplessness of not being able to speak the language and the realization that you are being disarmed, shut down and possibly taken advantage of is the same feeling I encountered on the night I attempted to learn Pinochle.

Okay, I can already feel myself getting upset.  Before I get all wound up and start my super-charged narrative about a horrible misunderstanding, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I take responsibility for all that went wrong and it was MY inability to master the four thousand chaotic rules of this particular card game while suspending my sense of natural reason and order.  The fact that this was harder than understanding baseball in Chinese (Cantonese), was all on me.  A ten-minute tutorial given to me by three people simultaneously before being expected to play the game masterfully should have been more than enough to ready my troubled mind.  Any frustration around the night’s events were brought on only by my poor self-esteem and had nothing to do with a game that has probably been used to effectively torture prisoners in Guantanamo.  I will accept ownership of my actions despite any of the cloud of ridiculousness surrounding the game or implied emotions of the night in question.

For everyone born after 1970, Pinochle is a game using playing cards and governed by rules created by a crazy person.

I believe Pinochle originated from a castaway on a remote island and his only friend, an incomplete deck of playing cards.  After exhausting all the card games he knew, somewhere around lonely year nine, the castaway developed a game that he could play as a team with his wife, a conch shell he named Gloria, and their neighbors, Bill and Eliza Coconut.  He called it Pee-Knuckle, after having to urinate on his hand from a particularly nasty jellyfish bite he received while rescuing his wife from the ocean floor where she lived.  It was an inside joke that the two shared.  Pee-Knuckle was also Gloria’s nickname.

When the castaway was eventually rescued, I imagine that whatever doctor that treated him told the castaway’s family to help the castaway slowly adjust to life back in the civilized world by doing activities common to the castaway’s island environment.  One of the activities most easily adapted by the family was the insane card game that eventually turned into a family tradition. 

The game was rechristened Pinochle to hide the family shame of a man married to the shell of a dead gastropod mollusk, the game made its way slowly into society as an odd curiosity from party to party as a fad.  From there, I assume the game has hung on as an unexplained tradition that nobody understood the benefits of—which there are none.  There are none.

I believe the above origin is a much more likely version of how this game became popular and reject the “official” French/German history as a false flag laid down by the family of the castaway.  You would go to extreme lengths to cover up the shame of a seashell marriage in your family too. 

Before I knew any of this; before the perceived world I lived in was tainted by the shroud of doubt Pinochle brought with it—not unlike a social disease—I was just a man who loved his girlfriend and wanted to spend more time with some of her oldest and dearest friends.   

I don’t know how they knew the game; if it was a form of childhood punishment to learn all the rules, or if they happened to be descendants of the lonely, cray-cray castaway, I never got the backstory.  They just wanted Wendy and I to come over, get to know me better and play a little Pinochle, whatever THAT was.  But if I would have wanted to condense the night down to the simplest ideas, I would have walked up to Wendy’s friends and told them that I was not smart.  I then would have INVITED them to hit me in the face with a shovel.  I would have preferred the speed of that interaction to what inevitably happened.

Krissy and Jeremy were old friends of Wendy’s and had gotten to know Wendy’s previous, ponytail-sporting boyfriend through many different fun activities.  They are very nice, good people and I liked them right away.  I knew that as a couple, it can be very difficult when a friend couple calls it quits.  You don’t want to take sides, you feel like you have to be supportive and sometimes you have to say good-bye.  Then there’s the effort made to get to know the new person and to re-invest time and energy into a new person.  That’s where I was with Krissy and Jeremy.  They had to say “good-bye” to the pony tail and “hello” to the drummer. 

We had a little dinner, and things were going very well.  Jeremy and I found common ground around geek culture.  Krissy made a spectacular dinner and let a strange drummer in her home hold her baby.  Before long, it was time to sit down and play cards. 

I’m no stranger to cards.  I’m fluent in several different variations of poker and familiar with many more.  I play Blackjack, War, Baccarat, Rummy, King’s Corner, Go Fish, Old-Maid, Uno, Memory Match—I know my way around a standard deck of 52 plus Jokers. (FYI-unless called out before hand, Jokers aren’t always wild, they play as aces, in straights or flushes.  See, I know the cards.)

The problem is, Pinochle doesn’t use a regular deck.  It uses 48 cards from TWO different decks.  To make a Pinochle deck, you take out all the boring cards, the twos through eights.  Leaving 9 through aces of all four suits (club, diamond, heart, spade).  I didn’t know that when the first hand was dealt. 

All the cards were dealt to the four of us, and my poker trained mind was pretty excited at the hand I was given.  My twelve cards had at least three straights, two flushes, enough full houses for two duplexes and five-of-a-kind. Everything was cool until I realized that I had a couple pairs that were the same suit; something impossible to have when playing poker, and in the old West would have gotten a cowboy shot for laying down a hand like that.

“Misdeal,” said Krissy, “too many nines,” as she laid her cards down to show us all. 

“Okay, everybody give me your cards,” said Jeremy as he laid his hand down too and collected Krissy and Wendy’s cards.

“Excuse me?” I said, not wanting to surrender the greatest hand of cards I’ve ever been dealt in my life, “what the hell do you mean, ‘misdeal?’” Every gambler knows that you play the hand you’re dealt.  That’s where the cliché comes from.  However, that isn’t the case in Pinochle.

“Well,” said Jeremy, patiently shuffling and explaining what just happened, “sometimes on a deal, someone will get a bad hand that doesn’t meld.  Too many nines will do that.”

“I see,” I said as I nodded, but I didn’t see.  I then contemplated telling Jeremy that there was something wrong with his deck of cards, but the little lawyer in my mind activated by my ADHD meds, waved both hands in front of himself and mouthed the word, “NO!” So I didn’t mention the extra cards. 

Wendy looked over at me from her seat with a big smile that said to me, “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

I replied to her with my own subdued smile, “I’m drowning in my own inability to grasp new concepts.”

After several hands of me fumbling through the wacky deck and moving cards in and out of my hand with Jeremy, who was my partner.  I started to understand some simple moves I could make, but if I only understood an eighth of the rules, how was I going to put together a strategy to win?  I figured I could just try to pick up as much as I could and run out the clock on this activity.  That was when Jeremy, unbeknownst to me, decided that it was time for me to learn how to cheat.

Pinochle is a game of auctions and bids.  You’re looking for trick cards and trumps.  You create melds of cards out of specific combinations worth different point values.  To the new player, all of this will appear to be arbitrary, like you’re playing a game with a six-year-old who constantly creates new rules to the game you’re playing based around what that six-year-old needs to win.  It was like the creator got tired of passing cards around, looked down at the hand they had, laid it down on the table claiming to have one with a hand because it had two Jacks, a queen of diamonds and all four kings.  “That’s it! That’s the winner!” 

So when you’re cheating with a partner, it is common to do so with what they call “table talk.”  That’s when you seemingly are talking about one subject, but you’re communicating to your partner what you either have or need certain cards.  An example of some simple table talk would go like this:

“So Steve, have you seen the Avengers, and if so, how many times?”

And the answer would be:

“Loved it! Saw it twice, but I’m most anxious to see Reds2 this summer, I really dug the first one.”

And now with the translations:

“So Steve, have you seen the Avengers, and if so, how many times?”

(Do you have any diamonds? How many?)

“Loved it! Saw it twice, but I’m most anxious to see Reds2 this summer, I really dug the first one.”

(This is the second time I’ve told you that I have hearts and not diamonds. Are you going to give me the 2 queens I need to go with the one I have of spades?)

 

You see, Mark Ruffalo played the Hulk in the Avengers and was the breakout star, and using Martin Scorsese as the asking party’s indicator code as would be pre-determined by the team, I then think of one of Scorsese’s film’s Mark Ruffalo was in, which is Shudder Island starring Leonardo DiCaprio, who was also the star of a movie called Blood Diamond. 

I bet you spotted the response right away, but if you didn’t, here’s what the reply means.  (Scorsese is only used in the original question, not the answer.) 

Loved = hearts.  Hellen Mirren plays a double agent in Reds2.  Hellen Mirren is also currently a huge hit in her stage play about Queen Elizabeth the 2^nd.  Hellen Mirren is universally loved in her country of the United Kingdom.  This meant I desperately need two queens of Hearts to go with one Spade.  Spades are shovels, shovels dig.  It’s just that easy.

Please understand this may be an over simplification of how table talk works but like I said, I wasn’t catching on too quickly.

When Jeremy instigated table talk, it caught me completely off guard.  He meant absolutely nothing by anything he said other than wanting to know about what suits I was after for cards.  But his opening question of a guy he was just getting to know seemed rather aggressive.

“So Steve, what are your intentions with Wendy?” he asked me, point blank.  “Do you love her?  Are you thinking about giving her a ring?”

This was at a time when Wendy and I were simply dating and I wasn’t yet ready to propose.  The subject was a powder keg between the two of us and here was an opportunity to either make a good impression or step in a big pile of emotional dog doo-doo.  Why would anyone ask that question to a guy like that in front of his girlfriend?

“I, uh, love her very much,” I said, avoiding the second half of the question.  I had had about enough of the situation.  I still didn’t understand the game we were playing despite it being stripped down solely for my benefit, to the level of game they use to teach learning-disabled pre-schoolers.  I already felt extremely stupid by not being able to figure out a card game and now I was being questioned about my feelings for Wendy.

“What about an engagement ring?” asked Jeremy.

“Oh Jeremy,” Krissy giggled, “that’s just a little obvious.”

What was obvious?  Holy cow, I was getting grilled there.  Was it obvious that I was or wasn’t going to get her a ring?  Was it obvious that I loved her?  These were nice people, I liked them, now it’s getting all hostile.  Wendy had known Krissy since before kindergarten.  What if I didn’t get her approval?  And Jeremy?  If he hit me with another supercharged question like that again, I would reach across the table and slap the tact back into his mouth.

I needed an emergency exit.  I needed out of that insane card game that I didn’t understand and turned nice people into pushy bastards.  It was still early though so I felt like I only had a couple options, cut myself bad enough to go to the emergency room where I could relax, or pee my pants and have to leave in shame.  The problem was that I couldn’t think of a good reason to use a knife and I had just used the restroom about fifteen minutes before.  What a horrible night this turned out to be.  I was proving to be a real dummy and now it seems I wasn’t good enough for the girlfriend I had fought so hard to win the heart of.  I was angry, sad and depressed all at the same time, and I still didn’t know what a good Pinochle hand looked like. 

I struggled through another hour of play before they all gave up trying to show me how to big, pass, trump and all the other ridiculous crap you do with a wonky deck of 48 cards.  We said our good-byes and I tried to not be bitter about the experience but I left there feeling not-good-enough.  I wasn’t good enough to play a bafflingly popular card game and not good enough to be with Wendy.

I expressed my anger to Wendy on the way home, and she deflated my concerns as quickly as one would deflate a child’s balloon with a push-pin. 

“That was just him asking about hearts and diamonds,” Wendy said, “Don’t make a big deal out of it.  And I love you… for some reason.”

Despite the night I had spent wrestling with gaming concepts slipping in and out of my grasp, it turned out that I still had a pretty cool girlfriend and when the haze of the night lifted the next morning, I would realize that I had fit in just fine with Krissy and Jeremy.

The main idea I would really like to have taken away from this is that Pinochle sucks.  This isn’t a matter of opinion… yes it is, but it is my opinion and this time I happen to be right, and that’s the Damm truth.

At the poker table, the winner isn’t always the person with the best hand.  The winner is usually the one with the best cards, however, sometimes the player that comes out on top only does so because they made the others around the table BELIEVE they had the best hand.  That’s the art of the bluff. 

A bluff, at its core, is a deception, a lie.  But more importantly, it is a deception with purpose, making it a manipulation.  It’s not the kind of complex manipulation as was used on me in high school by girls I liked to get me to drive them the eight miles into the next town.  No, THAT kind of manipulation STILL confuses me, and there were at least two times I drove a girl into town without even a “thanks Steve”.   I still don’t understand what that was all about.  Those were more along the lines of an emotional confidence scheme.

Man, I’m going to have to talk some of that out with the counselor.  My apologies, we were talking about the art of the bluff.  It’s just, they were so cute, and I thought they really liked me.  They didn’t.

Bluffing works best when enough credibility is built up with the bluffer for those around them to trust that they have the goods.  That means, more often than not, the person had to have played legitimately good hands and made a show of it consistently for the rest of the table to believe the bluffer actually has the best possible hand. 

But most of all, if the bluffer is going to bluff, they have to BELIEVE they have the winning cards and have the guts to play the marginal cards they have like they are the nuts (poker term) they need.  If you’re going to pretend to have a winning hand, you need to be Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro or to a lesser extent, Cuba Gooding Jr.

It was this principle of bluffing that my mother Sharon Damm based her entire philosophy of discipline around, and she was very good at it.  Although there were many instances of my mother bluffing her way through discipline, here is one that stands out. 

I was a kid with ADHD.  It was undiagnosed, or what I would call fun-diagnosed, meaning I was just a rambunctious kid who had little self-control.  Medication for such an issue was a long way off and at the time, I don’t think it was an option.

For kids like me, structure and discipline were important.  Other kids don’t need it at all, only kids like me.  Okay, that first sentence of this paragraph was ridiculous and may highlight my sense of narcissism and entitlement.  I apologize, but it will definitely happen again. 

What I SHOULD have said is that if you don’t want your ADHD kid to end up in jail (or worse), structure and discipline are a necessity.  My mother, having zero training in raising a wild chimpanzee did the best she could to keep order.  Although spanking was used sparingly in our house, she did wield one heavy handed approach to scaring the crap out of me.

When I was between the ages of 4 and 7, I was deathly afraid of being sent to the home for naughty children. 

Sounds kind of anti-climactic doesn’t it?  Well, that’s my fault as a crumby writer, because the way my mother built this bluff was very real.

She started out by laying a foundation of faux honesty about how my sister Somer and I would be disciplined.  She stressed to us that she would carry out punishments and not load us up with empty threats.  She falsely chastised how other parents would make up bogus stories about monsters to keep  their kids in line, though this was always a false flag for us as she probably employed the best use of this tactic of all the parents. 

But where mother really sold it was in the theatricality of the home for naughty children.  It was a living, breathing institution, and the picture of it in our minds was always a work in progress.  The home for naughty children was ever present, even when my sister and I weren’t misbehaving.  References to the home were sprinkled in amongst conversations to keep the specter alive.

For instance, when the Roots miniseries was playing and my family was surrounding the television, watching in horror as Kunta Kinte was being whipped savagely while trying to retain the pride of his African name, my mother spoke up.

“Oh! I hate this scene!  You know, they still whip like this at the home for naughty children.  That’s just awful!” Mom said without moving her eyes from the screen.  The casualness of that lie, at a time when no misbehavior was present, told us that it wasn’t just an institution created at the heat of the moment when my mother wanted to show us discipline.  It gave the claim credibility.

But when either I or my sister pulled some terrible stunt and needed to be corrected, mom would try a few things first, like yelling, a swat to the butt or even waving the stealthily-flat candy spoon in a menacing way.  But when those things didn’t work and I pushed Mom over the edge, she would raise her voice, throw her hands up in the air as if the decision was now officially out of her control and say, “THAT’S IT!  I’m calling the home for naughty children!” and proceeded to storm toward the phone.

At that point the house might as well have burst into flames because it was a race to the phone with me immediately pleading to my mother for mercy.

“NO! MOTHER, NO! NOT THERE!  PLEASE!  I’LL BE GOOD, I PROMISE!” I would say sincerely.  I knew if my mother asked for one of the home’s express pickups, I would be doomed.

“It’s out of my hands,” my mother would say, “what kind of mother would I be if I DIDN’T follow through on your punishment?”

She would let me plead my case and repent for whatever sin I had committed—probably involving a sassy mouth—before ultimately hanging up.  It was mind blowing.  I was merely seconds away from going to the home for naughty children.

You’re probably thinking, “Wow!  This kid was dumb,” and I would agree with you if you only knew this much of the story, but let me enlighten you to how Mom doubled down on her bluff.

Sharon had created a whole backstory for the home for naughty children, so when we asked about it, she could readily answer instead of stammering around her story and ultimately watching it all fall apart.  Every question we asked instead, created a deeper understanding of the stone-cold institution you would envision carrying a moniker like “The Home for Naughty Children”. 

You would think that the name would be a dead giveaway as it sounded too generic and unoriginal.  That was a stroke of brilliance from my mother who routinely referred to specific places with common nouns instead of proper names.  The Nanum Dairy, where we picked up fresh milk, was called “the milk barn,” Safeway was called “The store,” Albertson’s was “the other store,” and Super One Foods was “the store we don’t shop at.”  Mom wasn’t good with names, so when she said “home for naughty children,” I knew she wasn’t making it up.  It would have been suspicious if she had given it a proper name like: Washington State Department of Correcting Troubled Children.  So the mere fact that she never gave the name of the facility just strengthened the notion that it existed.

One time, when my sister and I started a fight and Mom wanted to convey her nuclear option, she picked up the newspaper and gave it a quick scan and said to my father, “Looks like the home for naughty children picked up three more kids in Ellensburg this weekend.”

My father, unfamiliar with the art of theatrical improvisational acting would pick up his cue to react with a questioning look back at my mother, who would return his confounded look with eyes boring into his brain while her lips silently told him to agree with her.  But I saw it, and smelled something rotten in what my mother was doing.

“The paper doesn’t say anything about the home for naughty children,” I said, believing I had caught my mother red handed.

“Oh, it doesn’t?” my mother began, “Well look right here on page two,” she finished with a flourish, slapping the paper down on the coffee table.  She had me come over and look at a section she was pointing to, “See?”

My mother was right.  There in the paper was an article about the home for naughty children.  She was pointing right at it.  She actually showed me proof in the local newspaper that the home for naughty children existed.  If I wasn’t five years old, I would have been able to read every word of the article she had hastily put in front of me and then jerked away.

“Not so funny now, is it?” She asked looking at me as if I should be ashamed of myself for questioning her word.  “It’s cold in here,” she said with a shiver, “I think the fire is dying.”  She wadded up the newspaper and threw it in our fireplace insert.  “Now stay away from the damn fireplace,” she said casually as she headed into the other room.

I wondered if I had known any of the kids that were picked up.  I wondered what kinds of torture or merciless, backbreaking work they were now being forced to do.  I didn’t question the validity of the home for naughty children for a long time after that.

The next occurrence was after I had socialized with other children and had brought up the home to them, hoping to piece together more of the mystery of the institution.  Other children hadn’t heard of the place, which I thought was odd, considering that in my mind, two prisons stood out: Alcatraz and the home for naughty children.

At first, I just attributed the fact that other kids didn’t know about it as me being just a really rotten kid, who had to be reminded of such dark places to keep my actions in check. 

Then I thought I had it wrong, and that my mom had probably broken some rule and gave us fair warning where other parents would just call the home and have their kids picked up using the element of surprise.  Those agents from the home were probably trained professionals, but every advantage would count when picking up naughty children, especially the very naughty children.  I had always wondered how the three kids from the newspaper were picked up.  Did they go quietly or were they snatched simultaneously with the aid of several different types of law enforcement.  The briefly seen article didn’t have an accompanying photo, so I never had any idea.

I had asked mom a few times how the kids were taken and if it was scary.  Mom would just answer serenely, “I bet it was very scary for them, being taken away from their mothers,” or “You know, I would really hate to have to find out how that’s done.”

Still, I had gotten to know some genuinely bad children and they hadn’t been picked up yet.  This made me collect enough courage to push my mother all the way to the edge.  I started slapping my sister around and sure enough, Mom chimed in with the threat to call the home for naughty children.  I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I am sure it was extremely sassy and enough to send Mom to the phone.

I stood there in front of my mother, defiant.  My six-year-old intuition calling my mother’s bet, waiting for her to call the home for naughty children.  Mother looked at me with the receiver to our wall-mounted, kitchen rotary phone (in eggshell white) held loosely in her hand.  She nodded at me slightly, indicating it was my last chance to stop being a turd.

“Go ahead, call them!” I bellowed, “they don’t exist anyway, you’ve been making it up!”

Mom tightened her loose grip around the phone and drew the receiver to her ear.  She locked eyes with me as her finger quickly rotated the number selector. 

My heart was breaking as I came to the realization that, “you already knew the number?  You didn’t have to look it up?”  Had she no faith in her own son?  Then I pulled it together, figuring she had probably learned the number for Somer’s sake.

“Of course I do,” Mom said, drawing closer to the end of the seven digit sequence, “every parent knows the number for emergencies just like this.”   She reached the end and brought the phone in closer to her head.  I couldn’t hear it ringing, but I saw a wave of relief wash over my mother before she spoke back to the voice that had obviously picked up on the other end.  Was it relief that she would soon be burdened with one less child?  Had I driven my poor mother to this state, where giving up her child was now a relief to her? 

“Yes, is this the home for naughty children?” my mother asked with purpose, and then she held the receiver out in front of me so that I could hear a tiny, authoritatively stern woman’s voice reply to my mother’s question.

“Why yes it is!” said the voice.  As my mother’s stare said to me that she had in fact, told me so.   I heard the voice ask another question, “How many children will you be needing us to pick up?”

HOLY COW!  They do pick up! 

I scampered off to my room where I hid in my closet, starting to cry and waiting for the bastards to come and take me to a place where none of my naughtiness would fly.  I couldn’t charm my way out of punishment and chores there.  Eventually, after years of backbreaking labor picking rocks from fallow fields, my records would just transfer directly into the penal system where my big act of defiance in a kitchen, sassing my mother would prepare me for a life inside the clink.

I could hear my mother laugh cruelly while talking to the administrator.  I’m sure they had shared a joke at my expense.  It wasn’t much longer that my mother came into my room and coaxed me out of the closet with reassurances that I wouldn’t be going away to the home for naughty children that night.

Mom cuddled up with me on my bed and held me as she calmed me down.  “I just needed you to calm down Steve, you were driving me nuts today with your yelling and fighting with your sister.  Enough already,” she said to me looking for assurance.

“I’m sorry mom, please don’t send me away,” I said through the last of my tears.

“Not today,” said Mom.

We just sat there as I calmed down and my mother hugged me.  I felt like this woman loved me so much, that it would indeed pain her to have to send me away, but if I did end up at the home for naughty children or the Washington State Department of Correcting Troubled Children or Madam Chechvernischk’s Children’s House of Forgotten Dreams, it would be because of choices I made, not my mother.

“Mom?” I asked.

“What?” my mother replied.

“Is there really a home for naughty children?” I asked, believing we were sharing a moment of true understanding between each other.

My mother waited several seconds before pulling me in for a very tight hug and held onto me tightly as she felt I could handle and then said, “Yes, yes there is.”  Then she added, “And I would prefer you never go there.”

Years later, when it became apparent that there were no newspaper articles on the home for naughty children, and my mother’s friend Lael was the phony receptionist that answered the phone at the non-existent home,  I justified that fudged answer with the fact that juvenile halls are kind of like homes for naughty children .  If you had a child, you too would probably prefer that child never go there.

My mom had found a way to use my overactive imagination in a way that some might find cruel, or odd.  However, I believe it was an effective tool.  Unfortunately this story is heavy on how my mother used deception and illusion to keep me in line.  It illustrates a side that was a very small part of her duty as a mother to raise us children the best that she could.  She did an amazing job (this compliments both her AND me… and also Somer).  Most importantly, I want you all to remember that the real concept that made the home for naughty children so terrifying was the idea that if I was to be dragged away to that horrible place, the worst part would be that  I wouldn’t be with my mom anymore, and that’s the Damm truth.

The bad news on the caller ID really needs to be set aside for right now.  Indeed, it was bad but I don’t think I really illustrated how bad it could be.  In order to do this, I need to take you back to three days prior to this particular evening, otherwise I would reveal something that you would deem to be “no big deal”.  It is a big deal.

As much as I was getting paranoid about Wendy finding the ring or that I was about to ask her to marry me, it paled in comparison to how Wendy was starting to feel about the two of us moving in together without a real commitment.  The marriage talk and the engagement/future/commitment subjects would come out of nowhere.  This was rough for Wendy, but because I knew we were about to get engaged, my flippancy or disregard for the subject only magnified the discourse for her.

Her biggest concern was that I needed to ask her to marry me, and my biggest concern was that she would figure out that I was about to.  As I had nightmares about the secret getting revealed to Wendy, she had dream after taunting dream about wedding cakes and dresses.  I of course could not tell Wendy about my nervous, nighttime visions; but Wendy couldn’t wait to tell me about hers, both to get them off of her chest and to once again open up discussions of the possibility of perhaps, maybe, you know, what if we just did something crazy and promised each other we would get married so we don’t become another stupid statistical argument for not moving in together before you’re married.

Everything on the television, radio, in the movies we saw, in the windows we walked by, in the billboards on the roads we drove on seemed to have a conversation starter about marriage.  You know how it goes, for instance, we were watching Toy Story, and Slinky Dog voiced by the late, great Jim Varney says: “It’s too short! We need more monkeys!”  Wendy would hear that and turn to me and say, “Are we just not going to get married?  Is that the plan?”  It’s like Pixar had some kind of stake in the engagement ring business.

It was the less subtle ads that we would hear on the radio that provided the best openings.  We would be riding along, listening to a little Bad Company on the radio and then a telephone sound effect would clang away before being picked up by an eager plumber or whoever ready to sell their wares.  Wendy would ask and answer her own question, “You know what else has a ring? Every other girl I know.”  Unfortunately, this would make me laugh, because I knew, hidden in my best friend’s underwear drawer, my wife had a ring waiting for her.  The laugh wouldn’t score me any points, and probably make the car ride much more unpleasant (seemingly), but I just had to keep up the façade.

My paranoia met her frustration one day (three days before I asked Wendy’s parent’s permission to marry her), while I was at work and my wife and I spoke on the phone.

“Steve, I had to call you, I had the craziest dream last night,” she said over the phone. 

“Oh, it’s an emergency,” I said loudly and stepped away from my desk, “tell me more.” I didn’t want my job to think I was taking a personal call that wasn’t important.

“It’s not an emergency,” Wendy said confusedly.

“Please tell me,” I asked with measured concern.

“You’re weird, whatever, I had a crazy dream last night that we were getting married,” She said as though this were the very first time the subject had ever come up.

“REALLY?!?!” I said, trying to convey importance to my workplace, but instead only gave Wendy the impression that I was pouring on the sarcasm to an unacceptable level.

“What is wrong with you today? Do you want to hear about my dream or not?” She asked. 

I didn’t.  But if I said that, I would be insensitive and the call would not only go on longer than I wanted it to but would also end badly.  “Of course I do,” I said with concern, “tell me everything.”

For a moment on the phone, I could hear Wendy weighing my sincerity against her need to tell me about her dream.  My genuine interest must have registered as acceptable because Wendy launched into her dream about our wedding.

“Our families were there with us and we were on an island.  I kept looking for my dress because I didn’t have it and the ceremony was about to begin,” She continued as I, now back in my work station, typed away at an email to a client, half listening to the nocturnal vision my girlfriend was describing.  “Someone told me they had the dress and they brought it to me in a beautiful dark red box.”

“Uh, huh,” I said as I typed away.

“They opened the box and it was lined with white satin.  On the ceiling of the box, written in gold on the satin were the words ‘Bain Bridge’,” she said as she began to continue with rest of the detail.

I about pulled a Denmark Pond and had an accident in my pants right there at my work desk.

“Did you say, ‘Ben Bridge’? Like the box had ‘Ben Bridge’ written on the silk on the ceiling?” I asked as calm as I could muster.

“Ben Bridge? I thought it said Bainbridge, like the island, but you know, I think it did say Ben Bridge with two capitol B’s.  That’s weird, how did you know that about my dream?” She asked.

Had she just tricked me into telling her about the ring?  Did she suspect I had purchased it from there?  Had she gone back to her apartment now hosting our friends and found the ring box and now this was how she was going to get me to admit I was going to ask her to marry her?  Or was she just telling me about her dream?  No way!  She’s a psychologist!  She’s in my head now.  How could I think I could pass a surprise off on somebody this smart?  She eats wee little brains like mine for breakfast.  Of course she’s messing with me.  She knows something about Ben Bridge but what…

“Hello?” She said, seeing if I was still on the line.

“Hold on, I’m trying to think,” I told her hastily, “…uh… about your dream.”

OH, SHE’S TRICKY!  What does she know?  How much?  Dave?  Did he let it slip?  Tessa?  No, they’re solid and would have told me… Would have told me if they knew they gave the secret away, but what if Wendy was pumping them for info as hard as she interrogates me?  They might not suspect?  No, that’s crazy.  Could Wendy simply have the ability to absorb telepathic thought then manifest that data into dreams that gives her a glimpse into the minds of others?  …OH MY GOD… Wendy must be a telepath.  My girlfriend can read minds.  If that’s true, I can’t let her know that I know she can read minds.  But couldn’t she be reading my thoughts right now?  Not over the telephone, that’s nuts.  No telepath can read minds that far away, not without some kind of telepath enhancement device, but those devices only exist in comic books.  I’m sure she wouldn’t have the kind of telepathic power, capable of reaching through a phone line.  Don’t telepathic people have to be fairly close?  What I need to do is use my brain so that she doesn’t.  She’s waiting on the line.  I need to tell her something.  Call this bluff.  Let her know who Ben Bridge is and what they do.  See what happens next.  BUT DON’T TELL HER ANYTHING BUT COMMON KNOWLEDGE.

“Well babe, you said island and Bainbridge is an island,” I began as if I was analyzing her dream, “but there’s also Ben Bridge jewelers, and they probably do lots of wedding rings and stuff.”

“But why would I be dreaming about that?” She asked, as if she didn’t already know.

“I don’t know, have you ever been to a wedding on Bainbride Island,” I asked, with a suddenly bright idea, “Hey, didn’t your last boyfriend live on Bainbridge Island?”  I asked that last question to throw her off a bit, knowing full well that her last boyfriend lived on Whidbey Island, which is just North of Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound.

“No, he was from Whidbey, and I don’t remember going to a wedding on Bainbridge, at least it wasn’t like anything from the dream.  Ben Bridge sounds right, why would I dream about Ben Bridge jewelers?” she asked.

“Oh you tricky little she-devil, you totally know why Ben Bridge is significant!  YOU KNOW I GOT YOUR RING THERE AND YOU WANT ME TO FESS UP!  WELL I WON’T, AND YOU CAN JUST STOP TORTURING ME WITH YOUR DIRTY PSYCHOLOGIZING!”  I thought to myself.

“I have no idea,” I said calmly, “but the box the dress was in sounds like one of those ring boxes we see on the commercials for Ben Bridge on television, you know with the satiny lining and the logo written on it.”

“Does Ben Bridge have TV commercials?” Wendy asked.

“Tons of them, they are all over the tube,” I never remembered seeing one.

“I don’t remember seeing one,” she said.  Was she pushing me? 

“Well, you’ve certainly seen something because it is manifesting itself into your dreams.  Look, I have to get back to work, did we get married in your dream or what?” I asked with a hint of exasperation in my voice.

“Yes, we did, so it must have been a dream…” she said, turning my exasperation into venom.  Her words would have stung, had I not been planning our engagement in less than two weeks.  But I had to play along and fire something back that would stall, yet get me off the hook.  It had to be the perfect comeback, otherwise we would end up going a couple rounds when we returned home from work.  I just had to resist trying to be funny.

“Well, it must have been a destination wedding because it sounds like I’m on a guilt trip,” DAMN IT!  That isn’t going to work at all.

We went a couple rounds that night because on the phone I was both of the things my wife does not find charming, I had been inappropriate AND disrespectful.  However, I had to remember that if I didn’t get myself into trouble and exchange angry words, I would never figure out if Wendy did, in fact, know that I was going to ask her.  By the end of the evening, it was clear to me that my wife’s “dream” was just the product of wedding season over-marketing, because she didn’t think we I was ever going to ask her to marry me. 

Three days later when I entered my apartment with Wendy right behind after I had successfully and sneakily received the nod from her parents, I went straight to the kitchen for a cold drink, and figured we would watch a movie before heading for bed.  Wendy went into the living room area to sit down. 

I don’t know how long she was in there, a minute, ninety seconds, but I do know that it was dark and the only artificial light in the room was coming from the LED screen of the caller ID device about ten feet away from her.  When I entered the room and looked down to see if the answering machine had any messages, I saw, scrolling across the backlit device, the words: BEN BRIDGE JEWELERS, and then two other numbers. 

I grabbed for the tiny device and immediately pushed the reset button.  The other two numbers could have been from the Publisher’s Clearing House prize people and a phone number to David Geffen who called wanting to give me a record deal, I didn’t care, I just needed to wipe the whole machine clear before Wendy saw the incriminating Jewelry store number.  The paranoia in me rose once again.

“Did you see that?” I asked her.

“See what?”  She answered slyly.

“You know what,” I said, stone faced and staring into her eyes as if I was a human lie detector.

“No, I don’t,” she replied now a bit suspicious.

I didn’t know what to do.  It sounded like she hadn’t seen the words, but was she once again waiting for me to mess up?

“Big spider… on the caller ID, just perched there ready to bite me,” I said in an extremely unconvincing way.

“Well, don’t kill it, just put it outside,” she said, convincing me that she bought my lie. 

Had she though?  Had she seen the message from Ben Bridge?  Would I be able to sleep that night, second guessing whether my girlfriend knew that I was going to ask her to marry me? 

…

We were less than two days away from the moment of truth.  We were packed up for our week long vacation getaway with my family for the Independence Day holiday.  Dave and Tessa had come over to my apartment to see us off.  Dave slipped the ring to me and I placed it carefully into some rolled up underpants in the side of my duffle bag, you know, where you put engagement rings that you’re convinced are no longer a secret because your psychologist girlfriend can read minds. 

None of that mattered though because within 48 hours, I will have proved to her that I respected her and that I was incredibly committed to us becoming one single entity of love and companionship.  OR that I was a fool and she knew all along.

The first part of the trip was a four hour car ride to my sister’s place.  Wendy and I sang a few songs and made each other laugh for the first part of the trip, but when a song came on the stereo that got Wendy thinking about marriage and commitment, “Wipeout” by the Surfaris, we were back in the heated debate about whether or not we should get married again. 

These discussions were MY FAULT.  I cannot stress this point enough.  I had been dragging Wendy, a bright woman with a bright future, around for several years and although I told her I loved her very much, I was also a little boy that didn’t want to grow up and commit to being on a bona-fide team.  Wendy had been more than patient and deserved to know that she had a person guaranteed to be in her corner, instead of a guy that had one foot in and one foot out of her life.  She deserved that respect, and she was trying to let me know that she respected me that way too.  The discussions weren’t nagging or because she wanted me to save her by marrying her.  HA!  HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA! Far from it!  She was showing me the kind of patience you show a child learning how to read.

The problem was, I was quickly running out of her patience for me and the discussion became heated for at least an hour.  I don’t want to use the word ultimatum, because that implies coercion.  But the discussion was getting dangerously close to boiling over even though we were just hours from me proving to Wendy that all the things she was talking about were things I believed in too.  My simple replies for us to wait just a little bit longer were just too vague to count.  My credibility had started to run dry, much like our gas tank.  So, needing gas and a breather from the cockpit, I hopped out of the car to tank up at the next Freeway exit. 

Tired of the conversation, with the woman I loved sitting tormented and upset from my seemingly lack of lack of ability to commit, I opened the hatch to the luggage in the back of my station wagon.  As the gas pumped into the tank, I found my duffle bag and extracted the engagement ring box and stealthily pushed it into the left front pocket of my jean shorts.  … Like you never had jean shorts.

Fully fueled, we got right back out onto the Freeway and right back into our conversation.  No amount of apologies or assurances could keep Wendy from arriving back to the same point again and again.  Steve was not going to ask Wendy to marry her anytime soon.  This made Wendy tremendously sad, and when you’re tremendously sad, you hurt and become angry.  When you’re angry, you lash out and say hurtful things.  Wendy was justified to be sad, and I couldn’t take it anymore.  I wanted her suffering to be over even if I had to pull off and propose at the next truck stop mini-mart. 

We sat in silence as we drove at what Wendy believed was an impasse.  There was nothing more to say.  I could hear Wendy’s mind racing in her head.  Tears were streaming down her face as she was surely contemplating whether to continue to foster the love of a man who wished to remain a boy, or just give up and find someone who wasn’t this kind of trouble.

Wendy was confused when I pulled off on another exit so soon after the last one where we re-fueled.  The ring box was warm against my leg. 

“Trust me,” I said, hoping she understood that I meant “trust me, I’m going to make you so happy, so much sooner than you expect,” rather than, “trust me, I think I forgot to remove the nozzle from the last gas station and the hose has been dragging behind our car for thirty miles.”  But seeing as how she twisted in her seat to look behind us, I knew it was the latter.

I parked the car in front of the mini-mart.  This was it.  End her pain.  Take out the ring and ask her to marry you, don’t make her suffer anymore. 

I sat there for a minute, next to Wendy, feeling the ring in my pocket, so ready to end this pain for both of us by proposing to my girlfriend at a… at a place that smells like corndogs cooked with cigarettes.  I was seriously thinking about proposing to the woman I love in front of a place where people take a key attached to a hubcap to use to get into a restroom.  A place where any meal you purchase will have some part of it either fried or made of candy.  No.  No I will not.  I will stick to the plan. 

Instead, I purchased a mental Band-Aid.  I went in and picked up an audio book on cassette to occupy our minds until we reached our destination and then, the next day, the plan would come together as it should, as Wendy deserved.  I stashed the ring back in the duffle bag. 

The detective story seemed to work.  We both listened closely and it carried us all the way to my sister’s where Wendy and I exchanged apologies and kisses and turned in for some much needed shut eye.  Apologies and kisses aside, I figured I conveniently had only one more day worth of credit before Wendy called in my marker and severed ties with me forever.

My sister, Somer, was in on the surprise and a key part of the misdirection, though after our car ride, I didn’t think there would need to be much in the way of subterfuge.  Her job was to suggest a destination off the beaten path to our rendezvous with my parents at a vacation rental.  After a delicious breakfast at my sister’s favorite pancake house, we followed her to a gas station that served as a crossroads for where we needed to go.  The three of us debated as we gassed up.

“We have about six hours to kill before Mom and Dad show up to the house and get the keys,” said Somer, “why don’t we go out to the cape?” She did exactly as I instructed.

“Nah, I’d like to get into town early in case Mom and Dad show up,” I protested, but Somer wasn’t ready for me to disagree.

“I’ve never been out to the cape,” Wendy said, eager to see something new in time that we had enough of, “what’s out there?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Lots of stuff,” my sister said annoyed that I was going off-script.

“Please? We have time, I haven’t ever been out there.  Is this the place with the tree?” Wendy asked.

“Okay, fine.  Let’s go,” I said with false assertion, “sure, we can see the tree.”  I was now certain that there was no way my girlfriend would figure I was going to propose to her at a place I didn’t even want to go to.  My confidence was back.  I was so glad I didn’t propose to my girlfriend at a place that sold caffeine in pill form.

The drive to the state park was winding but very beautiful.  The sun was breaking through the early morning mists and pushing the clouds far away.  Wendy held my hand and smiled up at me as I pointed out several historical points of interest.  The scenery was appearing to me as if it had been filmed through a romantic filter on a wide angle lens and then projected back across my field of vision.  I was capturing every moment with delicate care.

We turned off the main road to the state park access road that led us through a lush, evergreen forest.  Rays of sunshine pierced the coniferous branches and dotted the ferns and moist soil of the forest floor.

“Steve, I’ve been here before,” Wendy said to me, not really believing it herself.

“No you haven’t,” I said casually.

“Yes, I have, I’m having the craziest Déjà vu moment here,” Wendy exclaimed. 

Did she know what was about to happen?  Is she messing with me?  Of course she knows.  The Ben Bridge dream and then the caller ID.  She knew I almost proposed to her last night too.  She knows and she’s just trying to let you know before you pop the question. 

My face soured a little as I let these dark thoughts take hold of me.  “No!” I thought, “Impossible!  Stick with the plan!”

We parked the cars and got out to do some exploring.  I had the ring in my pocket and I only had to keep her from noticing.  I brought a disposable camera too.  It was a park that I had been introduced to by an old girlfriend’s family and I had always been fond of its beauty.  I had always held in the back of my mind that it would be the perfect place to get engaged, as long as it wasn’t socked in with fog, which it frequently was.  On this particular day, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The three of us walked down a short inclined path to the big destination of the park and we marveled at the view.  We went in the structure and milled about the gift shop until the upstairs was completely empty.  I nodded casually at my sister to take her position at the base of the stairs and she made her way over there to run interference.

“What do you say? Do you want to go up?” I asked Wendy, gesturing to the staircase.

“Sure,” she said and made her way with me up the very steep, narrow staircase of the small Oregon Coast Lighthouse at Cape Mears. 

We reached the conical glass room where the lenses were polished to an impossible shine.  Although the lighthouse is short, we felt as if we towered over the crashing waves on the rocks below us.  The sun warmed our faces and the blue to white haze of the sky met the enormous Pacific Ocean in a panoramic vision that had inspired souls both before and after us that day.

I was alone with Wendy and stood behind her with my arms wrapped around her.  I pressed my face into the hair behind her ear as we looked out over the amazingly perfect scene.  She pressed back and squeezed my arms. 

“Are you happy?” I asked her. 

Her eyes were closed and she answered from a satisfied smile, “yes.”

“Wendy, I love you.  You’re the most important person to me.  You’re the only person I ever want to be with for the rest of my life.  I want you to know that I will always be true to you because you’re my best friend,” I said to her.

“I love you too Steven,” She began, but turned to see why I had let go of her.

I knelt before her and began to speak as I lifted the box with the ring up for her to see, “Will you do me the honor of marrying m…” I said, almost completing the sentence.

Upon seeing the ring exposed and realizing her surroundings, Wendy snatched the ring from my hand as a hungry, hungry hippo would snatch a little white marble off of a smooth plastic game board.

She wrapped her arms around me and said, “Yes! YES! Of Course!” all the while clutching the ring box in both hands.

“Would you mind telling me why you grabbed the ring out of my hands?”  I asked her after a moment of embracing.

“The grating on the floor.  I didn’t want the ring to fall through the grating and get lost,” she said. 

“Ah, I understand,” I said, “would you like to take a look at it?”

“Let’s be careful,” she said opening the box and marveling at the humbleness of the stones and letting me know that she thought it was beautiful.  “It’s perfect,” she said as I carefully slipped it onto her finger.

We stood there together and both cried as we soaked up the last few private moments in the top of the lighthouse.  A couple had muscled their way past my sister, too impatient to wait another minute for us to head down ourselves.

They arrived on the deck and looked at us as we finished our “I love you’s” to each other. 

“Been there, done that,” said the woman as she turned away from us.  It was a wonderful first blessing of our engagement.

We arrived back down in the gift shop to applause and my sister who was waiting to fight the slightly older couple that had interrupted us.  “I told them that you were getting engaged, and they didn’t care, they just pushed on past me,” said Somer.

Not only had the sky cleared up from all the morning clouds, but with the simple request for a commitment to love each other, all of the doubts or questions about the relationship between Wendy and me seemed to drift away.  Doubt was replaced with trust and the emotional credit that I had been borrowing against was almost wiped completely clean. 

When I think back to that perfect day with my wife, I’m always reminded of her patience and how she believed in me even when I did not believe there was anything that needed to be believed in.  I expressed my love with my commitment to Wendy, and Wendy expressed her love with her commitment to gain my commitment.  She’s still my biggest believer, and that’s the Damm truth.