Friday, December 17, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Way to go, Dad.
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Way to go, Dad.: "As a kid your parents are usually the only fans you have. Maybe a grandparent that calls you by your cousin's name, maybe an observant uncle..."
Way to go, Dad.
As a kid your parents are usually the only fans you have. Maybe a grandparent that calls you by your cousin's name, maybe an affectionate uncle (hopefully not too affectionate), but usually the only people remotely interested in your life are your parents. Because they love you, everything you do, no matter how menial, is fascinating to them. (Also because to the world you are a walking billboard of their DNA, and they are desperate to see some sign of greatness in you that will prove to them, and their friends and coworkers, that they really are genetically superior). I wish I could go back in time and repay the favor, be my Dad's cheering section on a couple of occasions, because looking back he had a few moments deserving of a high five and a trip to McDonalds.
My parents divorced when I was 8, or at least began to. I believe in was in my early twenties by the time they had reached an agreement on child support. Obviously that's an exaggeration, they have yet to agree on anything. In reality I was close to 11 when the case finally wrapped up in court. A staggering amount of misconceptions about the impact divorce has on children abound in the child-worship era of today. Divorce doesn't necessarily screw a kid up, remarriage, however, almost always does. Living with one parent instead of two is much easier than one parent and an extra adult you don't know very well, which is how these things work out. You weren't getting to know this new person over strawberry margaritas at the Mexican place by Walgreens. You were at home, hopefully not with the too affectionate uncle. The other potential pothole is the way the divorce is carried out. My mom left my Dad by means of a note. He never saw it coming (though the recent "business trips" might have been a clue to a more suspicious man), in fact he would often say later that if someone had told him the day before that he would one day be divorced he would have laughed out loud. No fights, no tension, no warning. He didn't take it too well.
Dad was a school teacher, and was home in the afternoons when I got home from school. I can remember coming in the house and seeing him sitting in the basement, rocking in his La-Z-Boy (loved that chair), with the lights out and shutters shut. At night I could hear him on the phone with people, sometimes crying, and he lost a bunch of weight. That is very telling when you're thin to begin with.
I think this happened in February or March, who knows, but when the weather started to get warm he put a basketball hoop up on our garage. Being a teacher he was off summers, and that summer I would wake up in the morning and hear the basketball bouncing off the backboard. I was too young to be able to see shooting baskets 8 hours a day as a means of coping with emotional turmoil, I just liked him available to play whenever I wanted to. Nice having someone cheer when you make a good shot.
Drama aside, I'll let you in on one of the coolest things a kid could hope for. Our house was about 3 miles from 6 Flags Great America (marriotts at the time, to be technical), and like most people in our town we had seasons passes, and the season parking tag. We were both off for the summer, so in the evenings after dinner we would cruise over to Great America, ride a few rides, stop by the root beer stand, and go home. That really was awesome. We went to Six Flags the way most kids and their parents go to a park or maybe a Dairy Queen.
Back to hoop dreams. My Dad grew up in rural Indiana, so basketball was in his blood. Shooting baskets, anyway, he wasn't driving the lane. He was like a white Larry Bird, and after a few weeks of practicing a mere 16-18 hours a day he had a damn good shot. One night we were strolling around Great America, and as we walked through the games section we spied a basketball shooting game. A dollar per try, sink the shot you win a stuffed basketball. They had five different styles to choose from. I asked Dad to win me a ball. (Ok, I made have made that part up, it may have been his idea to try, but it sure sounds nice this way). We walked up to the counter (this part is 100% true) and Dad gave the guy a $5; and proceeded to sink 5 straight shots and get me each ball. Right the fuck on!
Those games are not meant to be easy, everybody knows that, but years later I did business with one of the top execs from the park, and he told me the games got harder after noon. Most every game had a small adjustment, so people would win early and carry around huge stuffed animals, leading people to try their hand at a contest whose odds had already changed. With the basketball game the rims go up, I don't remember how much, but it wouldn't take much variance to throw someone off. Shaq has been shooting at 10 foot rims for years and still can barely hit 50%. My Dad handed the guy a five at night, the harder time, and was straight money. Oddly, I still have all five stuffed basketballs. I have very few possessions, so many moves, so much irresponsibility, foreclosures, evictions, rehab, bankruptcy, and yet I still have those balls. Way to go Dad. Way to ball.
My Dad and I lived together, just the two of us, for seven years. Seven great years, really. My mom lived close, I did the dual family kid every other weekend thing, so I still saw her quite a bit, but my Dad and I were super close. And I had a few friends, rotating through best friends as I advanced through elementary school. When I was 11 or 12, my best friend at that time had the same name as me, Hoi (haha). He had a sister who was a year or two younger than us, very sweet girl, and a brother who was about 5 when I met him. His younger brother was a sociopath. Ok, maybe not an according to Hoyle sociopath, but something, criminal mind, borderline personality, or in those days just crazy. I don't remember many specific examples to give you of his behavior, other than to say he was usually very nice but would do very damaging things out of the blue, calmly. No lack of comprehension that what he did caused damage or pain or whatever, just no emotional reaction. I wish I had a good story about him killing small animals or something, but I don't, all I can say is that you just knew it about him. Everyone around him knew it.
Aside from having a sister and Ted Bundy for a brother, he had a Mom (apparently more than half the people in America at that time had mothers). Well, he had a MILF, really. At 11 or 12 I was at a unique age when it came to the opposite sex. I knew his Mom was pretty, but I was never attracted to her. A couple years later and my best friend's hot mom would have been fantasy material. My Dad, being a few years ahead of me, was at that stage the first time he met her. She was single, like him, and had been divorced twice. Her first husband, and the father of my friend and his sweet sister, had killed himself. Car running in the garage. At the time the story my friend and his sister had been told by their Mom was that he accidentally fell asleep, but I remember the day they told me, and I remember then not believing that, young as I was, and I remember knowing for certain that neither one of them did either. Her second husband, and the father of Dahmer, turned out to be an abuser. She took the kids and left him, left the entire country in fact, they were Canadian. She had a pretty good job as a chemist, so that may have spurred the long distance move. On the other hand, having met the walking billboard advertising that man's DNA, she may have just wanted to get as far away as possible.
She and my father saw each other a lot dropping us off and picking us up from sleepovers at each others houses and things like that, and they started spending more time with each other. It didn't really change much for me, I still slept over at my friend's house on the weekends, only now my Dad was coming with. He slept over too.
Again, 11 or 12 is a weird age for sexual awareness. My friend and I both knew what it was, and that our parents were doing that at night, but it wasn't something we thought much about. A year or two younger, we would have been clueless, a year or two older and it would have been a big deal. As it was we existed in the balance between awareness and giving a shit, and this unique perspective made possible a hilarious scenario.
His house had four bedrooms, one for each kid, and one for his Mom. His room had bunkbeds, so it really worked out great for us to stay there, which we did, a lot. We made up a pretty good dynamic, the lot of us, got along well and had fun together, took some small trips. His brother wasn't that bad, not at that age, and he wasn't mean, per say.....just wired wrong. You felt angry with him and bad for him at the same time when he did things.
One Friday or Saturday night my friend and I were in his room trying to go to sleep, but we couldn't help but clearly hear....Ok, two things, one, she had one of those old fashioned brass beds that will sound like a porno is being filmed on it if you so much as roll over, and two, she was a screamer, or at least a loud moaner. I can't believe I didn't appreciate the magnitude of the moment, neither of us did. He should have been totally creeped out hearing his Mom getting off, and I should have been totally aroused. I kind of am just thinking about it now, like I said, she was hot and she was loud. Yum.
But we didn't grasp the weight of the situation, we were just annoyed that we couldn't get to sleep. I was laying there awake, staring at the ceiling, when I heard my friend whisper to ask if I was awake. I said yeah, of course, it was loud (tile floors in the hallway and not much distance between rooms, that brass bed echoed something terrible). He agreed, and we were silent a moment. Then he asked me if I thought we should say something, and I said yeah go for it. So he yells out, "Excuse me, could you please quiet down!" and the way he said it, not angrily, but forcefully, firmly, and plenty loud enough to hear.
Instant silence. We didn't give it another thought, didn't talk much more, just went to bed, and woke up the next day thinking about other things. It was years before I happened to remember that, and fully appreciated the incredible awkwardness our parents must have felt. I can only imagine how mortified they must have been. Late at night, been doing it for months, caught up in the moment, forget your kids are about 15 feet away....and then hear one of them politely ask you to quiet down....wow! We didn't think about it at all the next day, but I bet they were embarrassed as hell to sit with us at breakfast, probably were dreading leaving the bedroom that morning. haha!
Like the basketballs, I appreciated what my Dad was doing on a much smaller level. I now appreciate how hard it was to hit five straight shots, at the time I just liked getting the stuffed basketballs. At the time I just liked spending more time with my friend and his family, but now I appreciate how hard my Dad was hitting that very respectable Canadian ass. Way to go Dad! Way to ball.
A footnote: I don't know if I will ever write about them again, so I'll mention that my Dad dated her for about two years. They broke up, and he met my next step mother ( I have had a couple, I'm issuing trading cards for them) and, obviously, married her. He would soon, and forever, regret that, at least the part about my step mother. I'm not sure if he wished he had stayed with the Canuck. I know this though, he loved my friend and his sister, really did, but he was not at all sorry to not have to deal with the little brother growing up. Like I said, you just knew, everyone did.
My friend and I lost touch, and I went a good fifteen years without seeing anyone in his family again. Then one night I went into a bar that was about 3 blocks from the apartment I had been living in for the last six months. I'm sitting at the bar with a friend, having a beer, and I keep looking at the bartender. There is something familiar about her, but I can't place her. She did, though. It was weird and so out of the blue to see her. We were very close when we were young, she really was like a sister to me for two years, and my Dad and I kind of left her, her brother, and her mother. I never really looked at it that way, but I did the moment I realized it was her, and it flustered me a bit. I talked with her and found out her older brother, my friend, was married, house, young kid, doing well, as everyone knew he would. Her mom had remarried as well and was apparently doing well, but I could tell that even all these years later she was hurt that my Dad had left her Mom, and her I guess too. Her Dad had killed himself, her step dad beat up her Mom, she meets my Dad (who really is a great guy) at age 10 and at 12 he's gone. Even worse, two years later she is attending the high school he teaches at, and sees him and talks to him frequently (in passing, not confiding), so that wound must have never really closed. My Dad had mentioned a time or two that he saw her and her brother around the school and they were doing well (we had moved to another town to live with step#1), so I had all the facts to deduce that she was really hurt by that situation, but....I was young, and had a total nightmare of a woman in my life to deal with. Never occurred to me. So like I said, I was flustered, and I didn't really talk as much to her as I would have liked to, and I'm sure didn't seem very interested in seeing her, even though I was.
Drinking at that time had started creating real problems in my life, it was an odd night, a slip I guess, that I went to a bar at all, the one she worked at or any other. I didn't think to mention that, but I did mention that I lived within shouting distance. So when I never went back there, what might she have thought? My Dad bumped into her some months later, and she mentioned I had been in. And never been back. He said she looked hurt by that, and he didn't know what to do. One the one hand he wanted her to know it wasn't that I was avoiding the bar right outside my house because she worked there. On the other hand, explaining why I shouldn't be at a bar in the first place was a long topic for a chance meeting in a grocery store or wherever. I have no idea how he handled it, I hope he made it ok. She wasn't an emotionally feeble clingy person at all, just a good person who had been the victim of circumstances beyond her control.
The $10,000,000 dollar question. When I saw her at the bar that night, she told me what had become of her older brother and mother, but what of her younger brother? I asked about him. She looked down briefly, shook her head a little, and said, "Exactly what you thought would" or something to that effect. She mentioned him being in prison, either at the moment or already had been and was out. I didn't press her on it. It was too sad, at that moment, to think of the five year old boy that I had spent so much time with, baby sat for, taught to throw a football, turning into the dark character that had always been inside him. Despite the efforts of so many people who had loved him and done all they could to save him from that. I know perfectly well that my Dad and I staying with them wouldn't have been enough to help him, but at that moment, I felt horribly guilty. We would have helped her.
My parents divorced when I was 8, or at least began to. I believe in was in my early twenties by the time they had reached an agreement on child support. Obviously that's an exaggeration, they have yet to agree on anything. In reality I was close to 11 when the case finally wrapped up in court. A staggering amount of misconceptions about the impact divorce has on children abound in the child-worship era of today. Divorce doesn't necessarily screw a kid up, remarriage, however, almost always does. Living with one parent instead of two is much easier than one parent and an extra adult you don't know very well, which is how these things work out. You weren't getting to know this new person over strawberry margaritas at the Mexican place by Walgreens. You were at home, hopefully not with the too affectionate uncle. The other potential pothole is the way the divorce is carried out. My mom left my Dad by means of a note. He never saw it coming (though the recent "business trips" might have been a clue to a more suspicious man), in fact he would often say later that if someone had told him the day before that he would one day be divorced he would have laughed out loud. No fights, no tension, no warning. He didn't take it too well.
Dad was a school teacher, and was home in the afternoons when I got home from school. I can remember coming in the house and seeing him sitting in the basement, rocking in his La-Z-Boy (loved that chair), with the lights out and shutters shut. At night I could hear him on the phone with people, sometimes crying, and he lost a bunch of weight. That is very telling when you're thin to begin with.
I think this happened in February or March, who knows, but when the weather started to get warm he put a basketball hoop up on our garage. Being a teacher he was off summers, and that summer I would wake up in the morning and hear the basketball bouncing off the backboard. I was too young to be able to see shooting baskets 8 hours a day as a means of coping with emotional turmoil, I just liked him available to play whenever I wanted to. Nice having someone cheer when you make a good shot.
Drama aside, I'll let you in on one of the coolest things a kid could hope for. Our house was about 3 miles from 6 Flags Great America (marriotts at the time, to be technical), and like most people in our town we had seasons passes, and the season parking tag. We were both off for the summer, so in the evenings after dinner we would cruise over to Great America, ride a few rides, stop by the root beer stand, and go home. That really was awesome. We went to Six Flags the way most kids and their parents go to a park or maybe a Dairy Queen.
Back to hoop dreams. My Dad grew up in rural Indiana, so basketball was in his blood. Shooting baskets, anyway, he wasn't driving the lane. He was like a white Larry Bird, and after a few weeks of practicing a mere 16-18 hours a day he had a damn good shot. One night we were strolling around Great America, and as we walked through the games section we spied a basketball shooting game. A dollar per try, sink the shot you win a stuffed basketball. They had five different styles to choose from. I asked Dad to win me a ball. (Ok, I made have made that part up, it may have been his idea to try, but it sure sounds nice this way). We walked up to the counter (this part is 100% true) and Dad gave the guy a $5; and proceeded to sink 5 straight shots and get me each ball. Right the fuck on!
Those games are not meant to be easy, everybody knows that, but years later I did business with one of the top execs from the park, and he told me the games got harder after noon. Most every game had a small adjustment, so people would win early and carry around huge stuffed animals, leading people to try their hand at a contest whose odds had already changed. With the basketball game the rims go up, I don't remember how much, but it wouldn't take much variance to throw someone off. Shaq has been shooting at 10 foot rims for years and still can barely hit 50%. My Dad handed the guy a five at night, the harder time, and was straight money. Oddly, I still have all five stuffed basketballs. I have very few possessions, so many moves, so much irresponsibility, foreclosures, evictions, rehab, bankruptcy, and yet I still have those balls. Way to go Dad. Way to ball.
My Dad and I lived together, just the two of us, for seven years. Seven great years, really. My mom lived close, I did the dual family kid every other weekend thing, so I still saw her quite a bit, but my Dad and I were super close. And I had a few friends, rotating through best friends as I advanced through elementary school. When I was 11 or 12, my best friend at that time had the same name as me, Hoi (haha). He had a sister who was a year or two younger than us, very sweet girl, and a brother who was about 5 when I met him. His younger brother was a sociopath. Ok, maybe not an according to Hoyle sociopath, but something, criminal mind, borderline personality, or in those days just crazy. I don't remember many specific examples to give you of his behavior, other than to say he was usually very nice but would do very damaging things out of the blue, calmly. No lack of comprehension that what he did caused damage or pain or whatever, just no emotional reaction. I wish I had a good story about him killing small animals or something, but I don't, all I can say is that you just knew it about him. Everyone around him knew it.
Aside from having a sister and Ted Bundy for a brother, he had a Mom (apparently more than half the people in America at that time had mothers). Well, he had a MILF, really. At 11 or 12 I was at a unique age when it came to the opposite sex. I knew his Mom was pretty, but I was never attracted to her. A couple years later and my best friend's hot mom would have been fantasy material. My Dad, being a few years ahead of me, was at that stage the first time he met her. She was single, like him, and had been divorced twice. Her first husband, and the father of my friend and his sweet sister, had killed himself. Car running in the garage. At the time the story my friend and his sister had been told by their Mom was that he accidentally fell asleep, but I remember the day they told me, and I remember then not believing that, young as I was, and I remember knowing for certain that neither one of them did either. Her second husband, and the father of Dahmer, turned out to be an abuser. She took the kids and left him, left the entire country in fact, they were Canadian. She had a pretty good job as a chemist, so that may have spurred the long distance move. On the other hand, having met the walking billboard advertising that man's DNA, she may have just wanted to get as far away as possible.
She and my father saw each other a lot dropping us off and picking us up from sleepovers at each others houses and things like that, and they started spending more time with each other. It didn't really change much for me, I still slept over at my friend's house on the weekends, only now my Dad was coming with. He slept over too.
Again, 11 or 12 is a weird age for sexual awareness. My friend and I both knew what it was, and that our parents were doing that at night, but it wasn't something we thought much about. A year or two younger, we would have been clueless, a year or two older and it would have been a big deal. As it was we existed in the balance between awareness and giving a shit, and this unique perspective made possible a hilarious scenario.
His house had four bedrooms, one for each kid, and one for his Mom. His room had bunkbeds, so it really worked out great for us to stay there, which we did, a lot. We made up a pretty good dynamic, the lot of us, got along well and had fun together, took some small trips. His brother wasn't that bad, not at that age, and he wasn't mean, per say.....just wired wrong. You felt angry with him and bad for him at the same time when he did things.
One Friday or Saturday night my friend and I were in his room trying to go to sleep, but we couldn't help but clearly hear....Ok, two things, one, she had one of those old fashioned brass beds that will sound like a porno is being filmed on it if you so much as roll over, and two, she was a screamer, or at least a loud moaner. I can't believe I didn't appreciate the magnitude of the moment, neither of us did. He should have been totally creeped out hearing his Mom getting off, and I should have been totally aroused. I kind of am just thinking about it now, like I said, she was hot and she was loud. Yum.
But we didn't grasp the weight of the situation, we were just annoyed that we couldn't get to sleep. I was laying there awake, staring at the ceiling, when I heard my friend whisper to ask if I was awake. I said yeah, of course, it was loud (tile floors in the hallway and not much distance between rooms, that brass bed echoed something terrible). He agreed, and we were silent a moment. Then he asked me if I thought we should say something, and I said yeah go for it. So he yells out, "Excuse me, could you please quiet down!" and the way he said it, not angrily, but forcefully, firmly, and plenty loud enough to hear.
Instant silence. We didn't give it another thought, didn't talk much more, just went to bed, and woke up the next day thinking about other things. It was years before I happened to remember that, and fully appreciated the incredible awkwardness our parents must have felt. I can only imagine how mortified they must have been. Late at night, been doing it for months, caught up in the moment, forget your kids are about 15 feet away....and then hear one of them politely ask you to quiet down....wow! We didn't think about it at all the next day, but I bet they were embarrassed as hell to sit with us at breakfast, probably were dreading leaving the bedroom that morning. haha!
Like the basketballs, I appreciated what my Dad was doing on a much smaller level. I now appreciate how hard it was to hit five straight shots, at the time I just liked getting the stuffed basketballs. At the time I just liked spending more time with my friend and his family, but now I appreciate how hard my Dad was hitting that very respectable Canadian ass. Way to go Dad! Way to ball.
A footnote: I don't know if I will ever write about them again, so I'll mention that my Dad dated her for about two years. They broke up, and he met my next step mother ( I have had a couple, I'm issuing trading cards for them) and, obviously, married her. He would soon, and forever, regret that, at least the part about my step mother. I'm not sure if he wished he had stayed with the Canuck. I know this though, he loved my friend and his sister, really did, but he was not at all sorry to not have to deal with the little brother growing up. Like I said, you just knew, everyone did.
My friend and I lost touch, and I went a good fifteen years without seeing anyone in his family again. Then one night I went into a bar that was about 3 blocks from the apartment I had been living in for the last six months. I'm sitting at the bar with a friend, having a beer, and I keep looking at the bartender. There is something familiar about her, but I can't place her. She did, though. It was weird and so out of the blue to see her. We were very close when we were young, she really was like a sister to me for two years, and my Dad and I kind of left her, her brother, and her mother. I never really looked at it that way, but I did the moment I realized it was her, and it flustered me a bit. I talked with her and found out her older brother, my friend, was married, house, young kid, doing well, as everyone knew he would. Her mom had remarried as well and was apparently doing well, but I could tell that even all these years later she was hurt that my Dad had left her Mom, and her I guess too. Her Dad had killed himself, her step dad beat up her Mom, she meets my Dad (who really is a great guy) at age 10 and at 12 he's gone. Even worse, two years later she is attending the high school he teaches at, and sees him and talks to him frequently (in passing, not confiding), so that wound must have never really closed. My Dad had mentioned a time or two that he saw her and her brother around the school and they were doing well (we had moved to another town to live with step#1), so I had all the facts to deduce that she was really hurt by that situation, but....I was young, and had a total nightmare of a woman in my life to deal with. Never occurred to me. So like I said, I was flustered, and I didn't really talk as much to her as I would have liked to, and I'm sure didn't seem very interested in seeing her, even though I was.
Drinking at that time had started creating real problems in my life, it was an odd night, a slip I guess, that I went to a bar at all, the one she worked at or any other. I didn't think to mention that, but I did mention that I lived within shouting distance. So when I never went back there, what might she have thought? My Dad bumped into her some months later, and she mentioned I had been in. And never been back. He said she looked hurt by that, and he didn't know what to do. One the one hand he wanted her to know it wasn't that I was avoiding the bar right outside my house because she worked there. On the other hand, explaining why I shouldn't be at a bar in the first place was a long topic for a chance meeting in a grocery store or wherever. I have no idea how he handled it, I hope he made it ok. She wasn't an emotionally feeble clingy person at all, just a good person who had been the victim of circumstances beyond her control.
The $10,000,000 dollar question. When I saw her at the bar that night, she told me what had become of her older brother and mother, but what of her younger brother? I asked about him. She looked down briefly, shook her head a little, and said, "Exactly what you thought would" or something to that effect. She mentioned him being in prison, either at the moment or already had been and was out. I didn't press her on it. It was too sad, at that moment, to think of the five year old boy that I had spent so much time with, baby sat for, taught to throw a football, turning into the dark character that had always been inside him. Despite the efforts of so many people who had loved him and done all they could to save him from that. I know perfectly well that my Dad and I staying with them wouldn't have been enough to help him, but at that moment, I felt horribly guilty. We would have helped her.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: A favorite website of mine, convet youtube videos ...
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: A favorite website of mine, convet youtube videos ...: "http://www.video2mp3.net/afterdownload.php"
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Gamblers
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Gamblers: "There was a time in my life when I considered drug or alcohol addiction to be the worst character defect a person could have, in terms of th..."
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Gamblers
There was a time in my life when I considered drug or alcohol addiction to be the worst character defect a person could have, in terms of the damage done to themselves and everyone around them. That was before I had ever encountered a gambler. In a way it seems surprising to me that considering the degenerate life I had led I was about 25 before I crossed paths with a gambler, but upon further reflection I guess it makes sense. While both activities would certainly appear to attract a similar type of person, personal priorities may keep some from one activity or the other. If getting high is your thing, you probably will rarely accumulate the cash for a night at a casino. When you wind up with money you get high, and only essentials will even begin to compete with that. However, if gambling is your thing, you could very well find yourself leaving the casino with more than enough cash for a lost weekend. I can't even imagine what life would be like with both problems.
It wasn't one gambler I met, it was actually two at the same time, a winner and a loser. They were both sales managers at a dealership I worked for. I'll start with the story of the winner, because it's shorter and less interesting (how often that is true in life!)
Dean was a Greek guy in his early fifties and without a doubt the absolute sleaziest person I ever had the pleasure of working with during my ten year tenure in the car business. Everyone that I know of that worked with him would say the same. He was an old school car guy, one of the generation who had earned the car business its dubious reputation, beyond dishonest, really, criminal. And he was so good! That's what made the guy scary to work with. As a salesman you have no control over the financial make up of the deal, the sales manager does that, so you can't sell anything without dealing with one of them. Sometimes there was only one guy available, so there was no decision to be made. Sometimes you could choose. Choose Dean, and you might well end up watching him fleece the customers you have spent the last two hours bonding with, and might actually like. But oh my the commissions some of his deals generated! He once went in to talk to the customers a salesman had been working with, and in the course of his schmoozing told them he was the guy's uncle. The salesman was Japanese, his name was Takashi. That lie may seem minor, and it was sure as hell funny, but it is really indicative of his pathology. That lie didn't get him any extra money, it didn't help him form rapport, it served no practical purpose at all. He did it because he enjoyed seeing what he could get away with.
He also enjoyed gambling, and he was good at that too, thought as a slot player skill doesn't really come into play. He had once won a major jackpot at some casino, and had a picture up in his office that showed him shaking a guys hand and getting an oversized check. I don't remember the exact amount, but it was enormous, $200,000 or somewhere in that vicinity. I never went to a casino with him because he went on his days off, which I worked, but from the accounts of my coworkers I understand he had a peculiar method. He played $25 dollar slots, something I didn't realize even existed, and here is how he played. He chose a machine, would feed in a grand or two, then rest his forearm on the machine and lay his head on his arm so he couldn't see what he was doing. He would then hit the spin button until he heard the lights that signaled a win. Strange. He might lose ten grand on a Wednesday afternoon, but overall, he came out on top. I would find it hard to believe but I heard that from numerous people who had known the guy for twenty or thirty years. Some people are just lucky that way.
And some aren't, which brings me to the other type of gambler, the loser. Sean was a used car sales manager, and my immediate boss when I moved to that department though he was only a year or two older than I. The first time I went to a casino with Sean he impressed me. He was a blackjack player, which was the only game I was even remotely interested in. When we got to the casino he sat down at a $50 table, which was too much for me. I settled in at a $25 dollar table and played for about an hour. I had brought about $300 with me, had gone up to nearly $600, and then back to where I started. That was enough for me, and I went to find Sean, hoping he was ready to go. When I found him he was at a $50 table with a substantial pile of chips in front of him. I knew he had brought $1500 in, and while I couldn't see exactly what he had now, it was over $4000 at least. So I took a free seat at the table, ordered a drink, and watched him play. He knew what he was doing. He played a tight, controlled game, not betting wildly, splitting, doubling, hitting, standing all based on math rather than impulse. He didn't win every hand, but he was winning consistently, and seemed very much in control. Until a few hands in a row went the other way, including a couple he had doubled or split. Even though he was still way up on the night, the rapid loss of a large amount of chips flustered him. The tight, controlled game gave way to large, impulsive betting as he attempted to regain lost ground. This, predictably, only accelerated the pace at which he was losing money and faster than seemed possible he was broke. He turned to me and asked to borrow a couple hundred bucks.
Let me stop right there and explain a few things. While I often borrowed money, I never lent it. Life had taught me that anyone looking to borrow money from me would never be able to repay it. I also knew addictive behavior pretty well, not that you had to be a psychologist to understand what was going on with him. And he was really only slightly my boss, which sounds weird, but he was almost a junior manager of sorts, and I at that time was an absolute rock star in the used car department, the store for that matter. I could tell him to fuck off with impunity, which is exactly what I, politely, intended to do. I had been ready to go for quite awhile anyway.
I loaned it to him. I don't know how he talked me into it. The guy was incredible at borrowing money, and I would see this skill employed in the near future to a much greater extent. The ability to be told no and ask again, and again, and again is what separates great salesmen from the absolute worst. The average don't push it, and don't make waves with people. The truly terrible just repeat themselves and badger people into annoyance. The great ones find a way to ask the same question a dozen times, subtly rephrasing it to overturn the reason given for the previous denial, and the mood stays friendly the whole time.
Fortunately for me, he started winning again, and as he won he paid me back. He played up to nearly $3000 before we called it a night. What you remember about a situation is highly dependent on its outcome, and though I had watched him crumble and had witnessed textbook addictive behavior, what I took away from that night was this: He won a lot of money, he was a good gambler. Within three months I would be standing outside behind the used car department smoking a cigarette, and out of the corner of my eye see a guy that looked a lot like Sean jump over the back fence of the dealership and disappear into the neighborhood beyond.
The story of the events that led to this includes a story that might be more interesting than Sean's daylight dash, or even the reason for it. It started with me answering a call about a used BMW X3 we had.
The guy who called was Mexican, and his accent was so thick I had trouble understanding him. I wasn't sure he understood me for that matter. I did the salesman thing and tried to set a firm appointment and get a name and number out of him, but it was difficult and I gave up pretty quickly. He said he would stop by, and I said OK, hung up the phone, and totally forgot about it almost immediately. That night as Sean and I were locking up to go home a Chevy Avalanche pulled in and a short Mexican guy hopped out. He was wearing an old flannel and faded work pants, and there was nothing remarkable about him. He was probably in his forties, and looked like he had worked hard every day of his life for not very much return. I walked out to say hi, and mention we were closed, and he asked for me by name. Then I remembered the call, and noticed his truck was not more than a year old. Avalanches are not cheap, in fact they are pretty pricey, but I still didn't get a different vibe from him than my initial impression. It was late, we walked over to the BMW, he peeked in, and said he would be back. Once again, I forgot all about him. It wasn't that I dismissed him because he didn't fit the BMW mold. I had sold expensive to cars to very broke people before. It was late, and I wanted to go home.
The next evening he came back, and this time with his wife. She looked even less the BMW type, and spoke no English at all. They drove the car, they liked it, and they wanted to talk numbers. They would be trading the Avalanche. That really wasn't good news to me. On the one hand, he had a current model year $30 something thousand dollar truck, so he must have a little money and credit, but on the other hand, the first year of depreciation on a car was a killer, and he almost certainly owed way more than it was worth. Trying to finance a used car plus negative equity from a trade in required really good credit, or a lot of money down. When I began the appraisal on his truck and saw the odometer I was even more dismayed. Over 29,000 miles on a current model year truck, about 18,000 more than average. I went through the motions, called and got his payoff while I was waiting for our GM to assign a value to the truck. He owed a lot. Sean drew up some numbers for me to present to him based on $8000 down, and we were giving him a pretty good deal upfront. His situation didn't seem to present an opportunity to try for more.
I presented the numbers to him, he talked to his wife and looked over the worksheet for 2 or 3 minutes and said ok. I was surprised, but I hid it, and asked him to start filling out a credit application. I had explained earlier that the payments we quoted were only estimates, his credit would determine final rate and we would need to run his bureau before I could give him more exact numbers. He started filling out the application. While he was doing this I strolled into the large office Sean and the GM shared. They asked what was up, casually, and I told them he was filling out an app. Neither one of them saw this going to far either. Still, as Sean mentioned, if he wasn't scared off by the $8000 grand down....who knows. A couple minutes later I grabbed the app and we took a look at his credit.
His score was great, high 700's absolute A-tier by the strictest of standards, but his bureau didn't make a lot of sense. He worked at a factory and listed his income on his application at $34,000, or thereabout. His bureau showed that he had a mortgage, the loan on the Avalanche, and another truck, another expensive truck, only 2 years old, and a few smaller open accounts. He had put a fairly large chunk of cash down on both trucks, yet the payments on them and his mortgage were higher than his income. By a lot. Even weirder, the loans were all through a major lender, not a high risk secondary finance company. We couldn't figure out how he had accomplished this. True, his payment history was perfect, never a late payment on anything, but banks look at debt to income ratio regardless of your repayment history, and they never loan money for cars when your outstanding debts are higher than your income, for obvious reasons. The other question we pondered was where he came up with the cash he had put down on these trucks. It didn't look like he had room in the budget for gas. Hey, not our business. Banks were closed for the day, only thing we could do was ask him for a deposit and call it in tomorrow and see if someone would go for it. I explained this to him and he said he would be back in an hour with a deposit. I halfheartedly mentioned he could put in on a credit card, no, he wanted to bring cash. I said Ok, see you soon, and gave him his keys back.
Close to nine that night, and once again it was just me and Sean locking up when we saw the Avalanche pull in. He came in and said he brought the deposit. It occured to me at that point that I had never given him an amount for a deposit (I usually got as much as I could, but all the deposit was for was to give the customer the feeling that they were obligated, though legally we couldn't keep it). The three of us walked into the sales office, Sean sat down at his desk and I sat across from him and motioned for my new friend to sit next to me, but he was busy fishing something out of his pocket. $8000 grand, in a rubberbanded roll so tight it sounded like a pool ball hitting the desk when he flipped it down. Sean and I looked at each other, and Sean looks at him and asks how much that is. $8000, the deposit, he replied. Bless his heart he brought the whole down payment. In cash. I still didn't think we would be able to get him approved. Before we could even move to start counting the money he said, OK I call you guys tomorrow and was gone. Didn't ask for a receipt, didn't wait for a thank you (which was certainly forthcoming, I was liking this guy more every time I saw him), just left. Which is what I wanted to do. I sat with Sean and we counted the money and I happily abandoned him to receipt the cash and do the paperwork.
Around noon the next day Sean tells me he heard back, and got a conditional approval, but the bank wanted $13,000 down minimum. I called him to tell him what I thought was the bad news, but all he said was OK, I bring it tonight. Now I was in a gray area. Federal cash reporting laws start at amounts of $10,000 or more, and you're not supposed to warn people of this. I had watched a 12 minute video and signed a form to this effect. However, I had no intention of letting this poor guy walk into something, so as casually as I could, I mentioned that maybe he would rather bring a check for the additional money. I assured him a personal check from him was fine. He wanted to bring cash. So, screw casual, I told him as bluntly as possible about cash reporting. He said OK, and that night he came by and dropped another $5000 grand on Sean's desk.
We got the deal approved, and a day or two later he picked up his BMW and left us his Avalanche. Our GM was a truck guy, and when he heard it had a full tank of gas he had his plates put on it and drove it home that night, and for the next few days. One morning he arrived at work and told me the check engine light had come on. No big deal, it was still under warranty, so I dropped it off at the Chevy dealer down the street.
The next day our GM gets a call from the Chevy dealer. The problem is with the fuel system, but they can't cover it under warranty. Apparently, someone had taken the gas tank off, and it looked like something had been welded in it, but was no longer there. This voided the warranty. The GM called me and Sean in and told us this and we all busted up laughing in amazement. It all made sense. The high miles for the year, the other truck with high miles, the insane amount of cash this guy had. I had considered that the guy was doing something, but I never really thought it was true. He just wasn't at all what I expected a trafficker to look or act like. I still can't reconcile the guy with the situation, but it makes me smile every time I think of him. Guaranteed, none of his gringo supervisors at the factory had ever considered the guy they were talking down to was Pablo Escobar.
Which brings me back to Sean. The night our friend dropped off the first $8000 I went home and left Sean to receipt the cash. Sean, however, went to the riverboat and lost it all. The following night he lost the next $5000 as well. He had now embezzled $13000 from a store owned by people you did not want to steal from. Things only got worse as he tried to win back his losses over the following weeks. He used his skill at borrowing money to borrow $5000 from one of my best friends who was now working in our department, and he wasn't naive or foolish either. Worse yet, he convinced him to do it via a credit card advance at the casino, so he was out $5000 he didn't have plus mounting interest. In desperation Sean started leaning on our vendors and wholesale buyers. A lot of people made money either buying cars that we took in trade but didn't want to resell and reselling them or doing minor body work on the cars we took in. He used this as leverage to extort loans, $1000 here, $2000 there. I had no idea this was going on, and we worked long hours together. I can only imagine how sick with worry and anxiety he must have been, but it never showed.
The day I saw him go over the fence I finished my cigarette and went back inside. In our parking lot I could see two unmarked police cars with sheriffs plates, and a minute later the owners wife and two sheriffs walking towards the used car department, and she looked furious. She was not a woman to be trifled with, and when she asked where Sean was I just said I didn't know. I didn't want any part of whatever was going on. Later that day the GM filled me in, and I was absolutely astonished, and at once I felt so bad for him. I liked him, our GM did too. We weren't best friends but we worked long hours together in a small department. He was like family. In the coming weeks more and more people came forward, and we finally got a bead on how many people he had borrowed large amounts from. My sympathy for him faded a bit with each case, and when my friend told me about the $5000 on his credit card it evaporated entirely.
In the end he turned himself in, and made arrangements to sign over his 401k to the owners, among other concessions, but I doubt that that even nearly covered the $13000 grand. Everyone else was just out, and so was he. He had been living with his parents and had his girlfriend and daughter there with him. I guess they stayed.
He had had problems with gambling before, so to his family it was a matter of economic survival that he not be allowed near their house. They had a bit of money, and he simply could go through too much too fast when he lost control. This was the first and only time in my life I have ever felt fortunate to have drug problems, because I learned then, there are far worse things.
It wasn't one gambler I met, it was actually two at the same time, a winner and a loser. They were both sales managers at a dealership I worked for. I'll start with the story of the winner, because it's shorter and less interesting (how often that is true in life!)
Dean was a Greek guy in his early fifties and without a doubt the absolute sleaziest person I ever had the pleasure of working with during my ten year tenure in the car business. Everyone that I know of that worked with him would say the same. He was an old school car guy, one of the generation who had earned the car business its dubious reputation, beyond dishonest, really, criminal. And he was so good! That's what made the guy scary to work with. As a salesman you have no control over the financial make up of the deal, the sales manager does that, so you can't sell anything without dealing with one of them. Sometimes there was only one guy available, so there was no decision to be made. Sometimes you could choose. Choose Dean, and you might well end up watching him fleece the customers you have spent the last two hours bonding with, and might actually like. But oh my the commissions some of his deals generated! He once went in to talk to the customers a salesman had been working with, and in the course of his schmoozing told them he was the guy's uncle. The salesman was Japanese, his name was Takashi. That lie may seem minor, and it was sure as hell funny, but it is really indicative of his pathology. That lie didn't get him any extra money, it didn't help him form rapport, it served no practical purpose at all. He did it because he enjoyed seeing what he could get away with.
He also enjoyed gambling, and he was good at that too, thought as a slot player skill doesn't really come into play. He had once won a major jackpot at some casino, and had a picture up in his office that showed him shaking a guys hand and getting an oversized check. I don't remember the exact amount, but it was enormous, $200,000 or somewhere in that vicinity. I never went to a casino with him because he went on his days off, which I worked, but from the accounts of my coworkers I understand he had a peculiar method. He played $25 dollar slots, something I didn't realize even existed, and here is how he played. He chose a machine, would feed in a grand or two, then rest his forearm on the machine and lay his head on his arm so he couldn't see what he was doing. He would then hit the spin button until he heard the lights that signaled a win. Strange. He might lose ten grand on a Wednesday afternoon, but overall, he came out on top. I would find it hard to believe but I heard that from numerous people who had known the guy for twenty or thirty years. Some people are just lucky that way.
And some aren't, which brings me to the other type of gambler, the loser. Sean was a used car sales manager, and my immediate boss when I moved to that department though he was only a year or two older than I. The first time I went to a casino with Sean he impressed me. He was a blackjack player, which was the only game I was even remotely interested in. When we got to the casino he sat down at a $50 table, which was too much for me. I settled in at a $25 dollar table and played for about an hour. I had brought about $300 with me, had gone up to nearly $600, and then back to where I started. That was enough for me, and I went to find Sean, hoping he was ready to go. When I found him he was at a $50 table with a substantial pile of chips in front of him. I knew he had brought $1500 in, and while I couldn't see exactly what he had now, it was over $4000 at least. So I took a free seat at the table, ordered a drink, and watched him play. He knew what he was doing. He played a tight, controlled game, not betting wildly, splitting, doubling, hitting, standing all based on math rather than impulse. He didn't win every hand, but he was winning consistently, and seemed very much in control. Until a few hands in a row went the other way, including a couple he had doubled or split. Even though he was still way up on the night, the rapid loss of a large amount of chips flustered him. The tight, controlled game gave way to large, impulsive betting as he attempted to regain lost ground. This, predictably, only accelerated the pace at which he was losing money and faster than seemed possible he was broke. He turned to me and asked to borrow a couple hundred bucks.
Let me stop right there and explain a few things. While I often borrowed money, I never lent it. Life had taught me that anyone looking to borrow money from me would never be able to repay it. I also knew addictive behavior pretty well, not that you had to be a psychologist to understand what was going on with him. And he was really only slightly my boss, which sounds weird, but he was almost a junior manager of sorts, and I at that time was an absolute rock star in the used car department, the store for that matter. I could tell him to fuck off with impunity, which is exactly what I, politely, intended to do. I had been ready to go for quite awhile anyway.
I loaned it to him. I don't know how he talked me into it. The guy was incredible at borrowing money, and I would see this skill employed in the near future to a much greater extent. The ability to be told no and ask again, and again, and again is what separates great salesmen from the absolute worst. The average don't push it, and don't make waves with people. The truly terrible just repeat themselves and badger people into annoyance. The great ones find a way to ask the same question a dozen times, subtly rephrasing it to overturn the reason given for the previous denial, and the mood stays friendly the whole time.
Fortunately for me, he started winning again, and as he won he paid me back. He played up to nearly $3000 before we called it a night. What you remember about a situation is highly dependent on its outcome, and though I had watched him crumble and had witnessed textbook addictive behavior, what I took away from that night was this: He won a lot of money, he was a good gambler. Within three months I would be standing outside behind the used car department smoking a cigarette, and out of the corner of my eye see a guy that looked a lot like Sean jump over the back fence of the dealership and disappear into the neighborhood beyond.
The story of the events that led to this includes a story that might be more interesting than Sean's daylight dash, or even the reason for it. It started with me answering a call about a used BMW X3 we had.
The guy who called was Mexican, and his accent was so thick I had trouble understanding him. I wasn't sure he understood me for that matter. I did the salesman thing and tried to set a firm appointment and get a name and number out of him, but it was difficult and I gave up pretty quickly. He said he would stop by, and I said OK, hung up the phone, and totally forgot about it almost immediately. That night as Sean and I were locking up to go home a Chevy Avalanche pulled in and a short Mexican guy hopped out. He was wearing an old flannel and faded work pants, and there was nothing remarkable about him. He was probably in his forties, and looked like he had worked hard every day of his life for not very much return. I walked out to say hi, and mention we were closed, and he asked for me by name. Then I remembered the call, and noticed his truck was not more than a year old. Avalanches are not cheap, in fact they are pretty pricey, but I still didn't get a different vibe from him than my initial impression. It was late, we walked over to the BMW, he peeked in, and said he would be back. Once again, I forgot all about him. It wasn't that I dismissed him because he didn't fit the BMW mold. I had sold expensive to cars to very broke people before. It was late, and I wanted to go home.
The next evening he came back, and this time with his wife. She looked even less the BMW type, and spoke no English at all. They drove the car, they liked it, and they wanted to talk numbers. They would be trading the Avalanche. That really wasn't good news to me. On the one hand, he had a current model year $30 something thousand dollar truck, so he must have a little money and credit, but on the other hand, the first year of depreciation on a car was a killer, and he almost certainly owed way more than it was worth. Trying to finance a used car plus negative equity from a trade in required really good credit, or a lot of money down. When I began the appraisal on his truck and saw the odometer I was even more dismayed. Over 29,000 miles on a current model year truck, about 18,000 more than average. I went through the motions, called and got his payoff while I was waiting for our GM to assign a value to the truck. He owed a lot. Sean drew up some numbers for me to present to him based on $8000 down, and we were giving him a pretty good deal upfront. His situation didn't seem to present an opportunity to try for more.
I presented the numbers to him, he talked to his wife and looked over the worksheet for 2 or 3 minutes and said ok. I was surprised, but I hid it, and asked him to start filling out a credit application. I had explained earlier that the payments we quoted were only estimates, his credit would determine final rate and we would need to run his bureau before I could give him more exact numbers. He started filling out the application. While he was doing this I strolled into the large office Sean and the GM shared. They asked what was up, casually, and I told them he was filling out an app. Neither one of them saw this going to far either. Still, as Sean mentioned, if he wasn't scared off by the $8000 grand down....who knows. A couple minutes later I grabbed the app and we took a look at his credit.
His score was great, high 700's absolute A-tier by the strictest of standards, but his bureau didn't make a lot of sense. He worked at a factory and listed his income on his application at $34,000, or thereabout. His bureau showed that he had a mortgage, the loan on the Avalanche, and another truck, another expensive truck, only 2 years old, and a few smaller open accounts. He had put a fairly large chunk of cash down on both trucks, yet the payments on them and his mortgage were higher than his income. By a lot. Even weirder, the loans were all through a major lender, not a high risk secondary finance company. We couldn't figure out how he had accomplished this. True, his payment history was perfect, never a late payment on anything, but banks look at debt to income ratio regardless of your repayment history, and they never loan money for cars when your outstanding debts are higher than your income, for obvious reasons. The other question we pondered was where he came up with the cash he had put down on these trucks. It didn't look like he had room in the budget for gas. Hey, not our business. Banks were closed for the day, only thing we could do was ask him for a deposit and call it in tomorrow and see if someone would go for it. I explained this to him and he said he would be back in an hour with a deposit. I halfheartedly mentioned he could put in on a credit card, no, he wanted to bring cash. I said Ok, see you soon, and gave him his keys back.
Close to nine that night, and once again it was just me and Sean locking up when we saw the Avalanche pull in. He came in and said he brought the deposit. It occured to me at that point that I had never given him an amount for a deposit (I usually got as much as I could, but all the deposit was for was to give the customer the feeling that they were obligated, though legally we couldn't keep it). The three of us walked into the sales office, Sean sat down at his desk and I sat across from him and motioned for my new friend to sit next to me, but he was busy fishing something out of his pocket. $8000 grand, in a rubberbanded roll so tight it sounded like a pool ball hitting the desk when he flipped it down. Sean and I looked at each other, and Sean looks at him and asks how much that is. $8000, the deposit, he replied. Bless his heart he brought the whole down payment. In cash. I still didn't think we would be able to get him approved. Before we could even move to start counting the money he said, OK I call you guys tomorrow and was gone. Didn't ask for a receipt, didn't wait for a thank you (which was certainly forthcoming, I was liking this guy more every time I saw him), just left. Which is what I wanted to do. I sat with Sean and we counted the money and I happily abandoned him to receipt the cash and do the paperwork.
Around noon the next day Sean tells me he heard back, and got a conditional approval, but the bank wanted $13,000 down minimum. I called him to tell him what I thought was the bad news, but all he said was OK, I bring it tonight. Now I was in a gray area. Federal cash reporting laws start at amounts of $10,000 or more, and you're not supposed to warn people of this. I had watched a 12 minute video and signed a form to this effect. However, I had no intention of letting this poor guy walk into something, so as casually as I could, I mentioned that maybe he would rather bring a check for the additional money. I assured him a personal check from him was fine. He wanted to bring cash. So, screw casual, I told him as bluntly as possible about cash reporting. He said OK, and that night he came by and dropped another $5000 grand on Sean's desk.
We got the deal approved, and a day or two later he picked up his BMW and left us his Avalanche. Our GM was a truck guy, and when he heard it had a full tank of gas he had his plates put on it and drove it home that night, and for the next few days. One morning he arrived at work and told me the check engine light had come on. No big deal, it was still under warranty, so I dropped it off at the Chevy dealer down the street.
The next day our GM gets a call from the Chevy dealer. The problem is with the fuel system, but they can't cover it under warranty. Apparently, someone had taken the gas tank off, and it looked like something had been welded in it, but was no longer there. This voided the warranty. The GM called me and Sean in and told us this and we all busted up laughing in amazement. It all made sense. The high miles for the year, the other truck with high miles, the insane amount of cash this guy had. I had considered that the guy was doing something, but I never really thought it was true. He just wasn't at all what I expected a trafficker to look or act like. I still can't reconcile the guy with the situation, but it makes me smile every time I think of him. Guaranteed, none of his gringo supervisors at the factory had ever considered the guy they were talking down to was Pablo Escobar.
Which brings me back to Sean. The night our friend dropped off the first $8000 I went home and left Sean to receipt the cash. Sean, however, went to the riverboat and lost it all. The following night he lost the next $5000 as well. He had now embezzled $13000 from a store owned by people you did not want to steal from. Things only got worse as he tried to win back his losses over the following weeks. He used his skill at borrowing money to borrow $5000 from one of my best friends who was now working in our department, and he wasn't naive or foolish either. Worse yet, he convinced him to do it via a credit card advance at the casino, so he was out $5000 he didn't have plus mounting interest. In desperation Sean started leaning on our vendors and wholesale buyers. A lot of people made money either buying cars that we took in trade but didn't want to resell and reselling them or doing minor body work on the cars we took in. He used this as leverage to extort loans, $1000 here, $2000 there. I had no idea this was going on, and we worked long hours together. I can only imagine how sick with worry and anxiety he must have been, but it never showed.
The day I saw him go over the fence I finished my cigarette and went back inside. In our parking lot I could see two unmarked police cars with sheriffs plates, and a minute later the owners wife and two sheriffs walking towards the used car department, and she looked furious. She was not a woman to be trifled with, and when she asked where Sean was I just said I didn't know. I didn't want any part of whatever was going on. Later that day the GM filled me in, and I was absolutely astonished, and at once I felt so bad for him. I liked him, our GM did too. We weren't best friends but we worked long hours together in a small department. He was like family. In the coming weeks more and more people came forward, and we finally got a bead on how many people he had borrowed large amounts from. My sympathy for him faded a bit with each case, and when my friend told me about the $5000 on his credit card it evaporated entirely.
In the end he turned himself in, and made arrangements to sign over his 401k to the owners, among other concessions, but I doubt that that even nearly covered the $13000 grand. Everyone else was just out, and so was he. He had been living with his parents and had his girlfriend and daughter there with him. I guess they stayed.
He had had problems with gambling before, so to his family it was a matter of economic survival that he not be allowed near their house. They had a bit of money, and he simply could go through too much too fast when he lost control. This was the first and only time in my life I have ever felt fortunate to have drug problems, because I learned then, there are far worse things.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: The Starter's Pistol
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: The Starter's Pistol: "I wasn't supposed to regain consciousness, but I did. I was foggy, to be sure, but conscious. And I knew somehow that I was in a helicopter,..."
The Starter's Pistol
I wasn't supposed to regain consciousness, but I did. I was foggy, to be sure, but conscious. And I knew somehow that I was in a helicopter, and I knew that something very bad had happened. I remember becoming aware that there was a tube down my throat, and I reached to pull it out, but my arm didn't move. My hand didn't move either. With mounting horror I realized I could not even wiggle my fingers. I was paralyzed.
There is a song that came out years back that was billed as Kurt Vonnegut's commencement speech to M.I.T. It's called don't forget the sunscreen, and Kurt had nothing to do with it, but the song still contains some worthy pearls of wisdom. One of them is not to worry about the future, because the things that would really knock you for a loop were never the ones you worried about, they were the things that blindsided you at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon. So true, so true.
March 6, 2008, it's Tuesday, and about 2pm. I was working as a waiter at a local chain steak house (yes, I had totally collapsed at this point) and I was in the break time between a split shift. One of my coworkers had come back to my house and we were watching tv and drinking fortys (just one a piece). Having finished our meager supply of beer with hours left before we had to be back at work, we decided to make a beer run. We left my third floor apartment, and as I locked the door he got a bit of a head start. The stairs between floors 2 and 3 were half flights and changed direction, the first flight of stairs was the only full flight. When I reached the top of this last flight of stairs Shane was already down, about 4 stairs from the bottom, maybe. Not far. So he lifted his butt onto the handrailing and slid down the four stairs. He looked back up at me and said, "Come on, I wanna see you slide the whole rail." He didn't mean it, he wasn't daring me. In fact, he didn't even look to see if I did it but just proceeded out the front door.
I tried to do it, and I have no idea why. I was 12-15 feet up, far enough that the potential danger should have been apparent. The handrail was just one of those cheap black metal apartment building rails, maybe 3 inches wide, certainly not a large bannister in an old Victorian home. Sliding down that thing would have been a circus worthy feat, and I could see that, and yet.... People tend to blame beer, I had been drinking, clouded my judgment. I would love to believe that, I really would, because that makes the mistake drinking, not the subsequent action. Unfortunately, I am an alcoholic, and one forty of beer just doesn't affect me much.Whatever the ridiculous reason, I tried to slide down that railing, all the way from the top. I backed into the rail, grabbed it with my hands, and hopped up on it. Over it, actually, I guess.
Shane didn't see it, but he heard the crunch of my body hitting what amounted to a cement floor with a thin piece of stairway carpet on top. Backwards over the railing, and since my hands were grasping the railing it was headfirst, not hands or arms first. 12-15 feet, headfirst to the point that when I hit the impact burst vertebrae in my spine. Shane later told me he would never forget that moment, seeing my laying there with blood pouring out of my ear. He was sure I was dead, that is until he got right down to me and heard me babbling incoherently (I would like to point out, if that impact didn't knock me out how much could a forty of beer have done to me?) Obviously, he needed to call 911, but this presented a challenge. Shane's phone was out of minutes, and he didn't know exactly where to look on me for mine and didn't want to move me. As a matter of fact, he was having considerable trouble keeping me still. I kept telling him I just needed to get back upstairs to my apartment, and I would try to get up. He would get me back still and start off to try and knock on people's doors to get help, and I would try to get up again. Eventually, someone called 911 for him, at least that's what I assume as I made it to the hospital.
I was living in Southern Illinois at this time (don't ask, story for a different day) in a town of 16,000. It had a nice hospital, two of them in fact, but neither were staffed to deal with me. The idea was to stabilize me for a helicopter trip to Saint Louis University Medical Center. The initial survey of the damage amounted to one burst vertebrae, and one with a compression fracture (they found more later), as well as two brain bleeds, subdermal hematomas, I think, but brain bleeds in any event and my skull was cracked almost all the way around. The staff at the hospital made a back brace to try and prevent me from moving and doing further damage, made sure my vitals were up to the trip, and then they intubated me and gave me a paralytic. They also gave me something to insure I didn't regain consciousness en route, but that one failed slightly. I don't want this to seem like I'm bitter at the doctors who worked to save my life because I woke up for twenty seconds, far from it, I am so incredibly grateful to them and the staff at SLU.
Once I got to SLU medical center a spinal thoracic surgeon looked at the damage to my back, and had an idea on how to repair it, but the surgery would have to wait. My brain was still bleeding, and if it didn't stop soon brain surgery would have to come first. I would have to wait, knotted up worrying that I would need brain surgery, or my back surgery wouldn't work and I'd be permanently disabled.
Well, not exactly. I was on huge amounts of morphine and oxy contin, and I didn't have a care in the world. I was driving the nurses nuts because I kept getting out of bed to walk around. I didn't seem to understand that with the damage already done to my back one bad step and I could be paralyzed, or further disabled, or who knows, but there was serious disaster potential. I needed to understand that it was a total miracle that I could still walk and I really should not do it. I think it took the very real threat of restraints to get me to stay in bed. Or maybe I bartered with them for more painkillers, likely, or maybe I kept doing it and just got lucky. The point is that I was doing all I could to hurt my chances for a full recovery, or at least as full as possible at that point in time. I would continue to do this throughout my recovery, seemingly at every opportunity.
After 4 days my brain stopped bleeding, hooray! Couldn't hear real well out of my left ear, and have a bit of hearing loss to this day in my right, but given the circumstances, almost no cerebral damage. With my brain ok it was time for my back surgery. The night before my surgeon came by to explain the risks, using terms like "if this works", and "we will see how well you can walk", or "hard to tell how much pain you will have to live with." I wasn't concerned. Know what I was thinking about? Win, lose, or draw with the surgery, I was going to have some serious painkiller scripts. How fucked up is that.
When he opened me up the next day he found another vertebrae with severe damage (it was mentioned that I might have caused this moving around so much, and that's why the initial x-rays didn't show it). Fortunately, Dr. Howard Place is a resourceful man, and brilliant as well. Using two 12" titanium rods and a dozen titanium screws, about 2" long each, he linked my back back together, and then took bone grafts from the top of my butt to cover some of the work. On the topic of the bone grafts, he mentioned that they might not take, my body might reject them, or whatever happens. The risk was relatively small, but smoking made a huge difference. I think 20% more likely to fail was the number. I of course did not quit smoking.
Out of surgery and in the recovery room I awoke to the knowledge that the surgery had gone well, and I also learned I had a fentnyl pump or epideral or something planted in my back. That was pleasant, but the recovery nurse said that that amount of opiates would make it almost impossible for me to pee (I pretended to not already know this) so I would have to have a catheter inserted. Never a fun experience, I had had an incident earlier in life with these things and I resisted. She said ok, but if I couldn't pee then the pain meds would have to go. She must have led the debate team in high school, she won that one in a hurry. My heart goes out to her for having to do the insertion. Surgical anesthesia and huge amounts of painkillers have a similar effect to a cold pool, times 20. I couldn't even find the thing, gave up looking. She pulled it off though. Well, she didn't "pull it off" what I meant was.....yeah.
Couple days later I was out of the hospital. What was going to come in the next 5 months, or maybe even every day since then, made the surgery and even the accident seem trivial. I got into body building and running following a surgery whose recovery limited me to not lifting more than just a few pounds. A year after the surgery I was in much better shape than I ever had been before, much better. I experience basically no pain from all that metal, far less than the average person deals with in their "all natural" back. However, before these good things came to be many, many bad things happened first.
That accident was a catalyst, it initiated a series of events, and those events led to other events, and so on. The accident itself, however, is almost irrelevant now. Other than a wild x-ray to post to facebook and a big scar on my back. The accident was like the starter's pistol at the beginning of a race. It's loud, for a second it has everyone's attention, and it gets action underway. But it's completely forgotten about 10 seconds after it happens. The race is what matters then.
There is a song that came out years back that was billed as Kurt Vonnegut's commencement speech to M.I.T. It's called don't forget the sunscreen, and Kurt had nothing to do with it, but the song still contains some worthy pearls of wisdom. One of them is not to worry about the future, because the things that would really knock you for a loop were never the ones you worried about, they were the things that blindsided you at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon. So true, so true.
March 6, 2008, it's Tuesday, and about 2pm. I was working as a waiter at a local chain steak house (yes, I had totally collapsed at this point) and I was in the break time between a split shift. One of my coworkers had come back to my house and we were watching tv and drinking fortys (just one a piece). Having finished our meager supply of beer with hours left before we had to be back at work, we decided to make a beer run. We left my third floor apartment, and as I locked the door he got a bit of a head start. The stairs between floors 2 and 3 were half flights and changed direction, the first flight of stairs was the only full flight. When I reached the top of this last flight of stairs Shane was already down, about 4 stairs from the bottom, maybe. Not far. So he lifted his butt onto the handrailing and slid down the four stairs. He looked back up at me and said, "Come on, I wanna see you slide the whole rail." He didn't mean it, he wasn't daring me. In fact, he didn't even look to see if I did it but just proceeded out the front door.
I tried to do it, and I have no idea why. I was 12-15 feet up, far enough that the potential danger should have been apparent. The handrail was just one of those cheap black metal apartment building rails, maybe 3 inches wide, certainly not a large bannister in an old Victorian home. Sliding down that thing would have been a circus worthy feat, and I could see that, and yet.... People tend to blame beer, I had been drinking, clouded my judgment. I would love to believe that, I really would, because that makes the mistake drinking, not the subsequent action. Unfortunately, I am an alcoholic, and one forty of beer just doesn't affect me much.Whatever the ridiculous reason, I tried to slide down that railing, all the way from the top. I backed into the rail, grabbed it with my hands, and hopped up on it. Over it, actually, I guess.
Shane didn't see it, but he heard the crunch of my body hitting what amounted to a cement floor with a thin piece of stairway carpet on top. Backwards over the railing, and since my hands were grasping the railing it was headfirst, not hands or arms first. 12-15 feet, headfirst to the point that when I hit the impact burst vertebrae in my spine. Shane later told me he would never forget that moment, seeing my laying there with blood pouring out of my ear. He was sure I was dead, that is until he got right down to me and heard me babbling incoherently (I would like to point out, if that impact didn't knock me out how much could a forty of beer have done to me?) Obviously, he needed to call 911, but this presented a challenge. Shane's phone was out of minutes, and he didn't know exactly where to look on me for mine and didn't want to move me. As a matter of fact, he was having considerable trouble keeping me still. I kept telling him I just needed to get back upstairs to my apartment, and I would try to get up. He would get me back still and start off to try and knock on people's doors to get help, and I would try to get up again. Eventually, someone called 911 for him, at least that's what I assume as I made it to the hospital.
I was living in Southern Illinois at this time (don't ask, story for a different day) in a town of 16,000. It had a nice hospital, two of them in fact, but neither were staffed to deal with me. The idea was to stabilize me for a helicopter trip to Saint Louis University Medical Center. The initial survey of the damage amounted to one burst vertebrae, and one with a compression fracture (they found more later), as well as two brain bleeds, subdermal hematomas, I think, but brain bleeds in any event and my skull was cracked almost all the way around. The staff at the hospital made a back brace to try and prevent me from moving and doing further damage, made sure my vitals were up to the trip, and then they intubated me and gave me a paralytic. They also gave me something to insure I didn't regain consciousness en route, but that one failed slightly. I don't want this to seem like I'm bitter at the doctors who worked to save my life because I woke up for twenty seconds, far from it, I am so incredibly grateful to them and the staff at SLU.
Once I got to SLU medical center a spinal thoracic surgeon looked at the damage to my back, and had an idea on how to repair it, but the surgery would have to wait. My brain was still bleeding, and if it didn't stop soon brain surgery would have to come first. I would have to wait, knotted up worrying that I would need brain surgery, or my back surgery wouldn't work and I'd be permanently disabled.
Well, not exactly. I was on huge amounts of morphine and oxy contin, and I didn't have a care in the world. I was driving the nurses nuts because I kept getting out of bed to walk around. I didn't seem to understand that with the damage already done to my back one bad step and I could be paralyzed, or further disabled, or who knows, but there was serious disaster potential. I needed to understand that it was a total miracle that I could still walk and I really should not do it. I think it took the very real threat of restraints to get me to stay in bed. Or maybe I bartered with them for more painkillers, likely, or maybe I kept doing it and just got lucky. The point is that I was doing all I could to hurt my chances for a full recovery, or at least as full as possible at that point in time. I would continue to do this throughout my recovery, seemingly at every opportunity.
After 4 days my brain stopped bleeding, hooray! Couldn't hear real well out of my left ear, and have a bit of hearing loss to this day in my right, but given the circumstances, almost no cerebral damage. With my brain ok it was time for my back surgery. The night before my surgeon came by to explain the risks, using terms like "if this works", and "we will see how well you can walk", or "hard to tell how much pain you will have to live with." I wasn't concerned. Know what I was thinking about? Win, lose, or draw with the surgery, I was going to have some serious painkiller scripts. How fucked up is that.
When he opened me up the next day he found another vertebrae with severe damage (it was mentioned that I might have caused this moving around so much, and that's why the initial x-rays didn't show it). Fortunately, Dr. Howard Place is a resourceful man, and brilliant as well. Using two 12" titanium rods and a dozen titanium screws, about 2" long each, he linked my back back together, and then took bone grafts from the top of my butt to cover some of the work. On the topic of the bone grafts, he mentioned that they might not take, my body might reject them, or whatever happens. The risk was relatively small, but smoking made a huge difference. I think 20% more likely to fail was the number. I of course did not quit smoking.
Out of surgery and in the recovery room I awoke to the knowledge that the surgery had gone well, and I also learned I had a fentnyl pump or epideral or something planted in my back. That was pleasant, but the recovery nurse said that that amount of opiates would make it almost impossible for me to pee (I pretended to not already know this) so I would have to have a catheter inserted. Never a fun experience, I had had an incident earlier in life with these things and I resisted. She said ok, but if I couldn't pee then the pain meds would have to go. She must have led the debate team in high school, she won that one in a hurry. My heart goes out to her for having to do the insertion. Surgical anesthesia and huge amounts of painkillers have a similar effect to a cold pool, times 20. I couldn't even find the thing, gave up looking. She pulled it off though. Well, she didn't "pull it off" what I meant was.....yeah.
Couple days later I was out of the hospital. What was going to come in the next 5 months, or maybe even every day since then, made the surgery and even the accident seem trivial. I got into body building and running following a surgery whose recovery limited me to not lifting more than just a few pounds. A year after the surgery I was in much better shape than I ever had been before, much better. I experience basically no pain from all that metal, far less than the average person deals with in their "all natural" back. However, before these good things came to be many, many bad things happened first.
That accident was a catalyst, it initiated a series of events, and those events led to other events, and so on. The accident itself, however, is almost irrelevant now. Other than a wild x-ray to post to facebook and a big scar on my back. The accident was like the starter's pistol at the beginning of a race. It's loud, for a second it has everyone's attention, and it gets action underway. But it's completely forgotten about 10 seconds after it happens. The race is what matters then.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Sunshine and Orchid
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Sunshine and Orchid: "As so often happened during my early years, I needed a place to stay for a few days. Apparently my roommate had not been taking my half of t..."
Sunshine and Orchid
As so often happened during my early years, I needed a place to stay for a few days. Apparently my roommate had not been taking my half of the rent to the owner. He had just been taking it. I'll say for him I don't think he ever meant to, like all of us he had some expensive habits and a low paying job, and it's easy to make a poor decision or two in those situations and get behind. The landlord gave us an option, we could just leave, and he wouldn't report it credit wise or give us bad rental references, or he could evict us. At that point in life I didn't care about either of those things, but clearly my roommate couldn't keep up with rent and I had no intention of paying his past due amount to stay in the place (although my bedroom window looked out into the back of a dunkin donuts and a popeyes chicken, which ended up presenting some opportunities). So, being that I didn't have any furniture, leaving seemed like the way to go, and away I went.
The place I found to crash was interesting. I knew this girl Sunshine (party kid alter ego, I never knew nor cared who she really was), and Sunshine was staying with this guy Andy I had met once. Andy had a true loft, maybe the only one I have ever seen. Most people who say they have a loft in Chicago are in a building of condos for half a mil a piece and a couple walls that don't touch the 16 foot ceiling. Andy, on the other hand, had either bought or leased square footage on a vacant floor of what was basically a five floor factory building. It was on the west edge of Chinatown in an industrial area. There were train tracks (unused at that time) leading to the front door of the building. There weren't any actual factories there at that time. The first floor was the offices for 1000 Words Magazine, which I think has long since shut down, and now there is an online unrelated magazine of the same name. Other offices on floors two and three. Andy was I think on four, don't remember the other. What was cool was that the offices on the first three floors had no doors, you walked in the front door or got off the elevator (no lockout) and you could walk through these relatively large offices, and go through peoples desk drawers. Which is what I did on the one occasion I had a good experience on Special K. Two friends of mine with a Blazer helped me drive some of my stuff over, and when we got there we just parked right in front of the building, since it was night and at night there was NO ONE in that area. Before getting out of the car we each did a bump (not much) of Special K, and then got buzzed in the front door of the building. And found ourselves in the middle of the 1000 Words Magazine office. At the time it was a trendy magazine that we were all familiar with, so it was neat finding ourselves unexpectedly there. And almost instantly, in mild k-holes. We hadn't done much so we weren't incapacitated, we just wandered through the office looking through peoples desks and things. Didn't take anything, we were just curious. Then we went up to the second floor and did the same. Then the third. Judging by the reaction we got when we got to Andy's we roamed around a very long time. It was engrossing, this little peek into peoples work lives (sober we would have realized how dull these people were, I don't remember finding anything unusual. Course I probably wouldn't remember.)
When you got off the elevator at Andy's floor, you stepped out onto a vast open area, old beat up floors, exposed ductwork and beams, factory type windows that were opaque. Immediately to your left was a new looking wall and door, and inside here was a bathroom (with small hottub) and a washer and dryer. At the other end of the floor, far, far, away, you could see where someone had basically built a couple walls to make an enclosed space out of the corner of the floor, and it looked tiny. It wasn't, it was just that far away. I have no concept for square footage, but you could just about smoke a cigarette going from the elevator to Andy's enclosure.
When you got close you could see that though he had built the walls himself he knew what he was doing, and the same inside. The ceiling of the floor of this building was tall enough that Andy's place had two bedrooms upstairs. To get to these bedrooms you went up a spiral staircase in the middle of the apartment. That had no hand rails. Just the little steps going up and around the pole. Going up that thing sober was nerve wracking. Going down when you weren't was....actually it was much easier, or at least not scary. Go figure. Now.....remember where the bathroom is? By the elevator. Far. And it was late fall, and obviously only Andys place and the bathroom itself were heated, the walk to and fro was not. Wake up at two in the morning having to pee and that staircase, the walk, and the cold really made you search for other options.
It was Sunshine that I was staying with, in her room, of course she was just mooching off Andy temporarily, so whatever. Sunshine was....well....fierce, in a way. She was cute, but she was kinda of broderline mean/aggressive. Or at least always had that kind of look on her face even if she never said or did anything mean. And she wasn't nearly attractive enough to have looks related attitude, so it was all very mysterious. Hey, place to stay for a bit. And as it happened, I would discover the root of her 'tude.
Like myself, and really most other Chicago party kids, Sunshine loved meth. When I started going to parties Ecstasy and LSD were the main drugs, and I had watched as tweak took over. And I watched the scene take a decidedly harder edge. The music switched more to harder breakbeats than the disco like (and Chicago original) house sound, the clothing got more serious and less candy (less bright and colorful) and the drug dealers were a lot more like drug dealers, not a guy on Ecstasy who sells you a pill and hugs and thanks you twelve times. Some of these new type lived in Hammond,Indiana (and seemed like Indiana tweekers instead of Chicago Ecstasy vendors, not a change for the better) and one night Sunshine and I scraped up a bunch of cash and headed to Hammond to make a moderately large purchase (for us, anyway). Sunshine drove us in her Honda Accord, which she had named Orchid.
I quickly learned that Sunshine was originally from Kenosha, Wisconsin. She explained this when I asked her how she couldn't find the highway that was one turn and about three minutes from our door. It was late fall, cold, raining, and between nine and ten at night. When we got on 94 traffic was still pretty heavy (it was a weeknight as well) though not stop and go. And Sunshine was driving way too fast, especially considering that it was raining. I tried to explain to her that city traffic would move then totally stop very abruptly, but my warning had no effect. I think she thought I was implying that she couldn't drive because she was from Wisconsin, which to a degree I probably was. And she was, probably still is, female. Two strikes. And she was driving too fast.
This was not a situation that I wanted to be able to say I told you so in. But not five minutes down the road brake lights flash on all in front of us, and I knew instantly that traffic was dead stopped. I doubt it would have mattered if she had slammed the brakes instantly, but she didn't. She started to slow, and we actually had enough time for me to gesture to the car ahead of us (rapidly getting larger) and say, "Well, you're gonna hit him." A car ahead of us had used the left shoulder and was stopped there, and the middle lane was solid with cars, so there was no where to go, but into this dude's trunk.
Now we are in a crash in the left lane of bumper to bumper traffic on the Dan Ryan expressway. Her car won't run (she hit this dude for real) and neither of us are really dressed for the cold, much less the rain. But that was a small immediate issue. We both were thinking of what we were going to get, and the fact that that clearly was not going to happen, at least not anytime even close to soon. Again, before widespread cell phone use. Eventually an IDOT truck came and towed her off to the right shoulder and called a tow company. Getting to the right shoulder was actually a huge relief. Traffic was bad before we caused a shut down of a lane, and we had been getting murderous looks from drivers for the previous hour or however long we sat there. And not looks as they cruised by. Traffic was so slowed that one driver could swear at us for a good 6 or 7 minutes before he was passed.
The tow truck came and hauled us, and Orchid, to their yard, which was in Calumet Park. Great. Now we are even further from home, and in Calumet Park. Sunshine called her parents from there, the legal owners of the car, and they had triple A so at least there was no bill problem. Getting home was a problem. Again, no cell phones, we tried a few peoples home phones, but not a lot of our friends had them, or the stability they would imply. We had a fair amount of cash, but that money had a purpose, and not all was ours. It would have been an expensive cab. So there we sit, talking a bit with the one guy there, the dispatcher, who somehow was a hick. I never understood how this happens, Calumet Park is south suburban Chicago, but it's hickish, at least some of it. Weird. Anyway, somehow we got talking about parties with this guy, I don't remember if he asked about our fat pants or what (would've been a far question, wearing pants that were over 32" around each cuff at the bottom). He tells us, oh yeah, one of the driver's is into those, always talking about them. He would be in pretty soon, depending on where his next call was, maybe he could give us a ride. A party kid tow truck driver? What luck! We never even considered how bizarre that sounded, especially in Calumet Park. There were not a lot of people in our scene over 22 or 23 (and that was pushing it) other than the DJ's and people who produced some of the big ones.
Finally this guy gets back, the dispatch points out his truck as it pulls in. We jump up and go to the window, and see a 45 year old Joe Dirt with a bald spot on top hop out. He was indeed into parties, followed info on them online (we didn't really know what that meant, this was 96 or 97). His next call was North, and he would be driving right past Cermak, our street more or less, so he could drop us. We pile in the cab of the truck and head out, back up the Dan Ryan. At least the traffic was light at this point. I idly noticed the sign for the Cermak exit coming up. Then the dude was pulling onto the shoulder of the highway. When he said drop you on the way, he meant right on the side of the highway, which as I remember was above Cermak, a bridge (but I may be embellishing that). Either way, we got out and started our walk down Cermak. We probably had a mile and a couple blocks to get to our building.
We had been slightly damp earlier but had dried out waiting for the ride. It had rained steadily all night, but now was just a light drizzle. There were, however, significant puddles and no real nice place to walk down the road, and at this time we got a little science review. Do you remember what capillary action is? When a solid-ish object comes into contact with the surface tension of water, the water will absorb and rise up the object (my definition, blow me if that's not exactly right).
Our pants were enormous around the cuffs, and came into contact with huge amounts of water. Fat pants produce a capillary action like nothing else. About five minutes of walking and we were soaked, soaked, to the knees, and it was rising fast. And dear God was it cold! We were basically wearing long almost knee length sweaters and fat pants. Maybe shirts underneath, but that's it. Chicago, late fall, nearing midnight, windy, soaked. And I swear those pants held so much water the weight slowed us down.
It seemed like forever, but finally the doors of the elevator were opening to our floor, and we both walked immediately to the bathroom/laundry room, took off our pants, and threw them in the machines. We then made the pilgrammage to the apartment. We walked in wearing long sweaters, no pants, no shoes, but socks (wet or not we werent walking barefoot across that floor). Andy and one or two other people were watching tv as we walked in and they looked at us incredulously. Sunshine mumbled car accident and we went up those freaky stairs into her room, got dry clothes and they only drugs we had, a little bit of special K and marched back to the bathroom. We started the hot tub, took off the rest of our wet stuff, did some K, and hopped in. I know me and Sunshine did it a few times but I don't think we had at that point, so that would have been the first time we had seen each other naked. I don't think we even noticed, we were that dead (and empty handed, an accident on the way back would have been much easier to take).
I mentioned earlier that I found out why Sunshine had that mean look to her so much of the time. I found a picture of her that was only a year or two old buried in some of her stuff. And she was fat. I don't mean chubby, I mean fat. Probably 16 or 17 in the picture, but shit, we were only like 19, so it was pretty easy to figure out what happened. She somehow found the party scene from Kenosha, not hard to believe, not that far, and she found meth. When she did, she figured out how to be rid of her weight problem in a hurry, and moved away from Kenosha to be with her new crowd, who never knew her before. I didn't stay there too long, and we didn't make a huge effort to hang out after, just bumped into each other out and about, like before I lived there. I never told her I found that picture, and she never looked mean to me again.
The place I found to crash was interesting. I knew this girl Sunshine (party kid alter ego, I never knew nor cared who she really was), and Sunshine was staying with this guy Andy I had met once. Andy had a true loft, maybe the only one I have ever seen. Most people who say they have a loft in Chicago are in a building of condos for half a mil a piece and a couple walls that don't touch the 16 foot ceiling. Andy, on the other hand, had either bought or leased square footage on a vacant floor of what was basically a five floor factory building. It was on the west edge of Chinatown in an industrial area. There were train tracks (unused at that time) leading to the front door of the building. There weren't any actual factories there at that time. The first floor was the offices for 1000 Words Magazine, which I think has long since shut down, and now there is an online unrelated magazine of the same name. Other offices on floors two and three. Andy was I think on four, don't remember the other. What was cool was that the offices on the first three floors had no doors, you walked in the front door or got off the elevator (no lockout) and you could walk through these relatively large offices, and go through peoples desk drawers. Which is what I did on the one occasion I had a good experience on Special K. Two friends of mine with a Blazer helped me drive some of my stuff over, and when we got there we just parked right in front of the building, since it was night and at night there was NO ONE in that area. Before getting out of the car we each did a bump (not much) of Special K, and then got buzzed in the front door of the building. And found ourselves in the middle of the 1000 Words Magazine office. At the time it was a trendy magazine that we were all familiar with, so it was neat finding ourselves unexpectedly there. And almost instantly, in mild k-holes. We hadn't done much so we weren't incapacitated, we just wandered through the office looking through peoples desks and things. Didn't take anything, we were just curious. Then we went up to the second floor and did the same. Then the third. Judging by the reaction we got when we got to Andy's we roamed around a very long time. It was engrossing, this little peek into peoples work lives (sober we would have realized how dull these people were, I don't remember finding anything unusual. Course I probably wouldn't remember.)
When you got off the elevator at Andy's floor, you stepped out onto a vast open area, old beat up floors, exposed ductwork and beams, factory type windows that were opaque. Immediately to your left was a new looking wall and door, and inside here was a bathroom (with small hottub) and a washer and dryer. At the other end of the floor, far, far, away, you could see where someone had basically built a couple walls to make an enclosed space out of the corner of the floor, and it looked tiny. It wasn't, it was just that far away. I have no concept for square footage, but you could just about smoke a cigarette going from the elevator to Andy's enclosure.
When you got close you could see that though he had built the walls himself he knew what he was doing, and the same inside. The ceiling of the floor of this building was tall enough that Andy's place had two bedrooms upstairs. To get to these bedrooms you went up a spiral staircase in the middle of the apartment. That had no hand rails. Just the little steps going up and around the pole. Going up that thing sober was nerve wracking. Going down when you weren't was....actually it was much easier, or at least not scary. Go figure. Now.....remember where the bathroom is? By the elevator. Far. And it was late fall, and obviously only Andys place and the bathroom itself were heated, the walk to and fro was not. Wake up at two in the morning having to pee and that staircase, the walk, and the cold really made you search for other options.
It was Sunshine that I was staying with, in her room, of course she was just mooching off Andy temporarily, so whatever. Sunshine was....well....fierce, in a way. She was cute, but she was kinda of broderline mean/aggressive. Or at least always had that kind of look on her face even if she never said or did anything mean. And she wasn't nearly attractive enough to have looks related attitude, so it was all very mysterious. Hey, place to stay for a bit. And as it happened, I would discover the root of her 'tude.
Like myself, and really most other Chicago party kids, Sunshine loved meth. When I started going to parties Ecstasy and LSD were the main drugs, and I had watched as tweak took over. And I watched the scene take a decidedly harder edge. The music switched more to harder breakbeats than the disco like (and Chicago original) house sound, the clothing got more serious and less candy (less bright and colorful) and the drug dealers were a lot more like drug dealers, not a guy on Ecstasy who sells you a pill and hugs and thanks you twelve times. Some of these new type lived in Hammond,Indiana (and seemed like Indiana tweekers instead of Chicago Ecstasy vendors, not a change for the better) and one night Sunshine and I scraped up a bunch of cash and headed to Hammond to make a moderately large purchase (for us, anyway). Sunshine drove us in her Honda Accord, which she had named Orchid.
I quickly learned that Sunshine was originally from Kenosha, Wisconsin. She explained this when I asked her how she couldn't find the highway that was one turn and about three minutes from our door. It was late fall, cold, raining, and between nine and ten at night. When we got on 94 traffic was still pretty heavy (it was a weeknight as well) though not stop and go. And Sunshine was driving way too fast, especially considering that it was raining. I tried to explain to her that city traffic would move then totally stop very abruptly, but my warning had no effect. I think she thought I was implying that she couldn't drive because she was from Wisconsin, which to a degree I probably was. And she was, probably still is, female. Two strikes. And she was driving too fast.
This was not a situation that I wanted to be able to say I told you so in. But not five minutes down the road brake lights flash on all in front of us, and I knew instantly that traffic was dead stopped. I doubt it would have mattered if she had slammed the brakes instantly, but she didn't. She started to slow, and we actually had enough time for me to gesture to the car ahead of us (rapidly getting larger) and say, "Well, you're gonna hit him." A car ahead of us had used the left shoulder and was stopped there, and the middle lane was solid with cars, so there was no where to go, but into this dude's trunk.
Now we are in a crash in the left lane of bumper to bumper traffic on the Dan Ryan expressway. Her car won't run (she hit this dude for real) and neither of us are really dressed for the cold, much less the rain. But that was a small immediate issue. We both were thinking of what we were going to get, and the fact that that clearly was not going to happen, at least not anytime even close to soon. Again, before widespread cell phone use. Eventually an IDOT truck came and towed her off to the right shoulder and called a tow company. Getting to the right shoulder was actually a huge relief. Traffic was bad before we caused a shut down of a lane, and we had been getting murderous looks from drivers for the previous hour or however long we sat there. And not looks as they cruised by. Traffic was so slowed that one driver could swear at us for a good 6 or 7 minutes before he was passed.
The tow truck came and hauled us, and Orchid, to their yard, which was in Calumet Park. Great. Now we are even further from home, and in Calumet Park. Sunshine called her parents from there, the legal owners of the car, and they had triple A so at least there was no bill problem. Getting home was a problem. Again, no cell phones, we tried a few peoples home phones, but not a lot of our friends had them, or the stability they would imply. We had a fair amount of cash, but that money had a purpose, and not all was ours. It would have been an expensive cab. So there we sit, talking a bit with the one guy there, the dispatcher, who somehow was a hick. I never understood how this happens, Calumet Park is south suburban Chicago, but it's hickish, at least some of it. Weird. Anyway, somehow we got talking about parties with this guy, I don't remember if he asked about our fat pants or what (would've been a far question, wearing pants that were over 32" around each cuff at the bottom). He tells us, oh yeah, one of the driver's is into those, always talking about them. He would be in pretty soon, depending on where his next call was, maybe he could give us a ride. A party kid tow truck driver? What luck! We never even considered how bizarre that sounded, especially in Calumet Park. There were not a lot of people in our scene over 22 or 23 (and that was pushing it) other than the DJ's and people who produced some of the big ones.
Finally this guy gets back, the dispatch points out his truck as it pulls in. We jump up and go to the window, and see a 45 year old Joe Dirt with a bald spot on top hop out. He was indeed into parties, followed info on them online (we didn't really know what that meant, this was 96 or 97). His next call was North, and he would be driving right past Cermak, our street more or less, so he could drop us. We pile in the cab of the truck and head out, back up the Dan Ryan. At least the traffic was light at this point. I idly noticed the sign for the Cermak exit coming up. Then the dude was pulling onto the shoulder of the highway. When he said drop you on the way, he meant right on the side of the highway, which as I remember was above Cermak, a bridge (but I may be embellishing that). Either way, we got out and started our walk down Cermak. We probably had a mile and a couple blocks to get to our building.
We had been slightly damp earlier but had dried out waiting for the ride. It had rained steadily all night, but now was just a light drizzle. There were, however, significant puddles and no real nice place to walk down the road, and at this time we got a little science review. Do you remember what capillary action is? When a solid-ish object comes into contact with the surface tension of water, the water will absorb and rise up the object (my definition, blow me if that's not exactly right).
Our pants were enormous around the cuffs, and came into contact with huge amounts of water. Fat pants produce a capillary action like nothing else. About five minutes of walking and we were soaked, soaked, to the knees, and it was rising fast. And dear God was it cold! We were basically wearing long almost knee length sweaters and fat pants. Maybe shirts underneath, but that's it. Chicago, late fall, nearing midnight, windy, soaked. And I swear those pants held so much water the weight slowed us down.
It seemed like forever, but finally the doors of the elevator were opening to our floor, and we both walked immediately to the bathroom/laundry room, took off our pants, and threw them in the machines. We then made the pilgrammage to the apartment. We walked in wearing long sweaters, no pants, no shoes, but socks (wet or not we werent walking barefoot across that floor). Andy and one or two other people were watching tv as we walked in and they looked at us incredulously. Sunshine mumbled car accident and we went up those freaky stairs into her room, got dry clothes and they only drugs we had, a little bit of special K and marched back to the bathroom. We started the hot tub, took off the rest of our wet stuff, did some K, and hopped in. I know me and Sunshine did it a few times but I don't think we had at that point, so that would have been the first time we had seen each other naked. I don't think we even noticed, we were that dead (and empty handed, an accident on the way back would have been much easier to take).
I mentioned earlier that I found out why Sunshine had that mean look to her so much of the time. I found a picture of her that was only a year or two old buried in some of her stuff. And she was fat. I don't mean chubby, I mean fat. Probably 16 or 17 in the picture, but shit, we were only like 19, so it was pretty easy to figure out what happened. She somehow found the party scene from Kenosha, not hard to believe, not that far, and she found meth. When she did, she figured out how to be rid of her weight problem in a hurry, and moved away from Kenosha to be with her new crowd, who never knew her before. I didn't stay there too long, and we didn't make a huge effort to hang out after, just bumped into each other out and about, like before I lived there. I never told her I found that picture, and she never looked mean to me again.
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Amazingly, the morning ended peacefully
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: Amazingly, the morning ended peacefully: "Sometimes the things you didn't get caught doing are far more amazing than the things you did get caught doing. Case in point. It was a Sat..."
Amazingly, the morning ended peacefully
Sometimes the things you didn't get caught doing are far more amazing than the things you did get caught doing. Case in point.
It was a Saturday night, and I was hanging with a friend of my at his parent's house in the north burbs. His parents were gone, the house was nice, and we didn't plan to go to a party that night. We did, however, still want to get high. We were party kids who had reached the stage where drugs are far more important to us than going to parties. In retrospect that was a sad stage to reach. We had both worked so hard, and spent so much on drugs, becoming great dancers. The rave scene was ostensibly about the music and dancing, but the reality was that drugs were a major draw and a fundamental part of the success of the scene. As time went on, many people forgot about the music and dancing entirely. We were falling into this group. But on this night, we were striking out with our contacts and it looked like our one option to get some speed was to go to the party that night. Financially this was no small undertaking. Aside from the distance, maybe a bit over an hour from where we were, this was a big, massively promoted and produced party, which meant a $20 cover easy. Plus party prices for whatever we bought inside. Going to a party to buy a couple small bags of speed is like going to a Cubs game to buy a couple beers. Totally inefficient, way expensive, not at all worth it. So that's what we did.
It was late when we left, probably 2am or later, and probably past three when we reached the venue which I think was Sibley blvd, and that's around 147th street (I think). We bartered with the doorman over cover since the party would be ending in an hour or so, but I don't have any clue what success we had. Once inside we split up and began looking for someone selling crystal. These big parties hired "security" for insurance reasons, and this made finding stuff a little tougher. The security at these big parties was a complete joke, just a group of the most ghetto south side flotsam and jetsam that could be given windbreakers. What they were supposed to do was control drug sale/use. What they actually did was watch for people selling, they were ghetto rats they could spot that, they would then confiscate the drugs, throw the person out, and then promptly try to resell what they had just taken off the dude. But being ghetto rats, they had no clue what party drugs were, or what they were worth. I watched a guard bust a kid I knew was selling ecstasy once. The second he had confiscated the stuff I went up to him and asked him what he had taken. He showed me a bag of pills, at least thirty, maybe fifty. I offered the guy fifty bucks for the bag and his eyes lit up, he looked over his shoulders, and jumped on it. Those pills would sell for $25 to $30 a piece at a party, slightly less in regular life. There ended up being close to fifty. So that was security.
After about an hour we had found what we wanted and were ready to go. The party was about to end, it was near four, so we had no rationalization issues with taking off. Get back in the car, start heading north up the highway back to my buddy's house.
About 30 minutes north we see a car pulled over on the left shoulder, hood up, and two girls standing in front of it. They had clearly been at the same party, the clothes were a dead giveaway, but as I remember we both recognized at least one of them. We decided to do the gentlemanly thing and go back to try and help. After all, we both worked at a gas station and had no tools. Clearly we were qualified. My buddy pulls into the left shoulder, puts it in reverse, and backs up to them. As they watched us approach, backward, they looked puzzled, but when they saw us (and our clothes) they were glad for the help. Now we are standing on the left shoulder of a Chicago (nearly, anyway) highway, and it was summer so it was getting light. And all four of us are wearing full party kid dress, so a space shuttle couldn't have missed us. But we have drugs on us, so my buddy comes up with a great idea. At parties people pass out huge amounts of laminated color flyers for other parties, so he pulls one out of his pocket, folds our drugs in it, and when we get out, he sticks it in a crack in the median. The left side median is made of preformed cement blocks, so there are cracks where they meet every twenty or forty feet or whatever.
I don't remember what was wrong with there car, but we got it started pretty easy but there was doubt whether it would get them back home, Indiana I think. This is like 96 or 97, so no one our age had a cell phone. The plan was that my buddy would drive their car to the nearest gas station with a pay phone. I would follow driving his car with the girls. Off we go.
My buddy drives to the next exit and gets off and starts driving. And driving. There is nothing. And now these girls are thinking we are pulling something, and they're are getting hostile. I explain to them we aren't from around here, that he just took the first exit expecting to find something. And on we go. Still nothing. These girls are getting insufferable, what the fuck is he doing? Where are you guys taking us? I don't remember what they were driving, but it was a $200 car, and broken to boot. I point out to them that from a carjack standpoint their car wasn't worth the gas we had spent driving so far. Surprisingly, this did not help. Finally we see a gas station and he immediately pulls in, parks near the phone, and starts walking to us, still friendly and happy having no idea what these idiots had been accusing him of. They got out slightly mollified, but didn't really apologize. I quickly filled in my friend and shared a few thoughts with the girls and off we went. We make it back to the highway, get back on going north, and are back on the way home.
After ten or fifteen minutes for some reason I ask my amigo where our drugs are, glovebox, hatch area,...so on. The look on his face tells me immediately where they are. Still stuck in the median! He forgot to grab them before we left. There are no words in any human language to convey the feelings I had at that moment. We immediately turn around and start heading back south as we try to figure out what to do. Going back to grab them was obviously the intention, even though it was daylight now, on a Sunday morning with no traffic other than us. As we got back to the area we realized that we had no idea where we stopped to help them. We remembered the exit we took them off, so before that. But where do we start? We drove back to a point we remembered passing for sure, and it was pretty far. And then we turned around, headed back north, pulled into the very narrow left hand shoulder, slowed to about twenty, flipped on the hazard lights, and started looking for a brightly colored flyer sticking out of the median. Hopefully. Hopefully he didn't shove it too far in. We turned down the bass music (wouldn't want to call attention to ourselves) and made our way slowly up the left shoulder. While we are doing this we are trying to come up with an explanation for why we are doing this to give to the state trooper who should be showing up, well, anytime now. Fifteen minutes easy, and then I hear my buddy yell Eureka! There it is. But now we are really looking over both shoulders, a cop driving way back seeing him hop out and back in and us drive away would find that peculiar. All the stickers on his civic hatchback and the way we looked would warrant further investigation. Coast looked clear, he jumped out, grabbed it, jumped back in and tore ass up to sixty five, watching the rear view fearfully. But we were fine. No cops, no one at all really. We are just outside Chicago city limits, not out in the sticks. At 6am on a Sunday in this area cops on the road are the only cars you see half the time. That not one drove by when we were helping the ingrates or doing our search was so unlikely. But good, because we never came up with any reason for why we would be driving down the left shoulder for several miles. We made it back to his house, and I have no clue what we did from there. Didn't sleep, that's for sure. But how we didn't get busted throughout this massive sequence or terrible decisions is beyond me.
It was a Saturday night, and I was hanging with a friend of my at his parent's house in the north burbs. His parents were gone, the house was nice, and we didn't plan to go to a party that night. We did, however, still want to get high. We were party kids who had reached the stage where drugs are far more important to us than going to parties. In retrospect that was a sad stage to reach. We had both worked so hard, and spent so much on drugs, becoming great dancers. The rave scene was ostensibly about the music and dancing, but the reality was that drugs were a major draw and a fundamental part of the success of the scene. As time went on, many people forgot about the music and dancing entirely. We were falling into this group. But on this night, we were striking out with our contacts and it looked like our one option to get some speed was to go to the party that night. Financially this was no small undertaking. Aside from the distance, maybe a bit over an hour from where we were, this was a big, massively promoted and produced party, which meant a $20 cover easy. Plus party prices for whatever we bought inside. Going to a party to buy a couple small bags of speed is like going to a Cubs game to buy a couple beers. Totally inefficient, way expensive, not at all worth it. So that's what we did.
It was late when we left, probably 2am or later, and probably past three when we reached the venue which I think was Sibley blvd, and that's around 147th street (I think). We bartered with the doorman over cover since the party would be ending in an hour or so, but I don't have any clue what success we had. Once inside we split up and began looking for someone selling crystal. These big parties hired "security" for insurance reasons, and this made finding stuff a little tougher. The security at these big parties was a complete joke, just a group of the most ghetto south side flotsam and jetsam that could be given windbreakers. What they were supposed to do was control drug sale/use. What they actually did was watch for people selling, they were ghetto rats they could spot that, they would then confiscate the drugs, throw the person out, and then promptly try to resell what they had just taken off the dude. But being ghetto rats, they had no clue what party drugs were, or what they were worth. I watched a guard bust a kid I knew was selling ecstasy once. The second he had confiscated the stuff I went up to him and asked him what he had taken. He showed me a bag of pills, at least thirty, maybe fifty. I offered the guy fifty bucks for the bag and his eyes lit up, he looked over his shoulders, and jumped on it. Those pills would sell for $25 to $30 a piece at a party, slightly less in regular life. There ended up being close to fifty. So that was security.
After about an hour we had found what we wanted and were ready to go. The party was about to end, it was near four, so we had no rationalization issues with taking off. Get back in the car, start heading north up the highway back to my buddy's house.
About 30 minutes north we see a car pulled over on the left shoulder, hood up, and two girls standing in front of it. They had clearly been at the same party, the clothes were a dead giveaway, but as I remember we both recognized at least one of them. We decided to do the gentlemanly thing and go back to try and help. After all, we both worked at a gas station and had no tools. Clearly we were qualified. My buddy pulls into the left shoulder, puts it in reverse, and backs up to them. As they watched us approach, backward, they looked puzzled, but when they saw us (and our clothes) they were glad for the help. Now we are standing on the left shoulder of a Chicago (nearly, anyway) highway, and it was summer so it was getting light. And all four of us are wearing full party kid dress, so a space shuttle couldn't have missed us. But we have drugs on us, so my buddy comes up with a great idea. At parties people pass out huge amounts of laminated color flyers for other parties, so he pulls one out of his pocket, folds our drugs in it, and when we get out, he sticks it in a crack in the median. The left side median is made of preformed cement blocks, so there are cracks where they meet every twenty or forty feet or whatever.
I don't remember what was wrong with there car, but we got it started pretty easy but there was doubt whether it would get them back home, Indiana I think. This is like 96 or 97, so no one our age had a cell phone. The plan was that my buddy would drive their car to the nearest gas station with a pay phone. I would follow driving his car with the girls. Off we go.
My buddy drives to the next exit and gets off and starts driving. And driving. There is nothing. And now these girls are thinking we are pulling something, and they're are getting hostile. I explain to them we aren't from around here, that he just took the first exit expecting to find something. And on we go. Still nothing. These girls are getting insufferable, what the fuck is he doing? Where are you guys taking us? I don't remember what they were driving, but it was a $200 car, and broken to boot. I point out to them that from a carjack standpoint their car wasn't worth the gas we had spent driving so far. Surprisingly, this did not help. Finally we see a gas station and he immediately pulls in, parks near the phone, and starts walking to us, still friendly and happy having no idea what these idiots had been accusing him of. They got out slightly mollified, but didn't really apologize. I quickly filled in my friend and shared a few thoughts with the girls and off we went. We make it back to the highway, get back on going north, and are back on the way home.
After ten or fifteen minutes for some reason I ask my amigo where our drugs are, glovebox, hatch area,...so on. The look on his face tells me immediately where they are. Still stuck in the median! He forgot to grab them before we left. There are no words in any human language to convey the feelings I had at that moment. We immediately turn around and start heading back south as we try to figure out what to do. Going back to grab them was obviously the intention, even though it was daylight now, on a Sunday morning with no traffic other than us. As we got back to the area we realized that we had no idea where we stopped to help them. We remembered the exit we took them off, so before that. But where do we start? We drove back to a point we remembered passing for sure, and it was pretty far. And then we turned around, headed back north, pulled into the very narrow left hand shoulder, slowed to about twenty, flipped on the hazard lights, and started looking for a brightly colored flyer sticking out of the median. Hopefully. Hopefully he didn't shove it too far in. We turned down the bass music (wouldn't want to call attention to ourselves) and made our way slowly up the left shoulder. While we are doing this we are trying to come up with an explanation for why we are doing this to give to the state trooper who should be showing up, well, anytime now. Fifteen minutes easy, and then I hear my buddy yell Eureka! There it is. But now we are really looking over both shoulders, a cop driving way back seeing him hop out and back in and us drive away would find that peculiar. All the stickers on his civic hatchback and the way we looked would warrant further investigation. Coast looked clear, he jumped out, grabbed it, jumped back in and tore ass up to sixty five, watching the rear view fearfully. But we were fine. No cops, no one at all really. We are just outside Chicago city limits, not out in the sticks. At 6am on a Sunday in this area cops on the road are the only cars you see half the time. That not one drove by when we were helping the ingrates or doing our search was so unlikely. But good, because we never came up with any reason for why we would be driving down the left shoulder for several miles. We made it back to his house, and I have no clue what we did from there. Didn't sleep, that's for sure. But how we didn't get busted throughout this massive sequence or terrible decisions is beyond me.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: After Hours at the funeral home (or, the only two ...
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: After Hours at the funeral home (or, the only two ...: "I'm short on facts on how this came to be, so I'm going to go with the story as I know it. It's gotta be close. During my rave years, say 13..."
After Hours at the funeral home (or, the only two good things Rupe ever did for me he did the same day)
I'm short on facts on how this came to be, so I'm going to go with the story as I know it. It's gotta be close. During my rave years, say 13 years ago, there was a popular spot for after-hours parties. A funeral home. Kid you not. It was on 47th street in a ......well ethnicky area, not really a rats ass area. Lots of first generation latino immigrants, good people, just not the kind of area you would expect to find around a party spot. How this came to be, as I understood it, was a Polish kid and his brother inherited this funeral home from their grandparents. This made sense, because I'm sure that was a Polish neighborhood at some point. This is Chicago, after all. Every neighborhood was Polish at some point.
Anyway, these guys inherit the funeral home and the apartment above it. They move into the apartment, but instead of hosting funeral parties, they take a different course. Like any after-hours, their parties would start around 4am, prior to that the promoters would be attending the raves that night and handing out fliers. I don't remember what they charged but it wasn't much. The building was long and relatively narrow, and originally there was a large comfortably furnished room, then the area that the casket would sit. In the back of the building was a large workroom or stockroom or whatever (I shudder to think what that room was originally used for) that sealed off pretty well to the reception area. The place had last been remodeled in the 70's, and the furniture, carpet, and decor reflected that. What these guys had done, and it worked pretty well, was to take the stock room and line the walls with a hodge podge of anything that could contain sound, carpet remnants and the like. The turntables and speakers were back there. So you entered one end, paid your couple bucks, and walked through the narrow rooms of couchs, easy chairs, etc (all very 70's) where raver kids were lounging about. At the end of this area was a door that led to the dance floor/stock room. It was really a great idea, raves were fueled by a myriad of different drugs, so some people at 4am+ some would still want to dance, and others would want to relax. The problem, really, was that all the carpet remnants in the world couldn't deaden the kind of bass they were pushing into a pseudo-residential neighborhood. Most of the residents of this neighborhood spoke little English, all went to the church (almost directly across the street) Sunday mornings. See the disconnect?
I loved the funeral home after hours, and I probably went to a half dozen there, but you could see that this was not going to go on forever. One Sunday morning, probably 6am or so, a friend and I left to go pick up......chewing gum, because there was a lack of chewing gum and people wanted more. We walked out the front door,turned left, and were crossing an alley when we heard, "Hey! Hey you two!"
It was two chicago cops in the car at the other end of the short alley. Joe and I looked at each other with the same uncertainty. Granted, we had nothing illegal on us, but we sure looked like we did, white kids wearing bright raver clothing at that hour in that neighborhood. And Chicago police are incredibly hard to predict. Some people think they are meaner than suburban cops. Not true, at least not all the time. Suburban cops follow the "book" pretty much all the time, they aren't going to haul you out of your car and search it cause they feel like it. They also will almost never let you out of anything. Chicago cops play different. Finer points of due process are lost in their effort, but you stand a MUCH better chance of them letting you go if they do catch you with something they deem not a big deal. As long as you're not black, that is. Anyway, we glance at each other, trying to decide whether to run or not (instinct), and the cops must have sensed this cause they said ,"Hey wait guys. Did you just come out of the funeral home?"in a nice tone of voice. We called back, yeah, we had just left. They told us to go back and tell them to turn the music down, if they kept getting complaints they would eventually have to do something. And they drove off. Fair warning. When we got back an hour later we mentioned this event to a few people, none of whom seemed to care much. But it was pretty obvious to me, that unlike most rave locations, in industrial areas where no one is around for miles at night, a bass heavy, DJ featured (they promoted by booking known DJ's, at least known to us) party starting at 4am was not kosher in this neighborhood.
Now it's a couple weeks later, and I'm at a party (what we called raves) that's drawing to a close. There is a DJ there named Rupe (everyone was a DJ) and he was planning to play the funeral home. I wanted to go there anyway, he needed a ride, and walking in with him would save me the few buck cover (really the principle of getting in free). We went, hauled in his records, and basically went our separate ways. Well, not that separate, it wasn't that big. But before he even played, he finds me, tells me he has a bad feeling about being there, and wants to grab his records and go to another after hours. I was having a lovely time, and though my spider sense was not tingling, I knew the funeral home was precarious at best, so I agreed and we left. I don't remember where the second after hours was, but we got there, were there for five minutes, same thing. Bad feeling wants to go. Fine, fine. So we leave and head to a mutual friends house for a quiet small gathering. Not that this matters, but as I drove Rupe split a microdot of messcaline with his teeth, perfectly in half. A microdot is like a flat BB, maybe smaller. I was impressed. I would learn later in life it was a skill acquired from being a master mooch, and making people share what should be unsharable.
He was right about both parties! The second one was more a routine shut down, but when you're holding, there is no routine. The funeral home was a far larger deal. Apparently, on a couple of occasions Police had tried to stop by and tell them to turn the music down. The guys responded by killing the music completely when the cops were walking up, and not answering the door. There were no windows left exposed, city spot so thick metal barred door. And there was only one door left, the main front, the other in the stock room/club land had been sealed over in a vain attempt to soundproof. I guess having tried to openly come by before, the cops this time got sneaky. And there were a lot of them, paddy wagons already on hand, they planned on making arrests. So all of a sudden, boom, cops are filling the place. Some people ran into the dancefloor room and told them what was going on, they tried to bar the door between the two sections but the CPD took that out like it was paper (and really, where would they have gone? The door outside back there was sealed over. The party kid Masada, holding out back there until the Roman legions got through.)
So, stunned, nowhere to run, those holding illegal things (99%) did the one thing they could; they threw their shit onto the floor. As the cops took order, they rounded people up into areas, like ok you three sit on that couch and so on. And if you ended up next to something on the floor, you were one of the lucky ones to go to 26th and California. The details I have about this part are exactly factual. A girl who would go on to become one of the major girlfriends in my life was one of the unlucky ones that morning. They were drugs all over the floor, and a bag of coke by where she had been seated, with a couple other girls. All three were taken. (Coke, of all things. Not a party kid drug. She got busted because of what some imposter ditched.)
I had been hanging with her that night before Rupe got us out of there. In time, the charges were dropped, but she had to deal with a lot of people (family) doubting her story. I knew it was true. No way Kelly had coke (now if it had been ecstasy.....)
Rupe's intuition saved me, potentially big time. I was holding heavy that morning. And I would end up being rommates with the guy (and another guy) within 6 months. He was one of the worst roommates and worst people I had ever been around. The kind of guy who would ask you for a favor, and just not take no, keep asking, keep asking, until you literally had to scream at him. One of these favors was always to borrow my car, short time periods "for nothing". Heroin was not a major party kid drug, and at that time I was unfamiliar with it. That would soon change, as it brought down the house that tweak built. Next story.
Anyway, these guys inherit the funeral home and the apartment above it. They move into the apartment, but instead of hosting funeral parties, they take a different course. Like any after-hours, their parties would start around 4am, prior to that the promoters would be attending the raves that night and handing out fliers. I don't remember what they charged but it wasn't much. The building was long and relatively narrow, and originally there was a large comfortably furnished room, then the area that the casket would sit. In the back of the building was a large workroom or stockroom or whatever (I shudder to think what that room was originally used for) that sealed off pretty well to the reception area. The place had last been remodeled in the 70's, and the furniture, carpet, and decor reflected that. What these guys had done, and it worked pretty well, was to take the stock room and line the walls with a hodge podge of anything that could contain sound, carpet remnants and the like. The turntables and speakers were back there. So you entered one end, paid your couple bucks, and walked through the narrow rooms of couchs, easy chairs, etc (all very 70's) where raver kids were lounging about. At the end of this area was a door that led to the dance floor/stock room. It was really a great idea, raves were fueled by a myriad of different drugs, so some people at 4am+ some would still want to dance, and others would want to relax. The problem, really, was that all the carpet remnants in the world couldn't deaden the kind of bass they were pushing into a pseudo-residential neighborhood. Most of the residents of this neighborhood spoke little English, all went to the church (almost directly across the street) Sunday mornings. See the disconnect?
I loved the funeral home after hours, and I probably went to a half dozen there, but you could see that this was not going to go on forever. One Sunday morning, probably 6am or so, a friend and I left to go pick up......chewing gum, because there was a lack of chewing gum and people wanted more. We walked out the front door,turned left, and were crossing an alley when we heard, "Hey! Hey you two!"
It was two chicago cops in the car at the other end of the short alley. Joe and I looked at each other with the same uncertainty. Granted, we had nothing illegal on us, but we sure looked like we did, white kids wearing bright raver clothing at that hour in that neighborhood. And Chicago police are incredibly hard to predict. Some people think they are meaner than suburban cops. Not true, at least not all the time. Suburban cops follow the "book" pretty much all the time, they aren't going to haul you out of your car and search it cause they feel like it. They also will almost never let you out of anything. Chicago cops play different. Finer points of due process are lost in their effort, but you stand a MUCH better chance of them letting you go if they do catch you with something they deem not a big deal. As long as you're not black, that is. Anyway, we glance at each other, trying to decide whether to run or not (instinct), and the cops must have sensed this cause they said ,"Hey wait guys. Did you just come out of the funeral home?"in a nice tone of voice. We called back, yeah, we had just left. They told us to go back and tell them to turn the music down, if they kept getting complaints they would eventually have to do something. And they drove off. Fair warning. When we got back an hour later we mentioned this event to a few people, none of whom seemed to care much. But it was pretty obvious to me, that unlike most rave locations, in industrial areas where no one is around for miles at night, a bass heavy, DJ featured (they promoted by booking known DJ's, at least known to us) party starting at 4am was not kosher in this neighborhood.
Now it's a couple weeks later, and I'm at a party (what we called raves) that's drawing to a close. There is a DJ there named Rupe (everyone was a DJ) and he was planning to play the funeral home. I wanted to go there anyway, he needed a ride, and walking in with him would save me the few buck cover (really the principle of getting in free). We went, hauled in his records, and basically went our separate ways. Well, not that separate, it wasn't that big. But before he even played, he finds me, tells me he has a bad feeling about being there, and wants to grab his records and go to another after hours. I was having a lovely time, and though my spider sense was not tingling, I knew the funeral home was precarious at best, so I agreed and we left. I don't remember where the second after hours was, but we got there, were there for five minutes, same thing. Bad feeling wants to go. Fine, fine. So we leave and head to a mutual friends house for a quiet small gathering. Not that this matters, but as I drove Rupe split a microdot of messcaline with his teeth, perfectly in half. A microdot is like a flat BB, maybe smaller. I was impressed. I would learn later in life it was a skill acquired from being a master mooch, and making people share what should be unsharable.
He was right about both parties! The second one was more a routine shut down, but when you're holding, there is no routine. The funeral home was a far larger deal. Apparently, on a couple of occasions Police had tried to stop by and tell them to turn the music down. The guys responded by killing the music completely when the cops were walking up, and not answering the door. There were no windows left exposed, city spot so thick metal barred door. And there was only one door left, the main front, the other in the stock room/club land had been sealed over in a vain attempt to soundproof. I guess having tried to openly come by before, the cops this time got sneaky. And there were a lot of them, paddy wagons already on hand, they planned on making arrests. So all of a sudden, boom, cops are filling the place. Some people ran into the dancefloor room and told them what was going on, they tried to bar the door between the two sections but the CPD took that out like it was paper (and really, where would they have gone? The door outside back there was sealed over. The party kid Masada, holding out back there until the Roman legions got through.)
So, stunned, nowhere to run, those holding illegal things (99%) did the one thing they could; they threw their shit onto the floor. As the cops took order, they rounded people up into areas, like ok you three sit on that couch and so on. And if you ended up next to something on the floor, you were one of the lucky ones to go to 26th and California. The details I have about this part are exactly factual. A girl who would go on to become one of the major girlfriends in my life was one of the unlucky ones that morning. They were drugs all over the floor, and a bag of coke by where she had been seated, with a couple other girls. All three were taken. (Coke, of all things. Not a party kid drug. She got busted because of what some imposter ditched.)
I had been hanging with her that night before Rupe got us out of there. In time, the charges were dropped, but she had to deal with a lot of people (family) doubting her story. I knew it was true. No way Kelly had coke (now if it had been ecstasy.....)
Rupe's intuition saved me, potentially big time. I was holding heavy that morning. And I would end up being rommates with the guy (and another guy) within 6 months. He was one of the worst roommates and worst people I had ever been around. The kind of guy who would ask you for a favor, and just not take no, keep asking, keep asking, until you literally had to scream at him. One of these favors was always to borrow my car, short time periods "for nothing". Heroin was not a major party kid drug, and at that time I was unfamiliar with it. That would soon change, as it brought down the house that tweak built. Next story.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: A Warm (and hilarious) Thanksgiving Memory
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: A Warm (and hilarious) Thanksgiving Memory: "People say divorce wounds the children involved. I suppose it does, but in all honesty, remarriage is what really fucks them up. And in hono..."
A Warm (and hilarious) Thanksgiving Memory
People say divorce wounds the children involved. I suppose it does, but in all honesty, remarriage is what really fucks them up. And in honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday I would like to share a Thanksgiving memory made possible through the magic of remarriage. When I was 14 my Dad got remarried, to a woman he had been dating for about 6 months. In retrospect, had he spent a little more time wrestling with that decision he probably wouldn't now be on his 3rd marriage. Having dated for only six months, I had only met this woman twice before my father and I moved into her house, with her two boys (she was divorced from a cardiologist, and got the house. The house really was nice.) I met her two sons only once, on a Sunday afternoon for a few hours, before we all became one big, dysfunctional family. When I arrived at her house that Sunday afternoon her sons were not yet home, and my step mother- to- be took a moment to share something with me. Her older son had a bit of a problem with his mouth, and if I ever felt the need to solve a problem with him physically that was ok. I stood in stunned disbelief, and just as my mind began to accept the idea that this woman had just invited me to kick her sons ass my father pulled me aside and told me sternly never to do this. Talk about mixed messages! One thing was clear, either this woman was totally insane, or her son was really that obnoxious. Over the next 13 years I learned that both were true.
And with that bit of background I bring you to the first Thanksgiving dinner we all shared. My grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousin joined us. I knew this was a disaster in the making when I saw what my stepmother was cooking. She came to this country when she was 15 from Germany, and presumably knew what traditional Thanksgiving fare consisted of. She chose to abandon this for salmon-almond mousse pate, among other things I had never heard of. My family was coming in from Northern Wisconsin and rural Indiana. If they had known that coming up with a turkey would be a problem they would have shot one themselves. Still, the strange food could have been overcome, but my older step brother could not.
We sat down to dinner with my father and step mother at the head and foot of the table, my family lining one side and my step brothers and I on the other. My older step brother was sitting to the right of my father, perpendicular to him. As the meal progressed, my step brother's comments became more and more inappropriate. I could see me family trying to catch me eye with the strangest looks on their faces, my father looked uncomfortable, his mother mortified. As for myself and my younger step brother, well.....we loved every minute. We ate our bizarre food and felt the tension in the room grow in what my theatre professor would refer to as rising action, the precursor to the climax.
That climax came when he made a comment about his mother deep throating my father. No shit. And instantly, while everyone else sat in shocked silence, my father (sitting perpendicular to him) punched him square in the jaw. Clearly, my step brother had never had taken a shot to the jaw before (it wouldn't be his last) and I'm not sure my father had ever thrown a punch before (though he threw that one like Evander Holyfield). My step brother sat there for a moment, then jumped up, grabbed his plate, and took he off. He grabbed his Domino's cheese pizza off the counter and retreated to his room, where he spent the rest of the evening. (A note about the pizza, he may be the pickiest eater I have ever met, but really, given the shit the rest of us were forcing down, he did all right getting himself a pizza. The rest of us had been watching him eat it, like, can we do that? I didn't know we could do that.)
My family didn't spend the night, I'm not sure if they had ever intended to, but they took off as soon as was polite. Our first Thanksgiving was a harbinger of things to come, and while we had many instances far more tragic and inflammatory, few spawned such hilarious memories.
And with that bit of background I bring you to the first Thanksgiving dinner we all shared. My grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousin joined us. I knew this was a disaster in the making when I saw what my stepmother was cooking. She came to this country when she was 15 from Germany, and presumably knew what traditional Thanksgiving fare consisted of. She chose to abandon this for salmon-almond mousse pate, among other things I had never heard of. My family was coming in from Northern Wisconsin and rural Indiana. If they had known that coming up with a turkey would be a problem they would have shot one themselves. Still, the strange food could have been overcome, but my older step brother could not.
We sat down to dinner with my father and step mother at the head and foot of the table, my family lining one side and my step brothers and I on the other. My older step brother was sitting to the right of my father, perpendicular to him. As the meal progressed, my step brother's comments became more and more inappropriate. I could see me family trying to catch me eye with the strangest looks on their faces, my father looked uncomfortable, his mother mortified. As for myself and my younger step brother, well.....we loved every minute. We ate our bizarre food and felt the tension in the room grow in what my theatre professor would refer to as rising action, the precursor to the climax.
That climax came when he made a comment about his mother deep throating my father. No shit. And instantly, while everyone else sat in shocked silence, my father (sitting perpendicular to him) punched him square in the jaw. Clearly, my step brother had never had taken a shot to the jaw before (it wouldn't be his last) and I'm not sure my father had ever thrown a punch before (though he threw that one like Evander Holyfield). My step brother sat there for a moment, then jumped up, grabbed his plate, and took he off. He grabbed his Domino's cheese pizza off the counter and retreated to his room, where he spent the rest of the evening. (A note about the pizza, he may be the pickiest eater I have ever met, but really, given the shit the rest of us were forcing down, he did all right getting himself a pizza. The rest of us had been watching him eat it, like, can we do that? I didn't know we could do that.)
My family didn't spend the night, I'm not sure if they had ever intended to, but they took off as soon as was polite. Our first Thanksgiving was a harbinger of things to come, and while we had many instances far more tragic and inflammatory, few spawned such hilarious memories.
Friday, November 19, 2010
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: What if songs were news reports?
Empty Thoughts and Random Memories: What if songs were news reports?: "Over 15 years ago I was listening to the radio, and heard Steven Tyler report that Janie had a gun. Today, I was listening to the radio and ..."
What if songs were news reports?
Over 15 years ago I was listening to the radio, and heard Steven Tyler report that Janie had a gun. Today, I was listening to the radio and was dismayed to hear Steven Tyler tell me the bitch has yet to be disarmed.
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