Finding Wanda

Today, I came across this picture of a sweet soul that I haven’t seen in almost thirty years. I was thinking about her as I edited one of my stories in which she’s lovingly recalled, and I realized that I didn’t have any keepsakes or pictures of her. In fact, I couldn’t even remember her last name after all these years. I decided right then to change that. I tried all kinds of advanced searches on Google, each one increasing in complexity, all of them meeting with failure. Several times I came across sites that had records I could search by date and county, but she never came up. Finally, after almost two hours, I simply tried “Kitsap County Wanda 1991.” She was the very first result. Wanda Rose Tingelstad. Wanda Rose, we called her. How could I forget?

Wanda died in a car accident in October 1991, on her way to Moses Lake, Washington, where she had enrolled at Big Bend Community College in their pre-med program. At nineteen, she was just beginning as a Freshman there, and had been my very first friend—of the two that I had—in Washington. We met in September at Messenger House, a care center for those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. I’d moved to Washington that July, on the day of my twentieth birthday. I had to beg, borrow, steal, and kill just to get a job mopping up urine in the locked dementia wards, thanks to my credentials as a Certified Californian looking for work at the height of anti-California hysteria.

I’d previously held down a nice office job as Division Secretary for the Southern California Rent-A-Center franchise chain. Not a milestone career, but pretty nice gig for a guy in Community College, and a damn sight better than dealing in adult incontinence for a living. But there I was, having spent three months of impenetrable solitude looking for a job in a town that literally had fewer people in it than my Senior class at Long Beach Poly. I’d been job hunting four hours a day, five days a week for three solid months before I got that shit detail, and had not made even one single friend while stranded in the lush no-man’s land of Kingston, Washington. Not until Wanda Rose.

If you think Alzheimer’s is bad from the outside, you should try watching the gears turn on the inside of the locked wards; tragedies churned out daily. It’s demoralizing even at the best of times, but somehow Wanda Rose took it all in stride. She had her plans, her exit strategy. She was the first person that didn’t look down and spit on the ground every time my name got mentioned, and the only friend I had for a thousand miles in any direction. Day one, she'd been assigned to train me on how to properly mop up lakes of diarrhea. Turns out it’s all in the wrist.

Messenger House Care Center, Bainbridge Island, WA

Wanda Rose and I didn’t hang out much, outside of work. The odd cup of coffee here and there, the occasional smoke out on the jetty. She took me to the DMV once after I got a ticket for expired out of state plates. Mostly it was just shift work together and an hour a day between breaks and lunches. But after the months of seclusion, even that was like an oasis in the desert; a balm for loneliness, if ever there was one. Though Wanda was a bit of a wallflower, kind of mousy and unassuming, she had a sweet, easy laugh, and an uncommon grace about her. She welcomed me when literally no one else would, and she was just a good egg, through and through. The kind we really could’ve used more of in this world.

She introduced me to her crazy boyfriend, Chalon, who came to work at Messenger House several weeks later. He was an affable hippie type; a bit of a douche, but harmless enough and generally well-intentioned. After Wanda Rose headed to Moses Lake to secure a job and an apartment in advance of school starting, Chalon and I kind of fell in together, both just waiting for her return. I never had a lot in common with him, but three months of solitude in the wilds of rural Washington make for strange bedfellows, believe me. I was into the Smiths, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. He liked Steve Miller Band and the Doors. He had brown hair almost to his shoulders and seemed like the living embodiment of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. One citified kid, a stranger in a strange land, thrown in with a hippie stoner behind the locked doors of a tragedy factory. What could possibly go wrong?

Chalon got the news of Wanda’s death at work. It’s funny how seeing someone you love somewhere they don’t belong can immediately fill you with dread. His mom showed up while we were sitting at the ersatz break table on the loading dock. It was really just a discarded wooden spool from a high-voltage line roll, but with a couple of crates to sit on, it made for an OK place to catch a smoke out of the view of the powers that be. Plus we could keep an eye on all the cute CNA’s that came by. I happened to be looking at Chalon as he caught sight of his mom approaching from the parking lot, and saw the change that came over him. He knew something was wrong before she even spoke. When she said, “It’s Wanda,” he disintegrated instantly, his whole world over. I’d known him for four days.

Circumstances kind of dictated the strange sequence of events that put me in Chalon’s house listening to “Riders on the Storm” in the gloaming of October 31, 1991. There’s a set protocol of events that kicks into gear when someone dies in a single car accident. Questions to be asked and answered, tests to be run. It’s not like a heart attack or falling off the roof. It might be drunk driving, it might be suicide, who knows? And you can’t bury the body until there are some reasonable answers. Turns out Wanda’s friend, the driver, had simply fallen asleep and driven them into a tree. Which constitutes a reasonable answer, I guess, and so it came to be that by the conclusion of these inquiries Wanda Rose was buried on Halloween Day. There are no good days to bury your child, your sweetheart, or your only friend. But there are worse days.

Halloween has got to take the cake. Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. All of his friends and hers came to the funeral, and then every single one of them had somewhere else to be. Life goes on. After all, it wasn’t just any Thursday. It's Dia de los Muertos, man. Got my best suit and my tie, a shiny silver dollar on either eye. So off they went, and there I stayed, having inherited Chalon and his grief, bequeathed to me by Wanda Rose as the vig on the loan of her friendship for the six weeks I’d been sustained by it. I try to be a stand-up guy, but even when I’m not, I never forget the debts I owe. So I drove him home to his parent’s house on the edge of the Suquamish Reservation.

It overlooked Puget Sound and took advantage of the view with floor-to-ceiling windows on one full wall of the house. I remember thinking that the water was the exact same gray as the clouds that day, and then grasping for the first time that the color of the sea is a reflection of the sky. It had never occurred to me until the moment I saw them meet at the iron gray horizon-line out those windows. So I sat there as an ambassador from the faraway Land of Decency, where one's friends—not virtual strangers—bore burdens like this, prepared to console a dude I'd known for forty working hours, total. How, I knew not. Chalon cued up a CD from the stack Wanda had left behind.

“Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone

An actor out on loan

Riders on the storm”

Then he offered me a hit off his joint. That started me down a road that didn’t emerge from the woods for seven years. A long, strange trip indeed. One I’m grateful to have taken, and even more grateful to have survived. I think fondly and often of Wanda Rose, who was the first person to greet me with open arms down at the far end of a season of loneliness that had seemed boundless. And the first friend I ever had die on my watch, though sadly not the last. In life, she showed me how vast a kindness simple acceptance can be. In her death, I learned the grace of bearing one another’s burdens. Even those of virtual strangers. Remembering her today, seeing her face again for the first time in thirty years, and even just saying her name aloud in an empty room has renewed me, and I am all the richer for it. Gratitude is all I have to offer.

 

Serenading The Crips

 

Back at the Dawn of Time, which any reputable cosmologist will tell you was the Spring of 1990, I had no idea what a maudlin, self-pitying drunk I turn into when I’ve had too much. Just a complete Barry Manilow-singing drama-queen the second I cross the 2.5 drinks-per-hour threshold. Of course I was only 18, so I had no good reason to know that back then, but I chose the absolute worst possible time and place to discover this about myself. In fact, it was so epically stupid that the fact that I lived to tell the tale practically qualifies as proof of God’s existence. I’ll go further and say that the phrase “God loves fools and drunks” found its origins in a Friday night stroll that I took that Spring, just loaded to the gills on Bartles & Jaymes wine-coolers.  

And thank you for your support.

I don’t know if Bartles & Jaymes are still in business nowadays. If I’m not mistaken, today when you want to let the world know that you’re an effete with at least one undescended testicle, you drink White Claw. But back in 1990, it was Bartles & Jaymes, and specifically Peach or Tropical, because the other flavors were a little too intense. At 18, I was 5’9”, weighed a buck-thirty-five dripping wet, and my inseam was inches longer than my waist was around. Needless to say, I didn’t have to tip too many back to get me going on those first few bars of “Oh Mandy.” That fine Spring evening wasn’t the first time I'd ever been a little blotto. I had lived in Naples, Italy for a few years before that and there’s no drinking age there, so I’d had a few a few times. But never out in the wild, never unsupervised by my peers, and never on something that I actually liked the taste of. So finding out that night there was an alcohol that tasted like kool-aid turned out to be a bit of a problem.

Even in the land of first-world problems, the kind of problems I had rated about a 2 on a bad day. But when you multiply that by 18 years-old and alcohol you arrive at the Protagonist in the Story of The World being shat upon by the Universe Itself. I was working my first-ever tax-paying job, which cramped my recreational time without providing significant financial means. I was meandering aimlessly through my first year of City College with no idea what I was doing there aside from getting free rent at home. And then there were the perpetual girl problems. Oh, the humanity! It didn’t help that I’d been swindled out of my paycheck the previous week by a grifter named Bantu, who ran the Pigeon Drop con on me like I’d been born yesterday. So I was almost dead broke and being expected to take my girl out on a Friday night. Aces.

But my girl’s BFF had a friend visiting from out of town and they wanted to take her out to show her a good time, so we rallied at a mutual friend’s place out in Signal Hill for a pre-function drink to loosen up. I was driving my first-ever car, a red VW Bus with camper conversion that had come pre-named Red Floyd. Because I was too broke to just be cruising around willy-nilly—to say nothing of the fact that Floyd was a complete hooptie—it was decided we’d take another vehicle, which meant that I was free to tip back a few of the ol’ Bartles & Jaymes. Then me and 5 Woo-Girls piled into somebody’s Jeep Grand Cherokee and headed to the only all-ages club in Long Beach, Toe Jam. I rode in the rear cargo area behind the back seat, surreptitiously guzzling the cooler I’d kiped from our host’s fridge. One for the road, and thank you for your support.

Red Floyd

In my day, which ended mid-1991, Long Beach wasn’t much of a club-scene town. It was a Reggae-Sunsplash outdoor-venue kind of town. It did have a thriving Rap scene, but that mostly went north to Compton for production and shows. There were a few dives around where local bands could play, and when the Skeletones, Fishbone, and Sublime occasionally made their way out of Orange County to play some Long Beach shows, Toe Jam was pretty much the place. And if you were under-age and wanted to dance, Toe Jam was literally the only place. It was in the East Village right next to the first location of the far more famous Roscoe’s House of Chicken & Waffles. Toe Jam closed in ’92 after a shooting on the sidewalk outside, so now everyone and their brother swears they saw Snoop Dogg, Warren G, and No Doubt play there. But on my fateful night, it was just a wall of thumping bass and nothing else.

Toe Jam

Walking into a place like that already wasted doesn’t make for a great start to anything. I’d begun the evening feeling sullen and put-upon by the world, then added 4 wine-coolers, 5 Woo-Girls, and 2-Live Crew. What could possibly go wrong? The answer to that question was forthcoming within the hour. After we’d secured a table, we made our way to the dance-floor where my John-Hughes-Breakfast-Club dancing was not a hit, nor was my rendition of the Cabbage Patch or Running Man. Although I will not allow anyone to besmirch my Robocop, even to this day. I’ve got that shit dialed in. But being the only guy dancing with a bunch of Woo-Girls is a heavy burden, one my narrow shoulders were not built to bear, so I made my way off the dance floor and back to our table. 

After an interminable time waiting for my girl to notice that I was stewing petulantly—possibly 3 entire minutes—I headed to the men's room where I discreetly vomited into the first open urinal I saw. I felt decidedly better after that and realized that I didn’t need to stay there and get treated like this. I could go anywhere and get treated like this, and I decided to do just that. So, fueled by righteous indignation, I stumbled out the door into the night without so much as a "by your leave" to anyone. Just drunk as a lord and filled to the brim with unwarranted confidence in my abilities to traverse the 38 blocks between me and Floyd on foot. About 10 blocks into the journey, I realized that I’d made a terrible mistake and taken my life into my hands. 

Pound for pound, Long Beach is literally the most diverse city on Earth. It has large and thriving populations from almost every demographic background: Blacks, Latinos, Whites, Pacific Islanders, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Japanese all find homes and businesses throughout the city. 7-Elevens, Bodegas, and Korean-owned liquor stores all got robbed on an equal-opportunity basis, and if you had enough money, you could live in the true melting pot parts of town. If you didn’t, you’d find a distinct neighborhood where you could live based on your ethnicity, most of which came complete with their own neighborhood gang. 

Large portions of Long Beach are made of pre-war Craftsman Bungalows and post-war apartment complexes, most of which are covered in stucco. Various swaths of it are always falling into decline while others are renovated according to the vicissitudes of capitalism. The stretch of town between me and Floyd was almost entirely made of the parts that were in decline. Lots of gates, fences, and barred windows defining what’s yours, mine, and ours. For 11:00 at night, there was a surprising number of young men out in the street. Groups sitting on stoops behind closed gates, drinking from brown paper bags, dudes leaning on light-posts, lounging against tricked-out Impalas right next to cars up on blocks with no wheels. Smoking, drinking, laughing, cat-calling to each other, and hitting blunts right out in the open. Obviously not worried about even the shadow of a cop car hitting the ground anywhere near them.

Enter 135 pounds of drunk Whiteboy.

Dressed head-to-toe in black, hair tressed-up in Robert Smith-lite fashion, clearly oblivious to my surroundings, just a be-bopping along to the music in my head, which I may or may not have been singing aloud, I was on my way from Broadway & Lime to Burnett & Cherry. Following my internal compass inerrantly North and East toward that destination with only an instinct to avoid busy streets where my erratic ambling might attract police attention. Or, you know, where I might stumble into traffic and die? North and East, young man, North and East!

While that course was geographically sound, the impracticality of it didn’t strike me until I was deep into Rollin’ 20s Crip territory. For those living in more harmless parts of the world, that’s a gang. And a famously deadly one, at that. I didn’t know they were Rollin’ 20s Crips specifically, but I knew they were some flavor of Crip by the part of town I suddenly realized I’d stumbled into so blithely. Ordinarily, I avoided this quadrant of the city like the plague. Even in the daylight, even in a car. Now I was strolling through on foot in the dead of night, three sheets into the wind. I may as well have signed my own death warrant. 

I was blotto enough not to realize where I was, or what was happening, until I was many blocks into their territory. But not so blotto that I couldn't recognize the danger I was in as my situation slowly dawned on me. Up to that point I’d stopped to pee a couple of times in random alleys, and then woozily, boozily made my way up the street, humming and singing along to music only I could hear. Occasionally stumbling, otherwise swaying, sauntering, rambling, meandering, and moseying like Mr. Magoo in the cartoons, tip-toeing between hazards unaware. Then, somewhere on 11th between Lime and MLK Ave, I caught the attention of one of the corner boys, who in turn caught my attention by calling out from his stoop behind a closed gate. 

He was sitting with his homies, drinking from a 40, and wearing an LA Raider’s hat. I knew instantly what that meant, and a bolt of adrenaline shot through me. Better than an entire pot of coffee or cold shower could, that adrenaline woke me up to the mortal danger I was in. A Raider’s hat, jersey, or jacket always meant gangs. It might be Crips, it might be Longos. Hell, it might even be the Cambodian gang the Tiny Rascals. But in Long Beach it was never, ever a sports enthusiast. And since the gentleman was Black, it meant Crips. There were a half-dozen other fellas on the stoop all dressed in similar attire, wiling away a lovely Friday night in the LBC.

“‘Sup, Whiteboy?” He called to me, his insouciant tone loaded with menace. He and his buddies were all smiles, murmuring and pointing, with low chuckles passing among them.

Since the day I moved back to Long Beach five years before, I’d never once had a satisfactory answer to the question “‘Sup?” I certainly didn’t have one then as I turned to look at him, swaying side to side, the whole block spinning around me. I had to say something, but at the moment, all I could think of was trying not to bring up the rest of my Bartles & Jaymes on his sidewalk. To this day I have no idea why I started singing right then, but it may well have saved my life. The last song I'd heard on my way out of Toe Jam had been on a loop in my head ever since, and I just opened my mouth and belted it out to the cheap seats: 

“Oh, it's opening time down on Fascination Street

So let's cut the conversation and get out for a bit

Because I feel it all fading and paling and I'm begging

To drag you down with me, to kick the last nail in”

To a man, they fell out laughing together, pointing, pumping fists, shouting encouragement to me. “You go, Whiteboy!”  “Hellz yeah, boiiii!” And other sentiments to that effect.

I floundered through some kind of drunken hybrid of a bow-curtsy-pirouette  and was on my way, still singing "Fascination Street" at the top of my lungs. Even through the fog of my inebriation, I knew where I was, I knew I didn’t belong, and I knew I sure as hell couldn’t blend in to my surroundings. My former high school was just blocks away, and in my time there 2 guys had been killed on the campus right after Friday night football games. Needless to say, the dire consequences of my breathtaking idiocy had become clear to me: This was no joke. Any one of these guys could snatch my life as soon as look at me, and there were easily 100 of them between me and Floyd, some 25 blocks distant. 

But the only way out was through, and I was filled with a sudden certainty that my sole chance to make it to the other side was to stand out. To purposefully get myself noticed by the most dangerous people in town, by singing, dancing, and generally making a complete ass of myself all the way through their neighborhoods. Because if I slunk off, skulked through the alleys, or just straight-up ran, there would be no hope. I was outnumbered, outgunned, and their territory was 20 square blocks easy, so making myself an object of sport for predators like that was out of the question. But making myself an object of ridicule and entertainment? Hell, that’s practically my middle name. 

From Toe Jam to Signal Hill on foot

I performed the entire Cure album “Disintegration” from start to finish, including some pretty unfortunate air-guitar solos. I threw in a couple of ditties from “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me” randomly, choosing to stick with The Cure for some reason, and sobering up with each step I took. Mostly I was met with laughter and catcalls, and a perhaps ironic appreciation for my dance skills. Although I still choose to take their enthusiasm for my Cabbage Patch as sincere. Hey, you don’t know! I mean, sure there were any number of hurled malt liquor bottles, but none of those came close enough to hitting me to be taken as a genuine threat. More like an encouragement to keep on singin’ and dancin’ so nobody got any other ideas about how else I might be of entertainment to them. No matter what came my way, I doubled down on my crazy, drunk Whiteboy strategy, never breaking character for a second. Loud, proud, and trying not to piss myself all the way down Martin Luther King Jr. Ave.

When I saw the World Famous VIP Records sign across from the Poly High athletic field, I cut over to Alameda on 17th because I knew there would be a gaggle of OGs in the VIP lot, flexing on each other with pimped out Impalas, Crown Vics, and LTDs. I didn’t want to chance my act with any homeboys not on their stoop and chilling for the night. I mean, maybe all them corner boys along the way couldn’t be bothered to do more than fuck with a dumbass Whiteboy for their own amusement and from the comfort of home, but who knows what a bunch of strutting gangsters out marking their territory might think of me? Whether this was sound strategy or not, I can’t say. I can say that I made it all the way back to Floyd with nary a scratch on me, and only a couple of blisters and a hoarse voice as mementos of my little suicide stroll.

World Famous V.I.P Records

My girlfriend and her BFF were sitting in the Grand Cherokee waiting for me when I got back. Although it felt like the Bataan Death March, I’d really only trekked across about 3 miles of the city. Due to my meandering performance and the switchbacks I’d taken to avoid the most dangerous choke-points, it took me almost 3 hours. No idea how long they’d spent looking for me, or had been waiting there after my wordless departure from Toe Jam, but even 31 years later I can still see the icy look she wore when she laid eyes on me. By then I was sober as a judge and gave her a ride home, slowly realizing that I only thought I’d had girl problems before. I never even got the chance to tell her how the rest of my evening went. Hell, I might have stood a better chance with my homies in the Rollin' 20s.

In retracing my steps that night—based on some landmarks I still remember from that drunken haze—I laid my Google Maps route over an available map of Long Beach gang territories. It turns out that I strolled 38 blocks through some of the most dangerous parts of the city, right in the midst of no fewer than 8 different gangs. Besides my besties in the Rollin’ 20s, there were also the East Side Longos, Sons of Samoa, the Asian Boys, and perhaps the most apropos of all… Suicide Town. And I serenaded every last one of those motherfuckers along the way. 

What can I say? God loves fools and drunks, and He got a 2 for 1 deal out of me that night.

Each blue pin represents a known gang and their territory

Of Dragons and Dumbasses

 

Monroe, Oregon is an odd little burgh. It sits in the middle of nowhere, population 651. The closest town of any significance is 8 miles distant, with just under 5,500 living in it. Stringing them together is Highway 99W, cutting through unimaginably verdant grasslands and orchards as far as the eye can see. Upon exiting a thick copse of trees, Monroe suddenly appears from around a bend in the Long Tom River, looking like God planted some magic beans and it just grew out of the rich, alluvial soil of the Willamette Valley. It’s a total of 3,503 feet long, and 2,542 feet wide. Not even one mile in any direction, though they still have that one traffic light for some reason. After that, the highway goes back to grasslands and farms for 15 miles before you reach the outskirts of Corvallis, home of Oregon State University.

These are the kind of places you drive through on your way to somewhere else, perhaps taking a moment to marvel that people choose to live there, or that the places exist at all. I spent about six years driving through Monroe twice a day on my way to and from work in the north valley or out on the coast. Anywhere the itinerant winds of insurance restoration took me, as fires and floods have no predictable season or locale. The bigger construction-restoration companies like Belfor had the metropolitan areas all but sewn up, so the smaller outfits like the ones I worked for had to hunt and peck in the tiny communities that dotted the landscape up and down the parallel circuits of Highway 99 and I-5, or out in the coastal villages.

As such, Monroe became an occasional waystation for coffee, biscuits & gravy, or a quick pee break if one of the crew hadn’t managed their bladder properly for the drive in front of us. But most days, it was just a landmark to be checked off on a long drive to and from work. Monroe, check. Twenty five minutes to Corvallis. Long, boring drives repeated incessantly are filled with those kind of markers, passing like ticks on a metronome. In that sparse neck of the woods, Monroe is actually one of the more significant ticks. Otherwise, the county is the literal Grass-seed Capitol of the World, so it’s nothing but oceans of grass so green you can’t even imagine it if you get less than 80-inches of rain per year, broken up by the occasional farmhouse, pole-barn, or stand of trees.

Guys that get into construction generally fall into three categories. Crooks who should be in jail, but are working in your house instead. Dumbasses who can’t actually do the work, but are otherwise earnest enough people who mean you no harm. And finally, actual craftsmen. This last category is the rarest, and it’s typically made up of those born to the work and those that found it while waiting for something better to come along. As a foreman in the company, on any given day I was as likely as not to have one of the crooks or dumbasses working for me, depending on who was available and what I needed them for.

Turnover in the crook and dumbass categories was always pretty high, with guys coming and going every few weeks (or even days), depending on whether or not their baby-mama’s cousin could get them a spot on a fishing boat, road crew, or union job. So I never knew from day to day who’d be riding with me in the van. One day it might be the owner’s idiot son, who I was always trying to get fired only to find myself stymied by the firewall his mom put around him to shield him from the consequences of his incompetence. Another day it might be any one of the depressing array of his douche-y buddies who always had to be picked up from some gas station, or bus stop because their car wasn’t working. Occasionally, I’d catch a break and one of the former Marines would be on the team that day and we’d actually get some work done.

On the day in question, however—Wednesday, December 10^th, 2008—the guy riding with me was of the dumbass variety, although I was soon to learn that it wouldn’t take much to push him over into the criminal category. Maybe just one terrible idea. And God knows I’m just chock full of those. It’s been a while, and I only remember the date because it wound up on the news the next day, but I don’t really remember the dumbass’s name at all. In my defense, it was an impressive cavalcade of douchedom that sat in that passenger seat over the years. Let’s just call this guy Joe, shall we?

I’d been off the Highway 99W route for the better part of 18 months by that point because I’d been running a 90-unit apartment-to-condo conversion in town. Returning to the run had been bittersweet. It was good to see a long project put to bed, but it meant heading back out on the road and the next job was in the middle of nowhere, even for us. The first couple of days I was on my own, headed out to Alsea to prep the job-site and order lumber drops. On my way through Monroe, I happened to notice that one thing in the 1950’s-frieze town had changed. Monroe High School.

The school was a stout brick building, small but tidy and well maintained over the years. It looked no-nonsense, with the exception of a giant boulder that sat out at the edge of the drive. The boulder was always covered in graffiti, clearly a designated outlet to drain off some of the PSI from the students’ more puerile instincts. The messages were constantly changing, but the street-facing side always said something about how the senior class rulz. Nonsense, obviously. Since everyone knows that ’89 rulz. But that boulder had been an unchanging landmark for all the years I’d been coming through. No, the thing that had changed was that high atop the cupola on the steep roof of the 2-story building sat a dragon.

The dragon was awesome. Sincerely, Daenerys would have been proud of this gothic-iron beastie perched menacingly atop the school, peering down on all who dared approach. It was the kind of thing that Stephen King would have coming to life at night to terrorize the town. I thought for sure I would have noticed it after driving through town twice a day for six years, so I wondered if it was new. You never know, though. Sometimes you look right past the same things over and over on autopilot and never see them. So on the morning of December 10^th, I asked Joe about it.

“Joe, you grew up in Junction City, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, born and raised.”

“So you probably hung out in Monroe sometimes, maybe your football team played against their school?”

“Yeah.”

Pointing out the window I asked, “Has that thing always been up there?”

He got a good gander at it, mouth agog, marveling at it as I had.

“Hell no, it hasn’t always been there! That thing is awesome! What in the world is it doing in Monroe?”

“I knew it,” I said. “Glad to see I’m not crazy. It’s definitely a cool sculpture, but I don’t really get the significance of the dragon. Seems kind of random.”

“That’s their school mascot. The Monroe Dragons,” Joe said, staring at it intently as we drove slowly by. “That thing is way too good for this town. It should be in my living room holding my next beer for me,” shaking his head.

“That does sound like a better use for it,” I replied. “You should hop up there and grab it. Be a great conversation starter for the skanks you bring back from the bar.”

“By the time we’re at my place, there’s no more need for conversation.”

“Natch.”

Looking back at it as we sped up to leave town, he said, “I bet it wouldn’t be that hard.”

I didn’t even let him finish the thought. “Dude, that’s a 10/12 pitched roof. I can barely get you out on a 6/12 pitch without you crying about it being too steep. Plus, it’s two stories up and you’re a smoker. For both those reasons, you would absolutely die before you even made it to the top.”

“I could totally do it,” he replied, defiantly.

Shaking my head. “Dude, last week you called me from a Denny’s to tell me you tripped in the parking lot and hit your head and couldn’t make it back from lunch. And seeing’s as you can’t find your ass with both hands and a flashlight, there’s no way you could detach that thing in the first place, even if you made it all the way up to the top. Which you wouldn’t.”

“Whatever, man.” And we drove on.

Imagine my surprise when, the following morning as I was getting ready to leave at O’Dark:30, Kelli Warner of KMTR News informed me that the Monroe Dragon had been stolen from the roof of the school. Their theory of the crime, after speaking to the Principal of the school, was an Ocean’s 11-level heist involving a scaffold and a crack team of master thieves. After all the statue was mounted 55 feet in the air, weighed between 200-300 pounds, and was done in the dead of night. My theory of the crime was one dumbass who had some s’plainin’ to do.

Imagine my total lack of surprise when said dumbass called in sick that morning.

The next time I ran into Joe was a couple of weeks later at the contractor desk at the Home Depot. He’d been working for another foreman in the company, so I hadn’t had a chance to grill him about the amazing coincidence of the missing Dragon.

“Hey, Joe. Whaddaya hear, whaddaya know?” I asked.

“Nuthin’, man. Just workin’.”

“I sincerely doubt that, but whatever. I hear on the news you’ve been busy redecorating your apartment.”

He couldn’t help but crack a grin at that. “Told you it wouldn’t be that hard,” he gloated.

“How in the world did you get it down?” I asked. “They said it weighs a couple hundred pounds.”

“Naw, that’s BS. Might have weighed 75 pounds. Shit, I was drunk when I did it and all I needed was my Leatherman. There were, like, four bolts holding down.”

“You just got drunk on school night, when you had work the next day, and then drove all the way out to Monroe, scrambled up the roof and took a Dragon. All by your lonesome?”

“My buddy’s girlfriend drove us, he boosted me up and I did the rest. I rolled the thing down the roof and he got it at the bottom,” he answered. “Now we’re kinda beefin’ over who gets to keep it.”

“Well, it should really come to my house, don’t you think?”

“Dude, seriously?” he asked.

“Hell no, dumbass! It’s valued at almost three grand, and you did another twelve-hundred in damage to the roof. You’re in felony territory now. At least one of you is going to big-boy jail.”

“What, you’re gonna narc me out?” he asked, suddenly aware that we were in a very public store at a crowded sales counter.

“Shit, son, I won’t have to. Any time you set out to commit a crime, there’s fifty ways you can fuck it up. If you can think of twenty-five of them, you're a genius. Are you a genius, Joe?”

“Well if you’re not gonna, then who’ll know?”

“Any of the skanks that have the poor judgment to go with you to a second location. You think they won’t see that thing and put two and two together?”

“Shit…”

“How many have you had back to the ol’ bachelor pad by now? Or what about the two rocket surgeons you had helping you out? You’re already in a beef with them, right? How long will they stay quiet? What if, God forbid, they break up?” I couldn’t help but laugh. I mean, I must have been this young and stupid once, right? Must've been.

“Hmmm… Maybe I oughta just let them have it,” Joe said.

“Well whoever has it when the music stops is gonna be the one left holding the bag, that’s for sure. You just better hope they don’t roll over on you.”

It wasn’t long before there was a modest reward for any information leading to the return of the statue, and from that day to the hour Joe’s place got searched was measured in a flurry of texts. Not finding it there, they just used Joe’s Fb friend’s list to narrow it down to the next-most-likely dumbass’s house. Meanwhile the dumbass network fire-lined the Dragon from place to place, staying just ahead of the Man, until the music stopped and an arrest was made at the home of John Lawrence Crymes, 41 days after the initial theft. By then, Joe had long since been replaced in the passenger seat by some other dumbass even more forgettable than him.

Crymes returned the Dragon in good condition and plead out to criminal mischief, never rolling over on anyone else. It took him six years to finish making restitution to Monroe High School. Joe went off to become a pilot but wound up driving long-haul truck. Meanwhile, I kept on rollin’ up and down Highway 99W for years more, just-a-keepin' them terrible ideas to myself.

Sorry about that, Monroe. My bad.

Maps & Legends

Sitting next to Joh Padovan astride our trusty steeds, looking at the edge of World’s End, I could feel foreboding coming off of him in waves. I shared it, but couldn’t say why. We were awaiting the return of his older brother Andrew, who had gone off into that world beyond our own and was now fifteen minutes late. Andrew was never late. Despite our inability to explain the dread we both felt, we were right to dismay Andrew’s tardiness, we just didn’t know it yet. So John and I sat silently, staring across the boundary at the edge of our world, a line we could never cross. Andrew may have dared to venture out beyond that event horizon, but on our map it said, “Here be dragons…” And this was the day that the dragons came for him and he did not return to us.

It was the first time in my life I remember knowing at a gut-check level—for no reason and with no evidence—that something was terribly wrong. No matter that Andrew had done this many times, this time it had ended in disaster. We’d been waiting for him back at headquarters at the end of the day, as was our habit. Being four years older than both John and I, Andrew moved in different circles throughout his day, and we enjoyed being regaled with stories of the weird denizens he encountered out past World’s End. We’d spend a couple of hours hanging out at the end of each day, a pleasant routine that had rarely varied over the past two years. Not until that day, when Andrew was late. Andrew was never, ever late.

After waiting at headquarters for five agonizing minutes beyond the appointed time, John and I had mounted up to head out to World’s End. To do what, I know not. There was nothing we could do if Andrew didn’t return, because he was out past the boundary of our world. We couldn’t render aid, or even search for him, and we dared not alert anyone to his absence, lest the nature of his mission come to light. So we sat there in a wedge-shaped median painted on the asphalt, silently staring out at the relentless traffic, willing Andrew to appear from the vanishing point around the bend from whence the unending stream of cars appeared and disappeared. But he never did.

Absent our normal banter, the road noise where Cedar Avenue and Pacific Avenue bent so acutely to meet one another was a roar, ever-increasing as we waited into the Long Beach rush hour for our friend. At the unnatural place where two parallel avenues meet, no good thing can happen. Still, we sat in the imaginary protection of lines painted in the middle of the street, having never before ventured this far up Cedar Avenue. I’d previously believed that it came out of the sea and went on infinitely to the north, but not so. Looking out from the end of our tree-lined residential spur at the grim, utilitarian visage of a chain-link fence dividing the raised railroad berm from the dirty four-lane blacktop, it was easy to believe that this was indeed where the world ended.

Just sitting in that meridian, staring out at World’s End, filled me with awe that Andrew navigated this landscape daily. I’d known the Padovan brothers for two years, and without a doubt Andrew was the smartest dude I’d ever met. He was a gangly guy with jet-black hair and his nose was always in a book. He preferred the hard sci-fi of Asimov and Clarke, although his fondness for Star Wars knew no bounds, like every guy his age in 1982. He excelled at invention and improvising solutions out of materials on hand. The things I’d seen him do with fishing line and a Swiss army knife boggled the mind. He was MacGyver before there even was a MacGyver and, despite evidence to the contrary, it was impossible to believe that he’d run into a situation he couldn’t MacGyver his way out of.

John had a Fred Savage Wonder-Years quality about him, earnest and good humored. We’d had an instant affinity with each other from day one and had spent most days in the past two years together. We both looked up to Andrew to an almost fervent degree, but any blowback from this failed mission would land in their house, not mine. So although we usually chattered continuously about every possible thing, we sat together silently, magnifying the dread that had landed solidly on our young shoulders. When we hit the half-hour mark, John finally turned to me and said, “You should just go, dude. There’s nothing we can do. I’ll call you when I find out what happened.”

I agreed reluctantly, feeling guilty as hell when I turned my Huffy to go, while he returned to searching the horizon for his brother. I felt I was leaving a man behind and putting the weight of it all on my best friend while I slunk away. But by the time I was home, I was thinking only about myself and what consequences might reach my own door. It was two full days before John called and I learned of Andrew’s fate, which was exactly as we feared. They got him. Though he’d succeeded many times, that was the day they finally got him.

And by “they” I mean the security team at the Gemco Department Store in Bixby Knolls, where Andrew had been routinely shoplifting on his way home from school over the preceding months. The difference being that this time—in the face of the steady stream of highly-coveted Star Wars and GI Joe action figures that Andrew brought home—both John and I had forgotten all qualms about the dishonesty of the endeavor and had sent along a “shopping” list of our own. And the second we did, he immediately got caught. So what did that make us, accessories? Or was it racketeers? Some kind of RICO operation, maybe? Who the hell knows from all that?

Whatever the case, I just knew in my bones that my parents would certainly not be interested in technical distinctions about who was doing the actual stealing. I’d be up a creek, same as the Padovan brothers. I didn’t want to ask John the selfish question aloud—although after cursing the fact that my order for the GI Joe figures “Flash” and “Stalker” wasn’t going to be fulfilled as requested, my own culpability was forefront in my mind. I didn’t have to ask though, because John was just as worried as me. Apparently, Andrew’s Army-recruiter dad had gone down to Gemco and picked him up from their security office and spent the past two days stepping into him. But Andrew hadn’t rolled over on us. He took the weight himself.

No charges were filed, although the Padovan clan lost their Gemco membership for life. There was also a picture of Andrew up in the store, so security could make sure to deny him entry for the rest of time. Naturally, I assumed said picture was twenty feet on a side and plastered prominently throughout the store, such that my parents would surely see it and start grilling me about it on our next visit. As a result, I made some preposterous excuses to get out of going to Gemco for the next several months, which was usually my favorite destination in all the world because my allowance was constantly burning a hole in my pocket. In reality, the pic was actually just a shitty Polaroid on a dingy bulletin board by the door on your way out, as invisible as the FBI’s most-wanted sheets at the Post Office.  

I laid eyes on it once, months later, and saw that he was as unrecognizable in it as any perp in a mug-shot bound for big-boy jail, because his face was all puffy like he’d been crying. Not to mention that his was merely one amongst a dozen other Polaroids of those not welcome on the premises. No, there was no neon sign connecting me to the caper, my guilt and shame just made it feel that way. So despite the absolute certainty I placed in my mother’s omniscience, I’m guessing my parents are only just now learning of my profligate ways in a Facebook post. As per usual.

We didn’t hang out with Andrew much after that. His parents saw to it that he stayed too busy with chores and extracurriculars after school to be a “bad influence” on us. Besides, what was an eighth grader doing still playing with action figures? I never really knew why Andrew had taken to shoplifting to begin with. The Padovans seemed comfortable enough. Our “headquarters” was a two-car garage they’d converted into a kid’s playroom filled with toys, comic books, and model-making supplies. We even had our own AM transistor radio out there. It seemed like Nerdvana to me, and Andrew was King. It wasn’t until years later—after we’d left and then returned to Long Beach on the thousand-day cycle that the Navy moved us on—that I came to understand Andrew in a different light.

While we were away in Italy, the Padovans had moved as well, so we hadn’t seen each other in years. But once I had my driver’s license and was able to visit them in far-away Thousand Oaks, I made a pilgrimage to see my long-lost friends. I’d never been back to the same Navy post before, so seeing old friends was new to me. Usually, when they were gone, they were gone for good. Andrew made the trip home from the University he was attending so we could all be together during my visit. As the afternoon wore on, we turned a nostalgic eye to the good old days, although never once did we bring up the Gemco Incident. It had long-since become a Target anyway, and I’m sure they’d forgotten all about Andrew Padovan.

He did talk some about how much he’d hated living in Long Beach, and especially going to Hughes Junior High. I was surprised to hear it because he seemed like such a boss back in the day. But things are rarely as they seem, especially when viewed through the funhouse mirror of a fourth grader’s eyes. It turns out that Andrew was a wildly unpopular dork at Hughes, his sci-fi ways being compounded by his mixed Italian-Korean parentage. I’d never heard the term “half-breed” until that day in Thousand Oaks, but apparently Andrew had been hearing it all of his life, especially on the days his mom sent him to school with some of her home-made Kimchi. I well recalled her Kimchi being a force of nature, and viscerally understood the dread he must’ve felt opening a Tupperware of something so potent in the school cafeteria.

To me, he’d been a fucking legend. Everyday, sailing off the edge of my map, braving traffic lights, railroad tracks, and freeway overpasses to get to school. Using words like “geo-synchronous” conversationally, and knowing how to solder stuff. At school, those things landed firmly in the debit column and were worthy only of wedgies and scorn. So to go from being a reviled pariah to a King (and vice versa) in the span of twenty-two blocks must have been like passing into a parallel universe. Looking back, I wonder if he might have been wanting to impress us, his adoring acolytes. Perhaps even thank us for validating him in a way that we couldn’t understand he needed. Or maybe he just wanted to find some power in a world where he was otherwise so powerless. All I know for sure is that every life is a mélange of hidden motivations, buried longings, and unseen wounds. A secret history wrapped up in the appearance that everything is okay.

Sometimes the best you can do is take the weight yourself and not pass it on. 

 

 

 

 

The Masks We Wear

 

Every time I leave the house, I take a mask with me. It lives in my truck, so I don’t forget it when I go shopping or on my infrequent trips in to campus to meet with contractors and customers. Some stores that I go into have almost no one wearing masks, while in others almost everyone is. In Eugene, the white-collar hippie town where I live, mask use is much higher than in Springfield, our blue-collar sister city across the river where we lived for the previous twelve years. Meanwhile, if you go into a home improvement store on the weekend, when it’s 90% homeowners in there, there’s plenty of masks in evidence. But on the weekdays, when it’s 90% contractors in there, there’s virtually no mask usage. And I think that speaks to a very interesting distinction between who wears them and who doesn’t and why.

But the distinction isn’t necessarily between blue-collar and white-collar, but between conservative and liberal and how each group tends to view society. Most often, I’ve found that liberal people tend to be collectivists, while conservatives tend to be individualists. Obviously, when discussing a nation of hundreds of millions of people, it’s necessary to paint with a broad brush, which means there will be exceptions to be found. The race may not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet. Both of these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, infectious diseases aren’t something that we can opt in and out of at our leisure, or in accordance with our particular political views. It may be your body, but it isn’t your choice as to whether or not you get COVID-19 or whether you give it to others. Like it or not, we’re in this together. We may not be in the same boat, but we’re in the same storm.

I know that wearing a mask sucks. I hate it. But I also spent fifteen years straight wearing a full respirator eight hours a day for work. And I wasn’t standing in line at the grocery store or sitting at a desk, either. I was swinging sledgehammers, running chainsaws, ripping up floors with a crowbar, jackhammering out concrete slabs, and otherwise demolishing entire buildings by hand. Every time we took a break, we had to pour the sweat and condensation out of the bottom of the rubber face cup. And God help you if you forgot to brush your teeth on any given morning, because once you strap that respirator on, you and your morning breath are now locked in a steel-cage deathmatch.

Once, we came across a refrigerator filled with rotten food that we had to empty out before having it recycled. After several weeks of sitting in a burnt-out townhouse, filled with curdled milk, fetid meat, and maggots, the smell was so overpowering—even through a respirator—that all of us started puking the second we opened it. Have you ever vomited into a bowl that’s strapped tight to your face? Good times. Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who can’t bring themselves to wear a paper or cloth mask.

Of course, there is a lot of disinformation and conspiracy theories out there that aren’t helping things. People keep pointing out that the masks don’t stop COVID because the virus can pass right through the pores of the fabric. The warning signs that the lawyers make us put on the package of masks to keep the manufacturers from getting sued say it right out loud. But that’s not what the masks are designed to do. In short, they’re designed to keep us from spitting on each other, because that’s how the virus spreads. It’s not actually airborne in and of itself, it’s spit-borne and our spit is then airborne on the virus’ behalf. So if we could all just stop spitting on each other, which the masks are very effective at preventing when everyone is wearing them, we lessen the spread significantly.

Unfortunately, the people that are supposedly on the side of science, who should be explaining these things to us more effectively than they are, have big credibility problems these days, which we can ill afford. First off, the CDC told us initially that masks wouldn’t help us and weren’t necessary for the public. Later, they admitted that they were manipulating (read: lying to) the public, in order to keep us from sucking up every mask on earth before they could get into the hands of cops, nurses, EMTs and doctors, who actually needed them right away. We, the public, would eventually need them, once the quarantine gave way to re-openings, but at the outset, while most of us were home, we actually didn’t need them at the time. That part is true, but that’s not what they told us, and that's where a lot of our current troubles began.

There’s a great line from Men In Black that I keep in my back pocket while considering the public. “A person can be smart. But PEOPLE are stupid, panicky, and dangerous.” I think if you consider the whole toilet paper incident of March/April, you might agree with that sentiment. So keeping the masks out of the grubby hands of the great unwashed masses was a smart, necessary move, and I totally get it. But now that the public needs them, we all remember the authorities telling us that they weren’t of much use and wouldn’t be necessary for us. So they admitted to “manipulating” us (read: lying) and then lost most, if not all, of their credibility, which they now need in order to get us to wear the masks. As people have been saying all over FB and IG, "If masks work, then why did you release convicted felons instead of just giving them masks?"

Every bit as nonsensical has been the gov’t’s policies on shopping at Wal-Mart vs. going to Church. Or when they arrested lone beach-goers with no one around them for miles. One minute, you’re alone and social-distanced on the beach, the next minute you find yourself in the midst of a half-dozen officers who are all now breathing on you. You know, for your safety? And now that we’re in a position to be re-opened, the governor in my state (Oregon) has decreed that we must wear masks at all times when in public, even indoors. But don’t worry, if you’re eating or drinking at a bar or restaurant, you can take the mask off then. That makes about as much sense to me as having a set time and place in the pool when you’re allowed to pee, because I suspect the virus has as much respect for these rules of transmission as urine does for discreet sections in a body of water. But to me, the real coup de grace to the credibility of the people trying to reign us in came in the form of protests.

When the mask protesters got together in their nonsensical display of outrage, they were rightly condemned. However, just a few weeks later, when much bigger crowds came together for Trans-rights rallies and BLM protests, the same voices of caution and censure not only fell silent in their condemnation, but actually praised the gatherings as necessary to quelling another form of disease in our country: racism and bigotry. Although their diagnosis of our social issues was correct, COVID-19 still obeys all the same rules of transmission in worthy gatherings as they do in supercilious ones, and yet they meet with completely different responses. And not just from political pundits and activists, but from supposedly objective journalists and scientists as well. Right or wrong, that has widely been seen as a double standard and, as such, has completely blown the bottom out of what was already a tenuous effort to unite a nation of disparate views into an ersatz team willing to do what was necessary for the common good. Kicking and screaming fringes not withstanding.

With conflicting reports from WHO and CDC on the spread and transmission of the virus, death-counts being mis-labelled and mismanaged (some say purposefully because of the monies attached to COVID-19 cases), and admitted manipulation of public (mis)information, we’ve never had a bigger crisis of confidence in our public institutions. Remember when the CDC told us, for like five minutes, that the risk of transmission from surfaces was very low, only to reverse themselves the very next day? That's only one in a long list of retractions, policy gaffes, and selective enforcement that are completely undermining critical efforts. Now, if we don’t see any spikes in COVID-19 after the protests, then no one will believe that we’ll see them at 4th of July celebrations or local church services. Meaning that we’ve successfully politicized a virus, and eviscerated public confidence in the leadership of our country at every level.

At the end of this long tunnel, the casualties will be counted in the deaths of our fellow citizens, but they’ll also be measured in the death of public confidence in scientists, educators, journalists, and experts of every stripe. To say nothing of our common bond as Americans first. Before all of this started, we were already fighting an insipid battle to prove that we went to the moon and that the earth is round. After the death of credibility, competence, and objectivity this represents, I can’t imagine where we’ll find ourselves next year at this time.