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.