Authors: Joey Goebel
After we get the third call about some suspicious activity in the Hills, I get going. They say some suspicious-lookin guys (a black and a foreigner) are lurking around at the Blackwell residence. One of the ladies that called said that the family left for Cancun this morning, so something is probably up.
Just as I’m getting out of the car, I hear someone say “One, two, foot, shoe,” and then some rock music starts. They ain’t ten seconds into the song before I’m ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door.
An old lady wearing blue jeans and a shirt that says “Screeching Weasel” on it finally answers the door.
“What do you want?” she asks.
“Ma’am, that music’s too loud. You can’t be playing music that loud in the middle of the suburbs like that.”
“But we just started playing ten seconds ago! We were just ten seconds into ‘Awesome Possum.’ Nobody could have complained yet.”
“Well, they were going to. Do you mind if I come in, ma’am?”
She walks away pissed off and leaves the door open for me. I walk in and see a portrait of a good-lookin couple hanging in the foyer. I thought the name Blackwell sounded familiar. He’s a lawyer I see at the courthouse from time to time. I actually think I may have arrested the wife once for meth.
I follow the old lady into the living room and see where the noise was coming from, and now that I seen it, I seen it all. There’s a curly-haired black guy standing at a microphone, an Arab-lookin guy with one of them keyboard guitars, a little girl
with a great big guitar, and a slutty girl behind the drum kit.
The old lady says, “Well, what do you want? You wanna watch us or something?”
“No, ma’am.” The foreigner looks kinda scared and afraid to move. The black guy is staring me down. He looks kinda familiar.
“The eternal question,” the black guy says into his microphone. “Is there a problem, Officer?”
“Well, no problem, but I’m sure someone was gonna complain about that noise. Listen—who’s the head of this household?”
“I reckon you could say I am,” says the old lady.
“This is your house, then?”
“Naw. The owners left for Cancun. I’m babysitting their girl, the bass player.”
I look at the little girl. She’s cute as hell, but she’s giving me a real dirty look. Then she sticks out her tongue and strums her big guitar like she’s mad at me.
“So you’re the babysitter, and you’re babysitting the kid. And who are these other people?”
“Our friends,” says the old lady. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason. We got some reports of some suspicious activity at this residence. I just wanted to check things out.”
“You don’t see anything suspicious here, do you, Officer?” asks that hot young thing.
“Well, uh, I guess not, ma’am.” I still gotta make sure there’s nothing going on here. “Hey, little girl, do your parents know you’re playing that rock with these grown-ups?”
The little girl don’t even answer me. She just stares at me. Meanwhile, the foreign dude looks like he’s about to have a nervous breakdown, fidgeting and sweating and shit.
“Policeman, please! We break no laws here!” he yells in a shaky voice. “But okay! I’ll confess it! Coming in America I was not familiar with urban traffic laws. I jaywalk! I jaywalk many, many time! I’m sorry! I—”
“Hey—take it easy there, chief,” I say. “No one is in any trouble.” Yet.
“Then will you leave?” snaps that hot piece of ass.
“Yeah, I’ll leave. Y’all sure are a curiosity, though. I’ll tell you that much.”
I figure I must have pissed off the black guy by saying that, ’cause he’s about to stare a hole right through me. I stare at him right back, and then I realize where I know him from. He’s one of the Johnson boys, some of the biggest dealers in town. I’ve seen this guy before when I’d make an arrest at his shack. He’d be off on his own writing in his bedroom while his brothers were getting busted.
“Aren’t you one of the Johnson boys?” I ask him.
“Yes. I am sure you are familiar with their work. But do not consider me one of them.”
“Is it Jerome?”
“No. Luster.”
“Well, Luster, you’re a good ways from home, ain’t ya?”
“Yes. I am breaking the social law, Officer, and so are the rest of my bandmates. If there is a problem with that, you can kiss my ass, figure of speech style.”
“Watch it, mother fucker. I’ve put away plenty of your brothers, and I could just as easily do the same to you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re guilty just for being related to ’em.”
The boy shakes his head and just starts laughing like a crazy man. The whole time he’s staring at me. He’s fixin to say something when the old lady interrupts.
“You remember the way out, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll be on my way. Just keep the noise down.”
My work is done here, so I check out the slut again and look at the black boy one more time to show him who’s boss, and then I head on out. Just as I’m fixin to leave, the black boy yells at me on his microphone.
“Oh, sweet lord, Officer! It just dawned on me like a black hole sun that there is something I have been meaning to ask a man in uniform!”
I turn around and re-enter.
“Okay, but you don’t need no microphone to ask it.”
He steps away from the mike and says:
“I have always wondered about a situation. I am sure that it is one that happens every day somewhere in the world, even in a small town like this one.”
“I’m listenin.”
“Let us say there is an individual driving his car down a lonely road at night, doing his own thing, minding his own business, obeying traffic laws, and keeping his speed at the posted limit.”
“No problems there,” I say.
“I guess not,” says the gangster. “But then let us say that a second car comes up behind him and keeps getting closer and closer yet shows no interest in passing. Remember, it is night, so our individual can only see headlights creeping up behind his ass. When he sees that he is being tailgated, he speeds up.”
“Right. What’s your question?”
“So the second car keeps right on the tail of our individual, forcing him to keep increasing his speed, until finally he is driving well past the speed limit. At that point, the second car, the one that is doing the tailgating, turns on its sirens and
patriotically displays its red, white, and blue lights. We know the rest. Pull over, please, license and registration, please, step out of the vehicle, please, here’s your ticket, and so forth and so on. So my question to you is, who should be blamed here?
I ain’t stupid. He expects me to say the police officer wasn’t doing anything wrong, since after all, I am a cop. I know how to handle this.
“First of all, that wouldn’t happen. Second of all, both of them are at fault. The cop should’ve had something better to do than follow around that driver. But the driver didn’t have to speed up, though. Nobody was forcing him to. He didn’t have a gun to his head.”
“Would you say that the cop actually created this crime?” he asks. “It would have never occurred if he had not appeared.”
“Now you’re getting into chicken or the egg stuff, there. I gotta get going.”
“Fry the chicken and scramble the egg. That is what I always say. But I am surprised at you. You said both drivers were at fault. How could the police officer be at fault, for as soon as the first driver exceeded the speed limit, the police officer was merely doing his job in pulling him over?”
That’s true. Now he’s making sense.
“That’s true. Now you’re making sense.”
“Yes, sir,” says the boy. “The police officer was just doing his job, being a fucking asshole. You push us into things like that and then wonder why we are the way we are. You push us out just so you can get things the way they are in your head, and then you do not even give us a chance, and none of you have guns to your heads, either.”
Listen to all that bullshit. Sounds just like his brothers, like he’s on crack.
“Shut the fuck up, Johnson. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”
I hurry out so I can have the last word.
“And keep that noise down!”
The only thing I have in common with my brothers is a hard-core Jedi hatred for cops. My brothers hate cops because they interfere with their drug dealing. I hate them because they interfere with my life progress since they are the muscles of The Thoughtless Confederacy. We both refer to cops as “The Man,” but I put much more weight in that term than my Neanderthal brothers do.
As we move our band equipment to the basement of Ember’s house, taking our music subterranean so as not to disturb suburbia, I think about how my brothers’ drugs are floating around in the fine homes above. In fact, my brothers’ marijuana, acid, ecstasy, and now crack helped build some of these fine homes. The prominent businessmen, lawyers, doctors, and real estate agents who occupy these homes not only ingest the drugs themselves but also get these drugs into town in the first place and then profit by selling to dealers like my brothers who go on to sell the stuff to everyone from blacks to whites to foreigners to politicians to the elderly to the unborn to pregnant teenagers to high school principals to playground children to PE teachers to college kids to housewives to meter maids to the poor to the rich to the middle-class to the tired, poor, and huddled, to the Jewish carpenters, the preps, the rednecks, the fags, the hippies, the bold and the beautiful, the shy and the
repulsive, widows, orphans, amputees, introverts, extroverts, and all of their mothers, fathers, guidance counselors, mistresses, therapists, and former best friends. The one common strain in the wires attached to their brains is my brothers’ drugs, those chemicals which temporarily make this world more tolerable.
Those prominent upper-class good guys with their cool out-of-state underground connections introduce the drugs to our town and sell them to guys like my brothers even though they would never give my brothers the time of year, or sit at the same burgoo table with them, or let their daughters date a man named Jerome. But money is being made, and everybody is cool with it. Cool, cool, cool. Everyone feels the same when they’re making fabulous moolah and putting weird shit in their bodies. They all feel cool, and that’s the way the giant mechanical brain likes it.
I have nothing against drugs. It’s just the cool I have a problem with.
Our band has now safely evacuated to the basement.
We have a gnarly practice, so rocktageous that it comes across as subversive, almost anarchic. We rock harder than a peanut butter famine. I think after this practice I can honestly say that we are the best power-pop new wave heavy metal punk rock band that this town has ever produced.
“When are we gonna play in front of people?” inquires Aurora.
Soon, for time is our greatest enemy in this retrograde existence. I will be working on setting up a show. But for now, I better get back to the rut I call home.
“Don’t go! Stay the night!” Ember pleads.
“Yeah. Y’all can just start sleeping over here if you want,” agrees Opal. “I’m sure Ember’s parents wouldn’t mind, and who
cares if they do?”
We all immediately accept the invitation since our home lives are so lonely and undesirable. I would take any chance to get away from my crackhouse home and the subhumans that live there. Ray’s family has returned to Iraq, leaving him singular. Aurora’s dad is still pissed about his Jesus statue and has really been on her case.
We move in and become the family that none of us ever had, the family that no one has ever had, if only for the few weeks that Ember’s horrible parents have allowed us.
It’s pretty late when we’re done rockin out, but of course, Ember isn’t ready to go to bed yet. So the five of us make fun of the TV for a while, crackin on the idiots on The Real World, the morons on Blind Date, and the assholes on E!’s Wild On. We also watch Jay Leno for a while just to see how awkward his interviewing will be.
Around two a.m., after making fun of Roadhouse on TBS, Ember makes us play Good Morning, Judge. How the game works is that one person sits in a chair facing opposite everyone else so he can’t see what’s going on. Then, one of the other persons goes up behind him and says, “Good morning, Judge” three times, only you disguise your voice by talking all funny. The person in the chair has to guess who said “Good morning, Judge.”
The problem with us, though, is that each of us has such a unique voice and can’t fake it. So it’s impossible for the person in the chair to guess wrong.
“This game blows it,” says Ray. “No one has guessed it incorrectish all night.”
“I agree with Fuquay,” I say. “It’s bedtime for this booty.”
“No!” hollers Ember.
“Yes!” I holler back. “We cannot play Good Morning, Judge all night, honey.”
“I’m not sleepy!” she whines.
“Well, baby, I’m sorry, but we are. I know. What if I told you a bedtime story?”
She reluctantly agrees. We all get ready for bed and get situated in Ember’s big, messy bedroom. Luster, Ray, and Aurora
lie in sleeping bags on the floor with all the clutter, and I’m in bed next to Ember.
“What story do you want to hear?” I ask her. “I know ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and the first two seasons of Magnum P. I.”
“Tell me about the night that you and Luster met.”
“You’re too young to hear that!” says Aurora.
“Tell it!” screams Ember.
“Tell it!” screams Luster.
I had told Ember this story once before, and she got a kick out of it, so I’ll tell it again if it’ll make her angry little tush happy.
“It all started one Thursday night a couple years ago when I was—well, I was playing with one of my boyfriends. This was back when I just dated people closer to my own age, and this boyfriend died while we were in the act of…playing.”
“You mean you were doing it,” interrupts Ember.
“Right. So my date died, but the night was still young. I had the ambulance give my tail a ride to Gloria’s, my favorite bar. The driver said he was sorry they couldn’t save him and all that, and I told him to forget it, that it happens all the time.
“So I walked in the bar, and it’s karaoke night, a night I normally avoid. Sean the bartender gave me my usual, which at that time was a Fin du Monde. (They special ordered it for me.) So I was sitting at the bar like I usually did, kind of feeling down after having my playmate croak on me.
“Just when I was starting to feel old again, I heard this gigantic voice scream over the opening chords of ‘Some Guys Have All the Luck’ by Hot Rod, or Rodzilla as I call him. The voice was screaming, ‘I do not even need that smart-ass teleprompter!’ I turned around from the bar, and that was the
first time I saw Luster.
“He was lookin handsome in his flea market T-shirt, the one that says ‘Hey now!’ So then he started singing the opening lines. What were they, Luster?”
“Alone in a crowd in a bus after work and I’m dreaming,” says Luster, already half-asleep on the floor.
“That’s it. So he started singing, and his voice was so strong, and he was really gettin into it. He was a showboat even back then in front of a couple dozen skanks at a karaoke bar. He would rub himself all over all sexual and what have you, and he would kind of hop around, and lo and behold, he really didn’t need that teleprompter.
“So I said to Sean, ‘Who’s that youngblood?’ and Sean said, ‘That’s Luster Johnson. He’s a regular here on Thursday nights. Kind of a weirdo.’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, but he’s a hot weirdo,’ and then I got up close to the little stage, and I yelled, ‘Hey! Show us your tits!’ and I think it bothered him. He kept on singing and didn’t show me his tits. But I wasn’t through with his tuchis yet.
“A little later when he was at the bar downing some milk, I went up to him and said, ‘Hey, biggun.’ That’s what I used to call him, ‘biggun.’ I said, ‘Hey, biggun. You kicked rump up there tonight,’ and he said, ‘Thanks be to you.’
“I told him he was really playing for keeps, and then he gave me some of that old Luster talk. He said, ‘Keeps? Keeper Sutherland. Trapper Keeper. I always play for keeps’ (or something like that). Then he explained how his karaoke singing was just practice for when he had a rock band one day that would conquer the whole world.
“I told him he didn’t have to tell me about rockin out, ’cause I knew all about it. I lived for rock. Then I offered to buy
him a drink.
“Well, he didn’t want me to buy him a drink. He snapped at me and told me to go away, and he said he was liable to bite me just for having fallopian tubes. (Those are some female parts.)
“So I told him I’d take my chances and that my name was Opal Oglesby. Then he noticed my Dead Milkmen T-shirt. He said, ‘I like your shirt, but within it dwells a humanoid of the worst design—woman’. I told him, ‘Boy, you’re about as fun as shopping for school supplies.’
“It turns out he was all pissy because this girl named Tonsillectomy Tina had stood his crupper up that night. He said he guessed she just didn’t take their plans as seriously as he did, and that he guessed you can’t go around acting like an alien without people treating you like one.
“I said, ‘I think aliens are sexy,’ and he could tell right then and there that I was just as big of a strange-butt as he was. I told him I was sorry about his getting stood up, and that I’d had a lousy night, too.
“He said, ‘Nothing feels worse than being stood up,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s bad, but what about havin your date die on you while you’re bonin?’
“He said, ‘You win,’ and then he let me buy him a drink after all. So that was the beginning. After that, we ended up dating for almost a year.”
I check down on the floor. Luster is sound asleep, already drooling.
“And then I dumped his cheeks. The end.”
Ember is still awake, but she allows me to turn out the light, only if I’ll stay in the bed with her. I think how you gotta be careful nowadays with things like this just because some sickos
have ruined it for everyone else. Anyhow, she’d never admit it, but I think Ember is scared of the dark, so I agree to stay in bed with her. It’s more than her grandmas would ever do for her. Her grandmas are in their late forties/early fifties and are bigger sluts than I am.
After I take Ember to school the next morning, I have to go in for another fucking group therapy session. I promised my nieces that I’d go to the stupid things because they’re the only relatives I’ve got. All the others are dead.
I’m kinda looking forward to today’s session ’cause I’d like to see how Carl’s doing. We slept together one day last week.
He comes in smiling for a change. I’m guessing he’s not hoping he’ll die now, thanks to my sexual healing. Beats the hell out of getting enemas all day, I’ll tell you that much. He winks at me, but we don’t let on like we’ve been banging each other.
Kip the faggot skips in and begins the session. He takes roll and doesn’t mention the fact that one of us has had a stroke since the last meeting. Then he pulls out some papers and says “take one and pass it over” like he always does.
“Okay, group. First off, this handout has a list of ways you can improve your time management skills,” he lisps. “So you can take those home and read them over yourselves. Okay. So now what I’d like to do is have what I call a ‘happiness exercise.’ I want you to think back to a time when you were completely happy. For instance, for me, my happy memory is when I cashed my high school graduation checks and went on a shopping spree at my favorite antique mall.”
I’m sure Kip means well like everybody, but I just don’t care for him. The guy makes no effort to get outside the picture we already have of him. We all know him just by looking at
him or hearing his voice, and I think there oughtta be more to somebody than that, dammit. I think he just caught me rolling my eyes at him.
“So, Opal, would you like to start the group off and tell us a happy memory?”
“Shit. What the hell,” I say. Better than listening to him talk about his antiques and his shoes. “The first thing that comes to mind is this thing I used to do with my ex-boyfriend Manny. This was about a month ago. I’d have Manny wear the same pair of underwear for two weeks straight, right?”
“Uh-huh,” says Kip.
“And then, when the two weeks were up, I’d have him take off his drawers and hide ’em real good somewhere in my house. Then—now this is the happiness part—then, I’d sniff around my house all day until I found ’em.”
I get a big laugh out of the group for that one. But Kip looks uncomfortable, acting like a prude even though he’ll probably go home tonight and do the same thing with his Hispanic boyfriend. He looks at me like he either feels sorry for me or wants to hit me. Or I guess he’d be more likely to bitch-slap me.
“Oh, Opal. Oh.” He jots something down on his little notepad. I know he’s gonna tell my underwear story to my nieces, and they’ll all be rarin to put me in a home once and for all to end my foolishness. But I’ve got a news bulletin for them: The foolishness is just beginning. The band’s gonna practice every night at Ember’s, and we’re taking off soon whether they like it or not.
“Let’s move on to Trixie,” Kip continues. “And maybe we should just forget about the happiness thing. Just tell me what’s been going on in your life.”
“Well, I had a talk with my friend about him taking my medication like you told me to,” says Trixie.
“Oh good. With Jesus, you mean?”
“Yes. And when I was talking to him, I got to thinking about some of the things Opal said, and well, long story short, we ended up sleeping with one another.”
I give Trixie a big thumbs up. The rest of the group applauds her. Kip looks like he’s gonna cry, or do something, I don’t know what. I’m suddenly glad I’ve been coming to these things, just to show these old people that they don’t have to be what they’re supposed to. I wish Kip could pick up on that, but he’s always too busy changing the subject.
“Okay. Maybe we should move on to Carl. Carl, you seem much happier this week. Why is that?”