Other Stuff

Hot Phones on a Cold Night

He looked like a liar, which is a distinct disadvantage, if you are a liar. Yet, even with that disadvantage, he was a good liar. We might have been a couple of 14-year-old kids, but to listen to him, you’d think we’d been all over the world and slept with the greater portion of the fairer half of its population. Garth was a rat-faced kid whose skinny frame moved in  jerky, suspicious beats. But, I liked him anyway because he could spin a tale and have the world believing him. Boring was one thing he never was.

We were cutting across town. The northern night fell cold and sharp--unkindly piercing the denim of our jackets, so we were in a hurry. Garth thought we’d bisect the city block with a diagonal through a car lot. I hesitated, but it was dark and the “No Trespassing” signs carried almost no weight since they were not being enforced by a fence of some sort. As we wove between the rows of used cars, a sort of howling emerged from the small building, set like an island in this sea of sedans and coupes. Very soon it became obvious it was a voice aimed at us, in a distant tongue. The tone was unkind. When it broke into English, it was dis-welcoming us to his car lot. “I know what you little shits do! I know! You may fool your mothers, but I know what bastards you are. You beat my cars. You make dents!”

In a near comic gesture, Garth and I looked at each other, then behind ourselves to see if he was really talking to someone else.  

“You little shits! I know you! I know who you are!”

I did the geometry and figured we could be out of the lot before he got to us, if we went left. Garth went right, and he was yelling back, “Listen to me, buddy! Do you know who I am? Do you know WHO I AM?!?”

His brand of bravado-laced creativity was fine when we were trying to impress some girls at the Mini Mart or trying to get out of getting beaten up by the high school kids, but this was different, a fact...lost on Garth. So I grabbed his arm and took him away from the yelling man.

“I call cops on you! You see! I call cops!”

“I’ll call the cops on you!” Garth spat back brilliantly, as we hit the street running.

The thing about Garth was that lying wasn’t his only deadly sin. He had an affinity for stealing, too. Since I did not, I carefully concealed my rather impressive talent for picking locks--a talent that all started when I was about ten and one of the neighborhood bullies thought it was funny to padlock my bicycle chain to the spokes of my rear bicycle wheel. It took awhile, but I gamed the lock and rode on past the kid’s house about 199 times waving at him, not with all my fingers, from my bicycle. He ran after me, demanding his lock back, which was enough reason for me to keep his lock. That chincy padlock provided the Gateway Picking to bigger and better locks, and soon I had made my own set of picks (surreptitiously, in metalshop at school). Though stealing wasn’t in my repertoire, exploring and snooping was. So, curiosity determined the application of my craft.

When Garth and I were clear of the lot, the anger at the unjust accusations of the lot-keeper burned. It burned so hotly that it ignited my curiosity about what might be inside that little building overlooking the car lot.

***

It was well after one in the morning before we snuck out of our apartments and made our way back to the lot. I didn’t want Garth to see me pick the lock, or he would come up with all sorts of nefarious uses for my talent. So I got him to stand guard while I “tried the doors.” There were two. Even so, it took me a few minutes to “find” an unlocked door. I motioned Garth over, and we stepped into the office.

The pressure switch must have been under the doormat. The alarm sung with the shrill percussiveness that renders eardrums numb. In less than three-tenths of a second, I rolled over Garth, who was standing behind me; was out the door; and had tunneled under the first car I came to, with Garth right behind me. We stumbled out the other side and snuck deeper into the lot--away from where we were sure the cops would be coming and/or the lot keeper would be emerging with a rottweiler and belt-fed machine gun.

Comically, the alarm wound down onomatopoeiaically, like a depressed alley cat after one nip too many. In less than a minute, all was quiet again. No one came from the building. No lights went on. No cops arrived. We waited a few more minutes, then stood up like we belonged there. We strode into the building. I had to slap Garth’s hand just before he was about to turn on the light. It struck me he may have lied about his experience breaking into buildings.

There was already enough light coming in from the street through the windows from which the salesmen spied potential marks on the lot during the day. But that night the windows helped us find our way around inside. There were about six small rooms off of the lobby area. When Garth started going through desk drawers, I said, “Go stand watch in case someone called the cops.”

With that sentence, inspiration hit. I grabbed a big trash can and set it in the middle of the room. I went into each room, unplugged each phone, brought them into the lobby, and set them in the trash can. Garth, as expected, didn’t stay on watch. In a misguided effort to keep this from turning from trespass into theft, I had him help me carefully steal each phone.

“Let’s see him call the cops now!” I chortled with unbridled hilarity. With one of us on each side of the trash can, we snuck out the door into the dark car lot. Being all of 14-years-old, we were unencumbered by the notion that a couple of giggling kids walking down the sidewalk with a trash can full of telephones in the middle of the night was suspicious. When we crossed through an overgrown property, we stashed the phones in the brush and slunk to our homes as quickly as we could.

As a broad indicator of how silly an adolescent’s brain can work, the next night we went back to the car lot. We wove in through the cars and watched the place for a good fifteen minutes before I snuck up to the door alone. Amazingly, it was “left unlocked” again. (Garth didn’t notice it took me a few minutes to “find” the door unlocked.) I crept in; activated the brief, pathetic alarm; and then ran back to Garth to wait for the police to not show up and/or the lot keeper to not emerge with dogs and guns. Once back inside the offices, we found it hilarious that new phones had been installed--and not the kind with the dials. These had been replaced by the ones with buttons! Garth had started going through desk drawers again when another idea struck me. I grabbed Garth and dragged him out of there. In about 15 minutes we were back with a trash can full of old phones. In another 15 minutes, every one of the new phones had been swapped out for one of the old phones we had stolen the night before, and the new phones were now in the trash can. We fled the building, with a full trash can, to the lot. It took a few minutes, but we found an unlocked car. It was a station wagon, so we opened the hatch and dumped the phones in the back. Garth wanted to put the trash can back--a thin guise to go through a couple more desks. But alas, the door was locked this time, so he set the can on the stoop.

The next morning we met at school. Garth was so excited by our adventure that I knew the whole school was going to know about it in a couple minutes; so I begged him that if he had to tell the story, he should broadcast it starring a different accomplice, in a different town. I could tell by the look on his rodential face his promise to do so was a lie. This incited a slow-burn of panic.

I skipped first-period class and went to the lot with nothing even resembling a plan. It was still early, and no one was there; but it was daylight now. So if the stupid alarm went off, people would notice. Also, the station wagon where the new phones had been deposited was closer to the street than it had seemed at night. I was at the end of the block when a car pulled into the lot. I crouched behind a light pole; and at that age, I was skinny enough to be hidden by it. It wasn’t the guy who had yelled at us who got out of the car, but I was still terrified when he got to the door and had to remove the trash can from the stoop. He looked at it suspiciously, then looked around the lot. He unlocked the door, with a key, then went in.

The phone number was posted on the front door; and not able to find a pen in my jacket, I quickly memorized it . The phone booth was less than a block down the street.

“Hello?”

“Hi.”

Beat.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah, your new phones are in the back of one of the cars.”

Silence. It struck me that he’d answered with one of the old phones, forgetting that it was suppose to be a new one.
“Really?” he finally said.

“Okay, ‘bye.”

“Okay, ‘bye.”

When I got back to school, Garth predictably had made sure everyone knew he and I had pulled off the heist of the century. He was the mastermind, and I almost got us busted because, yup, I was going to turn on the light, which would have given away our position to the snipers. The part I liked best about his story was how the door was always left unlocked, inviting us into this palatial den of opulence. Or, as I knew it, a  little, crappy used car lot just off the strip with a worn out lock I could open with a paperclip.  

That was the last adventure I shared with Garth. He was on an ever increasing, impulse-fed, downward spiral. He tried to get me to drop out of school and move to California with him, so I moved onto a different set of friends. He swore he had jobs waiting for us and we would live like kings on the beach. That was the final lie. Shortly after, Garth fell off the face of the Earth. I sincerely hoped he was on a beach somewhere, warm and free from the truth he feared--the truth for which he would tell any lie to anyone not to reveal.

Oh, Canada.

The Canada I knew was filtered through the lens of Santa Cruz, California—the starting point to my northward journey to Vancouver, British Columbia. In Santa Cruz I was under the influence of sun and a surf-town mentality. In my California, we would skip out on junior high school classes to ride the waves or check out the girls at the nude beach, only to be run off when discovered gawking—hiding our adolescent erections under untucked T-shirts. It was a Norman-Rockwell-meets-The-Beach-Boys childhood that ended on my first day of school in my Canada, where I was beaten simply because I was an American.

Vancouver in the 1970s was by contrast quite gloomy, and much more populated with people crowding me—quite disruptive to an adolescent from a place with more than a glancing familiarity with the sun. Though wet and cold, Vancouver was and remains a city with its noise, buses, balanced by plentiful merciful parks. The crosswalks filled and emptied to a staccato rhythm tied intimately to the pulse and throb of the moving taxis and trucks. Through all this the French language wove with cavalier familiarity, with its hard vowels barking from the TVs and my teachers. I was left to make my own way through this maze of cultures since my parents moved us there to go back to school. Though I have plenty of extended family in Canada, I was an American—a point they never failed to make. I did not fit in.

The abstracts of this prejudice have morphed until its roots have vanished. Anti-Americanism remains these few decades later a national pastime practiced by people wearing Levis, absorbing American media, and gladly taking our tourist dollars. In my time north of the border, Nixon was being bounced from the White House and our war in Southeast Asia was killing tens of thousands. As near as I could tell, Canadians seemed possessed by a dichotomy of hate and admiration of the US, which raged even before US history exploded with such embarrassment. Whatever the reasons, it made it reasonable that a teacher could stand outside a ring of kids beating the new kid. Somehow this 13 year-old boy from California was responsible for the sins of the country that bore me. It was just my bad luck to be in a Canadian school.

I escaped every weekend, whisked away by a 50-cent bus pass. For half a Canadian buck (this was before the loonie) one could ride the buses all day all over Vancouver. I prowled Stanley Park, with its zoo, aquarium, and other attractions neatly placed among the trees, all of it surrounded by a stone sea wall that wrapped around the park and weaved comfortably along the water. Weather would blow in from the ocean pushing grey and wet. From the sea wall I was close enough to feel the raw energy of the tangled air. As exposed to it as I could be, I faced into it letting the power of the wind press against me. Somehow this rattled loose a little of the rage and kept me putting one foot in front of the other in my hike through this Northen chapter of my life.

Queen Elizabeth Park was clean and organized amidst the chaos of the city. The lure was the geodesic dome greenhouse filled with tropical plants and birds in a tropical microclimate. The depressing B.C. weather was just outside the of the transparent triangles overhead. For 15 cents Canadian I could experience the contrast in worlds.

Simon Fraser University sits atop a green hill with architecture so unique it showed up in X-Files. I wandered about these places pretending I was from somewhere else, anywhere else but from that shitty apartment complex in Coquitlam. In reality I was just another disaffected teenaged boy in a denim jacket with a pack of Players Filters in my pocket.

In my excursions about the city I would see others new to the Canadian culture. It was a time of intense migration of Asians and Indians, clustered together in homogenous knots of people moving along too slowly or too quickly. They didn’t live and die for hockey and Molson’s, but many hoped that one day they would. I was comfortable with these people though they looked nothing like me and never spoke to me--we were all part of this neo-mosaic in a strange land.

Vancouver, like all cities, has a soul. You could smell it in the bus exhaust or hear it in the song of the gulls flying under the Lions Gate Bridge. The mountainous buildings and their foothills of drunks and junkies seemed almost antithetical to the colossal mountains rising up in the backdrop. Voices of the world flooded the downtown with languages so alien they made me feel invisible. Smells of foods so pungent I could feel their tastes on my tongue. And I was able to fade into the background of this mess and move with its flow—part of the body of this whole.

The buses stopped running sometime after midnight and sometimes I found myself miles from home with four hours to kill before the next bus. If it was cold and I had no money, I walked. Never the same street twice or I might get noticed by the RCMP, or worse, by the element the RCMP were there to keep in line. I was big for a 14 year-old boy, but I knew I wasn’t invincible. If I had a dollar, I could sit in an all-night diner nursing a coffee, fending off the homosexuals pontificating on the virtues of male administered blowjobs, or the incoherent, urgent ramblings of the rationally challenged. Neil Young and Elton John provided the soundtrack through the restaurant speakers with all the fidelity of two tin cans and a string. The coffee was bad but it was warm and was cheap enough to leave me a few coins for bus fare. The waitresses knew I was hiding from the night and could be cool about it or hate me for it. The difference was discerned by how often I had to ask them to refill my cup.

Dawn would break with delivery trucks and rattling storefront grates, and I would wander to the chilly bus stop and catch the first bus of the day. I knew as soon as I got home I would get shit for being out all night. Per our well-rehearsed duet, I would storm out the door minutes after I walked in. If I was lucky I’d get a shower and some food. If not, Mom would often slip me a couple bucks. If I felt like it, I would wander off to school.

Too young to drive, I relied on my bicycle when not riding the buses or trolleys. When summer arrived—a short warm period separating the wet and cold seasons—I hit the road. For all its annoyances, British Columbia has enticing islands between the mainland and Vancouver Island and a fine ferry system to connect them. A friend and I would load up a backpack with a bunch of stuff we really didn’t need piled atop the few items we did, and head to the docks. Bicycles were the first vehicles on and first off of these vessels. This made it easier to chain our bikes on a pipe above the car deck. Our trip was once cut short when an Oldsmobile shifted into a bank of bicycles during bad weather, turning the bicycles into chained up tangled angles of steel. It didn’t do a lot for the car, either.

At that time it was only $1.50 to go from Tsawwassen to Salt Spring Island, a bucolic little island upon which we would bum around, sleep in cow pastures, and then do a little more bumming around. We were free and independent and completely unaware of how precious these moments would become, once we became responsible adults. We took great pleasure in the adolescent pastime of not bathing. We could get food for almost nothing and the people were pretty much apathetic to our presence. The docks were a meeting place where travelers of all stripes would congregate to wait for that white speck on the horizon between the islands to become a ship to take us to the next island. We would toss a Frisbee around and bug the cute girls traveling with their folks until their folks ran us off. We would smoke and could often bum a beer, the Canadian National Beverage which was easily attained by the youth of the country at that time. To this day, the theme to “The Rockford Files” brings me back to the dock of Salt Spring Island where that song came from the AM radio of a car waiting to board. While I listened to the music, a curious Asian girl broke away from her family to ask me if I really rode that ugly bicycle all this way. My bike was particularly pathetic that trip since I had blown out the tire and repaired it with duct tape and my sewing kit. It looked like something a clown would ride in a cartoon circus and I smelled like one of the elephants. Little else in later life has come close to that perfect moment when youth collided with hope, unencumbered by the realities of my impending adulthood.

And it was on that dock, on that day, that I realized this was one of those times I would be taking with me into the rest of my life. I somehow had a glimmer of how fleeting this youth was going to be and how as I got older, this country with its odd people whose blood ran in my veins would still be a part of me. I understood beyond any doubt why, on those all-too-rare occasions when my mom got drunk, she would go on about those “Goddamned Canadians!” Canada was the country she fled from to the warmer weather and sunnier dispositions of California in the 1950s, but she never escaped it--and it never left her. Not unlike my mom, Vancouver looms over my mind and under my skin. I remember how a Canadian cigarette smells and what it meant to walk these streets like a quintessential Canadian while trying to light a smoke with a lighter that I had to refill, and would never think of throwing away. The trolley rails ran parallel under the power lines for miles and miles of urban streets, separated by the whirring coach traveling between them—sparks popping like photoflashes as the runners skated along the wires above. These wires criss-crossing and creating a metallic spiderweb between me and the grey sky.

Mom getting her American citizenship

Adolescence is like a lost chick, and like the strange bird I am I had imprinted on this land and its islands and its urban disruptions between magnificent mountains. Whether I liked it or not, this place had become part of my identity; who I am now. And like it or not, part of who I will always be.

 

California Roofin'.

“Stop!”

“What?”

“Just stop! Don’t move!”

I was on a ladder and Wayne was on the roof in front of me. He was holding the cord to the saw. The cord I had just carelessly severed with the saw while doing a plunge cut into a board. I could see the copper of the wires that had been violently vivisected from their insulation by the whirling 40-tooth carbide tipped blade. Wayne, thinking he was helping, dragged the wires out of the way of the saw. Unfortunately, he was dragging the wires over my arm--a very sweaty arm. The kind of sweaty arm that would conduct electricity perfectly into my Central Nervous System, causing some very important muscles to spasm. The muscles I was using to stay standing high on the ladder.

Wayne stopped when I barked louder. I lifted the rubber snake off my skin--careful to keep the exposed wires at bay. Even though he was one of the blackest black men I’d ever worked with, he turned a little white when I showed him why I was a wee bit excited. When he learned the circuit breaker hadn’t tripped and the wires were still very live, I thought he would cut off his dreadlocks and start selling insurance.  

Another day in paradise.

The summer is not kind to the Darkside Cinema which means I sometimes have to trade in my Prancing Lavender Bunnies T-shirt for a tool belt and put some nails into other people’s homes. So, there I was in a very un-Corvallis urban environment with automatic gunfire erupting sporadically and police helicopters thumping overhead. Though this was only a couple days drive from Oregon, it felt like a foreign country. The area I was working in was in the process of being reclaimed from the type of urban rot that makes the sounds of gunfire not really worth mentioning. When someone complains about the Darkside prices being too high, I remember that I often have to swing a hammer in places like this to make ends meet. This allows me to go to my happy place and let them rant, secure in the knowledge that if they do not know how hard it is to keep those doors open, my staff and I are doing our jobs well.

Wayne was also on a quest to make ends meet, thus he ended up as part of the crew to whom I taught Roofing 101: the fine art of making the top of a house watertight, classes held at the college of Real Life. Wayne came to me as a laborer. He was half a head over six-feet tall, weighed in about the same as my old Mercedes, and sported a full grill (His front teeth were all covered with gold caps) and he could climb a ladder with a hundred-pound roll of tar paper on his shoulder and a half dozen bottles of water in his hand. His voice was so bassy I sounded like a velociraptor in comparison. Though he was college educated, he spoke with an urban black parlance that was so pervasive, in a couple days I was using some of it, too.

After the first day of work, we were sitting around a fire in the homeowner’s backyard eating too much and drinking enough that the next day those shingles were a little bit heavier. Music was being played and Wayne and I seemed intent on setting race relations back at the rate of about a decade an hour--to the amusement of the others. Wayne finally asked the guitarist the lay down a beat then improvised a rap that reprised  the whole day. He seemed particularly intent on making fun of me, OSU, and my general skills as a roofer. It was perhaps the funniest thing I had ever heard. Knowing I’m pretty much un-offendable left him free to riff on all aspects of my persona and physique. Frankly, it was kind of an honor.

It is a rare person who can oscillate between comments so inappropriate I cannot even allude to them in this essay, to the respectful tone needed to get a job done safely and quickly. Wayne was raised well and even if he never let one of my “observations” pass, when it was time to work he never balked and was usually doing more than expected of him. All the other members of the crew seemed to take their lead from him if I wasn’t there being managerial. Mostly because he was very smart and learned so quickly that he would be teaching the others before I got a chance to. While I was rehydrating and checking my email on my phone, he’d be showing someone else the best shingle offset to make things look just right. I’ve done roofing for decades and can run a roofing nailer like a machinegun. The hardest part about working with a non-professional crew is EVERYBODY wants to run the nailer like a machinegun. These are the times when people put nails through their feet. When the nailer was in Wayne’s hands, I never had to worry about nails going anywhere except where they were supposed to.

In perhaps the most profoundly caucasian moment of my life, Wayne found it necessary to teach me how to shake hands. I was hopeless, though he kept trying. At first it seemed the intent of this exercise was to humiliate me as possible, but he sincerely thought this was a skill I should have. Despite his best efforts, let’s just say my level of shaking hands like a black person is perfectly suited for the Corvallis demographic.

The climate where this job needed to be done was very unlike the kindly Corvallis summers. It was hot. Damned hot. The trick for me is to keep water flowing and get onto the ground when the roof seemed to start rocking and rolling. In the hottest part of one afternoon I stepped off the ladder into the backyard and removed my hearing protection when I heard a loud Thwaaack! I looked over at the concrete and a bullet was rolling to a stop about 20 feet from me. I picked it up and it was still hot. I vacillated between feeling lucky it missed me and pissed off that some assclown popped a round into the sky probably over a mile away with no regard to where it would land. I could feel the heat from the lead and copper lump in my pocket

Well, that was close...

when I sat and opened a bottle of water. It struck me there was nothing to be gained by sharing this experience with the others. It was surely just as random as a skinny assed white boy from Oregon supervising a crew of inexperienced guys so used to the heat, some still wore sweatshirts while I fled to the shade for water with a copper-clad secret burning in my pocket.   

Hot lead falling from the sky indicated that this area we worked was pretty depressed. Daily, people came up to the house looking for work. Some would offer to work for food. I’d offer to dig them up something to eat and they would wander off with thanks, once they figured out no cash would be trading hands. Many would claim to be experienced roofers. One young man went so far as to describe how to install flashing on a chimney in the hope I would recognise his genius and give him work. Unfortunately, my “genius” radar was overridden by my “meth user” detection app and I wanted him nowhere near my tools, let alone on a roof where he would probably get hurt or hurt someone else. There was a simpering sadness that he knew roofing quite well at one time. But that skill had been sold out to a white powder that made him unhireable.

Meanwhile, I had a theater to get back to before my employees fired me. With the roof 95% completed I packed up my old car and sped north to Oregon. When I said goodbye to Wayne, I thought I had the handshake down pretty well, then he laughed at me. I ignored that and told him he was too smart to be shucking shingles onto a roof and needed to get his ass back to school because he was a born teacher. Anyone could see it. He respectfully nodded and I realized he will do what most young people do: exactly as they damn well please. That’s okay, it’s what young people do, no matter from whence they hail.

Today there is no gunfire to be heard from my open Corvallis apartment window. The only thing coming down from the sky is occasional rain showers and goose poo from the flocks on their way to the Finley refuge. I’m still trying to relearn to drive like an Oregonian. After asking loudly and with excessive profanity if the driver in front of me would kindly hang up her cellphone and drive, it was suggested by my passenger I had nowhere to be in such a hurry that I needed to be that angry. I wasn’t angry. I was just...driving...like one drives in Stockton.

There are places in the middle of the Willamette Valley where you can close your eyes and hear only the sound of the wind pushing across the grassy plain and roughing up the leaves on the trees. The air was warm for this time of year even if it was picking up speed. It carries with it the scent of the rain in the hills and the last bit of smoke from the final field burning fires. It smells like home. It slows things down because you are sensing the hand of winter moving into our valley, which shames the hands of a clock for being too fast to measure the things that really matter. Two weeks ago I was dizzy with heat. Today, I’m zipping up my motorcycle jacket against the rain mixing with the wind and wondering how my fair weather friends are faring.

Now, if only I could stop honking back at the geese....