{Author's note: I'm still hitting up storytelling events around Chicago, but will be getting back to fiction shortly. Meanwhile, enjoy another transcript of the nonfiction story I told the other day. I do have plans to records these... soon.}
Despite growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I spent most of my teens hanging out in Mundelein, a town more rural Illinois than urban. A close friend in high school moved there when his parents divorced, and I ventured there almost every weekend. The subdivision he lived in featured an assortment of folks from several walks of life, and this hodgepodge of humanity extended into the surrounding town. In one driveway find a rusty pickup truck with a Confederate flag bumper sticker, and across the street a lawyer is pulling away in a luxury sedan. It was a pleasantly unpleasant place to be.
Although we came from various backgrounds, my friends and I primarily shared a point of view molded by our attraction to heavy metal, and a burgeoning alcoholic nihilism. We were too young to realize having something in common didn’t necessarily mean we had to be friends. We seemed alike because we needed to be alike, since apart from one another we related to no one else. So we made our friendship more than it really was.
Our paths diverged when I went to college, and it was a year before I got a chance to visit my old comrades again. It felt good to be back among them, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling these friendships were fading. We’d always have pleasant memories of the past, but whatever connected us felt less tenable. Me complaining about the stress of finals didn’t matter to a buddy who recently found out he couldn’t get an MRI for his knee because working as a machinist left metal particulates in him. But safe in reminiscences, we obscured the obvious fact of our increasing disconnect. It felt like old times because that’s all we tried to talk about.
Then R---’s phone rang.
R--- recently started seeing a woman in Round Lake. Her previous relationship didn’t end well, and her ex-boyfriend didn't like “his woman” dating a Puerto Rican. Mainly because, according to him, a brown man fucking a white woman turns her vagina into a toxic wasteland – the Love Canal of vaginas. On this particular evening he stopped by her house to shout at her front door how she couldn’t leave him unless he said she could. Why she broke up with this blossoming asshole, one can only speculate. In any event, his visit inspired her to chug booze until her tears reeked of tequila. It was in this drunken, sobbing state she phoned R---. And so we immediately piled into my car to go spend some time with her in hopes of cheering her up.
We got to her place, and the minute we rang the bell, a pickup truck pulled into the driveway. The ex-boyfriend had returned. He saw the seven of us, and promptly drove away.
Crisis seemingly averted, we set about comforting the young lady with a certain degree of success. However, twice I went outside for a cigarette. Both times I saw the Ex’s truck cruise by the house. I asked the others if they noticed him too. It seemed the last half hour he’d been circling the block. We decided to keep an eye out, but tried to remain optimistic, especially when some of the young lady’s girl friends arrived. We appeared to be on the verge of an impromptu party when once again the pickup pulled into the driveway, followed by a station wagon full of guys, and a sedan loaded with more white trash all of whom proceeded to pour out onto the front lawn.
A guy once tried to stab me, and I was less certain of his violent intentions than the impending assault. We met them on the lawn. Obviously outnumbered, my buddy Zeke pulled out a church key (bottle opener), and in what I can only assume was an intimidation tactic, stabbed himself in the shoulder. Him standing there bleeding actually made me feel better about our odds. There’s an old adage I’ve come to find is very true: “you may know karate, but I know ka-razy.”
Then the cops arrived – four squad cars and a K-9 unit.
Anticipating the bloody brawl about to ensue, a sensible lady inside called the police. It was the right thing to do, and we never forgave her for it because when the cops showed up, they immediately started cuffing me and my friends. They saw two factions about to rumble, a row of heavy metal kids facing off with a group of rednecks, and they knew what needed to be done: cuff those metal freaks, let the good old boys go.
Sitting on the curb while the police ran our IDs, a recent addition to the group, a guy named K----, said to me, “Dude, I’m on fucking parole. I wasn’t supposed to leave Ohio. I cannot get arrested.”
It then occurred to me our group wasn’t exactly a collective of innocents. One was on probation for taking part in a burglary that turned into a kidnapping; another was technically on house arrest for assaulting a security guard while shoplifting; and one night I had been arrested for drinking as a minor, drunk and disorderly, drug possession, and carrying a concealed weapon. The chance of us explaining the situation, in a way favorable to us, was evaporating very quickly.
Yet, by some stroke of luck, instead of taking a deep journey into our various nefarious backgrounds, the cops simply investigated the validity of our IDs, apparently trusting the system to tell them about any red flags rather than outright searching for them. Realizing this, when a cop radioed in my info I sat smugly waiting for nothing to come back. The radio replied hissing out a string of police code.
The cop walked away, and started what became a ten minute conversation with dispatch. I couldn't hear it, but the look on his face didn't bode well. He then came over to ask questions like: What are you doing here? If I open up that trunk, what am I going to find?
I answered honestly, which is the most infuriating thing you can do to a cop because it doesn’t confirm his suspicions about you. However, he eventually let us leave, though not without saying to me, “I don’t want to see you around here anymore.”
It turned into a minor mystery we would speculate about on drunken evenings – “he’s a serial killer!” We would never know the answer, but the whole experience refreshed our bond. It reminded us that rebels without a cause are still in it together. Whatever the hell It is.
Despite growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I spent most of my teens hanging out in Mundelein, a town more rural Illinois than urban. A close friend in high school moved there when his parents divorced, and I ventured there almost every weekend. The subdivision he lived in featured an assortment of folks from several walks of life, and this hodgepodge of humanity extended into the surrounding town. In one driveway find a rusty pickup truck with a Confederate flag bumper sticker, and across the street a lawyer is pulling away in a luxury sedan. It was a pleasantly unpleasant place to be.
Although we came from various backgrounds, my friends and I primarily shared a point of view molded by our attraction to heavy metal, and a burgeoning alcoholic nihilism. We were too young to realize having something in common didn’t necessarily mean we had to be friends. We seemed alike because we needed to be alike, since apart from one another we related to no one else. So we made our friendship more than it really was.
Our paths diverged when I went to college, and it was a year before I got a chance to visit my old comrades again. It felt good to be back among them, but I also couldn’t shake the feeling these friendships were fading. We’d always have pleasant memories of the past, but whatever connected us felt less tenable. Me complaining about the stress of finals didn’t matter to a buddy who recently found out he couldn’t get an MRI for his knee because working as a machinist left metal particulates in him. But safe in reminiscences, we obscured the obvious fact of our increasing disconnect. It felt like old times because that’s all we tried to talk about.
Then R---’s phone rang.
R--- recently started seeing a woman in Round Lake. Her previous relationship didn’t end well, and her ex-boyfriend didn't like “his woman” dating a Puerto Rican. Mainly because, according to him, a brown man fucking a white woman turns her vagina into a toxic wasteland – the Love Canal of vaginas. On this particular evening he stopped by her house to shout at her front door how she couldn’t leave him unless he said she could. Why she broke up with this blossoming asshole, one can only speculate. In any event, his visit inspired her to chug booze until her tears reeked of tequila. It was in this drunken, sobbing state she phoned R---. And so we immediately piled into my car to go spend some time with her in hopes of cheering her up.
We got to her place, and the minute we rang the bell, a pickup truck pulled into the driveway. The ex-boyfriend had returned. He saw the seven of us, and promptly drove away.
Crisis seemingly averted, we set about comforting the young lady with a certain degree of success. However, twice I went outside for a cigarette. Both times I saw the Ex’s truck cruise by the house. I asked the others if they noticed him too. It seemed the last half hour he’d been circling the block. We decided to keep an eye out, but tried to remain optimistic, especially when some of the young lady’s girl friends arrived. We appeared to be on the verge of an impromptu party when once again the pickup pulled into the driveway, followed by a station wagon full of guys, and a sedan loaded with more white trash all of whom proceeded to pour out onto the front lawn.
A guy once tried to stab me, and I was less certain of his violent intentions than the impending assault. We met them on the lawn. Obviously outnumbered, my buddy Zeke pulled out a church key (bottle opener), and in what I can only assume was an intimidation tactic, stabbed himself in the shoulder. Him standing there bleeding actually made me feel better about our odds. There’s an old adage I’ve come to find is very true: “you may know karate, but I know ka-razy.”
Then the cops arrived – four squad cars and a K-9 unit.
Anticipating the bloody brawl about to ensue, a sensible lady inside called the police. It was the right thing to do, and we never forgave her for it because when the cops showed up, they immediately started cuffing me and my friends. They saw two factions about to rumble, a row of heavy metal kids facing off with a group of rednecks, and they knew what needed to be done: cuff those metal freaks, let the good old boys go.
Sitting on the curb while the police ran our IDs, a recent addition to the group, a guy named K----, said to me, “Dude, I’m on fucking parole. I wasn’t supposed to leave Ohio. I cannot get arrested.”
It then occurred to me our group wasn’t exactly a collective of innocents. One was on probation for taking part in a burglary that turned into a kidnapping; another was technically on house arrest for assaulting a security guard while shoplifting; and one night I had been arrested for drinking as a minor, drunk and disorderly, drug possession, and carrying a concealed weapon. The chance of us explaining the situation, in a way favorable to us, was evaporating very quickly.
Yet, by some stroke of luck, instead of taking a deep journey into our various nefarious backgrounds, the cops simply investigated the validity of our IDs, apparently trusting the system to tell them about any red flags rather than outright searching for them. Realizing this, when a cop radioed in my info I sat smugly waiting for nothing to come back. The radio replied hissing out a string of police code.
The cop walked away, and started what became a ten minute conversation with dispatch. I couldn't hear it, but the look on his face didn't bode well. He then came over to ask questions like: What are you doing here? If I open up that trunk, what am I going to find?
I answered honestly, which is the most infuriating thing you can do to a cop because it doesn’t confirm his suspicions about you. However, he eventually let us leave, though not without saying to me, “I don’t want to see you around here anymore.”
It turned into a minor mystery we would speculate about on drunken evenings – “he’s a serial killer!” We would never know the answer, but the whole experience refreshed our bond. It reminded us that rebels without a cause are still in it together. Whatever the hell It is.
RSS Feed
