Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

Last night was 70s bowling night and I won. In the fifth round, my zipper split, and in the seventh the seam burst down the middle of my pants. I untucked my shirt to hide the color of my underwear and played to a score of 156. Before bowling was quite the different experience. My best girl and I went to the theater to see Spider-Man 3. We were excited about it, but not nearly as excited as the forty or so fans ahead of us in line, who might have been waiting there for a few hours. It was a sight that reaffirmed the validity of the comic-book-nerd stereotype: mostly males, from a broad range of age and experience, unkempt hair, hand-held video games in hand, hunched over, and blowing cash on oversalted popcorn and syrupy sodas. There was a family ahead of us, a father, an older son, and three daughters. Two of the daughters were teenaged; one was younger than ten. They discussed buying soft drinks and other overpriced goods until they ran out of things to say. Then the two teenaged daughters walked off so they wouldn’t have to stand in line for a long time—let the men do that. But the youngest girl wanted to stay with her dad. I saw a close bond between the oldest son and the youngest daughter. He held her and then set her down and started playing a game of slapping hands (gently) with her, trying to get her riled up for the movie by putting some sort of Spider-Man theme on the game. While this was all going on, a wild herd of long-haired, loud-mouthed boys of ten or younger ravaged the miniature video arcade to out right. They did what they wanted. I asked, “Where are their parents?” and was reminded of my own age. No one came to rebuke them or at least make them set the arcade machines back in their original positions. They finally got tired of the place and migrated away. Inside the theater, thirty minutes before the movie started, it seemed like there were already a hundred people sitting in the seats. Two theatric high school Spider-Man fanboys game an impromptu pep rally before the advertisements started playing on the screen. The speech had no substance, but had plenty of gusto. It ended with one of the boys just saying, “So, Spider-Man 3,” and everyone cheering. The movie eventually started, and there was much rejoicing. I had heard snippets of good reviews of the movie, and the first two Spider-Man movies were surprisingly good for blockbusters, so I was expecting at least a good show. I got a good show, but that was all. The special effects were spectacular, but the regular effects, like the ones good stories are based on, were weaker than mediocre. Aristotle would have slapped the writers. It was more interesting listening to the crowd’s responses to the actions on the silver screen. They cheered as if Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst were their high school comrades and they were watching a high-production school play. There was a point where Spider-Man became bad (with a meaningful but paper-thin reason) and began acting like a biker punk, disrespectful and harsh, and that is when the crowd cheered the most. I said to Sarah: “This audience is cheering for the wrong things.” I was reminded of someone telling me that a popular fast food restaurant had been using cardboard in their food as filler, and though I don’t know how reliable that statement was, it is still a good image for how the crowd received this movie. The filler, what was supposed to be the most meaningful and nutritious, was empty. The plot of this movie (it doesn’t deserve to be called a film) had a purpose: to provide a means to get from one display of computer-graphics prowess to the next dull, cliché comic effort. The crowd loved it. Sarah and I walked out after the credits started showing us names no one ever pays attention to. We both had a leery look on our faces. I called it “Okay at best.” She just said she didn’t like it. Am I grateful that my girlfriend is a good student of rhetoric! I’m not happy that she was displeased along with me, but I am happy that she is not just one of the crowd. I heard a lot of people saying they were just happy that so-and-so character was actually put into the movie. I chose not to write a review of the movie because I am not a qualified film critic. What I am qualified to do is to write my observations and gatherings. I am always looking, watching, and taking notes, especially in public. Sarah and I then drove to the bowling alley, and as I bowled and as my pants split, I thought it a good metaphor for what I did to the movie in my mind by rising above the “I’ll take what I get” attitude. I ripped it open.

The window was open a little last night, and some cigarette smoke began to drift in from my downstairs neighbors. I was practicing my guitar, but as soon as I sensed the flavor of the smoke I was transported. I tripped into the past.

I was a construction worker, measuring and cutting drywall, working at the Bour house. I worked alongside Andy and Ben, but another troupe of laborers hung drywall elsewhere in the skeleton of the house. We were young and they were older. They were David, Loretto, Chris, and Wes.

Andy, Ben, and I would work through our morning and afternoon breaks so we could take an hour break for lunch. The rest of the workers would take smoking breaks in the morning and afternoon, but they would smoke the rest of the day anyway. Anyone could walk around that construction site blindfolded and tell where the chain-smokers were. Their skin and clothes reeked of tobacco—well, except for Chris. Chris’ skin and clothes reeked of tobacco and alcohol. He was drunk every day I ever saw him.

Chris would show up whenever he wanted to, wobbling on his bike with a cigarette hanging off his lower lip and mumbling some hard rock lyric. He talked dirty, listened and wailed along to metal and country-pop on the radio, and seemed to be impervious to pain. His fingers were always bloody somehow, and I don’t know how he did it. Once I accidentally drilled a Phillips bit through my left thumbnail, and I was out of commission for a half hour or so.

Chris, on the other hand, would repeatedly hammer his fingers, drill them, and slice them open with razor knives that we used to cut the drywall. He would just cuss and keep on working. Sometimes he would bring in some cup from a fast food restaurant, but I knew it was full of alcohol because of the way it smelled and the way he drank it.

Our contractor, Merv, would usually comment on the other workers to me. He would say things like, “Yep, he’s always drunk but he gets the job done.”

Chris and I had a few meaningful talks, mostly about things I never wanted to talk about. One of them ended up with Chris saying, “Well, I guess you’re a bigger man than I am if you don’t need to sleep with a woman to love her.” This was sort of a nightmare for me, because he was almost always bellowing everything he said.  

Chris wore almost the same thing every day. It was a gray, stretched-out t-shirt, blue jeans (dirty, of course), and beige work boots. Everything he touched smelled like alcohol, much to my dismay when he asked to borrow my cell phone. He had to call some sort of agency to arrange a meeting with his son. He was incredibly polite on the phone, but when he got off he would curse the mother of his son. He handed me back my phone and it was oily and potent. I might have gotten drunk just by putting it up to my face. I waiting until he was out of sight to wipe it on the underside of my t-shirt, with vigor.

Loretto was a quiet illegal Mexican immigrant who ate habañeros every day with his lunch, washing it all down with salted lemonade. He would give me Spanish lessons and would congratulate me when I could communicate with him in his native language. He called Andy, Ben, and David by different names. Andy was Dandy, Ben was Benz, and David was Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis-Davis, sung in a little ditty.

Loretto was a smoker too, but not as much as the other three. He was always cheerful, because, I supposed, he was earning money for his family. He was a Catholic, but believed that the Bible was all myth. He and I talked about the Bible on several occasions. He also shared his habañeros with me once.

We were in the garage, having lunch on stacks of drywall sheets. Andy, Ben, Loretto, and I talked about whatever came up in our lunchtime banter, until the conversation came around to Loretto’s peppers. I asked if I could try one, and Loretto said yes. I bit the pepper off at its stalk and told Ben that it was good and he should try one.

I held back my tears as the acids of the pepper saturated my taste buds, chewing the whole time. Ben put one in his mouth and bit, and that’s as long as I held my true reaction back. I fumbled for whatever liquid I could drink as Ben started turning red, jumping up, and doing whatever he could to alleviate the heat.

I had a good laugh amidst my habañero tears and red face, and so did Andy and Loretto. Ben wasn’t enjoying himself, but he got over it and our friendship suffered no harm. I still don’t know how Loretto ate two or three of the peppers every day.

Merv usually chuckled at things he saw Loretto do.

There were only a few times when I saw Wes’ mouth without a cigarette, it seemed. I think he was an Okie; at least he talked with the drawl. His speech was short, though, blurred and rapid: “Gimm’ thet thar ham’r.” He wore a dirty baseball cap over his dirty blond hair, always had sunglasses on, and wore his mustache long. His arms were too thin, with the veins and arteries protruding like mole tunnels. He looked like he was as old as Merv (in his 70s), but I’ll bet he was younger than 40.

The first time he came, Wes just showed up on a bike, I think, and with a big smile, assuming that Merv would put him to work. It was a little while after Andy and I had started working. Merv put him to work, but Wes didn’t last as long as everyone else. He was fired the first time because he was taking two hour lunches and then clocking in eight hour days. He apologized and later talked Merv into letting him work again. He lasted a little while until I exposed him for doing jobs he wasn’t supposed to be doing, jobs that were easy ways to pass the day.

Merv just shook his head and admitted, “I don’t know about him. He’s no good.”

David was Merv’s main worker, and David went through bouts of alternating bitterness and thankfulness toward Merv. Some days it would be, “Merv’s a good man. He’s pulled me out of so many bad situations and gave me work and let me earn good money.” Other days would be full of cussing.

He rolled his own cigarettes. There would be a pouch of cheap tobacco in his pocket and a wad of papers as often as he had money. Every few weeks he would claim he was quitting, but he never did. He also claimed he never drank, but I remember him complaining about hangovers.

His teeth were as rotten as his stories about his divorce experiences. Sometimes he would laugh when talking about his past and sometimes he would be furious. He and I had a subtle feud over the radio—he wanted it on the hardest rock station and I wanted it on something easier to listen to. That lasted until I bought a small CD player and branched off with Andy and Ben to work as a different group.

David would laugh his hoarse laugh and smoke through his breaks, and we could hear him laughing anywhere on the site. He was always advocating Metallica and Pantera, and condemning whatever music anyone else was listening to, with few exceptions.

I worked with David and Marv on another job after the Bour house, tearing off a roof of an East Bakersfield house. On that hot roof David and I talked plenty about life and sundry issues, until he blew up at Merv over some little thing. Merv fired him or he quit on the spot—it wasn’t clear what happened. There was a lot of yelling. David fumed around, smoking like a steamboat, cussing all the words, and threw his shovel off of the roof. We used shovels to pry up the old shingles.

Then David decided to prove his value to Merv and began to work feverishly. He yelled at me, telling me that I needed to work like a man, but I kept on working like I had been—not wearing myself out, prying off the shingles steadily. There was an unspoken threat in this. He held his shovel up for a while as he screamed at me, and I didn’t even spare him a frightened face. I kept on prying up shingles.

After that, I gathered my wages and told Merv that I wouldn’t be able to come back to work for him as long as David was there. He understood.

The smoke still lingers after years. As it wafted through the window last night, I looked backwards in time and felt like I did back then: in the world, in the heat of the semiarid outskirts of town, and in the paths of different lives.

Thank you for your time and comments, readers. I would like as much feedback as I could get, so feel free to comment or email me whenever you have something to say.

About the story: this started as an idea I had when I was driving from Bakersfield to Newhall last Sunday. I started writing it out in my notebook, and it got me excited (but why not? That’s my nature, and if I’m not getting excited about what I write, then I’m a failure already). I finished writing out the first draft on Monday afternoon, but I didn’t find a suitable point to finish publishing the story until tonight. I have thought a lot about this. I’m sure there are some implausibilities in it, since I’m not experienced in either the drug business, the police force, or the workings of amateur, inadvertent detectives.
If there is a way I can improve this, please suggest it to me. I always welcome constructive criticism.
Oh, and by the way, if you kept up with the story, you’ll have to reread the first two parts. I changed them significantly. Whoops.
Thanks, and have a great day.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but it wasn’t a matter of left or right. I woke up as I fell off the foot, onto my shoes and my just-in-case baseball bat. It was just before noon. Sleeping-in had its price that day. At least I didn’t have to go to work. I wished I had a real job. Behold the groggy downward-spiral of thought.

I shook off the bad feelings and checked my 28-year-old body for bruises as I walked down the hall to the front of my house. It was stuffy inside my house, so I opened the front door, looked up, and sneezed. Maybe an air purifier would be a good, justifiable investment. As I looked down and north, three ducks, one drake and two dull browns, flitted to me. It didn’t take long to figure out they had guns for my bare feet. Bold ducks. Before they could attack my toes, I hopped over the threshold.

There was a broken sprinkler in my neighbor’s yard and it made a miniature lake in her flower garden, to which the ducks lighted after I was safe indoors. Why were there ducks in the front yard anyway? The reservoir where they usually were was a three blocks’ run away, which I made every Tuesday and Thursday, at the park.

I saw a picture once in a magazine with a duck in a sound-engineer’s room, with all of the foam cross-hatched pads on the walls. The caption said that a quack doesn’t echo, which would make the duck the most inconsequential and irresponsible animal out there, at least in my book. Things happen to ducks; ducks don’t do anything, and even when they make a noise, it’s not around half as long as other animals’ noises are. Ducks don’t build dams and they don’t feed too many Americans (that I know of).

I guess I’m sort of a duck, for that matter. I own a few gas stations around town and I stock vending machines. No one’s ever been held up at one of my joints to my knowledge, I don’t write books that change people’s lives, and pay a lot of taxes. Nobody knows gas station owners or vending machine stockers, and what I say only matters in my little world of gas prices and in the investigations of the bursts of kicking and rocking on my machines.

I shrugged the matter off. It was Saturday, I really did have friends, it wouldn’t be long until I had forgotten about the ducks, and I was going to detail my car. I put on my moccasins and changed into an old t-shirt, gathered my car-washing supplies, and found a newspaper for spotless windows.

As soon as I had rinsed off my 1968 Volkswagen Beetle (baby blue and cream two-tone, but a little worse than average Volkswagen condition nowadays), I noticed a black car pull up across the street with windows that were too tinted to be legal. I think it was a ‘70s LeBaron, with expensive rims and no radio antenna. By the time I had soaped down the entire body of the car I also noticed a sticker on the driver’s side of my back bumper.

This was a contradiction of my philosophy. I had vowed years ago that I would never even accept a free bumper sticker.

I expected it’d be a campaign sticker. I knew some nerds in my World Lit class back at the community college who put Republican bumper stickers on some of the liberal professors’ vehicles. Knee-slapping hilarity, I know. But the one on my car said, “Prince Charming” in black block letters against a fire-engine-red field.

I reached to pull off the sticker and the driver’s door opened on the dark LeBaron. A male voice, hoarse and cracking, shouted, “I knew it was you!” I straightened up and shaded my eyes so I could see who was talking to me from across the street.

He was no one I had ever seen before. Pale, skinny, and nervous, he wore a black A-shirt under a navy-blue pinstripe sports coat and tucked into his faded black jeans. His head looked like a squished cantaloupe that was smoothed and polished, but one that had two deep-set brown eyes, a flat nose, and a lipless frown. I never caught his name, but I’ll call him Bowser. I name all of my cantaloupes Bowser.

“Excuse me?” I said and remembered that if this guy bothered me I could soak him at very least.

“I saw you last night stealing my stuff. I saw your car and your bumper sticker, Charming,” Bowser spat out in a hard-knocks-school trained staccato. He glided across the street in his white Reeboks until he was too close, then reached down behind my bumper. He pulled out what looked like a thick wad of duct tape. Bowser continued spitting out words like pills: “It’s all right, bo. We’ll forget the whole thing.”

I liked this situation as much as I liked being attacked by territorial ducks in the wrong territory. But I let Bowser walk off with the duct tape and didn’t say another word. I might as well just let this slide. I didn’t want any trouble. It was Saturday.

I finished detailing my Beetle, but not thoroughly because my mind was ticking off thoughts like seconds. The LeBaron didn’t leave. I kept a wary eye (my right one) on the shady windows.

I vacuumed the interior out after that, still watching the dark car, feeling used. I had been reading too much Hammett lately to not be suspicious. My car had been used as a drop-off for a pusher, I concluded.

I thought back to the first (and only) cigarette I had ever tried and remembered gagging and promising myself that I’d never do anything to alter my personality besides sleep and sugar. I couldn’t dare imagine looking at myself in the mirror and seeing a prematurely gray hophead; being prematurely gray was enough. But I guess it’s different when you’re hooked, so I planned on never getting started.

Soon enough the “used” feeling got carried away by that train of thought. All these self-reassuring, I’m-no-junkie pep-thoughts got me riled up and I started to march over to that car calling the fuzz on my cell with its license number. Duck soup.

But the car had no license plates. Rats.

I finished vacuuming, locked up my car, and took my car-cleaning supplies back inside. I set them in the entryway, scrambled onto the couch, and set up camp behind the Venetian blinds. Before two minutes had passed, I watched bald Bowser sprint from behind my car to his and peel out. So much for the stakeout. He must have gone to my car as soon as I turned my back to walk inside.

I walked back outside, peeked around the corner of my garage to make the LeBaron was out of sight, and went to go peel off the wretched bumper sticker. I knelt down and reached for the curled corner and expected it to be at least a little sticky, since it wasn’t there yesterday. It was grainy, not sticky at all. Then I realized that the paper backing of the sticker was still intact, and duct tape had been used to fix it to my bumper. I peeled it off and beheld a thin but impressive wad of cash between the two strips of doubled-over tape.

(To be continued.)

I went inside and thought for a long time, while cleaning up and doing various chores that didn’t take mental activity. I waited until all my necessary jobs were done to take the small piece of invisible tape off of the roll of cash. I counted $1650 and wondered if this was a threat to my safety resting in my hands. No doubt someone would be after this money. I guessed not all drug deals were well thought out, especially if under the influence.

The duct tape on the back of the sticker was well-used, though, so I gathered that this little play had been working for a while. The one thing they must have banked on was the usual cursive attention most people give to older, junky cars.

I was an exception, at least on that day, because I was tired of my car being as cluttered as my mind. I took action at the precisely wrong time. These are all just speculations, but I’m also guessing that these drug drops went off without a snag most of the time, without confrontation.

Walking back to my car at dusk, after much acute thinking, I heard ducks making noise somewhere in the indistinguishable surroundings. It was toward the end of mating season, and amorous birds didn’t make me any less nervous. I sipped on my root beer bottle as I looked for something that Bowser might have dropped, any clue I could find. There was nothing. I knocked off the rest of my root beer and walked back inside. As I stepped over the threshold and reached for the knob, I heard the clouds grumbling.

“Spiff,” I muttered to myself. “All that work for nothing.” I savored the last few shiny moments of dusk-lit glory my car had to offer for the time being, and I shut the door. Then I did the dishes.

After all my chores were done, I looked out of my Venetian blinds and noticed two things: one was the dark clouds coming from the East, and two was a black, tinted Mercedes with its running lights on parked across the street, where the LeBaron had been just hours before. “Could anything else go wrong today?” I sighed. It could be nothing, all in my mind.

I scuffled to the kitchen table with bottle in hand to sit and think, but as I sat down the doorbell rang. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I swallowed and opened the door to a well-dressed man of 30 or so with his hands in his pockets, looking to the right. He seemed to be intent on something down the street, but when I opened the door all the way, he turned and faced me. He spread out his words like cream cheese: “My car broke down. Mind if I use your phone?”

I was pretty sure I could hear the engine purring, but the rain was picking up. If the engine really were running, at least he didn’t plan on staying at my place long.

I just went with his little plot. Maybe I let him in because the last adventure I had had was ten years ago when some old lady in her Olds ran into me on my bike and I broke my collarbone, if that could be called an adventure.

As he stepped inside and I closed the door, the noise of the rain picked up, and there was no way to hear anything but the downpour outside.

One of my chores earlier was to put the bumper sticker on my refrigerator door, which was right next to the land line.

I pointed my guest to the phone, excused myself, set my root beer bottle on the coffee table in the living room, and crept back to my bedroom to get my baseball bat. I could hear my visitor talking loudly on the phone. My just-in-case bat came in handy, filling me with just-in-case security. Was I getting too worked up over nothing? I reassured myself that I had reason enough to be cautious, since my car had been used for a drug run, and I didn’t let it be.

I sneaked back to the living room, set down the bat under the coffee table, and sat up just in time. He came around the corner and saw me sitting there.

“Let me introduce myself,” he smoothed out. “I’m Alfred. You can call me Al.”

“Nice to meet you. Do you need help? I’m Manny,” I replied. The nerves started tingling. There was only so much courtesy I could have for a suspicious stranger in a suit whose car wasn’t really broken down.

“No, sir. I have some friends coming in a few minutes to help me with my car. Mind if I stay inside out the rain until they get here?” I said I didn’t, but I did. I asked him if he wanted some water. He said yes, and I walked into the kitchen.

When I got there, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the bumper sticker. That confirmed my suspicions. I started planning my actions. I had the following assets: baseball bat, thorough knowledge of the floorplan, moccasins. My list wasn’t so lengthy. What had I gotten myself into?

So there we were. He sat with glass in hand against the west wall. I was against the east wall on the couch, just below the big window. Two minutes of silence passed. I ventured.

“I noticed you swiped my bumper sticker. I was growing fond of it. Sing, sap.”

He flicked out a switchblade. That was something I hadn’t counted into my plans.

(To be continued.)

“Where’s the cash? Maybe you’d like a little haircut.” His voice wasn’t so smooth anymore. It resembled more of a garbage disposal rather than cream cheese. When he mentioned the haircut, he swiped the shiv in the air recklessly.

“It’s down here in the cigar box,” I said, purposefully appearing to be nervous (although not all a guise). I pointed down below the coffee table. Al rose and yanked his tie off with his right hand. It looked like he was having trouble, but he threw it on the carpet. He then took a few steps forward with his switchblade leading him.

I didn’t have a cigar box down there. Just the baseball bat. What a pinch. Why hadn’t I called the bulls when I had the chance? Had I had a chance?

The phone rang toward the beginning of my crisis and Al looked over his shoulder. Seize the day, I said. I tried to swing the situation in my favor, but all I got was the bat behind my ear when Al turned back around a second later.

I swung the bat as Al opened his eyes wider. His left hand went crunch and the shiv bent and clattered against the wall. Al yelled a dirty word. On reflex, his right hand shot out and yanked the bat from my arms. I wasn’t expecting that.

He tossed the bat through the front window, which wasn’t tempered as I found out. The bat damaged the blinds on its way. A cold, misty draft passed the back of my neck.

“What now?” I asked as I grabbed the root beer bottle. It was the only thing to grab. It should have been on my list of assets.

“Give me the cash and I’ll be nice,” Al spat.

“Of course. I trust you. How about,” I said as I broke the bottle on the edge of the coffee table and raised its jagged edges in the direction of Al’s face, “how about you just be nice?”

“Whoa, bo,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the window. He turned white. He continued, saying, “Wait, wait. I’ll make it up to you. Let me get my wallet out.” What a quick repentance, or what a sham. He reached into his back pocket, but didn’t pull out his wallet. I couldn’t easily stop him without jumping on or over the coffee table, and I couldn’t afford to put myself in a more vulnerable position.

I suspected he would pull out something dangerous, and he did. It was another switchblade. I wondered how many he had in his pockets, and whether or not he used them often. Then I ducked as he leapt forward. The ducking foiled his plan.

He landed on top of me with his blade in my left bicep and my root beer bottle somewhere in his lower gut. My dome was wedged in the bottom of his ribcage, and he was twisting his shiv into my arm. I stood up and heaved Al, who was lighter than he looked, through the serrated hole that used to be my front window. He took the Venetian fixture with him as he flew.

I looked out of the window and, by the light of my living room, saw Al on the ground, motionless. He was soaked and getting wetter, but he didn’t move for a long time. I walked around the coffee table, grabbed his necktie, and wrapped it around my left bicep to stop the bleeding. I couldn’t use that arm much.

I knocked the lower teeth out of the window cavity and stepped out. If Al were faking his unconsciousness, the sound of the door opening, faint as it would have been under the rainfall, would have been his cue to get ready with some plan B. As I stepped out I heard footsteps running away, barely discernable in the rain. I didn’t know how much to worry about that. I wasn’t red-handed, but I must have looked impressive stepping out of a wrecked window with a bloody, broken bottle in my hand, backlit by the light of a fight-wrecked living room.

Al’s hands were empty, he still didn’t move, and he was bleeding badly. There was glass in him all over. The blood petered out of his wounds and mixed with the rainwater that was flooding into the flowerbeds in my neighbor’s yard.

I wondered if he really had friends coming to help him. No one came, but he surely had friends if he had any business. Maybe the footsteps scurrying away were his friends’.

I called the authorities and they were in my yard in fifteen minutes. As I was waiting for them I got an idea and scrambled to act it out. I went through all of Al’s pockets and rumpled all of his clothes to find some sort of leverage. I needed a way to make sure that Al wouldn’t send his friends to do a little number on me as soon as he could get the word out.

It didn’t take long before I found his wallet, the bumper sticker, and keys on his person and a little black address book in his glove compartment in the Mercedes. I pocketed the address book, pulled a wad of dough out of his wallet, left the sticker in Al’s pocket for the fuzz to find, and examined his keys. There were four keys on it. One was a Mercedes key, two were home keys (probably for an entry lock and a deadbolt), and one was a key with a number engraved on it. I guessed it was for a storage unit. I took the numbered key off of the ring. Then I went inside and stashed my finds underneath the silverware drawer.

When the cops got there, I gave them the almost-full report, telling them about the bumper sticker, and then watching them find it in Al’s pocket. I told them how I thought it was the signal for the hopheads, and showed the switchblades without my fingerprints on them. They had plenty of questions for me, and I told them about everything but the money and Al’s personal effects I had swiped. I had self-defense going for me, and that wasn’t a lie.

I had to go to the ER to get my arm sewn up, and I slept through most of Sunday. It rained nonstop until Monday afternoon. That gave me plenty of alone time and time enough to clean up my soggy, bloody, chaotic living room.

Al was in the downtown hospital with a cop outside his door until he was patched enough to be tried and sent to the can. I gave him a visit on Tuesday. The cop was asleep when I went in. Al wasn’t happy to see me, but I made him talk after I closed the door with a soft click.

I was greeted with bitter words: “Thanks, chump. Look what you did to me!” He was actually talking to the ceiling looking at me through the corner of his eye. He had stitches all over the area I could see.

“I could have lingered a while. None of the neighbors suspected anything because it was dark and the rain covered most of the racket of the glass. You should thank me for calling the police.” I looked at his medical report on the foot of his bed. Something important had been punctured, and his surgery had gone well. That was all I could get out of it. I stepped over to the open window and looked down three stories at the sidewalk below.

I asked Al what I should do with the money. He cursed and demanded it, of course. I reminded him that I had his little black book, and told him it was a little soggy from the rain, but I could get at least forty names to the bulls whenever I wanted to. He clammed up but said he didn’t care.

I asked him what the right thing to do with the money would be. He swore at me and gave me a Sunday-School answer. I told him, all right, I would give it to a charity. He groaned. Then the room phone rang. Since Al was out of commission for the time being, I answered it. There was immediately the sound of wind over the mouthpiece of whoever was calling. Then came the voice.

“Who are you? Give the phone to Al.”

(To be continued.)

I hadn’t made a noise. Not good: someone was watching me. I stepped back after I gave Al the receiver. He listened for a while, then said, “How did…I’ll get it back, I swear! Give me a minute.” He muffled the phone on his stomach, carefully placing the receiver where there weren’t stitches, I suppose.

“Manny, I need the address book. They don’t trust me anymore, and they’re going to snub me if I don’t give them that stuff back. I don’t know how,” he said, but I knew how, because as he said that a little red dot appeared on his right nostril and wiggled around for a while until it disappeared.

“Listen, Al: ‘they’ have a laser trained on your face right now,” I said and he froze, looking out the window. “Which brings me to who ‘they’ are. Some sort of family going on? Spill.”

I was expecting a hesitation like in the movies. There was one. After a few seconds of biting his lower lip, Al said, “‘They’ are called the Barbershop. That’s all you have to know, because if you don’t look for them, you’d never know anything about them. They don’t run this town, but they tell who comes in and goes out of my business.”

I said, “Hmm.” I remembered promising myself years ago that I’d never get caught up with drug cartels. I guessed the address book was full of contact information for customers, cohorts, or both.

The red dot appeared again and moved over his left eye, so he could see it was there. He was sweating. Suddenly he burst into a sob and screamed, “Show them the book!” That scream was going to attract some attention, and I couldn’t afford putting anyone else in danger, so I jammed the visitor’s chair under the door handle. I could hear the cop stirring.

I whispered to Al, “Put the phone back up to your ear and tell them I’m going to slide the book under this door, so they’d better send someone here in three minutes. Tell them to take the gun off of you, and tell them that if I don’t hear someone knocking in some creative way I’m going to do something irrational. And I want another creative knock on the door after they’ve got the book to let me know the right person got it. And whisper that to him.” I was sweating too. I didn’t want any part of this, but my desires got me nowhere. I was in this trouble, and I had to get out.

He told the Barbershop rep all that I wanted him to tell. I waited a minute and a half. I heard footsteps and someone trying the door handle a couple of times, and then I heard keys jingling. A key went in and turned, but the door stood still because of the chair, and because I was sitting in the chair. The footsteps went away. Where was the bull? I took the chair down and cracked the door open, enough to poke my noggin out. I looked to the right, and there was nobody in the hall. I looked to the left, and there was the cop talking with the nurse, holding his keys up for her to look at.

One minute left. I closed the door again and didn’t put the chair back. The laser was bouncing around on the art deco painting on the wall by Al. His eyes followed its every move, and he was tense, but happy it wasn’t on his head anymore. He sort of reminded me of a cat.

Then came the knock like a drum roll and then a staccato set of triplets. I toed the book under the door, and the same knock came again. Relief. A minute later the laser disappeared for good.

A minute after that and the cop tried the door again. It opened slowly, and the bull’s hand was on his hip between his keys and his Glock. He relaxed when he saw me sitting with my hands folded on my lap in the visitor’s chair next to Al.

“Sir, what went on in here? And who was that clown who was just kneeling by the door?” he asked. I ignored his questions and said that I was calm because I was trying not to cause the man with the gun on the roof across the street to get suspicious. I knew the sniper was gone because I had risked a look out the window, but I wanted extra police presence to ensure I could get to my car safely. The bulls came, and I had a few last words for Al.

He promised me he would put me on the white list. That meant protection, or was only supposed to mean protection since there was no way I could trust him. I would just have to be careful. I told him that.

As I walked out, Al called out to me: “Manny, how come you gotta be so rough to me?”

“You’re a leech. Get a real job.” I meant after prison, of course. I flicked the etched key I had taken from him earlier and it landed between his legs on the sheets.

On the elevator ride down to the first floor, I counted $3570 from the bumper sticker cash and the wad from Al’s wallet and I put it all into an envelope. At the front desk I asked about donations to children patients, left the envelope and walked back to my Beetle. As I opened my car door, I looked up and saw a jagged V in the sky. The season was over.

(The End.)

There is a house south of Bakersfield, California, and it is a work of art. Its art is not necessarily fine art or modern art, but it does have elements of both. The word eclectic pins this house almost perfectly.

There is modern art in the arrangement of antiques. There is fine art when music from long times past meanders or careens out of one of the many pianos inside.

The orange caboose in the front yard sets the mood immediately. A railroad crossing arm blocks the path from one side of the driveway to the other, its purpose less than enforcing. Railroad ties in the back yard define boundaries and build walls. There are remnants of the old Southern Pacific Railroad Company almost anywhere you can look here.

The roof and the DVD player are, perhaps, the newest things on this property. It was two years ago when my brothers, a friend, and I put the roof on in the alternating heat and rain, and that was when the sun burned the shape of an aardvark on my back (I thought I had the sunscreen equally applied). The sunburn stayed like that for months.

The rest of the artifacts out here might be worth millions, collectively. There are antiques and period pieces in every room—even the closets. Right now, lying on my stomach in the den, I can see a telegraph tapper, several early cameras, and an old-fashioned iron—without a cord. The crazy-quilts in the next room over where sewn by my great-great-grandmother, I think, and their theme is the same as the house’s: mix-match, hodge-podge, puzzle-fitting, eclectic, and every one of these terms in the most positive light possible. Each door you go through brings a new theme, a new atmosphere, and a new set of legends.

This old house used to be somewhere in the middle of Bakersfield, and it used to be half this size. This den I’m writing in used to be a back porch. There is a bathroom in the center of the floor-plan—but it used to have a window, I’m sure, when it was along the wall facing the back yard.

There used to be a pool behind the house, and a gazebo, too, next to it (where my parents were wed). I remember being taught how to swim in that pool (or, as I remember thinking then, how to drown in that pool). The pool was eventually filled in and turned into a garden, after I started remembering things distinctly. Eventually the concrete walk around the pool was broken up and hauled off, and the yard nearly entered normal-status. Surrounded by corn and cotton, the yard still was an oasis in the flat bed of the San Joaquin Valley, with its pines, walnut trees, Granny Smiths, and its willow.

The willow used to be a source of fantasy for me, because its mop of branches would become walls and inside was my haven. The whips, easily removed from the walls of my hideaway, helped me defend myself against the imaginary onslaughts of enemies. I don’t exactly recall when we cut the willow down.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia in one of the walnut trees—the one that’s still there now. The pines are still there, too, but they were always sort of boring because I couldn’t climb them.

My childhood here was my first stage of appreciation for this land. Though I would have then much rather preferred the city, where my friends with better Nintendos lived, and I would have rather taken a bike ride around the block over a walk through the fields of silage any day. Things are—no, everything is so different now.

Two summers ago my grandmother charged me to house-sit the priceless montage of history and American culture. Those two weeks as she enjoyed herself in Israel were some of the most crucial times of my life. The movement of crickets’ songs and frogs’ conversations outside, with the melody of Elliott Smith’s “Twilight” running through my short-term memory—all this defined a period of my life. They were the two weeks that I had to think in silence, absorb art and biblical wisdom, and develop my sense of the world. I wrote a song, and to this day I think it’s one of my best.

There was at least one night where I just sat on the ground behind the back fence, thinking and looking out over the fields, at the lights coming from the farm-houses a mile away.

I walked away from that house-sitting job a fledgling poet, and possibly a bit of a philosopher.

Late last year I returned yet another time on my weekly commute from Newhall to Bakersfield. Something had happened, and I wanted to investigate.

When I got there, I paced and crouched behind the back fence, visualizing the story I had heard.

I saw the tire tracks and guessed where exactly the spot was that the car got stuck in the mud. It was hard to tell. Tire tracks and footprints in the dried mud left no smooth ground in the first road between the back yard and the field.

I imagined the scene: a car stubbornly trudging through the mud until it slowed to a stop, the mud sapping the tread of traction, a man getting out of the car with a gun tucked in his belt, the gun falling out as the man started to panic and run, the man sprinting to the houses and trying to break in anywhere he could, the man heading next door to my great-grandparents’ house, getting in somehow, and trying to coax my Granny into giving him her car keys, the man grabbing the keys and running, driving away in the Buick.

The tire tracks awakened the P.I. inside of me. I hoped I could find a muddy outline of a Beretta somewhere as I paced with my eyes scrutinizing the ground.

But the police (or “the fuzz” as my inner detective called them) had done their jobs—they had caught the man, retrieved the gun from the neighbors down the street who had found it, found the Buick in central Bakersfield, and returned everything that was missing.

So I went and grabbed the secret key to let myself into the house (no one was at home), drank a glass of water from the faucet (from the well behind the South fence, and with plenty of minerals), locked the house back up, and drove off, resuming my weekend. I left behind the eclectic house, but only for a while. I keep going back, even if just to walk through all the doors.

Nothing is dearer to the heart of Americans than the happy ending. It is the supporting beam underneath the pier of our satisfaction.

Is this true? Or is it just a blanket statement made, like many Americans make, trying to sum up the world, like the average pop-country singer does by song titles (and, consequently, the line that is repeated too many times in the song)? We’re all trying to uncover that one thing that will make the hearer stop walking, look thoughtfully up at the sky, and let out a wistful and epic “Hmm” just in time to see the clouds uncover a picturesque rainbow. How crude. I declare war.

“Pardon me for being cynical, but I live in a sinful world,” said my history professor today, after giving a forty-five minute tirade on entertainment and its inverse relationship to thinking skills. There on the forefront of our video-game wars, there atop our patriotic concerts, and there saturating our DVD-case shrines hovers the happy ending with its shiny streamers and office-leftover confetti, the echoing foundation of satisfaction.

What percentage of the happy ending is made up of lies? The happy ending is so popular because of its displacement of the ending. Sure, if you re-label “the end” anything can have a happy ending, provided that thing has not been miserable its entire existence.

If marriage at the end of a Shakespearian comedy is seen as the ending, it would indeed be happy. If marriage is, more realistically, seen as a happy beginning, we are closer to reality (and that is a better place to be, no matter what any postmodernist says). Things don’t work out like the Mary Kate and Ashley movies. Everything in this life ends in death, even though there are plenty of happy events along the way for many, many people. But let’s remember that the only reason we know any of this is because we’ve heard or seen stories. The enemy here is not storytelling or happy endings themselves, but the opposite of thought.

The purpose of all this talk about happy endings is to point to the center of life, which is its purpose. Without a purpose, anyone would be an antihero. Superman does not save the world just because he feels like saving the world. Indiana Jones does not risk his life at the hands of the Nazis just because he’s tired of only being a professor of archaeology. But Jake Gittes has his life pulled out from under him because he’s going through it with this attitude: “I’m just the leper with the most fingers.” He does his matrimonial investigating because it’s something to do, not because he wants to rid the world of the evil of adultery.

If Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark had ended a few minutes before it did, the audience would leave with a despondent attitude. If Chinatown had ended a few minutes before it did, Evelyn and Catherine would have been getting away from Noah Cross, and Jake would have been a little sad, but probably content that he had done the right thing.

Aristotle’s definitions of the parts of the sequence of a story, though, make sense of this all. He advocated a beginning, middle and end in a story—but the thing is that the artist creates them all. There is no mandate for realism in a story—otherwise hardly any of them would have a happy ending. But there is no room for implausibility, either.

I won’t assert that this is a matter of life and death or even about danger (aside from the emotional kind). However, most depressing stories aren’t favorites of the majority of people, I’m sure. And all this may be enough to make someone throw up their hands and surrender, saying, “Why can’t I just have my happy ending? I want to walk out of the theater with a smile on my face!” That about sums it up.

When we live our lives in the theater by the means of the characters we see, we have no time to create our own character.

Charge me; I am guilty, but repentant.

Let’s try to achieve the better half of the distinction between well-versed and no-imagination. It’s the difference between a pier supported by concrete and a pier supported by hollow mahogany. Foundations aren’t supposed to echo when you tap on them.

My youngest brother, his girlfriend, and my dad sat in the living room watching a movie.

“Poetry is too hard to understand,” said my brother after one of Lovelace’s poems was recited in the dialogue.

I was there, too, but not completely paying attention to the film. I tried reading Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice, but to no avail. Three dying poinsettias at the base of one of my dad’s bookcases caught my interest, though.

I tried to think of how these plants could be a symbol for something universal, or even something that’s happening in my life. I thought for a while: “Old age—the flower pots are still wrapped in shiny red tinfoil, but there are only a few red leaves left. Old people deteriorate, but they can still wear nice clothes.” The idea didn’t last too long.

Then I thought another losing thought, but I can’t quite remember what it was about. Something like selective noxiousness, because poinsettias are poisonous to cats (which is why my mom didn’t give the poinsettias to our next door neighbor—she has maybe six cats, if not more)…

But I finally settled on something relevant. Universals are often sought after, but they are hard to master, and I don’t have the strength to tackle that project right now.

The thing about the poinsettias is that I remember them at Christmastime, and they were full and luscious. I then recalled a friend I used to know, and back then our friendship was full and luscious, too. The remembrance is the sweetest part—both of the friendship and the poinsettias (I guess).

I still know her name, what she looked like, and silly things like how she laughed and what her hair smelled like (one time she gave me a lock of her hair for a school project and I just kept it). I even remember her Chinese name.

The memory has also seen better days, though. I haven’t talked with her in years, and in that time details have eroded like the frills of intricate seashells that are smooth by the time they are found on the shore. That’s the funny part about remembering—you can remember knowing things, while not remembering those things directly. Memory is a transaction negotiated through a middleman.

The yet-living poinsettias still resemble the memory, however, because I have recently found a way to contact her brother and there may be a chance to keep that comatose friendship alive—although it will not return to its former splendor. With the uncertainty of the future, though, I cannot know if tomorrow’s opportunities will be as ripe as today’s. The poinsettias may be thrown out tomorrow.

I can see the part where the water from the bathroom sink smeared three words around, which reminds me that these words are fallible and temporary.

I will keep on writing, but later. It’s time for sleep now.