Well, huzzah.

Beautiful, Funny, Sad & True is celebrating its fifth anniversary today, and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you for sticking around and reading.  I realize that updates and stories have been a little sporadic around here lately; I’m working on rectifying that situation.  Five years is a long time to keep a blog.  Actually, including the previous incarnations of BFS&T on Blogger and that other social network, it’s been more like eight years, which is a bit mind-boggling.

Here are some updates I can provide you with, and I’ll divide them into the quadrants that create the name of this place.

beautiful:  My friend and I started writing and recording an album together a year ago, and it’s getting very close to completion.  We’re aiming for a release date this spring.  We’re thrilled to finally have a bassist (who also plays a number of other instruments) on board with us, and an excellent drummer is in the works as well.  Exciting times!

funny:  I could split hairs and wonder if this means funny/strange or funny/ha-ha, but either way I’m at a bit of a loss on this one.   Well, okay, here’s a little joke.

JOHN:  Ask me if I’m a truck.

PAUL:  Are you a truck?

JOHN:  No.

Ha ha.  Don’t worry if you don’t get it; there’s really nothing to get.  It’s just absurdist, and you either like it or you don’t.  I happen to like it.

sad:  Holidays are tough.  I tend to get the blues around this time every year.  It’s not seasonal affect disorder, I just find myself ruminating a lot about the things in my life (or even in myself) that are missing or lacking.  That’s about all I’ll say on the subject here, but I thought I’d let you know that’s what I’m dealing with at the moment.

true:  I went to visit my dad a couple of weeks ago, and came home with two big boxes of LP records.  Almost all of them are classical, and many are the same ones that I grew up listening to.  Some I know by heart, like the Glenn Gould piano recordings and Bach organ recordings, while others are ones I wasn’t familiar with back then but am totally interested in now.  There were a few surprises in there, too, like Johnny Cash’s greatest hits (from the 1960′s! and a couple of Moody Blues and Chet Atkins records that I doubt have ever been listened to.  I certainly don’t remember hearing that stuff in our house when I was growing up.  Certainly am glad to have them now, though.  I’m totally looking forward to plowing through all of them and giving them the attention they deserve.

So that’s what’s happening on this Very Special day.  Here’s to another five years!

Musicians are supposed to enjoy jamming, it seems, but I usually prefer to work on songs with structure and create ‘perfect’ parts for them.  I do love to improvise, however, and I always jump at the opportunity to do so, especially with other musicians who can also improvise well.  I don’t know how to explain the difference between a Jam and an Improvisation, but a jam always seems so much more lame somehow.  It also implies that an actual song will come from it, as opposed to an improvisation, which exists as its own separate entity and then disappears into the ether.

The perfect opportunity came when a guitarist friend of mine used to host a weekly Not-Jam at his place.  It was all a group of professionals from various bands, and whoever wasn’t gigging that night had an open-ended invitation to come down and play.  There were two drum sets, a bunch of guitars, amps, keyboards, saxophones, percussion instruments, a full PA system, and everything.  The idea was to bring your instrument and your drink (or whatever) of choice, and everyone would grab whatever they felt like playing, and we’d all see what happened.  It was very Zen, and I miss those nights.  I’ve considered starting my own improvisational group of acoustic instruments.  I’ll play cello or accordion, and invite other string players and brass players, and anyone else who plays an acoustic instrument.

About five years ago, I was really trying hard to make a living at recording, despite the fact that I just getting started, and wasn’t quite up to that task yet, but that’s neither here nor there.  I try to carefully pick and choose the people I work with, since you end up spending a good deal of time with people when you’re in the studio with them, and I have to really like them and their music in order to want to spend that much time with it.  I would hate to slog through day after day with a black metal band, for example.  Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with black metal—you have to be an amazing musician to play it—it’s just not my thing, and I’d prefer to focus on My Thing.

So anyway, five years ago.  A songwriter friend hooked me up with a friend of his who I’ll call G, not because he’s a gangsta, but because that’s his first initial.  I didn’t find his songs particularly compelling, but I decided to work with him as a favor to my friend.  Plus, I needed the money.  G was (and still is) a guy of a certain age, whose songs were more classic blues-rock than I gravitate towards.  He also has a sort of ‘Earth Mother’ folky side to him that doesn’t quite jive with me, either, but he seemed to like what I did to his songs in pre-production, so we decided to work together a bit.

I told him that my usual way of working was (and still is) to record him doing his thing, and then I usually play most or all of the other instruments around what he had done.  I told him that I play drums and bass and all kinds of other things, and he wanted to hear me do that so he could assess my skills.  Fair enough.  He also had a weekly jam session with his friends, and he invited me to join them at his friend’s beautiful house near Mount Tabor.  They had all the instruments already, so I wouldn’t need to bring anything if I didn’t want to.  It was an offer too good to refuse, so I took him up on it.  I also brought my accordion and five-string Tobias bass, just in case.  I put them in the trunk of my forty-shades-of-purple BMW 2002 and drove over there.

It was quite different from the improvised music night that I’d been attending at my friend’s place, in that A) these guys were amateurs rather than professionals, and B) I suspect that they used their jam session nights as excuses to escape from their families and regular lives, rather than to express themselves musically.  I could be wrong, but that’s the impression I strongly got.   It was also different in that everybody else sat around and got high before we started playing.  I don’t smoke, myself, and I’ve found that when some people are blissed out, they occasionally overestimate their playing abilities.  That started out as one of those nights.

There were five musicians in the band, on guitar, bass, drums, piano, and organ, so whenever there was an instrument that wasn’t being played, I’d jump on it.  Usually that meant piano, but at G’s request, I played the drums a little bit, too, and played the bass a little bit.  Each song would start as a cacophony and then sort of find its way into a key.  We eventually hit our stride, played extremely well, and actually managed to create some beautifully dynamic pieces of improvised music.  After four or five songs, we all felt compelled to slap high-fives and have a group hug, which was interesting and a bit funny.

At that point, we’d been playing for a couple of hours, so we put our instruments down and walked into the kitchen to eat some food and refill our glasses.  We talked about how great playing together felt, and how amazing it was when songs spontaneously come together, almost as a form of emergence.  Suddenly, the pianist got very quiet and told us that he had a confession to make.  He had recently (maybe the week before) been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and he was gradually losing the use of his hands.  As a jazz pianist, this was particularly devastating, as I’m sure you can imagine.  This gave the evening an entirely new focus and gravitas, and Pianist told us how he would hear something in his head and attempt to play it, but his fingers were simply unable to comply.  He made a request that during our next song we go ‘all out’, in order that he could test the limits of his playing and manual dexterity.

I played my bass, and each of the other guys assumed their various roles, with the bassist switching between tambourine and percussion.  The pianist started the song as an atonal jazz ballad, and we all followed suit.  After a few minutes of atonality, my mind started to wander.  The good thing about playing bass is that you can really use it to lead and set the tone for the entire rest of the band, forcing them all to change structure if need be.  They kinda have to follow you if you’re going a certain direction.  I gradually morphed it in a very tonal, almost classical direction, and that, combined with the jazz piano, became really beautiful.  It was as if we all were creating a simultaneous homage to Pianist by weaving a colorful musical tapestry for him.  The song climaxed and wound down with a simple scale in B major, which gave everything a depth, and a certain positive overtone.  It was transcendent.

By then, it was ten o’clock, so we packed up all of the instruments and went our separate ways.  We seemed to be walking on eggshells.  What do you say when someone drops a bombshell like that?  ‘I’m sorry’ seems insulting, or anti-climactic, or insufficient at the very least.  Plus, it was the first (and last) time I ever saw any of those guys, so I was really at a loss.  I’m sure I stammered something tactful like, “Um, nice to meet you guys.  Good luck with the Parkinson’s—?”

As I was backing my ancient BMW out of the driveway, it slipped out of reverse gear, like it did occasionally.  It made a huge, metallic CLUNK sound which stopped the car in the middle of the street.  It sounded and felt as if I’d backed into something in the road, so I got out and looked behind me.  I saw nothing, so I got back in and drove home, albeit a bit nervously.  That was one of the most fun and also one of the strangest nights of music that I’ve ever experienced.

I haven’t done any improvisational nights lately, but I still think of that one.   I hope that Pianist is okay, and still playing.  I just looked up G, and he’s still out there playing.  And his music still doesn’t really do much for me.  He decided to record his album at his house, and spend the money to buy microphones and all that for himself.  I certainly can’t fault him for that, since that’s how I got started, but I do think that he’s the kind of person who could benefit from some editing and some outside influences.

And now I need to grab the cello, pack up the car and head over to tonight’s gig, but I’m glad to have been able to finally tell this story.  I really do hope that Pianist is okay, and that his Parkinson’s is under control.  I also want the best for G, and I hope that his career is going well.  I’ll keep tabs on him from a distance.  Who knows; maybe he’s doing the same for me.

This story is about a kid in my fifth-grade class who used to pick on me mercilessly.  I genuinely hated him, in the way that only children are capable of hating each other.  The good news for me at the time was that he was absent from school a lot, and no one seemed to know why.  There were rumors that he was sick, or that his parents traveled all the time, but we never really knew for sure.  I only remember him being in class for a few weeks of fifth grade, and a handful of days of sixth grade before another of his famously long absences.

A few months into the school year, we finally learned what had happened to him.  Our teacher, Mr. G (which, incidentally, stood for ‘Growcock’; I’ve written about him before), brought in a copy of the newspaper and read us a story from the front page about how the boy had died from leukemia.  “What’s loo-keem-uh—what’s that?” someone asked.  Mr. G explained to us that it’s a form of cancer that spreads through the inside of your bones, and that it’s extremely rare in children, but devastating when it does appear.  He went on to read that our classmate’s teenage brother donated some of his own bone marrow to help the boy’s cause and hopefully give him a new lease on life, but two days before he was scheduled to be released from the hospital, he lapsed into a coma and died.  He was eleven years old, as was most of the rest of our class.  We were dumbfounded.  He was dead?  How was that even possible?  I found myself feeling secretly relieved at the news, since When Bad Things Happen To Bad People It’s Good, at least in a kid’s mind.  As far as I was concerned, justice had been served.  I also found myself wishing, in my little heart of hearts, that some of my other tormentors would be similarly dealt with, by God or whoever.

I had forgotten about all of this until my friend reminded me of the boy during my last trip to Yakima.  Somehow he came up in conversation—I’m not entirely sure how—but we were talking about our grade-school teachers, since my friend had just recently run into one of them at the grocery store.  The strange thing (one of the many) about this story is that the boy’s legacy lives on to this day, since he happened to be born into an extremely famous sports family.  They’re so famous, in fact, that I won’t even write his name because it’s unusual and you may very well recognize it.  The dad was a pitching coach, and he’s still alive.  The brother who heroically donated his bone marrow went on to be a major-league pitcher, and since his retirement from baseball, he seems to have recently started a multi-level marketing business in Canada, which is a bit strange.  A third brother went on to be a professional pitcher as well.  Since I don’t follow sports whatsoever, and I haven’t since I was a kid, I had no idea how famous they all are, so I when I typed their names into FamousSearchEngine, I was shocked by how many results came up, and by the fact that almost every article mentioned the boy who had died so tragically from leukemia, all those years ago, and almost every interview featured one of the family members saying how they don’t go a day without thinking of him.  But I knew him, and he was cruel.  He was more than just an abstraction in a news story; more than just a little halo in a hospital room.

Yakima is a town from which very few well-known people hail.  It’s a bit like Canada, in the fact that people who grow up there know the names of every famous Canadian, and they can rattle them all off on cue.  It’s a secret society.  Those of us who grew up Yakima have the same ability to run down the list of famous Yakimaniacs from memory, and we can do that even if you wake us up in the middle of any random night.  My personal favorite is Raymond Carver, the amazing author, but there are a few others, such as comedian Sam Kinison and actor Kyle MacLachlan.  Oleta Adams, who famously sang with Tears For Fears, had my dad as her insurance agent back in the 1970′s. (Incidentally, here’s an awesome live video of Woman in Chains.)  Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson supposedly each owned a ‘getaway’ house somewhere on Scenic Drive, but none of us knew which houses they actually were.  Further down the list are a pair of Olympic gold-medalist skiers who also happen to be twin brothers, and there are a few supernumerary professional football players.  Now, at the very moment I decide to tell this dark and surreal childhood tale, I find out that there’s this legendary baseball family as well.

At this point, I would normally try to find some way to wrap this up in a nice little package, possibly with a ribbon and a bow, and leave it for posterity, but I don’t know that I can do that in this particular instance.  I should, of course, mention that despite my mixed feelings at the time, I hope my former classmate rests in peace, and my heart definitely goes out to the family now, who are clearly still dealing with the grief and the legacy of this thirty-year-old tragedy, which never quite seems to go away.

I still have my ticket stub floating around here somewhere.  It always turns up when I’m not looking for it, but it disappears again on the rare occasions that I need it.  I realize that this entry would be slightly more compelling if I could provide photographic proof, but for now, you’ll just have to take my word that I still have it.

That night at the dinner table, Dad gave us his equivalent of a warning.  “Now, British comedy tends to be a bit. . .blue, so they may say things that you guys aren’t used to hearing, and make some crude jokes.”

“Yeah, Dad, we know what to expect.  We’ve watched Monty Python for years, and they’re definitely not ‘blue’ or whatever.”

“Is there an opening act?”

“Yes.”

The present-day version of me will now step in and tell you that there was indeed an opening act, but we’d never heard of them, either before or since.  They were quite terrible.  In fact, I can remember only one line of their boring sketch comedy routines:   someone yelling, in a mock-drunken stupor, “Start the fuckin’ car!“  Oh, the hilarity.

“Well,” Dad continued, “I’m sure you guys will be fine, but don’t be too surprised if blah blah blue blah blah—”  I don’t even remember the rest of what he said, actually.  I was much too excited to finish dinner and get downtown.

Dad drove us to the Masonic Temple and dropped us off by the door.  We waited in line, everyone buzzing with excitement, until the doors finally opened and the line of people was let in.  It was the first live comedy show we’d ever seen, and we expected to see Graham peeking out from behind a curtain or, if we were really lucky, sitting on one of the metal folding chairs in the audience somewhere.  We kept glancing around the room, hoping for a sighting.  The opening act came out and did their thing, and like I said, they were terrible.  The audience dutifully clapped, and some people even laughed a bit, but we thought it seemed like a mistake to have an opening act for a colossus like Graham Chapman.  Anyone coming between us and him was an unwelcome distraction.

After what seemed like forty-five minutes (because it probably was) of torturous comedy, Graham came out on stage.  He received a thunderous standing ovation before he settled into his part of the show.  It wasn’t a comedy performance, as such.  He mostly told stories, some of which were funny and some of which were not.  He talked about his new Dangerous Sports Club, which involved lots of skydiving and things, and warranted a longish slide show.  (I think Douglas Adams was in the DSC as well; I seem to recall him being in a picture or two in the slide show.)  Graham talked quite a bit about Monty Python, obviously, and told us a great story about how during the final season of Flying Circus, the censors started to suspect that one of the members was homosexual.  One of them was, of course, and it was Graham, although he was still publicly in the closet at the time.  But when the Pythons kept getting letters from the BBC saying You Guys Really Need To Do Something About This Homosexual Problem, it all came down at the exact same time that John Cleese decided to leave the group.  The remaining members took the funny opportunity to write to the BBC:  “Thank you for bringing this to our attention.  We have discovered the offending member, and he has since been sacked.”

My favorite moment of the show, however, was during the question-and-answer session near the end of the evening.  Most of the questions were the usual variety of softballs like, “Do you miss being in Monty Python?” or “How hard is it to get into comedy?”, but one guy stood up and asked, “What’s a jindiggot?”

“A what?”

“A jindiggot.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“But you said it.”

“Er, I don’t. . .think I did.”  Graham was gamely trying to answer the guy, but by this time, everyone was looking at each other in a what-in-the-world-is-this-guy-talking-about way.  We all turned and looked at him as he started to really get nervous.

“Yeah, you did.  It was in The Holy Grail. . .the scene with the French guy yelling insults at King Arthur from the top of the castle.  You said, ‘You and all your silly English jindiggots.’ ”

At that point, everyone realized what he was talking about, and we all burst into peals of laughter.  The French knight couldn’t pronounce the word ‘knights’, so it sounded like ‘ken-NIG-ots.”  This guy had misheard the line and wondered for years what a ‘jindiggot’ was.  Now Graham was performing in HIS town, and answering HIS question, which must have seemed like the most amazing opportunity in history.

“Um,” Graham said diplomatically, “there seems to be a slight misunderstanding.”  The audience was howling by now, as Graham had to good-naturedly explain the joke that everyone else in the world knew so well.  Furthermore, it was John Cleese who had spoken the line, not Graham.  Graham was King Arthur, standing at the base of the castle and the opposite end of the conversation, being taunted by Cleese’s French knight.  As the audience continued to laugh, the guy realized his mistakes and slunk low in his seat, presumably praying for a quick (and hopefully invisible) death.  That was definitely the highlight of the night, and no one had any further questions, so Graham took the opportunity to wrap up the show.  He thanked us and walked off to another thunderous standing ovation, after which he came bounding across the stage like a rabbit, with his fingers raised next to his head like rabbit ears.

I don’t think anyone knew yet that Graham had cancer.  When he died three years later, there were rumors of AIDS, but they proved to be unfounded.  The world was stunned; he wasn’t even fifty years old.  The other Pythons are all still alive and presumably well, but I’m pretty sure they’ve never been to Portland.  It was a huge honor to have been able to see him here, and I certainly won’t forget it.

R.I.P., Graham.  Happy Monty Python Day.

It’s been a while since I wrote, a fact for which I must apologize, but I had to take a bit of a hiatus to see how everything was going to pan out.  Three weeks later, inertia has settled over me, and I feel like I’m getting too far behind.  I do have other things I want to write about, too, but I feel I should  wrap up this story first.

The DUI was dropped, which was an obvious choice since I wasn’t even impaired.  The related charge of reckless driving was also dropped, but they did decide to charge me with careless driving, which amounts to about the same thing as a speeding ticket.  They cited me for a wide turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, which seems ridiculously trumped up, but they also agreed to lower the price of the ticket from six hundred dollars to two hundred since I had a clean record.  I decided to plead guilty and quit while I was ahead.

A friend took the liberty of finding me in one of those newspapers that publishes mug shots, which I thought was humiliating but also kinda funny.  At least they don’t publish peoples’ names.  I thought it was funny until yesterday, when it occurred to me that while I may not care too much about ephemeral newspapers, I should probably see what’s out there online.  I typed my name, and the first two results featured my mug shot.  My blood turned to ice.  Fucking hell, I thought, that’s the last thing I need. I e-mailed both of the web sites to have them remove the offending pages.  It’s insult to injury, if you ask me.

Let’s hope that’s the end of the story.  I’ll be quite happy when this stupid incident is nothing but a distant memory.

It turned out to be a particularly good flow show, too, if I do say so myself. I thought we were totally on our game, and we were playing songs that really complemented each other and went together well. At three o’clock in the morning, when the show was over, we gave each other a hug and went our separate ways. We’d been doing the show since midnight, and I’d been out at a dinner/drinks/movie night with a couple other friends earlier in the evening, so I was definitely looking forward to going home to bed.

As soon as I left the station and came to the traffic light at the end of the block, there was a guy in dark clothing who surprised me by walking across the intersection against my green light. I had to swerve a bit in order to avoid him, which sent my heart racing. I turned onto Couch, and then Grand, heading toward home. Around the point where the freeway crosses Grand, a guy was crossing against that light as well. He was slowly pushing a shopping cart across the street, and he was very difficult to see in the darkness. Right before my turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, there was a construction cone in the edge of my lane, so I had to maneuver to avoid hitting it. All of these obstacles turned a normally tranquil late-night drive into a very nerve-wracking event.

As soon as I turned onto Lloyd, I saw police lights come on behind me. I pulled over right away. “Do you know why we stopped you tonight?”

“I don’t, actually.”

Apparently, I had made what appeared to be a wide turn onto Lloyd, and they’d noticed my swerves for ShoppingCartGuy and the construction cone, and assumed that I had been drinking. I had been, yes, but not for many hours, and I hadn’t been home to brush my teeth so it was still on my breath, though the effects had all but worn off. Suffice it to say that my tiredness and nervousness caused me to fail the standing-on-one-foot test, though, so they placed me under arrest and sat me in the back of the police car. They confiscated my laptop and had my car towed.

Speaking of my car, an important tidbit in this story has to do with the fact that the interior smells like marijuana, and it has since long before I owned it. I’m well-known in my social circles for my stance on marijuana. I’ve voted for it to be legalized a number of times, particularly for medical uses, but I don’t smoke it myself, and to this day I still never have. I didn’t know the car smelled like that when I bought it, but whenever the weather is rainy (and this is Portland, after all, so it’s always rainy), the smell is particularly pungent and strong. I’ve tried to scrub the interior, I’ve pulled the panels off and cleaned inside the doors, I’ve pulled up the carpet in the back to clean underneath it, and still the smell persists. I’ve half-joked about taking it to a K-9 police unit and having a dog sniff the car to find the source of the smell, so I can get rid of it, because I don’t like the smell of pot, and I don’t like the impression of me that it gives people when they ride in my car.

One of the officers noticed the smell when he was searching the car, and he walked to the door of the police car, poked his head in and told me, “Hey, your car really smells like marijuana. Are we gonna find something in there? If you take a urine test, are you gonna turn up positive?” I smiled and told them that no, they weren’t and that I don’t smoke, and that’s just the way my car has always smelled. He didn’t believe me; no one ever does. They drove me downtown for processing and further questioning. By this time, it was approximately four in the morning, and I had no idea what was going to happen to me. I answered their questions, and took all of their tests, while they filled in the paperwork. They gave me a breath test, which registered “.00″, which made the two officers very suspicious, so they decided to get a third opinion from their drug specialist. I was ushered into a cement and steel holding cell with a long wooden bench. I sat down and was amazed to see that even in a police holding cell, people will still attempt to carve their initials in a wooden bench.

DrugSpecialist appeared in the doorway, and ushered me to a chair next to his desk. He took my vital signs and blood pressure, and had me perform more stringent variations of the tests I had performed on the street for the two other officers. I had to close my eyes, tip my head back, and touch a finger to my nose repeatedly. I had to walk a straight line. I had to stand on one leg and count the seconds until he told me to stop. Each series of rapid-fire instructions was punctuated with, “Do you understand the question?” I easily passed all of these tests. He gave me a barrage of eye exams and asked me lots of medical- and drug-related questions. I answered all of them truthfully (I’m not on any medications, I don’t use drugs, I don’t intend to harm myself, I’m not suicidal, etc.) and they put me back into the holding cell while they conferred with each other about my mystifying results. It seemed to them that my stories all checked out, and that I was telling the truth; I wasn’t drunk, I was just tired and nervous. At about five-thirty, I think they decided that they were satisfied, and I was not the threat that they had originally perceived. They each made it a point to tell me that nothing like this had ever happened before in their many years of experience. One of them went so far as to sit down and say, “I don’t get it. I don’t know how you ‘blew a zero’, when I could smell alcohol. Your car smells like marijuana, and you say you don’t smoke. I believe you, but we’ll have to wait for your urine test to come back before we know for sure. You’ve been nothing but cooperative, but you have to look at this from our point of view. You’re a one-in-a-million case.”

They somewhat apologetically handcuffed me again, not because they felt they needed to but because the law said they had to, and they led me to a room where a different man frisked me and told to exchange my steel-toed Doc Martens for small, uncomfortable slippers. The original two officers again took me through a maze of electronically locked doors. “Sometimes people run,” one of them said, “but you don’t seem like a runner.”

The other one continued. “Assuming that you’re telling the truth, and your urine test comes back clean (and I’m sure it will), this case against you will disappear. You won’t have anything on your record, and it’ll be like this never happened. Your car’s been towed, so you’ll have to deal with that, but the rest of this. . .” He trailed off. They opened the door to the waiting room, unclasped my handcuffs, and gave me one of the strangest looks I’ve ever encountered. They still couldn’t believe the way this was turning out. I should mention that they were totally cool and respectful with me, and they did a great job, especially considering the bizarre circumstances. I thanked them and walked into the fingerprint room. The fingerprint attendant was a very friendly, almost jovial guy. “Did you know that you have what looks like eczema on your thumb?” I didn’t know that. “It’s not red or anything, but see how you don’t have much of a fingerprint there? That’s a classic sign of eczema.” Interesting. At this point, I thought the whole ordeal would be over soon. The fingerprint guy said, “Okay, looks like we’re done. Only four to six more hours, and you’ll be out of here.” Four to six more hours?

It was six o’clock in the morning now, and I was told to wash my hands and go sit in the waiting room, which reminded me of the old Firesign Theatre joke about the butler ushering a man into his home. He told the man, “You can sit here in the waiting room, or you can wait here in the sitting room.” There was a mens’ side and a womens’ side of the room, which were divided by a short cement wall. The room was gray on gray, with government-green highlights. There were two televisions mounted on the walls, and the sound was only turned up on the mens’ television. Sitting there with me was an assortment of serious drug users and repeat criminals. I kept thinking, BUT I PASSED ALL THE TESTS. I SHOULDN’T EVEN BE HERE. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, while avoiding the burnouts and miscreants I was trapped in there with. On the television was one of Dick Clark’s blooper shows, followed by an ‘urban’ sitcom, followed by Married With Children (a meth-head behind me blurted out, “That’s what I’M talkin’ about,” when MWC came on), followed by an hour-long show about a guy who pretended to be developmentally disabled so that he could run in the Special Olympics and beat their champion, becoming a champion himself and winning a bet for his partner in crime. It was painful.

Around eight o’clock in the morning, they finally called my name. I staggered wearily to the desk and faced another barrage of questions. The woman used the same loud, deliberate tone that they all use, after years of dealing with deadbeats and cretins. “We just need to confirm your identity, okay? Do you understand the question?” You have GOT to be kidding me. Yes. “If you have any friends or family members, we need to call them and talk to them, okay? Do you understand the question?” JESUS CHRIST; I’M NOT ONE OF THESE CRETINS! Yes, I understand the question. The only phone number I know by heart anymore is my mom’s land line, since people rarely have to manually dial phones anymore, so I gave the attendant my mom’s number and name, adding, “This ought to be a nice surprise for her.” The woman told me that it wouldn’t be much longer now. Did I have any questions?

“Yes, actually.” I tried very hard to formulate this sentence in a way that wouldn’t seem flippant. “I passed all of my tests with the officers just now, so I guess I’m wondering why I’m still here.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but you’ve been booked, so you have to follow the procedures just like everybody else.” The phrase ‘just like everybody else’ echoed through my head as I made a quick scan of everybody else in the room. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

I glumly walked back, slumped in my seat, and noticed that Not Just Another Teen Movie was playing on the television now. A staff member went around and provided us with a sack lunch that consisted of a dry bologna sandwich, a piece of dry coffee cake, a hard boiled egg, an orange, and a tiny carton of milk that proclaimed it was “best if used before 04-08.” In my delirium, I thought the date meant April of 2008, and that they were feeding us three-year-old milk. I sniffed the milk nervously before sipping it ever so slowly. With all the recent milk issues my stomach has had, I hoped to God that I wouldn’t explode vomit all over the room. Luckily, I managed to keep it all down. I left the egg and the orange sitting in the bag on the chair next to me, until an attendant wearing a prison-orange jumpsuit took and deposited the bag in the garbage can.

I sat for another two hours, head bowed and eyes closed, barely able to maintain my rapidly declining sense of equilibrium. Suddenly, a little after ten o’clock in the morning, someone came in and announced quietly to the staff, “We have a release.”

“A release?”

“Yeah, for [my last name]. It came in just after you guys showed up the last time.” Incidentally, I should note that ‘the last time’ (the last THREE times, in fact) was for a group of guys who were lining up to have their clothes checked in, so that they could be issued the clothing for their stint in jail. I had been expecting to hear my name each time, and each time it wasn’t called, my nervousness intensified. When they told me I was released, I was too tired to even feel relieved. The man told me to follow the black line, and I was ushered through another maze of electronic doors until I was finally let out to the room where I collected my phone, keys (minus my car key), car insurance card, and debit card.

“I had a laptop, too,” I told the man, “and a bunch of CD’s and a black scarf. Would that stuff be here?”

That stuff turned out to be in the Property Room, which wasn’t the property room I was standing in front of. “You can ask the gentleman over there about the Property Room.” I walked to the gentleman over there, who was seated on a high chair alongside a security checkpoint near the main door to the building. I was almost outside.

“I had a laptop and a few other things in a backpack, and I need to find the Property Room.”

“Oh, that’s not here,” he told me, rattling off a series of rapid-fire directions. “Gooutsideandturnleftandit’sinthissamebuilding, andthengointhedoorandtalktotheguyinthere.”

“Uhhh. . .errr. . .I spent the night here, and I’m a bit sleep-deprived,” I stammered. “So. . .out the door, turn left, and in this building. What’s the department name?” He told me what it was. I thanked him and walked out into the blinding blue morning. After staring at grey and green for the last seven hours, the beauty and color of downtown Portland was overwhelming. I called my mom’s cell phone, but she was unable to answer. I talked to John on the phone for a while, recounting the highlights of the previous hours. I got on the train and headed toward home. Luckily I live close enough that commuting to downtown and back is easy. Mom called back just as I was stepping off the train, and I told her that despite what the call must have sounded like, the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, and that everyone knew I would be cleared of this charge in no time.

I have a court date this week, and I have to get my car and computer and everything back, and those things will surely cost money to resolve. I didn’t need any of this to happen, since I have enough happening already, but I’ll just keep being honest, and I’ll keep doing what I have to do to keep my name clear.

I can’t wait for this ridiculous nightmare to be over.

But Niece doesn’t have to know about any of that for quite a while, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t want to burden her with that knowledge, or to use the influence I have over her (as the ‘cool’ uncle) to sway her in that negative direction.  I want her to have the best school experiences she can, for as long as she can.  School’s hard enough without your uncle telling you how crappy it is.  But I do think about it from time to time, and I feel like fifth grade was the first real low point in my life, and that’s when something changed in me forever.

In sixth grade, I had a teacher with the very unfortunate surname of Growcock.  On the first day of school, he would quickly tell the students, “Call me ‘Mister G’.”  Thankfully, he was one of the best, nicest and most memorable teachers I had during elementary school, which helped bring me back from the shell shock of the year before.  He was always quick with a joke, but we knew to take him seriously also.  Each year, he would take the entire sixth-grade class to see a Harlem Globetrotters game in the nearby college town of Ellensburg, which was a tradition that all the younger kids looked forward to.

On Valentines’ Day that year, all of us kids made cards for each other, boys and girls alike.  That was the last year we did that before we all hit puberty the following year, which meant that valentines were out of the question.  One of those valentine folders survived in my childhood box, too, but I’m not sure if it’s the one from fifth or sixth grade.  What I do remember about that day was the folders we all made.  We cut out construction paper and drew a bunch of designs all over it – usually hearts or poems or whatever – and then we taped them to the side of our desks so that people could come around and place cards into them.  One kid, M. Reynolds, wrote a poem on his folder that quoted a popular commercial of the day:  “Reynolds Wrap:  the best wrap around.”  M.’s writing skills were a bit lacking, however, so he misspelled the word ‘wrap’, which meant that his Valentines’ poem was proudly displayed on the side of his desk, in huge bold letters, for all to see.

“REYNOLDS RAPE, THE BEST RAPE AROUND.”

My desk was right next to M.’s, which meant that I got to see that gem in progress before anyone else did, and I knew that it might get him in trouble if anybody else saw it.  I wasn’t necessarily a friend of M.’s, but I felt that I should mention it to Mr. G., and somehow stick up for M. at the same time.  When the bell rang and everyone else, including M., ran outside for recess, I walked up to Mr. G.’s desk and told him I had something to show him.  “I’m sure this is a total accident, since M. isn’t very good at spelling, but I thought you should see this, cause it’s funny.  I don’t want him to get in trouble or anything, though.”  We had a good laugh, and he told me he’d take care of it.  When the class came back inside from recess, M. had crossed out every instance of ‘rape’ and replaced it with the correct word.

Incidentally, I’m sure Mr. G. knew how lucky he was that he taught younger kids, because with the last name Growcock, teaching any older age group would provide decades of ridicule for the poor guy.   Maybe he consciously chose to teach lower grade levels for that very reason.  One of my current friends, who was in Mr. G.’s class at the same time I was, recently joked, “Man, I’d be changing that shit to Smith.“  I couldn’t agree more.  I did a quick search for Mr. G. online, and it seems that he’s still alive and living in central Washington state, although he’s almost eighty years old now.  I hope he continued to enjoy teaching, and I hope he’s had a good life.  I probably owe my sanity that year to him, although I promptly lost it again the next year, as soon as I entered junior high.