Brett and Leslie: Chapter 11

A Busterous Gathering

Exactly as I would again do, decades later, when something even worse happened in the comfort of my own home, at one point I turned into a stand-up comedian. When people pick up your mortality and shove it in your face like you’re a puppy that shat on the floor, there’s something irresistibly comical.

Ha, ha.

But layered between the hysteria and the initial formless confusion, there was a moment’s terror.

At first I couldn't stop looking up and down at the officer who had me at gunpoint—from his unmistakable erection to his firearm, up and down again, down and up, the cylinder below clearly very excited that he got to brandish the cylinder above.

As my drunken sleep cleared out to make room for the fear, I stopped trying to say “What’s going on?!” and began to emit a formless stammer.

By reply, he looked more nervous. Did he want to shoot me? Did he want not to shoot me? What would make a good excuse to shoot me? Maybe it would have helped if I had the slightest idea what he was doing there.

Shouting, from everywhere, continued, and footsteps thumped up the stairs. On my knees, on the mattress, I glanced around our living room and kind of saw the cops’ point… I had never agreed to that wall stuck full of throwing stars, but from an outsider’s point of view, it did kinda make us look like, on average, scumbags.

Also, I was passed out drunk on a mattress in the living room. Which was not illegal, but not the act of an upstanding citizen, either. And then there was the giant altar of televisions… So our slightly scummy, predawn living room had been turned into a churning, shadowy hell of demons in blue polyester.

OK, so we were being arrested for something. What, I hadn’t the foggiest. But unlike the Kids These Days—or the ones who get featured on YouTube for scumbag heroism, anyway—I wasn’t about to argue. They had a bunch of guns in my face, plus that space-age-fabric-clad erection; it seemed sage to go where they put me, keep my paws in the air, and shut my mouth for as long as I was allowed.

It sure wasn’t dignified, and I was scared they were going to blast my face off anyway. But once in a while, your survival instinct—Kids, are you listening?—has got to be stronger than your petty pride.

However, there are some instincts that are at least as strong as survival—and as I slowly pieced reality back together, my giggling began.

I wasn’t the only one. I heard cops shouting, but I also heard Brett and Leslie cackling, like a Greek chorus of drunken girls. My hands were quickly, roughly wrenched behind my back. I think our captors thought there would be a lot more of us to round up, so instead of the good ole steel handcuffs like you copy from the TV when you want to play bondage and domination, they had a huge roll of ugly, yellow-plastic wrist ties.

Leslie was complaining about it as they herded us into the kitchen.

“Yellow! Yellow plastic TWIST-TIES?!” he howled. “I look like I’ve been kidnapped by the price gun at K-Mart! What kind of stickup is this?! You guys suck!”

If it had happened ten or fifteen years later, he would have been even more aesthetically annoyed—assuming they let him keep his phone long enough to document a selfie. As it was, I don’t know whom he was hoping to impress with his handcuff stylings. Maybe he had a high school girl hiding in the bushes.

More likely, Leslie was as hysterical as I was. For all we knew, Paul had framed us for a murder.

But as the polyester demons in their dozens began to tear down shelves, rip posters from the wall, and joyously chuck random objects into a pile in the center of each room, it became pretty clear what they were looking for: Drugs.

The fact that none of us could afford anything better with which to damage ourselves than Huber beer began to make us feel a bit cocky.

Even Goober felt clever: “Hey! Bonehead! Do we LOOK like we know where to find heroin?” He had a point; with his barrel belly and blank eyes, he still looked like he had fallen off the turnip truck yesterday.

“If I keep my twist-ties on, can I go back to sleep?” Smacky whined. We hadn’t seen him for a few days; he’d picked a bad time to stop falling asleep behind the bar.

“Yeah—Jesus, what is it—six AM?” Brett mused, giggling through a theatrical yawn. I looked down and noticed for the first time how pigeon-toed Brett was. I had been too busy being irritated by Leslie’s more duck-like stride. But they had laced our giant twist-ties together in a clot, so I had nothing else to look at.

“Ha ha— I bet THESE jerkoffs had to get out of bed at ass o’clock!” Leslie said, nodding his head at the cop who had to babysit us while the rest of them ruined our house. The officer re-folded his arms. “And for what?”

“I guess there’s guinea pig turds upstairs they can play with,” I chortled.

“Ohhh… Do you think they’re looking for Tony?” Smacky whispered.

“Ooooooohhhhhhhhh,” we all said.

“Ha ha, you’re six months too late, ya clowns!” Leslie crowed.

“Shut up, dickhead.” Brett elbowed him in the ribs. “Cops are like feral dogs, you don’t want to make eye contact. Or say anything they might understand.”

That was a big laugh line—look, when you’re hysterical, everything is funny. All of a sudden you’re a sitcom studio audience.

“Ha ha, there’s nothing they can do to us!” Leslie giggled. “I’ll call them all dog-fuckers if I want! None of us have any drugs for them to find, loooooo-zuh-urrrrs!”

That’s when the cops dragged Paul into the kitchen.

I have never seen a human being look that pale; he was actually blue, like he had died and they had put an electrode up his rectum to make him shuffle into the room.

We got a look at his face and began to laugh as one.

“Took you a while, Paul!”

“They had to find him up there, in his private suite.”

“His mansion.”

“Him and his stash!”

“Tell Tony thanks!”

Everyone but Paul roared with laughter. He was silent—possibly for the first time in his life.

“You wanna trade rooms with us now, Paul?”

“Whoops—too late!”

Once in a while, it’s not too bad to be part of a mob. Fortunately for Paul, we were literally conjoined.

For him, there were real handcuffs. I couldn’t see Paul the Asshole breaking Chumpy’s grip on a food pellet, much less a giant narcotics-squad twist tie. But he was their big catch so far, apparently, and they had clearly screwed the pooch here; they weren’t taking any more chances. Except for Paul’s stash of free pot he had gotten from Tony, as far as we knew, the house was clean. Not that we didn’t want drugs—Kurt Cobain had only recently died—but at four dollars an hour, good luck with that.

And from the gloomy looks on their faces, the cops were clearly beginning to agree: Somebody had sent them on a goose chase.

I don’t know whether they were a special drug squad, or merely the locals on a field trip. I hadn’t been trained properly in journalism yet, I was probably still drunk, and I had burned my last three living brain cells on figuring out how not to do something stupid and get myself shot. I only noticed their initial enthusiasm, which—in the absence of Tony and however many bales of weed they had hoped to find in that big old closet—was fading into bitterness.

Now those three dead brain cells were busy trying to amuse myself and my roommates, and to get the maximum gloating out of Paul. Things were threatening to become dull, and who knew how long they would be searching the house?

It went on and on. I thought I heard a wall being knocked out. They had been savoring the anticipation of a massive drug bust, and all they found was Paul the Asshole! You almost can’t blame them, except…

“What is THAT noise?” I said.

“It’s my empty stomach,” Paul whined.

“No… it’s not just apes up there—they have a drug dog!” I could hear the dog’s paws, skittering; then a frustrated woof.

“Wow, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now!” Leslie cawed. “Hey Paul, you are officially their booby prize!”

“But my guinea pig is up there!” I cried. I heard littler feet, scampering, then a joyous barking.

“Is that a rat? Oh my god, these low-lifes have a rat,” said some pig upstairs.

“He’s a guinea rat!” I screamed. “Please don’t hurt him!”

“Leave that pig alone, porkers!” Leslie yelled.

“Chumpyyyyyyyy!” Brett howled.

From upstairs, we could hear the beer-drinking, friendly little creature scream in terror. Big paws scraped the floor, joyously—the dog must have him cornered. The bastards laughed.

“This isn’t funny!” I yelled. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!”

Now I started to squirm and resist. But I was tied to Brett, Leslie, and Smacky the Clown in a mass of yellow twist-ties. I could no longer hear the guinea pig; my blood ran cold. More awful laughter.

OK, tying up a bunch of drunk scumbags is one thing. You’re doing your job. It’s not a job that I could ever do. But siccing your sniffer dog on a guinea pig because you bungled a drug bust is not something I will ever forgive.

I know I’ve been waxing philosophical in most of these chapters, but as I write along and re-live things, peering round the inferno of my feelings from the time, philosophy rings hollower and hollower.

How many 21-year-olds, at the dawn of their adult life, always need to either be working or drunk?

When I remember why even my own unjust arrest seemed so goddamn funny to me, I realize that I was so depressed at the time, I was almost psychotic. I could read my little novels till my eyes fell out—I would never understand how people worked. I would never even bullshit my way into being a bellhop or a waitress. Much less a real job. I was a prisoner on an alien globe, and I entirely blamed myself. It was too nauseating to look at my feelings; my guts might spill out on the floor. The only thing I had resembling empathy for myself was my empathy for Chumpy. Some of the things that have happened more recently might have been more dramatic, but I had already been through so many grinding grey winters with so little hope—I felt like I was already about gone.

Anyway. After a couple hours of tearing up our house, they dispatched us in a string of police cars to the station—they said they needed to keep on searching overnight.

“What are you looking for? China?” said Leslie, denting his pompadour on the roof of the squad car.

“Get a shovel!” yelled Brett.

“Your animal is fine, M’am—get in the damn car.”

I took off my earring and scratched my initials in the grey painted wall of my jail cell; it seemed to be a tradition, from the looks of the thing. Like the walls of a student pizza parlor. If you get arrested in Madison, let me know if they’re still there.