April 26. 2008 (revised June 30, 2008)
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�Well, um, okay, I��
�Don�t be nervous. Take your time.�
I was filming him myself, with no assistants. He was sitting in the room he called his den. Kris was standing off-camera, watching him with her usual look of total devotion. The twins had gone with their grandmother to see that girly-girl movie Molly Mae: Farmhouse Girl.
�Well�I had spent the night partying,� he said. �It was Friday night, after all, and I always did some serious partying on Friday night. Anyway, around one in the morning, I ended up at this house party, I don�t remember how I�d heard about it. I do remember I was drunk, but not too drunk. I wasn�t any drunker than usual for a Friday night, I want to clarify that.�
�Okay, you�ve clarified that,� I said with a chuckle. �So what happened at the party?�
�Well, I was trying to hook up with this girl I knew, Darcy Reynolds? But she didn�t have any interest in me. �Piss off!� she told me before walking away.
�Well, that hurt my feelings a lot. Couldn�t she see I needed sex? I had to get even with her, but how?...Then I remembered she drove an expensive convertible. So I went outside to look for it. I found it parked two blocks away. The roof and the windows were down. I had planned on keying her car, but I suddenly had a better idea. Something more appropriate to the situation.
�So I grabbed a chair from a nearby porch. I put the chair on the curb next to the driver�s-side door. I stood on the chair. I�unzipped my pants, and I proceeded to piss off, so to speak, all over the seats, the floor, the dashboard, even on the Garfield air freshener she had hanging from the radio knob. Not Garfield in Pittsburgh, Garfield the cat? I�ve always hated that cat.�
Kurt laughed, and so did Kris and me.
�I�d drunk a lot of beer, so I soaked that car good,� he continued. �Then I thought, as long as I was there, I might as well poop off, too. So I pulled down my pants, I pulled down my underpants, and I squatted over the car, butt first, but I mustn�t have been eating very much fiber, for I could only manage to poop one small turd�excuse the language, Kris. Just as the turd fell out of my butt, wouldn�t you know, a police car pulled up.
�Two cops got out. The first one, who I later found out was Officer Brant, the first one said �Step down from the chair.� Well, I didn�t want to disobey a cop, so I stepped down from the chair. I stood there looking at them with my hands in the air and my pants around my ankles. I didn�t threaten the cops in any way, didn�t say anything or make any sudden moves, but Officer Brant��
Kurt sighed.
�Officer Brant took out his Taser and shot me in the leg�.I should explain to your audience how that worked. He shot two barbs into my leg, barbs connected by, like, trailing wires. Then he shot all that electricity into me, 50,000 volts, for maybe five seconds. I felt, like, intense pain in every molecule of me, even the molecules that hadn�t been formed yet. My muscles contracted and I fell on the ground, unable to move or say anything, the prongs still stuck in my leg. A couple seconds, or a couple million seconds, went by. Then the other cop, who I later found out was Officer Neeley, he said �My turn,� and shot me in the side with his Taser, sending another 50,000 volts into me for five seconds.
�The cops handcuffed me, picked me up, and threw me into the back of their car, not even bothering to wipe my butt or put my pants back on, because I was obviously in no condition to do either. Anyway, I spent the night in jail. The next morning, I was arraigned on one count of indecent exposure, one count of public intoxication, um, one count of resisting arrest, two counts of assaulting a police officer, two counts of vandalism�one each for the pee and poop, apparently�and, oh, one count of petty theft for taking that porch chair without permission.�
�Oh boy,� I said.
�Yeah, oh boy. Anyway, I immediately left school, as you know. A few weeks later, the D.A. decided to be a nice guy and offer me a deal, which I took. I pled guilty to indecent exposure, public intoxication, and both counts of vandalism. I had to pay a three-thousand-dollar fine and serve a year on probation, after which my record would be cleared. Oh, and I couldn�t pursue legal action against anyone regarding the incident. That part of the deal sucked, but I had no choice. Otherwise, I would have gone to trial on all the charges, and since there were no witnesses, it would have come down to the cops� word against mine. Who would the jury believe�two police officers, or a drunken kid who used someone else�s car as a toilet?�
�Uh-huh.�
�I would have gone to trial if I�d been able to afford a high-powered legal team.�
�Uh-huh.�
He glanced at Kris.
�Actually, in a way, I�m glad the incident happened. I was a real jerk in college, a lazy jerk, I drank all the time and treated women like garbage. I treated everyone like garbage.�
�You were nice to me, Kurt.�
�Well, just to you, I guess. Anyway, as I sat in the jail cell after the incident, feeling numb all over from the Tasering, I knew it was my own fault I ended up there. Sure, the cops shouldn�t have Tasered me, but I shouldn�t have vandalized Darcy�s car just because she wouldn�t sleep with me. I didn�t know what else to do, so for the first time, I talked to God, really talked to him. I�d never been religious, but now I promised him I would change my life for the better if he made sure I didn�t go to prison. And I didn�t go to prison, so I changed my life. I left college because its surroundings were a negative influence. I resumed my computer studies at��
�Are you religious now?�
�I would say so. Kris and I go to church each Sunday at the Unitarian church in Oakland.�
�I�d always been spiritual, but I�d never gone to church until meeting him nine years ago,� Kris said.
�We started going to that particular church five years ago. We�d heard good things about it, like how friendly it was. And it was friendly, and still is.�
�Uh-huh,� I said.
The next day at work, I received a bill in the mail from D-Gear South, that electronics distributor in Florida. �We ask that you please remit the entire balance below within ten (10) business days of�� I fed the bill into the paper shredder. How could I pay them if I didn�t have their bill?
Then one of my interns, Amy Cohen, walked into my office and asked if she could have a word with me. I had an arrangement with PAMA, the Pittsburgh Academy for the Media Arts, in which students like her would do unpaid work at Frequent Zoom Productions for class credit. But she wanted a different type of credit. �I want directing credit for the Granny Rambo ad,� she said. �Sole directing credit.�
�Why should you get any credit? You didn�t direct that ad. I did.�
�Excuse me? You weren�t even on the set!�
�I directed by telephone, remember?�
�The only directing you did was to tell me not to suck.�
�And you did follow my directing, so that makes me the director.�
�Uh-huh. I�ll be sure to tell PAMA that.�
�You do that.�
�I�ll be sure to tell the Viddys that.�
�You do that. Just don�t forget to resign first, to save me the trouble of firing you.�
�Well, I like to cause as much trouble as possible, so you�d better fire me.�
�Okay, you�re fired. No class credit for you, babe. Pack up your stuff and leave.�
She walked out of the office.
Unitarians are cool. Jews are cool. Atheists are cool....Fiction, Home.
� 2007-2008 David V. Matthews