strange scenes – If there is something

Agony of victory

Whenever I do something really stupid and foolhardy, I can take comfort in knowing I come by the impulse honestly. I descend from a long line of proud men whose pride has sometimes led them to undertake imprudent and reckless challenges. The line between glory and sheer stupidity can be difficult to discern. Unfortunately for myself and some of my forefathers, striving for greatness sometimes has the opposite result, often depositing one on the manure heap of ignominy.

Once I read a newspaper account of my Uncle Gus, who many generations ago was a baker in Los Angeles, California. It was 1908 and the city was still young and construction was booming. Everywhere, utility poles were erected and daring men, working high above the city, strung electric lines and telephone cables.

On the ground, residents watched the men work and marveled at their bravery. Everyone, except for my Uncle Gus, of course. He was not the least bit impressed. Spitting a large glob of tobacco juice onto the dusty ground, he told the assembled crowd, “They ain’t so special. I can climb a telephone pole as good as any lineman.”

The crowd jeered and mocked the 37-year-old baker, who was caked in flour and still wearing his apron.

Fixing his gaze on a tall, sturdy, steel pole at the corner of Amelia and Turner streets, Uncle Gus threw off his apron, grasped the pole and began his ascent. As promised, Gus scurried up the pole with twice the speed and skill of a lineman. Down below, friends and onlookers marveled at his nerve. As he neared the top of the pole, the crowd’s cheers ringing in his ears, Gus made plans to sit atop the pole and bask in his well-deserved glory.

Unaware that the lines the pole supported carried 1200 volts of electricity, “Gus threw one leg over one of the wires,” the newspaper reported. “In an instant blue flames shot out from his head, arms and legs and he fell from his lofty perch. He landed on a network of telephone wires and from them bounded to the pavement, thirty feet below. He lay as if dead and his friends notified the police station.”

Gus survived the daring stunt, suffering a compound fracture to his right leg and severe burns to his feet and hands. The glory that was nearly his evaporated in a brilliant burst of blue flames. Undoubtedly, this result caused Gus a great deal of consternation. However, Gus took comfort and was humbled by the reality that some benevolent hand reached out and broke his fall. Bounding off those telephone wires surely saved his life. Perhaps next time I’ll stick the landing, he thought, and all the glory and honor will be mine.

Strange scenes in the alley 2

A couple of nights ago, there was a car parked in front of my garage containing a young couple engaged in amorous relations. My garage doors open almost directly into the alley, leaving not so much a driveway, but a small, car-width sliver of space between the garage and the alley. Of all the thousands of discreet places in the city, it was in this space that the pair of youngsters, overcome by passion and desire, decided to dock their mid-size sedan to permit the male occupant the opportunity to dock something else.

Inside the house, I was totally oblivious to the strange vehicle and the illicit love making going on outside. That is until my wife came home and asked who was parked back by the garage. Needing to take out the trash anyway, I decided to walk back there and investigate. As I drew closer to the garage, I could tell that the car was running. Although it was dark, I figured the driver would see me approaching and tear off into the night. I rattled the trash cans a bit, hoping to get the driver’s attention, but still there was no discernible activity coming from the car. In retrospect, if the car had been rockin, I might not have bothered knockin. But I couldn’t see anyone sitting in the front seat, so I moved in closer to take a look. It was dark, but I could just make out a figure laying down in the backseat. I wondered if perhaps this was some homeless person who had pulled into this spot to take a nap. Almost every conceivable explanation flashed through my brain as I knocked on the window. But it never occurred to me that the car’s occupants were making the beast with two backs until two figures popped up, startled at my tap, tap, tapping on their Chevy Malibu door. The young man hurriedly hopped out the door on the opposite side of the car, struggling to pull up his pants.

For my part, I was a little shocked at the scene I had stumbled upon and immediately began to flip out. “What the fuck are you doing!? This is private fucking parking! You can’t do that shit here! We run a clean damn family neighborhood around here!” My wife later told me that from inside the house she could hear every word I shouted, which means my daughter and most of the neighbors could probably hear me as well. Listening to myself cursing at this young man, I paused, collected my thoughts and began to calm down. “Listen, son,” I said. “We’ve all been in your situation before, but parking in someone’s drive is a real amateur move. Any homeowner that sees a strange vehicle parked on their property is going to investigate. You’re lucky it’s me and that I’m cool. My wife wanted to call the cops. Just go find a deserted parking lot, or park behind one of the bars downtown. Nobody down there will give a second glance to a couple of lovebirds copulating in the backseat of a car. Probably happens every night. Now scram, you horny devil.”

As I stood there, proud of myself for reining in my irritation and using the situation as a teachable moment to impart some of my accumulated wisdom on the younger generation, the impassioned couple tore off down the alley and into the night, flipping me the bird and yelling “Fuck you old man” as their taillights disappeared into the darkness. I just shook my head and smiled. They may not realize it yet, but one day when they’re coupling in solitude, they’ll appreciate the wise advice that grouchy old man gave them.

Strange scenes in the alley

While cable television, Netflix and YouTube are all very well and good, sometimes the most compelling drama plays itself out in the alley next to my house. A very popular pedestrian throughway, it terminates a few blocks west of my property where it runs into a brick wall that is attached to a popular national pharmacy chain. Among the procession of shoppers, there are recurring characters that frequently shuffle by, like a gentleman who puffs on a cigarette with his right hand while carrying a case of Busch beer in his left. By my estimation, this gentleman regularly “heads for the mountains” every couple of days or so. Undistracted by the activities of the neighborhood, his stare is always fixed at a point far in the distance, like he’s sizing up some far away summit.

One day, from my kitchen window, I see a man in the back alley engaged in a heated exchange with a stop sign. Struggling to keep his feet underneath his swaying torso, the man is pointing at the sign and threatening to violently disassemble it. This particular stop sign normally minds its own business, so it is unclear why the man has such a beef with it. I’m busy working on the dishes and allow my attention to wander away from the tense standoff for a brief moment. When I again look up, it seems that in the interim the stop sign has performed some lightning-fast Karate move, leaving the belligerent fellow laying face down in a heap in the alley.

One drawback to viewing this live drama is that you cannot pause and rewind, so I’ll never know how that sign bully was brought to his knees by this normally docile stop sign. Anyway, the man lay there incapacitated and munching on gravel for quite some time. Still, from that unflattering position, he continued to curse loudly and issue violent threats. However, it appeared his arms had stopped working, because he was unable to push himself up off the ground and back onto his feet. After the thrashing he had just taken, I began to wonder whether he was in need of medical attention.

Just then, a police cruiser turned into the alley and slowly crept up on the scene. By now, three cars had driven around the dude without diverting his attention from the finer details of the asphalt on which his face now rested, but let a police car creep into the vicinity and old boy was on his feet faster than you can say “lickety-split.” The amount of time it took for this guy to go from crumpled heap to bolt upright could be measured in nanoseconds.

There must remain in modern man some primitive holdover operating independent of our five senses that can intuitively perceive a threat and generate an instantaneous physical reaction. Where it once may have perceived wild animals or enemy tribesmen, it now seems to zero in on law enforcement or killer clowns. Whatever fight or flight evolutionary forces got this guy on his feet, they were also now enabling the man, who until moments earlier was arguing with signs and lampposts, to communicate coherently enough with law enforcement that they allowed him to go on his merry way.

The officers grilled him for quite some time and undoubtedly concluded that he was drunk as hell. But since he wasn’t driving and he seemed more or less capable of walking, if not in a straight line in the general direction of his home, and since whatever grievance he had with the stop sign seemed to have resolved itself, the officers let him totter out of the alley a free man.

Much respect, “dude in the alley,’” you may never win an Oscar or even a Daytime Emmy, but, when it mattered, you gave the performance of a lifetime.