Telltale signs
It was right after this party that a group of more criminal and derelict so-called friends began to frequent our living room. The first was a blond in her late twenties. She was pretty but had been prettier, with the first wrinkles starting to show on her well-tanned face. She had a trim, athletic build and would sit at the same table almost every afternoon at our bar nursing her pitcher of beer, which she made last twice as long by continually adding ice from another pitcher, which in the heat of the afternoon made good sense. She often wore tight jeans and had the strange but sexy habit of straddling the bench she sat on (like a picnic table) and moving her butt back and forth along it in a slow, even motion, as if she had an itch, about a foot in each direction, interesting to watch.
She was lively and talkative and pleasant. She went to the beach every morning and didn’t seem to need to work. We developed an acquaintance and she started visiting us in the evenings, always enlivening our small company. The problem wasn’t her but her boyfriend, who began accompanying her to our house. He was a large, blond ruffian, loud and boastful, a heavy beer drinker, wearing only shorts and sandals (all he owned) reminding me of a Viking. If the beers were available (and they most often were) he would drink until he passed out on the couch, then slouch against whoever was next to him and begin to snore. We’d still be up and talking, but neither his girlfriend shaking him nor any of us were able to wake him. I don’t know why she loved him. I never saw them leave together. So that’s where he stayed, embarrassingly, till we called it quits and turned out the lights, his girlfriend wandering off alone. He would wake up in the middle of the night and disappear in the dark. I think he slept on the beach. His only money came from her or schemes, definitely criminal.
One day he asked to use our stove and a pan. Without thinking I said ‘sure’. When I walked past him a half hour later I noticed he was cooking butter and egg whites, oregano and some finely ground up pot leaves from our blender and cooling it in the fridge. He was making fake hash to sell to the ignorant Navy recruits who flocked to our beach, looking for drugs and adventure on their first time off. But he’d done this so many times he was marked by the local police. Unfortunately for me, his frequent visits to my house also marked it out to the police.
But I can’t point the finger at just one. Besides him we let in a whole crew of petty criminals and drug addicts. Harry O. at this point left our driveway, saying the place was getting too wild. That, coming from him, should have been a clear warning signal of our judgment and home going astray. I had other distractions. A sandy-haired, tall and skinny mother of two, our neighbor, would drop by and spend an inordinate amount of time in our bathroom, where she would shoot up, leaving needles and blood stains on the sink.
But before this she asked me one afternoon to accompany her to a Walmart for some shopping. She’d kissed me on the beach the night before and I easily agreed. We drove there in my car and she half-filled a shopping cart with clothes, sundries, bathroom items, a hundred dollars’ worth of cheap things and proceeded to the check-out where she produced a credit card and some ID. The cashier, a young girl, bags the stuff, but right before handing over the receipt says there’s a problem with the card and that she has to see the manager. She leaves us at the counter. My nervous companion says she’s feeling sick, asks me for my car keys and rushes out of the store. I stand there like Laurel of Laurel and Hardy, wondering what’s going on, mouth agape. The cashier returns and says everything’s fine, asking me where my friend is.
I nonchalantly reply that she had to use the bathroom. I take the four large bags, the returned I.D. and, when I see the car gone, sit at a bus stop across the street till I catch one home. She’s sitting in my living room and has told everyone in a panic that I’ve been arrested. The credit card and I.D. were stolen. I walked into the room, tired with carrying all the bags, dropped them on the floor and berated her for ditching me and stealing my car. The rest of the company just laughed at the scene. They couldn’t care less that I escaped but now that I was back, asked me to join them in drinking, and blind to their callousness I did. I even let her come over several more times, but that was the end of any possible relationship. Junkies often nip any chance of life improvement in the bud.
I remember why the cashier acted the way she did. Many people involved in criminal activity get caught because they go into panic mode at the mere sight of a cop, who may be pulling them over only to mention a broken taillight. In this case the young cashier noticed that her paper booklet of stolen credit card numbers wasn’t the current week’s version, so she went to the manager’s office to get it. Our number wasn’t on it and everything was fine. But if I’d bolted out along with her, we would have been chased, caught and with the I.D. checked more carefully, arrested. Always keep a poker face and never show your cards until the last minute. The ignorance of your adversary will astound you. This I found true on more than one occasion.
What I don’t know is why I allowed myself to fall in with such wretched company. I can only guess it was pure ignorance of the darker sides human character at that stage of my youth or the novelty of these situations, or a bit of both.
