Also, I want to give a special shout-out to Mamasan, it's her birfday today--Happy Birfday from your favorite son! (She sometimes says that while I'm not really her favorite, I'm *definitely* in the top six!). And although it wouldn't be gentlemanly of me to reveal a woman's age, I will drop a little hint by telling you the two numbers involved, and leave it to my readers to figure out what order to put them in, thereby figuring out her real age. One number is a six, and the other number is a six. Again, I won't tell you which order to put them in, but my more astute readers should be able to figure it out...
Last night was fairly interesting--around eight o'clock or so I got back on the computer and logged onto my Yahoo messenger and waited for Sticky to show up. Instead of burning up the cellphone minutes with international dialing rates, we can get on the computer and do the voice chat--which is every bit as good as a phone call, except that it's free. And as a bonus, Sticky also has a webcam (although I don't), so I can see her when we talk. Well, we've discovered that we pretty much share the same brain, so once we get talking, time just flies by. She logged on a few minutes later and the next thing we knew, it was getting to be almost 3:00 am! We were doing more yawning than talking by that point, so we wrapped it up and said our goodbyes after over six hours of interesting conversation.
I was wiped out, and immediately went to bed. I turned the tv on to the Christmas music channel, turned off all the lights except the ones on my tree, and promptly fell asleep.
About an hour later, I was startled awake by pounding on my bedroom door, and while barely coherent, seeing a flashlight in my face and a man's voice saying in a rather stern tone Sir, I need you to get out of bed and come with me!
Holy shit!
In my half-asleep state, I thought it was a home invasion or some other such scary shiat, but then that little voice in my head said that a criminal wouldn't be calling me sir, and I wouldn't be hearing the constant chatter of the radio traffic unless it was high-tech gangsters like the kind that took over Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard.
Needless to say, I was a little slow moving and quite out-of-it, but I got encouragement from the silhouette standing in my doorway--they hadn't turned on the lights, and all I saw behind the beam of the flashlight was a dark outline of a guy in tactical gear, and he wasn't being very patient.
Sir, I need you to come with me to the living room!
So I got up, gathered my senses enough to ask What time is it? What's going on? What do you need? as we were walking to that part of the house.
I sat down on the couch, and a couple of my roommates were in there already, the double entry doors in the front of the house were wide open, making it freezing cold, and there were a couple of cops standing in there asking questions.
Finally, it was explained to me that there was actually a call from our address reporting a break-in and home invasion, and they needed to get everyone that lived here in one spot so they could search the property.
Again, Holy Shit!
Now, I've lived here for over a year, and there are still rooms in this sprawling house that I've never even seen, and hell, just a few weeks ago I found another 'hidden' closet. This house is over 40 years old, over 4000 square feet, all one level, and goes on forever. So the cops were going around with one hand on their sidearm, opening every door in the house and searching every room and closet while questioning all of us.
Of course, I hadn't seen or heard anything, and I was a little skeptical of anything happening because our dog goes absolutely apeshit when the mailman or UPS driver shows up, so I can't imagine him just sitting around watching if someone was breaking in. Besides, he's old and his eyesight isn't that good, and when I drive up sometimes he starts barking at me until he realizes who it is. So while I'm hearing all this, there is some sort of disconnect.
So I'm asking the cops all kinds of questions too--I was confused as to who reported what--Was it a neighbor or one of the guys that live here? Where's the dog? Where are the other guys that live here?
Apparently, according to the information I got (remember, I may be wide awake at this point, but still not altogether coherent...), one of my roommates got up and went to the kitchen and saw the lights on in one of the other bedrooms that's built off the side of the 'empty' living room. So he peaked in and saw two guys that he didn't recognize (at four in the morning), so he said something to them, and then, according to him, they chased him back to his room and tried to get in, and he was trying to barricade the door. He said he yelled at them that he's calling the police. I guess he had his cellphone right there, and called 911. The cops actually showed up within about 3 minutes--with a home invasion call, I guess they drop everything and get right over, and as soon as he yelled that they were here, the two guys took off, according to what the police told me. (The 911 dispatcher stayed on the phone until the cops showed up).
But our house is on the dark end of a dead-end street, sitting in the middle of two heavily-wooded acres with storage sheds and all kinds of other hiding places all over the place. So if anyone took off running it would be almost impossible to find them, unless the cops brought out a K-9 unit. They could also scale the wall in back or on the side and get into another neighborhood that is totally separate from ours. In fact, if you drove from our driveway to the house closest to us (about 60 yards away from the north end of the house), it's actually over a mile away, because of the dead end street and the line of trees, there is no direct route--the two neighborhoods aren't connected at all. So it makes a great escape route if you're on foot.
Anyhow, the cops were swarming all over the house and property, and I was sitting in the living room in a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt, freezing my ass off, answering all kinds of questions about the house, property, and what I did or didn't see or hear, and still wondering just what the hell was going on.
And then it got interesting...
It's not much of a secret that a couple of my roommates like to get high. And they like to smoke almost every day. Me--I've been known to hit the pipe on occasion, but ever since I've been working in a casino with their pre-employment and random drug tests, I've given it up. In fact, I haven't smoked in a couple of years. Especially since in the back of my head I keep telling myself that I need to get a second job, and that would require yet another whiz quiz. So I've got nothing to worry about when the boys in blue come calling and start looking around my nest with the flashlights and rubber gloves.
Well, not so much with a couple of the guys that live here. So when the cops started searching one of the bedrooms and saw all of the baggies and residue all over the desk, they came back and started asking a lot of pointed questions.
The best exchange that almost had me laughing out loud went something like this:
Cop: We found lots of drugs in your room. Do you use drugs?
Roommate: I smoke pot.
Cop: When was the last time you smoked?
Roommate: I dunno, what time is it?
I was cracking up at that one, but got a look from one of the cops that told me it wasn't exactly funny. So I just sat there watching as they directed all their attention to him. Apparently, weed wasn't the only thing they found, so they suddenly got very interested in questioning him (who, by the way, was the one who placed the original 911 call).
The other cops eventually found their way back to the living room and said they could find no evidence of forced entry, break-in, damage to his bedroom door (where he said the two 'perps' were trying to break in and 'get' him). Butch, the dog, wandered in and laid down on the floor at some point, and I questioned why the dog didn't start barking if there were strangers breaking into the house.
Since there was no evidence of any break-in, and lots of evidence of heavy drug use, the cops were fairly skeptical at this point. I didn't know what to think--I've always thought of this place as the Vegas equivalent of the type of house where Manson and his cronies offed Sharon Tate and the gang--A big, sprawling, isolated, dark, 60's-hip type of place in a neighborhood where that kind of thing Just Didn't Happen. So I was hoping that it was just my dumbass roommate seeing things instead of some bad people showing up in the middle of the night with evil intent.
So under the heavy questioning about the drugs, my roommate was clearly getting very nervous. They could've easily hauled him away and locked him up, but one of the cops said Listen, I'm not here to bust you for narcotics--but you've got to start telling the truth. What exactly did you see? The dog wasn't barking, nobody else heard anything, there is no sign of forced entry, nothing is missing... What exactly is going on here? Are you on something else besides weed right now?
If this were a porno, what happened next would be the money shot.
My roommate said Well, I used to do a lot of heavier stuff in the past, so it might've just been a flashback...
I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I heard that, and all I could do was roll my eyes and say You f*cking retard...
The tension level in the room immediately dropped in half among everyone except the roommate on the hot seat, and I could tell by the body language of the police that they all relaxed just a bit.
At that point, the investigation was over, but I got to enjoy the cops lecturing him about drug use, not unlike Dog the Bounty Hunter giving his 'Come to Jesus' motivational speeches to the fugitives he catches every episode. Clearly the police were relieved that there were no criminals to be found, and my roommate was relieved that he wouldn't be wearing the matching bracelets that night or spending his holidays sporting an orange jumpsuit, but I could tell that the cops were just exasperated that they wasted all that time on a basic dumbass call. It was truly a surreal scene.
Of course, it was still a little nerve-wracking there at the house after the police left, and I took a just-in-case attitude with me back to bed and basically slept with one eye open and one hand on a means of personal defense. The roommate who was at the center of all this spent the rest of the night skulking around the house and the back yard with a flashlight and a golf club, dog at his heels, looking to slay whatever demons had come after him.
Once the sun started to come up, I finally got a few hours of sleep. I woke up thinking What the hell was that all about last night?, but so far everything seems normal today--except that Mr. Flashback called in sick to work and he's currently sitting out on the patio with a cup of coffee in his hand a thousand-yard-stare in his eyes.
I think that getting called out by the cops in front of the rest of us may have put the fear of God into him. He came this close to getting hauled away last night, so I'm guessing that that little episode won't be repeated. Or at least he'll have enough sense to hide all of his drugs before he calls the cops next time.
Mikey
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