Have you ever noticed that peculiar phenomenon, where everything is going great guns and then something steps in to kill the buzz? As you might surmise from the previous post, Friday afternoon I was steaming full speed ahead like Farragut up Mobile Bay, damning torpedoes left and right, doing what I do best. Then, as happens to all of us at one inconvenient time or another, the phone rang, and, when I answered it, one of my relatives was on the other end.
It was Katje, my sister in law. She’s my younger brother Rob Roy’s wife. Before I go on with this, I guess I should tell you about Rob Roy.
Rose, my big sister, arrived first, the oldest child, and, as the first born and a female, was Mom’s steadfast helpmate and confidant, as well as the apple of Dad’s eye, his princess who could do no wrong. Anybody who has had an older sister knows what I am talking about here. Rose turned out to be a fit, muscular, extremely healthy and very athletic person, all of which sounds good until she has beaten the tar, pitch and turpentine out of you. Then, perhaps, it’s not all that great. Well, I may be a lot of things, but I’m no fool, which, despite his considerable intelligence and talent, is more than I can say for my poor little brother Rob Roy.
The predictably pragmatic middle child, I learned very early not to cross my dear sister Rose. But for Rob Roy, crossing her was, as I look back, apparently his principal form of entertainment. Not that Rose is anything that rhymes with witch. On the contrary, as the large and harmonious family which Rose so quickly, easily, efficiently and successfully procreated for her husband will attest, she’s the greatest, and I love her dearly. Still, at one time, the three of us were children, and Rob Roy proved a natural hellion. If there existed a single act of bedevilment, annoyance, gratuitous vandalism, misdirected defiance, filial disrespect or pure, undiluted mischief that Rob Roy did not perpetrate upon Rose, I cannot recall it at the moment. And, despite his obvious disadvantages in size and maturity relative to my big sister, Rob Roy proved, time and time again, that he could outwit and vex poor Rose to a point which, as I consider it in the hindsight of a couple of decades reading the papers and watching television news, would have driven plenty of other people to wring his neck.
So that’s the back story, as my friends in Hollywood say. Katje was her usual stolid Norwegian self as she related the latest family crisis to interrupt my happy and pleasure filled bachelor life – oh yeah, and my work on what promises to be an extremely profitable project. Alas, we can choose our friends and we can choose our spouses, but we cannot choose our relatives – or our relative’s spouses, either.
Katje: Tom, Jason has been arrested.
Tom: Jason just turned nineteen. If you haven’t been arrested by the time you’re twenty, then you’re a failure as a teenager.
Katje: Really? What did you get arrested for?
Tom: Ask your husband. By the way, why isn’t he calling me about this?
Katje: He would never call you about something like this, even under these circumstances.
Tom: Which means, being an emotional Italian, he’s too proud and ashamed, but, as a stoic Scandinavian, lacking all that hot blood and melanin, you aren’t. Well – don’t keep an idiot in suspense, Kat, what has my dear nephew been arrested for?
Katje: Statutory rape.
Tom: I know Jason about as well as an uncle can, so I guess what you mean by that is, he engaged in consensual erotic acts with another teenager of the female persuasion?
Katje: That’s what he says.
Tom: Based on what I know about his father’s personality, I’d say he probably did it and he’s probably telling the truth – which, if we can stop dancing around the issue, is that Jason and his girlfriend both desperately and sincerely wanted to do the big nasty, for all the reasons that teenagers have done it since time immemorial, and, bless their unsophisticated, impractical romantic young hearts and underdeveloped, hormone soaked brains, they did. So how the hell did he manage to get arrested for that?
Katje: It’s illegal in Virginia.
Tom: So is adultery, last time I checked. Seems to me that the authorities called off statutory rape around twenty years ago, as long as the man wasn’t more than twenty five. Same thing with the 55 mile per hour speed limit – nobody drives less than 65 these days, not even the cops.
Katje: I know what you mean, but the pendulum is swinging back the other way now. Growing influence from conservative religious fundamentalists.
Tom: Not with the speed limit, though – I see them doing 70 on their way to their mega-churches every Sunday.
Katje: I don’t even understand how you can make that analogy. There’s no comparison between having sex and driving.
Tom: There is for men.
Katje: That’s ridiculous!
Tom: Oh yeah? Ask Rob how he feels about his Mazda RX-8 six-speed with the 184 kilowatt Wankel rotary engine and its 9,000 RPM redline. So how old is the girl?
Katje: Seventeen.
Tom: As I recall, you were fifteen when you and Rob…
Katje: We were both fifteen! And I turned sixteen three days later!
Tom: And had Jason nine months after that. Ah, young lust, was there ever a folly so fair?
Katje: We got married, didn’t we?
Tom: Yeah, when Jason was eight. He’s in your wedding pictures – wearing a child size gold tux, white shoes and about half of his father’s hip-hop club jewelry.
Katje: He put that ensemble together on his own! We’ve always let Jason dress himself!
Tom: It shows. Come on, what did you two expect, with your lifestyle? It’s like you and Rob were from some exotic native society, living in New York City in the 1990’s, covered with tattoos and festooned with body piercing. I have snapshots of you, Rob and your friends in Central Park where there are no buildings in the background, just trees and bushes – they could be straight out of National Geographic – “Tribes of Manhattan Island” – “Drumming, skateboard bravado, a festive dance and smoking of intoxicating herbs precedes the customary mating ritual of the TriBeCans, seen here with their chief, Rob BadBoy and his queen, AlphaKat.” Then you get into Web development, hook up with a dot-bomb during the dot-boom, and, when the bubble burst, you were stranded with jobs in Fairfax, Virginia, slinging code for overpriced dot-NET Web sites, working for a company whose clients simply don’t know any better. But did you take the metal out of your bodies? Did you get those tats taken off, or at least start dressing so your neighbors couldn’t see them? Oh, no, you thought you could just keep living the quaint tribal life of Manhattan Islanders, didn’t you? Hanging at Iota over in Arlington, the Black Cat down on 14th Street and Chief Ike’s in Adams Morgan; doing up U Street and Southwest, then coming home at all hours to that totally bland Fairfax County bedroom community you two bought a house in. Didn’t I tell you not to live in Virginia if you two were going to keep behaving like that? Didn’t I tell you to at least move to Takoma Park if you want to get away with pretending you live in New York City, not Washington?
Katje: Takoma Park’s nothing but a wildlife preserve for flower children, Tom. They call it ”an urban forest,” like you should expect Bilbo Baggins or somebody to live next door. I mean the whole thing in Takoma Park is so mellow and dated, it’s duller than Fair Lakes – wind chimes on every porch, people wearing patchouli, Tom, in 2007, and tie dye! It’s nothing like Manhattan.
Tom: Who said it was like Manhattan? The point is, the people who live there are tolerant. That’s the operative concept – tolerance. That neighborhood you live in now is full of people from the South – when they come to Washington, they all stay on that side of the Potomac. No way they’re going to live in Prince George’s County – the Southern rednecks who already live there are tougher than East Los Angeles barrio malos and they scare the daylights out of Andy Griffith crackers from places like Alabama and North Carolina. No way they’re going to live in the District or Montgomery County, either, because those two places are full of godless liberals who don’t care if their seventeen year old daughter is fornicating with a boy from Manhattan who’s covered with tats and metal studs – just like his parents. And no way they’re going to live in Arlington, even though it’s on their side of the river – Arlington is full of scary foreigners. No, those white bread Sunbelt types who come up here to work in Washington all live out in Fairfax, feeling safe and comfortable among their own kind, because those white bread Sunbelt types are completely intolerant of anything but their own kind. So, here’s such a place – a community full of transplanted white people from Dixie, whose entire culture consists of sports, family activities, country and western music, fraternal organizations, praying for God to favor their politics, eating too much processed food, peeping out their windows at their neighbors, and gossiping about what they see. Then you two come along and buy a house there, and your weird kid starts going to school with their kids. If they wanted kids like Jason sitting next to theirs in homeroom, they wouldn’t be living…
Katje: Tom, that weird kid of mine is sitting in a jail cell at the moment.
Tom: So, Monday morning there will be a bail hearing and they will let him go on his own recognizance.
Katje: No, he was arrested yesterday. The cops came to the house and asked to talk to him – said they needed his help in solving a crime; and as soon as he stepped out the front door, they threw him on the ground and cuffed him. Then Rob came out and made a scene…
Tom: I’m not going be channel surfing someday and run across Jason and Rob on one of those TV programs where the highway patrol drag drunk trailer trash out of dilapidated pickup trucks and local police convene SWAT teams in armored personnel carriers to bust retards’ meth labs, am I?
Katje: No, I got things cooled off with Rob before he could make the cops mad enough to arrest him, too. Anyway, the bail hearing was today, and the bond is $150,000.
Tom: Ah, the girl, is her father or mother by any chance a some kind of cop, DA, preacher, or local politician?
Katje: Yeah.
Tom: I remember when Rob drank three 40 ounce malt liquors and peed on an electric fence.
Katje: What’s that supposed to mean?
Tom: I guess it means that I think maybe doing dangerous things with your package runs in the family. Couldn’t Jason have given even a moment’s thought to dating somebody else after he checked out her old man?
Katje: It’s her mother, really, that’s what it looks like to me – she’s one of those activists who are always yelling “Think of the children,” and that kind of stuff. Anyway, we need to borrow fifteen thousand dollars to pay a bail bondsman.
Tom: From me?
Katje: We can’t put up the house, there’s not enough equity in it, and besides…
Tom: If there were enough equity in it, or they lower the bail so there is, and then Jason jumps bail, you and Rob will be living in your cars.
Katje: That’s the situation, Tom.
Tom: Before I write Rob a check for fifteen grand, do you mind if I ask a couple more questions about the girl?
Katje: I’ll tell you what I know.
Tom: I can imagine Jason’s taste. She party down? She hot?
Katje: Well, she’s certainly not going to end up like Mary Cheney. There are boys stopping by all the time when her parents aren’t home – you notice that kind of thing when you’re a telecommuter three days a week. And she’s definitely pretty hot looking, Tom. I’ve seen her, you know, at the supermarket or the mall or whatever, since when she was about eight or nine – zoom, she took off like crazy. I even caught Rob staring at her once – when she was, like, eleven! I slapped him so hard I got a hairline fracture in my hand.
Tom: Precocious puberty, huh? I think they develop that from exposure to the plasticizers in soft drink bottles and the excess hormones in cheap ground beef, like they eat all the time at those burger chains. So her mother’s been obsessing about it for a longer time than most. Only child?
Katje: Yeah.
Tom: You mentioned seeing the girl at local stores. You said you saw boys visiting her home. So, she lives in your neighborhood?
Katje: Yeah, her family was there when we moved to DC in 1996.
Tom: The girl next door.
Katje: The girl from across the cul-de-sac, actually.
Tom: How you and her mom get along?
Katje: Nobody in the entire neighborhood has ever said a single word to us since we moved in here.
Tom: So what’s the matter with you and Rob – you can’t take a hint or something?
Katje: Well, if you move into a new apartment in New York, it’s not like the neighbors come over and throw you a party, either, is it?
Tom: Did you ever observe your neighbors consorting with each other in your New York apartment building?
Katje: No.
Tom: How about in Fairfax, you see your neighbors socializing there?
Katje: They have barbecues, garden parties, that kind of thing, and lot of them belong to the same churches, of course. Rotary, Lions, Civitan, Optimist, Moose, all that stuff; plenty of it here.
Tom: But when you threw parties, you invited the weirdos you met at edgy downtown nightclubs, didn’t you?
Katje: The neighbors never invited us to anything, why should we invite them?
Tom: Actually, you shouldn’t have – one of you three would have gotten busted much sooner, I’m sure. The girl, she engage in any extracurricular activities?
Katje: Jason mentioned that she’s a cheerleader.
Tom: How popular is Jason? Any guys on the varsity squads who might be friends with him?
Katje: Jason’s very popular, Tom, he’s got that cheeky monkey charisma…
Tom: Just like his old man. Good. Why don’t you call some of his male friends, especially the ones on the sports teams, and see if you can find out if Ms. Seventeen is really the innocent child her mother obviously thinks she is, or… not.
Katje: Tom, Jason’s in jail. We need that money right away.
Tom: So start calling right away.
Katje: But where do I get the telephone numbers of Jason’s friends?
Tom: If Jason doesn’t have a cell phone, I will eat the doofy ear flaps off your husband’s genuine Peruvian wool Chullo hat; and if the cops didn’t make him leave it at home when they arrested him, I’ll eat the rest of it.
Katje: Yeah, it’s right here on the dining room table.
Tom: Of course. So, start with the names and numbers stored in Jason’s cell phone and ask those people for more numbers when you call them. And don’t forget to check out his instant messaging buddy lists, too.
Katje hung up abruptly without even saying goodbye, and I went back to work. She called back today day about five in the afternoon.
Katje: Hello, Tom? I have wonderful news! She did the entire football team backfield, four of the basketball team, and three guys on the track team. They said they think this whole thing with Jason is a bunch of B.S. Then one of them got all the others to call her mother and tell them that if Jason goes on trial, they will testify that they had sex with her daughter, too. So this morning, she goes down and begs them to not prosecute Jason. They just rolled their eyes went along with it. Then we had a hearing and they let Jason go! It’s it great? I’m so happy; Jason’s girlfriend is a total binge-boozing, blunt-hitting, head-bobbing, bottom-banging slut!
Tom: Like father, like son.
Katje: What?
Tom: I said “I gathered she’s one.”
Katje: Oh. Me, too.
Tom: For sure. Now promise me that you and Rob will sell that place, and that the three of you will move north of the Potomac before your fine, upstanding, Christian, family-valued Fairfax Virginia neighbors find another excuse to lock one of you – or all of you – in jail again.
Katje: I promise we’ll talk about it, anyway.
Tom: Getting that much concession out of you and Rob is about all I can expect. Tell Jason I said to stop risking loss of his motivators over underdone chicken dinners.
Katje: I’ll tell him, but probably not in those words.
Tom: You’re his mother, so I’m sure you’ll choose the right ones. Moms always do. Bye, Queen AlphaKat.
Katje: Bye-bye, Tommy Cocktails.
No doubt about it, when I hung up that telephone, I deeply and sincerely felt like I was the luckiest man in the world – because I have a family and because I love my family; and because my family loves me; but most of all, because I know my family; and, because of that, I knew there was no way in hell Rob and Katje would have ever paid back that loan.