Blog: Some things never go away
Get home from my appointment with my personal trainer and as I pull up to back into my driveway I look over and see a electric scooter sitting on our lawn next to the front porch.
Instantly my inner alarm is going off: whose goddamn scooter is this? Why is it there? OMG, home invasion!
(Well, on the bright side, a home invader on a scooter is gonna have a bitch of a time stealing all 3 of my Gibson guitars… and being that they’re all insured so it’s a matter of sentiment not value, I’m hoping he takes the Les Paul… definitely not my beloved “Jeff“… besides, Jeff is cheap, leave me Jeff, take the $4000 Les Paul… even though I play the Les Paul more than Jeff… and don’t take the 1986 alpine white ES-175 identical to the one Izzy Stradlin played at Live at the Ritz you bastard, but you can have the acoustic…)
Why do I jump straight to “home invasion”? Because August 1998. Saturday morning. The day after the Bauhaus reunion tour date in Vancouver (the first Bauhaus reunion, where they played at the Queen E and I had a seat in 5th row).
I was writing about it in my diary when I heard some noises outside and then someone started leaning on the doorbell continuously. The way this house is, there’s a narrow hallway from the bedrooms and you can see out the end of that to the window by the front door without someone there seeing you. What I saw in the window was a guy looking in who had this deranged look on his face.
I retreated to the bedroom, the doorbell kept ringing. I figured I should call 911.
The cunt who answered told me to go open the door and ask what he wanted, apparently unconcerned about the context of lone female at home scared with crazy looking guy trying to gain access. I refused to open the door to him and insisted she call the cops. She argued but eventually promised to send them.
BTW: the house was 4 blocks, less than two minutes’ drive from the RCMP detachment even at regular driving speed, let alone with sirens flashing emergency speed. This becomes important.
Immediately after hanging up I heard I crash and someone in the house. I barricaded myself in my room by dragging furniture across my closed bedroom door.
There were two of them, because I heard one of them let the other in.
One of them said “Hi there, how are you?” to my iguana, sitting in her big living room cage.
Well, I assume it was the iguana he was talking to, because I presume that criminals don’t usually talk to each other in that sort of “koochie koochie koo” cute voice people use when talking to small animals.
I heard them talking to each other in gruff voices as they rummaged through my parents’ stuff in the next room.
Then they walked to my door and tried to open it. The door wouldn’t budge, even though the door knob turned just fine, and after a few seconds, it clicked in their heads: “Oh, fuck, dude – there’s someone here… RUN!!!”
And they bolted and were gone.
I watched my clock radio, they were in the house about 7 minutes.
And I called 911 back and got the same cunt, who got all huffy that I was pissed off that I’d been broken into and that I was specifically pissed that she didn’t send the cops the first time.
Well, 20 seconds later I hear a screaming siren in the distance and a minute later (just long enough for me to drag my dresser back out of the way, open the door, and walk down that narrow hall to the front door), the first cop car pulled up.
Two more arrived a minute after that.
No, the cunt hadn’t dispatched anyone after the first call, and the cops were pissed to hear that.
The iguana seemed a little confused as to what all the hubbub was about: “Jeez, the chimps sure have a lot of company today… if it’s a party, they best be letting me have some extra treats from the fruit platter…”
Well, she did freak out eventually… five minutes later when the fingerprinting cop came to dust the place (turned out my parents had accidentally left the kitchen window open so while the one asshole was leaning on the doorbell, the other one was around back stacking up sawhorses from in front of my dad’s garage to be able to reach… the crash I heard was the various knickknacks from the windowsill hitting the ground as he pushed by them). I guess fingerprint dust must smell bad to iguanas, because she spazzed the second he walked in the front door and went and hid in her little bed/hidey hole on one end of the big cage.
Anyway, for years afterwards the doorbell kinda freaked me out until my eBay habits got regular enough that I learned to associate it with the mailman needing my signature instead of thieves coming to rob us.
But every so often, something out of whack like a scooter on the front yard will do the same thing.
I grabbed my cell phone as I backed in, prepared for the worst. But as I got into the driveway, I see my father in front of the garage welding something or other.
Oh… hmmm… (heart rate starts to slow a little bit) Did he buy a goddamn scooter?
And I come and ask what the Hell is going on with that scooter.
Well, it’s one of the construction workers down the block who came and asked if he could charge up his scooter for the afternoon.
Phew. False alarm. The scooter is authorized. Fine. No big deal, after all.
