Kid in the House

Well I was worried that we’d make it through 4 years here without having a drunk kid in our house–the quintessential Normal Beleaguered Resident’s experience in this town, and a situation for which the police actually have a specific official code, it’s such a common occurrence. But worry no more! For it has happened to us.

Lately I’ve been sleeping better than I have been in my whole life, while the old man has been amazingly antsy. This has led to weird role reversals, where he’s the one who makes coffee in the morning and I make the bed, because I’m sleeping later. CRAZY, oh how wild our life is. So anyway at 5 in the morning the old man heard the snoopy bark. His short, deep bark that means “someone is fucking with the house I live in.” Normally we discourage this bark as 99 out of 100 times it just indicates that the mailman is trying to give us a package but at 5 a.m. it could only mean one thing. So the old man got up from bed and found the dog alert and ready to fuck shit up, and looked outside and saw a dude wearing only shorts–no shirt, no shoes–punching the parking sign in our front yard. He did this for awhile and then he raged around in our yard for awhile, then he came inside our house!

We live in a fourplex–it’s a nice little house the inside of which is carved into four apartments. So the front door is unlocked, but it’s not like an apartment complex. It’s a house–it’s super homey. Lots of times people don’t even come in the front door, they just knock on it, and one of us has to go let them in, because it feels weird to walk into it, because of the aforementioned homey vibe. It felt really weird for there to be a scary half-naked inebriate out in the hall where we keep all our shoes and umbrellas and the snoopy’s balls.

He started throwing himself against our door, hammering on it, and yelling to someone named “Donovan” to “come on man.” Frank was going apeshit, gruff barks and leaps toward the door, like, “do you hear this bullshit???” The kid started talking to Frank through the door, which gave me the creeps. I took Frank into the kitchen and straddled him to keep him quiet. Dude was quivering! BRAVE WATCHDOG: who knew??! Makes you feel better about having him around the place. Do you guys realize this is officially the first time Frank has served an actual purpose in our lives? GOOD JOB. “Mister, you no call that dog ‘Hero.’ Call him ‘Shit Head.'”

The old man had called the police, which later we felt bad about, but at the time it was surprising how scary it was. Not, like, terrifying, but definitely not like something I wanted to handle on my own, and when you live in a town where wasted kids are going into people’s houses and beating them to death with their fists you are less interested in opening your door and engaging somebody like this in a pleasant heart-to-heart. Plus, the kid was enormous and muscular, like they are here, the old man would sadly be no match at all for him, to say nothing of me myself. I’m scrappy, but come on.

The lady at the non-emergency police number took his call and then said to someone else in the room, “that kid’s in somebody’s HOUSE now,” so it turns out they’d been getting calls about this kid rampaging around already, and I felt less bad.

He kept leaving and coming back in and pounding on our door. It was creepy! Calling us “Donovan.” Then I heard the front door open and the kid very calmly said, “Oh you bring the cops to our house, Donovan? That’s cool,” then I heard the cop very calmly say “lets go man,” and the kid left.

At the time it felt like a no-brainer that cops should be called, but immediately when it was over we began to feel ambivalent.

1. What if you call the cops because someone’s trying to get into your house and then the cops SHOOT the person? Cops are always shooting people! You’d never fucking forgive yourself.
2. Is it really important that this drunk kid be arrested and have that on his record? The jail system is bullshit, etc. etc. I used to work in a criminal defense attorney’s office and believe me the system is BULLSHIT. One of the attorneys I knew there actually got mugged at knife point and STILL didn’t call the cops, because of his deep personal awareness of how bullshit the jail system is. So now I feel bad.
3. Are we wieners for not dealing with it on our own? Should we keep a baseball bat by the bed like people I know in Texas? I have thought about this before. Do we just call the cops every time there’s a little wrinkle in our lives? Why not open the door and give him what-for!

But the counter-thoughts to those thoughts are:
1. The cops don’t tend to shoot people in this town–in fact, what they mostly do is handle this exact situation
2. The kid was white, and cops mostly shoot black kids who don’t have a bus transfer.
3. The kid was deeply wasted and I am of the firm opinion that there is no reasoning with wasted people, so dealing with him would have involved opening the door to engage him, and
4. When you live in this town you are constantly terrorized by tales of the drunk kids doing insane things, like beating that old man to death. Raping people and not remembering in the morning. So my desire for gently engaging was pretty low, if I’m honest.
5. THESE GODDAMN ENTITLED BULLSHIT KIDS who make this town so fucking UNBEARABLE to live in i.e. “revenge cop-calling,” i.e. “I don’t feel sorry for this kid for one single second.”

Anyway, what’s done is done. His parents will probably think it’s badass that he spent the night in the drunk tank. These kids! Did you listen to that This American Life about Penn State? You should–then you’d know what my town is like. You could also look at it like maybe we saved his life, because another thing kids are always doing in this town is blacking out and dying, or letting garbage trucks run over them, or passing out in alleys in wintertime so they have to get their arms cut off, etc. So anyway, it’s probably a wash, in terms of my feelings for this actual kid vs. my feelings about calling cops.

It was sobering though, because many times we have gone to sleep with our front door unlocked. It just doesn’t feel sketchy, our whole set-up here, and it’s easy to forget to lock the door. So if it had been one of those nights, we would have woken up to the dog going completely apeshit and probably attacking this kid, who would have been in our actual living room, and what if the kid killed our dog, or one of us? What if I was home alone? What if I was home alone, the kid came into the house, wouldn’t leave when I screamed, and then I STABBED him?? The possibilities are endless and none of them are great, except the one where I say “hey you’re in the wrong house” and he says “oh I beg your pardon” and leaves, which is unfortunately the least likely possibility of all. Or he gives me a bag of gold and says I am being rewarded for not calling the cops, for he is the Drunk Kid Fairy.

To be fair, we were also worried the kid would puke in our hallway, which happened to a friend of mine. They had their ubiquitous drunk kid in the house, pounding on their doors, raging up and down the stairs. All the girls who live in the house were standing behind their doors yelling to him to go away, but he didn’t. Then he puked in their vestibule and passed out. The cops finally came and took him away, and in the morning the girls got up and cleaned up his puke, and WHILE THEY WERE CLEANING UP HIS PUKE, he CAME BACK and asked them if he’d left his sunglasses there by any chance.

!!!!!!!!!

No shame! He didn’t even say he was sorry, or anything! Just like, “cool, that happened, now I gotta get to Spanish class.” They were like “we thought you were going to murder us. Also your puke is all over my hands.”

I imagine the cops here are not stoked about the fact that the majority of their job involves hauling shitty drunk kids around. But I have to be honest–they are very good at it.

So anyway, that happened. I still feel bad about the whole thing. One of my political persuasion would like to opt-out of the police system whenever possible, and I feel like we got scared and just immediately opted in without thinking about it, which sucks. It’s one thing if someone is in your house with a knife trying to rape you; it’s another thing if he’s just punching your door and screaming. And yes, there are all those influences, like knowing exactly who this kid is and what his deal is, from living here for so long, and having zero pity or tolerance for him, and knowing the police would just calmly take him away and probably keep him from doing worse damage to himself or others. But still.

Next time we will be more thoughtful. “Excuse me sir, but you appear to be intoxicated. Would you mind going back outside? I don’t wish to call the police, for I am uncomfortable with the power the police hold over us, the citizenry, and I believe the increasingly Kafkaesque administrative bureaucracy of the system we live in, enforced by gun-wielding police officers and accepted by the narrow-minded and fearful, is bringing American innovation and progress to a standstill, to say nothing of the bureaucratic destruction of our education system, the fruits of which are fully viewable in the example of yourself, young sir, and what a huge idiot you are. You can certainly understand my reluctance to engage the police and become implicit in the deadly fascist system we increasingly allow to have more and more power over our daily lives. However, if you continue throwing yourself against my door I will open said door and hit you with a baseball bat.”