Cops Have Always Hated Me

I had kind of a weird experience the other night: I was bartending my Monday night shift as usual, and as usual I was parked directly across the street from the front door of the bar, in a space that I know after years of parking there to be safe from alternate-side street-cleaning tickets, late-night No Standing tickets (that's only in effect on the weekends), and after the 7pm expiration of the 2-Hour Parking regulation.

But a little after midnight, one of the security guys stuck his head inside the door to tell me I was getting a ticket. This made no sense: though it's not uncommon for that space, and all of Ludlow Street for that matter, to get annexed for a movie shoot (I've narrowly avoided being towed a couple of times in that situation), there were no orange cones and no signs indicating that, as there usually are.

So I hustled outside and found a uniformed NYPD officer copying my VIN (and, by the way, the 'N' stands for 'number,' so "VIN number" is redundant and we all need to stop saying it) onto a fresh parking ticket. "What's the ticket for?" I ask him in a friendly voice. "No parking," he says without looking at me, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the three stacked-up parking regulation signs for this side of the street. Just as I start to wonder if maybe they've changed the rules for this block (which has happened before) and open my mouth to ask him just that, he turns around and looks at the signs himself, then mumbles, "Oh -- it's Tuesday now."

We both laugh, and I give him a buddy-buddy "better luck next time" clap on the shoulder, and he wanders over to the other side of the street to write some valid tickets and I go back into the bar. What's striking about this is that yes, it's very unusual for a cop to admit he's done something wrong -- everyone I told this story to said anytime they'd tried to move a car in the process of getting ticketed, the cop insisted that once they had begun writing a ticket they were powerless to stop writing it, whereas in my case the guy just balled it up in his hand and shoved it in his pocket -- but on a more personal level, I was struck by how unthinkable this interaction would have been only a few years ago. If the bulk of my previous interactions with cops are anything to go by, the guy would have slammed me down on the hood of my car, handcuffed me, and sent me to central booking for the rest of the week at the moment I asked "What's the ticket for?"

There seems to be something about me that arouses contempt in the heart of on-duty sworn officers. I had a few run-ins with cops in my 20s, never for anything serious, but I always got nothing but stonefaced, barely suppressed hatred in any of these incidents. I don't understand it, because I don't talk back, or cop an attitude (pun accidental), or do anything at all to provoke them, but in every case it felt like the guy would go out of his way to mess with me. Maybe it's something about my face. Maybe I just look like a hardened criminal, or like I hate cops, or like I've got an 8-ball stuffed where it won't get sunburned. Even though I know, and everyone who knows me knows I'm no threat to anyone (except maybe the odd inanimate object during a home improvement project gone pear-shaped), cops seem to see something different.

Examples? Oh sure, I've got examples.

Right after I finished college, I embarked on a cross-country drive by myself, making stops to visit friends in Buffalo, Cincinnati, Chicago, Breckenridge, Missoula, and Seattle before arriving at what would turn out to be my home for the next six years, San Francisco. I was driving south on the 101, coming down from Seattle, and had just crossed the state line into California; it was about 3am, and I'd been driving for 12 hours or so. I hadn't seen another car for hours, and I was only about 3 hours from the Golden Gate Bridge, so I was, needless to say, eager to get off the road and driving accordingly.

As I passed through a wide spot in the road I would later learn was a municipality called Willits, I slowed down a little, but not to the posted speed limit of 45mph, because as I mentioned it was 3am and the town was completely still and I was in a hurry and I could see the south end of the town as soon as I came in at the north end; had I kept my foot on the brake, by the time I got down to 45mph, I would have already been out of the town.

Indeed, I could see the sign raising the speed limit back up to 65 in the distance just as the red and blue lights went on behind me. I pull over, the guy gets my license and registration, and informs me that I was going 60 in a 45. I am, at least in my mind, answering his questions respectfully and succinctly, but apparently what he sees is a dangerous fugitive, probably with a couple of silver briefcases in the trunk and maybe a hostage, because he starts grilling me based on the fact that I have a Maryland driver's license.

I answer all of his questions about where I'm from, where I'm going, and what my general plans are honestly and patiently. I know better than to mess with cops. But he gets this strange gleam in his eye and set in his jaw, because the next thing he says is "I could give you a ticket, but you'd probably just go back to Maryland and forget about it, and there wouldn't be much I could do about it. So instead what I'm going to do is arrest you, book you, and set your bail for the amount of the ticket: $200." This seems insane to me, because it's insane, but I don't feel like there's much I can do about it but mention that I don't happen to have $200 cash on my person, but he says he'll be happy to drive me to an ATM.

My car is left by the side of the road, and he does me the minimal courtesy of not handcuffing me before I find myself illuminated by his headlights, withdrawing $200 from the machine. Then he takes me to a tiny police station and puts me in a tiny cell, where, mercifully, I am alone. An hour or so passes, and I am not sure what I'm waiting for; I can see there are no other prisoners here, and I can hear a few voices chatting and laughing as one does at a boring job, and I resist the urge to call out and remind them that I'm here.

The cop that arrested me suddenly appears and I think finally I can pay this stupid bail or fine or whatever it is and get out of here, but he says "Hey, we just got a call about a domestic dispute so we're going to have to go and handle that. We'll be back in a bit, just sit tight." As though there's anything else I can do. Another hour or so goes by, and I'm as tired as I've ever been in my life -- I'd been driving 12 hours before I got stopped -- but I can't sleep because a) the cell is too small to lay down in and has only right angles so I can't get comfortable and b) I'm so hungry by this time I can't think about anything else.

Finally the cops come back, let me out of the cell (no apologies or even acknowledgement of what they're putting me through), and process me: mugshots, fingerprints, and paying the fine. Then he drives me back to my car and as he's letting me out of the back of his squad car he hands me a business card and tells me, "Write a letter to this judge and tell him what happened, he'll probably refund most of that fine." He also told me I looked terrible and I should pull over and take a nap ASAP, and I resisted the urge to point out that I looked a lot better before he arrested me for speeding and then left me in a cement phone booth for three hours.

Is there any other explanation for this than that I somehow aroused the darkest, most sadistic impulses in this guy? Under what other circumstances is someone thrown in jail for speeding? If anything like this has ever happened to you, I would love to hear about it in the comments below, but as of this writing, I have never heard of anything like it.

But one incident is only an anomaly. One incident can happen to anyone. Two is when it starts to get weird, so without further delay, here's example #2, which occurred three years later and managed to surpass it.

I took my then-girlfriend/now-wife, her roommate, and my buddy Matt to a party just north of the Golden Gate bridge, in the big national park called the Marin Headlands. Whoever was throwing this party (and I have no memory now of who that might have been or how we heard about it) had somehow commandeered a park ranger station deep into the park. If you know your SF geography, basically we took a U-turn to the left just after the bridge and drove 20 minutes or so through unspoiled park land before arriving at this ranger station, which was like a big house with cement floors and no heat.

As it turned out, the party wasn't that great: it was cold (of course) and the only thing they had to drink was two kegs of homebrew someone had brought, and the homebrew was awful. So awful I couldn't even drink it, which anyone who knew me in 1999 would stipulate must have been some pretty awful beer. It was bad.

So, before very long, we got back in the car and started heading back. A few minutes into the trip back, through the Headlands -- guess what! -- the red and blue lights hit my rearview.

Little backstory: I had recently renewed my car's registration at the DMV, and for whatever reason they did not give me the sticker that goes in the corner of the license plate -- instead they explained that it would be mailed to me, and gave me a temporary paper registration, a little square that I was supposed to put in the back window of my car, until I could put the stickers on my plates. I don't know if they still do it this way in San Francisco (I left ten years ago this week) but these little square-paper temporary registrations were not uncommon at the time.

So I'm pulled over by an unfamiliar uniformed officer who I feared at first was a State Trooper but I soon realized was a Park Police officer, with a gun and everything, and I'm sure he assumed I was drunk driving.  That had to be it, because I wasn't speeding. If I'm being completely honest, had the beer not been so completely terrible, he probably wouldn't have been too far off base, my habits being what they were at the time. But as it stood, I was not drunk, not even close. I couldn't drink more than a couple of sips of that terrible homebrew. But I did see a familiar gleam in his eye, a gleam I had last seen in Willits, California, and the ranger ordered me out of the car for a field sobriety test: touch your nose, walk a straight line, the whole bit.

As I mentioned, it was cold, and it being the Marin Headlands -- basically an awning between the bridge and the Pacific -- pretty darn windy. So this field sobriety test, though easily passed by virtue of my not being drunk, was a bit awkward. My three passengers looked on in stunned, respectful, we-don't-want-any-trouble silence as I stood on one foot with my head tilted back and my arms outstretched, my hair and collar flapping in the breeze. Nobody protested. Nobody did or said anything to provoke him.

And yet, even after my sobriety was firmly established, the gleam returned and got a little deeper and darker, and his eyes narrowed, and he said, "Your plates are expired."

"Right, I know, but I have the temporary thing here, see?"

"Where did you get that?"

"At the DMV?"

"That's no good, your plates are expired."

"They're not expired, that's a 30-day temporary sticker. That big 11 means November, it expires in November, they're mailing me the permanent sticker. You've never seen this before?"

He doesn't answer me, because he's going to the trunk of his car. I worry for a moment that he's going for his shotgun or his taser or maybe his Park Police butterfly net. I am relieved when it is none of those things, and then I am startled when I see it's a screwdriver, and he's removing my license plates.

"What are you doing?" I say, of course. What would you say?

"Your plates are expired, I have to impound them."

"You have to impound them? How do I get them back?"

"You can pick them up at the Park Police station."

"Where's that?"

"In the Presidio," he says, meaning the big former Army base on the other side of the bridge, in the city.

"What am I supposed to do if I get pulled over? You're leaving me with no plates!"

He leaves me standing there, tosses the plates in his car, and takes off. Once again: what other possible explanation can there be for this, but that I awakened some kind of primordial adversary instinct in this guy? Once again: Have you ever heard of anything like this before? If so I would love to hear about it.

Postscript to that story: The next day I find the Park Police station in the Presidio, wander around until I find someone to talk to, and tell them my story. They can only stare blankly. It is, I see by their expressions, not common for Park Police to remove people's license plates, and they assure me they don't have mine, and they seem puzzled that someone from their station would have even been over there in the Headlands. This led to some very difficult conversations over at the DMV -- their expression when I told my story was the same I imagine it'd be if I was telling them I had a dog that smoked cigarettes.

So the very idea that I stopped a police officer from writing me a ticket, that I said something that suggested he was doing something wrong, and then clapped him on the shoulder, and then nothing happened, makes me wonder what's different about me now. Did I somehow shed my (otherwise unknown to me) air of danger and menace, and get respectable? I feel a little more respectable. And then I realized: I just got old.

The Devil's Kibble

We went to visit my extended family in southwest Missouri over Memorial Day weekend and our travel couldn't have gone smoother. Our flight was direct, nonstop, and on time. Our rental car was fast, comfortable, and easy to drive. Most important, our five-year-old was well-behaved on the plane, and, except for a minor meltdown directly followed by a nap, in good spirits in the rental car. It seemed that our little friend had graduated to being a somewhat easy travel companion, and we allowed ourselves to fantasize about other, more exotic trips we might soon take with him.

Those hopes were soon dashed, however, as we pulled off the highway and realized that we'd have to make a quick stop at Wal-Mart before arriving at my grandmother's, because we knew to a certainty that she wouldn't have anything on hand that the boy would eat in a million years.

To say that this kid is a picky eater is like saying Jimi Hendrix was a guitar player. Though we did our best when he was a baby to expose him to all kinds of foods, he only liked a small fraction of what we gave him: bananas, cheese ravioli, fish sticks, chicken tenders, apple slices, veggie burgers, mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, grilled cheese, yogurt, cereal, and (of course) pizza.

That is a very limited diet, and we worried that it wasn't balanced enough, but at least there was seven days' worth of meals there, so he was eating something different every day. But at some point, things started coming off the menu. Bananas were first: after eating them almost every day for a couple of years, he was suddenly repulsed by them. Then ravioli, a dependable dinner staple, could only be depended on to get spit back into the bowl. Then apple slices got the hook, and peanut butter wasn't far behind.

I could feel my chest constricting when he started poking at his pizza and pulling the cheese off. Our go-to, our rock, frozen pizza, in danger? We put it on the bench and put in veggie burgers, which he'd always loved, though not without a strange little quirk: every time I gave him a veggie burger he'd scream and cry and protest that it's not what he wanted. Every time I'd eventually persuade him to have one bite, and every time he'd declare it yummy and then go to town on it. Eventually I shot a video of him enjoying a veggie burger with my phone so I could show it to him every time I served him one, but even that wasn't enough to keep him from eventually declaring them yucky.

It wasn't long before his diet was down to buttered toast in the morning, a grilled cheese for lunch, and either fish sticks or chicken tenders for dinner. Every day. EVERY. DAY.

Let me tell you what kind of person we're dealing with here: After refusing, in rising tones, every bona-fide healthy, questionably healthy, and obviously unhealthy but at least DIFFERENT option his mother suggested, she'd give in and accede to his demands for buttered toast. The butter would melt on the toast, sometimes as it sat in front of him on the table, sometimes before it got there, and he'd protest that it had no butter on it and was therefore inedible. If you have never tried to explain the concept of butter melting into bread to a screaming three-year-old, let me just say I envy you. For a period of about six months, my alarm clock was rendered superfluous as I woke each day to high-pitched screams about NO BUTTER and my wife's helpless, infinitely patient insistence to the contrary. In these circumstances, there is no right side of the bed to get up on.

He's mellowed a little since then, and there are no longer any screaming matches at breakfast, mostly because his mother has settled him into a routine of cereal and/or toast and possibly a (Trix) yogurt, and mostly stopped bothering him to try a strawberry ("you loved them nine days ago!") or an orange ("it tastes exactly like orange juice! You like orange juice!") or a banana ("THE ONLY FUCKING THING YOU ATE FOR EIGHT MONTHS WAS FUCKING BANANAS NOW EAT SOME BEFORE I SHOVE THEM DOWN YOUR STUPID LITTLE THROAT."). She kept the cereals semi-healthy (Life, Chex, Cheerios, and their all-organic Food Coop counterparts) but made the strategic blunder of rewarding him for good behavior with a box of Lucky Charms, which immediately became the Alpha and Omega of his entire existence; when his sixth or seventh box ran out a few days later, suffice it to say he did not take it well, and his mother suffered multiple contusions on her legs and hips. Once we banned the Lucky Charms -- or as we came to call them, The Devil's Kibble -- from the cupboard, things got back to normal and breakfast went back to being relatively easy, the boy alternating between toast and plain cereals.

Lunch is a crapshoot. His mother packs him a sandwich -- jelly on whole wheat, now that he's scratched grilled cheese off the menu -- plus a couple of strawberries and a handful of Goldfish crackers, and at least two days a week this lunch makes it back to the house unopened and uneaten.

As for dinner, as I mentioned he's down to chicken tenders and fish sticks, split about 70/30 in favor of the fish sticks. While that's an appallingly narrow diet, we comfort ourselves in the idea that fish is "brain food" (I'm sure I heard that somewhere) and if he's got to subsist almost entirely on one thing, at least it's not hot dogs or cotton candy or something. These are the pathetic stories one must tell oneself in order to parent.

Anyway, as we pulled into the teeny-tiny Missouri town where dinner was waiting on the stove for us at my grandmother's house, we had to stop at Wal-Mart, because no matter what was on the stove, we knew with a grim resignation that the boy wouldn't eat it.

Here's a question you might be asking yourself, and that I've asked myself, and that I've asked my wife about a hundred thousand times, usually through clenched teeth: So what if he doesn't eat? You make him whatever you make him and if he doesn't like it tough shit! It's not like he's going to starve to death. Let him go to bed hungry a time or two and maybe he'll be a little more adventurous next time!
Unfortunately, he seems to be one of those people -- like for example his mother, and come to think of it, his father (what are the odds?) -- whose mood shifts dramatically with his blood sugar levels -- we can tell when he's hungry before he even knows it, because that's when he turns into Demon Boy, disagreeable, argumentative, teetering on one rusty ice skate at the precipice of emotional collapse. That is not the state we want him in for our family reunion -- my cousins and aunts and uncles haven't seen him since he was a baby, and he's now the oldest of seven great-grandchildren visiting my grandmother -- so we've got to feed him something, so into Wal-Mart we trudge in search of fish sticks and chicken tenders.

Sounds easy enough, but of course -- and if you don't know where this is headed, I would love to co-star in a body-switch movie with you -- it's not enough to get fish sticks and chicken tenders, they have to be the RIGHT KIND of fish sticks and chicken tenders, the kind he's familiar with. Which is why it's particularly inconvenient that like good little Brooklyn center-left pseudo-citizens, we do our shopping at the Park Slope Food Coop, where only grass-fed, free-range, karmically pure, pesticide-free, no-GMO, yoga-practicing chicken tenders and fish sticks with aligned chakras are sold, and there's nothing close at the Wal-Mart (which put the other two reasonably-sized grocery stores in my grandmother's town out of business, God bless the free market). So I buy a frozen pizza, which is also unfamiliar -- Wal-Mart doesn't have Amy's Organics, if you can believe that -- but seems to be the best bet. (They don't have any minced fish sticks, just the filets, which are unacceptable, and when I reach for a big bag of frozen chicken tenders, he and his mother say in unison "He doesn't like those"/"I don't like those.")

He ends up turning up his nose at the frozen pizza, of course, when I cook it an hour later, and for the rest of our three-day visit he subsists entirely on Honey Nut Cheerios, which he spotted on top of my grandmother's fridge on arrival and which we banned from our house three years ago when, shortly after they came into his life and foreshadowing the Lucky Charms Siege of 2011, he started shriekingly demanding them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We decide just to go with the flow on this and let him live on Honey Nut Cheerios for the weekend if he wants to, as he's otherwise behaving beautifully, adapting to the role of Oldest Kid in the Family with aplomb and generally having a great time, and we don't want to wreck that with a Dinner Scene.

You know: A Dinner Scene:

INT. KITCHEN TABLE -- TWILIGHT.
MOMMY and DADDY sit on either side of HENRY, 5, at the small square table.

MOMMY
Just try one bite.

HENRY
I don't like it.

DADDY
How do you know you don't
like it?

MOMMY
Did you try it?

HENRY
No. I don't like it.

DADDY
But you didn't try it!

HENRY
I want cereal.

DADDY
Mommy didn't make you cereal,
she made you this.

MOMMY
How about some yogurt?

HENRY
Yogurt with honey?

MOMMY
All right!

DADDY
You can have yogurt with honey if you
eat one bite of your dinner.

HENRY
Mommy said I could have yogurt!

DADDY
If you eat one bite of your dinner! This is
ridiculous!

HENRY
(screams, weeps, lashes out physically)

MOMMY
(to Daddy)
I really need you to read this book.
Daddy kills them both with a hammer.



Small problem with letting him live on Honey Nut Cheerios: right after dinner the last two nights we were there, he complained of stomach pains and then suffered about an hour of painful gassy diarrhea just before bedtime. Guess what happened then? Honey Nut Cheerios came off the menu and he didn't eat anything at all for the rest of the trip.

So now we're back from Missouri, and he's settled semi-comfortably back into his routine, though, weirdly, he still didn't want to eat dinner the night we got back despite his three-day Cheerio fast, and he threw a fit when we ordered a Grandma's style pizza last night instead of regular pizza ("you liked Grandma's pizza four and a half weeks ago!"). It's clear we've got to do something about this. Not because we're worried about his nutrition, or that he'll starve or something (has any kid in the history of America ever starved himself?), but because this situation has made it very difficult for us to go anywhere. Because let's be honest, concerns about rickets or malnutrition are abstract -- Whether or not we can go to someone's remote summer cabin is real life. When we find ourselves discussing the logistics of transporting frozen fish sticks on a commercial flight, that's real life. He's ruining our real life!

Of course, this is only our latest in a long series of resolutions to Do Something About This. Our most successful previous effort to get him to try new foods was when I drew a grid with ten squares on it and told the boy that for every new food he tried, I'd put an X in a box, and once he got to ten, we'd let him watch Star Wars. He did it, he got to see the movie, and then he did it twice more for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, for a total of 30 new foods tried. This seemed like a triumph, and I crowed to my wife that I was a genius, for this plan had been my idea and she'd been more than a little skeptical.

Not one of the 30 new foods he tried stuck -- when offered again, he turned his nose up at each and every one of them. A year or so before that, we made the mistake of telling him he could have a treat (a cup of chocolate pudding, a cookie, a brownie, something like that) if he finished his dinner. Because even when we give him something he likes, he takes about 24 years to eat it.

That resulted, naturally, in a couple of pink pages for the Dinner Scene:

INT. DINNER TABLE -- TWILIGHT.
MOMMY and DADDY sit on either side of HENRY, 5, at the small square table.

MOMMY
Eat your dinner, Henry.

DADDY
We've been sitting here for forty minutes.

HENRY
It's yucky.

DADDY
It's fish sticks! If they're yucky it's
because they're cold!

MOMMY
Just eat it. You have five minutes to eat it.

HENRY
If I eat it can I have a treat?

MOMMY
Yes.

HENRY
How much do I have to eat?

MOMMY
Two of them.

HENRY
I don't like this one.

MOMMY
So eat one of the other ones.

DADDY
What's wrong with this one?

HENRY
It's yucky.

MOMMY
It's split, some of the breading came off.

DADDY
It's the same thing! There's no way you'd
ever notice that if you were blindfolded.

MOMMY
Should I get the blindfold?

HENRY
Now can I have a treat?

DADDY
You ate one. You have to eat two.

HENRY
   (crying)
Mommy said I could eat one of the
other ones!

MOMMY
I said you have to eat two.

HENRY
If I eat two can I have a treat?

DADDY
Yes!

HENRY
I need more ketchup.

DADDY

I'm going out for cigarettes.



Mommy kills him with a rusty pipe wrench.

It's a disaster, and we're running out of ideas. You can lead a kid to celery, but you absolutely cannot make him eat it.  My wife, for her part, is diligently searching the Internet for the book that will Change Our Lives and Teach Us How To Parent, as she has with each big parenting obstacle we've faced up to now. She's got a pretty good batting average with this method, so I'm trying to have faith.

Meanwhile, I have to try and suppress my hatred of people whose kids just eat anything. A six-year-old of my acquaintance actually prefers vegetables to all other foods, Henry's best friend Zeke and to an even greater extent Zeke's little brother Jack will eat anything and they just prance around in front of us eating anything and it makes me NUTS. I actually saw red when my 2-year-old nephew ate fried chicken gizzards when we were in Missouri while I tried in vain to get Henry to try some onion rings ("Onion rings! Look at these photos of you eating onion rings!") after he had rejected the delicious chicken tenders he'd ordered ("They're chicken tenders! You like chicken tenders! You eat chicken tenders no fewer than three nights a week! I will sign over the deed to our house to you right now if you will eat one bite of deep-fried chicken! What do you mean, Mommy went out for cigarettes?").

My Elaborate Unrealized Murder Plot

This is not Thurston -- it's the closest I could get
with Google image search. Imagine a much
sadder, much mangier version of this dog.

I once plotted a murder. I never went through with it, but I spent months painstakingly imagining every detail, every eventuality. Every part of the plan had a contingency, and the contingencies had contingencies. I was certain that if I ever set the plan in motion, I could go through with it, and just as certain that I'd get away with it, if everything went to plan. But I never did it. As sure as I was that it was the best thing for both of us, I just couldn't bring myself to kill my roommate's dog.

The dog's name was Thurston -- actually Thurston Howl III -- and he had been with my roommate for many years before we went in on a 3-bedroom house in Glen Park, the (at the time) great undiscovered neighborhood at the south edge of San Francisco. My roommate and I had worked together at a restaurant, and both found ourselves in need of housing: He was being evicted from a warehouse he had helped turn into a live/work performance space/disaster area, and I was growing weary of my studio apartment in the Tenderloin, which despite many positive qualities still insisted on being in the Tenderloin.

So we joined forces, and the house we found was a bit run down but architecturally typical (garage on the bottom, three-bedroom flat on top) and an absolute palace to the 23-year-old I was at the time. My new roommate, over the five years we both lived there, would prove to be unusually flinchy about tenant-landlord relations, preferring to either fix things himself or leave them alone rather than bother her, for fear that she'd suddenly raise the rent or kick us out or something -- let's just say that the San Francisco rental market changes people in ways I did not fully understand at the time. This tendency first revealed itself in relation to Thurston: The rental application asked if we had any pets, and the ad we'd replied to said "cats ok," so he wrote a little essay in the margins, in a supplicating handwriting, in hopes that his dog would not prove to be a dealbreaker: "I have an old hound dog who sleeps a lot."

This would prove to be true. What my new roommate left out was that the dog also shed a lot (and by a lot I mean enough to change the color of the carpet), suffered from severe arthritis and hip dysplasia, and smelled like a microwaved hot dog rolled in a marathon-worn sweat sock. He whined all the time, unprompted. He would lay in the front living room all day, moving only to stay in the sunny spot on the carpet, and where that lifestyle would have suited any of the other dogs I've known just fine, Thurston would let out a sustained, impossibly quiet, incredibly high-pitched whine, all day long. (ALL. DAY. LONG.) He could not be bothered to move at any time, seemed to be completely deaf (or at least totally immune to being yelled at by his owner), and let out the most pained, miserable sound I have ever heard any other living thing make if he was in any way pushed, pulled, lifted, or otherwise manhandled. The best way I can think to describe it is as a combination of a wounded seal and a coyote being struck with a crossbow bolt.

My roommate kept a cheap little loveseat in his bedroom but I never saw anyone sit in it but Thurston, probably because it had pinstriped white-and-blue upholstery, kind of like a seersucker suit, and had a darkening, greyish-brown, Thurston-shaped stain in the middle. Every time I walked past his doorway on the way to my room my eyes fell on this loveseat, and I instinctively shifted to mouth-breathing to avoid the awful smell that his room could not quite contain. I wondered how much of that smell was coming from that loveseat, and how much from the bed and the carpet. If that loveseat disappeared, how much better would it smell in here? Could I even get that thing out of here? I'd have to buy him a new loveseat, that's fine, but I'm not sure I could get that close to the old one without gagging.

The entire house had wall-to-wall carpet in a darkish, gun-metal gray -- not what you'd call nice, but not gross or anything, at least not until we moved in. Its dark color was ideal for setting off the color of Thurston's white fur, which coated every corner of the common areas and my roommate's room. I never imagined any animal could shed as much as this dog shed. If I were given a garbage bag full of white dog hair, a bag of speed, and a weekend, I don't think I could do as thorough a job coating this carpet as Thurston did on a regular basis. I have no idea where all this hair came from, because I've never seen a dog with so thin a coat. You could see his pink skin right through it, almost like he had no coat at all.

And don't think I just sat back and let this happen. I tried, oh god I tried, to keep things tidy. I went out and spent $150 -- and we're talking 23-year-old dollars here -- on an upper mid-level vacuum cleaner, and passive-aggressively started vacuuming the house every few days, without saying anything about it to my roommate.

The house would stay hair-free for about a night, and seem okay in the morning, but after about 24 hours I would start to wonder if I had gone into a fugue state and merely imagined vacuuming the house because there was no longer any evidence that it had ever happened.

Also, there was so much hair that the vacuum cleaner would clog up within a couple of minutes; I'd have to turn it off, take the thing apart, pull a golf ball-sized wad out with my fingers, and resume vacuuming, only to have it clog again within five minutes.

I guess Thurston also had fleas or something, because one of my roommate's favorite pastimes was to comb the dog's back with a very small, pink-handled, super-finetoothed comb while he watched TV, examining the hair that would come off in the comb, then dropping it in a glass (or sometimes a bowl) of water.

I know I already mentioned the noises, but oh Jesus god were those noises terrible. Whenever my roommate would take Thurston out for a walk, which he diligently did, like the good dog owner he believed himself to be, the dog's arthritis and hip dysplasia would cause him to resist and make horrible, tortured noises every step of the way. It being San Francisco, our house was on a steep hill, and my roommate would walk Thurston down the hill to the nearby park (Glen Canyon, for those of you scoring at home), but when they came back and Thurston had to come back up the hill, the dog would stop cold in his tracks and my roommate would literally get behind him and push, like you'd push a stalled-out car. Of course, this wasn't always the case: sometimes he'd get in front of him and pull his leash, like a miner pulling a sled of whimpering, smelly gold.

Closer, but still not quite miserable enough.

This all makes it sound like my roommate was sadistic, or didn't care about the dog, but that wasn't it. He seemed to really like the dog, and be very attached to him. He told me he'd found him in an alley behind his loft/performace space warehouse, and that he'd been abused by his prior owner. The couple of times I probed for more information, I never got any more details than that his penis was pierced, which I agree constitutes abuse, but didn't quite explain the endless, pointless mewling.

In any case, my roommate was in many ways a good owner to Thurston. He took him almost everywhere (though he'd then leave him in the car), and when he left him at home, would come home early to make sure he got fed at his regular hour, and was totally on top of his flea medicine. It's just that he also seemed to be oblivious to the fact that the animal was completely miserable, lived with excruciating pain, and got no apparent pleasure from anything or anyone. It would seem that the dog was making himself clear with his miserable noises, and both I and our third roommate would hint around that maybe the dog would rather not go on, but my roommate would just shrug it off and call him "a whiner." While technically true, it seemed an understatement akin to calling Charles Manson "a bad egg."

Thurston's raw, unleavened existential misery seemed screamingly, face-slappingly clear to me, our third roommate, and everyone who ever came over -- clear enough that I began to notice that despite all the talk about hip dysplasia and arthritis, my roommate never mentioned the vet, and I figured that had to be because any vet would see immediately exactly what I'd believed since about six weeks after moving in with Thurston: that his every move and every sound, that every fiber of his being right down to that awful smell coming off him so strong you could see it like heat coming off a road, was begging for the sweet release of death.

This may strike you as cruel. When I would tell people about it at the time, a few of them certainly seemed to feel that I was being insensitive (at best). I felt like it was the opposite, that it was my roommate who was being insensitive, that nobody else would prolong the obvious misery of this poor creature a moment longer than needed. That keeping Thurston alive, dragging him up that hill and pushing his feeble, creaking bones down those steps every day -- as my roommate was wont to do when the noises got too annoying -- was the real cruelty.

I can't remember when the thought first occurred to me, but before long it was nearly all I could think about: I needed to put Thurston out of his misery. Whatever horror my roommate had saved him from could not have been much worse than what the poor thing was going through now, and if my roommate didn't have the stomach for what needed to be done, I would just have to do it for him. I'd just have to make sure he didn't know I did it, or even that it had been done: I had to make it look like an accident.

Maybe I'd leave some chocolate out. Dogs can't eat chocolate because it'll kill them, right? I'm sure I heard that somewhere. So I'll just get like 12 Toblerones and leave them on the kitchen floor while my roommate's at work. Maybe I'll even go down to Ghirardelli Square and set him up with the good stuff -- it is his last meal, after all.

Another option: we'd had to train ourselves to make sure never to leave the front door open for more than a couple of seconds, or else Thurston would invariably make an otherwise uncharacteristically spry move out to the street, down the hill, and into the sunset. My theory was that he was trying to get to the highway a couple blocks away (280 South for you scoring at home) and throw himself into traffic. Whatever his motives, this happened quite a few times, enough that Animal Control had to get involved more than once. After the second or third time, they told my roommate if they found him again, they'd keep him. What could be easier than leaving the door open?

Both the chocolate and the open door seemed too risky, though, too easy to bungle. How much chocolate does it take to kill a dog? How serious is Animal Control when they make a threat like that? These were known unknowns, and I didn't feel good about either of them -- not to mention I would be blamed and held accountable even if he believed whichever plan I went with was an accident.

The plan I settled on was simple and (I hoped) undetectable: I'd inject a big air bubble into a blood vessel while he slept. I felt confident that I could find an injection point -- between his toes was the spot I tended to envision -- that would never be noticed, unless my roommate insisted on an autopsy.

For months I fantasized about the crime, with a frequency rivaling the way I fantasized about 1992 Cindy Crawford, but I never saw an opening where I could do it without fear of discovery. Obviously, I just didn't want to go through with murdering -- does anyone have a problem with me downgrading that to "euthanizing"? -- my roommate's dog, no matter how miserable they were both making me, because in his weird way, my roommate loved that dog.

And anyway, a solution eventually presented itself when I had the good fortune to meet the young lady who would become my wife and provide me with two things: reassurance that I was not insane to feel that this dog was utterly miserable and that his being kept alive was a peculiar strain of sadism; and an escape route from the situation, when we got an apartment together just around the corner (Glen Park, it was like Hobbiton then, I miss it even now) and I moved out of the house after four years.

Did I miss Thurston, or my roommate? Although he and I never had a single argument or raised-voice discussion in all the time we lived together, and had a generally affable relationship, I think I spoke to him less than five times after I moved out, and they were all when I bumped into him around the neighborhood (dragging a whimpering Thurston behind him, naturally), and I've had no contact of any kind with him since.

As for Thurston, I took the most vivid memento of him I can think of with me to my new apartment: the vacuum cleaner. I'd paid for it, after all.  But once we got it to the new place it became clear that it was so thoroughly imbued with the hot, retching smell of Thurston's coat that we did what my roommate never could: we put it out of its misery, took it to the dump, and got a new vacuum cleaner.  

Brooklyn's New Team Drops The Ball

It's just about this time every year that I get interested in pro basketball, when the regular season ends and the playoffs begin, bringing with them the stakes needed to make both me and the players interested in the outcome of the games. (Unfortunately, my adopted New York Knicks just got knocked out, so my interest may waver until later rounds.)

Here in Brooklyn, though, pro basketball is generating a whole different set of intrigues: with the end of the regular season, the so-far-from-making-the-playoffs-they-may-not-even be-allowed-to-watch-them-on-TV New Jersey Nets have officially become the Brooklyn Nets, and will soon take up residence in the $487 trillion Barclays Center, which has been under construction for the last 19 years.

It has been very interesting to watch this stadium being built, a day at a time, as I ride my bike past it heading to and from work. There was a whole lot of controversy surrounding its construction, to put it mildly: some shady eminent-domain land seizure was needed to accommodate the proposed stadium/low-income housing/shopping complex, displacing more than a few people from their homes, and they did not go without a very loud five-year legal battle to obstruct the project.

Once the courts found in favor of the developers (can you believe it?), they apparently felt free to drop some of the pretenses they'd used to sell the thing in the first place: It would not in fact be designed by rockstar architect Frank Gehry. The shopping complex was put on hold. The low-income housing was first turned into 16 luxury condo towers, then reduced to eight (construction start date yet to be announced), leaving the only thing the consortium presumably ever wanted: the Barclays Center, which would have been far less likely to get through the gauntlet of protest and zoning laws and ethical concerns and god knows what else is required to build a stadium not accompanied by promises of housing and job creation. 

(Interestingly, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957 because the team's owner was unable to persuade City Construction Coordinator Robert Moses to seize the exact same patch of land and build a new baseball stadium there [which incidentally he would have paid for himself] to replace the deteriorating Ebbets Field -- now a deteriorating low-income housing project a block away from my house.)

It all seems a little shady and feels a little icky, what with the displacing of people from their homes and all, but the dust has pretty much settled and whatever you or I may think about it, the stadium is here and it's not going anywhere, so it's time to make friends with our new team, the first Brooklyn pro sports team since the Dodgers left.

The Nets made it official the other day when the team unveiled its new logo and colors, supposedly designed and chosen by minority team owner Jay-Z. Whether that's true or not, the new logos are a bit underwhelming; if Jay did indeed design them, he probably did so by dictating his ideas over the phone while getting a manicure and choosing between an array of crushed-velvet black tuxedos in the back of his limo, or at best, scribbled it on a napkin in the champagne room on a break from making it rain. It doesn't look like a lot of thought went into it is what I'm saying. I don't hate the idea of a team wearing black and white, because amazingly no other team is already doing that and we are fresh out of primary colors, and black and white is cool and kinda badass.

But mainly, this feels like a huge missed opportunity, because they kept "Nets." Why didn't they change the name of the team? Recent history shows how well this can work out: the Seattle Supersonics were abducted by a cabal of Oklahoma-based businesspersons a few years ago and relocated to Oklahoma City, over the strenuous objections of Seattle fans, so rather than rub salt in their wounds (and rather than keep a name that made no regional sense -- apologies to the Utah Jazz, Los Angeles Lakers, Arizona Cardinals, and Memphis Grizzlies), they changed the team colors and redubbed it the Oklahoma City Thunder. The results speak for themselves: the Thunder is now 13th of 30 in attendance (quite understandably behind the Lakers, Knicks, Celtics, Heat, Spurs, Mavericks, and Bulls -- you know, the major-market and/or winningest teams of the last decade) and after a couple years' growing pains are among the elite teams in the league -- they just knocked last years' champ (Dallas) out of this year's playoffs. 

By contrast, the Nets ranked dead last in attendance this past season and finished with a dismal 22-44 record, losing their last six in a row. If the idea of keeping the Nets name is to keep continuity with the team's existing fans -- in hopes that they will perhaps make the short trip into Brooklyn to see the team, or more importantly, retain their season tickets -- that ship appears to have sailed. Whatever loyalty New Jerseyans may once have had for the Nets has been negated by A) the fact that they're leaving in the first place, and tripling ticket prices in the process, and B) their unbroken ten-year streak of sub-.500 seasons.

Also, "Nets" is a pretty terrible name for a team, no matter what the sport. Did they just stand at the center of the arena, cover their eyes, and then uncover them and name the team after the first thing they saw? They may as well have been the New Jersey Rims or the New Jersey Benches or the New Jersey Hot Dog Vendors for all the awe/intimidation/excitement their name inspires.

And badass black and white color scheme or no, two weeks after it hit the market, I have yet to see anybody wearing any Brooklyn Nets gear -- and Brooklyn is a place where people are quite enthusiastic about their Officially Licensed Team Apparel.

That's because no matter what, the Nets are always going to feel like someone else's sloppy seconds. They're not our team. Renaming them, ideally renaming them in a way that would resonate with the locals, would make them our team.

They could have called them the Brooklyn Dodgers. I imagine Magic Johnson et al would have something to say about that, which may be why it didn't happen, but that would have made a lot of people happy.

They could have called them the Brooklyn Brownstones -- not exactly terrifying, but very appropriate to the neighborhood.

They could have gone with the Brooklyn Bullets, but then they would have had the same image problem the team in Washington had (handgun murder rates being what they are). But that's still better than the Nets.

What about the Brooklyn Bombers? The Brooklyn Bears? The Brooklyn Bouncers? The Brooklyn Bees? The Brooklyn Blast? The Brooklyn Bodegas? Why not change the name to go with their new colors and be the Brooklyn Black? (This one feels oddly politically incorrect, even though it's totally innocent.)

Really, those all just came off the top of my head (though I do like a couple of them -- the Brooklyn Black is growing on me fast), and I seem to be attached to alliteration, but if I could drop that I bet I could come up with a hundred more. Brooklyn Hipsters leaps to mind. Brooklyn White Belts! Brooklyn Ironic Ts!

But there are two I've been hoping for for months, even though I know neither will never happen.

I really love the Brooklyn Zoo. It also feels oddly politically incorrect, even though every pro sports team in the world is named after an animal.

But you know who would really sell some jerseys? The Brooklyn Ballers! THE BROOKLYN BALLERS!! Could that name be any more perfect? It's full of braggadoccio (in the best Jay-Z boast-rap tradition), it actually applies to the sport in question, and it sounds a little dirty even though it's not. I don't even wear basketball jerseys, but I can't say I wouldn't be tempted to pick one up with BALLERS across the chest. I'd probably resist the temptation, but it would be catnip wrapped in awesome and rolled in badass jimmies to all those guys that love their Officially Licensed Team Apparel.

If they had gone with the Brooklyn Ballers, I guarantee you there would already be a multimillion dollar budgeted rap video on YouTube with its star wearing a BALLERS jersey while standing on the hood of an Escalade and pouring champagne on some underdressed young ladies who never met their dads. Don't bother arguing, you and I both know it to be true.

Instead, we're stuck with the Nets. But look on the bright side: at least it rhymes with "Jets" and "Mets"! Ooh! That gives me another idea: The Brooklyn Pets! The Brooklyn Vets? Wait, I got it: The Brooklyn Regrets.

How about the Brooklyn Tags?

Rest In Peace, MC Adam Yauch

This was supposed to be a good day. I took an extra-long lunch break so I could take in The Avengers, a movie I've been looking forward to for the last 28 years or so. It was great, it met all my expectations and then some, and I left the theater euphoric and certain that the air outside the theater smelled just like the comic book shop I used to haunt when I was 12. I had a lovely bike ride up the west side bike path back to the office. It was a really nice day. And within a minute of sitting down at my desk, I'm in tears.

I don't cry when celebrities die. Or, I never have before. Why should I? It's not like they're gonna cry for me. It's not like I really know them. But this is hitting me hard. The death of Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys is sad -- he was young, he has a young daughter, by all accounts he was a great guy in every way. He absolutely made an impact on my life: His music is literally the soundtrack to my high school and college years. But I never knew him, I never met him. It's not like if a friend died.

I may not know the guy, but I do know the band. Everybody knows the band, especially those of us born in the 1970's.

I think I saw the Beastie Boys more times than any other Big Famous Band. I saw them with Sonic Youth opening for them in some crappy little place, a wedding reception hall in Baltimore in 1992, right after Check Your Head was released, right before it broke and put them back on top -- all four guys from Fugazi watched the show from the side of the stage. I saw them with The Roots and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion opening for them in 1995 -- they brought out three full drum kits and all three played at once (which was awesome). I saw them at Lollapalooza in 1994 -- they had Q-Tip join them on "Get It Together." I saw them at the Tibetan Freedom Concert -- Yauch's baby -- in 1996, in Golden Gate Park. That was a benefit show with two stages side by side and seemingly every great act around at that time. I couldn't get in when they played a punk rock set under the name Quasar at the Bottom of the Hill in 1997, but I saw them in the round at the Oakland Coliseum in 1998 on the Hello Nasty tour -- my brother flew out to go to that one with me. And after a long gap, I saw them one last time at Summer Stage in Central Park, front and center, in the summer of 2009, and it was probably the best I'd ever seen them. 

They were always great -- I never saw them have a bad show. I never left anything but sweaty, exhausted, and happy. And this has to be said: if you like cute girls, in particular the kind that don't wear a lot of makeup, took a lot of art classes, and aren't scared to get sweaty at a rock show, the Beastie Boys drew the cream of that particular crop.

I remember watching their video compilation circa 1993, The Skills To Pay The Bills, on VHS at my friend's apartment over and over and over and marveling at how effortlessly they combined music and humor, never bending one to suit the other and both coming out perfect. That tape was the blueprint for the next ten years' worth of music videos in every genre, and Adam Yauch directed those video under his pseudonym Nathaniel Hornblower.

I sit here trying to think of how to explain how it feels to hear that the Beastie Boys are over, and worse, that they're over because they lost their social conscience, their best rapper, their bass player, and their video director to cancer, all in the same day. But if you know this band, I don't have to explain how it feels, because you're feeling it too. Because the thing about the Beastie Boys is that everybody liked them. I was living in a dorm at the University of Maryland when Check Your Head came out. Like everybody else, I'd loved Licensed to Ill and like everybody else, I missed Paul's Boutique when it came out. I thought the Beastie Boys were a novelty act, that they'd had their 15 minutes, that they were done. Check Your Head was immediately coming out of every window and every doorway in that dorm. Everybody loved it, and they loved it because it sounded like a mixtape. Anybody remember mixtapes? A straight-up hip-hop song followed by a punk rock song followed by a funk jam followed by an instrumental. Literally everyone I knew was listening to this record (and before long, going back to Paul's Boutique), from sorority girls to Deadheads. It was a little of everything, but more than anything it was itself. It was unique. It pushed boundaries. Who says white kids can't rap? Who says rap can't have live instruments? Who says we can't put a 90-second punk jam on a rap record? Who says we can't sample 480 different songs to make one? Who says we can't rap about Buddhism, over a backing track of Gregorian monks? Who says we can't be nice to women?

But more than any of that, their music had a spirit. It communicated a feeling that, clearly, those of us at the right age to receive it at the time, all responded to.  Listening to this band you felt like your best self. The most creative. The most open. The most positive. Closer to peace. I mourn Adam Yauch, and I mourn the Beastie Boys, because the band has obviously died with him. Because if there was ever an all-for-one-and-one-for-all kind of band, if there was ever a band that would never go on without one of its members, it's this one, and that's exactly as it should be. This is the first celebrity death that's ever made me cry. I'm going to stop thinking about MCA, and the Beastie Boys, and start listening to them, before I start crying again.