http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT-7EklLIG4

We Did It

I had never even shoplifted before. I was crouched down inside the construction barrel with my cell phone in one hand and the stun gun in the other. It was 3:45 A.M. I pressed the buttons on my phone every few seconds to keep the inside of the barrel dimly lit. Every minute or so I pulled the trigger on the stun gun to make sure it was working. I was convinced it wasn’t going to work when the time came. I knew I was killing the battery but I couldn’t help it. I was on the verge of panic.

I knew Dave was up in the hotel room watching the street from fifteen floors up. He could see every car coming in or going out. He was watching the street, but I figured he was also staring down at the barrel wondering how I was doing. I know I would have been. Chris was ten blocks away sitting in the car  – just waiting. It was 3:47 and still no text from Dave. The previous five Friday and Saturday nights the bouncer had made it there by 3:45 at the latest. Of course this would be the night he’d be running behind.

When Dave and Chris and I moved back to Boston from Los Angeles, after realizing we were never going to get famous, we all got regular jobs. Dave’s father got him a job through his Union connections. Chris and I went back to bartending. It wasn’t terrible. Our lives were fine but fantasies of fame and success had energized us for so long that without them time seemed to drag. Just about every night when my bar closed I would walk over to Chris’s bar, which stayed open an hour later, and Dave would already be sitting there. We’d drink and talk until Chris was done closing up. We’d walk home together over the bridge, usually, lamenting things that happened, or didn’t happen, while we were in L.A.

One night while Dave and I were sitting at Chris’s bar a guy we knew from our neighborhood walked in and sat down with us. He was drunk and pissed. He had just been fired from his bouncer job for saying something “of a sexual nature” to the coat check girl. He was carrying on about what a piece of shit the owner who fired him was and how bad he could fuck the guy over if he wanted to. We didn’t ask him to elaborate on how he could fuck the owner over - but he did.

The owner ran seven different bars in downtown Boston. It was well known to most of his employees that at the end of each night the owner would have one of his bouncers, who never carried a gun, a knife, or even a can of pepper spray, drive from bar to bar collecting that night’s cash deposits. The bouncer would then drive to an office on High Street, go inside, alone, and put the envelopes into the cash drop safe.  He said that after a busy Friday or Saturday night there could be as much as $50,000 in the drop. After a half hour of angry drunken rambling he stumbled out of the bar. That night during our walk home we talked about what it would be like to rob the bouncer. The conversation was fun. We were all talking fast and loud. It was a lot like the conversations we used to have about fame and fortune in L.A. Six weeks later I was crammed into a barrel waiting for the text from Dave.

It was 3:48 and I was about to lose my mind. I was sweating. My knees and back were burning with pain. Thinking about Dave sitting in a nice hotel room looking through binoculars sipping a soda wasn’t helping. It was my punishment for being the shortest and fitting inside the barrel.  I was five seconds from throwing the barrel off of me and running away when the one word text from Dave finally came: CAR. I looked through the peephole we had drilled into the side of the barrel and saw headlights brightening the street from around the corner. A second text: IT’S HIM. The two words knocked the wind out of me. The car turned onto High Street and he parked right where he always did. A third text: TURN YOUR PHONE OFF.

The bouncer sat in his car for about a minute before getting out, but it felt like a long time. It was pitch black inside the barrel. The stun gun was as wet with sweat as I was. Was that dangerous? Was I going to electrocute myself? The three of us had spent an hour on the internet researching stun guns to make sure we weren’t going to accidentally hurt or kill the bouncer. From everything we read they almost never caused any permanent harm. Chris even insisted that before we move ahead with the stun gun plan we check the bouncer out to make sure he wasn’t fat and out of shape. Chris thought that would make it more likely for him to have a heart attack. We didn’t find any evidence for his theory, but when the bouncer turned out to be young and fit Chris felt better.

The bouncer got out of the car and walked toward the door jingling his keys. Sidewalk construction had been happening on the street for weeks. Caution tape, the smaller orange safety cones, and the larger orange safety barrels were everywhere. The barrel sitting right next to the office door didn’t look out of place at all. He got to the door and was looking for the right key on his crowded key chain. He was a foot away from me. My heart was pounding. There was no way I was going to be able to go through with it. I had played it over a thousand times in my mind, but now everything was different. He was muttering swears to himself trying to find the right key. I think he was a little drunk. I lined the stun gun up with the rectangular slot we had cut in the side of the barrel. The prongs of the gun were 6 inches away from the side of his leg. All I had to do was reach out. It was just as we had planned it. I lowered the gun away from the hole. I couldn’t do it. I was too scared. I would just sit there and wait for him to leave. Chris wouldn’t care. He had been nervous about the whole thing from the start. He told me fifty times not to go through with it if anything seemed funny. Dave would make fun of me, but that would be it. We’d being drinking beers and laughing in the hotel room within a half hour.

The bouncer finally found the right key and opened the door. I was trying to decide if I should run away as soon as he went inside or wait for him to come back out and drive away. He was never in there for more than a few minutes. I would wait. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The second I decided I wasn’t going to do it I felt fine. Even my knees and back stopped aching. The bouncer held the door open with one hand and as he was trying to put his keys in his pocket he dropped them right next to the barrel. I saw them on the ground through the stun gun slot. My heart stopped. He bent down to pick up the keys and said, “What the fuck?” out loud. I closed my eyes and waited. Nothing happened. He was thinking. I don’t know if he saw me through the hole, or if without realizing it I had moved and he heard it. It may have been nothing. He may have just been putting the keys back into his pocket and thinking about some girl he saw that night. He may have been thinking about a future when he wouldn’t have to bounce anymore. He may have been thinking about what it would be like to be rich and famous. There was no way for me to know. I slid the stun gun through the hole and stunned the side of his leg. 

I ran around the corner of the building into the alley with the bag of cash envelopes pressed tight to my chest. I came to the green tarp in the shadows against the brick wall. I could barely see. I pulled up the tarp and got on the bicycle and started to ride as fast as I could. The alley that ran along the back of the buildings was about seven blocks long. There had been some disagreement about whether we should even bother with a bike or if it would be faster if I just ran. We timed my running and biking over that distance at a park near our apartment. It was ten seconds faster on the bike. I reached into my pocket and turned my phone back on as I rode through the ally. I got to the end and skidded to a stop. A car stopped right in front of the alley and my heart screamed – COP! But, my head knew it was Chris. I dropped the bike and got in the car. Chris had panic in his eyes. The first thing he asked was if I was OK. I told him I was. I looked at my phone. A text from Dave: ARE YOU OK? Neither of them asked about the money. I wasn’t thinking about the money.  We didn’t even get around to counting it until hours later. I just kept thinking the same three words over and over again – We did it. Chris drove toward the onramp to the highway. We did it. We did it. They were the only words my brain could produce. Later Dave and Chris told me they had been thinking the same thing.

A Memo

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To: Faculty and Staff, Cornell University

From: Williams G. Philpot, Dean of Students

Re: Benton Baxter Agricultural College

President Henry Jacobs, Provost Anthony Iula and Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration Jane Coward have distributed letters to the community describing the overall strategic plan for dealing with our current, highly sensitive, student body matter. I am writing to more fully explain the anticipated impact for the faculty and staff.

As most of you are aware our university has long held the complicated distinction of having the highest student suicide rate in the United States. We have all worked tirelessly over the past ten years to adjust school policy in the hope of curbing this unsettling fact. Now, however, new evidence has come to light and the ground is shifting beneath our feet.

Reports indicate that this past semester Benton Baxter Agricultural College (This is an actual school. Not a prank) overtook us, Cornell University, for first place with seven student suicides against our five. While we remain committed to improving our understanding of student needs, and mental health generally, we now have to revisit certain attitudes and policies.       

Student suicides, while tragic, are often viewed as evidence of the challenging, competitive, academic environment many parents wish for their children to experience. To put the matter bluntly - this is a business. Our suicide rate has always been, albeit quietly, something of a marketing tool. Parents want to know they’re not plunking down thirty thousand dollars a year to have their kids hanging out in the rec center shooting pool and having abortions. Vice President Coward in administrations will tell you, some of the Asian parents ask how many suicides we had the previous year before they say hello. 

Our goal is the very tricky, but essential, dance of keeping student suicides as low as possible without falling out of first place in the national standings. For ten years now this is exactly what had been happening. Everyone was happy. Now, out of the blue, Benton Baxter Agricultural College has seven kids drink turpentine because they couldn’t get their tractors started and now we’ve got Asian and American parents alike thinking “Hey, they must be doing something right down at Benton Baxter!”

I know you all dread seeing these memos in your inboxes because they invariably mean we’re going to ask you to do more work. Not this time. For once we’re asking that you to do a little less. We’d like to start teaching some “What Not to Notice” type signs.

What should I do if a student’s grades suddenly start to slip?  One approach that has proven successful over the years is to assume that the student is stupid.  Occam’s razor at its sharpest. I once had a student who thought Canada was an island. Anything’s possible nowadays. We don’t have to race every kid who gets C off to an analyst.

How seriously should I take it if a student threatens to commit suicide? Not very. Sometimes, honestly, most times - kids are joking. Humor is edgy and ironic today. “I have nothing to live for I wish I were dead” is like the “Where’s the Beef?” of the 1980’s. Remember that? Ten times every class kids would be shouting Where’s the Beef? back then. No more. Everything is dark now. Flow with the times. 

Is it bad to tell female students that they seem to be gaining weight? Not if you really think they are. Obesity is a problem. The notorious “freshman fifteen” is cute saying and all, but lets be honest, “freshman fifty” is more like it. Some of our girls leave here looking like Larry Holmes. We’re educators. There’s nothing wrong with educating your students in cold reality of the “guys don’t make passes at girls with fat asses” principle. In the end they’ll thank you. 

Is it OK to repeatedly make fun of the way a foreign student talks in front of the class? Only if you actually have something funny to say about it. Or if you’re particularly good at funny accents. Nothing gratuitous. No yelling – Hey go back to Surinam, Bombito! No one knows what the fuck you’re talking about! Actually, I just laughed out loud at the thought of that. Maybe it is OK. I don’t know. Your call.  

What should I do if I suspect a female student may have been the victim of sexual assault? Blame her. I barely even have to walk you through the drill with this one: You were wearing jeans and sweater? On a Tuesday? Yeah, I guess you can call the police if you want…

If a student dies mysteriously or goes missing, is it OK to write a fake suicide note in order that the University will get credit for the suicide? Obviously, not really. The last thing we need is to start writing suicide notes for ‘missing’ kids who are actually just up in Montreal getting lap dances for the weekend. These kids have families. And one thing we know about families – they sue. I’m 99.99% percent inflexible on this – NO WRITING FAKE SUICIDE NOTES! Unless you do it and happen to get away with it in which case, you have my word, we won’t be bringing in Scotland Yard to try and figure out what actually happed. But if you get caught you’re fired. No question. 

These are the just a few of ideas we’ve been kicking around on the administrative end. As always your thoughts and opinions are welcomed and highly valued. Lets keep the pop quizzes coming, keep telling kids their futures hinge on every breath they take, and keep making Cornell one of the world’s finest institutions of higher learning!  

 Williams G. Philpot, 

 Dean of Students 

Always Right

 

I walked into the restaurant during the cold, dark, depths of the lunch rush. I was immediately struck by the service staff’s performance, which in the midst of a zebra stampede would have stood out as particularly frenzied and unprofessional. The host stand was unattended. It’s always that way with restaurants.  The panicked staff will abandon their posts when discipline and calm are most needed. I saw the blighted girl, Molly the hostess, rushing from table to table helping the bussers and waiters clear plates and glasses. I had been standing there, unacknowledged, for what was approaching a full minute. It was a complete breakdown of order.

There was no little bell to ring, like at a hotel front desk, to indicate a customer in need of assistance. Restaurants almost never employ those little bells. I am not the sort of man to allow an establishment’s negligence in supplying the proper bells effect me one way or the other. I began slapping my palm firmly onto the spot on the host stand where the little bell ought to have been.

“Excuse me! I need assistance! DING, DING! I’m waiting to be seated! This is ridiculous!” I shouted.

The hostess’s arms were loaded with dirty dishes. She was helping the waiter Pablo, the Sphinx of the Daily Specials I call him, clear one of his tables. They glanced at me, no more than a glance, and she sneered, “We’ll be right with you Mr. Rainsford.” I felt raped.

“We?” I objected. “YOU are the hostess! Put down those dishes! Why are you walking toward the kitchen? Your post is abandoned!”

I could feel the seconds tick by as I stood waiting. 

“You are a very bad hostess.” I said when she returned.

“We’re very busy, Mr. Rainsford.”

“Consider your argument, Molly.” I said calmly, “You are employed at an establishment that, despite your best efforts to undermine it, is somewhat successful. This success is owed to customers, like me, who patronize it regularly despite your presence and the daily dose of nonsense and aggravation your presence assures. Are you following this?”

She was disorganizing a stack of menus. Ignoring me completely. 

“Our reward for making this business successful can only be, according to your reasoning, worse service? And further, according to your Heckle and Jeckle logic, the more successful we make this business, by more and more of us coming here, the more we will be repaid with worse service? Do I misrepresent your position?”

“Would you like to be seated, Mr. Rainsford?”

“Square!” I demanded.

“The square tables are reserved for parties of three or more. You may have a circle.”

“I will NOT have a circle! The circles are ill suited for an inmate. My elbows fall of the edges. I will take a square!”

“Circle or the bar.” She insisted.

“The bar! With that behemoth lurking back there like a caged bear. He spits when he speaks.”

“The bartender’s name is Sam.” She said.

“He should be in chains. I’ll take a circle. However, as compensation for being treated in a manner befitting a war criminal I insist on choosing which circle I’m to be punished at.”

“You may choose your circle.” She said.

I pointed at a square. It was worth a try. It would have been less than shocking to discover this girl did not know her shapes. Unfortunately, someone must have gone over which shape is which with her many times because she marched right to a circle and slapped down a menu.

“I was testing you.” I said.

“How’d I do?”

“For a preschooler you did very well. Send the manager over immediately. There is an open vent somewhere pumping air conditioning directly onto my face with the force of the gods. It must be turned off immediately to assure I’m not dead by the time my tuna fish sandwich arrives.”

“Would you just like to move to a different table where the air conditioner isn’t blowing on your face?” She provoked.

“Manager.” I said.

The manager approached my table with the easy manner of a man who has suffered a brain injury. I had dealt with this walking corpse many times in the past. His capacity as a problem solver seemed limited to the most highly specialized sorts of dilemmas. For example, if you, for some reason, were in immediate need of a man standing by your table in order that you could watch him blink - he would be an asset. If you required anything more complicated, like a napkin, he would continue to provide you with the blinking as you wiped your hands on your pants.   

“How are you today Mr. Rainsford?” The manager mocked.

“Doing poorly.” I admitted. “Interrogation experts would struggle to devise a method of agitating the human nervous system as insidiously effective as the act ordering a tuna sandwich in your restaurant.”      

“Specifically, what can I do for you?” He said.

“Well, I will think of it as a personal favor if you see to it that I am not decapitated by your air conditioner at some point during my lunch. Any setting lower than 'gale force' should be fine.”

“I will turn the system down.”

I could tell by the look of simpleton terror on his face he wasn’t even sure where the air conditioner was, let alone how to turn in down.

“I would also appreciate it if, at some point in the next few minutes, some member of your team decided to go out on a limb and assume that the reason I’m sitting here is in some way related to the possibility that I'm hungry.”

This confused him to the point of labored blinking.

“Lunch!” I said. “I would like to order my lunch! Send my waiter immediately. But, do not even consider sending Jake, Pablo, or Debra. They have all proven second rate. I believe Debra suffers from some sort of cognitive disorder. I once ordered a tuna sandwich and she brought me the prime rib. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I want a server who is alert and speaks English as a first language. Pablo explains the specials by way of the riddle. I am in no mood for his tricks. If anyone dares mention this system of “sections” you all seem fixated on I will empty this bottle of ketchup onto the table and smear it around with my hands. I will be pushed around by you incompetents NO MORE!”

Close to a minute later I was still waiting for my server to arrive. When the volume of the music in the restaurant was suddenly lowered I wrapped my scarf tightly around my neck and, in some small way, found myself appreciating the manager for trying his best. I decided to close my eyes and start screaming until someone came over to take my order. A few minutes later I opened my eyes to find Pablo the Trickster with his pen and pad at the ready.

“Pablo, go away! I’m trying to have a nice relaxing lunch? I won’t deal with your puzzles and mysteries!”

“Buenos dias, Senor Rainsford.”

“WHAT? What are you saying? My name isn’t Seymour! Please, someone help me!”

“Today – especial – halibut – Uh- brown butter sauce…”

I closed my eyes, resumed screaming, and banged my hand on the spot on the table where the little bell ought to have been.

 A Bad Day to Be Born

 I was born on December 27th. As those born on that same day can attest; we do not receive birthday presents. We, the wretched luckless, do no not receive presents because, as most of you know, December 27th is also Gerard Depardieu’s birthday. Six months ago, I started writing the French acting legend letters informing him that he ruined my childhood.   

Dear Mr. Depardieu,

For most children the holidays are a joyous time of year. I, however, was born on December 27th 1975; twenty-seven years to the day after the curtains were first raised on your own existence, and only a short thirteen months after your breakout performance in Bertrand Blier’s Going Places. In life it is generally agreed that timing is everything. Timing, as you can see, has cast me in the unrelenting, unyielding, unpitying shadow of Gerard Depardieu.

I am not alone. I am only one of thousands who has been subjected to the annual pain of that well known holiday cost-cutting tactic employed against children by their parents. The scene is the same the world over. You are handed a single carefully wrapped present and casually told: “This is your present for your birthday and Gerard Depardieu’s birthday.”

For me (I mentioned others born on December 27th out of a much needed sense of solidarity, but do consider my situation to be unique and particularly traumatizing) the injustices did not end there. With my sister’s birthday safely in April she has received twice the presents that I have throughout our lives. Add this to the fact that my parents always take her side and that, despite being a year my junior, she is now a homeowner while I still use a flip phone, and you can picture a developmentally stunting home life out from which few could climb.

It seems to me that the only fair way for this situation to be resolved, and I want you to know I’ve toiled over the details of this, is for you to reimburse me for the thirty-six birthday presents you have cost me. You may notice, and I count this as evidence of my pure motives, that thirty-six is a strictly symbolic number. If you consider all of the aunts, uncles, cousins, and girlfriends who, thanks to you, repeatedly gypped me, you owe me an incalculable number of presents. But I am not in search of a windfall. I only desire closure and the ability to move on with my life.

As this is the ninth letter I have written you, I’m beginning to suspect that we stand divided on where your moral responsibilities lie. You’re forcing my hand here, Depardieu. I may not have put things strenuously enough in my first eight letters (although it seems to me that a person as perceptive as a piece of French oak probably starts to sense a man means business around letter five or six). So, let me put it plainly - I want those presents! I’m serious. If you think I’m bluffing, allow me to quote the immortal words uttered by Marquis De Sade during a little revolution you may remember: Try me.

 I live at 346 Thomas Drive, Paramus, New Jersey, also known as my parent’s house. A 1950’s style Cape Cod. I’m still there as a result of dropping out of college, mishandling a few credit cards, and being such an emotional wreck over this birthday present business. Mail my presents there. Make sure to address the packages to me or else, as sure as I’m unemployed, my parents will open them, give them to my sister, and then we’re back where we started.

  That’s all for now. Bidding you a Happy Holidays would seem beside the point.

Expectantly,

James Scott Patterson

A Supposedly Insufferable Thing I’d Probably Do Again: German Opera and the Problem of Free Will 

I saw my old friend Commander Gomez marching toward me from across the Lincoln Center plaza. Gomez is the lead singer in a heavy metal band that, according to him, has been “a bass player away from superstardom” since the late 1990’s. He was wearing his customary black leather jacket. Friday night at The Met be dammed. His head was shaved close to the scalp in what could easily be mistaken for the neo-Nazi tradition. His tattoos were creeping up past his collar on his neck. He was walking fast - too fast. I could tell from fifty feet away he was wired out of his mind on drugs. I had half a flask of whiskey in my jacket. The other half was winding its way through my veins. We were there to see Die Walkure, the second of the four operas that make up Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. It’s long been one of Gomez's favorites. I was just there for the kicks. 

We ordered two glasses of water at the bar. I dumped the water into a plant and filled the glasses with whiskey. A little kid wearing a bowtie watched us. Gomez cursed the kid a busybody and said he wanted to smash his skull in. The small talk ended there. He launched into a detailed account of a psychological breakdown he suffered a few years back while studying existential philosophy and discovering that Free Will is an illusion. The notion that we our not the conscious authors of our own thoughts and motives, combined with enormous amounts of illegal drugs, pushed The Commander’s nervous system to the brink. He lapsed into an alter ego who called himself The Karaoke Navy Seal. The Karaoke Navy Seal would perform flawlessly executed “karaoke missions” around New York City. He had the sleeves cut off his heavy metal concert T-shirts by a professional tailor at thirty-five bucks per alteration. He added a few more tattoos to his already cluttered arms and back. He was ready to work. After he kicked ass on the karaoke stage the KNS would accost everyone in the bar insisting that they play bass in his band. Somehow, it was during one of these “karaoke missions” that he met his future wife. She, combined with enormous amount of legal drugs, cured him of his Free Will panic to the point where he could start going outside again.

 “I just read a book by Sam Harris about Free Will.” I said cheerfully. “Don’t tell me anything about it!” Gomez ordered. “That shit makes me nuts.” “Free Will doesn’t exist.” I said. “Total illusion. The facts are in. It’s as close to settled as a matter can be.” Gomez covered his ears and sang War Pigs by Black Sabbath at the top of his lungs as I explained the facts. Now everyone was staring at us. “What about quantum indeterminacy?” Gomez said once he calmed down. “There’s room for Free Will in quantum mechanics! A lot of smart people think so!” His eyes were desperate. He was pleading with me now. I laughed hard in his face. Quantum indeterminacy is the last stronghold for the serious Free Will fanatics. It’s a dead end street like all the rest. I explained it to him thoroughly. “Quantum indeterminacy is bullshit.” I said. He shot down his whisky and I shot down mine. He took a small amount of white powder out of a little container and snorted it right in front of everyone. He put the container back in his bag and took out two pairs of opera glasses. He handed me mine. “Do. Not. Fucking. Break them!” he said. We went to find our seats.

The Met's production of Die Walkure is dominated by an enormous set “machine” made up of twenty-four movable planks that, with the help of video projections, can twist and bend to form a number of spectacular visual designs. The first act opens with Siegmund, a fat man, fleeing through an eerie gray forest. Exhausted, he enters a strange house and collapses near the fireplace. Sieglinde, also fat, enters her kitchen and finds the unconscious stranger. She revives him and offers him a cup of water. Siegmund refuses the water out of some misguided principle. She tells him to just please take the water. He tells her he feels as though he really shouldn’t take the water. These two continue to go in circles over this cup of water for the bulk of the first act. Eventually, sanity prevails, he drinks the water, and something masquerading as dramatic tension is released.

Toward the end of the first act Gomez leaned over and told me everything he thought the director was doing wrong. He said the singers, thanks in large part to “the Machine,” were missing a lot of the best sound spots on the stage. Placing the singers behind the planks was garbling the acoustics, he said. He said the costumes were cartoonish, but an improvement over the down right silliness of the costuming in Das Rheingold. He also said he was having major problems with the “stupid old cunt” to his left  who was putting her elbow on his armrest. I was having my own ordeal with the pretentious opera buff to my right. The entire performance he couldn't contain his opera seria ecstasy. He was enraptured with every note. With his hands clasped over his heart, he sat edged out on his seat, almost genuflecting; his anguished whispers never stopped: Wonderful! Wonderful! Simply splendid! Bravo! BRAVO!  
"Look at this bitch!" Gomez whispered. "Her elbow is all over my rest!"
"Don't tell me your problems!" I said. "The guy next to me is a raving psychotic."
"Should I do something?" he asked.
"Yes," I lied.    
 He knocked her arm off the armrest and I heard him whisper loudly, “That one’s yours, this one’s mine!” It was drugs talking, but the drugs happened to be right. The first act curtain came down and we shouted “coming through” as we fought our way back toward the bar.

This time we didn’t even bother with emptying water glasses. We just drank right from the flask in the middle of the lobby. You’ve never seen so many heads shake. I was just about to subject The Commander to a little more Free Will torture when two security guards approached us. A complaint had been filed that Gomez assaulted an elderly woman in the audience. Gomez explained that he accidentally knocked the woman’s elbow off his armrest, but that was it. I corrected him. “It was no accident.” I said. “But, the woman did have her arm on his armrest, so it’s a bit of a gray area. Very complicated.” The security guard pointed at the flask in my hand. “What’s in that?”
“Juice.” I said.
He nodded and radioed for back up.

We were brought down to the security office and detained in a small meeting room. Now I had Gomez right where I wanted him. I explained some of the latest experiments neuroscientists have conducted demonstrating that there’s no Free Will and that life is a horrifying nightmare. Harris' book is full of them. The physiologist Benjamin Libet used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex is detectable 300 hundred milliseconds before a subject “feels” he has decided to move. A different lab built on Libet’s research using FMRI. The researchers were able to predict which button a subject would push a full 7 to 10 seconds before the subject claimed to have “chosen” which button he would choose. The case is closed. We aren’t free to make choices. Choices are made for us in a place in our brain that our conscious minds cannot reach. After our brain decides on our next move, our “conscious minds” are informed of what that move is. Even if you then “decide” not to make that move, the decision not to move sprung into your mind in exactly the same way the previous decision to move did. “You” were not the author of either choice. In other words, if your life were a book, "you" are just reading it, you’re not writing it. Gomez was shaking like a drugged up leaf.

 They kept us in the room for what seemed like a long time. Gomez said he was hopeful that we could get everything straightened out by the start of the third act so that we wouldn’t miss the famous Ride of the Valkyrie scene. A minute later one of the guards came in and told us we were kicked out and couldn’t come back to The Met for a year. The Commander started to protest, but I shot him one of those looks that clearly means if these people search you and find the ‘with intent to distribute’ amount of drugs you’re holding then we’ll really have problems. He nodded in agreement and three guards escorted us out. They were sort of joking with us about being thrown out of the Opera. Not bad guys. They opened a set of heavy double doors to the outside. They said they just had to watch us leave the property. We walked through the plaza. It’s about fifty yards to the street. We could hear Ride of the Valkyrie booming behind us. When we hit the sidewalk I turned and waved to them. I couldn’t resist. “You guys can go fuck yourselves!” I yelled. They were the final three shaking heads of the evening. They slammed the doors and went back inside. Gomez was a little annoyed with me. “Those guys were alright. Why’d you do that?” He asked. I gave him a few seconds to regret the question.
 “Who knows?” I smiled.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He said.

A Paylapa in Yelapa
Or
In the Defense of Joan


The water taxi bobbed next to a rickety pier waiting to take us to Yelapa. I looked at the brochure in my hand. In a font called Blackadder, that may as well be called “Pirate,” this slogan was written: A Paylapa in Yelapa is better than a condo in Redando. It was the kind of slogan, and the kind of font, that could ruin an entire vacation.

Three fat Mexican men sat on the boat staring at my girlfriend Joan and me. Mostly at Joan. The fattest of the leering boatmen seemed a bit closer to sober than the other two. I knew this distinction was as close to something like a “captain” as we were likely to get. I handed him a few pesos. His smile told me he was drunker than I originally thought. Joan was smiling too. Oblivious to the many dangers. Oblivious to everything.

The motor coughed to start and the boat lunged away from the pier. “Hey, hey, hey!” yelled a nervous American who was me. “Lifejackets?” I asked. The captain gave a reassuring nod. He slowly stood up, opened his captain’s chair, which was a big plastic cooler, took out two Coronas and handed them to us. In other words: no lifejackets. After living in Mexico for three months I realized that this water taxi company operated in much the same way as the country did. In the faint, vague, hope, that nothing goes wrong. If something does, rest assured, no one has a plan. Emergency exits, evacuation routes, fire extinguishers, helmets, a phone number you can dial if you accidentally drink poison, extra batteries in a drawer? Gringo stuff. South of the border when things go wrong, “in charge” just means whoever is closest to their rosary beads.

Yelapa is a small tourist daytrip destination née fishing village just south of Puerto Vallarta. It’s only accessible by boat. There are no roads in or out. No electricity. No automobiles. No police. It was described to us, and accepted sight unseen by Joan, as a romantic tropical paradise. To me it sounded like the perfect place for bail jumpers and guys ducking subpoenas to hide out. The Captain, now Cinco De Mayo level drunk, pointed at a small cove off in the distance. “Yelapa.” He slurred. Joan grabbed my hand in excitement. It was going to be amazing, she declared. The best time of our lives. I was already regretting leaving my gun back at the hotel. It was an orange water pistol I bought off some Chicklet peddling nuisance on the beach the day before. But still, I’d rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

Joan sat on a beach chair happily sipping a mai tai. She didn’t know what was happening. My eyes darted from threat to threat. I saw everything. Three American bikers sat under a giant umbrella passing around a bottle of white rum. They stared menacingly at Joan. When I’m feeling paranoid I can read lips. They discussed killing her and raping me, or something a lot like it. “Pelican!” Joan shouted repeatedly, drawing unwanted attention. Our waiter was a local. He had that easy rapist manner. Other rapists milled about. As the sun set Joan and everyone else on the beach stood at the water’s edge and watched the sky melt into a molten red canvass over the bay. Together they held their breath, transfixed by its grandeur. It was some sort of rapist ritual. I stood with my back to the celestial what-have-you and stared at the tiny paylapa in which Joan and I were to spend the night.

The paylpa had no walls. A bamboo parapet served as the only exterior defense. It could have been stepped over in a single stride by a rapist anywhere over four feet tall. There was a bed in the center of the room with a mosquito net draped over it. While this net was the closest thing to precaution I had seen since arriving in Mexico, mosquitos weren’t what worried me. The roof’s supporting beams were also bamboo. The roof itself was thatched straw and palm. We’d be the first little pigs in need of saving when the Big Bad Wolf that is Latin America came huffing and puffing. Kerosene lamps were scattered throughout the room as a reminder of the distance between us and 20th century innovation. There was a footlocker with a heavy pad lock at the foot of the bed. Our possessions would be safe, but I don’t consider my possessions to be unique in that they are nothing without me. The picturesque view of the lagoon was spectacular but irrelevant. Its sole value to me was that it kept Joan enraptured and quiet while I devised a plan to keep her safe throughout the night.

I bought a case of Corona at the chicken coop that also sold beer just up the dirt and weeds from our paylapa. The first step to protecting Joan was to drink all of the beers and line the empty bottles along the top of the parapet. I found three steak knives in a drawer in the kitchenette and slipped them, handles out, in between the mattress and box spring. I put one of the kerosene lamps and a lighter under the bed. When an unsuspecting rapist tried to climb in to rape Joan or me, he would knock over the bottles. Upon hearing this, I would stab him repeatedly in the face with the steak knives before using the kerosene lamp as a Molotov cocktail and setting him on fire. At about that time he would know for sure; he had picked the wrong paylapa.

As Joan and I slept, bodies entwined, a thin layer of mesh separating us from the night, a warm breeze eased in off the lagoon and tripped my alarm. The bottles started shattering and clanging off of the floor. I shot up, shouting “I told you so,” and immediately got tangled up in the mosquito net. I fought loose and got to my knives. Double-fisted I started slashing at the darkness. “Honey, relax. It’s the wind! It’s just the wind!” I heard Joan pleading. I knew then that escape might mean having to leave Joan behind. A person has to want to be saved. I went back to swinging my knives in a manner Joan later described as, “very close to her face.” She ran to the parapet and tried to stop more bottles from falling. I prepared the firebomb.

People started yelling things from the other paylapas. “Knock it off idiot!” I heard clearly. “We’re trying to sleep moron! Enough of your nonsense!” It was mostly negative stuff. “They’re gone.” Joan said. “You scared them off.” I caught my breath and put the firebomb down. “Are you sure?” She pulled me down onto the bed. I was still breathing heavy. She put her hand on my heaving chest in way that let me know that everything was alright and that she was going to break up with me the first chance she got once we were back in America. I was trying to protect you, I told her. I know you were, she said. We laid in darkness listening to the waves paw at the beach for what seemed like a long time. I was almost asleep when I heard her thank me.