Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

I haven’t heard the whole story but I imagine it went something like this:

Low level screw-up friend comes by and says, “Hey, I know you need some cash. I know where to get some – easy!”

“Nah, man, you know I don’t want nothing to do with any of your mess. I keep my butt out of trouble and that’s just the way I like it.”

“No, really, man – look, you and me, we just stay in the car. Be the lookout. The other dudes, they the ones that go on and make that old white man cough up some of his money.”

“What!? No way, man. You going into some white dude’s house and robbing him? No way, I’m not going to be there. I got four kids – the baby’s only a month old! The wife and me, we’ll make the house payments somehow, I don’t need no mess.”

“Listen, listen! They running drugs, him and his old lady. Gotta whole pot farm in the basement and no one knows who doesn’t need to know. They are “well respected pillars of the community”. What they gonna do when they get robbed? Call the cops? Easy money, we can’t go wrong. We don’t even need you, you won’t be doing nothing anyway, I just wanted to do you a favor and get you a piece of the action. C’mon, man, you know you need the money.”

And it probably did seem just like that, at that point. Little risk for a big reward and god knows babies are expensive, and maybe that mortgage on the house is weighing a bit heavily on the bank account in this recession and the older kids are going to need new school clothes and supplies soon and with so many days over 105 degrees the electric bill will be monstrous and the food is being stretched just about as far as it can go already and the car is holding up but just barely, that’s not counting the price of gas that’s going up and up and a little more money would come in handy and, anyway, he’s right – if everyone is a criminal, us and them, who’s going to call the cops?

Very convincing, at least it must have seemed so to him because – just like that – there he is in the car with three other people including his screw-up friend, pulling up to the house in the nice, quiet suburban neighborhood, just the sort of place you’d expect well-known, well-loved pillars of society with a secret to live and just settling down to wait for his easy money while the two principle genius’s walk calmly to the house, ring the doorbell and go in.

I don’t know but I think maybe his first – or at least his biggest – “Oh, sh*t!” moment came when the two came running out of the house maybe carrying the easy money or maybe not, but definitely with blood on their clothing –

Actually, I don’t know that there was blood because the news didn’t say but I’m thinking you don’t cut one person’s throat, let alone two, without making a mess so I’m seeing blood on their clothes as they jump in the car and yell “Drive! Drive!” and he does, taking off out of there fast because at some point it’s been made clear that like most secure nice white folks, pillars of society even with a secret don’t mind picking up the phone and dialing 911 soon as someone threatens them in their home, maybe knowing that their little peccadillo could be effectively explained away by their age and maybe a claim to health problems and who would deny that people in their 60s no doubt have a few? and that’s just what these folks did. Maybe that’s when someone got the brilliant idea to kill them? Anyway -

“Man, what did you do?”

“Don’t worry about it, no one saw us, just get us out of here!”

Man, he didn’t even know these crazy muthas, what was he doing in this car being a part of whatever they did which he wanted no part of at all but it was too late now. Getting away before the cops got there or before someone got a description was priority but what they didn’t know and what even the elderly couple with a secret didn’t know was that the cops were already there, surveilling that same house while waiting for a warrant to go in and confirm that the pillars were indeed leading a secret life raking in cash by growing pot in big quantities and supplying it to … who? maybe the street, maybe to sick people, I don’t know.

It doesn’t matter anymore anyway, no one cares about the pot in the grand scheme of things – certainly not the police who had their surveillance subjects murdered almost literally right under their noses while they watched, not knowing that anything but a drug buy or something was going on until the 911 call came into dispatch from the very house they were sitting outside of so when the two ran out of the house and jumped in the car and the car peeled away from the curb and took off, the cops were right behind them.

Maybe they thought they could outrun them, maybe they just wanted to be caught on home territory instead of in some little country town or maybe the driver was being threatened but however it happened they didn’t stop or slow down when they saw the squad cars behind them but kept going and going until they neared the outer limits of their own city and they pulled into the parking lot of a big junkyard at which point a couple – the bloodied ones, I think – jumped out of the car and tried to get away.

Didn’t work.

He must have had a minute of hope when he was released after telling his story and what he knew and didn’t know would happen that maybe it’d be okay, he could rewind the tape, go back to being a husband to his wife, a daddy to his four girls, that the smallest would learn every contour of his face as he held her and gave her her bottle after he came home from work where he would just work harder and more and maybe somewhere else too to make up the shortfall because soon his wife would be going back to work and they would be doing okay and better soon and things would be back on track and he won’t become the statistic he never wanted to be.

But I bet it only lasted a minute, that hope, because everyone knows that while there is no law against being stupid, as far as the police and the courts are concerned if you are anywhere near involvement in a felony you are an instant Musketeer – all for one and one for all – and it doesn’t matter what he knew or thought he knew when he got into that car to go help- even if just by sitting outside – to rob some people who wound up dead, it’s like he held the knife himself and slashed their throats so I doubt he was all that surprised when they showed up at his door a couple of days later to arrest him for murder.

Hard luck, bad luck, no luck at all – I don’t know what’s going to happen from here, I’ve never actually known anyone accused of murder before – maybe he’ll be able to strike a deal, they’re always doing that in the movies and the prisons out here in California are overcrowded anyway, though I guess he can’t count on that either but maybe the fact that he’s never been even remotely in this sort of trouble before will be a mitigating circumstance, maybe at least they won’t seek the death penalty which we still have on the books in this “liberal” oasis, but who knows.

So far, things have not been really going his way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am and is filed under stupid people, what is there to say?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.