Busted

I've been attending to other matters but out of the corner of my eye I'm minding the table.

A blond girl with a beach bag of a purse approaches the table from the wrong angle to be coming off the table where you assemble a burger. She takes her soda from the table, then throws it in the bag, then a second. Emboldened by her success she grabs another one in each hand and begins moving them to her bag.

"What are you doing?"

The girl is cool as she keeps pocketing more sodas, "Our hotel doesn't have a soda machine, I'm stocking up. You know what I mean..."

"No, I don't."

The girl turns red and keeps taking the sodas "I'm just taking a few." She's probably taken at least 8.

"Stop."

"I'm just getting them for my team!" The girl is shouting now, "I don't know why you care!"

I stare at her for a moment. She takes one last defiant soda and stalks off in the opposite direction. Honestly if I cared about the girl I would have made her give them back, but I honestly was too pissed to care if she learned a lesson or not from all this. I have enough kids of my own that want to be taught for me to take on more that don't even want to change their ways.

Looking back on it though, I probably did that kid a disservice. Success only makes you bolder.

The next few kids try to take two sodas just to prove they can. I roll my eyes and give them a hearty "You're pathetic" look. Kids rarely respond to adult's rage, but anybody who ever survived middle school should know that people drop dead if you can combine disdain with any inner source of their guilt.

"Don't be such pigs."

One kid who already has two sodas in his hand takes them to prove he's not scared of me, but the line goes back to one a person after that.

I guess that's the latest and greatest in the American way. If you get busted, pretend you're right, and if pressed, its the messenger's fault. After all, we're all delicate and unique snowflakes right? Being wrong might hurt somebody's ego.

What I find most impressive was that these kids were also jacking what I personally thought to be some pretty nasty soda. When was the last time you saw high schoolers buy fruit seltzer?

***

Once when I was in Hong Kong I was on the subway with about 20 non-native kids from my university when in walks a little girl and her mother. The child is holding her mother's hand by the thumb. I smile and wave at her. The little girl looks at me for a long moment and then says to her mother in Cantonese, "Look mommy, there's a devil here."

Chinese body language is so subtle compared to ours, but I don't see any visible reaction from the mother. She instead walks to a hand loop and puts her arm in as she guides her daughter to a cherry red pole to hold on to so she can weather the movement of the train.

"Mommy," she continues still in Cantonese, "There are so many devils here."

There's not hatred in this little girl's voice. The sentence wouldn't have sounded a whole lot different if it had read "There are so many chairs here." She continues her ramble, but her speech is becoming progressively more complicated and I have trouble following it.

"Mommy, I have never seen so many devils together here."

I feel bad calling out a little girl, so I sit quiet and turn to smile at her.

"Devil's looking at me!"

By this time we're all looking at each other, and a few of us are chuckling nervously. We had read how in Hong Kong the language barrier meant that racial slurs had just become part of the language. If somebody started calling me names in America I might fear for my physical safety but here there was supposedly no need to fear. We had all read that this wasn't culturally meant as a serious insult, and that it carried no threat of harm, but we all felt a little awkward being cursed out and not knowing what the socially acceptable thing to do about it would be.

"Devil's are laughing!"

I remember looking around the train for any sort of social cue at all but everybody on the train, including the kids from Hong Kong University who were helping us learn our way around, were avoiding our eyes. For a brief few seconds I could hear every clatter of every wheel on the train track. The little girl turned away from us and was quiet.

I remember being very impressed that the mother seemed to share in the shame she thought her daughter should feel rather than ignoring its existence or handing it all back to her kid. What I found more bizarre was that everybody on the train seemed to share the kid's shame, like one bizarre cold shoulder of an apology. Oddly enough, the shared guilt which created this neat little line between "us" and "them" was more alienating than being called names in some sense.

Half in defiance, and half from not knowing what else to do with ourselves, being called out as "ghosts" after that became a sick little game. I would wait until somebody went on a reasonable rant calling me a ghost and a devil, and then turn and respond in my politest Cantonese, "yes."

The response was always the same. The speaker would always look away in shame, and sometimes even apologize in Cantonese a few times. Apparently most white people didn't learn to speak any Cantonese there, so they were not use to being caught. I was amazed though that none of them ever got in my face about it, they just acted embarrassed.

Where did our society lose that skill of admitting we are wrong when we are?

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

"Look," I interrupt, "Officer, we're sorry and we have given you everything. Please let us go."

The officers tried hard to rattle us after that and we pretended to be appropriately terrified of jail time or not graduating or whatever they were theatening at that moment (for portions of it, I'll admit, I did not have to pretend). Then they took our fireworks and left. I remember being thunderstruck. All they wanted to see was a little fear in us, scare us into saying sorry and hopefully into not doing it again.

***

"So what happened then?" I asked.

"Not a whole lot," Magpie shrugged, "The kid who ratted got suspended for a year, the kid he ratted on just went on academic probation."

"But I though that was part of his plea...he turns in his cohort and..."

"Guess the campus hearing board didn't feel that way for very long. Ratter didn't apologize in his closing statements, CoLo did."

"And that made..."

"All the difference I guess."

Surprise! You've Got a New Housemate!

"Oh, and Gilby moving in tomorrow," Hannalore added yesterday afternoon as she walked past my room.

"Uh...who is Gilby?"

"He's replacing you on the lease."

"I'm paid up until June..."

"Oh, well he is going to live in our living room during May, then he is going to live in your room."

"Uh...were you going to tell me?"

Hannalore looked at me fairly quizzically, "I just did."

You may think Hannalore is the resounding jackass of the century but the reality is she is not. She has a fascinating cocktail of neurological issues, a few of which overlap with my brother's, but she is not nearly as severe. This helps me understand her a little and sometimes translate her issues to the other housemates.

The bottom line is she lives in a totally different world than the rest of us. There are many things about her we will simply never be able to sympathize with: for example, she can not stand physical contact with other human beings in any form. It bothers her deeply. She is one of the most absurdly picky eaters I have ever met. I can probably count all of the food items she will eat on my fingers. These things are just how she was wired when she was born.

Just like we find her bizarre and alien, she finds us bizarre. Everything she does makes perfect sense to her. If you ask her she can even explain it to you in ways that make sense if you can accept her base premises. In her world we are the irrational and bizarre ones. I suppose if you didn't have a sex drive sex would sound pretty bizarre to you too wouldn't it?

The name I use for her here, Hannalore, comes from the Questionable Content character. Its a humorous (and hopefully not considered mean) reference to the fact that another part of her "abnormal wiring" is the fact that she is clincally OCD.

Our common method of communication is logic. Basically we both assert the premises by which we live our lives and then explain the logic which makes us feel the way we feel about things. In this way we can resolve disagreements.

This has its ups and downs. One of the major benefits of this is as long as I can explain to her just why something she didn't like happened, and why it won't happen again, she's pretty much ok with it no matter what it is. For example, the first time she met Magpie, our other current housemate, he had accidentally woken her up by drunkenly stumbling into her room (thinking it was the bathroom) and accidentally ripping the doorknob off the door. I'm a pretty tolerant person but Magpie is a pretty big guy and looks rather intimidating until you learn he wouldn't hurt a fly. But if I didn't know him and he had wandered into my room very drunk? I would have punched him and then run. Hannalore was pretty ok with this situation under the condition that I promised to show everybody where the bathroom was previous to bringing out the alcohol at parties.

The downside of her being like this is from time to time she does things which upset me greatly without having the faintest idea of why I am upset.

When she had found Gilby off some department mailing list and announced he would be replacing me when I left...I thought little of it. After all, I would never live with him right? If my current housemates wanted to live with some total stranger from the internet, they were adults, that was their choice, and I wasn't going to question it. Now, however, Gilby was my problem too. A quick call to Magpie (who was on a camping trip/picking up more crap to put in his room trip I had to skip due to finals) confirmed that he was also not expecting Gilby.

"He can't live here," I said, coming back out of my room and finding Hannalore.

"Why not?"

"He hasn't signed papers. The landlords wil be angry."

"Can he put his things here?"

"No"

"Why?"

"Where would he put them?"

Hannalore paused a moment. "I hadn't thought of that."

Bright and early the next morning the doorbell rang and I rolled over and rolled my eyes. Of course. I had explained my issue to Hannalore as "the landlords won't like it" and "we don't have space." She had, like always, taken me completely literally and probably resolved both those issues herself. She was not going to be able to read the meaning behind my words of "I don't want him here."

Wandering down the stairs I pulled the door open and found a tall dark-haired young man holding a printer in a box.

"So, you're moving in now?"
"Yeah."

"Uh..." I stammered, feeling like all of this was getting a bit out of hand and also struggling to remember what the kid's name was, "How is that going to work?"

Hannalore was standing over my shoulder, "I took care of everything. He's going to store his belongings in my room, I cleared a space. He's also going to live in my room during May as soon as finals are done. I'll be leaving as soon as finals are done so I won't need the space. When June comes and you leave he can move into your room.

"...and...you're going to pay?" I asked. Both of them nodded.

A part of me just wanted to scream and stamp "No," but I am quite short on cash right now due to being both a college student and employment impaired. Additionally, if I upset him too badly I would be screwing my current housemates out of a lot of money next year while they paid for my empty room. Besides, he didn't seem too overly creepy.

We cleared him a space in a storage area and he put his printer in it. We also gave him some keys.

"Do you guys drink?" he asked.

"Yeah, sometimes."

"Do you have a bucket?"

"What?"

"In my dorm, we had a bucket. His name was Mr. Bucket."

There didn't seem to be anything good to say in response to that.

Gilby wandered our house for a little while after that, belittled the sanitation of our kitchen, and left. We saw him again at about 6PM. He said he would be back at about 7 with a friend or two who was helping him move in. At about 8:15 he and the better chunk of a freshman floor arrived and situated themselves in my living room. They commented on how small my home was, and how ideal the back porch was for smoking weed. They then left with the living room mostly unnavigatible due to his stuff.

Gilby returned shortly later and sat himself down on the couch. I asked him to please put his stuff in the storage space he gave him so we could walk around the living room. He made fun of how I keep my room. I gave him wifi access. He complained about the bathroom being dirty. He then started eying the alcohol in the refrigerator.

"Can I have some?"

Normally I answer "yes" automatically but he seemed a little too excited about it and his perpetual whining was beginning to eat at me. "Um, if you pay me back for it."

Gilby wandered the house for a moment and retrieved a shotglass with the school insignia on it. "How much of it can I have of the Smirnoff for five dollars?"

"Um...well...a whole bottle is about 20...so you can have a quarter of it."

"Great" he said, emptying the five dollars from his wallet in my hands. He then removed the vodka from the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table to pour himself a shot. I watched silently.

"Man, this stuff is QUALITY, you can see how much better is is than Gilby's just in the glass."

I remained quiet, trying to be expressionless.

"Gilby's," he announced, "Is like State vodka, but its cheaper. You don't want to try it I think."

I nodded and then returned to my room to study for finals. At least he had a nickname now. About 10 minutes later he wandered into my room still holding the bottle of Smirnoff. "Have I had my quarter?" he asked.

"Uh," I said trying to be perfectly fair, "you probably have one shot left."

"Awesome!" he grinned.