It has begun.

Some people down the street were evicted recently, and I found this photo on their front lawn. For the life of me I can’t tell what’s going on in it.

Over the past few days I’ve been rubbing elbows with the drunks and pill poppers at the Long Beach Airport bar for a feature writing class I recently wrapped up. The following profile is a result of my research.

Nearly every Sunday night for the last two years, Candace Courtis has had the same nightmare.

She’s standing behind a winding, marble-topped counter, surrounded by bottles, in a confining, brightly lit area, while an insatiable sea of people bark drink orders at her. Try as she might, the demand for drinks overwhelms Courtis, 24, and her body fills up with anxiety. She wakes up worried, and it takes her nearly 45 minutes to recover.

While Courtis’ dream may recall shades of Sisyphus, it’s also a fairly accurate representation of a Friday night at the Prop Room, located on the second floor of the Long Beach Airport main terminal, where she’s tended bar for the last two years.

Despite the nightmares and the occupational hazards, Courtis loves her job. A pert blonde with an oval shaped face and square black glasses, her personality—stuck permanently on ebullient—is perfectly suited to bartending.

Over the past two years, the bar has become an unwavering source of entertainment, education, harassment, money, and, when needed, prescription pills.

“I got up at 6:15 this morning and wanted to punch babies,” Courtis said on a Monday afternoon near the end of her shift, “and I love babies.”
(more…)

Recently, my landlord Dave—a trim, white-haired fellow who spends most of his time fishing in the Bahamas—asked my roommate Andrew if he knew where to buy some heroin. Dave didn’t want to get high.

He wanted the heroin so he could plant it in our neighbors’ car and call the police.

Dave felt this was the best way to deal with our dirty, thieving, gypsy neighbors who had recently begun siphoning gas from nearby cars.

As it turns out, in addition to selling a cornucopia of home appliances out of the back of their truck that no doubt fell off of another truck, the neighbors also sell drugs. So why Dave didn’t just buy the stuff from them and then drop a dime is beyond me. Maybe he has a sense of decency, I don’t know. But his plan was thwarted, as neither I, nor Andrew, have the connections for scoring some horse. It was back to the drawing board.

While Dave was busy calling up a friend on the housing board to see if he could file a complaint and get the neighbors evicted, Andrew went outside and found a length of hose and a gas can near their dumpster. Without hesitation, he scooped up the siphoning tools and threw them in the dumpster down the street.

While this was not the most creative solution to the problem, and didn’t involve the planting of illegal narcotics or police, it was the most effective. All I know is that the gas siphoning stopped, and that I will never cross Dave.

Note: This essay was published elsewhere, but the editing and formatting were not what I asked they be, and I felt like the good guys should win once in awhile, so here it is in its intended form.

Some time ago, a heavily tanned, broad-shouldered, 6-foot-tall baseball player from Texas, who used the word “dude” to refer to male and female alike, took up residence in the cubicle next to me.

His name was Pat, and he was the son of one of the attorneys at work. Word ’round the break room was that all the ladies found him to be delicious eye candy. My initial impression was that he was a nice guy, if a bit dopey.

Pat noticed my calculator watch during our first encounter and asked, “Do you balance your checkbook on that thing?” Before I could answer, he added, “Damn dude, I haven’t seen one of those since the ‘80s!” and started laughing. I was at a loss for words. “I got it at K-Mart,” was all I could think to say.

A few days later, I found myself in the bathroom. I was absentmindedly studying the porcelain tile in front of my face when a booming voice, asking if I did anything fun that weekend, so startled me that I nearly lost control of my stream. I looked over to see Pat standing in front of the mirror, applying gel to his bangs and giving me a smile. I’m normally a bit reticent to divulge personal info with people I don’t know very well, particularly so when I’m urinating, and ended up saying, “I got my hair cut, but that wasn’t too fun.” Pat replied, “Sweet, dude! Looks good!”

Later that week I passed by Pat’s cubicle and he asked, “Did you get a haircut Brian?” I paused for a couple seconds, trying to figure out if this was a joke, but judging by the expectant look on his face and the lack of laughter, he was really asking. I told him that I had gotten my hair cut the weekend prior. He nodded his head thoughtfully, as if I had just said something wise, but didn’t add anything more to the conversation. I took this momentary lapse as the opportunity it was, and slowly inched away from his cubicle. When I was about twenty feet away I heard a loud voice call out, “Sick haircut, dude!”

I didn’t have any problems with Pat other than the fact that he made a lot of loud calls on his cell phone. The most memorable was a twenty-five minute chat with, what I was able to discern from his opening greeting of “Lorenzo, what’s up fool,” a friend from Texas named Lorenzo. It seemed Lorenzo had suffered some sort of setback, and needed consoling. In a hushed (for him) tone, Pat asked Lorenzo for his zip code so he could send him a postcard, and asked if Lorenzo had received his text message. “If that doesn’t cheer you up,” Pat said of the text message, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” And then, much to my entertainment and surprise, he upped the ante and said, “If that doesn’t cheer you up, you should go out into the woods and shoot yourself.”

As the weeks passed, my study of Pat became more nuanced. He became less and less a source of entertainment and derision, and more and more, to my surprise, one of inspiration.

I’m not sure if it was a result of hailing from the lone star state, or being genetically blessed, but Pat was so direct and honest, so genuine and unselfconscious, that he put most people instantly at ease. He also possessed the kind of curiosity about his surroundings and other people that most adults had long since shed.

Surprisingly, I witnessed Pat work his magic not on a female co-worker, but a married man who worked in the copy department. Within five minutes of meeting Edgar, a guy I had worked with for years, Pat had him telling his life story, a harrowing tale of his exile from Cambodia, and the eventual emigration of his family to the United States. Up to that point I had always assumed Edgar was born in the U.S, and had never thought to ask where he was from. “Wow, that’s amazing, dude!” Pat said to Edgar after listening intently to his story.

“How do you say ‘hello’ in Cambodian?” Pat asked. Though it took him about a week to get the pronunciation down, he greeted Edgar every morning with, “Chum reap suor.”

One by one, Pat won over the rest of his co-workers.

I never quite got used to conversing with him in the bathroom, and it took some training to shut out his deafening cell phone conversations, but after awhile I no longer thought of him as the goofy jock that I once did. Just when it seemed we were starting to become friends, the summer ended and it was time for Pat to return home to his cheerleader girlfriend, baseball team, and to Lorenzo, who apparently did not commit suicide in a forest.

I like to think that it was because of Pat’s text message.

It’s that time again.

First up we have one of my favorite segments from the recently concluded This American Life TV show, in which beloved cartoonist Chris Ware illustrates an interesting story about a group of school children whose world is turned upside down after one of them makes a fake camera.

The ad council cut together a series of spots meant to highlight the dangers of…blogging, and this is the result. I like to think that a rotund high school football coach, Dan Clowes-looking movie usher, and a tattooed busboy would really read the missives of a seemingly shy high schooler, but I just don’t buy the ad council’s ad. Via my favorite Dane Cook and Zach Braff hater.

This parody of To Catch a Predator (one of my favorite shows) is from one of my favorite shows (Human Giant). They get everything right: the odd confidence and suggestive banter of the predator (played brilliantly by “Wet Hot American Summer’s” H. Jon Benjamin), the young K.D. Lang-looking, backwards hat-wearing, gender-neutral jail bait, and the smug, accusatory tone of the host (complete with transcripts of the explicit talk). Plus, any video with the line “hardabs05″ is in my good book.

As long as he keeps making ‘em, I’ll keep posting ‘em. Paul Rudd. ‘Nuff said.