This story is going to take a while, so sit back and relax. I promise the payoff is worth it.
Years ago, I was sharing an apartment with a roommate. We’ll call him Matt, because his name was actually Matt. We were sitting at the kitchen table about midnight or so, having one of our regular late-night sort-of-philosophical discussions. The subject this night was on drama, and whether or not people would want it in their lives if they could add it at any time.
“Imagine,” I said, “if you could walk into the bank, gasp, put the back of your hand to your mouth, and rush – handkerchief fluttering – to the cashier and gush, ‘I… I need my money!’ Imagine how much more entertaining even the most boring tasks would be.
Matt shook his head. “You’d get tired of it very quickly. Drama is only exciting because it happens so rarely. If it kept happening, you’d find it annoying at best.”
“I disagree,” I said, and began to explain why drama for the sake of drama would be a welcome addition to anyone’s life, including mine and his.
This discussing went on for some time when, at about 1am, there was a frantic pounding at the door. It was a young man we both knew, not well, but as a friend of a friend. The friend’s name was “Christian Pete.” We called him Christisn Pete because this helped differentiate him from the other Petes we knew (Fat Pete and D&D Pete) and because he was a fundamentalist christian.
Christian Pete’s friend staggered into the apartment, out of breath from having run full-tilt up the stairs, and gasped, “Pete, he… he needs your help!”
We put on our shoes and flew down the stairs behind our visitor. He seemed so earnest and so worried that neither of us asked him anything until we reached the car and were flying down the road.
“So what’s the emergency?” I asked.
“Well,” said Christian Pete’s friend, “There are these ninjas…”
You see, there’s a reason we didn’t call Christian Pete “Genius Pete” or “Well-Adjusted Pete.” Someone, sensing Christian Pete’s gullibility, had convinced Christian Pete that he was an evil ninja. That he belonged to a gang of evil ninjas. And that they planned to heist an armoured car the next day, kill all the guards with machineguns, and then escape in a puff of ninja flash powder.
Matt and I were numb and silent with astonishment. We said nothing until we arrived at the suburban convenience store where Christian Pete was working that night. When we arrived, a worried-looking Christian Pete took us into the back room, pulled out some crates of milk to use as seats, and began telling us the whole tale of the bank-robbing evil ninjas, and how his christian conscience had convinced him that he must do something about it.
Not wishing to be unkind, I tried gently prodding Christian Pete’s story. How did he know his friend was a ninja? He’s seen his sword! How did he know his friend had access to machineguns? He’d seen the crates they were in! Had he actually looked inside the crates? Hell no, he’d have been killed by the evil ninjas!
Growing tired, I told Christian Pete that if he really believed a gang of evil ninjas was going to rob an armoured car, he should call the police. Christian Pete, looking sick and terrified, told me that the ninja had assured him, if they were caught they were going to cut off their own heads with their ninjas swords. He couldn’t have that on his conscience when he stood before the Lord.
By this point I was tired, annoyed, and frustrated. I demanded that I be driven home. The only car there was Christian Pete’s (he’d loaned it to his friend to come and pick us up), but Christian Pete had to finish his shift. My roommate, Matt, agreed to drive me home, then come back and try to talk Christian Pete down off the ceiling.
So I’m in the car with Matt, and we’re driving back on the deserted suburban roads in Christian Pete’s run-down car, and, after some silence, Matt said, “There. You see what life would be like if things happened your way?”
“Well, this was a little over the top,” I allowed, “but…”
And no sooner was the word “but” out of my mouth when suddenly blue and red police lights came on behind us with a whoop of siren.
Matt turned to me disintegrated me to ash with his venomously angry glare of sheer hate.
Now, Christian Pete had just bought this car, so it had no license plate, just a small temporary sticker in the window. And it seems that my roommate, who was not a regular driver, had forgotten to turn on his headlights. And since the car was a beater, the back seat and the back window and the dashboard were full of greasy tools Christian Pete had been using to work on his car. And for some reason, a set of walkie-talkies were sitting prominently on the dashboard.
Matt, furious, got angrilly out of the car, at which point the cop – a lone woman – leaped from her car, took cover behind her door, drew her pistol and screamed for Matt to get back in the car.
It turns out that a house had been broken into not 15 minutes earlier, and that those responsible had been described as two men in a car the description of which matched ours. Of course, we didn’t know this at the time, and it was a long time before we found out.
More police – a lot more police – arrived, and proceeded to do a “hard takedown,” with the stuff you always see on COPS, with the putting the hands out the window and backing towards the voice and lying on the ground and all that stuff. They separated the two of us, me on the hood of the car, and Matt in the back seat of a police cruiser, while they questioned us on our stories.
Now, Matt and I were both activists, and neither one of us liked cops very much. And as far as we could tell, the police had no reason to stop us except to harass us. So we were both angry, uncooperative, and tired. And, oh yes, I see now I’ve forgotten to mention the fact that Matt had Tourette’s Syndrome. No, he didn’t curse and swear, he did these weird little throat-clicky noises and jerked his head to the side. But only when he was under stress.
So while I laid on the hood of the car, giving an angry litany of my constitutional rights, Matt was in the back seat of the car, jerking and ticking and making throat noises at the cop who was questioning him.
My questioning went something like this:
“Why were you driving around at 3am with your lights out?”
“We went to see Pete.”
“Pete who?”
In the stress of the events, I had forgotten Pete’s last name.
“Where does Pete live?”
“I don’t know, he just moved.”
“What’s his phone number?”
“I don’t have it memorized.”
“Whose car is this?”
“Pete’s.”
“Why doesn’t it have a license plate?”
“Pete just bought it.”
“Why are all these tools in the car?”
“Pete was fixing it up.”
“And the walkie-talkies?”
“Uh… I don’t know.”
“So let me get this straight. You drove down at 3am in a car with no license plates, filled with tools, with your lights out, to visit good old Pete whose last name, address, and phone number you don’t know. Have I got that right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And what did you and Pete talk about?”
And I experienced a moment of total terror. I realized that I was pausing, and that this made me looking incredibly guilty and untruthful, but I also had no idea what to say. I couldn’t lie, because they were questioning Matt separately and if we gave different stories, we’d really be in trouble. But I also knew that I just absolutely could not give an answer which started, “Well officer, there were these evil ninjas…”
All I could do was sigh, close my eyes, and say: “I don’t remember.”
Things could have gone very badly wrong from that point onward, but fortunately the stories Matt and I gave were both equally implausible but identical, which convinced the cops to go down to the convenience store and talk with Pete to corroborate our stories. I was briefly terrified that Christian Pete might be afraid of the police and tell him we hadn’t been there, but Christian Pete had the good sense to confirm our stories to the police. In the end, the cops realized we weren’t the crooks, but that in their utter conviction that we were, they had let the real crooks escape. They were so angry that they wrote Matt as many citations as they could think up. And they thought up a surprisingly large number of them. The final tally for the tickets came to something like $700.
Matt of course blamed me, and he moved out a month later. We never saw each other again after he left, and neither one of us ever discussed with each other the events of that night.
And that is why it really is not a good idea to taunt the Universe with declarations that you would press the drama button. You have been warned.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
