#114: Hiding in Plain Sight

When I woke up Monday morning, my only thought was to get to school without incident. I tucked my hair up under my old Arbor State Abyssinian Wolves knit cap, pulled up the hood of my Warren Woodward Warhounds hoodie for good measure—nothing like mixing and matching collegiate licensed apparel from my two schools—and marched out the back door with my book bag. I thought I would be clever and instead of taking Second Avenue directly up to the Warren Woodward campus I took a roundabout way along Prentis to Cass Avenue.

#113: October Surprise in November

The first Sunday morning in November started off rather typically for me: playing the clarinet for the nearly-secular First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City church service. Our dysfunctional music ensemble was led by a long, grey-haired college-dropout organist—really a oboist and English horn player who never practiced the keyboard much during the week—who doubled as our insufferably snobby music director, choosing which hymns to butcher by cleaving out verses that didn’t meet his musical taste; a half-deaf brass player who doubled on electric bass and ukulele; a deeply manic-depressive older lady who played flutes, xylophone, and glockenspiel but always forgot her glasses, music, or the correct instrument she had intended to bring and always arrived in the sanctuary in a state of flustered meltdown; and her codependent husband, a guitarist and flugelhorn player who was forever offering to run home and retrieve his frantic wife’s glasses, music, or alto flute or whatever.

#112: Postmodern Sleeping Arrangements

“Say, what are you doing for Halloween?” asked Trent when I answered the phone. Stella had some academic thing all night, he explained, and he needed me to take Simon Trick-or-Treating while he stayed home and dispensed candy. “I can’t very well have Simon collect a bag of goodies while our house is the only dark one on the street—the other parents in the neighborhood would ostracize us for a year.”

#111: I Was a Graduate-School Sex Addict!

“Where were you all night?” asked Avie, as I bounded into the kitchen. She was already cooking scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast. “Want some? You hungry?”
        “No thanks,” I said. “I just gave Gene a knob-job.”
        “Ew, please! Not before I’ve eaten!” said Avie, making a sour expression and grabbing her midsection while still stirring the eggs. “Not on an empty stomach.”

#110: The Criminality Clinic

The van raced down empty Second Avenue under a succession of street lamps illuminating nothing at this hour. We came to Cass Park at the foot of the avenue and made a sharp left in front of Masonic Temple. Turning right down Cass, we crossed the Fisher Freeway toward Downtown.
        “You’re actually going to try to take extralegally procured prisoners across the border to Canada?” I asked. “I’d like to see how you’ll manage that.”