The Product of Inspiration

Something did occur when I put the pince-nez on my nose.

And no, it wasn't an infection, though my wife was quick to suggest that outcome when she first set eyes on the victorian spectacles.

I had begun to write, like I knew what I was doing. I spun a tale I thought magnificent. After the half-assed computer I had been using sort of had a melt-down (technology isn't my specialty), I pulled out an IBM Selectric II I had brought from my mom's house after she moved in with my sister. I had reams of slightly yellowed paper from a short-lived experiment with contract work I had done for an office supply company. The pince-nez, the typewriter, the weathered sheets of too-thick paper like mounds of foolscap, they all conspired in my favor. I was writing.

I was maybe even a writer.

The garage and I still stank. I was afraid to stop working because the spell would be broken, the magnificent little muse who had settled in among the squalor would be chased off by deodorants and soap, not to mention the leaf-blowing my wife was agitating for.

I wrote thirty pages one day. The story revolved around the possibility that Stevie Ray Vaughan had faked his death in a helicopter accident, and was now living a suburban life outside of Los Angeles. The intriguing bit was that unlike with Elvis or whoever, nobody had ever entertained the possibility that SRV wasn't dead; it was such an unlikely scenario that a bunch of people in the entertainment business knew it was a hoax and nobody wanted to bother Stevie anyhow.

The story was really moving along.

One completely insane fan had pursued the theory after a chance encounter with SRV at gas station in Alameda, and had set in motion a complicated plot involving cultists, real estate investors and the mob. Things were building to a climax I couldn't quite completely envision but I figured my muse would deliver.

I was completely mistaken.

It all came crashing to a halt on a Thursday afternoon. It was misting outside and I had a thorough aversion to the rain. Still, I believed I could slip into the trance and bang out a few more pages before heading in for some soup. But the seat I had sat in for weeks had somehow grown hard and uncomfortable overnight. The shed's cozy humidity had become a bone-chilling miasma, and I could barely function in the room.

I knew right away it was all gone, that I was finished, that the entire thing had been a fluke. I put out onto the street, wandering aimlessly. I was adrift.

Our street wound around to a little sort of loop of houses isolated from the things around them. The loop probably existed before the confluence of two highways boxed it off and made it seem like a city planning snafu. It was here I ended up, counting perfectly-spaced gaps in the sidewalk, and noticing old cars and blight that I thought might be worthy of a photograph someday.

Then I saw the man with the mohawk.

It wasn't a mohawk like a punk-rocker might have wore. It was a mohawk like the last of the Mohicans would sport. It was nearly as wide as his whole head, and beneath it were two narrow bands of scruffly shaved skin and two ears sticking out.

Our neighborhood and others in the region had been terrorized, using the word that the local newspaper used, by a person who was breaking into unoccupied houses, eating food and taking a few light, moderately expensive items. In one house, he ate half a cake, cutting it neatly and placing it on a plate, apparently while watching television, based on where the crumbs were found. In another house, he had taken a Bose wave radio and eight of fifty-seven cds. He appeared to enjoy Broadway musicals.

All of his crimes were ones of opportunity. The houses were empty and usually a back door or large window was left unlocked. The size and nature of the missing objects pointed to an individual working alone and possibly on foot, since he hadn't taken television sets, desktop computers, KitchenAid mixers or other heavy high-value items. One police detective noted that nothing was taken twice, meaning he only stole one computer (a laptop) and then one stereo (the Bose) and then a sampling of music selections, and then a cheap hand-mixer. "It's like he doesn't know where the Target is," the detective joked.

Nobody had spotted the man in the act, but a handful of shutins and swing-shift types had mentioned seeing an otherwise unmemorable man with an unusual haircut. One said it was an immense pompadour, long on top and very short on the sides. Another said it looked like a mohawk.

I had reached the back of the loop of houses. The constant windy sound of cars on the interstate behind the sound-absorbing wall was almost like the ocean. I was looking down and began to turn around when I thought I saw something dropping out of the corner of my eye. When I looked back, nothing seemed strange. I was looking at the space between two houses, and could see a shed behind one of the two. I must have imagined movement, or spotted a cat or a squirrel on its daily patrol.

Then, as I looked, a man leaned out of the window of one house. He didn't look my way, concerning himself with looking below the window, about a five foot drop. His head ducked back inside the window and then his feet came out, and his torso, and I heard a thumping sound over the car-surf whooshing noise, and the man fell from view. He had a mohawk.

Looking back, I guess it was pretty clear throughout this period in my life that I was depressed and maybe a little manic. I had never really analyzed the situation before, but I had the mood swings, the periods of soaring emotional highs (like the writing spasm that had just crashed to a close), and the moments of deep despair. People say that these can be controlled with medication, of course, but that other factors, such as adrenal surges and personal tragedies could also affect the emotional status. I had read an article about an athlete who fell into a depression whenever he wasn't in the height of his competitive season, apparently because the adrenaline surge served as a medical check on his natural up and down shift.

I stood on the sidewalk for maybe ten seconds after spotting the man leave the window. What I had seen before, I concluded, was his latest acquisition. He dropped or lowered it out and then jumped after it. There was no-one else around, and destiny, I thought in the final seconds of my reverie, had placed me here on this curb to witness his crime.

I dropped into a crouch. Everything was moving slowly and I felt like Spider-Man. Staying low and keeping an eye on where he fell, I moved along the grass just off the sidewalk to make less sound. I got to the house nearest his latest target and pushed my back against the front wall, lower than the windowline, edging toward the gap between the two homes.

I reached the corner and stole a peek at the mohawk-man. He was lying on the ground but wasn't unconscience or anything. He had hurt himself, maybe bumped his head coming through the window. He was blinking his eyes and then touched his forehead tenderly.

I jumped him.

It doesn't make any sense. This person is a criminal, obviously, and prepared for something like this to happen eventually. Maybe I thought his compromised position gave me an edge. I was obviously not thinking straight myself. We struggled for a few second and he reached for the small duffle bag next to him. I tried to kick his arm as he reached and ended up overextending myself and losing my balance, coming up short. He reached the bag and swung it toward me landing a blow in the general area of my shoulder, neck and head.

I fell over and he took off. I felt stupid, but at the same time figured I had started this so I might as well keep going. I was still feeling a rush, and he wasn't running that fast. But he was running toward my house.

For some reason, I shouted as I ran after him. What I said sounded strange to my ears even as I ran. I said "Now hold on a minute" and "Hey hold up now" and other random, Andy Griffin-like things. I don't know why. The mohawk man didn't say anything.

But he was definitely running right toward my house. Then he ran around the far side along the drive way and I thought that I might have him. I took the deceptively quicker route to the back yard and thought I heard the shed door slam. I grabbed a snow shovel, which is not a good weapon, if you're interested. I kicked the door open and the mohawk man was standing there in the middle of my shed. He looked tired. I am certain I did, too.

He looked around and lunged for the spool I previously had been sitting on, nearly knocking over the IBM Selectric II. I shouted to watch the typewriter and he tossed the spool at me. I swatted at it with the snow shovel and hit him in the process (swinging a snow shovel inside a shed leaves little untouched). He went down and sprawled across the typewriter, the pile of typed pages and the mound of blank paper. I jumped on his back and tried to put him in some kind of a headlock. I was basically completely insane at this point, protecting my masterpiece like a mother hen.

Then he said, "Is this your house?"

"What?"

He stopped struggling. "Is this your house?"

I thought for a second about what the impact of telling him the truth would be. Probably erroneously, I concluded that it would be okay. "Yeah, this is my house."

"You writing the book about Stevie Ray Vaughan?"

"Wait a second. You read my book?"

"I break into houses."

"But you broke into my shed and read my book?"

He had apparently snuck into the shed one night while I was inside the house watching tv. He thought the book was going well, and wanted to know how I would end it. I was still sitting on his back at this point.

I didn't know what to do. Nobody had been permitted to read the book (not as if there was some huge interest from anyone in my house), because I probably didn't want to know what anybody thought. I got off his back and tried to sound gruff. "Get up."

"I think it's a good start. I thought about writing crime fiction, and even considered writing about my work. Being a non-violent offender, seeing the lives of these people in your neighborhood from the inside for a couple hours a day, I've become more thoughtful about my career choice." He stood up and I meaningfully brandished the snow shovel in a way I thought menacing.

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. Afterwards, I would note that he had confessed to me.

"More than half the time, I don't even take anything. It's like when you're in someone's house, and you use the bathroom. You don't even know why, but you wonder what's in their medicine cabinet, or what shampoo they use, or if they have migraines, or hair loss, or whatever. That impulse is there, even if you don't realize it. What I'm doing isn't much more than that."

"You're breaking into people's houses," I said, thinking this maybe needed to get mentioned.

"It's hardly breaking in if the door or window is open. Besides, I was tired of that same live I was living. I was worked in a loading dock, dividing up and passing time box by box. Nobody cares about the guy in the loading dock. I realized I didn't care about me either. One day I was walking around my neighborhood and noticed a sliding glass door open. In I went, and I ate an apple, and left. Nobody noticed, and I started to feel like a ghost, like I was half invisible. I never went back to the loading dock, and I don't even think anybody thought to ask where I was."

Maybe this was designed just to elicit sympathy from me. It wasn't really that sad of a story, unless you happened to have a loading dock -- or local outlet of a gigantic coffee conglomerate -- of your own. Whichever. What it made me start thinking about was that I could change it all, right now, if I took the steps to get a few things back into synch. This wasn't any way to live, and I probably had enough excuses to keep trying like this for years, but it wasn't going to make any difference. If it wasn't the coffeeshop, or this idiotic backyard writer's workshop bullshit it would be something else. Who is convinced by this?

Then he hit me with the typewriter.