To Catch a Thief

I wrote this a long time ago, updated it where it needed to be updated. I always wonder if this dude is still out there.

So there I am, stoned. How many stories can I tell that start like that? Every one that’s how many. So there I am stoned, approaching the Charlie Parker section when out of the corner of my eye I see him. “Shit” I say to myself, there’s no way that guy will recognize me at this point, it was….over 15 years ago now. “Fuck, he’s listening to jazz now?” Perhaps he always was though. I would assume that he would only listen to Led Zeppelin and Ozzy if he was doing what he was doing when I first encountered him. Looks like he gained a little weight. Has the glasses on, looks sort of like a computer programmer, or maybe someone who works at Radio Shack ( let me just say that Radio Shack is the worst thing in the history of things that have existed in the world. You go in there and first of all, they don’t have anything good whatsoever. There is not one good thing. And if you say they are different now like Sears, because they carry all these top name products now, I’ll tell you to shove a box of 9 volt [my favorite member of the battery family] batteries up your ass, as Radio Shack is not good now. I don’t care who they have doing their television ads now, I don’t care if the logo is hip now. I don’t care if when you think of Radio Shack you think of Radiohead. It’s 2 things that stink Radio’s and Shack’s. When I think of the radio I think of noisy static and shittier music. When I think of a shack, I think of an old run down fucking shack, not somewhere I want to buy stereo equipment. Anyone who buys anything from Radio Shack other than a fucking LED light or something is an asshole, and should not be allowed to listen to music or use anything electronic. You go in there to buy something, and first off they ask you for all this shit…name, address, phone number, social security number, the last time you listened to Vampire Weekend{this obviously is probably more often than not answered “yes” in the Radio Shack environment if you catch my drift}, mothers maiden name, all to buy a fucking fuse for 29 cents. Fuck that, I’ll take my business elsewhere.) or some geek like that. So I quickly make my way out of the jazz section, as the guy is there, and secondly, there’s nothing there I need right now anyway. I guess I should back up a little.

So years ago when I had a skateboard and my prom would be a couple years later where we would hear all sorts of 80’s songs because it was the 80’s, not because it was an “80’s themed prom” (I tell you, being in junior high, and high school in the 80’s was not fun. It wasn’t like those John Hughes movies. It wasn’t like Saved By the Bell, it sucked. The clothes people wore were so god-awful it wasn’t even funny. Ronald Reagan was in office, there were no punk rockers around where I lived, the pot wasn’t what it is today, if you hooked up with a girl you spent half the time trying to figure out if something was a strap or a ribbon or a belt or whatever, and then of course you were fifteen so when you did finally get the baggy outfit off you had no idea what to even do with the “stuff” So when you start thinking that you want to go back to the 80’s because it seemed cool, think again, as it really wasn’t that great of a time for anyone. Let’s let it rest.). I looked like a dork, I was a teenage punk rock kid with a skateboard, how original.

My friend Peter and I used to hang out at this shopping mall literally every day of our lives. It was a small shopping mall with maybe a dozen stores, anchored by a big pharmacy (pharmacies are out of fucking control nowadays, people don’t think about it, but you go into a pharmacy and the days of just getting a prescription and a card for your sister are long fucking gone now you can get anything you want in there…at any time of the day. They have 24 hour pharmacies here, perfect for a guy like myself who sometimes will wake up in the middle of the night and go out to the car to take a ride and cool myself down. Sometimes I need a bag of licorice in the middle of the night, and sometimes I need to buy a box of blank DVD’s, or maybe I am coming back from a keg party on a golf course at like 4 million o’clock in the morning and I need a copy of the new Michael Crichton novel [paperback edition], either way, it’s now all there. Pharmacies do not get the much deserved respect they have built over the past few years now), and a department store. The details of this are sketchy at this point, but from what I remember Peter may have said some bad words about some girl. For a week or so after that we kept seeing these two sort of scary looking guys in the mall. We thought they were after us for saying what we did. So one night, I’m sitting in the mall leaning against this wall with my skateboard, I have a clear view of one of the entrances (I can still picture the big brick pillars outside at each entrance), so anyone pulling up in a car, you can see. This would be where you waited in the winter for your mother to pick you up after a long day of mall shopping, if you weren’t a nerd like me who just hung out there. So I’m sitting there, presumably waiting for my friend to get out of work when I see this motorcycle pull up, okay, well a “chopper”. I notice it’s our two friends who we thought were going to kick our ass, they look a little different though. The taller, blonde one is wearing mirrored sunglasses, and a bandana on his head, and overalls; he gets off the chopper and enters the mall. The shorter dark haired one stays on the chopper and is looking in at me. I’m thinking he’s going to come in and kick my ass. I hadn’t had much experience with getting my ass kicked at this point (although, a few years before or so, I was down at the movie theatre and there was this nerdy “new kid” eating a sandwich, for some reason I decided I wanted to eat the sandwich, so I took it away from him. Me and my long hair, and my Ozzy Diary of a Madman tour shirt [which was the first concert my mother let my brother and I go to without parental guidance, and I was right after all these years with the date thanks to the new reissue of this classic record which shows a flyer which indicates Ozzy would be in the New York are on April 4th, 5th of 1982. I always remembered the show being April 2nd, 1982. Which now that I think of it, me buying the reissue of Diary of a Madman back in 2002 was the 20th anniversary of that gig. Shit. Fuck. I wish I knew, I would have celebrated by going to the Boston Garden that night, or rather where the Garden was. UFO opened for Ozzy at that show, without Michael Schenker, who had already started making waves with his solo career, we also missed Randy Rhoads who was killed right before the gig, instead we got that guy Brad Gillis who ended up on the underrated Speak of the Devil live record, and eventually to Night Ranger] took the poor kids dinner away from him. Big mistake, it turned out the kid was the younger brother of “that black belt crazy kid Bill Ward {we’ll call him Bill Ward for the sake of anonymity}” So now the rumors were that Bill Ward wanted to fight me. I couldn’t fight him however; I was a long-haired freak who couldn’t hurt a fly. I avoided Bill Ward for weeks when finally he caught up with me. He was definitely the Mike Tyson of the town, not really a big guy, just crazy, and could fight and knew karate and loved ninjas and shit. So one day, I’m leaving school, about to cut through some backyards when he runs up. Mind you, he’s running, not walking. “Let’s go man, why’d you fuck with my brother??!?” “I didn’t know it was your brother” “Well, you have to fight me” “Bill Ward, I’m not gonna fight you” He then says “Then I have to hit you”, and he punches me in the face and says “Don’t fuck with my brother”.), so I was getting more or less ready to run away from the crazy biker guys who wanted to kick my ass for having a skateboard and gallivanting around with the kid that said that shit about his sister. (Un)Fortunately, it wasn’t that at all, as while I was standing there with my skateboard and punk rockness I heard this door being flung open loudly and a woman yelling. The tall blonde mirrored sunglasses and bandana guy was running out with a box in his hand, coming from the jewelry store. He hopped on to the motorcycle, or chopper rather, and they drove off into the sunset. The police came down and I gave them a report.

A month later, I get on a bus and look in the back, and there’s mister tall blonde guy with the bandana and mirrored sunglasses, this time he’s wearing a baseball hat though. I avoided eye contact with him and hid my face for the bus ride.
So now, years later I see the guy at the record shop looking through the jazz and blues CD’s, before I disappeared from his sight I wanted to see what he was buying. BB King – Live at Cook County Jail. Ha (?)

Okay I'll go back to writing about how miserable I am and that kind of thing later on. This was fun for a minute.