Yebo! in Normal entries

Sometime in the last fifteen years or so, I went to my niece’s graduation in Olympia; The Evergreen State. That’s the name of the school; The Evergreen State. There were all kinds of family there and I drove up in my Convertible with my wife, so it couldn’t have been much less than fifteen years. And the car was repossessed like fourteen and a half years ago. For weeks whenever I told someone that my car was repossessed they’d say something to the effect of “Those bastards! Why’d they do that?” It was really flattering, so much so that I let some people believe I was mistreated by the bank. Um, I quit paying them and they took the car.

When of the more memorable things to the niece was driving around campus with the roof down and this song blaring from my very powerful eight speaker infinities and blaupunkt deck;

What, you ask, does this have to do with the price of shit and shinola in Philadelphia? Huh, well, what do you think Yebo means? Yeah me either. The song came up on the deck as I was driving past another memory. I rolled the windows down and cranked the dial.

Up until last autumn these little shacks stood on the corner of the four hundred block of
my street. They were built in the forties, after the war, and looked like a low rent set for grapes of Wrath. Dumpy concrete bunker/bungalows; all exactly the same (except the pastel/Easter egg outside paint, faded from lack of maintenance, and, if you’ll forgive the anthro-morphizing, hubris). One of my infamous birthday car wrecking stories involves one of those shacks.

Moving forward, or backward as the case might be, the 1977 girlfriend had an old roommate who lived in a shack with her needs-citizenship beard, a pale white red headed Norwegian. He had just returned from home with homemade white lightening and Nepalese temple ball hash. Yes, I said beard, she was convinced she was a lesbian. They had two children and as far as I know are still happily married and/or happily dead.

The relationship was new and we were fucked up. Had less than eight blocks to travel, late at night on empty streets in mid-Michigan in February. This isn’t a story about bad weather conditions, the culprit, as in so many tales, was sex. I won’t be explicit, but when I realized both hands weren’t free, I looked up to find a tree careening towards us. Ok, the tree was parked, but still. Totaled my beautiful 73 fastback mustang. I spent the night with her in the ER, she caught the windshield, had a mild concussion, glass sticking out of her forehead, and fucked up on white lightening and Nepalese temple ball hash. She kept telling nurses and doctors that it wasn’t my fault and that she loved me.

The following morning, the one cop in this world I’ve had the worst, most ignoble, history with, showed up at my door and accused me of drunk driving. I asked if I could pee for him, like in his pocket. He said I farted around for twelve hours and the urine would be clean. I told him it was clean anyhow. He wrote me a DUI ticket. The magistrate told the cop there was no proof, no UA, no statement, except from the GF who said she loved me and it wasn’t my fault. I said I swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel. The magistrate said that he found that admirable, but, it meant I was going unsafe speeds for environmental conditions. I didn’t get a fine or anything but I got three points on my license. I don’t know how they do it now, but at the time twelve points would suspend your license for three years. I had eleven after that. I stayed even at eleven from 76 to 79, and was out of state a lot and points disappear after two years.