Monday misdemeanors
On Monday, I woke up feeling somehow a little out of sorts, the way that we sometimes do and can’t explain. Maybe it was just too much Maker’s Mark the night before (but it had seemed so right at the time!) or maybe it was the recognition that there was nothing on my schedule that day (almost unheard of), but finally, in the middle of the afternoon, I decided to go see a movie. “Robot & Frank,” to be precise, of which I would recommend the first 80% — up to the point when the police stake out Frank’s house — after which I suggest you leave.
And that’s what I wish I had done, because the movie, wonderful up to that point, falls off a cliff after that, and because I suspect that that’s about when something was happening to my car in the parking lot at the Burbank Town Center. Because when I returned to my car and got in and went to back out and looked into the passenger-side mirror to ensure there was no one behind me, I found myself staring into a black empty space where my mirror had once been. The mirror was gone. I got out of the car and walked around and looked at this emptiness, and then walked to the front of the car — no idea why — and then back to the mirror, and then all around the car, somehow disbelieving that this had happened. I mean, this was Burbank. It’s not like I was parked in Eagle Rock (where my Toyota Celica was smashed into with a football-sized piece of cement in 1990 in a failed attempt at car theft). And this parking spot was near IKEA. I mean, if you can’t trust that your car is safe when it’s entrusted to IKEA, where can it be safe?
Long and short on the car: It’s a BMW, so I knew this mirror — just the glass and its little electrical cable, not the whole assembly — wouldn’t be cheap, and I was right. Replacing it cost me $438. The deductible on my auto insurance? $500. So now seeing “Robot & Frank” cost me not 10 bucks, but almost five hundred bucks. I liked the movie, but not that much.
Then my wife called. I assumed she was on her way to work, but no. “Are you on your way home? There’s an incident here and I can’t leave.” “Incident.” I figured our kids were arguing. No. I got home to find that my gardeners of 15 years, two brothers, had decided to have a drunken backyard brawl on my property in front of my children. They were drinking beer while mowing the lawn and trimming trees, then they hung around and drank some more, then they started belting each other and rolling around in the mud. I didn’t get to see any of this, but my 10-year-old son did. He reported that Juan seemed to get the worse of it because “he had more blood all over him.” My wife said she didn’t call the police because the one brother had already had drinking-related issues — which made me think that a wake-up call from the authorities was precisely what he needed — but I needn’t have worried about that, because two blueshirts in a squad car showed up anyway because two neighborhood teens had called them. I think this way: that when kids call the police, the fight must look pretty serious. It must not have seemed serious to the police, though, who were very cavalier about it but who quizzed my neighbor no fewer than six times about whether or not he was one of the combatants. When I told these cops that these men had been my gardeners for 15 years and now I was firing them, one of them said, “That’s a shame. Maybe you can work something out,” evidently confusing my locale with that of Mayberry RFD. “They were rolling around drunk in the mud having a fistfight in front of my kids,” I said. “This isn’t a Hemingway novel.”
So I got my car back today, mirror freshly replaced, and I’ve been collecting referrals for gardeners on Facebook. Someone asked why my kids don’t just “mow the lawn” — someone in Brooklyn, NY, with no sense of the scale of the job. My kids have a fair number of chores (many more than their friends, they tell me), but I’d rather have the avocado tree, lemon tree, orange tree, sugar cane, grapes, fig tree, tangerine tree, and even the trees without edible products, plus the lawn, tended by professionals. I’d just rather these professionals not roll around among these plants while drunk and beating each other.