Sunday, March 02, 2003

DANIEL AND THE STUPID DECISION

DANIEL AND THE STUPID DECISION

Let’s start with an admission: I will do almost anything for a friend.  Sometimes that leads me to lose perspective and to court personal injury.  It’s a positive trait that can have serious negative consequences.  But so far I’ve lived to tell the tale. 

The tale: it begins at work, as I decide that I haven’t done enough this week, and will miss too much of next week, to leave at 4 or 4:30 as I’d planned.  I stay till 5 - not working, mind you, just blogging and keeping my seat warm, but staying near the telephone and looking sharp and professional.  (Friday I looked extremely professional, several people told me so.)

SO I got home not much earlier than I would have otherwise.  The dog was really pokey on his walk, it took forever.  Once I’d had something to eat and found the book for Helen Jane (it was squirrelled away, I’d looked everywhere but if you got on your knees behind the dining table you could see it) and wrapped Krista’s present and changed into warmer pants and shoes and I had all my stuff it was really time to get to Happy Hour; it was getting late and tonight, in an unprecedented move, Greg was to make an incursion from the wilds of nepAlameda County.  I’d instigated a face-to-face, mano a mano, Grego a Dano, and damned if I would show the poor form not to be there.  It had been a long, challenging, dense week, made even more intense by Kelly’s having left Wednesday for Florida - she’s there for two weeks, I’ll join her at the end for my cousin’s bat mitzvah and associated 48-hour carnival of adulation. 

But I digress.  I was starting to stress, I was psyched as hell to get out the door.  But I knew the moment I heard the latch click into place behind me that I’d learned yet another lesson in How to Lose Your Keys.  The thing that had felt like keys in my pocket was change.  The keys were still inside.  I had totally choked and was getting ready to freak out.  Take a minute, fella.  Catch your breath.  Let’s calm down.  Carefully checked all the pockets again; nothing.  Door is securely locked.  That’s good.  Cellphone: a pretty new accessory for me, and now it could pay off.  Two people had keys; I called them both, no one answered; I left messages. 

One other key was with some other friends who lived a bit further away; about half an hour round trip.  Here, I made a preliminary stupid decision.  This friend had asked me to go with him that night to see a band at the Fillmore, which I totally would have done, but for the Greg thing which had awakened in me my aforementioned sense of unreasoning fidelity.  Here’s someone who’s putting himself out for me.  Meeting me halfway.  He’s standing in the middle of the freaking bridge and I don’t have the common decency to meet him on my own terms.  So anyway, in some ways my thinking was a bit unbalanced and I just decided, stupidly, not to call this friend because he was doing something and busy and too far away and I didn’t want to impose under those circumstances. 

I wasn’t performing any great feats of intellectual prowess anyhow.  I was not exactly trapped; the building is set up with an iron gate in the flat front wall that leads through a terrazo entryway to stairs that climb up a central light well onto which landings open for the front doors of both units, my landlady’s and then mine above hers.  I was at the top of the stairs, at my front stoop, working myself into a froth over this situation.  The landlady wasn’t home; I’d knocked on her door and all their lights were out and it was full on dark by now, their place was dead.  I had to get into the apartment and get my keys so I could go to Happy Hour and shake Greg’s hand like a man.  I couldn’t panic. 

I began to panic.  I looked around at the windows into the kitchen and the front bedroom, both of which face into the light well which drops three stories to a concrete bed.  I decided to break in through the bedroom window, being the larger of the two and marginally lower; I would bust it in with my shoe and then clear out enough glass so that I could raise the sash (for this I’d have to lean far out over the railing), climb into the house, get my keys, and out the door no questions asked. 

Some of you may have computers that came factory equipped with sensors for Phenominally Bad Decisions; I apologize to those of you whose PBD sensors I just overloaded.  In the rational light of day there is absolutely nothing to recommend this plan.  I had a phone; I could have called anybody.  It’s not like my landlady makes a habit of disappearing for long periods of time; she’s home a lot and so are her kids, who could also have helped.  What I needed to do was take a few moments for quiet reflection. 

Instead I took off my shoe.  This is a big window, though, and no matter how hard I swung (you know what I mean) I wasn’t making any impression on it at all.  The length of the swing, the rubber sole of the shoe, the hyperstrong glass - I was getting nowhere.  I wrapped my jacket around my hand - by this time, though it was chilly, I was sweating and so overheated from my anxious confined pacing that I’d taken my jacket and hat off some time previously. But the jacket was just too soft and fluffy to be an effective agent of destruction.  That’s when I took my moment of quiet reflection.  And in the limpid calm of that moment, I decided to punch in the window with my bare hand. 

It’s not like I didn’t know it could literally kill me; I’ve actually represented people claiming injuries from horiffic accidents involving windows breaking.  So anyway, I popped at the window with the heel of my left hand, leaning far out over the light well, shouting to focus my chi.  The window wobbled significantly.  I focused more closely and took two more ineffectual strikes before I broke through, punching a nice hole right through the window and up to the next pane. 

Yes, I’d overlooked my own knowledge that this window was both, in trade parlance, double hung and double-paned, and I had another pane of glass to shatter with my fists of ineptitude.  Again I steeled myself and saw the essential earthpower coursing through my thick yet graceful hands, slamming my flesh into the glass again and again until I punched through.  Big shards tumbled three stories down and shattered to splinters in the concrete pad below, which had eight foot walls and could only be accessed via a ladder that was kept elsewhere.  As transparent guillotine blades fell and I started removing loose dangling bits, each of which was razor sharp and which were, as a group, shaped like the greatest set of kitchen knives ever devised, I began to question my own plan.  I’d bloodied my knuckles with the punching, which was strange because I’d used the heel of my hand, but whatever, the knuckles were bleeding.  Then I’d gotten a few lacerations on my right hand cleaning out some big bits of glass.  The shards had scattered everywhere, very broadly, including all over the floor in the room where I’d hoped to roll in from the window; and then again I could see that the sash would be really hard to open because jagged sawtooted pointy vein-severers were jutting out all over the place and the sash was sticky in the first place and would be hard to lift, expecially while standing on a two-inch wide iron railing rising at a steep angle perpendicular to the wall next to a three-story drop into a pit carpeted with broken glass.  My left palm hurt - I seemed to have poked it fairly deeply somehow, and though the wound was a clean puncture it was starting to sting and bleed a lot.  I heard grandma starting to stir downstairs in the in-law apartment in the garage.  She speaks only Chinese but I hoped maybe she could help me.  I was clearly unable to help myself. 

I trotted down the stairs but before I could knock on her door, headlights appeared in the driveway - the landlady and her daughter had come home.  I went out to wave to them.  Maybe grandma had called them to report an intruder and they had come home to investigate.  It didn’t make any difference.  They had keys for me, they could let me in.  I might yet be able to make a token appearance during the Gregification of Happy Hour.  They were both kind and solicitous, though quite sensibly pointed out the gross stupidity of many of my decisions.  But they were nice about it (I made clear my intention to absorb all costs of repair and to clean it up thoroughly) and they got me into the house, where I had to staunch some bleeding, pour alcohol into my wounds and then betadyne them and slap on some bandages, and get out the door. 

Once I arrived at the bar, I learned that Greg had already left but had accounted for himself most satisfactorily.  Speck was out the door within minutes of my showing up, too, but at least I got to say hello to him.  Ultimately I stayed till 9:30 in a circulating series of conversations that covered a lot of ground and made me laugh and think in pleasant, curious, recreational ways that recharged me for another enthusiasm-sapping week, which, though short, is to be followed up by a bout of the 96-hour Bat Mitzah fever.  As I sat there on the chilly patio with my dual beers, I kept thinking back to what it was like to punch through the glass, and trying to find catharsis in it.  But it felt false.  There was no sense of triumph, no demon I was slaying as I gouged out the eyes of my own home.  The image that was sticking with me was that of the jagged hungry teeth of glass that now scowled down into our serene light well, formerly all plants and skylight and green terrazo, and now this desecration, waving bayonettes at our visitors as they come to our front door.... It made me feel cold and disappointed. 

The next day I cleaned up the mess; it wasn’t a horrible chore though I had to be very careful and did get a few more little cuts.  (Just remembered those thick canvas work gloves I got when Jared set up the tree-planting.  Could’a worn those.  Saved some grief, made things easier.  But why would I have wanted to do that?) I dumped the transparent pigstickers and parers and scimitars into a garbage can and carefully swept out everything, inside and out, and then used a spray wood polish on the whole floor of the front bedroom to get any slivers stuck beteen the hardwood slats - that’s our yoga and stretching room, we’ve got our mat and ball and handweights there and we roll around on that floor; I’d hate to discover a chunk of glass by doing a shoulderstand on it.  Today I have to get some plastic to cover the damage superficially, both to reduce the danger of slashing oneself to the bone on the remaining shards and to keep that cold pacific wind from blowing pretty much straight up into our chakra studio.  That’s bad fung shui.  But that’s what you get with really stupid decisions.  After I was done cleaning up, I fell asleep as if I were dead on the awesome not-green couch in the warm sun on the warm side of a closed and undamaged window.  I felt like all the life had been drained out of me.

Have I learned a lesson from this?  I’d like to hope so, but only time will tell.  My greater hope is that, perhaps, my story can be a precautionary tale for any of you great kids out there who might be thinking of punching out a double pane window three stories up over a concrete pad so you could enfenestrate into the house and get your keys - yes, you, I’m talking to you - take it from me.  You probably have a better option.  You don’t want to live with this on your permanent record.  When I think about how I’ve got a hole in my palm from where I plunged sharp glass into it just because I was so intent on meeting people and going out - well, there’s simply no justifying that kind of self-imposed social stigmata. 

Okay that last part was too much, but everything else really happened.  Sorry Greg.  Next time, your turf.  And I’ll stay away from the windows.