Lust & Wonder (19 page)

“Here, we need the registration,” he said.

It didn't seem that we were going all that fast.

A young, beefy cop appeared at the driver-side window and said the usual, “License and registration, please.”

Dennis passed these to the cop, who then walked back to his cruiser.

As we sat, Dennis fumed. “I was not speeding. This is just bullshit. This is just…”

I warned him, “Whatever you do, don't piss him off. Don't get him mad. Or it'll just be worse.”

Dennis seemed to be one of those people who had decades of rage simmering below the surface, masked by a smile.

The cop returned and passed the documents back to Dennis. He said, “Do you know how fast you were going?”

Dennis replied, “I think I was going fifty.”

The cop said, “Did you see the speed limit sign?”

Dennis told him, “Well, it was fifty-five back there. And then I think it changed to forty-five.”

The cop said, “You were going fifty-four miles per hour. And the speed limit was forty. You may not have seen the sign. But it was there.”

Then the cop noticed something on our dashboard: a small green indication lamp. He walked around to the front of the vehicle and then returned. “It's illegal to use fog lights when it's not foggy.”

It was currently six degrees below zero in western Massachusetts, and we drove with fog lights because there were large, flat sheets of ice on the road. They were easy to miss. Unless you had on the fog lights and could see them.

The cop wrote out a ticket and passed it to Dennis. Then he returned to his car. The ticket was for $175, including $40 for the fog lights. As we pulled out, the cop followed behind us.

Dennis kept checking his rearview mirror. “That fucker is following us,” he said. “To make sure we don't speed.” And he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store.

The cop drove on by. And we sat there for a moment. Dennis was fuming. “There was no fucking sign. I was going fifty-four. The speed limit was just fifty-five. I saw
that
sign. What the fuck?”

He said, “I'm going to fight this ticket. That was some sort of trap. Who do they think they're pulling over? That road is all local residents going home from work.”

I knew he wouldn't fight it, because he was speeding, if only just a little. And what sort of case is that? But the fog lights thing. That's bullshit. That's not a ticket for fog lights; that's a ticket for two fags from Manhattan in a black Range Rover.

After the speeding and fog lamp ticket, we became aware of just how many cops patrolled this small New England college town where we were about to live, and it was a little alarming.

“Look at that,” Dennis said the following night as we approached the local strip mall. “Will you just take a good look at that.” He made a
tsk
sound and shook his head from side to side. A cop had pulled over a minivan. Peering in the window as we drove by, I saw it was an ordinary woman, probably a mother.

Dennis was still livid from his previous brush with law enforcement, so he was especially compassionate toward her. “Yeah, right. There are people who want to fly planes into our nuclear power plants and dump poison in our reservoirs, and these fat-assed college-town cops have nothing better to do than pull over some soccer mom in a blue minivan. Bullshit.”

I laughed, but then when I looked at his face, I saw he was enraged. He wasn't being funny; he was being borderline personality disorder-ish.

But then? Less than two miles down the street, we saw
another
cop, this one speeding in the opposite direction. I assumed he was driving to the scene to assist the other cop with the dangerous tampon user.

Until we could move into our new house the following week, we were living in a local motel that we called the Roach Motel. It was the sort of motel where the carpets were composed of equal parts nylon fiber and dried bodily fluids. We stayed there because it was one of the few places in the area that would accept our two dogs.

The dogs had come to accept the Roach Motel as home and playpen. There were two full-sized beds in the room with only a slender nightstand between them, so the dogs were able to leap from one bed to the other. They chased each other this way, back and forth between the beds. It was as if this bit of canine acrobatics was something programmed into their genetic code.

We reached the Roach Motel and slid into the parking space directly in front of our door. The motel was actually sort of charming red brick with twenty rooms, though uncared for. But if a couple of gays were to buy the place, redecorate it, and jack the prices up and out of the range of keg-crazed frat boys with hard-ons and roofies, it'd be a nice place.

Inside the room, I grabbed my laptop and peeled back the covers. We needed to use all four flat foam pillows on our one bed.

Immediately, I noticed the smell of cologne wafting up from the sheets. I leaned in close and saw crinkly red pubic hairs. Definitely not hairs from either of us.

Luckily, the sheets on the opposite bed were clean. So I switched them around and then turned on HGTV to watch the downscale decorating shows that Dennis found so amusing. In some rear compartment of my mind, I realized I kind of liked living in the semicharming, semigross motel room and almost dreaded moving into our cedar-shingled, plaster-walled dream home.

At eleven, we drove to Chili's to pick up our takeout order. On the way back, Dennis decided to stop into the convenience store to get some milk. But when we pulled up to the curb in front of the place, we noticed a trio of suspicious youths. What made them suspicious was that they had mullets. Programmed by years of living in Manhattan, I immediately suspected that these weren't ordinary college kids but unsavory white trash from the nearby slum town of Holyoke. Even-staid Dennis was on alert.

“That looks a little weird, doesn't it?” he said.

“Yes, it does,” I agreed. “I think they're probably about to go in that store and rob it. I wouldn't go in, seriously. They could easily have guns. This is bad. Look at their hair.”

Dennis wasn't paranoid the way I was. But these were undeniably scummy kids. We drove away.

Then Dennis happened to glance in the rearview mirror and saw that the little psychopaths had actually walked into the center of the street and were now watching us as we drove away. So maybe I wasn't so paranoid after all. Maybe I was just fucking savvy.

The motel was just around the corner from the store and the hoodlums. If we turned into the driveway, they would definitely see us. And even if they hadn't intended to hold up the store and shoot the clerk in the head, now we'd insulted them by driving away at the mere sight of them. So surely they would teach us a lesson and shuffle over to the motel parking lot, find our car, and smash all the windows with large rocks. They might even try to pry their way inside the room and kill our dogs.

My therapist back in New York told me that one of my problems is that I create these elaborate fantasies—always of disaster—and then my emotional response engages as though it's actually happening. In other words, because I imagine all these horrible things happening at all times, the stress on my body is so bad, they might as well just be happening. The problem is, so many horrible things have actually happened to me that it's hard for me to buy this “It's all in your head” bullshit.

I told Dennis I was worried the thugs were going to break into the room and kill the dogs, so instead of turning into the driveway, he made a left onto a side street.

That's where we saw a police cruiser, slowly driving along the street perpendicular to ours, about one hundred feet away. Seeing us, the police cruiser drifted to a stop.

Now, we drove into one of the residential driveways and then backed out. We turned around. Something perfectly normal. And while it was late, it wasn't so late. Didn't people in the suburbs drive after 10:00
P.M.
?

We cruised back to the traffic light and made a right. Safe now from the eyes of the eventual inmates, we drove up to our motel room door and parked.

“You just watch,” Dennis said, “that fucking cop is going to drive right past us now.”

And sure enough, he did.

The next morning, we saw three police cruisers in the three miles between the Roach Motel and our house. So, basically, one cop per mile.

“This is just unbelievable,” I said. Somewhere deep in my bones, I had known all along that moving back to this town had been a terrible mistake. My first childhood had been horrible enough; why would I even want a second chance in the same fucking town?

We came across a cop who had pulled over an old man in a pickup truck. An old man! In a pickup truck!
These cops should be hunting down those kids from last night
, I thought. They should be slamming them to the ground and beating them with nightsticks, not ticketing onion-growing seniors. I thought,
We could have been killed last night. Those kids should be in handcuffs.

That evening in the room over a dinner of pizza from Joe's in Northampton, I went online to research these Amherst cops. What I found was an interesting local Web site that displayed an activity log from the Amherst Police Department.

Here, under the heading “Suspicious Activity,” I noticed a number of curious entries.

The first stated, “Four individuals inside copy center turned out to be employees.” To make sure I'd read it correctly, I read it again.

Exactly what were they implying?

Wasn't it likely that if there were four people inside a copy shop, at least some of them would work there? Also, they still had copy shops?

The next item on the list was worse. “People in white van turned out to be waiting for man walking dog.”

Dennis was in the bathroom washing his hands, and I called him over.

“You gotta take a look at this!” I hollered.

He came over to the bed drying his hands on a bleach-scented towel. I turned the laptop around so the screen faced him.

“Check it out. Second line from the top. Or fuck it, read the top one, too.”

I watched him scan the page and saw his eyebrows pop up in recognition. “Oh, you've got to be kidding me. They're hunting down people who are out walking their dogs now?”

“That is a little weird, isn't it?” I said.

I was a little worried about this. Maybe more than a little worried. After all, we might be staying in a motel now, guests of the town, but in just a few days, we'd be living here. This would be our hometown.

If they were going after copy shop employees for just being copy shop employees, I would
for sure
be put behind bars.

If you can think of a suspicious activity, chances are good it's something I engage in unwittingly every day. Nearly everything about me is suspicious: I twitch my shoulders when I walk (plastic explosives strapped to my body?), I check my pockets constantly (carrying concealed weapon?), I tend to stare into people's windows when I walk past their houses (sexual predator?).

At this rate, we wouldn't be settled a week before my face would be plastered on the front of the local newspaper under the headline
NEW AMHERST RESIDENT NABBED IN PIZZA SLICE INCIDENT
.

Dennis saw another one. “Look here. It says, ‘Man reported standing near bushes no longer there when police arrive.' Did you get that? Somebody reported a man standing near bushes.”

I could see the scene in my mind: a forty-seven-year-old professor of semiotics at Amherst College, standing just off the town common near a bush. He's thinking,
Wait a minute. What did Ann want me to pick up on the way home? Apple cider donuts?
So he's standing there, and then one of the intolerant Amherst locals, clearly brainwashed by the local law enforcement agency, saw this and panicked. “Who is that man? Why is he standing there? Who just stands in place without moving? Maybe that goes over okay in Sherman Oaks, California, but it's sure not okay here. I'm calling nine-one-one.”

Dennis and I looked at each other. “This isn't good,” he said. “There's an awful lot of
suspicious activity
on this page, and none of it looks very suspicious to me.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “We're moving into a police state. This is like an Eastern Bloc country in World War II.” How long, I could only wonder, would it be before a bronze statue of Stalin was erected on the town commons, directly opposite the Lord Jeffery Inn? And didn't some of the older UMASS dorms look very much like upscale New England concentration camp buildings? Surely, they would be easy to retrofit. Perhaps a plan was already in place. And who'd be the first inside the gas chambers? Absolutely, the insufferable gay guys from New York.

I couldn't continue thinking this way. I had to see the flip side. I said to Dennis, “But the great thing is that there's just not much crime here. Just students screwing off. Maybe they have a couple of robberies now and then, but that's it.”

“Well, yeah,” Dennis said. “Of course there's no crime. The citizens are too terrified to make a move. I bet three-quarters of the population don't leave their houses. I mean, look at this log.” He pointed to another entry. “Says here that police approached a man on a path. And it turned out the man was waiting for his friend.” He was crazed. “This is just unbelievable. They're nabbing
friends.
On
paths
.”

One would think they'd have better things to do. But then, maybe these are the better things, and they're doing them. Maybe now, you do have to stop the mom in the minivan and the man on the path waiting for his friend. I expect you do. The alternative—an “Anything goes!” police department—would not do.

In the city now, you had to expect the plane to fly into the building, the subway to explode. But in the country, you didn't have to expect this yet.