Trouble in the Great White North
My friend Chet McGovernson is one of those people to whom amazing things happen. And by amazing, I mean fucked up.
Chet has never won the lottery. He’s never been “discovered” by a top talent agent for his outstanding ability to… to… eat Kluski noodles, for instance. He’s never found a Rembrandt at a garage sale or discovered a chest full of gold doubloons while scuba diving. In fact, Chet doesn’t own a scuba suit at all. Not even one.
No, Chet is the guy who comes to a stoplight, looks over, and sees a clown in the next car, in full makeup and hair, smoking a cigarette and swearing. He’s the guy who sets the gas cap on top of his trunk and drives off, but then literally stumbles over that same gas cap a week later halfway across town. He’s the guy who sees a band with a spastic singer named Ron House, makes dumb jokes several times a day about Ron House for months, and then sees Ron House in another city, behind the counter at a store, eating a McDonald’s salad.
I think we all know someone who has created homemade Mother’s Day cards, cut and pasted the dictionary’s definition of “mother” into the cards, sent the cards to literally every single mother and grandmother of anyone he even remotely knows, and then discovers only after sending them out that he accidentally included the definition below “mother” as well, which just happens to be “motherfucker.” Chet is that guy, too.
So when I heard that Chet had gotten busted by Canadian customs, I actually wasn’t surprised at all. Not because he was trafficking drugs or smuggling Mexicans, but because he’s just that guy.
Before I go any further, I want to warn you that you are going to think I’m making this story up. I swear I am not.
Anyway, you already sort of know Chet, who I realize now I accidentally called “Chuck” throughout all of this post. You know him because he used to work at Mr. P’s Barn. In fact, the McGovernsons are rather close to Mr. P. for a reason I’ve never been able to uncover, which is probably why they knew that he wasn’t dead. Chet’s mother Stacy used to pretty much run the Barn. I think there might be a fractured love affair in there somewhere, possibly between Chet and bacon.
Or between Chet and Mr. P’s Ford Bronco.
Chet loved to drive Mr. P’s Bronco. So it was actually convenient when, each year, Mr. P. would head to Florida for the winter and leave his Bronco at home. To keep it in shape, he asked the McGovernsons to drive it on occasion. Chet was always happy to oblige. He’d drive it to the store. To Long John Silver’s. To his classes at the university. And to Canada.
Where you’d think the guards would know about him and his random, pointless visits. But they did not.
“Citizenship?” asked the man in the booth.
“American.”
“Are you carrying any cigarettes or alcohol?”
Chet pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Just these.”
“Purpose in Canada?”
Chet literally had no purpose whatsoever.
He told the agent, “No purpose whatsoever.”
The agent was confused. Most people come over to gamble. To shop. To sightsee. To visit. So he asked a follow-up: “How long will you be staying?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a half-hour.”
“And you’re going to…?”
Chet shrugged amiably. “I just want to drive around.”
Suspicious, the agent turned to his second-tier questions. “What do you do for a living?”
At the time, Chet was a student. But as he didn’t currently have a job, he said, “I’m unemployed.”
“I see. Is this your car?”
Chet frowned. “Sort of.”
“May I see your license and registration?”
Chet pulled out the registration and his license, and handed them to the guard.
The man in the booth looked from one document to the other. “This is not your car.”
“No. No it is not.”
“Whose car is it?”
“It’s my boss’s car.”
Here’s where Chet’s astonishing ability to fuck things up catches up with him. The guard said, “You said you were unemployed.”
Chet knew by now that his answers weren’t up to par, but he couldn’t put his finger on a way to explain his way out. He could have told the agent that he had a boss during the summers, but he didn’t.
Instead, he said, “It’s… um… my mom’s friend’s car.”
The guard nodded. “Okay. Where is your mom’s friend?”
Chet answered with blunt honesty: “I have no idea.”
“When will he be back?”
“No clue.”
Chet’s the guy who amazing things happen to. He’s the guy whose two-man ensemble, “Lol’s ‘87 Hairdew,” gets banned from a coffee house because “you make customers go away,” leaving him to cart around a dead amplifier in his freezing truck all winter long. He’s the guy who loses a hundred pounds by biking every day, decides on whim to take a day off, then immediately regains 100 pounds during several months of lethargy.
The customs agent said, “Are you at least insured on this car?”
Chet wasn’t sure. There was supposed to have been a rider, seeing as Mr. P. left the Bronco with the McGovernsons all winter, every winter.
“I think so,” he said.
“Can I see the insurance card?”
Chet pulled it out and handed it to the man, who scanned it.
“You aren’t insured on this car.”
“No. I guess I’m not.”
The agent nodded. “What’s that big piece of expensive-looking electronic equipment in the back there?” he said. Chet turned around and saw the remnant from his Lol’s ‘87 Hairdew experiment, still sitting where he had left it.
“It’s an amplifier,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to get it out of here.”
The guard said, and I quote: “Why would you want to immigrate with such a speaker?”
Chet started sweating. Sweating like Ron House eating a McDonald’s salad.
By now, the guard was suspicious. Unemployed American kid. No agenda. Big guy, acting funny. Possible stolen wares in the back seat. The guard craned his neck into the Bronco’s rear and indicated the large Rubbermaid storage container next to the amplifier. The Rubbermaid container that Chet had seen many times at his own house; the one his mother often carried laundry in.
The guard pointed. “What’s in there?”
Chet exhaled, trying to slow his heartbeat. “I think it’s my mom’s laundry.”
“Could you open it, please?”
The guy amazing things happen to. That’s Chet. And by “amazing things,” I mean “catastrophic, epic failures.” Failures like discovering on the spot that Mr. P. also owns a Rubbermaid container, and that it is not filled with laundry. Or food. Or even tools.
Failures like opening a container in front of an already suspicious customs agent and finding a thick yellow rope with large, gore-stained hooks along its entire length. And, for good measure, a huge bloody machete.
At this point, the agent got a lot more interested. Three-hours-in-a-small-room interested. Many-questions-about-the-giant-Ziplock-in-the-glove-compatment-filled-with-unmarked-pills interested.
It was, Chet tells me, a very, very long day.
But, that’s what happens when you try to cross the border in a car that isn’t yours and whose owner is MIA, while carrying pills and instruments of torture.
Fortunately, Chet’s grandmother owns two waffle irons. One of them chirps like a bird when the waffles are ready. And that little factoid has absolutely no relevance to anything, but it can be a ray of sunshine when you’re looking at 30 years in a federal prison.
Chet screwed up. He should have known better. I go to Canada all the time, but I never bring my drugs or murder weapons. And if I did, I’d at least clean off the blood and intestines.
But I would certainly bring waffle irons. Because that chirping is fucking ridiculous.
Michigan, land of thieves
I hadn’t been to my mother’s house in Michigan for a while. Part of it was probably due to the fact that I work with her, and end up talking to her several times each week. Part of it is because she’s at our house semi-regularly to visit with her grandkids or to attend family events. Part of it is simply that as you get older, you tend to visit a bit less often.
But mostly, we haven’t visited because Michigan is filled with weirdoes and thieves.
Last Friday, we went to visit my mom and stepdad in order to get rid of our children. This was the first time that my daughter, Sydney, would be staying overnight, so we decided to compromise on our usual drop-off-for-the-weekend. Instead of leaving them, we’d stay too, in a small guest house. (Don’t go thinking they’re loaded. While comfortable and technically a guest house, the cabin is closer to “Unabomber shack” than it is to “Butler’s quarters.”) That way if things got ugly, we’d be right there to pretend that we couldn’t hear my mother pounding on the door.
But we still got our alone time. So on Friday night, Robin and I went to the Olive Garden — just the two of us. It was very quiet and we immediately realized we had no idea what to do with ourselves.
“So what are we supposed to talk about?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Robin replied.
After an extended period of time, the waitress stumbled over, announced that she “needed more wine,” took our drink order, and then stared at us for a while. Then she left. After another extended period of time, she returned with our drinks. Then she stared at us again and left.
One of the people behind Robin was talking about her favorite TV shows.
“Do you watch House? It’s about this doctor who has like a limp and he solves mysteries but nobody likes him but he’s so good that it doesn’t matter and he has like polio or something. And Wife Swap? It’s about these families who trade the mothers and they’re all totally weird like this one lady who was possessed by the devil or something and like ate fire and then there was this kid? Have you seen Heroes?”
The waitress returned. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
“We already have drinks.”
She stood in place and stared at us. So we decided to start ordering food in her general direction and hope that in some part of her mind, she would recognize our verbalizations as valid inquiries for food.
I decided to call my mother to see how Sydney was doing. I could hear her in the background, screaming.
“She’s playing,” my mom announced.
But really, all I cared about was that she wasn’t “playing” with us for a change. It was nice to have a meal without being interrupted. However, halfway through my plate, the waitress arrived with a to-go box and attempted to shovel my food into it.
“I’m still eating that,” I told her.
She stared at me, then left.
Later, while we were sitting at the local Borders book store and reading, a woman walked up to the endtable between our chairs, moved our coffees, picked up one of Robin’s magazines, appraised it briefly, and walked off with it.
You can’t blame Michigan, though. They live so close to those shifty Canadians that descent into lives of thievery was almost a given.
My mom works with a Canadian man named Greg. I once spent a weekend in a Canadian lake house with a group that included Greg and his wife. Greg did not like the lake house. He was bored and didn’t enjoy the beach. He didn’t care much for quiet, or tranquility. He was too busy complaining about the slow cellular internet service.
“There’s a way you can get satellite high-speed for free, you know,” he chided my mother. “It’s the same with DirecTV. You used to be able to get Dish Network TV here, and you could rig it so that it’s free, but then they changed the way it was broadcast and so we had to switch to stealing DirecTV instead.”
I was intrigued. ” ‘We?’ ”
“You know, Canadians.”
Greg tapped a key angrily, mumbling. “The setup I have at home is so fast that you can get full DVDs in no time at all,” he said.
“I can’t figure out how to burn them,” I told him.
“It’s complicated because sometimes they put copyright protection on them. You have to find the programs to break the protection. It can take a long time. There are times that I really want a DVD or CD and I have to search for hours to find it for free somewhere, and then I end up having to get through some copyright bullshit. It’s really annoying.” He tapped a key angrily again.
“Why don’t you just… I don’t know… buy the DVD?”
Greg shook his head. “I can’t. It’s part of being Canadian. We always want to get stuff for free.” He gestured out the window. “Hell, most of these houses have satellite dishes on them. But look around; most are for services we don’t have in Canada. They’re stealing American signals.”
You learn something new every day. Apparently Canadians steal. It’s like that Seinfeld episode where Jerry learns that all old people steal. I wonder what it’s like to be an old Canadian? Museums in Calgary and Toronto must have dozens of safeguards to hold back the onslaught of geriatric catburglars. Like maybe staircases, or low toilets.
The rest of my time in Canada, I walked around with my hands in my pockets.
Back in Michigan, I called my mom again. In the background I could hear the sound of my daughter screaming.
“She’s listening to Boppa play the guitar,” she told me.
I visited the Borders bathroom. When I returned, Robin told me that several people had tried to steal my clearly-marked seat. Later, she went to the bathroom and more people did the same for her seat. It was like they were circling, looking for weakness. I wondered if they could smell fear.
When we returned to my mother’s house, my mom announced that Sydney had cried so much that she had exhausted herself and collapsed into hypoxia. The house was quiet. Satisfied, we headed out to the cabin for our first night of uninterrupted sleep in approximately sixteen thousand years, and it was good.
When we awoke, we had another 36 hours ahead of us in Michigan. Near Detroit, just a stone’s throw from Canada. I decided it would be prudent to put my wallet in my sock and hang my food from a high branch. You never know, and better safe than sorry. Thieves and bears are everywhere.