from Part I: Summer

Strange what one day can do. You live your life a certain way and a year can pass with the days blending into each other with nothing too dramatic happening to upset your rhythm, then, one sunny May morning you wake up to a convoy of DEA agents brandishing assault rifles, pounding down your door. To be accurate, I had already been up for about twenty minutes, dressed for work and had just put on the coffee when I saw the convoy. I ran to the window to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing, then ran into the bedroom and woke up K with a panicked, “the cops are here.”
Rubbing her eyes and sitting up, the zebra print blanket falling to her waist, she says, “no, honey it’s not the cops. Probably April, or Roger.” Her voice had that condescending, don’t-be-so-paranoid tone to it. And for a second, I thought maybe she was right, that I was being paranoid. We hadn’t slept together the previous night, because I was so fidgety. Kept getting the cold sweats, my joints were aching, my thoughts assaulting me from every angles, all with one urgent message: get out of the house, now.
K and I were having problems, had been for some time. She’s an alcoholic who has perfected the Jeckle and Hyde routine, and despite my efforts to stick to my sober guns and insist she cut down on the drinking, I was slowly becoming a co-dependant, spineless prick. My guns turning to shot glasses, my ammunition of choice: Jameson. Every night was up in the air. We might have wild, drunken sex, or we might have wild drunken fights; it was as predictable as flipping a coin. I knew I couldn’t carry on this way. I’d already conquered several addictions: sex, heroin, pot, speed, acid, but I never thought I’d journey into alcoholism. I was beginning to hate myself. Here I was, a devoted yoga practitioner, vegetarian, mountain-biker, teacher and stage actor, throwing my sanity away for some fragmented notions of loyalty and love. My instincts had been kicking in now, telling me to leave, so I related the urgent thoughts of escape to our relationship. “I’m going to end it,” I said that night, into the silent darkness. “Now let me sleep.” But my instincts weren’t satiated. I managed maybe two hours of rest the entire night.
“K,” I said “It’s two trucks filled with guys carrying assault rifles, dressed in camo.”
This description got her attention. “What?” She said, life shooting through her widening eyes as she pulled the blanket over her breasts. I turned and hurried out of the bedroom and I was half-way to the ping pong table (Yeah, we had a ping pong table in the living room), when they were through the door, barking orders and pointing their laser sighted rifles at my head and chest.
My heart was thundering and my head was grasping at reality straws. Everything was moving so fast, they were moving so fast, and acting so forceful, so full of energy. The way they were dressed with their camouflaged fatigues and black combat boots, for a second I wondered if there was a camera crew somewhere or if I was on stage, and had so thoroughly embraced my character and the scene, that the stage had turned into my living room. Then a second passed like a bullet and a portal of pure white light opened in the center of my head and tractor beamed all my thoughts into its bright void. The light turned into a fist of adrenaline that punched my consciousness into the present. The vastly narrow present.
“Hands on your head! hands on your head,” I heard but I didn’t catch who said it. There was all this screaming and even though they had all the control and all the guns and ammo to kill us a hundred times over, fear tinged their voices, like they were in a war zone and I was the enemy and who knew if there might be some booby trap or crazed wife with an uzi ready to jump from a corner and blow holes through their dreams.
My hands shot above my head and I was frozen by the intense excitement in their faces, the adrenaline shooting from their eyes like nothing I’d ever seen so early in the morning. There’s nothing to fear, I repeated like a mantra in my mind over and over, and I knew I was thinking it as much for them as for me. There’s nothing to fear.
“Hands behind your head! Hands behind your head!” My hands went behind my head as more of them streamed in through the front door, darting into and out of rooms, rifles at the ready.
A large, barrel-chested man with a crew cut and pouchy cheeks, a prominent hair-lip scar, holding a walkie-talkie in one hand a pistol in the other approached me and looking me hard in the eye, said: “is there anyone else here? I managed, in a daze of surrender: “Yes, my girlfriend’s in the bedroom.”
And an authoritative voice from the bedroom (I didn’t even see anyone go in there), “we have her, she’s secure.”
While two guys handcuffed me, the big guy with the pistol bent his face so close to mine I could smell his aftershave. “Is there anyone else here?”
“No,” I said, “Just us.”
He cocked his head slightly like he didn’t believe me. His light blue eyes bore into mine “Are you sure?”
“Yes, there’s no one else.”
To the two guys who were holding me, he says, “He secure?”
“Yep.” And it was true, for them, I was secure. The cuffs bighting into my wrists could attest to that naked fact.
To me: “okay, on the ground. Face down, flat on the ground.” I complied, and got on the ground, my arms at an awkward angle cuffed over my ass, my head facing the bedroom, my chin becoming one with the blue carpet fibers. I could see K’s bare feet walking out of the room, her gold-colored toenails, the tribal tattoo snaking up her left shin, the zebra print blanket caressing her thighs. On either side of her, acting as escorts, were two pairs of black combat boots. Quite a juxtaposition, I thought, and couldn’t help but grin.
“Take her to the couch,” the guy in charge said. Then, to us, in an almost-friendly, this-is-just-business kind of tone, “Okay guys, we’re going to ask you some questions, figure out what’s going on here. First, are there any firearms?”
K and I answered at the same time. “No.”
“If there is, we’ll find them, and that won’t be good for you, so I’ll ask again, are there any firearms on the premises? Anywhere?”
“No,” we both said again, and I added, “There are no firearms. I’m a teacher.” It felt just as stupid coming out as it probably did to hear. There was acerbic snickering and someone said, “He’s a teacher.” More snickering. “You teach your kids how to smoke pot?” A couple guys laughed and I couldn’t blame them, it was such a hoot.
“What?” I said. My shoulders were beginning to really hurt and I could feel a knot rolling hard against the left side of my cervical spine.
The captain of the merry DEA brigade said, “Which brings me to the second question. Is that your greenhouse down the hill?”