So yesterday at one in the afternoon, zipping along the 250 bypass just prior to, fittingly, the Barracks road off ramp, I hit a 150 lb black bear at 55 miles per hour. I didn’t even have a chance to break. I knocked the poor beast probably eighty feet, went into a good long fishtail skid amidst airbag smoke and confusion. I managed to get over to the side of the road about ten feet from whee the bear ended up. And there we were. The bear was still alive, but clearly fucked up bad. I felt HORRIBLE. I have been waiting to see a bear since I moved to Virginia, just not this close. So what to do? Well I didn’t know if the bear was just stunned or what, but it kept trying to get to its feet. So I went over to the side of the road and tried to get oncoming traffic to slow down and/or move over to the fast lane. I was also waving my arms like mad trying to get someone to stop and let me use their cell phone. A good five minutes passed. Probably a hundred cars passed. No one slowed . No one stopped… the bear was making these horrific noises and flailing about. Finally this old man stopped in a tiny car, handed me his cell without asking anything and proceeded to try to get traffic to slow down while I dialed 911. I know, I know, I should have a cell phone to call help. But I have always preferred calling for help the old fashioned way… by flapping my arms and yelling. I guess that doen’t work so well anymore.

Another five minutes, the bear is still wailing and flailing, and here comes the fire truck. Fire men pull up and hop up on their truck on the bumpers and shit, all looking all around. Im thinking what the hell, and I ask them as much. They say that maybe momma bear is probably around and pissed. I am thinking, if there is a reason for three burly firemen in big ass outfits to be up on a truck, then maybe you guys could, oh I don’t know, invite me and this old guy up on the truck? I told them I’d been there a while and hadn’t seen any signs of momma (as if I had even really considered that being mauled by momma was an additional option in this cavalcade of tragedy). So they got down an started putting up traffic cones.

Then the Ablemarle PD shows up. Nice guy. Heavily armed. Lots of equipment. And after a brief overview I start to kind of ask him if he might “put the bear down”. It was making the most awful sounds. He looked at me and told me that “this gun wouldn’t kill that bear”. Now Im no gun fetishist, but Im pretty sure that a 9mm would kill the already mortally wounded animal. And if it really wouldn’t, then Im pretty sure the shotgun in the trunk would. But what do I know? I figured he was avoiding some sort of weapons discharge paperwork. Won’t someone think of the paperwork!

Then a landscaping crew showed up, decked out in hunting cammo and such. They started to tell tales of bears they’ve killed hunting and habits of black bears and on and on. At this point the bear is trying to flop itself down the embankment. I can’t stand to listen to its cries anymore and I start to walk up the road to check the place of impact, maybe find my hood ornament, and also just to put some distance on the whole circus of death. I also didn’t wanna be right there if it got ‘put down’.

That is when two animal control jeeps pulled up from opposite directions. One guy pulls up on the medium and wanders down into the “woods” to deal with the bear. But the other woman pulls over way back up the road, where I am. We ended up walking back towards the circus that was ensuing by my broken car. I casually mentioned that the last thing I expected to pop out of the bushes behind a shopping mall was a bear. She said that bears use this part of the bypass to cross “all the time” and that it must be part of their “migration route”. Again, Im no animal behaviorist, but Im not sure if bears do ‘migrate’ per say. And even if they did, and this stretch of 250 was some sort of orsine artery (which I have driven four times every day nearly every day, for six years, miraculously missing the flocks of bears crossing the road) don’tcha think you’d put some sort of ‘bear crossing’ sign, or some such? I am pretty sure that this woman had just seen march of the penguins the night before or something. All the time. Migration. Yep. Sounds good.

As we then passed my beloved, crumpled honda she stopped looked at it and said ” I thought these cars were supposed to be safe.” Safe? Safe for what? I just hit a 150 lb animal at 55mph and Im here talking with you about it. I loved that car and it had done its job, and here “March of the Bear Cubs” was casting posthumous aspersions. Oh the humanity.

Well the bear finally died on its own, with one last painful moan and then it was paperwork time for everyone. The clipboards were brandished, the numbers jotted, the boxes ticked – heck, the cop who was drawing out the accident diagram even had a litle stencil for animals, which he carefully etched onto the front of the little car diagram. It looked kind of like a tapir riding a golfcart. I asked if he had different stencils for different critters, but no, he said, he didn’t. Damn budget cuts, I thought.

So in this flourish of proto-beauracracy the landscapers came over and were chatting with me, all casual like. ‘I reckon’ this and ‘I can tell you what’ that. Then one finally asked “so… you want that” casually gesturing towards the dead bear, as if it were the last portion of mashed potatoes. I wasn’t sure if I understood him correctly. I glanced at the officer who volunteered that, as the driver, I had “the first rights to the carcass”. First rights to the carcass? You know, if they have made up rules about this, then that can only mean that there have, in the past, been fights over such things. “You may have knocked that bunny into the fast lane, but Im pretty sure it was my grill that killed him.” Tune in next week on RoadKill Court”. Carcass rights, eh? Well at least I know I have them should I ever hit something that I would really treasure. And what exactly did anyone there think I was going to do with the carcass anyway? I had no more car. Was I to sling it over my shoulder in the 100 degree weather and mosey off down the bypass into the horizon like the end of some western feel good movie? Yes, I said. I waive my rights to the carcass. You can have the bear. May has well have been early christmas as they tossed on the back of their trailer and drove off, thanking me. Upon reflection I have wondered what their intentions were. Food? Decorations? One of my coworkers has since told me that I could have sold the “gall bladder to the chinese for thousands”. Oh yeah? And how exactly does that work – ebay? “Winning bidder pays shipping and provides removal of the gall bladder?” Whatever.

So then it was done. I caught a ride with the sixty year old tow truck guy with profound psoriasis who proceeded to point out every female human that we passed with some qualitative observations (mmm look at those nice thick legs!). In between the rounds of pornographic pageant judging he told me that yes, bears are something, but when you’re driving what you really got to look out for is turkies. Turkies? Yes. Turkies. “They’ll come through the windshield and really fuck you up, fuck you up bad”. So I guess now when my post traumatic stress disorder abates slightly I will, while driving, be greeted by phantom suicide turkies popping into my peripheral vision. I tell you one thing, next thanksgiving, Im not leaving the fucking house.

So here I sit, waiting to see if my car is indeed totalled officially, wading through paperwork, and wondering if I will ever pull myself out of debt. I had just paid it off and just changed the oil! I am trying to shake the thought that, if there is a god, that somewhere along my life’s path I must have done something so terribly wrong that now he is throwing bears at my car. It has come to that, has it? I can’t for the life of me figure what my transgression might be, but believe me, if I do, I’ll stop. Please, just no more flinging wildlife. And by the time I finally figure that out, maybe all my coworkers will have stopped calling me “Grizzly Adams”.

Sky’s Place was a special bar in my college town. It was special because it was in the basement lounge of a sleazy 70’s era motel. It was special because the carpet and walls were still the unique shade of maroon-red that was so familiar to the dark side of the disco era. It was special because it didn’t even have its own restrooms and you were forced to stumble through the brightly lit reception area a half dozen times a night. It was also special because it was the easiest bar in town to get into and every freshman that would fit was there. The doors were naugahyde, and  the windows were frosted by 20 years of dust and cigarette smoke.  There was an old jukebox that had Motley Crue, Skid Row, Guns N’ Roses, any probably more; but who knew because only those three were ever played.

After a few months of burning tuition one $4 pitcher at a time, I had gotten to know the staff pretty well. One night that they were down a man, they asked me to fill in at the door. After finding out that staff drinks for half price, I could not have been more up for the job. I think it’s safe to say that the staff were usually the drunkest people in the bar each night. On the nights that we weren’t, it was because Sky was around. Sky was a big dude. NFL big. About 6′9″ and 350 lbs. And seriously, NFL big. He played for Detroit and Buffalo in the pro’s. You tried not to piss him off.

Fortunately, Sky didn’t hang out too late and the staff would be able to resume festivities in short order. We were well known for running a late-night, so we took comfort in knowing that there would plenty of play time after the boss man left.

There are many stories I could tell about Sky’s, but sadly this one focuses on the events that brought an end to its’ era. It occurred at the end of January, 1999. The Falcons were in the Super Bowl, and Sky had tickets. He left us in charge of the bar, but seemed to be a bit hesitant.

It was just a regular weekend night. The staff had a pretty solid buzz working before the first customer walked through the door. Skid Row, The Crue, and GnR were playing their standard rotation on the jukebox. Most of the employees could be found huddled around the Adult PhotoHunt game at the end of the bar. One of the bartenders was showing off a new trick to light cigarettes for bar patrons. It was simple enough, you peel one match back from the matchbook and wrap it back around so that the head was on the striking surface. With a quick flick of the thumb and forefinger, the matchbook would slide across the bar, coming to rest with a single match standing up aflame. We were pushing cigarettes on hot girls all night long vying for a chance to show off our new trick.

The night wore on, and everyones’ intoxication levels reached new highs as Sky was guaranteed not to show up. 2AM (closing time) came and went, and the naugahyde doors just barely slowed the influx of drinkers. One regular patron was especially drunk and attempting to broker deals to make his drinking future more lucrative. As the time neared 4AM, we were confident that he wouldn’t remember any of this the next day, so we were willing to negotiate. The final agreement was that he would strip down to his boxers and dance the ‘Dirty Bird’ 25 laps around the bar, and in return he could drink for free for the rest of his life. We volunteered to keep count. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the Dirty Bird, it basically consists of flapping your arms and high stepping around a lot. Add blinding drunkeness, subtract everything but underwear, and you’ve got quite a spectacle for the crowd.

4AM found us with a full bar, Skid Row blasting ‘Youth Gone Wild’ at deafening volume, and a pale undergrad stumbling the Dirty Bird in laps around the crowd. We needed a finale. You could feel it in the air. Thankfully, the guy that taught us the matchbook trick, Zach,  had something else up his sleeve.  So, he grabbed a handle of Golden Grain, tossed the cap in the trash, and emptied its contents along the length of the bar. As Zach stepped back, we all knew what would come next. He took a matchbook, folded one back, and motioned for the stragglers to get clear of the bar.

As the matchbook sailed through the air, time slowed to a crawl. The only set of eyes that weren’t locked onto that match belonged to the dirty bird dancer, who was on his 40th or 50th lap. We didn’t know. We had stopped counting almost as soon as he started. As the dancer crossed in front of the naugahyde doors, they burst open; and through them poured what seemed like 20 police officers in riot gear. They didn’t even have time to finish screaming, ‘POLICE!’, before the bar erupted into flames. The situation instantly dissolved into mayhem. Underage kids started a rush for the door, dirty dancer just stopped and stood in underwear and awe. Flames licked the ceiling, and Skid Row wasn’t showing any signs of letting up.

Fight or Flight engaged itself, and I reacted accordingly. I ran like hell. I fled for the kitchen, and jumped into the ice maker. I spent about an hour in that ice maker. I could still hear the mumblings of the police and the bar staff just outside the kitchen. The only thing to punctuate my time in the icemaker was occasionally being pelted in the face as it ejected freshly made ice cubes. Still, it seemed like a pretty good alternative to jail. When I finally cracked the door on the ice maker, all the lights were off. I slunk out of the kitchen and through the doors to freedom.

It was a month or so before I ran into one of the other bartenders. Essentially, he said that Sky was pretty unhappy with the stack of fines awaiting him when he returned from the Super Bowl. He shut the doors of Sky’s Place right then and there. He did have one other bar in town, and I knew that I wasn’t welcome there. In fact, I pretty much spent the rest of my college career avoiding Sky. Fortunately, there was no shortage of drinking holes in my college town; so it never negatively impacted my habit. Much in the same way that Travis knew that he had to be the one to shoot Old Yeller, I took some solace in knowing that I was part of the ‘closing crew’ for Sky’s Place. To abuse the cliche, it was better to see Sky’s Place go out with a bang than to watch it slowly die at the hands of a fickle college drinking crowd.

So, this story will probably explain a lot about me to those that know me personally. It probably has everything to do with my off the charts A.D.D., my inability to do math, or process travel directions. While we’re at it, maybe I’ll charge my propensity for alcohol and that damn tweed to it as well. I’ll be the first to say that it’s probably why I’m amazing in bed (ladies, take note here). I consider myself to be a pretty smart guy, though I certainly never showed it in school. I’m like Rain Man for random information, and I still remember my best friend from 4th grade’s phone number. Numbers and random facts; A generally useless trait, unless I can somehow get onto High School Jeopardy. Anyway, enough about how awesome I am. I just wanted you to pity or lust after me (or both, I’m not above pitylust), before I make every bit of your human instinct want to murder me.

Because…. technically…..    I’m a zombie.

I’m hoping that most of you are either drunk or high enough that you forgot when I gave that part away in the title.  It wasn’t the only time that I’ve cheated death, but it was probably the closest I’ve ever been to losing the coin toss. Honestly, it’s like Final Destination up in this bitch. Death has come after me many times, and I was probably inviting him in for most of them. I’m sure that some of those stories will show up here in time.

This is a weird story to tell, because it has only been relayed to me by my brothers. I was both too young, and too dead to be taking good notes. Anyway, here’s what went down.

4th of July, 1981: Atlanta, GA.  Capital City Club.

This was the heart of decadence. In the very early 80’s, Atlanta was exploding with industry and the 80’s party lifestyle was just warming up. The Capital City Club was top shelf, and the white collar place to be seen. It was mid afternoon, and the club’s fireworks show wouldn’t start for a few hours. The place was packed. My dad had brought my brothers to hang out in the pool all day, while he kept an eye on me. I was just one year old, and fat like a marshmallow. So, hanging out poolside, my dad was like a one man sales show. He could charm his way into any deal; and for a while growing up, he did. Of course, when talking shop at the club, you had to knock back scotches with the good old boys, lest you be an outcast. No, no. I’m joking. The man loves the sauce. He was probably buying rounds. I wasn’t really interested in his business dealings, nor was he likely interested in my diapers and jibberish dealings. I guess I wandered off.

*scream from the crowd* THERE’S A BABY IN THE POOL!

And so there was.  I was face down in the shallow end. Not moving. Some kid dove in to save me. I was already blue by the time they laid me on the concrete. The lifeguards ran to offer aid, and delivered whatever the contemporary excuse for CPR was. It wasn’t helping. After a couple of minutes, a doctor had rushed to the scene and had taken over. A couple of minutes longer, and he delivered some heartbreaking news to my father. I was officially pronounced dead. No breathing. No pulse.

This is the part that really gets to me every time I think about this story. When my brother tells it to me, I can tell that it’s something that has stuck with him for life. I can hear it in his voice. We joke about it now, but I can’t imagine the trauma that must’ve been inflicted on him at that exact moment. He says… all that you could hear was my father screaming. Wailing. The shell of a man.

I really pressed for specific times at dinner tonight, but my brother just can’t say when exactly the EMT’s showed up. When my father started screaming, someone rushed my brothers away, far from the scene. Still, even hidden away in a building, nothing could drown out that wail of agony.  By his best guess, the EMT’s could not have been on-site for at least 5 minutes. There’s no telling how long I was face down in the water, so I’ll never really know the times. What he does know is that once at the scene, the EMT’s pumped my stomach and I puked all of that water right back out. My lungs refilled with air.

At one year old, I challenged death, and I won. Because, fuck that guy.

I don’t know all of your fancy scientific facts and whatnot, but ‘people’ tell me that the brain damage begins very soon after oxygen deprivation. My good friend, Dr. W. I. Kipedia, just said something about brain death occurring at around 6 minutes the other day. I really don’t know if the drowning resulted in brain damage or not. My friends would all probably agree that it did, but I refute to them that they can’t prove which brain injury is responsible for ‘all of that’. I do know that I’m pretty lucky to have lived through it. I doubt I’ll ever know who that kid was that pulled me out of there (Thanks kid!).

I do know that, strangely, the first time I heard that story was one of my favorite conversations that I’ve ever had with my brother…. as we drank by the country club pool, watching his daughters play in the water.

As I was dressing myself in all black again this morning I started thinking about my own interminable sense of self-loathing. I really think I am getting it down to a science! My Joy Division records all have scratches in them, the PBR is flat for some reason, and I’m out of clove cigarettes. To make matters worse, all my friends want to do is have fun. I went to a standup comedy show last night at BelRio and actually laughed. I felt so guilty for enjoying myself that I had to throw up when I got home. Only I couldn’t throw up ’cause I hadn’t eaten all day. This just depressed me, and then I felt better so I went to sleep with dreams of hate and despair floating through my brain.

Happy Thursday!

[photo credit]

After a few years of drunkenly roping, herding, and generally molesting animals in the name of science, I felt pretty comfortable with huge farm beasts. Not only was I comfortable with the farmer’s daughters, but the horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs too.

Fast forward a few months, and you would find me taking a ’semester off’ and working to repay some of my squandered tuition (thump, thump). Not being too good for free rent, I was living comfortably in the downstairs floor of my parents’ suburban Atlanta home, and calling it an apartment (thump, thump). One fateful day, I returned from work to find my dog going absolutely ape shit in the back yard (thump, thump). As I navigated the woods towards the source of the barking, something just didn’t feel right (thump, thump). And just what the hell was that drum noise (thump, thump)? Within a few steps, the ridiculous events about to unfold would make themselves apparent. My dog had cornered a large bird. A 7 foot tall bird. An emu. A sense of relief washed over me as I realized that a bird must have escaped from the emu farm a mile through the woods and was simply lost. As you may or may not know, emus make a deep thumping sound when agitated. It doesn’t NOT resemble the drums of war. Upon closer inspection, the bird seemed fairly calm and wasn’t even acknowledging the presence of myself or the dog that had just about finishing barking his lungs onto the forest floor.   Fortunately, I had all kinds of large animal wrangling skills, and I would finally prove to everyone that college had not simply been a drunken waste.

I sprinted to the house to put the dog away and retrieve enough rope to fashion a lasso. Upon my return I found the enormous bird pacing in the same corner of the yard, with battle drum at full tempo and cold black eyes… fixed somewhere in the distance. I brought the lasso up over my head, spinning rings through the air, and cast it toward the errant emu. As the rope crossed the plane of the bird’s view and fell around its neck, everything changed.

Those cold black eyes promptly jerked from their previous destination and locked onto me. The bird lurched forward. Up until this point, I had expected that source of danger from the 7 foot bird would be the huge pointed beak atop its hideously ugly bird face. This opinion changed in milliseconds. With each lunging step, the bird would raise its massively powerful leg above my head and bring it down with enough speed to make a sound that could only be described as tearing the air. I turned tail and ran for my life. By this point, I had made an enemy of the bird, and he had a score to settle. I needed not turn my head to see if the bird was still there, as I could feel the rush of wind as it sliced the air behind me. I sprinted through the woods, hopping fallen trees, ducking branches, getting lots and lots of poison ivy, and the bird was hardly a full step behind me. The sound that introduced itself next was a familiar one, but was nothing I would’ve expected at this point. Ziiiiiiiiiiiing *POP*. Ziiiiiiiiiing *POP*. Bark was exploding off of trees around me, branches were being snapped, and I realized that I was being shot at. After changing my direction of sprint to match the origin of the shots, I laid witness to my father standing on the deck of my house, at least 500 feet away, with a .22 rifle. The subsequent exchange went just about like this:

Me: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!

Dad: DON’T WORRY! I’M AIMING FOR THE BIRD!

Me: THE BIRD IS RIGHT FUCKING BEHIND ME! STOP!

Dad: I’M NOT GOING TO HIT YOU!

Me: STOP FUCKING SHOOTING!!!

Stop shooting, he did not. Apparently, in his desire to bring this situation from a 10 to a full fledged 11, he decided that introducing gunpowder was the best way to up the awesome levels. I disagreed, but I realized that it was a moot point as 3 inch long talons sliced the air behind me, and tiny angry bullets shredded the forest around me. In this moment, I recalled that there was about 10 feet of rope trailing at the end of the lasso. I made a sharp turn between some trees and cut back to flank the bird. I scooped the end of the rope up and began to zig zag through the trees. Once the bird was finally caught up in the web of rope, I tied the end around a tree as the bird flailed and lunged at me.

Full of adrenaline, I ran through the woods toward the emu farm as fast as I could, intent on returning the errant bird to its owners. The driveway was full of cars and I was relieved to know that I would find someone at home. I pounded on the front door and received no answer. I continued frantically ringing the doorbell and beating on the door, until I saw shadows in the foyer of the house. A lady in her mid-thirties opened the door, and at her side stood none other than Spiderman. 3 foot tall, 5 year old Spiderman. I finally managed to explain that I had their bird in the woods, and they needed to come quickly. A look of joy washed over young Spiderman’s face, and his mother explained that she would be right back. It’s just that she needed to tell the other parents and children that they would briefly be leaving Spidertoddler’s 5th birthday costume party, but would be back soon. As we traipsed through the woods, toward my previous battleground, the mother explained that the bird belonged to the boy and had been missing for days. Her son had been quite upset about it, and she was so happy that she would be able to return the bird to him on his birthday.

As we turned the last bend in the woods, we discovered the huge bird in a pile on the ground. It was a shell of its former self. Almost all of the feathers had been stripped from its neck, and that same neck laid in a very unnatural angle on the ground. It was clear that the bird had successfully flailed itself to death. It resisted the rope to the point that it actually broke its own neck. A river of tears erupted from the child. My heart sank. The mother realized just what was occurring before her. And then the police showed up. It struck everyone as a little strange that the police would happen across us in the middle of the woods, but my surprise levels were just about depleted for the day. The two officers on the scene were in a state of amazement. I tried to verbalize everything that had happened, and the child’s mother tried to restore order. It was at that moment that another set of neighbors burst onto the scene. To say that these neighbors were overly dramatic, would be an slight understatement. The officers on the scene wore their concern clearly on their faces.

Neighbor 1: OH MY GOD! THAT GUY WAS ATTACKING THE BIRD! AND HE KILLED IT! AND BRUCE HAS THE WHOLE THING ON VIDEO TAPE!

Neighbor 2: IT WAS HORRIBLE! AND THEY WERE TRESPASSING! I WANT THIS THING OFF OF MY PROPERTY!

Admittedly, I had managed to cross over to their property in my struggle, and this particular property line had been quite the topic of debate in the past. At that very moment, my father strolls up to the scene and things got slightly more out of control.

Neighbor 1: AND HIM!! HE WAS STANDING ON THE DECK SHOOTING AT IT!! HE HAS A RIFLE UP THERE!

Dad: What?!? No! No! I was just standing up there and using my pointing stick! Nooooo! No rifle! I just like to use a pointing stick!

The two officers finally asked the neighbors to return to their home, and informed them that they would stop by before they left. Sans neighbors, the police explained that due to the fact that it was April Fool’s Day, they really thought they were being dispatched to a prank call. The neighbors had been warned of the consequence of prank calling 911 and hung up on, but after 4 or 5 calls, the police finally dispatched someone. So, there we stood, a half dozen people circled around a pile of emu/killing machine. The woman that owned the bird explained that male emus sit on the eggs during gestation, and this particular bird’s egg had not hatched. It was rotting in the nest, and the bird was growing increasingly stressed about its unhatched egg. The owners’ had to flush the bird out of the nest in order to sneak in behind it and remove the egg. After the egg had been removed, the bird began a desperate search for its missing charge. It only took about a day of pacing around the emu enclosure to convince the bird that the egg was not there, and it jumped the fence to exit the enclosure. The fence was 10 feet tall. The bird jumped a 10 foot tall fence. I’m not sure if you caught that. Fence. 10 feet tall. Bird. Jumped fence. This bird was clearly a bad ass death machine hell bent on finding its egg and/or killing everything in its path.

Spidertoddler’s mother actually thanked me for finding her bird and preventing it from making it into the neighborhood. Spidertoddler just sat in a heap and cried his little web slinging eyes out. I tried to make good by offering the child the only thing I could think of, a fruit roll-up. He wasn’t interested. He was more interested in the most horrible birthday present ever,  his dead pet.

The police eventually decided that it would just be best to put a blanket over the bird, and to ask the woman to please recover the body as soon as she was capable. The neighbors were essentially told to get some compassion, and my father and I retreated home to get incredibly drunk.

I never went back there to look for the bird’s body again. I never saw the emu farm owners again. We had plenty of future confrontations with our property-line neighbors, but none so strange as this one. I can only imagine that the boy let the pain fester and will eventually send an army of trained death emus after me.

I do wish I had seen that video tape. I’ll always wonder what happened to it. It’s probably out there on YouTube somewhere. Let me know if you find it!