A great hiding place for squirrels.  Right?

After depositions the following day, I drove a couple hours up the freeway to Pasadena.  There were a few strange squeaking noises coming from somewhere near the engine.  But they always quieted down once I was paying attention.  By the time I was driving back to San Diego the next evening it was dark and I was exhausted.  I settled in for a mindless freeway run with the radio turned up and my eyes pried open.  Somewhere in the middle of that monotonous journey, I became aware that something was touching my knee.  My mind told me to be cool; to keep my eye on the road until there was a moment to look down and see what was going on.  Two hands on the wheel, I steadied my car in its lane, and looked down at my knee.  There in the bleary freeway light, something fat and furry sat on the raised platform between the seats, just next to the gearshift stick.  Brushing against my leg.  That’s when I panicked.  My knee, acting on its own, jerked hard against the little animal, my whole body convulsed, and I had to look back up at the freeway to make sure I hadn’t swerved off it in my seizures of disgust.  By the time I looked down again, the thing was gone.  I hadn’t gotten much of a look at my little antagonist in the darkness.  But now I knew that there was something logging these miles along with me, and there was not a lot I could do to make him go away.  Funny how I didn’t have to fight sleep the whole rest of that drive.  I sat straight up, my knees pressed into the driver’s side door, and my mind churning through the various ramifications of sharing my car with an overly friendly rodent.

Two days later, it was finally time to go home.  There were so many things to think about on that trip that the automotive infestation didn’t always stay at the top of the list.  I headed into town to take a quick peek at San Diego before catching my plane.  Pulling into town, my car hit a hard bump.  Something hit the floor of the passenger’s side with several angry squeaks.  It recovered quickly and disappeared up under the dash panel, but this time its getaway wasn’t perfect.  A long, gray, loathesome wiry tail hung down in plain view and jerked around in plain view for the longest time as its madly squeaking owner scrambled around for more secure footing.  This was the first time I had actually spotted the thing in broad daylight, and I really had never imagined it could be this bad.  The thing that had commandeered my car and shared my journey with me, and attempted to take an affectionate nap on my leg was a big fat rat with a huge, hideous tail.

The realization filled me with a kind of shaking anger and deep-running hatred.  I slammed on the brakes while the tail jerked around, and started preparing to kill this thing once and for all.  But it’s hard to wrap your mind around stepping on the tail of a rat when he’s hiding under the dash of the passenger’s side and you’re over in the driver’s seat.  I threw a binder at the tail as hard as I could.  Strangely, even though he had remained silent almost the whole trip, the squeaking didn’t stop now.  I imagined a nest of them reposing just underneath the hood somewhere, all squeaking in distress at their mother’s predicament.  Or maybe all the squeaking was that of just one rat, laughing at how easy it was to hijack my car for four days.  I got out of the car just to bend over and breathe.  I left it in the street right there and went into a store for a minute.  A parking ticket sat on the windshield when I came out three minutes later.  Again the rat laughed.

It wasn’t a long drive from there to the rental car place.  I dropped it off and waited for one of those super nice, clean cut college kids to come ask me how my trip went.  I remained calm and polite and told them that a rat, or a nest of rats, or some sort of traveling menagerie, live in the car they chose for me to drive around for four days.  The girl gave me a questioning look and I had to explain the whole thing again- the flash of fur in the night, the groping on my midnight drive, and the tail– the long, sickening tail jerking, writhing up and down.  It took her a while to believe me.  But when it was time for her to pull my car forward in the line of returning vehicles, she didn’t budge.  She made a call down to the garage and some guy in a mechanic’s outfit walked up and pulled it forward for her.  She asked her companions if anyone had ever heard of something like this.  No one had.  The mechanic guy looked all around the car, finding nothing.  I told them they’ll need to pull the dashboard off, because, yep, there’s a rat living in this freaking car.  The girl kept looking at me really intently, trying to figure out if I was telling the truth.  Finally, she handed me two ‘free upgrade’ coupons and sent me on my way with apologies. The people on the shuttle bus to the airport asked me if there really was a rat in my car.  I was a little tired of thinking about it now, but I still had to testify.  Yes, there was a rat.  Living in my car.  Touching me.  Caressing me.  They all stared in amazement as I focused on a spot just outside my window for the rest of the drive to the airport.

A week later, I wrote to the email address on my free upgrade coupons.  “Hi Natasha, I just wanted to see if there was any end to this story.  Did they inspect the car and find the rat?  What happened?  Thanks, Ryan.”  She responded later that day.  “Hi Ryan, we looked all throughout the car.  We haven’t been able to find any rat.  Sorry!  Natasha.”

But there was a rat.  I don’t know where he hides or how he does it exactly, but there’s a rat living in that car, possibly a family of them.  Or maybe he made it onto the airport shuttle just in time to miss the car inspection.  For all I know he’s flying around in the engine compartment of some airplane by now, snacking on airplane peanuts.  Wherever he is, I hope someday he crawls just a little to close to a motor fan or engine belt or something.  There’s no way he survives in those kinds of quarters for long without catching that enormous, spasmodic tail in something.  So long, rat.

I don’t know whose fault it is.  A lot of people think it’s the lawyers, but let’s be honest, a lawyer is only as sleazy as the client he’s working for. Or at least he’s only as sleazy as he can get his client to let him be.  Anyway, I didn’t ask that one lady to call me to try to hire me because her son was at Wal-Mart and he fell down in the bathroom because he slipped in poo.  And the other guy who called because he found a mouse tail in his cola can. I’m the one who told him he’s got nothing.  So it’s not all on the lawyers.  It’s these crazy complainers that are pushing us all down the liability vortex, and the lawyers, at their worst, are just their accomplices.

Come on, you don’t honestly think people like this are making things worse, right?

But there’s a way out of this.  Spending this weekend in Bear Lake with the family, Davis and I were talking about the air of simplicity that exists out here, and we came up with a fairly good rule: the farther out into the hinterlands you go, the more loosey-goosey everything gets, liability-wise.  In my neighborhood in Salt Lake City, I will literally be dragged into Court if I put vinyl windows in my house without getting prior approvals from the neighborhood style counsel.  People gasp when they see Macy and me walking around along our block when the kids are home in bed.  Out here in Laketown, Utah, I’m pretty sure I could light Kook on fire and the rodeo kings that run this town would just throw firecrackers at him.  And, as Davis has noted here before, cross the border to the South, and forget about it— they don’t have a word for ‘liability’ from Mexico on down.

We happened upon the Laketown Rodeo a couple nights ago.  We enjoyed the usual sights of the local rodeo for a half hour or so, and then the announcer shook things up.  “And now, if you want a chance to win some money, and you’re between five and nine years old, come on down into the arena.”  All the people visiting from the city sort of looked around in confusion.  Meanwhile, all the local kids were already standing on the dirt in the ring cracking their knuckles and licking their lips between spits of tobaccy.  With a little consternation, we cajoled our kids down through the stands, and they took their places in the rodeo ring, a step behind the local cowboy kids.  And there they stood, an army of some 150 kids, ages five to nine, standing on the furrowed dirt, facing a livestock gate, and having absolutely no idea what was going to come out of it.  It might have been Rancor, from Return of the Jedi, for all we knew.  The MC hadn’t said a thing about what was going to happen next.  I looked around to see if they were passing waiver forms down the rows in the bleachers for all the parents to sign, but they never came.

The MC told us that we were about to see the kids’ calf rustle.  A calf would be running through that gate, and whatever kid could grab the ribbon from his tail would win the prize purse and the trophy.  Go.  I watched our kids tense with excitement and I knew they were only down there because they trusted that we wouldn’t send them if it wasn’t safe.  And I only sent them because I knew that the Laketown Rodeo wouldn’t just call them down there if it wasn’t safe.  But then you sort of sit up and realize you’ve put your kids’ lives in the hands of some rodeo announcer in crazytown Utah, the same rodeo announcer that just saw a young man in his prime thrown from a crazy horse onto a fence and just kept up a stream of light-hearted prattle while his family hovered over him as he shook on the ground.  So maybe the circle of trust was a little loosey-goosey.

Seriously, you don’t think that thing could do some damage to a five year old, running at full speed?  Yeah, me neither.

Then the calf came charging through the gate.  A swarm of kids looked around at each other and then realized they were game, and just descended on that poor calf.  He was game too, and gave them a good chase.  Rex came within ten feet at one point, and I could tell he was loving the chase but wouldn’t get any closer than that even if he could.  After the best two minutes of that whole rodeo, a thick local cow-kid dove at the calf’s hind-quarters and came up with a ribbon.  Our kids walked off the field looking a little dazed, still not believing that they were allowed to be in a ring with an angry two-hundred pound calf, let alone chase him around like he was a barnyard hen.  Yes, it was just a calf, but watching him jerk around out there, it was very clear that he could really hurt a kid.  But the Laketown Rodeo is betting he won’t.  It’s an entertaining bet.

I was tempted to call up the rodeo afterward and offer my legal services.  Maybe a little advice, perhaps a posted disclaimer notice at the front gate?  But then I realized that maybe they’re in the clear.  After all, some snot-nosed brat from Salt Lake takes a hoof to the face, do you know who’s going to be deciding his case?  A bunch of jurors from Laketown, and Garden City, and Wellsville.  A Salt Lake jury gives him a million bucks, plus costs and attorneys’ fees, and maybe a scholarship.  Up here, they probably give him another kick in the face.  Life’s better where there’s no liability.  Unless you’re the one representing the snot-nosed brat.  Then the good folks of Laketown, Utah have some serious explaining to do.

One summer during college, back when Davis, a.k.a. “Gordon Gecko,” still tried to get ladies by posing as a do-gooder, he convinced me to spend a summer in Honduras, do-gooding.  We landed in post-Hurricane Mitch Tegucigalpa, picked our way around the carnage of broken bridges and collapsed shanties to the bus terminal, and took a mountaineering bus four hours out to our new home in the outlying village of San Lorenzo.  We moved our light belongings into a simple three room unfurnished house, and set about finding beds and a table.  It was a spartan existence, but we were cohabiting with a suprisingly awesome guy and two girls, one of whom was following Davis Do-Right around on his do-gooder deeds.  We had a lot of fun.  We also taught presentations to Honduran middle school students about AIDS prevention using drawings of a cheery animated character named Senior Condon!  He was great.  But we’ll get to that some other time.

Davis’s Honduran birthday party, before life turned into a walking nightmare

Everything about the house was hard.  Hard tiles on the floors, hard plaster on the walls, dim lighting, hard chairs and a table in the main room.  In fact, I honestly never saw any carpet or upholstery or plush furnishings of any sort the entire time I was in Honduras.  Not even any grass.  It sounds weird, but you come to miss softness.  Every night we would come home to that hard house and sit in the hard chairs and sweat in the hard heat, and swat at the bees in the room.  There were always a couple bees flying around, just in that main room.  The girls were skittish about them at first, but we learned to live with them.  After a while, they became much more annoying than scary.    They were very comfortable buzzing right around us, running up and down our hard table, sitting in our food.  And there were always, always three or four around at a time.  It was a little galling.

When they started getting in our way, we started killing them.  Just one or two at a time.  We’d use a fly swatter, or the old smack-and-smush method.  Sometimes, when there was no food around, we would even shoot down a buzzer with a burst from our aerosol bugspray can.  This was a dramatic way to knock them down, but it took them forever to die that way.  During one of these playful killing sprees, one of them stung me.  I couldn’t believe how bad it hurt.  It was ten times the pain of an American bee, pulsing and hot and an hour long.  A few other people got stung, and it became clear these bees were not to be trifled with.  After a few weeks of our uneasy detente, we noticed that the bees always came from a certain opening at the top of one of the walls.  We went outside to see if there was a hive nearby.  As it turned out, the hive was built right under the eave of the roof, saddling the wall on both sides, with openings on the outer and inner sides of the wall.  The bees were colonizing our little house, and that made us their imperial subjects.  Again, galling.

So one evening we finally decided we wouldn’t stand for it anymore.  I don’t think there was a whole lot of thought that went into it, but Davis and I wrapped some cloth around a broom, doused it with bug spray, and lit it on fire.  We held the smoking environment-bomb up to the top of the wall and let the smoke pour into the nest.  We expected the bees to simply exit via their outer opening and find some other place to squat.  I was holding the broom up there, chatting with Davis about something else, not really paying attention when I became aware of a building sound.  It was like nothing I’d ever heard before.  It started very quietly, a bass rumble like far-off thunder.  As the smoke penetrated deeper into the nest the sound grew louder.  It was the angry buzzing of a single enraged bee, times thousands and thousands.  They buzzed as one enormous army, a warning growl so low and steady that it honestly seemed to vibrate everything around us.  I honestly have never experienced a sound so menacing, and so full of credible, angry danger.  Davis and I just stood there staring at each other, eyes wide.  We never communicated about what the sound meant, because there was something so instinctual about it.  It vibrated our brains and told us that now we were screwed.  Based on the sound, that little nest must have actually been home to thousands of bees.  And they were angry.  And they were coming.

This is sort of what it sounded like, only super mean.

We dropped the broom and backed away.  A few bees started diving out of the gap under the ceiling.  Then there were twenty, then fifty, then one hundred.  They weren’t leaving by the outer opening, they were pouring into the breach to eliminate the threat.  In just a few seconds, our living room was filled with literally thousands of darting, rage-crazed Honduran viper bees.  We had retreated to the bedroom by then, door closed.  The ladies had already barricaded themselves in their room.  It was up to us to deal with the new threat.  We acted quickly.  We each donned a long-sleeved shirt and sweat pants, and then a poncho.  We put on hats and sunglasses and socks.  We grabbed the fly swatter from the separate kitchen, and the lighter.  We charged out of our bedroom and swatted our way to the waiting can of aerosol bug spray, and retreated to the kitchen once more.

The cloud of bees circling our table was insane.  There was a solid core of hundreds of them circling noisily, with dozens of bees flying looser orbits around the outer perimeter of the room.  I remember being really, really nervous about taking them on, thinking that with the potency of their stings, it might only take a few stings to do real damage to one of us.  But we were determined not to take this invasion lying down.  So we set out to enact our plan.  With a crazed scream of our own, we rushed out of the kitchen at them.  I went in first with the flyswatter and a magazine, whacking our way through the outer wings, crunching downed bees with every step.  Davis followed behind with the big gun.  Once I had cleared a space for him, he lit the lighter and held it up to the bug spray.  Geysers of orange chemical flames pounded into the core of bees, and whole hundreds started to drop with each shot, scorched and smoking.  But we only had time for a few shots before the pressure of bees buzzing right at our ears broke our courage, and we retreated.

The only weapon capable of striking fear into a bee’s buzzing heart

We traded roles back in the kitchen.  Davis rushed in, whacking madly, and I came in and set up the artillery.  We had a few seconds to blowtorch them each attack until they started to suround us and test our protective coverings.  One bee got into the hood of my poncho and I felt it buzzing around the back of my neck.  I screamed and ran.  There are not many feelings like having a hotly vibrating bee rumbling inside your clothes, against your skin.  After a minute of panicked undressing, he stung the back of my neck and then flew away, and pain covered my back.  Then all those years of hatred for these insects filled my head and we made another crazy charge.  The scene was slow-motion to me as we ran into the room, spraying and torching and whacking and crushing.  We knocked over chairs and fell against the table.  We feinted at the center and retreated to corners, and we killed them and killed them and killed them, all while they dove at our heads and ears.   When they surrounded us we tightened into a back-to-back formation, fighting them off as they came.  And soon, finally, they stopped coming.

It took a while to chase down the lingering drones and burn them out of the air.  We were sweaty and hot in our ponchos, and my neck had a bulging sore growing on it, but when the carnage ended, we were still standing.  Our living room was a bee graveyard.  There were bees piled on our table, and bees scattered all over the floor, most of them blackened and immobile.  We swept them into piles inches deep, and we burned them some more-thousands of bee skeletons crackling in the bugspray flames.  It took a while for the magnitude of our victory to set in.  We called the girls out of their room and sat down on the hard chairs and celebrated with cups of water and some pringles.  And then we picked up the smoking broom, doused it again, and smoked that nest until no bee would ever live there again.

That’s me cremating the last pile of scorched bees.  No, honestly, that’s really me.  I’m not kidding.

And that, dear readers, is the story of the Battle of San Lorenzo.  And possibly the reason I was set down on this earth in the first place.  In Honduras, we learned to kill them.

The numbers on offer were impressive, though never very easy to precisely nail down. We took it as evidence of our own naiveté that we couldn’t figure out whether your 12% super-seller escrow bonus kicks in between your gold and platinum level merit awards, or after your management star upgrade. But Oliver and Becton always had answers, the kind of answers that penetrate you with good sense and then instantly evaporate into the pepperoni air. Regardless, the bottom line numbers were easy to understand: If you had disfiguring acne and the kind of demeanor that causes young mothers to draw their children closer, you were looking at around $100,000 for the summer. For a group of impressive, charming young strivers like us . . . well, Ollie and Becton will let you do the math.

So one morning in early summer, four of us caravanned out of Farmington in four different cars, each packed with a few small possessions and unbounded optimism. No prospector ever headed west with higher hopes than we took with us on the high road to Denver, and no product bore more promise than our ProtectAmerica Basic Package with optional key fob and added glass break detection upgrades. We could almost hear those Colorado criminals making their relocation plans as the mile high skyline appeared on the horizon (A skyline that benefits greatly from being the next stop on the line from Cheyenne, by the way). Just kidding. I have no clue about the criminals. All anyone thought during the whole 10 hour drive was whether they’d save any of the $100,000 in summer commissions, or blow it in a month.

Our apartment was waiting for us. We had to arrange the cable TV for ourselves (NBA playoffs were the primary logistical concern), but everything else had been previously arranged by our super-competent manager, Jason. Some training was given, some glossy one-sheets passed around, and then we sacked out to rest for the work of the coming day.

Pounding pavement and knocking doors in the name of commerce and ambition is more invigorating than you might think. We were an energized group, fed on motivational chestnuts and a stew of sketchy crime statistics. We invaded those neighborhoods not only as salesmen, but as experts—educators partnering with our neighbors to cast out the criminals and take our communities back. “Just having this sign in your yard reduces your chances of a burglary by 20 percent, ma’am,” we’d say, “but of course only the full system is going to stop those committed criminals. And that’s the only way to get the free key fob too, but I don’t know if you’re the type of person who uses a set of keys . . .”

Every day, five hours or more, you knock the doors, looking for that perfect neighborhood. You try a rich area, then a poor one, then one that is exactly the middlest middle class neighborhood in America. You find an ethnic pocket every once in a while, and you try out different greetings based on the demographics. Your one deepest certainty is that these people are afflicted with crime, and the best possible thing they can do is to just stop hemming and hawing and making excuses and hand over their money to you– the security professional.

And then you find that none of them want any help. For two weeks straight, and 2,000 doors in a row. Life gets harder fast. You stare at the calendar wondering if there’s still time to hit that six-figure mark that was a given just days before. You rationalize: “Hmm, I guess in a pinch I can make do with earning only 90k this summer.” But still, nobody’s buying.

Until day number 14. When you knock on Mr. Martinez’s door. And finally, everything changes.

To be continued . . .