July 30th 10:10am - Mini Titans and Sick Poos

I've started introducing the three-year-old as the love of my life in three-year-old form. Sometimes I forget to add the second part of that sentence. When I announce that he's the love of my life, some adults glance at me with eyes that tell me I need psychiatric assistance. Others eyeball me like I'm a pedophile. Coach, the head of Mini Titans, stared me down with a mad dog expression.
"Nice to meet you, too," I smiled, holding the three-year-old's hand.
I waved to Coach's back as he walked away. We were in the athletic complex's parking lot and I was bribing the kid with chocolate so he wouldn't shout and awaken the eight-month-old sleeping in the car. The last time the baby fell asleep in the car, the three-year-old bashed in his head with a hardcover book. When I demanded to know why he was trying to brain damage his little brother, he replied, "So my baby will be strong."

Mini Titans constituted twenty two- to four-year-old males in a warehouse room carpeted in synthetic turf. Little girls weren't allowed to register. Six punching bags beautified the back wall, with a stage on the left and a basketball hoop without the net on the right wall. The mutilated hoop belonged in an L.A. ghetto. Balls, baskets, and torture devices for young children were scattered around the room.
For the first activity, the boys threw balls at each other. Every mom sitting near me on the spectator bench mentioned her husband's influence in Mini Titans enrollment. Coach hollered at the two-year-olds, referring to them as pussies and wimps when they chucked balls with the force of two-week-old girls. Sentimental memories surfaced in my brain as I recalled my club soccer coach in high school. His grandma could kick better than us, and his overweight son could run faster. Every practice, someone would cry. I missed that coach.
Halfway through the second activity, one of the moms walked into the room, broadcasting that someone's baby was screaming in a car. As I ran into the parking lot, I contemplated inquiring after her career. She'd be a magnificent public speaker.
The baby was crying like someone was drilling into his testicles. I retrieved him from the car and reentered the room to judging mom eyes. I was a bad mother.
The third activity was tackling each other. The baby sat on my lap playing with the car key and my cell phone. Translate this as, he smashed the key and phone onto the floor at five second intervals. As I retrieved my brick of a phone from the floor, the three-year-old sprinted to me. He placed both hands on my knees and declared, "I have to do sick poos."
I didn't know what sick poos were, but it couldn't be good. The toilet was on the other side of the parking lot. I chucked the baby onto the floor, seized the three-year-old's hand, and raced towards the exit. We advanced three steps from the bench before he cried. Mid-stride, I glanced at the back of his jeans. A dark discharge oozed through his pants. Excrement odor ruptured my nostrils.
Diarrhea had exploded through his rectum and anal cavity. Butt juice leaked down his legs and onto Mini Titan's turfed floor. I picked him up, swung him through the next few steps and the exit, and frisbeed him onto the parking lot concrete. I stripped him of his pants and underwear like a professional. Within seconds the three-year-old stood, butt drool streaming down his legs, and his pants and underwear a shit volcano. We held hands as we walked across the parking lot to the bathroom. He was naked from the waist down, and drizzling excrement like a soft serve. Only one person observed us.
In efforts to cleanse the three-year-old of his poop mudslide, liquid diarrhea got monkey-tossed everywhere. It was on his shirt, my shirt, his hands, my hands. It was on my face.
I left the three-year-old by the car, his little uncircumcised penis poking out, under strict instructions not to touch anything. I recovered the car key, phone, and baby. The baby was sitting on the floor, stabbing his finger into his brother's poop smoothie trail to the exit. He put his finger in his mouth seconds before I got to him.

July 26th 2:05pm - July 2010 Quote of the Month

Five-year-old (praying at night): "Dear God, please make sure Mummy and Daddy are safe and there's no plane accident. And please make sure my little brother's doodle grows bigger. Amen."

July 20th 9:45am - Fiji=Master Master

Fiji should have been booze cruises, midnight beach bonfires, jungle bush walks with a gangsta medicine man, and dancing at nightclubs entitled Pirates, Captain's Cocktails, Crabs, and Make Babies. But it wasn't. I wasn't with friends. I was babysitting five little anklebiters and their parents. After exiting the plane in Nadi, bolting and buckling five children and nineteen bags into a taxi commandeered twenty minutes of my life. Two of the luggage were gorged with toys. Neither suitcase could be moved without a forklift.
We cabbed to a port before nabbing a boat to the Mamanuca Islands. The boat hit a stop sign of locals on Treasure Island. We entered the resort to fifteen Fijians welcoming our arrival with singing and dancing and juice. I contemplated bulldozing the bar to top off the juice with rum. But, I was working. I continued to work every day of our two-week vacation.
I shared a room with the two eldest children. Most mornings, by four-thirty, they scavenged and foraged around the room with the covert skills of heroin addicts. By five every morning, I was out of bed listening to fart ammunitions projectile across the room and boomerang off the walls. The kids giggled. I sat with my back to a wall and my eyes closed, breathing through my mouth. Most nights, the parents consumed a relaxing restaurant dinner accompanied by live music and wine. I sat on the front porch outside the rooms, listening for sounds of sleepless, delinquent children. Low winds raided my hair. A few nights, raindrops violated my life.
The first day, the resort's staff referred to me as Mum. I was jet lagged and had as much energy as a coma patient. I didn't correct them. The second day, the mom and I escorted her child mob to the restaurant for breakfast. The dad was on another island performing refractive cataract and retinal surgeries on locals. In talking with the restaurant's hostess, the mom referred to the kids as, "our children." Mine and hers. For the remainder of the trip, the resort's male personnel gazed at the dad with the reverence of a sex god. The women consistently referred to both of us as Mummy.
One day, I rolled four of the kids to daycare and bribed the parents to give me the morning off. I was awarded with an hour and a half reprieve. Treasure Island boasted one bar and one restaurant. After an internal debate between bar and bed, I determined that a beer was vital to my sanity and survival. Sleep could wait.
We shacked up in the restaurant more than the ocean. I exerted all my powers to keep the kids doped up on lollipops and sugar. I coordinated dosages so they'd crash at the same time and I could put them to sleep.
One afternoon, I was supposed to watch four of the kids at the pool. The seven-year-old convinced me to swim-chase her around the pool's inside seating edge. She was the dolphin, I the witch. A third of the way around the pool, and I slowly sank. I labored in the water, groping for the seating to pull myself forward. My legs might as well have been manacled. The girl takes swimming lessons. I kick balls, not water. One lap around one of the three pools, and I noticed the mom standing on the side of the pool fully clothed and Titanic-wet. I stopped, bracing my arms on the pool's border. Three minutes later, when I'd recovered my breath and the ability to articulate, I asked the mom what had happened. The three-year-old, complete with flotation device, had pulled the five-year-old girl under the water. While I was across the pool half-drowning, the mom had jumped in to save her children.
The next day, I returned from the pool with the baby a half an hour before the rest of the family. He needed to nap. I needed to hibernate. I danced the baby to sleep and then submerged into the bamboo chair outside the room. My body was on the verge of collapsing into a vegetative state when little urchin shouts bitch-slapped my brain.
"Kara, Daddy saved him, Daddy saved him, Daddy saved him, Kara, Daddy saved him," spasmed through my eardrums. I slanted one eye open with resistance shot with curiosity.
"Your dad saved who?" I asked.
"He saved him, Daddy saved him, Daddy saved him, Daddy saved him," chorused four child voices.
A man had retrieved a drowning five-year-old from the pool. The dad had performed CPR on the kid until a helicopter arrived, transporting him to a hospital on the mainland. The resort pimped the parents out with countless bottles of wine as a thank-you for avoiding a death and bad press.
One thing Fijian men and women love: babies. Especially rotund babies who appear to have been fed lard half their lives. Often, when supervising the eight-month-old, I didn't know his location. The local staff would cluck his name, pick him up, and walk away rubbing him across their cheeks and breasts. I found it pleasurable to be relieved of watching a baby who was rapidly becoming a terror on legs. The mom did not.
"Where's my baby?" she'd ask.
"Oh, one of the men has him," I'd reply. "No worries."
She worried.
Another thing the Fijian workers relished: touching my shoulders. In a fully-booked resort of families and couples, I was the only one under the age of forty without a ring on my finger. And I had five children. I was easy. One man's fingers were attracted to my shoulder and back like they were a pet monkey. I couldn't comprehend much of what he said. However, I did decipher words when he disclosed that he was a member of the Nakelo Clan. He had a gold tooth. It sounded like Fiji's version of the mafia. I stayed away from him. It wasn't until weeks later that the dad mentioned the Nakelo's. They're Treasure Island's original land owners and own fifty percent of the resort.
The morning we left, I was launching clothes and shoes and sticks into six open bags when the five-year-old approached me.
"Kara, Daddy sticks his doodle in Mummy," she said.
I glanced at her in her yellow ruffled flower dress. I raised myself to my feet, and I walked away.

July 13th 4:17pm - Fifteen Hours and Rum

I have a physical disability. It's called airports. Planes depart without me, take vacations that I'm unaware of, and become invisible while I look for them with the persistence of AIDS. Things like bomb threats and the swine flu judo chop my ass to places like Miami when I want to go to San Francisco. Last year, on the first day I was supposed to depart South America for SF, I told the airline attendant to leave me anywhere in California. He looked like a pimp but had more power than the pope. He was the authority on when I could leave Peru. By the third day I was overdue to be home, I begged like a crackhead to be flown anywhere in the United States. The airlines flew me to Miami. Miami might as well be South America. English is barely spoken there.

This time, I procured perfection by actually catching my flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. I got to LAX an hour after the suggested arrival time. I checked in my bags, no issues with my ticket, boarded the plane to Sydney, and the plane ascended as scheduled. It was beautiful. It was flawless. Until I arrived in Sydney. It was four in the morning. The airport was as barren as my sex life would be if I lived with a sasquatch. During the five-hour layover before my connecting flight to Auckland, I slumped into a coma in the waiting area for my next flight. I fell asleep sitting up with my backpack on my lap and my bag tangled in my legs. Hours later, a snore awoke me. It must have come from Bigfoot. I was drowning on the shoulder of a girl I didn't know. My saliva had blocked all my air passages. My legs were spread like a dirty whore. After wiping the Great River of Drool from my mouth, cheek, chin, and neck, I realized the snore had issued from my soft palate. My pillow had been the shoulder of a German girl my age. I smiled at her. As I regained consciousness, I looked at a clock. I had slept for five and a half hours. My flight to Auckland had departed a half hour ago.
I man-grunted to the five twenty-something females who had congregated around me, seized my backpack and bag, and sprinted away. Fifteen minutes later, I returned to the seating area. The only open seat was the one I had vacated like a lunatic.
"So, they lost the plane," I said, resuming my position as deranged American.
"Ya, they don't know where it went," Germany confirmed.
"It was coming from Abu Dhabi. They don't know whether it's in the air or in Abu Dhabi. It could be in Sydney. They don't know," Wales corroborated.
"They give updates. The loudspeaker says they'll give another in twenty minutes," Holland contributed.
Every hour, the loudspeaker broadcast that the plane was still delayed, and they'd make another announcement in twenty minutes. Sixty minutes consistently passed before the next update. Four hours later, I was hoping my ride wasn't still at Auckland's airport waiting for me. The airlines appeased their agitated passengers. They didn't have the plane, but they had food vouchers. The other girls applied their vouchers to food. I bought beer. Almost as filling and twice as good.
After waiting six hours for the plane, the loudspeaker informed us that the plane had been located. It was still in Abu Dhabi. Technical difficulties.
Attendants ushered all the flight's passengers through the airport. We were issued visas, told we'd stay overnight in Sydney - hotel and food paid for - and fly out the next morning, arriving in Auckland in the early afternoon. I should have been jazzed. I wasn't. I had a flight from Auckland to Nadi, Fiji that departed at nine in the morning.
When I informed the airlines that I needed to arrive in Auckland before eight the next morning, they made me a special exception. My flight left in three and a half hours. Germany was with me. She was a special exception too. We were told to return in two hours for check-in.
By this time, my rocket scientist dome recovered function. I had brought a handle of Captain Morgan in my bag from California. I had my luggage. I am generous. I had a handle with forty-two rum shots. Germany had let me harass her shoulder and saturate it with half an ocean of slobber. I decreed her worthy of my philanthropy. We bought cokes with the airline's apology money for losing the plane.
In life, I am as coordinated as a nine-month-old baby walking for the first time. As a youngster, I fell on my head a shitload of times. My mom told me. However, when it comes to alcohol, I am a tactical master.
Within my bag, jackets, sweatpants, a towel, books, and a science experiment blockaded my route to the rum. The science experiment was a gift for the nine-year-old I look after. I navigated the rum bottle's neck out the bottom edge of my bag. We couldn't see the handle, but could access the booze. It was fabulous.
In a handicapped bathroom, Germany and I used an empty cup and apple juice bottle to mix the coke and rum. We then relocated to a cafe to play drinking games with a pack of U.S Army cards. We frequently repeated the bathroom procedure for refills. We were stealth.
Until we realized what time it was. We were supposed to check in a half hour before. I reassured Germany that you never really need that much time. I told her it wouldn't be a problem. And then I stumbled on the carpet. It occurred to me that I was unaware of our consumption volume, as my bag concealed the bottle. We had limited vision access of the spout.
When we rocked up to the counter, the woman issued me a ticket, but said Germany's name wasn't in the system. She had to go across the airport to our original counter to procure a ticket. I Hitler-saluted Germany and promised her that I wouldn't move. I'd wait for her. Ten minutes later, Ticket Woman screamed at me. If I delayed any longer, I'd miss my flight. I had been fixated on standing upright. Apparently I hadn't been listening to her.
I left without Germany. Customs booby-trapped me like I had explosives strapped to my head. They said I didn't have a visa to be in Australia. I couldn't leave if I was there illegally. I replied that I'd been in Sydney for almost fifteen hours because the airlines lost my plane. I hadn't left the airport. It wasn't my fault I didn't have a visa. I name-dropped Fiji. I staggered to my departure gate with rum knitting my side, the last passenger to enter.
When I unpacked my bag at two in the morning, eighty percent of the handle was gone. Germany and I had downed thirty shots.

July 9th 10:07am - Geriatrics and the Dominican Republic

My grandma has two living sisters. One of my great-aunts recently hosted a dying party for herself. Nobody in her medical or familial circles corroborate, but she's convinced she's going to kick the bucket before Christmas. My other great-aunt is a coffin dodger. She's been in and out of the hospital for years. Seven years ago, at my dad's fiftieth birthday party, I had a beer bladder. I peed every five minutes. Upon every return, my great-aunt would interrogate me as to who I was. Every time she'd recall my identity, she would scream to everyone within a twenty-foot radius, "You were such a brat when you were younger." She sounded like a WWF wrestler. She's had some strokes.
On my way back to New Zealand, I stopped off in Southern Cal for a few days. I attempt to resurface once a year in So Cal to remind my extended family of my existence. Because I missed the Dying Party two days before my arrival, my grandma organized a fifteen-person brunch in Long Beach. The great-aunts were there.
The following day, my cousin and I watched the World Cup semi-final between Germany and Spain. We had been seated in Belmont Shore's sports bar Legends. We ordered a beer tower, because nobody wants to be sober during a semi-final World Cup game. And then my cousin got a lunatic phone call.
"Where are you," my grandma demanded. She was as hysterical as if she'd just lost a baby.
"At Legend's with Kara. World Cup game."
"So you're not in the Dominican Republic?"
"Um."
"You're in Long Beach?" she continued.
"You saw me this morning. What's going on?"

The great-aunt with more strokes than a round of golf had answered her phone. A man's voice informed her that one of her nephews was in trouble. When she questioned which one, he asked what her nephews' names were. Her nephews' names didn't issue into her stroked-out brain. Her great-nephew's names did. She named my brother and cousin. The Voice said that my cousin had been arrested in the Dominican Republic on narcotics charges. My great-aunt entered something between convulsive and spastic. She raged, repeatedly asking how much money he needed. She screamed for her daughter, who was outside watering the plants. Her daughter asked The Voice for a contact number. He hung up. My great-aunt called her sister, my grandma, hysteric about my cousin, the Dominican Republic, and drugs.
My grandma replied, "What are you talking about? You saw him yesterday morning at brunch."
"Yes, but what did he do after brunch?"
"He worked at the Yacht Club and then came home."
"But how do you know? Are you sure he's not in the Dominican Republic?" my great-aunt insisted.
It was after this exchange that he received the call from my grandma.
"I saw her yesterday. I saw you this morning. I swear I'm not in the Dominican Republic. I'm on Second Street with Kara," he reiterated to my grandma and hung up.

July 6th, 2010 5:40pm - Happy Birthday America - You Know You're Drunk When...

Two months after my midget-short retreat to California, my friend wrote that he looks forward to my next return and "seeing you and the tornado of crazy shit that follows closely behind you." I imagine he was primarily referring to the events of the Fourth of July weekend.
My mom donated her house to my endeavors to make the weekend Chuck-Norris-badass. After a Costco run, a friend and I entered the house with enough food and booze provisions for a tribe. We had handles of Vodka, Rum, and Jager. And a keg.
"You got so much," my mom exclaimed. "I thought you said fifteen people?"
"Ummm... about that," I replied.
I invited eighty.


You Know You're Drunk When...

* You and a friend re-enact the Dirty Dancing lift in the river. It doesn't work.

* You stagger and fall through bushes and hedges while trying to get to the river. A random ancient male screams at the crew not to walk on the grass. He looks like he could own a shotgun. This confuses you. You get lost on the way to the river.

* You play Circle of Death for hours. The next morning, you've never heard of the game.

* You make jello shots in the largest brownie tin you can find.

* Your friends chief your face, arms, stomach, legs, calves, and the bottoms of your feet with blue Sharpie. You awake the next morning to discover blue smudges on both toilet seats. You don't know if they're from your ass, face, or arms.

* You don't sleep in your bed. You sleep on the hardwood floor without a pillow or blankets in your own house.

* The next morning, you can't find your phone. Someone locates it in the microwave. You vaguely recall putting it there, relieved that the microwave could keep it safe.

* You do a keg stand without anyone holding your feet.

* You yell profanities because you forgot to bring your mortars. Another friend reassures you that he brought some.

* You bring an AK-47 to a party. You remove it from your car and bring it into the backyard. A friend kisses the AK-47 on the back porch. She then aims it at the house and pretends to shoot.

* You buy an inflatable raft. You don't have a pump. It takes you three hours to blow it up with your mouth.

* You don't wear sandals river rafting because the previous year, you lost them. This year, your feet burn. Glass shards, rocks, and splinters imbed in your soles. Fragments are still inside your feet a week later.

* You believe three ziplock bags will protect your camera. You take pictures through the plastic. Your camera gets water damaged.

* Pictures of you doing a keg stand resemble you giving birth.

* At the end of the weekend, you announce that you only had four beers from the keg. Your friends promptly exhibit pictures of you doing keg stands and chugging beer from multiple cups.

* You miscalculate how far you'll float down the river. What you intend to be two miles is twelve.
* You exit the river to attempt to locate the cars. You walk through vineyards. The winery's owner finds you and gives you a ride to your vehicles.

* You wear a U.S. Army armband for two days. You have tan lines and no blood circulation when you remove it.

* You play partner flip cup, two versus two, while everyone else is passed out. You decide upon strip flip cup, losing team remains naked throughout the following game. When friends awaken and wander into the backyard, they see nakedness. All four of the participants are males.

* You place the unlit end of a sparkler in your naked ass. You chicken-dance around the yard with the sparkler lit. You shove it into your male friend's naked asshole. The next morning, you recall the sparkler and laugh hysterically. "He cannot be feeling okay this morning," you continually repeat. "He must have scorch marks inside his ass."

July 2nd, 2010 9:13am - Phones and Cops

Whenever California's Finest, the policemen, pull me over, they eye me up and down. Those jackbooted thugs look at me like I'm a lazy-eyed giraffe with one too-short leg trying to run. This is generally because I'm a half-wit when it comes to driving. I've been pulled over for speeding nine times, going too slow, once. I've been pulled over for running stop signs, not using my turn signal, having outdated registration, tailgating, making an illegal turn as well as an illegal u-turn, going the wrong way down a one-way street, and for having a side mirror ACE bandage wrapped. The side mirror eventually led to the issuance of a warrant for my arrest. I sent in the paperwork but didn't comprehend I needed to include a fifteen dollar processing fee. I blame my eyesight.
Last night, I attended the Windsor Town Green's Summer Nights with my mom and a friend. The Windsor Summer Nights equates the parents and the frail rocking out with wine to an eighty's cover band. The swelling population enveloped the floods of grass with umbrellas, tents, blankets, and lawn chairs. Laid-out blankets on the grass were as common as chronic acne on a teenager. Hours before I arrived, my mom dropped in at the Town Green to spread her blanket and chairs. She emailed me a photo from her iPhone of the blankets on the grass, so I could locate where she was sitting. The picture didn't reveal any landmarks or defining elements that I would be able to recognize. The photo exhibited a downward view of the blankets. I could determine my mom had located a spot somewhere on the half-acre of grass. Once there, it took three phone calls, a four-minute conversation, and my mom waving her arms, screaming, and flailing around doing jumping jacks before I located the small colony my mom had settled.
I was supposed to meet my dad for dinner two hours after arrival. The restaurant was a twenty minute drive away. I calculated wine consumption and time constraints with driving. I consumed the majority of a bottle of wine. I'm no mathematician. When my dad called to disclose the restaurant name and location, my Chardonnay and the Led Zeppelin posers inhibited my brain's abilities to retain information. I heard, "Fourth Street," and what sounded suspiciously like, "Pluto's." I didn't hear a street number. I left the live music five minutes before dinner's start time. I drove up and down downtown Santa Rosa in my brother's 4Runner. I molested restaurant names with my eyes. My shitty eyesight didn't register a restaurant resembling the name Pluto.
My dad answers his cell phone one in every hundred times his children call. I've called him when I've been locked out of the house, when he left me at a soccer game, when I locked myself out of my car with the engine running, and when I set the kitchen on fire. He didn't answer. The only times he answers is when I happen to call to say hi. Predictably, I was a half hour late to dinner, and I didn't know where dinner was. The third time I harassed my dad's phone, I made complete, replete, uncut eye contact with a man of the uniform. I flung the phone towards the passenger seat and into my purse like it was a bowling ball. I turned right. The cop car immediately pulled out behind me with his flashing Christmas lights. I parked in the Santa Rosa Plaza's parking lot.
Cute Cop was Hispanic and a bit short for me, but he stepped up to the passenger window and asked if I knew why he pulled me over.
"One of two things?" I replied, knowing he saw me on my phone while driving. I also knew that it wouldn't take a police prodigy to see that the car's registration had expired in March.
"Well, I won't cite you for the California rolling stop," Cute Cop said with a smile.
"I didn't California roll! I wasn't even at a stop sign, I had been at a red light," I bellowed. I made a mental note to not let my abusive alcoholic side glisten its way into the situation. Cute Cop's smile went AWOL.
"License and registration," he recited.
I opened my brother's glove compartment. It pooped out an explosion of papers. I ransacked through my brother's first formal job offer, his grades from his last semester at USC, parking tickets, and the car's registration from three years ago. I explained to Cute Cop that I was just in town for a wedding and a week, that I lived in New Zealand, and that this was my brother's car. I was on the phone because I was calling my dad to see where I was supposed to meet him for dinner. I still had thousands of papers farting on my lap.
"Oh, here's your license," Cute Cop asserted and reached in through the open passenger window and into my purse. I'm sure that was illegal. He extracted my friend Kat's license, which was installed on top of my open purse.
"This isn't you." Cute Cop should go for detective.
"I know. It's actually my friend's, mine's in my wallet."
"Is this your fake identification?"
Kat and I both have blonde hair and light eyes. To men, we look like the same person. To cops, we look alike.
"My friend left it in the car, I just have to return it to her."
"Are you over twenty-one?"
"Yes, I'm actually twenty-four. Look, her bra's in the back-seat. I'm telling you, she left her life in the car."
My boobies don't fit into a size A bra. Kat has hooters. Detective could clearly see that the bra wasn't mine. I scanned the back-seat for open alcohol containers or knives or anything that could land me in the slammer. I sighed when the only thing back there were the legs of Kat's jeans positioned in a sexually suggestive way.
"I still need your license and registration," Detective announced. The look on his face mirrored the way my mom regarded me when I was young and affirmed that I had fed the cat. He was skeptical.
I handed him my license from my wallet, but said I had no idea where the registration would be. It didn't occur to me until later that there was no current registration.
"You said you live in New Zealand?"
"Yes."
"Then you don't have your current address on your license. That's illegal."
"Well, I'm living in New Zealand for a year, this address is my permanent address, and I don't think the state would issue me a California driver's license with a New Zealand address," I said.
Detective walked to his car, ran my license and the 4Runner's plates, and then came to the driver's side to return my license. His smile peaced out as I exhaled.
"Have you had anything to drink?" he asked.
"No, Sir."
"Are you sure? You smell like wine."
"Well, I was just at the Windsor Town Green and my mom was drinking wine," I answered. This made as much sense as the time I peed in the bushes in front of my friend's house. Three bathrooms were available inside. But Detective said, "Oh, I grew up in Windsor."
We exchanged where we went to high school, what sports we played, and what we've been doing since graduation.
When I mentioned I like to shoot guns, he shook his head. "Too far," he said.
After another five minutes and an hour overdue for dinner with my dad, Detective said I could go, but I had to make sure not to talk on the phone anymore while driving.
"Okay," I agreed. "Quick question," I spoke to his turned back. "Do you happen to know of a restaurant on Fourth that sounds something like Pluto's? Might be Bruno's? Or something? I'm really late to meet my dad for dinner and I don't know where it is."
Detective radioed it in to his fellow coppers, and got a reply that someone would look it up on an iPhone.
Two minutes later, the other voice bombed over the radio with, "1226. Bruno's. Are you citing her for the phone violation?"
"No."
"Oh, she must be cute."
"You're on speakerphone."