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clairedmaddox · 5 years ago

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The Goose

The following is an excerpt from The Lund Loop Newsletter. To learn more click here.

In one sense, the hole in the television was beautiful, almost artistic.

The impact – from what I first assumed was a broomstick, but later turned out to be a hammer – had punched a perfect circle in the center of the tube, radiating a sunburst of fine cracks towards the edge of the screen.

That it hadn’t exploded in an electric storm of glass shards puzzled me. All the TV’s I’d seen smashed by guitars in bad 80’s music videos had done so. But the lack of dried blood or bits of flesh in the shag carpet in front of the television cabinet convinced me otherwise – and somewhat disappointedly I must confess.

None of my roommates were home to help solve the mystery, but explicitly understanding the dynamics of a house shared by four twenty-something males, I started to backfill a theory as to why the only TV in the house was now inoperable.

And it wasn’t just any TV. It was a 32” Sony Trinitron, arguably the best set you could buy in 1986. And even though my roommate got it for free by pulling a credit card scam at Circuit City, it was still a loss.

Occam’s razor suggested an overly inebriated partygoer had backed into it while playing air guitar with a broom, but that’s as far as I could take my mental exercise as I was tired and numb. To the point that kissing sixteen channels of cable TV goodbye for the foreseeable future didn’t even register.

I had just arrived home after a six-hour drive from Arizona, where my girlfriend and I spent a week trying to make Castaneda-like connections with the spirits of dead shamans, but instead got drunk and crashed in cheap motels.

I was disappointed by the experience, though the fact that Castaneda’s tool of transformation was peyote and ours was Crazy Horse Malt Liquor did not occur to me at the time.

It was upon climbing the stairs to my room that I realized the damaged TV was just the beginning of a tale that would end with the spilling of avian blood and a public shaming, the likes of which Huntington Beach, California had never seen.

—-

The older you get, the more your circle of friends solidifies. Though you still might pick up some acquaintances later in life, it’s very rare to develop true friendships after forty. Rarer still is meeting true friends of your true friends – those whom you’ve never met before. That’s because, by the time you hit forty, you’ve known your true friends for a long time and are much more likely to have met anyone else meaningful in their lives.

Meeting friends of friends is something that happens in your early 20s.

That’s the time when your world is expanding, first by leaving high school, and second by entering college or the workforce. That’s when you first start to meet people who don’t know your parents or siblings, aren’t familiar with your hometown, and don’t share a common history with you.

Meeting a friend of a friend is a dicey proposition when you’re young. They come with implied approval due to their relationship to your new friend, but not a guarantee. After all, you haven’t really known your new friend that long, so how can you be sure they are a good judge of character – present company excepted.

For me, it worked like this…

In my early 20s, I picked up some new friends whom I ran with for a few years. One was from across town, another from one county north, while three or four others were transplants from out of state. Those were the ones you had to worry about.

The transplants were trying to get away from something. Usually a small-town mentality or small-minded people.

But small-minded people aren’t very good at getting the hint, and every spring break or 4th of July holiday a friend of a friend would arrive in town, excited to see what Southern California was all about.

That’s how I first met Snap. His real name was Sean.

Sean was a good guy. A solid guy. He was intelligent and polite, even thoughtful at times. The type of guy you’d introduce to your mom and she’d tell you the next day, “I really like that Sean.”

But Sean was a different person when we went out drinking – which happened quite a bit.

One moment everything would be great. Everybody would be laughing, joking, and having a fun time. Then in an instant, it would all go bad.

Sean would fly across the bar and crack a random guy in the jaw. Or scream “you’re a fucking bitch,” to a girl whose only crime was to order a drink next to him. Often, he’d break down and sob incoherently to his friends, who, while trying to console him, would suddenly be accused of mockery and challenged to a fight.

The worst part was that you never knew when it would happen. On some nights it only took one beer before things went off the rails. On others, he could drink all night long without incident.

But when it did go bad, it always happened without warning. There were never any signs or telltale clues that he was about to go off. He just snapped.

So, we called him “Snap.”

—-

As I came to the top of the landing, I noticed that three of the four doors to the bedrooms were open, an unusual occurrence in our house. Though all my roommates knew and mostly trusted each other, it was best practice to keep your door shut.

And it was no coincidence that the only door that was still closed had a lock on it. Or that it was mine.

Walking past the open doors, more damage was revealed. In my roommate Andy’s room, his pride and joy, a five-component stereo system, had been destroyed.

All the knobs from the tuner were on the floor, and the posts that held them in place bent downward as if hit by a hard object.

Both the windows on the dual-cassette player were cracked, like some solid metal object had been smashed into them.

The five-disc CD player had dents all over its case, the type that would occur if a hammer type instrument had struck it.

Hmmm?

And finally, both speakers had multiple holes punched in front and back, each the same size and circumference as the hole on the TV tube downstairs.

Double hmmm?

Then I passed Greg’s room and saw that the strings on his prized guitar were hanging by the tuners, as if ripped out from the bridge. There were also round impact marks across the face of the guitar which matched up with the stereo and the TV.

I was sensing a pattern here.

My third roommate, Jeff, has a couple of things askew in his room but no damage as far as I could see.

As tired as I was, I couldn’t help but modify my theory. Besides, it was simple.

Andy worked five days a week and had to get up at seven each day. Because of this, he was always in bed by 9:00pm. However, Greg was currently in between jobs, and liked to watch TV downstairs until early in the morning. On more than one occasion – sometimes multiple times per night – Andy would come out of his room and ask Greg to turn the TV down.

Sometimes once was all it took. But other times it might be four or five times before the request was acted on, and by that time they both were screaming at each other like maniacs.

Like I said, it was simple. Andy finally had enough of the loud late-night TV, came downstairs, and in a fit of rage, smashed Greg’s TV screen with a hammer.

Greg then took the hammer, ran upstairs, and went to town on Andy’s stereo system. After he was done, Andy took the hammer and attempted to destroy Greg’s guitar.

My roommate Jeff likely tried to break them up – physically – which is why some of the stuff in his room was knocked around.

Simple.

So I unlocked my door, went into my room, and crashed for a well-needed rest, unaware that the real culprit in this mayhem was “Goose.”

—-

I met Goose for the first and only time when I woke up from my nap. His real name was Eric. I never did get his last name.

He was a friend of a friend – a transplant – who had been hanging out and partying at our house for the last three days.

Our house sat on the corner of our tract’s outlet street, right next to a main thoroughfare. Sitting on our front lawn, you could see a wall across the street which ran along the length of that thoroughfare denoting our neighbor’s backyards.

It was in one of those backyards where a honking sound began on the Saturday night I was trying to commune with dead Indians (sorry, that’s what we called them in 1986).

The sound was made by a goose.

Apparently, Goose – the friend of a friend, not the animal – was in the front yard drinking with my friends and roommates and got annoyed by this sound. So he announced to anyone who’d listen, “I’m going to go over there and kill that fucking goose.”

With that he threw down his beer, grabbed a club out of an old golf bag in the garage – I think it was a three-wood – ran across the street, and jumped the fence into a random neighbor’s backyard.

Immediately, he was confronted by a full-grown male Canadian goose, honking, and using its long neck to lunge and peck at him. According to Eric’s police deposition, he freaked out, took a swing, and despite never having played a hole in his life, connected flush with the head of the goose, immediately silencing it and in the process, separating it from life.

Eric claimed that he never meant to hurt the goose, just to scare it, but when it lunged at him, he panicked, causing him to take the fatal swing.

But that wasn’t the end of it and retaliation was swift. In addition to reporting it to the police, the owner of the goose got his brother and a buddy together, grabbed some tools, including – c’mon, you know where this is going – a hammer, broke into our house when everybody was out, and proceeded to do as much damage as possible to our highly prized consumer goods.

But he didn’t stop there. He also called the local newspapers – when local newspapers were social media – and begin a shame campaign.

So though Eric returned to the shithole from whence he came, never to face justice – or return to HB again, my roomates and I had to endure the scorn that arose from a series of front page articles about the goose murder, each one accompanied by a photo of the neighbors holding up their photo of Susie – their deceased pet goose.

The Goose published first on your-t1-blog-url

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