Things I Happened Upon

Essays

Sep 21

In ninth grade, someone told me it was dirty behind my ears. I swept my hand back there, and he wasn’t wrong. I realized that I never washed behind my ears. I really didn’t wash my face either, but it’s likely I let stray soap accumulate behind my ears along with the offset grime and sweat from playing sports outside in North Hollywood in the swells of September.

Tomatoes seemed suspicious to me growing up. They just didn’t look like they would taste good, so I avoided them altogether for years. I pushed them to the side of my rare salads and left them sitting on the edge of the plate like a hitchhiker on a desolate road in Tucson on a dark night. Then, as a young adult, I ate one. It was tremendous. And somehow I had been eating lima beans my whole life, but not tomatoes. Ignoramus.

When I was a prosecutor, I got lost in a relationship with my witness coordinator. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. She told me she was in a failing marriage and had moved in with her parents. I had no idea if this was true, but I went with it. I used to go upstairs in the courthouse to see her in her office, but one day it felt off. I got to the end of the hallway, saw her, and was about to wave when she lightly shook her head no. I watched the man standing before her drop a pile of flowers on the ground as I walked back to the elevator. I’ve never been able to find her online.

We used to hide our money in our dressers, behind our clothes, at camp. We did this because our counselor, the greatest man to ever live, told us that the Lewis Savings Bank was a scam. It was a fake bank at the camp where they kept your money. It was totally legit and safe. Our money would disappear because, as Burke told us, bandits found it from time to time. Some nights, in the middle of the night, he would bring us home fribbles from Friendly’s and introduce us to a random girl. None of us will ever face the truth, and we don’t care because the guy was a legend.

My friend Baird and I used to go to Blimpie’s in Brooklyn Heights after school when we were far too young to order large sandwiches by ourselves. I didn’t know my ass from my elbow in a sub shop, but Baird had the game down. He got a sub and had them put oregano on it. I had never even heard of oregano, much less wanted it sprinkled on my sandwich, but then I tasted it. It was like the Fountain of Youth, even though I was only nine.

When my kids were little, I hadn’t seen our cat in far too long a time. It’s one of those things you notice and then wonder how you didn’t notice. I had someone build a cat door to a closet under the stairs, and that’s where Hardaway had her litter box. Yes, Hardaway. Yes, her. Tim, not Anfernee. When I realized how long it had been since I had seen her, I knew. She was dead in her understair hideaway, but peaceful.

My stepdad liked a good gag. He used to leave rubber vomit and plastic dog shit on the floor of my room. I always fell for it because they looked so real when you were a groggy teenager trying to drag yourself out of bed to frantically look in the mirror at your pimples before going to the hellhole a lot of people called middle school. One day, it wasn’t plastic dog shit.