My Vacation, In which I do not appear on COPS

Since Clarisa’s mother died in November 2002, we’ve taken to traveling out to Redding, CA for vacation to see the some of her family. Last time we went it was a last minute decision because one of a great many hurricanes that year was busy beating the crap out of Florida and ruining our trip to Universal. This trip, though, was planned.

We left on Friday, April 22nd. Clarisa picked me up in hired car on 36th and Broadway a little after 4pm. It was cool cloudy and drizzling. Traffic on the way to JFK was slow, but we made it in plenty of time for our flight at 7:05, thus proving my father’s concerns about leaving Manhattan three hours before departure baseless. Score one for the kids.

On the plane, some of our fellow passengers could not get it together enough to find their seat and stow their shit in a timely fashion. While we waited, a zillion other planes packed the flight line. The pilot called the plane-jam he saw “impressive”. So we waited an hour on the tarmac to take off, but hey, there was that 6”x 4” TV with 36 channels on it. Six+ plus hours of TV. Oy.

Thought it was just my third trip out there, it was all very familiar. The night flight, the long drive north up I-5 through the Sacramento River valley past miles of nothing. Sacramento receding. The glow of San Francisco behind the shadowed mountains to the west following us for a bit. Denny’s. RV Park. Motels. Nothing. Nothing. Grain deal of some sort. Denny’s. RV Park. Car Dealership. Straight driving at 80mph. Never any traffic. A late hotel check in. A hard bed. Amazement in the morning as I step outside and see the mountains again. Mt. Shasta to the north, Mount Lassen to the East. They seem close, but I know they are far.

This time though, it started to rain like Hell about halfway to Redding. Actually it was more of a deluge. Not fun. Not fun especially when your wife is driving and you are nodding out constantly and waking up with the false sensation that your car is hydroplaning and you are zooming sideways across the road. In other words, totally fucked up. Muchos kudos to the missus for maintaining her composure has I jolted awake each time with a "Gaaaah!".

Rain and relatively cooler temperatures would punctuate the vacation, but overall it was a great relaxing time and I got to do and see things I’d never done or seen before. Highlights of the trip include racing RC buggies on an indoor dirt track, a pizza party with Hannah and a bunch of her friends, 4 wheeling through the mountains above Lake Shasta, a 531 mile road trip out to Eureka on the coast, up to Crescent City and into the Redwood Forest and then northeast into Oregon and back down I-5 from Grants Pass. Those were all great things to do. Really. Fun. Stuff. However, I will get to those things later. Now, I want to jump ahead to Saturday and my aborted appearance on COPS.

Saturday. Afternoon light. Sunny skies. The air is warm and a slight breeze is blowing. We can see a little windmill set up in the backyard turning at a relaxed pace. There are kids playing basketball in the park beyond the backyard. My brother in law, Matt, and I are chilling out on the back deck of his place. Clarisa is inside and so is her stepfather, Arlyn. In our house, he is often lovingly referred to as “Fucking Asshole”, or “Dick”.

The two of them don’t really get along. Actually its more one sided than that. Clarisa hates him with a furious passion, and with good reason. Arlyn, on the other hand is just too blocked, stupid or in denial to recognize why she hates him. Let’s just put it this way, a lot of the shit that would get you put in jail or your kids taken away today was just business as usual for Arlyn back then. Family accounts corroborate it.

So why are we there? Well, Clarisa wants to see her family out there and have a relationship with her brother. To have that she is willing to tolerate being around her step-father. To her credit there has not been an altercation. We do this dance. She tolerates him, I try to buffer things and just be polite.

Until this time.

Just after the thought, “She’s been in there a while…she should not really be left alone with him…” enters my head we hear an angry shout and then a loud sound of something falling or being slammed. Right away Matt and I know it’s on.

We come in the through the screen door to the dining room and Clarisa is on the left, screaming at Arlyn and he’s saying something back to her but I can’t quite tell what at first. Then I hear him hurl some insults at her. Words like whore and bitch are being used and Clarisa is trying to tear into Arlyn but Matt’s holding her back. She’s raging. Among other things, I hear!”

“I may be a bitch but I’m no child molester!” she screams. She’s clawing at Matt, trying to throw him aside. But Matt’s a big and he’s got her contained.

Arlyn really doesn’t like what she said. Things escalate. He calls her a fucking whore. She wants a piece of him.

The dog, Max, an eighty pound shepherd mix, is freaking out and jumping up on the two of them and barking like mad. For what seems like a long time I look at the three of them there to my left and keep Arlyn to my right. I see that the dog is not biting and that Clarisa isn’t being hurt so I turn my attention to Arlyn. I step in front of him. I get close.

“You better just shut your mouth. Shut the fuck up right now. Don’t. Talk. To. Her. Like. THAT.”

He’s hardly paying any attention to me though and is saying something about “This is my house!” and “I’ll show you.” He heads over to the kitchen phone.

The guy is going to call the cops! What a pussy. This is just a screaming match and he’s losing. I guess the rules change when you aren’t the one doing the screaming or beating or molesting.

Matt manages to fend off Clarisa and get the phone out of Arlyn’s hands. More screaming. Clarisa is letting him know how he ruined her life, how he took her childhood away from her. She is unloading a lifetimes worth of pent up anger. Arlyn is heading toward the garage door in the kitchen and I’m behind him, pissed off now myself, saying mean shit to him. He’s yelling that Clarisa’s told everyone he fucked her. He’s also restating the claim that its his house. Those are both lies. I respond sarcastically.

“Shut the fuck up. You rent. You mother-fucking scumbag. You piece of shit. She is so much better than you.”

Now he is pullng something out of his pocket and saying “I’ll show you!” (again). At first I think it’s a knife and I contemplate what I think I need to do. Jump him? Run?

It’s a phone. Again. He’s going to call the cops. Again. Unbelievable.

I go back inside and tell Matt. Matt comes into the garage and takes the phone away from Arlyn. He’s telling us just to leave, which is a good idea at this point, and that he’ll call us in a bit.

Even as we leave though, I’m trying to goad Arlyn into a fight. I really want a piece of this guy, seventy years old or not. I keep hurling the insults. He charges at me when I call him a fucking scumbag again but stops short. Its all show. Things are different when it’s not a helpless kid.

Then we are in our rental and Clarisa is still screaming and giving him dual birds. My knees are feeling a bit weak from the fight or flight dump of adrenaline I’ve got coursing through me. We pull out and I know I will never see that house again until Arlyn is on the wrong side of the grass.

Once we are down the street, I ask Clarisa, “What the hell happened?” All of this went down without me knowing why, but the answer was not too surprising. Clarisa had gone into the garage to pick up her vacation cigarettes (she only smokes with other smokers and whilst on vacation) and Aryln was out there too. He asked angrily “What do you have against me?”. She said she did not want to fight with him and asked him to drop it. He said she’d always been a fucking bitch as she went up the stairs. I guess he thought she’d let it go?

Anyhow that’s what set it all off. She finally got to tell him what and why and where to go.

She calmed down really fast in the car. We went to a nearby mall and sat at a table outside. Matt called and met us out there after closing the garage door and giving his father a piece of his own mind first.

All in all it was pretty cathartic. I know the two of us have been a lot closer since it happened.