Writer fantasy #259: Nailing bad guys

One of my best friends owns a designer handbag boutique. Because of her, I sometimes manage to look fashion-savvy instead of like a homeless person carrying my keys and lipstick in a paper bag.

A few weeks ago, her store was robbed by a guy who waltzed in and nabbed her laptop. Several people saw him, and since he has a mohawk in a city where two people sport that particular hairstyle, we’re hopeful he might eventually turn up.

Can I confess something? I’ve fantasized about helping catch him.

In my imaginary scenario, I’m walking down the street when I fall into step behind him. Since my fantasy version of myself knows how to operate my iPhone camera to photograph something besides the inside of my pocket, I snap a covert picture and email it to my friend at her shop.

Then I call her.

“So you know that hot guy we were talking about?” I say in my best wink-wink nudge-nudge tone. “I totally started following him on Twitter.”

Since my friend is also a super spy in this scenario, she instantly decodes my clever message to understand I'm following the bad guy on foot.

“I just got the photo you emailed, that’s totally him!” she shrieks into the phone. “Which way is he going?”

“Well get this – he’s all ‘let’s meet up for dinner at Soba,’ and I’m like, ‘why don’t we try Summit instead?’ And he goes, ‘I guess that’s cool if you want to grab a drink at Common Table beforehand.’”

See how savvy my imaginary self is, naming the restaurants we're walking past to signal which direction I’m headed?

You'll also notice my imaginary self sounds disturbingly like Paris Hilton.

Our conversation continues as my friend slyly uses three-way calling to phone the police and alert them what’s happening.

The fact that neither of us knows how to use three-way calling in real life and we can’t actually utter the phrase three-way without giggling doesn’t hinder my fantasy.

Eventually, I follow the guy to a dingy bar several blocks away, where he sets up the laptop in a cracked vinyl booth and begins using it to download illegal porn. I signal the cops, who come rushing in and wrestle the guy to the floor. Though he makes a brief escape attempt, I subdue him with my badass kung-fu moves and a bowl of peanuts grabbed off the bar.

I might also be wearing a cape and a pair of really hot stilettos.

Am I the only one who entertains hero fantasies like this? Is it a case of overactive writer's imagination, or just narcissism on my part?

Wait, don't answer that.

But I would look good in that cape, don't you think?

The big, hairy butt of romance

Some friends of ours just moved to a house a few blocks away.

After lunch, we went to visit and point out the highlights of the neighborhood.

One of those highlights is a large wooded area ideal for hiking, biking, and snowshoeing. It’s also a shortcut to the school their pre-teen daughter attends, and our friends were eager to take a look.

The five of us set out toward the woods, with Pythagoras leading the way down the dirt trail. “It’s really peaceful,” he explained. “We rarely run into anyone else out here.”

“Lots of great trails, too,” I agreed.

That’s when we all noticed the red pickup truck at the trailhead. It was unremarkable except that we rarely see vehicles there. As I continued to prattle on about wildlife and foliage, Pythagoras got a funny look on his face.

“What?” I asked.

He nodded toward the truck. “I just saw a butt.”

I squinted through the windshield. “A butt like someone’s throwing cigarettes during fire season or a butt like – oh my God, my eyes!”

And there it was, a big, white, hairy butt, appearing in the window briefly and then disappearing, then reappearing again, then disappearing in a rhythm that left little question what was transpiring in the cab of that truck. We had stumbled upon someone’s romantic interlude.

Well, as romantic as you can be in the cab of a dusty truck on a sweltering afternoon with the windows cracked and five strangers standing outside discussing methods for removing cheat-grass from a cat’s ear.

Not wanting her pre-teen daughter scarred for life by the sight of the butt pressed against the window, mom quickly herded her away while our friend stayed behind and Pythagoras and I continued chatting.

“Right up here is where the dog found the dead squirrel last week,” Pythagoras announced as the truck swayed gently.

“Couldn’t believe how fast he ate that squirrel,” I agreed, trying not to notice the butt was picking up speed. “Ate the fur and bones and maggots and everything.”

Several minutes passed and the truck stopped rocking. The butt vanished, and the windows rolled up.

We were all relieved.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not one to judge those who enjoy an amorous moment in a motor vehicle. I’m also not one of those romance authors who’ll tell you everything should be beautiful and tender and choreographed like a naked ballet.

But seriously? Must the thrusting continue with five strangers discussing carrion three feet away?

Eventually, our friend trudged back to his house while Pythagoras and I headed the other way toward ours.

“Think it was a couple teenagers, or an older guy having an affair?” I asked.

Pythagoras considered that. “Teenagers. There was a dirt bike in back.”

“I might've seen some gray butt hair,” I countered. “Maybe it's an older guy. Maybe the dirt bike belongs to his kid. He’s sneaking around on his wife and his marriage is already strained because he lost his job at the lumber mill and he’s pawning the bike so he can spring for a cheap motel room the next time he wants to bump uglies with his mistress.”

Pythagoras looked at me. “Please tell me the love scenes in your books are more romantic than that.”

I shrugged. “Sometimes.”

So what do you think? Teenagers or frisky adults? And where is the line between a fun afternoon romp and a disgusting image that shouldn’t be inflicted on the eyeballs of others?

Speaking of which, anyone know where I can get my retinas bleached?

The dirty lies writers tell themselves

We’ve somehow gone from freezing temperatures to scorching ones within a week, so Pythagoras and I are heading into the mountains for a camping trip.

I apologize in advance for not replying to blog comments right away, but I do have another post set to go up Friday, so come back tomorrow.

In preparing for this camping adventure, I’m reminded of the first time Pythagoras and I went fishing.

We both grew up in outdoorsy families, so camping and hiking and fishing were regular occurrences. Though we’d camped together many times, it wasn’t until we’d been together a couple years that we embarked on a fishing trip.

We rented a boat at Diamond Lake and headed out. I had a good book, Pythagoras had a fishing pole, and all was right with the world.

Suddenly, his line began to jerk.

“Quick, grab the net,” he ordered.

I stared, baffled, as he reeled the fish in. The second it came flopping into the boat, I burst into tears.

Pythagoras looked at me. “What’s wrong?”

“The fish,” I sobbed. “I don’t want it to die.”

“I’ll throw it back, no problem.”

“No! I want to eat it,” I whimpered. “I just don’t like seeing it die.”

He was baffled by this. “I thought you grew up fishing all the time.”

“I did!” I cried. “We just never caught anything.”

Being raised in a family of terrible fishermen had not prepared me for this spectacle. There was some more discussion, a bit more sobbing, and a quick, solemn death for the fish.

As soon as dinner was stashed safely in the cooler, Pythagoras turned to me.

“The fish was probably really old,” Pythagoras said. “On death’s doorstep. We saved all the other fish from having to watch him die slowly of old age or liver cancer.”

I thought about that for a minute, then nodded. “He was also a pedophile.”

“Absolutely,” Pythagoras agreed. “For years, he’s been terrorizing the other fish.”

“And he’s a compulsive liar.”

“And a car thief,” he added.

“Did you hear how he voted in the last presidential election?”

By the time we’d finished assassinating the fish’s character, I felt almost glad about removing him from the gene pool. We caught several more evil fish that afternoon, and they were all delicious stuffed with lemon slices and cooked over a campfire.

OK, so I know it’s unlikely each fish we catch is a tawdry character preying on children and passing out KKK literature. But believing it for a few hours assuages my conscience and makes me feel less guilty about something that’s a bit uncomfortable for me.

Am I the only one to use my overactive writer’s imagination like this? Do you regularly lie to yourself so you feel better about something? Tell me in the comments.

I’ve got some granddaddy pedophile fish to catch.

Pythagoras shows off our first evil fish, may he rest in peace.

Found: one nasty pair of underwear (plus a few good stories)

Yesterday afternoon, Pythagoras and I ventured out for an eight-mile hike on one of the trails snaking through the Deschutes National Forest.

The weather was lovely, the dog was wagging her tail, and I was lamenting the fact that I didn’t have a tail of my own to wag.

We had only gone half a mile when I spotted something tangled in the twigs beside the trail. I stopped in my tracks and stared at it. This is what I saw:

“Hey, Pythagoras,” I called. “Need some new underwear?”

He glanced at the tattered tighty-whities on the side of the trail and kept on hiking. “Thanks, I’m good.”

We continued hiking in silence for a few minutes. Pythagoras was the first to speak. “You’re still thinking about the underwear, aren’t you?”

“Of course. How do you think they got there?”

He shrugged. “Some dude was out mountain biking, had to take a dump, didn’t have anything to wipe with, so he took his underwear and—”

“Gross, never mind.”

“Well where do you think they came from?”

I thought about that for a second. “I think a couple was out hiking and she couldn’t stop staring at his back and at the muscles in his shoulders and thinking how she’d like to dig her nails into them, and he turned around and noticed how beautiful she looked with the sunlight in her hair, so they stumbled off into the bushes tearing each other's clothes off as they went, and in the throes of passion, didn’t notice the bear that ran up and grabbed his underwear.”

Pythagoras nodded and kept hiking. “That seems likely,” he agreed. “And this is why you’re the writer.”

I thought about that as we continued on down the trail. His mind had gone right to the practical – and I’ll admit it, most likely – scenario.

He’s a guy, and a fitness freak at that. If he says men in the wilderness will resort to such measures when faced with a lack of toilet paper, I’m inclined to believe him.

And while my overactive writer’s imagination is certainly part of what prompted my theory, I think you could more accurately say it’s a product of the type of stories I write – namely, romance.

Would a thriller writer have concocted a scenario involving a terrorist plot and an underwear bomb? Would a paranormal author have envisioned something that featured disintegrating werewolves with bad taste in underwear?

I’m curious about this. What was your first thought when you saw that picture? Tell me your theory, and then tell me what genre (if any) you write.

Oh, and if those are your underwear, go get those nasty things. And maybe wash them before you put them back on. I think my dog peed on them.

The curious case of the missing pants

“I can’t find my…”

These four words begin about 40% of the sentences uttered in this household.

I am not the one doing the uttering.

Pythagoras has always been absentminded, but a recent announcement gave me pause.

“I can’t find my pants,” he declared. “My favorite pants.”

“Um, OK,” I said, trying not to be alarmed about where my husband might have left his pants and how he arrived home without them. “When did you have them last?”

He thought about that a minute. “Maybe when we went to Greece. Or maybe a month after that, I’m not sure.”

I frowned at the calendar. “We went to Greece in June. You’ve been hunting for your pants this whole time?”

Apparently so. He turned the closet upside down looking for them. I searched the guest rooms, thinking maybe he’d overlooked them. We called my parents, thinking perhaps he’d left them there on a visit. We searched his workplace, thinking…um, actually, I’m not sure what we were thinking.

But the pants were gone. My overactive imagination ran wild. Had aliens abducted them? Had a badger eaten them? Had I somehow failed to notice a day my husband came home from work wearing only his shirt and shoes? The possibilities were endless.

We spent an entire day at the mall searching for a replacement. None were adequate. “These aren’t like the old pants,” he insisted.

“You do have three or four identical pairs though, right?”

He shook his head sadly. “The other ones were the best shade of gray.”

Fearful the grief might prompt him to go pantsless to brunch the next morning, I grabbed one of the identical pairs from the closet and hopped on the computer to see if I could find an online vendor selling them.

I searched for an hour, finally locating what I thought might be the right color, cut, and style. “Pythagoras,” I yelled. “Come look at these online and tell me if I should place an order.”

He wandered into the bedroom, looked at the picture on the screen, then looked at the pants in my lap.

“Where did you find my pants?”

I stared at him. “These are your missing pants?”

He nodded. “Where were they?”

I closed my eyes, realizing – not for the first time – there are reasons the female praying mantis bites off the male’s head after mating. “They were in Greece,” I told him. “I flew there this morning to get them.”

So my husband has his pants back. And at least for now, I have the assurance he did not leave them in the front seat of an ice cream truck driven by a transvestite stripper.

Because really, that was my next guess.

My vacuum bag drug deal: why writers shouldn't go out in public

So apparently, vacuum cleaners require bags. Who knew?

Probably anyone who does more vacuuming than me, which is…well, most people.

Given my husband’s obsession with the Shop-vac, I don’t do a lot of vacuuming on my own. But recently, Pythagoras pointed out that (a) our Kirby vacuum cleaner has a bag, and (b) said bag was so full it resembled a misshapen piñata (though I was sad to discover it did not contain Tootsie rolls).

I went out to purchase new bags, only to learn that no one in our town of 85,000 has the same vacuum we do. Undeterred, I hopped online and found an eBay vendor who not only carried the bags, but lived right in our town.

What are the odds?

I fired off an email and received a response from a guy named Gary who said he didn’t have a storefront, but would be willing to meet me at the Moose Lodge.

Moose Lodge? I had never heard of it, but my friend Larie had. “Isn’t it that dark-looking building hidden behind the bushes down that narrow road past the Goodwill thrift store? It looks a little shady.”

Shady indeed. I showed up fifteen minutes before my scheduled meeting with Gary, pretty sure I was about to be kidnapped. I called Larie from my cell.

“I think it’s a setup,” I whispered.

“Cool. Can I have your peridot earrings if you die?”

I hung up and assessed my surroundings, looking for an escape route. Was that a mobster dressed in all black at the front of the building?

I squinted at him. OK, so he was about 75 and was moving with the aid of a walker, but still. That bulge under his shirt could be a pistol and not a colostomy bag.

I looked at the opposite end of the parking lot. Did that car just flash its headlights to signal the guy standing by the dumpster?

A man exited the building and aimed something at the car. I started to duck.

Then I realized it was a keyfob. The headlights flashed once more as the guy disarmed his alarm.

I looked back at the dumpster guy just in time to see him empty the trash.

By the time Gary showed up, I was on high alert. As his car glided to a halt beside mine, I fumbled for something I could use as a weapon. Carefully, I stepped out of the car and stood to face him.

“Are you Gary?”

He nodded, his gray beard brushing the collar of his golf shirt. “What’s the plastic fork for?”

“Protection.”

“OK.”

He reached inside his coat and pulled out…vacuum cleaner bags.

What a letdown.

“That’ll be 20 bucks,” he said.

I pulled out a $20 bill and handed it to him. I reached for the vacuum bags, braced for him to grab my wrist and whip out a switchblade.

But he just gave them to me. I couldn’t believe it.

“This feels sort of like a drug deal,” I said, looking around the parking lot.

Gary stared at me. “Huh?”

“Nothing, I just – I’m a writer. Overactive imagination.”

“Right,” he said, taking a few steps back. “Well, I’m going to play Bingo now. If you need more vacuum bags, give me a call.”

I watched him retreat, wondering if “vacuum bags” was a code word for something. I looked down at the package in my hands.

Vacuum bags.

What a bummer.

The great tampon of mystery

So I went to the library yesterday. It’s a glorious place filled with wisdom and intrigue and, of course, books.

I gathered up my glorious, wise, intriguing books and headed to the self-checkout area. That’s when I saw it. A tampon.

Not used, obviously. It was still in its plastic wrapper, sitting there beside one of the checkout terminals looking a bit lost.

I glanced around. Three people manned the other terminals, none of them making eye contact. There was an old lady with smudged glasses, a guy wearing his baseball cap backwards, and a young mom toting a toddler with a suspicious brown smear on his cheek.

I looked back at the tampon.

The most logical explanation was that a library patron had dropped it, and someone else – driven by the misguided belief that its owner might wish to reclaim it after it had rolled around on the floor awhile – set it there to be rescued.

That’s the likely scenario. But writers seldom attach themselves to the most likely scenario.

What if a librarian put it there to symbolize something deep and profound – maybe our community “Read Together” selection? But what does a tampon have to do with Kathryn Stockett’s THE HELP? Did I miss something when I read it? Maybe I should check it out again.

Or maybe it was a bomb. I considered poking it to see if it was ticking, but hello – I’m not touching a strange tampon, even it was still in the wrapper. But if it suddenly exploded, would I be heroic enough to throw my body over it to protect the old lady and the toddler? (The dude in the backwards baseball cap – he’s on his own).

Or what if the tampon had a hidden camera inside? I’ve always heard that Big Brother is watching. Would he watch from inside a tampon? It’s a genius idea, really. What better place to stash a secret recording device than inside an object no sane person would willingly pick up?

I leaned closer for a better look, pretty sure I saw the glint of a lens.

“Can I help you?” a librarian asked behind me.

I straightened up. “Nope, just getting checked out.”

She nodded sagely. Did she wink at me? “Just let me know if you need any assistance.”

“OK,” I told her, and hurried to finish checking out my books.

Was it my imagination, or was the librarian smirking at me as I left?

In all likelihood, it was my imagination. See, this is why writers can’t be trusted with the simplest tasks. One minute we’re checking out the latest Susan Elizabeth Phillips novel and the next minute we’re imagining a vast international conspiracy centered around abandoned feminine hygiene products.

But if I read in the newspaper today that the library exploded, I’m going to say I told you so.

How I'm inspired by dog doo

I love writing about offbeat characters and wacky scenarios. Those who’ve read my manuscripts sometimes ask how I come up with it. Real life? Imagination? Am I in therapy?

Here’s a roundabout answer to all of the above.

This morning I took my two beasts to the dog park. It’s a 20+ acre fenced area with places for dogs to frolic and sniff and do what dogs do. As we made our way from the parking lot to the park, a man race-walked past with a small black terrier attached to what appeared to be a women’s belt. The man was burly with a camouflage jacket and a tattoo of a spider on the back of his neck.

“Come on, Belinda,” he snapped when his dog paused to inspect my dog’s hind end.

Belinda cast an irritated look at her owner, trotted three steps, hunched up, and . . . well, did what dogs do.

The man grunted with obvious disgust, waited for Belinda to finish her business, and yanked her toward the park.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

We turned to see an elderly woman walking a small camel. On closer inspection, the camel turned out to be a Great Dane with a growth on its back. The woman had frizzy blue hair that looked like someone dipped her head in a cotton candy machine.

“You can’t leave that doody there!” she yelled.

“Doody?” the man asked, looking genuinely perplexed.

“Poop,” I offered helpfully. “You’re supposed to pick it up in a bag.”

“But I don’t have a bag,” he griped. “And the dispenser is way over there.”

The woman scowled. The Great Dane took a step forward. I took a step back. My dogs hid behind my legs.

“Do you know what the fine is for failing to pick up after your dog?” the woman hissed.

No one answered, probably because none of us knew the answer.

The man snorted. “Bite me, lady,” he said as he turned toward the park with Belinda trotting beside him.

“That’s it, fart-knocker!” the woman shrieked. “I’m calling the police right now!”

“Fart-knocker?” I repeated, committing it to memory for future use.

The woman grabbed a hot pink cell phone out of her pocket and began to dial.

“Stop!” the man yelled. “No cops.” His eyes were wild as he looked from me to the old woman.

“I’d give you a bag if I had one,” I said.

The man shook his head in disgust. Then he bent down and picked up Belinda’s doody with one gloved hand.

We watched him stalk away, hand out, palm-up. Beside me, my dogs whined. I looked down at them. “Just so you know, I’m never doing that for you.”

The woman marched off. “Come on, Ferguson,” she told her dog. “Let’s make sure he disposes of that properly.”

And that was that. See, I can’t make that stuff up!

Except I just did. All of it. OK, there was a moment at the dog park this morning where I forgot my bag and briefly considered sacrificing a glove to avoid being yelled at by the couple behind me. But the rest was made up.

It’s a good illustration of where these stories and characters come from. One little thing will trigger an idea that just keeps going and going as I wander around the dog park. Normally, I’d put a little more thought into a scene and its characters before posting something for all the world to see, but you get the idea.

Oh, and for the record, I went and got a bag for the dog doody. I’m no fart-knocker.