I was a 21 year old who was liv­ing alone for the first time. Although I was tech­ni­cally “out on my own” since I was 19, this was new ground. Before I was stay­ing with friends, liv­ing with room­mates and with my cousin Melanie and I even spent some time as the “guy on the couch”. And now, after two years, I had my own apartment.My first apart­ment was the pri­vate attic of a house with a sep­a­rate entrance on Stoney Beach in Pasadena. My land­ladies were an elderly mother, and her daugh­ter named Edith and Rose, and they were about 86 and 66 years old, respec­tively. And they still lived in the down­stairs level of the house.

My rent was only $400 dol­lars a month with all util­i­ties included, which was an absolute steal for the year 2000, and I was able to pay that rent out of the tips I earned only work­ing dou­bles on Wednes­days and Sun­days as a waiter at a pizza restau­rant in Sev­erna Park. I always earned great tips, usu­ally around $100 each day, which more than paid for my rent with money left over to party. It also left me with plenty of room for par­ty­ing with my friends when I only worked 8 days a month.

Of course all of my par­ty­ing took place else­where because my cheap liv­ing sit­u­a­tion above two elderly ladies meant that I couldn’t have any wild par­ties, and the “pri­vacy” of my pri­vate attic apart­ment was about as much as if I were liv­ing in the upstairs of my grandmother’s house.

To fur­ther illus­trate my “pri­vacy”, Edith was of advanced years and her health was fail­ing, so they were con­stantly refi­nanc­ing the house in order to draw out the equity to cover the med­ical bills. That meant that the apprais­ers always had to walk through the whole house, my half included. Rose was good about giv­ing me heads up so I could make sure to pick my under­wear up off of the floor and do the dishes. Usu­ally, that would mean I would call my sis­ter Liz and pay her to do it.

My sis­ter Liz would always come over and clean my apart­ment for me. The arrange­ment was $20 cash and also she got to keep what­ever change she would find in my pock­ets or on the floor. And I, being a waiter, used to keep all the quar­ters I got every shift in order to go to the Laun­dro­mat and also to track down the new state quar­ters for my Mom’s new col­lec­tion. So if I for­got to take my quar­ters out of my pock­ets or apron, let’s just say some­times Liz cleaned house in more ways than one.

Hon­estly though, the deal was the deal, and I respected that.

The scari­est moment in my “pri­vate attic apart­ment” came the time Rose didn’t give me any notice of her and the apprais­ers going into my apart­ment. I wasn’t home at the time, and when Rose called me to tell me after the fact, I remem­ber being a lit­tle upset. Though I quickly got over it after remem­ber­ing that I had just had a date the week­end before, and Liz had come over and cleaned the apart­ment for me before said date. So I guess it was really no big deal.

That was, until I got home and saw the mar­i­juana seeds sit­ting on my cof­fee table.

I was pan­icked. I thought I was get­ting evicted for sure. And the worst part, the seeds weren’t even mine, they belonged to my cousin.

I know that sounds like the clas­sic “I was hold­ing it for a friend” excuse, but it’s the truth.

The night before, my cousin Anton had got­ten into an argu­ment with his wife at his in-laws house, and when her father stepped up to inter­vene my cousin decided it would be a good idea to punch him in the face before he could get a word in.

Of course, after her mother called the police, that was when he came over to my house to hide out.

The seeds on my table were from him clean­ing up his 1/8 of pot, before “hav­ing to smoke a bowl” because his “nerves were shot, I swear, that crazy bitch”.

But how could I explain that to a set of women who were at least over 35 years old when Wood­stock happened?

“Uh, Rose, Edith, I wasn’t smok­ing pot. I was just har­bor­ing a felon who brought ille­gal drugs into your house.”

The phone rings. After look­ing at the caller ID, I see that it is Rose. She must have heard me walk up the steps. I’m totally expect­ing to pick up the phone, and hear­ing Rose’s voice give no greet­ing, only sim­ply say­ing, “Pack your stuff, and get out.”

A bead of sweat rolls down the side of my face as I answer the phone.

“Hello?” I ner­vously answer.

“Hi Ben, I am sorry again about not call­ing you, but he kind of just stopped by.”

“It’s okay.”

“I also wanted to tell you I really like what you’ve done with the place, with your movie posters all over the walls and all. The appraiser really liked it too.”

“Thank you.”

“And thank you for decid­ing to do some­thing with that flower bed on the side of the house at the bot­tom of your steps. I bet what­ever you are plant­ing there will look very pretty.”

“No prob­lem, I, uhh, thought it could use it.”

It would appear that while upstairs with the appraiser, she had noticed the seeds, and said some­thing out loud about them. That’s when the appraiser, a man I had never met in my life and would never meet since, told her that they were flower seeds.

This com­plete stranger cov­ered for me and didn’t even know me. Maybe he saw the posters all over my walls for movies like Pulp Fic­tion, Clerks, and Half Baked, and shared my taste in movies. Maybe after he saw those posters and seeds he fig­ured I was a stoner, and maybe he was a stoner, and respected some code I wasn’t aware of. For years I wished I could have met him and thanked him. Who knows? One day he may read this story, and this will all ring a bell, and he’ll get in touch with me. I will def­i­nitely buy him a beer or two.

Or if he needed, maybe I can hide him from the police for the night.

In the week that fol­lowed, I went to a nurs­ery and crafts store and bought packs of dif­fer­ent kinds of seeds. I think I bought tulip seeds, daisy seeds, and a pack of Black-Eyed Susan seeds. As you can tell by my pur­chase, bou­quet arrang­ing was not a pos­si­ble career for me, and I knew noth­ing about the plant­ing of or arrang­ing of plants or flowers.

This was made even more evi­dent in my appli­ca­tion of the seeds to the flower bed out­side of my door. I sim­ply ripped the pack­ets open and dumped their con­tents onto the dirt as I walked to my friend Sam’s van one night. There was no till­ing and no water­ing. I more or less just sprin­kled the seeds atop the soil like jim­mies on top of ice cream.

A few months later I moved out of that apart­ment, and I can’t remem­ber if the seeds took or not. Although, after my hap­haz­ard dump­ing of them, I’m sure that if they did take, they were prob­a­bly grow­ing in the grass of the lawn after the wind blew them around the front yard.

As for the mar­i­juana seeds, I’m really glad the sit­u­a­tion turned out the way it did and that after all of these years the only thing I have from it is this story. Also, I’m glad Rose didn’t get overzeal­ous and decide to plant those seeds she found on the cof­fee table into the flower bed her­self. I would have come home and never knew any­thing about it. Well, that is until stalks of mar­i­juana began grow­ing next to my entrance way.

And as much as it would have been hilar­i­ous to see the looks on people’s faces as they won­dered if those plants grow­ing on the side of this elderly woman’s house were what they thought they were, I wouldn’t have wanted to see Rose and Edith plas­tered all over the front page of the Mary­land Gazette with the head­line: “DEA Busts Pasadena Mother-Daughter Mar­i­juana Ring”.

Okay, that prob­a­bly would have been pretty hilar­i­ous too, Edith with a shocked look on her face while sport­ing her nasal can­nula and the police wheel­ing her oxy­gen tank behind her, but damn I would have just felt so responsible.

Dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion, I’m sure the DEA would have come for me too, but I would’ve just hid out at my Cousin Anton’s house. After all, I’d say he really owed me one, wouldn’t you?

“You have two really crazy eye­brows!” my wife exclaims as she read­ies a pair of tweezers.

Every now and again, I get a cou­ple of eye­brow hairs that are over­achiev­ers. They grow longer than the oth­ers at a much faster rate than the oth­ers, and they also grow up and out from the rest of my eye­brow. It almost looks like what could be the anten­nae of some­thing liv­ing in my eyebrow.

As my wife moves in closer to pluck the non-conformist super cil­ium from my brow, she stops.

“Where did you get that scar?” she asks, notic­ing a small scar in my right eyebrow.

It was Hal­loween night 1997 in Glen Burnie. I was walk­ing around my favorite haunt, Mar­ley Sta­tion Mall, vis­it­ing acquain­tances and admir­ing cos­tumes. Hav­ing been employed by mul­ti­ple stores in the mall over a cou­ple of years, and loi­ter­ing there when­ever I was off, I knew peo­ple within every inch of the place.

That was, except for one girl. We knew each other, but label­ing her just another acquain­tance was not pos­si­ble or remotely my goal. She worked at a lit­tle smoothie shop, and at first sight, I was smit­ten with her. Her hair was dark, her skin was nat­u­rally tan. Her eyes were filled with brown irises. I pur­chased 5 dol­lar peanut but­ter and banana smooth­ies from her every­day for two months straight. Sure, the smooth­ies were over­priced, but nei­ther I nor my wal­let felt any pain over the chance to talk with her for a four minute trans­ac­tion of shout­ing over blenders.

Here on Hal­loween night, the mall was adver­tised and uti­lized as a safe trick-or-treating alter­na­tive for kids. Each store was sup­plied their own stash of candy to dis­pense to the wee sav­ages, and other than chil­dren in cos­tumes, busi­ness oth­er­wise was very slow. The mall’s nor­mal clos­ing hour was nine o’clock, but most every­one, aside from employ­ees, evac­u­ated the mall by 8 o’clock. That meant that for that last hour on Hal­loween night, the mall was an out­right ghost town.

As I made my way around the mall, I walked past the smoothie shop, and there she was. She was stand­ing there, look­ing just as beau­ti­ful as ever. She was using the lack of busi­ness dur­ing the last hour on Hal­loween night to get a jump start on clean­ing for the night’s clos­ing. As I approached the counter, time slowed down, and Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” played in my head.

“Happy Hal­loween!” I blurted out.

She looked up from her clean­ing, sur­pris­ingly not star­tled, and replied, “Hey, you too!”

“So, are you going to a party after here tonight?”

“Nah, prob­a­bly not. You?”

“I’m kind of walk­ing around right now to find out if there’s any­thing going on.”

Look­ing back on it now, that was my oppor­tu­nity to con­tinue with some­thing to the effect of, “But if you’re not doing any­thing after work, I would love to take you out for a bite to eat or a late movie or to shoot pool.” But instead, I let her say, “Well good luck with that.”

Not quite sure where to take the con­ver­sa­tion after that, I made a slick lit­tle back­wards exit that I must’ve picked up from Luke Perry’s char­ac­ter on 90210, com­plete with my hands in my pock­ets, as I said, “And good luck with your cleaning.”

She looked back up at me with a con­fused smile and said, “Thanks.”

As she went back to her clean­ing, I turned to walk away, and was met face first with a temp wall next door.

When the mall lost a store or a new store was being built, instead of hav­ing a vacant space or vis­i­ble con­struc­tion, they cov­ered the space with a tem­po­rary wall. And it usu­ally said, “Com­ing Soon, ‘New Store Name Here’”. The one next to the smoothie shop jut­ted out about 3 feet from the wall that I slickly backed over to dur­ing my Luke Perry Dylan-like exit. By explain­ing that, I’ll now tell you that when I was “met face first with a temp wall next door”, it was more like “my right eye­brow met the very cor­ner of the temp wall next door.”

That thud against the temp wall was so loud that she looked up from her clean­ing to find me hold­ing my right eye. I kept my hand on my eye and mus­tered out a laugh and an embar­rassed, “Duh.” before very quickly walk­ing away.

Five feet from of her sight, I took my hand away from my eye to find a pool of blood in my palm that was now run­ning down my wrist.

My mind was an adren­a­line filled blur of thoughts like, “Did I really hit the wall that hard?”, and “Why do head wounds always bleed so much? I hope I don‘t need stitches”. But ulti­mately, every thought went back to “Well, I guess I’m never going back there again.”

I ducked into the cof­fee shop on the other side of the offend­ing temp wall and asked one of my friends work­ing inside for some nap­kins. I was imme­di­ately met with a sar­cas­tic, “Very funny Big Ben.”

“Of course on a night where fake blood was a sta­ple, I would be truly bleed­ing from the eye.” I thought to myself as they finally gave me some nap­kins. After a few min­utes of inter­ro­ga­tion, I reluc­tantly gave up the story of my injury, which resulted in me walk­ing away to the empty mall’s echo­ing sounds of their laughter.

Still embar­rassed, I decided it was time to make my way to the pret­zel place where my ex-girlfriend worked. My mind was on one thing: sym­pa­thy. I seri­ously needed some, and maybe some ice. Dur­ing my walk through the mall, I would seem to pass every­one I ever knew. As my fel­low mall­rats and for­mer co-workers con­verge on me, I couldn’t help but think, “Where did all of you come from?”

I was look­ing around for secret por­tals or used zip lines dan­gling from the ceil­ing, when the group came to the con­clu­sion, with­out a sin­gle word from me mind you, that I had been in a fight. They asked me ques­tions like, “Who did this?” and “Which way did they go?” but at this point I was still so embar­rassed, espe­cially after the cof­fee shop con­fes­sion, that I didn’t answer them. I just walked into the food court, eyes fixed for­ward, as my fel­low mall­rats scat­tered to launch an offensive.

I didn’t care about the impend­ing war, or the call­ing off of a war car­ried out in my name, all I wanted was some ice for my eye, and some sym­pa­thy from my ex-girlfriend.

Walk­ing up to the pret­zel place, I once again had to explain my injury to her and her co-workers, com­plete with more dis­be­lief, and of course, more laugh­ter. “Hal­loween is the per­fect day to get injured, isn’t it?” I thought. “Glad I wasn’t shot, or I’d be dead by now.”

After the laugh­ter sub­sided, I got some ice for my eye, and walked out­side to smoke a cig­a­rette with my ex-girlfriend. And just as I had hoped for, I not only got a lit­tle sym­pa­thy, but a cou­ple of smooches too.

Only that night instead of any par­ties or ex sex, I, embar­rassed and slightly bat­tered, just went home.

Later that night I’m lay­ing in my bed, replay­ing the events of the night, when my pager went off. Cer­tain that the story had made it through the mall­rat net­work, and the voice­mail would sim­ply be one of those ear piece over­load­ing bursts of laugh­ter, I begrudg­ingly checked it any­way. When I called to lis­ten to the mes­sage, I’m met with a guy’s voice that I rec­og­nize as a fel­low mall­rat, say­ing, “Dude, we never found the guys, but we found blood on a temp wall.”

“Great. The girl from the smoothie shop saw it too I bet.” was my last thought before drift­ing to sleep and escap­ing this hor­ri­bly embar­rass­ing Halloween.

The temp wall was removed the next morn­ing, for the Novem­ber 1st open­ing of a store that spe­cial­ized in those goofy flags peo­ple have out­side of their front doors and kites and prod­ucts of that mate­r­ial. I never got to see my bloody after­math, though I would’ve loved to have seen the looks on the work­ers faces as they took down the wall. Then again, if that night before had taught me any­thing about people’s per­cep­tions on Hal­loween, the work­ers prob­a­bly thought it was fake blood too. But it didn’t mat­ter. Noth­ing about that area of the mall would mat­ter any­more, because I never went any­where near the smoothie shop again.

Five years later and it’s now the win­ter of 2002. I was doing a stand-up com­edy show at a dive bar in a neigh­bor­ing town of Glen Burnie called Pasadena. As I looked around at the crowd dur­ing my set, guess who was sit­ting at the bar? You guessed it; it was the girl from the smoothie shop. My heart skipped a beat, and in an instant I was that same ner­vous teenager all over again. As I watched her watch­ing me dur­ing one of my jokes, it didn’t appear that she rec­og­nized me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make her rec­og­nize me, or if I just wanted to make the audi­ence laugh, or sim­ply my ner­vous­ness, but for some rea­son, I told her and the whole crowd this very same tale of that Hal­loween night.

It was almost like I had been pos­sessed. My mouth just started going, telling the very story I just told you, a story that I tried for over a year after that Hal­loween to for­get. Blow­ing past any embar­rass­ment or humil­ity, I spilled it all, on the micro­phone, for her and for the patrons of the bar. Every­one laughed, espe­cially her, and I finally found myself hav­ing a great laugh over that night too.

After the show, I showed her my scar from that night as we shot a cou­ple of games of pool and talked about life and rela­tion­ships. She was now a mom, and was still as beau­ti­ful as I remem­bered. Maybe that’s why I was sur­prised that she was sin­gle. Now I know that any­one else would have called this encounter “fate”, but I couldn’t stop talk­ing to her about the long dis­tance rela­tion­ship I was in with this woman I had met in South Carolina.

As for “fate”, well, I guess there might have still been some in play. You see, I didn’t get to take the girl from the smoothie shop out that Hal­loween night in 1997, and after an embar­rass­ing moment, even made a point to never see her again. How­ever, fate saw that I would see her again and even got that chance to shoot pool with her. Top it all off with the big hug and the kiss on the cheek I got from her at the end of the night, and it was every­thing I had imag­ined it to be 5 years earlier.

It was a lovely Sat­ur­day after­noon. I had just fin­ished a morn­ing of some of my favorite car­toons like, “Ritchie Rich”, “Pac-Man”, “The Dukes”, “Incred­i­ble Hulk”, and “Spider-Man and His Amaz­ing Friends”. That’s when I, and my stom­ach full of Smurf Berry Crunch cereal, headed for the base­ment to play with my toys.

It was a sim­pler time; the days when car­toons, sugar, and toys were all that truly mattered.

Hopped up on the good stuff, I made my way to the base­ment and was play­ing along­side my lit­tle sis­ter Liz. I had my toy car, and Liz had her doll, or book, or what­ever. Being a 5 year old boy, I could have cared less what a 3 year old was into, let alone a lit­tle girl. This was espe­cially the case when I had my lit­tle Tonka car.

At 5 years old, it was my favorite toy of the moment. You would wind it up a bunch of times, sit it on the floor, and the press the yel­low but­ton on top, and it would go! As I sit here, I can eas­ily remem­ber the noise of it wind­ing up; it was a high-pitched plas­tic zip tie sound, and when you pressed the but­ton, it didn’t get much quieter.

Being a father now of a 5 year old myself, I com­pletely under­stand why we were made to play in the basement.

After play­ing with the toy for a while, I began to get bored, and as a 5 year old will do, I started to stray from the directed way to use the toy. After a big wind-up, I propped it up on the wall before hit­ting the but­ton. It had no wall-climbing abil­ity like my hero Spider-Man. I made a ramp out of some of my Lit­tle Golden Books, and as it flipped off the edge, I saw that it didn’t have the speed to give me that big “Duke Boys” jump I was look­ing for. I gave it one more wind-up, and as I’m look­ing around for its next stunt to attempt, I acci­den­tally pressed the but­ton. The noise of the tires spin­ning free sounded so famil­iar. Then it hit me.

As a child, I was the recip­i­ent of Mommy Cuts. That was the name for hair­cuts per­formed by my mother. While this may have been more trau­matic to some, in our fam­ily it wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, Mom gave hair­cuts to just about every man in the fam­ily from her broth­ers, to me, and even my Dad. She was very good at it, although she never did it pro­fes­sion­ally or even tried to make a pro­fes­sion out of it. Many in the fam­ily won­dered why, but at the same time, who wants her to go pro and lose out on free hair­cuts? She knew her way with a comb and scis­sors, and very recently in my 5 year old life, she began to expand her skills with the use of elec­tric clip­pers. As a child, I wasn’t too com­fort­able with them just yet. Mom’s clip­pers kind of scratched you up and every now and again they would pull a hair out. And that noise, that buzzing, hum­ming noise, sounded a lot like… the… toy in my hand!

“Hey Liz, come here for a sec.”

My lit­tle sis­ter walked over.

“Have a seat in the chair.” I instructed, to which she gladly obliged.

I wound up the toy on the floor. It was a good, hard, and fast wind-up. And as I hit the but­ton, it sounded exactly like Mom’s clip­pers! My imag­i­na­tion and my actions were fully together in this moment.

I lov­ingly tell my sis­ter as I bring the toy down on her head of beau­ti­ful blond hair, “Now hold still, I’m just going to clean up the…”

In an instant I’m snapped back to real­ity as the toy made a lock­ing, crack of a sound, and my sis­ter screamed out! I looked down at the toy, its wheels all entan­gled in my sister’s hair, and the only thing I could think to do was to pull it out of her hair. As her head snapped back with the force of my tug­ging, she cried out, and I let go.

Liz then took off run­ning for our par­ents upstairs, and before she left the base­ment, I could see the weight of the toy was pulling her head down to the one side. After the toy swung out and hit the door jamb, and her 3 year old body stum­bled back, I started to run after her. I wanted to try and fix it before she found our mother and father, of course, to spare my back­side, but I also at the very least wanted to try and hold the toy up for her so she didn’t hurt her­self fur­ther. Liz, on the other hand, was prob­a­bly think­ing that I was going to pull at the toy again and cause her more pain, so she was run­ning so fast that I could barely keep up.

As soon as she reached the top of the steps I stopped in my tracks back at the bot­tom. When she star­tled Mom in the kitchen, look­ing noth­ing less than a scream­ing, cry­ing mess with her brother’s favorite toy stuck in her hair, it didn’t take but an instant for me to hear, “Ben! What the hell did you do?!”

“I was try­ing to clean up her hair­cut!” I yelled up the steps.

By now Dad has joined my Mom and Liz in the kitchen and now came his bel­low­ing voice, “Ben­jamin! In here, now!”

I slowly made my way into the kitchen, and every­one was furi­ous with me. I was full-on ready to be dragged off to the bed­room for a beat­ing, when instead, Dad sim­ply said, “Stand there, and don’t move.”

It would appear that my date with the belt would be post­poned to deal with the sit­u­a­tion at hand. This had to be one of the worst feel­ings as a child. You knew that the whip­ping with the belt was inevitable, just not when. Not only that, but the sit­u­a­tion your par­ents had to deal with first would have given you more than enough time to hide, call a cab, or if you were really good, fash­ion a dis­guise and legally change your name. Only you couldn’t. Because you knew that in the end that it would all just make it worse. My only choice, and the best choice, was to stand there in silence.

Mom and Dad were try­ing their best to fig­ure out an approach to the sit­u­a­tion they found them­selves entan­gled in. Mom, our fam­ily bar­ber, was ready to go for what she knew best and said, “I guess I’ll have to cut it out.” Only she didn’t want to do that, because after what seemed like for­ever, a bald tod­dler Liz finally got this head of hair. After a few min­utes of Mom bat­tling over whether or not to cut the toy out of her daughter’s hair, with a “Dammit Ben­jamin!” thrown in there for good mea­sure, Dad stepped up to the plate.

Dad’s first approach was the sure­fire to never work method of revers­ing what was done. Every sec­ond of this only served to tan­gle her hair into the wheels fur­ther. Also, let us keep in mind that the toy’s gears were still engaged, so as he man­u­ally turned the wheels back­wards they were giv­ing an awful crack. Each crack sent chills down my lit­tle spine. “He’s going to break my toy!” I thought. After a few more cracks, it was as if some­one else was talk­ing when I blurted out, “You’re going to break it!”

Dad looked over at me with a face that was at first angry over my out­burst, but then gave way to a look of inspi­ra­tion mixed with a mis­chie­vous Irish grin.

“I guess we’ll have to take the toy apart.” He hap­pily stated.

As Mom turned around for our “junk drawer”, that catch-all drawer in most kitchens, to look for the screw­driver, I let out a, “Nooooooo!!!” and fell to the floor in heart-broken agony.

The scene that fol­lowed was one that I care not to relive, not here, not now. Actu­ally, I’m over it, but I hon­estly can’t recall much of it since my eyes were either closed or filled with tears for the major­ity of it. I will say that I remem­ber the final release of my toy’s clutch on Liz’s hair came at the use of a but­ter knife. And that final whir of the gears inside is a sound I will never forget.

“Tonka Tough”? Appar­ently Tonka was not tougher than my father.

I remem­ber cry­ing out, and my par­ents telling me, “You should’ve thought about this before you did that to your sister’s hair.”

To be fair, I did. Except that I was in a totally dif­fer­ent moment, hold­ing a pair of clip­pers. To this day, I par­tially blame the sug­ary intox­i­ca­tion of Smurf Berry Crunch.

In the end, Liz’s beau­ti­ful hair was spared, and in a shock­ing twist of events, so was my back­side. It turned out that Dad decided that los­ing my favorite toy was pun­ish­ment enough, and that I had learned to never do any­thing like that again.

And had I learned my les­son? Well, I will admit, maybe I should have got­ten beat with the belt.