My friends from the proverbial slow pitch beer league lobbed me another fat softball for my literary field of daydreams. It was a link to a website that sells, among other things, fake insurance cards. Though extremely tempting, I must decline to go down that path. Creating false legal documents is fun I agree, but as I learned in Junior High, they are actually illegal documents, or so says my PO. Note to aspiring criminals: never try to pass mimeographed counterfeit bills to the cafeteria cashier, especially in $1,000 denominations. Also, do not underestimate the risk of stealing a license from your buddy’s older sibling – the one with the facial hair - to purchase alcohol at a neighborhood package store, especially if that sibling works there behind the counter. “Can I see some ID please? What’s this? You little punk!!” Boy was she pissed. But I digress.
One teeny little lapse in judgment and no one ever believes you again! This haunted me through my 6 and ¾ years of High School. Any note from Mom, any plea for an extension for a term paper, even a love poem written in the throes of despair and drunkenness – all viewed as forgeries by significant players in my childhood. No matter how authentic the document, no one ever believed this beleaguered author. Allow me to illustrate.
· Missed a week of school tending to my dear, ill mother. The devil’s fire whiskey once again ravaged the home of The Captain. On Monday afternoon, Mom started to write a letter excusing her cherub from school – with lipstick on a napkin, only to trip and fall over the invisible rabbit that haunted her days. When she came to on Wednesday, she resumed writing, but the red letters were now indecipherable, lost in the crimson of the bloodstained napkin. By the time I managed to get her into her Depends, it was Thursday, and someone missed me enough at school to call and inquire about my whereabouts. It was the cafeteria cashier – I still owed money. When I finally got my chance to speak to the Principal (on hold for over an hour), I told him I had a note for him, but he just told me where I could stick the note and informed me that my presence was not required anyway.
· Then there was that poem I wrote to my first love, that new girl from California who once sat next to me on the bus before she knew she shouldn’t do such a thing – an entire 28 seconds elapsed, maybe even 29 - before someone noticed and whispered something into her ear, causing her to wretch and jump off the seat and hit her head on the ceiling. I was in love! And I immediately produced some very moving iambic pentameter and slipped it into her cubby at school when no one was looking. At the end of the day I saw the note back in my cubby with a handwritten reply. My heart skipped a beat! It read: “Don’t ever talk to me. I can’t believe you did that with a gerbil!”
· And perhaps the worst experience. When I produced a signed note from my caseworker explaining my tardiness due to him transporting me to visit my mother in rehab, the Principal threw the note back in my face and laughed, “Tell that lying bitch of a mother of yours that she needs to do a better job forging notes. This one’s almost as bad as the one on the bloody napkin!”
Believe The Captain when he says: don’t bother smashing that empty vodka bottle on your temple and let the wound bleed into an inkwell and use it to scrawl “Dog ate my homework” on eggshell white linen stationary – it’s a waste of time and money.
Yours writing to Mom,
The Captain
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