We were supposed to leave at 11 but Bryant called me and said to come to the office and I zoomed over to find that deranged lunatics had attacked our building during the night. The windows on the unoccupied side were smashed out and one of our windows had been cracked but not broken, it was a beautiful spider-web radiating from a teeny little hole such as might be made by a .22 caliber bullet. So we called the police and our malevolent landlord Dr. Hesheghian who promptly arrived to tell us that the window is not in fact part of the building’s enclosure system and thus is the responsibility of the tenant. Gee! Who would have guessed that? Bryant and I long ago decided that we would like to strap him into a sears lawn chair and place that chair at the bottom of a great pit. Dr. Hesheghian then morosely swept up the glass on his side of the building while lamenting the state of moral decay that society had fallen into and then he left. Carolyn showed up and helped us tape up the window as a temporary reinforcement while we waited for the cops to show up. After 2 hours this cop showed up and said that the damage had probably been caused by a BB gun or porcelain chips which are a favorite among the glass-breaking set. We said what, do they smash a toilet or something and he said there was something about the molecular composition of porcelain that made it particularly suitable for breaking glass, although he qualified this information by stating that he was not a molecular scientist. Bryant said that perhaps it was the molecules of the porcelain “smashing into” the molecules of the glass and “breaking it”. The cop said perhaps but stressed that all this happens on a molecular level; he said they usually use spark plugs. Then he went out to his car for a moment and when he didn’t return we found him arresting some people for something. I guess that’s just what they do. He was arresting two kids for vandalism, they had been defacing a bus and the driver simply pulled over and had them arrested. They were these weedy-looking youths with great baggy pants and the officer was pulling things out of their numerous pockets: magic markers, spray-paint cans, hammers, mat knives, cell phones, a rubber mallet, stickers. They were like horrid little gremlins of destruction. The bus driver showed us how in a short span of time his bus had been spray-painted etched magic-markered sliced scratched and stickered. Then a whole bunch of cops showed up and they were all greatly confused by the idea that these vandals didn’t break the windows, that it had been someone else. Some deep undercover gangster cops showed up and looked exactly like deep undercover gangster cops and we kept making fun of them. Finally things calmed down enough that we felt it was okay to leave, and we got on the road to San Francisco.
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