The cops broke up my friend's house party--and the strip poker game we were playing in his parents' dining room--the moment I tossed my jeans aside and sat back down. My shoes, socks, hoodie, and tee shirt were already strewn about down there on the floor. It was just me and my boxer briefs when a male voice from the front entry hall yelled, "Shit! Cops!" and a female voice shrieked.
It was the shriek that got to me. Something in the terror of it launched me. I smoked the other five half-naked girls and guys to the back door of my friend's house. I hauled ass across the deck, down the steps, around the covered pool, and over the fence. Maybe it took me twelve seconds.
My football scholarship was on the line. I was only eighteen; the cops would give me a minor-in-possession charge, and no way coach would gut a misdemeanor conviction just to have me on his team.
I heard other partygoers far behind me, hissing and calling to one another.
"Oh, shit!"
"They're coming!
"Hurry!"
"Go! This way!"
Then, I saw the flashlights bobbing and jerking to the right and left of me. The cops were encircling my classmates. Their voices and commands spurred me faster. I was in a dead sprint, and it wasn't long before I knew one of the officers had peeled off to chase me down. I heard the heavy footfalls. I saw my shadow as the cop's flashlight pumped up and down right behind me.
He was so close on my heels that the choice came down to either giving up or doing something extremely stupid on such a cold night. I rocketed across the street and ran down the cement path toward the community dock. A second after my feet began pounding on the wooden slats of the pier, I hear the thuds of his boots.
"Stop!" the basso voice hollered.
No fucking way. The end of the dock approached, and I shortened my last two steps to prepare my body for a forward-leaping dive. I launched. The air was sharp as I sailed like a dart. The way I knifed through the frigid water, I knew in my heart it had been a spectacular dive. Like fucking Michael Phelps off an Olympic pool's starting blocks.
But, shit! The water was shockingly cold, even with my flight instinct rampaging. Still gliding under the surface, I dolphin kicked three times, breast-stroking with my arms and keeping away from the surface.
More.
More, and my lungs began to fight me.
More, and I battled the impulse to gasp for air. The muscles of my diaphragm lurched, and I swallowed back a guttural cry. Two more strokes.
Two more.
Two more.
Desperate, I broke the surface as quietly as I could. Stifling the instinct to pant and groan, I took a few long, painfully silent breaths before pivoting my body to find the cop.
The flashlight was there, seventy yards away at the end of the dock, searching for me. While I fought for breath, the light crossed over me once, but it didn't come back. It moved on, scanning the surface of the dark water.
"Holy shit," I whispered. The lake ice was all gone, of course, but late March was no joke. "Keep moving," I huffed. Spinning away from the cop, I saw the light from a private dock across the water. Maybe a quarter of a mile. It was my best option. Time to go. I braced myself for the cold and ducked under the surface. Then, I continued my swim.
Halfway across the lake, I decided it was safe to make some noise, and I swam along the surface, stopping every half-minute or so to check if any cops were searching around my destination.
Nope.
I didn't know much about hypothermia, but I was learning quickly. My arms and legs began tiring and aching. The idea that I could actually drown crossed my mind.
By then, just twenty yards separated me from the private dock and the ladder at the end of it. The moment my hand found purchase on the rungs, I realized two things. First, I knew how weakened the cold swim had made me; my fingers could barely clutch the metal. The muscles of my body were all slow-motion sluggish and old-man weak. I needed to get out of the water.
The second thing I discovered was that my picture-perfect dive had robbed me of my boxer briefs. Stripped them clean off me. I was totally naked.
I climbed out and found I could not stand. The strength to do it left me like air from an untied balloon. I collapsed onto my side. Shivering, I balled up my arms and legs for warmth.
It was not freezing outside. I vaguely remembered my Dad saying something about low 40s and to take a jacket if I was going out. Mine was on an overfull coat hook back at my friend's house. The rest of my clothes were in a haphazard pile in his dining room. The whole situation struck me as insane, and I started laughing.
But not for long. The uncontrollable shaking of my body interrupted my mirth like a fit of hiccups. This was not working, I realized. Staying put was not making me any warmer. I needed to move, get my muscles warm again.
It took a minute, but I finally got to my feet and left the dock. The backyard of the expansive lakehouse with the private dock had no fence, so I jogged into the side yard and stopped. Turning toward a low, airy humming sound, I saw the little shutters of a vent--maybe a dryer vent--built into the home's siding. The open slats pushed air.
I ran to it and found a gift from heaven: warm air. "Oh, that's so good," I gasped.
Where I stood, the vent was about neck-height. I bathed under the flow of air, turning front and back as if it were a warm shower.
After some time, I heard a car on the street crossing in front of the house. Popping onto my toes, I looked. It was a police cruiser.
"Shit!" I hissed, ducking.
It passed onward. Carefully rising, I resumed my air shower and took stock of the situation.
It was about two in the morning on a Sunday. Naked, I had no phone on me, and there was little chance of me finding someone out and about who might let me borrow theirs. "Sure, Naked Dude, you can borrow my phone."
I had a possible answer to my problems, but I didn't like it. Shoving the thought aside, I looked for another way out.
Home, I thought, was about twelve miles away. Half of the trip would be through rural countryside, but the other half would be on suburban and neighborhood streets. No.
My friend's house would still be teeming with cops. There would probably be pissed-off parents, too, arriving to pick up their freshly ticketed minors-in-possession. If I could wait a few hours for things to clear, then I could go back. I'd have my clothes and a place to crash.
As if responding to that idea, the air from the vent abruptly quit. Forty-degree air returned to envelop my body once more.
"Shit," I whispered. "Shit-shit."
There was no other choice, really. It was less than a mile from here.
I shivered and rubbed my arms.
Scrambling up the side yard, I made it to the corner of the house. I glanced left and right. All was clear, so I darted across the street and into the woods.
I was going to my mom's place--my real mom.
***
It continued to confuse me that my mom had remained so near. We didn't talk. She didn't come to any of my games or visit. What was the point of staying in town? When she got out of prison, I figured she would head back to California and her old friends there. Nope. Stayed in the area and got a shitty little place not ten miles from Dad's. I didn't know what she was doing to make ends meet. Probably something illegal.
My birth mother left us when I was nine. Dad took care of me, and a few years later--just about the time Dad was getting remarried--we found out my mom had been arrested for burglary. She and a female friend had broken into a junkyard and stolen copper scrap--evidently such stuff was valuable. Since she already had a DUI and two drug possessions on her record, the judge gave her eight years. She served four.
Dad took me to visit her in prison once, but she wouldn't see either of us. We never went again. I had no idea who the woman really was. Dad would not offer much about her. When I asked, he would say things like, "She made her own choices in life," and that would be the end of it.
There were pictures of her, buried inside boxes and stored in our basement. She had an ethnic Jewish or middle-eastern vibe to her. It was strange that her maiden name was Jones and not Schaffzin or Issawi or something. The exotic shape of her face and her coloring made her look foreign. Long, thick, and wavy black hair. Dark eyes. One could call her skin tan, but this coloring wasn't from the sun. The woman who gave birth to me was mesmerizingly, exotically beautiful.
I didn't look anything like her.
About once every few years after she left, I would sneak to the basement and look at those pictures of her, trying to figure her out. Sometimes, the photos made me angry, and I hated her. Other times after looking, I would set them down and stare at the concrete blocks that surrounded me down there, wiping tears from under my eyes in the cold silence.
I drove by her crummy house from time to time, half-hoping to glimpse her, half-praying I never would. The place was a dump when she first moved in. It was a one-story shoebox, maybe 800 square feet--a tiny step above a trailer.
