I love my neighborhood. It’s historic, ethnically diverse and close to downtown, with lovely churches and a park with a playground.

I don’t always love the random people that wander through my neighborhood, especially since a bunch of nearby low-income housing was recently demolished to build a single A baseball stadium. Worse… use of tax money… ever. Vagrancy increased, the stadium never got finished (though might one day) and a drunk guy slept in my car.

I was working at an ad agency downtown (should have been walking to work, but be there at 9 am? No). I got into the car and noticed a few things were… off. There was a weird odor in the car, but eehhh…. Might have left a lunch bag in there or something. My ashtray was open, but I don’t smoke. The faceplate on my stereo was there, but it was slightly askew and I had difficulty reattaching it. I wondered if my husband had gone somewhere after I went to sleep the night before… but no, he went to bed before I did.

It took two and a half minutes for the liquid to penetrate my pants’ defenses. “Ahhhhh!” I yelled. “Why is my ass wet? And why does it smell like… cheap beer?” Just then the coffee kick-started my brain and I realized someone had been sleeping in my car – and could still be in the station wagon hatchback. I looked nervously in my rearview mirror – couldn’t see anything. So I started babbling. “Hey! If you’re still back there, I’ve got a gun! My husband’s in the Marines! You spilled beer on my seat! I could kill you, you know.” On and on like that till I pulled into the parking garage, found the first available spot and jumped out of the car, doing fake ninja poses.

The hatchback was empty. I was so relieved that I paid little attention to my beer-soaked pants until I stepped on the elevator. The ad agency occupied class A office space downtown, sharing a building with lawyers, bankers and some kind of bottled water company. Yup. Lawyer to my left, banker to my right, vp of ad agency right behind me. I thought the malty scent wafting from my bottom might explode the elevator. “Well,” I rationalized, “if alcoholism is accepted anywhere, it’s in advertising.” I stepped off the elevator and into a firestorm of busy. This needs to happen, and that, and this other thing right now, but not until you finish this even more critical thing. Send this proposal, get a car for the team in Chicago, business report on the president’s desk now, wire the conference room for a meeting, blah blah blah raaaaarrrrghhhhhh. The office got to smell my beer pants all morning. Lunch finally rolled around and I went home to change.

Yes, I was eventually “laid off” from that job (under suspicious pretenses, i.e., “we can’t afford to pay your paltry salary anymore”), but it went deeper than that. Obviously it wasn’t just the beer pants. It was my tattoos, and my disdain for popular culture, and my mommy status (which you did not have if you were on the career track), and my overstated desire to move into copywriting, my lack of makeup, my crappy clothes and affinity for aggressive music. A few years later my kid ended up at school with some of their kids. Awwwwwkward. But not really – they pretty much forgot about me anyway.

But it all turned out ok. The drunk guy slept it off in my car and vacated before 8:45 am, I got to tell people that “a homeless guy slept in my car,” which shocked and horrified many, but was not surprising to me considering the colorful nature of my neighborhood. One of my co-workers tried to convince me to move. I still leave my car unlocked, because if someone’s going to steal something, I’d rather they open the door than break the window. Cars never get stolen in my neighborhood, only things in cars. Current contents of my car: one booster seat, one travel mug, two little hats, a few stuffed animals and a whole bunch of paper coffee cups (bad environmentalist, bad!). So they can have whatever – hopefully not the booster seat though. The factory-installed CD player doesn’t work either, and no mp3 action – they can have my damn radio; if I have to listen to Diane Rhem one more time I might go on a bender bad enough to have me sleeping drunk in my own car. Good program, but her voice makes me think of cross-stitching at grandma’s house while listening to circus music. If you come across me sprawled in some public place, just make sure I don’t have beer pants, ok?

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