A Funny Thing Happened on the Way Home from the Mass Shooting

Heads up, hearts forward: This one is more peculiar funny than ha ha funny.

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All your crying don't do no good

Come on up to the house

Come down off the cross, we can use the wood

You gotta come on up to the house

—Tom Waits, Come on Up to the House

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This picture will make sense soon enough.

It’s August, early evening, and the sun’s setting behind me as I’m driving home toward our canyon. I’m listening to Tom Waits. He manages to squeeze an entire novel into a single set of song lyrics, and his voice sounds like his mother mistook cheap cigars for binkies and ba-bas. A friend of mine once described his vocals—affectionately, mind you—as a symphony of armpits. His songs feel like life and all of its contradictions—beautiful and haunting, tragic and comic, soulful and corrupt.

My wife on the cell phone cuts into Tom’s croaking pipes. I answer. “Hey,” I say, “I’ll be home in 20.”

“Don’t come through the canyon,” she says.

“Was there an accident?” Cars regularly veer off the canyon road for any number of reasons.

“No, there’s an active shooter at Cook’s.” I look up at the mountains and several helicopters hover near the mouth of the canyon, and Cook’s Corner is pretty much the crooked grin on that mouth.

Cook’s is a “biker” bar. I put biker in quotes because most of the bikers, in my experience, are accountants or corporate lackeys wearing weekend leather and running through all the curse words they wish they could say in their HR-sanctioned weekly meetings. Sure, there are occasionally some real-life bad dudes at Cook’s, but I’m fairly certain most of them are playing dress up.

During film school, I went to Cook’s to see if we could talk a “biker” into lending us his hog for our thesis film. Student films live or die on donations. One drunk accountant responded to my inquiry like this: “Why would I let a faggot like you on my bike?” I just nodded and moved onto the next drunk accountant. I didn’t point out his lazy, unimaginative “insult,” nor did I point out that he was the one who stuck a gas-powered V-twin vibrator between his butt cheeks. We found another biker willing to help us out. For every tough guy playing dress up, there’s another guy who knows what life’s about. But I digress…

The helicopters over Cook’s just sort of hang in the air, their spotlights carving up the dimming twilight. It looks like someone shaved off a war zone and dropped it into the canyon.

“Is anyone hurt?”

She doesn’t know.

Suddenly, an ambulance flies past me toward Cook’s. A few cop cars and a fire engine follow suit. I make a U-turn. There are two ways home, one through the canyon and another through neighborhoods adjacent to The Real Housewife of Orange County. These neighborhoods eventually end and lead to a switchback that drops me down into our canyon. All the while, my wife texts me updates…

…might be a second shooter…

…canyon communities ordered to shelter in place…

…only one active shooter… confirmed…

…30 cop cars on the scene…

…several dead… several more shot… exact numbers not confirmed…

…shooter down…

All of these texts come in over the twenty minutes it takes me to drive home. My heart thumps. My skin buzzes. My breathing labors. I roll down my window as I turn down the switchbacks. This is when I hear it.

Frogs.

Sounds like millions of them, and they’re louder than I have ever heard. A symphony of ribbits, chirps, and trills—a beautiful chorus of croaks. It’s an army of Kermits covering Tom Waits.

“That’s funny,” I say to myself. And then I think, Must be the frogs’ way of saying, We know what you assholes are up to, we don’t like it, and we think you should do better.

I hear the croaking for the rest of the night.

A new piece of the story comes to light…ex-cop…drove across the country from Ohio to shoot his ex-wife…she survived a shot to the face…three others did not…

And the frogs croak…

My son tells me his friend was supposed to be at Cook’s with his mom to celebrate a birthday. They canceled at the last minute.

And the frogs croak…

A few days after the cops wrap their investigation, I drive my kids to school, past Cook’s. The yellow Police Line Do Not Cross tape is still tied to a cone. The tape twists and turns as cars zoom past.

And the frogs croak…

We see big red blotches on the trees of Cook’s parking lot. It takes a minute, but we soon realize the red is not blood—it’s the color of the tree trunk after being torn apart by stray bullets.

And the frogs croak…

Cook’s reopens for business. The community shows up—drunk accountants, corporate lackeys, and more—to make sure the joint stays open for business.

And the frogs croak…

Of course the frogs probably aren’t croaking any louder than usual. The adrenaline has my senses turned up to 11 so that I can hear footsteps, see malice in a deranged man’s vacant eyes, taste aluminum on my lips…anything it can do to keep me alive. I am never in any danger, though my nervous system hardly knows that.

And I’m no herpetologist, but frogs, I imagine, have little interest in human affairs, so I probably shouldn’t put too much stock into the croaking. The sensitivity, though, there’s something there.

Not the sensitivity that takes offense or holds grudges. Not the sensitivity that bruises easily or makes a show of coming down off the cross. No, I’m after the sensitivity that opens you up, that knows precisely how a hug warms the skin, that hears the weight of a burdened voice and rolls up its sleeves in the face of a shattered soul.

All the while, the frogs keep croaking—an orchestra of busted mufflers, a symphony of armpits, a Tom Waits chorus come to life, croaking over this broken world.

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If you want to shake this story off with something a little more silly:

• Try this one about my mother-in-law’s faux pas on a film set.

• Or this one about my mom’s faux pas at an In-N-Out Burger.

• Or this one about my shit-for-brains basset hound.

Or if you want another story that will make you sensitive to the croaking of frogs…

• There’s this one about all the darkness and the light that cuts through.

• Or this one about the lighter side of a panic attack.

Or if you want a story I wrote that I would love to see adapted into a film starring Tom Waits, consider picking up Dig, my dark crime comedy on Amazon.

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