My life is a really, really strange thing, and I'm forever grateful for that very cool fact of my existence. I could do without a lot of the other stuff, but I'm all about the strangeness.
I'm about to tell a possibly illegal story, so I'm going to protect the guilty. Plus, I'm an author. It could be I'm using artistic license when I'm telling this story. Anyway, I used to date this woman on and off for many years. I will call her N. She went out with this guy for a while, and I will call him A.
I met A through N after a long period of not seeing her. The previous time we'd been together had ended on pretty bad terms. Long story. But she was dating A, and we were trying to move past our differences. I try to remain friends with women I've dated, and in this one case I probably shouldn't have. As of this writing I have not seen her since maybe fall of 2020.
A lived in Hyde Park, and while we were hanging out A said that President Obama didn't live that far away from him. And he was still president at the time. He said that he'll take me by Obama's house, and I thought, why not? I didn't have anything else going on.
A said to grab a few bags. They were filled with groceries. I wondered why, but I figured he knew what he was doing. So I grabbed a couple of plastic bags that were fairly overstuffed, and we headed out down the block. As we got closer to Obama's place he said, "The bags are to make it look like we belong. We might get stopped by the Secret Service. If so, no harm, no foul. We just turn back. But they might not stop us with the bags." Not an exact quote, but that's essentially what he said. (Said the author who might be using artistic license.)
We got to Obama's block, and no one stopped us. We kept going until we could see the house, and there was some kind of party his neighbors were throwing. We got a few odd looks that we tried to ignore. And then finally a middle-aged woman stopped us and asked us what we were doing.
I let A talk. He said that we were passing through, that we'd just gone shopping and were headed home. She asked if he knew which neighborhood he was in, and he said yes. Did he know who lived here? He very sincerely said no.
She said, "I'm surprised the Secret Service didn't stop you, then." She explained who lived just a couple of houses away from us and advised us to go around the block to avoid it. So we turned back and returned to A's house. It turns out that Obama wasn't in town, so we probably weren't considered real threats. But it's a little crazy that we were able to get as far as we did. If, indeed, I'm telling a true story, and this isn't artistic license talking. Which is possible, I suppose, but as Stephen King once said, authors are liars.
Louis Farrakhan also lived pretty close to A. We drove past his house once, and I have never seen so many armed guards just standing on someone's lawn before. These guys weren't fucking around.
What can I say? My life is weird.
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