My Home Invasion
Let me tell you a bit about my home.
It looks very much like a tornado ran through a Dr. Pepper factory, then a Marlboro plant and afterward both places were plundered by looters who thought the place looked too tidy.
I am a slob. And it shows.
Soda cans and empty boxes, of cigarettes and otherwise, litter my floor. Dirty laundry accumulates in piles which have their own weather patterns at the peaks. Cobwebs dangle from every corner of every room though even the spiders seem too horrified to touch the floor.
It’s a wreck, my home, but I must like it that way. Some folks have considered my messes to be like living art and have taken photos of them for display. I’ve been accused of being a hoarder, though it’s really more about laziness than any fascination with collecting junk.
A few weeks ago, my mom, who owns the house where I live in Irwinville, decided she wanted to change insurance coverage. Unfortunately, this required the new insurance provider to need to come to my home and take photos of the inside.
This spurred my mom to require me to clean my home, which is only slightly less difficult than rebuilding a country after a war. She told me to do this during a particularly stressful period of time for me, due to health and internet problems, and I seriously started wondering if I would have a nervous breakdown.
I procrastinated and procrastinated, and just when the deadline was nearing for me to have my home clean, she told me she was just going to stick with the old coverage, which may cost a bit more, but I pay the insurance on the house anyway, and I was glad to pay it rather than have to undergo the rest of the ordeal of cleaning. Also, there was a bit of unease at having someone come through my house uninvited, like it was an invasion of privacy.
Well, I thought I was off the hook for having someone invade that privacy, but... fate seemed to have other plans in store for me.
I got home from work last Tuesday and set about playing video games and adding to the collection of cans on the floor. This lasted for hours, but after all that Dr. Pepper, a bladder has to give at some point. So at about 9 p.m. I pried myself from the floor and headed to the bathroom. However, before I got there, I noticed something out of place, which is difficult to do in the third-world environment of my home.
Outside my bathroom is the hallway leading to my laundry room, where there is a backdoor to my home. In the middle of one of the piles of laundry was the entire frame of my backdoor window.
“What the %@&*?!” I said aloud.
Then I noticed the door was open and ajar, the wind whipping through the curtain. Someone, it seemed, had broken into my home.
Apprehension crept through me like vines, and I backed away from the door, worried the intruder was still in my home. I backtracked through the house, keeping a vigilant eye toward every dark corner and picked up my phone to call 911, but I had slovenly left the phone off its charger and it was dead. I would need to walk to my mom’s to call.
Because I’m too fat to comfortably sit in the floor playing video games in blue jeans, I was in my boxer shorts at the time, so I needed to dress. Worried a burglar would pounce on me at any moment, I grabbed a knife to defend myself, though it was the kind of small, just-for-show knife that was more likely to cause skin irritation than an adequate defense. So, holding my knife aimed toward the back of the house, I pulled on a pair of pajama pants, backward I later learned, and some shoes and headed outside. Unfortunately, I had never gotten to chance to use the bathroom, which had, especially combined with my fear, become a rather urgent problem, so I fulfilled my biological prerogative outside as my forefathers did, trying to appear like I was about to enter my car. As the burglar could have been lingering outside, I still carried my knife, though I was careful not to circumcise myself.
Afterward, I walked down the road to my mom’s, hiding my knife from the passing cars so I didn’t look like a homicidal maniac on the loose. Then, when I knocked on the door to my mom’s and my stepdad answered, he turned on the light to look out the window of the door. Seeing the knife, I’m surprised he opened the door. I imagine he thought, “Dusty’s finally lost it.”
He returned with me to my home, as I wanted him to help me inspect the house for intruders and make sure there was no other possible explanation than burglary. He surmised that someone had stood on my back step and kicked the window in, which seemed hardly feasible to me, because if so, the burglar would have been either Spider-Man or the Karate Kid, considering the thin steps up to my backdoor. After my stepdad returned to his house to call 911, or so I thought, I installed a light bulb in my laundry room and discovered that the burglar had thrown a concrete half-sphere, something used to attach reflectors on the side of the road, through the window. So superheroes were eliminated as suspects.
Shortly later, my mom arrived because, though she called 911, they required my exact street address, which she didn’t know, in order to respond to my house. I thought I was lucky I was not being murdered at the time.
With the correct address, she called on her cell phone, and we waited for a deputy to arrive. Meanwhile, she called one of my neighbors, who as it turns out, spotted someone lurking outside my backdoor suspiciously at about 4 p.m. that afternoon, some 5 hours before I discovered the break-in. I guess the knife was not needed after all.
Deputy Bob Billotte arrived and asked, as I led him through the house, if anything was missing. I jokingly remarked, “How could I tell?” while showing him the unnatural disaster which is my home. But in truth, nothing was missing. There were probably $30 worth of dollar bills laying about my floor, all of which have since been picked up for all you prospective thieves, and none of my few valuables were taken.
However, I was a bit disappointed the burglar didn’t take the broken down television which one day I will have to remove myself. The burglar could have done me a huge favor by cleaning up a little!
Instead, maybe he was scared away by the mess. I honestly don’t know what could have caused him to not steal anything after brazenly breaking into a home on a busy highway out in the open in broad daylight.
Maybe he decided he’d find more value for less trouble digging through a real garbage dump.
Originally published in The Ocilla Star on Dec. 7, 2011. I later learned that the burglar stole a tray full of change which also included my class ring, my back-up pair of glasses and other items. He was later revealed to be one of my best friends, who pleaded guilty as a first offender. After some time, we're friends again today. Turn the cheek, y'all.
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