The Roadside Killer

Several years back, on a rural stretch of Highway 1, I delivered Christina into the hands of a roadside killer... or so the story would have gone if Christina had had her way.

We were driving from San Jose to San Luis Obispo on the scenic Highway 1 along the coast. We had gotten a late start on the day, so we hadn't made it too far past Big Sur when the sun started to set.

We had just come out of a curvy area of the coast perched high on the rocky cliffs and into a straight section. Despite the fact the Highway 1 is tourist route, it felt very desolate. Nobody was out there.

Not too far off, in the middle of the road I saw something. It was a man holding some jumper cables. He was standing near a parked car.

It was dusk, no other cars were on the road, and it just seemed like a desperate situation. So I slowed and pulled to the side of the road behind his car, thinking that I might be able to help him by calling a tow truck and quickly get back on our way.

I started rolling down my window as he approached the car. As he got closer, I got a better look at him and I suddenly had second thoughts. Something was off about the guy — the way he looked, the way he moved, the way he was dressed. He was totally sketchy.

My intuition was telling me to leave right away, but my conscience was telling me that stranding somebody on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere just because I didn't like the way he looked was not cool.

But I didn't have to wrestle with that decision for very long at all because he was at my window in no time. And by "at my window", I really mean inches from my face, completely violating my personal space with his head and arms inside the car. It was one of those "oh shit" moments when you suddenly realize how vulnerable you've made yourself. I instinctively pulled my body away from him and reversed the direction of the window. His demeanor changed and he suddenly looked a little confused and maybe a bit offended.

Whoops. Did I over-react? Was I being a dick? Maybe this guy was just excited that I pulled over, or maybe he's just a close talker. Once again, my conscience got the best of me and I stopped rolling the window up at about half way. He must have gotten the message because he backed off a bit. His head was now outside of the car, which made me feel a lot better, but his hands were resting on the window—still way to close for comfort.

He was talking, but I wasn't able to hear much of what he was saying over the sound of my better judgment screaming at me to "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!".

I remember looking at his hand and thinking that if I wasn't careful, it could be around my neck in an instant. I either needed to be totally agreeable and compliant until I could get his hand away from my face, or I needed to hit the gas. I did some quick math and realized that unfortunately, hitting the gas was going to result in either me running him over, or hitting the car in front of us. So, I decided suppress my urge to bolt and just stay cool...

Me:  Do you need help? Is your car broken down? 

Him: Yes.

Me: You have cables, do you want me to pull up next to your car and I can jump it? <Pointing at the car in front of us>

Him: Oh... uh... that's not my car.

Me: Huh? Who's car is that?

Him: ... I don't know.

I looked around. Nobody else was near us. There were no other cars within view. We were next to a cliff and there was no beach access.

Me: Well, where is your car then?

Him: Uh... It's just a little ways off the road <pointing behind us to a wooded area on the non-ocean side of the road>

Me: I don't see it.

Him: Yeah, it's just a little ways off the road. We can walk there.

Me: ...

Him: I'll need your wife to get out of the car.

Me: Huh?

Him: I'll need your wife to get out of the car now.

Yeah, that's what I thought he said. We were clearly headed for trouble. But that goddamn hand was still right there. Right next to my face. So I decided, if he wasn't going to give me any space, I was going to have to create some.

I looked at Christina. She hadn't said anything this whole time, and I figured she was probably just as freaked out as I was. She said, "Yeah, sure. I'll get out.", which kind of surprised me. But then I realized... she was thinking the same exact thing that I was. This guy was way too close and we needed to get some distance fast.

But there was no way I was going to let her get out of that car. So, as she reached for the handle to open her door, I said, "Yeah, that's a great idea. Let me actually just turn the car around and get on the other side of the road just in case your cables reach."

The man lifted his hands off the window and took a step back. Immediately, I cracked the wheel and gunned it, narrowly missing him and the car in front of us. When I got about 20 feet down the road, I looked behind us. He was just standing there holding the cables in the middle of the road—right where we had left him. We were safe. I took in a deep breathe and exhaled slowly while I watched him get smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror. Christina turned around in her seat and looked out the rear window.

We had just cheated death. My head was hot and I could feel my pulse pounding in my ears. Adrenaline was pumping through my veins and I could feel sweat forming on my brow. I wanted to confess my love to Christina, howl at the moon, and cry all at once.

And just as I was about to turn to Christina to see how she was doing she yelled, "WAIT... IAN!! What are you doing?!? I thought we were going to give that guy a jump. HIS CAR'S BROKEN DOWN!"

The Homeless Orgy in My Car

In 2002 Christina and I lived in San Francisco. It was a decent neighborhood, but in San Francisco, even the decent neighborhoods are chock full with homeless people. So, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when some of them decided to have an orgy in my car. I mean, homeless people gotta have orgies too right?

It was just before dawn. I had a meeting to Petaluma that morning and I was trying to get an early start on the drive. The apartment we were renting didn't have a garage, but I was able to score an uncommonly sweet parking spot on the street directly across from our place.

Still blurry-eyed, and half asleep I walked toward my car. As I got closer, I could see that my bright orange sleeping bag, which had been in the trunk from a camping trip the previous week, was unfurled in the driver's seat. I was trying to figure out why it was in my front seat, and I was very focused on it as I approached the car. So focused on the bag, in fact, that until I was about a foot away from the car, I failed to see that a woman's face was pressed up against the passenger side window. Dead asleep.

She was a youngish black woman with unkept hair. Only her head was sticking out of my sleeping bag, so I couldn't really get a good look at her. But her mouth was hanging open and her teeth were all fangled and gross.

After the initial shock of seeing a strange face where I really hadn't expected to see a face at all, I knocked on the window right about where her cheek was pressing against the glass. She startled awake and shot me a look of half surprise, half embarassment. I'll admit that I was a little pissed until I saw that she was embarrassed. Then I felt kind of bad for her.

She slid into the passenger seat as I opened the driver's side door. She wiggled out of my sleeping bag and  was gathering up a surprising amount of her personal belongings into a bag — one of which was a pair of underwear, which totally ooged me out. I began to wonder how many days she had been sleeping in my car, since I really only used my car once a week or so when I lived there.

As she pulled herself out of the passenger side door, I stuck my head in the driver's side and was nearly overpowered by the smell of homelessness. I could see that the back seat had been pulled down to create an open area behind the front seats, which made me wonder why she was sleeping in the front seat instead of in the back. But I didn't ponder on that too long before I noticed that food had been smeared on my leather seats and a cigarette had been put out on the center console. Not cool. Whatever compassion I had for this girl evaporated at that point.

She was still gathering her things from the floor of the passenger seat, when I said to her, "You know, I understand that you have no home and that you need to sleep somewhere, and apparently I left my car unlocked, but vandalizing my car is just total bullshit. What's up with the cigarette burns and all this food smeared everywhere?" Now, if I could go back in time, I think I would have just kept my mouth shut because what she said to me next will haunt me for the rest of my life. She said "Hey man. That wasn't me. Those two dudes did that."

"Two dudes? What two dudes!?!?" I said. She then explained to me that she had been walking by late the  night before and saw two guys sitting in the driver and passenger seat, listening to music. She said that they were cute and she stopped to talk to them. One thing led to another and they invited her to get in the car with them. They put the back seat down and they all "did a bunch of stuff" in the back and then they all fell asleep. She was surprised that they weren't in the car with her when I woke her up. Apparently that look of embarassment that she had flashed me was actually a look of 'Oh my gosh, I can't believe I totally had sex with those two guys, and they left and didn't wake me up, and now I'm staring at the owner of this vehicle', which I totally should have recognized because... well... we'll just leave it at that.

Anyway, I suppressed my gag reflex, focused on happy thoughts and drove my car to the meeting. After which, I drove straight to the car wash and bought the most thorough cleaning package that they offered.

It would be awesome if the story ended here, but unfortunately, it does not. Weeks later, I was driving the car, and I noticed a bad smell. I didn't think much of it because there are all kinds of bad smells in the city, and many ways of tracking them into your car.

A week after that I drove the car again and noticed that the smell was getting worse. Kind of a rotten fruity smell. I must have been in a  hurry or something because I didn't investigate at that time either.

The next week, Christina was in my car and said it smelled like yeast. It did, and badly. And it occurred to  me that in my haste to put the whole homeless orgy in my car thing behind me, I had tossed the sleeping bag in my trunk and decided to deal with it at a later date, when I could maybe stomach it a little better.

I opened the trunk and it was clear that it was the source of the smell. I drug the sleeping bag out and opened it. Inside was a half-eated yogurt, a liquified cantaloupe, some catchup packets and bunch of other unrecognizable rotten stuff. I was disgusted, but not nearly as disgusted as the man behind the desk at he dry cleaners seemed when he asked me why I needed it cleaned. He tried telling me that they don't dry-clean sleeping bags because they use dangerous chemicals that can get trapped in the bag. But when I explained to him that some homeless people had sex in the bag and then left some food in it that rotted in my hot car for a month or so, we both decided that it would be best to either burn it or dry clean the shit out of that thing. And since it was a very expensive sleeping bag with a lot of life left in it, I decided on the later. Needless to say, at Christina's request, that's not a sleeping bag that we use for family camping trips.

But wait, there's more! About a month later we were driving the car and I was saying to Christina that I really liked the mix CD that she had put in the changer, but that it didn't seem like the kind of music that she usually listened to. She told me that she hadn't put any CDs in the car and she had never heard the music before. And after a couple minutes of silence, I think we both realized that it was music that the homeless people had left behind — the music that they lady had mentioned the "two dudes" were listening to when she walked by. Apparently we have similar taste in music. Huh. At least I got a free CD out of the deal.



Footnote: You may be asking yourself, "How did they play music without the key?" As it turns out, I had taken my car in for service a few weeks before the orgy and I had given the valet key to the shop. They had put the valet key in the glove box and not told me. When I picked the car up, I used the key on my keychain and forgot all about the valet key. I guess I should be happy that they only used it to listen to music.

The Red-Eye Strangler

Remember that time a psychopath suddenly, and without warning tried to strangle my dad on a red eye flight to Florida, and the flight attendent threatened to make an emergency landing, and homeland security met us at the gate when we landed? Well, if you were on that flight you would, because you just don't forget that kind of shit.

This is a long post—mainly because it is so bizarre that it requires a lot of explanation. I'm not sure how to condense it, so, I'll just lay it all out for you. But know this... every part of this story is the honest to God truth. This is not fiction, or an exageration of the truth. This actually happened.

In January 2009 my wife and son, my brothers, and my parents boarded a red eye flight from San Francisco to Florida on route to a cruise in the Caribbean. We were all seated in the same couple of rows of seats taking up both sides of the aisle. I was sitting in the aisle seat on the left side of the plane. To my left was my pregnant wife and my 2 year old son. Across the aisle to my right were my two brothers. My mom and dad were in the row behind me with my dad in the aisle seat. Got that? Good. Because you'll need to in order to fully understand how this went down.

While boarding the plane I had noticed that the man sitting in the seat directly in front of mine was not excited about having my toddler son sitting so close to him. How did I know this? Well, the man was snarling and making really mean faces at my kid while we were boarding and taxying, which should have been a red flag right off the bat, but at the time I was thinking that maybe the guy just had a really strange sense of humor and that we would all be asleep within a half hour of so anyway so whatever.

About an hour later, I woke up to my brother, Shea, punching me on the arm. "Dude, wake up and watch that guy in the aisle near the front of the plane. He's fucking crazy". I looked around and everybody was sleeping. The lights were low, but I could see a guy walking down the aisle toward us. As he got closer, I could see that he was probably a little over 6' and in his late 40s. It was the man who had been sitting directly in front of me, giving my kid the stink-eye. He was touching people as he walked down the aisle—mostly just shoulders and heads, but occasionally, he would stop and linger next to somebody just sort of staring at them. It was probably 1:30am and nobody really noticed because they were either asleep or wearing those stupid looking masks that cover your eyes.

I figured that he was making his was way back to his seat, but he passed his seat and kept walking. I didn't want to draw attention to me or my family by staring, but I didn't really want to lose sight of him either, so I was tracking him in my peripheral vision. I noticed that he stopped next to my dad, who, as you will recall, was sitting directly behind me. So, I turned around to see what he was doing.

He was standing sort of next to, but a little bit behind at my dad, who was asleep. He had both of his hands outstretched above my dad's bald head and he was wiggling his fingers as if he was giving my dad a pretend head massage, or maybe about to perform a magic trick. Then, with the kind of speed and force you'd expect from an alligator wrestler, from behind, the man placed one hand over my dad's mouth, and the other over his nose, while forcefully pulling my dad's head into the seat.

I wish I could say that we immediately jumped up and pulled him off, but it happened so fast, and it was unclear if the guy was falling over, or having a seaizure or what. So, I sat there in shock for a second waiting for the guy to regain his balance and let go of my dad's head. But after a couple of seconds, it became clear that wasn't going to happen. My dad, woke up about the same time that my brother and I jumped up and grabbed the man.

Three things you need to know about my dad...
1)The guy has a grip like a fucking vice. Big, overdeveloped hands and forearms from cutting and splicing cable with the phone company for 40 plus years.
2) He doesn't like unwanted attention and he really doesn't like to fly.
3) After raising three boys, having somebody jump on his back and start strangling him while he's sleeping is apparently less unsettling than you might imagine.

Naturally, thinking that this is one of his sons playing a bad joke on him, my dad rather calmly reached up, grabbed the man's forearm, and slowly started to put the crush on it. Within seconds the man let go and started hollering about his arm. He muttered something like "Hey man. You can't be grabbing my arm like that!" and walked back to his seat. Leaving us all standing there looking at each other like "What the fuck was THAT?"

We looked around expecting to see other passengers looking on in horror. But no. Everybody was sleeping, and nobody had heard anything because of the roar of the engines. As far as I could tell, nobody but my family and this crazy man, whom I'll call the strangler from here on out, had seen what happened.

A moment later the flight attendant came by and with a hint of annoyance, asked me to sit down because I was blocking the aisle. Apparently, she hadn't see anything either. So, I told her, "That man just tried to strangle my dad". But the thing was that the guy I was pointing at was now sitting calmly in his seat trying to sleep and my dad was doing his best to downplay the whole scuffle and get back to sleep as well. My mom was sitting next to my dad and you would think she would have woken up during all of this, but she was out cold—never even woke up.

So, the flight attendant kind of looked at me like I was the crazy one, said something like "Okay, go ahead and sit down.", and then walked away. And I started to wonder if I WAS the crazy one... until that strangler, sitting uncomfortably close to me turned around and started flipping off my dad and mouthing things like "Fuck You!" and "I'll fuck you up!" It was clear that he was super pissed and shit was going to go down. My brother's and I were sitting in the row between the strangler and our dad. Each time he would turn around to mouth off, you could hear a us taking our seat belts off—Click, Click, Click.

But we were on an airplane, and it's not like you can just beat the shit out of somebody mid-air and then merrily continue onto your destination. So, we kept our cool. I think we were all hoping that he would mouth off a bit, cool down, and go to sleep.

Somehow, the strangler seemed oblivious to the fact that my brothers and I were traveling with our dad and that we were ready to kick his ass. At one point he was complaining about how my dad had squeezed his arm really hard and turned around to ask if my brother and I had seen my dad grab him. Apparently, he hadn't realized that we were the other two people who stood up and grappled with him. Or he forgot. Or he was on drugs or SOMETHING. We said that we hadn't seen anything, that we were trying to sleep and that he should sleep too.

Occasionally he would get up and walk the aisles, gently touching other people while they were sleeping. He thought that a lady passing by in a dark blue sweater was the flight attendant and he grabbed and yanked her while she was walking by because he wanted to talk with her about the incident with my dad. At one point he had reached under his chair and grabbed one of my shoes, which I had taken off while I was sleeping earlier. He put it in his carry-on and placed it in his overhead bin. But I wasn't about to ruin our pending vacation over a shoe. So, I opted not to say anything. And just as I was envisioning a vacation with only one shoe and what kind of challenges that might present, he stood up, took his bag out, opened it and looked at the shoe as if he was totally confused by it. Then he placed it back under his seat without saying anything to me about it.

As the night wore on, he appeared to get angrier and angrier, and a few hours into the flight he sort of jumped out of his seat, spun around and angrily shook his fist at my dad. My dad was either asleep or doing his best to ignore the guy. In any case, he was getting no reaction. So, he sat down again.

I decided it was time to have another talk with the flight attendant. So, I hit the call button and she came to my seat. I was sitting just a couple feet from the guy and I didn't want to set him off. So, as quietly as possible, I told her that they guy was crazy, he was threatening us, and that there was probably going to be a brawl soon if she didn't step in. I'm guessing that she had been more attuned to the situation at this point because she took me serious this time.

She asked the strangler what was going on. He said that the a couple seats back had grabbed and crushed his arm. He said, "This is my first time flying, but I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to do THAT!". She must have been able to see the crazy in his eyes because she then told him very calmly that the authorities would be meeting him at the gate when we landed and that we could either make an emergency landing right now, or he could sit quietly and meet with the police when we landed in Florida.

The strangler suddenly changed his tune. He was incredulous. He said, "Did any of you see what happened? Did I do something to that guy back there? I don't remember anything... I must have been... uh... sleepwalking. Yeah, yeah. I was sleepwalking!". And for the final hour of the flight he spent most of his time trying to convince everybody around us, as well as my dad, that he had been sleepwalking, and apologized for anything that might have happened.

We landed in Florida, and just as the flight attendant had told us, plain clothes officers detained the strangler and my dad. We had been up all night, we were all a little tense, and we were in a hurry to make our connecting flight. My dad wanted nothing more but to get to our destination so he downplayed the whole thing saying something like, "Yeah, I don't know. That guy grabbed me while I was sleeping. He must have been confused or something. I don't think we should make a big deal about it".

It felt a little odd to just walk away and not peruse the whole thing further, but it was my dad who had been strangled, and if he was cool with it, then so be it. I guess you could argue that we should have taken this up further with the authorities as a matter of principle. But who needs principles when you're rushing to catch  connecting flight to the Caribbean, right?

We later saw the strangler walking around the terminal. I think we were all hoping to God that he wasn't going to end up on our next flight or on our cruise ship. Luckily, we never saw him again.