MAN IN TREE

A seventeen year old male had climbed a tree outside of Myrie Bledsoe's home. The distraught woman discovered him outside her bedroom window at two in the morning and called the authorities.

Two fire trucks and four police cars arrived on the scene to assist in the removal of the man. In the meantime, he fell out.

The minor received a few bruises. He was taken into custody, and later released to his parents. Charges were not pressed.
-- The Times-West Virginia circa 1982

I was the kid in the tree. The story was all wrong, but funnier the way they told it. I’d been staggering along an alley, so drunk that I began hallucinating. There were glowing eyes in the darkness all around me. I became convinced – through the extrasensory perception of inebriation -- that a Satanic human sacrifice was underway in a large house that abutted the alley. I could just feel the evil, sort of like our President can. I was God’s chosen crusader, and had to rescue the victim. I climbed the house, or a tree – maybe I flew! I pried open a gabled window.

I must have stumbled around in the attic and knocked something over. Footsteps thundered in the house below. The Satanists were coming! I scurried back out the window onto the roof. I stood on the rain gutter three stories in the sky and watched the ground spin below me. The Satanists would soon be upon me, tearing my flesh with their ravenous teeth! The only reasonable solution was to leap into a nearby tree.

I caught bark in the face, chest, and thigh, and slid down until a sharp branch snagged me by the armpit. I clutched for dear life. I heard a window open behind me, and the reassuring sound of a shotgun being pumped.

"Don't move, or I'll blow your motherfuckin' brains out! Cops is on they way."

“Okay.”

Between the leap, the bark burn, the suspension at an unknown height in the chasm of night, and the rifle pointed at my noggin, I had forgotten all about Satan and begun to sober up.

Four cruisers and two fire trucks did show up. The cops yelled for me to come down. I inched down till I was within reach. Officer Chuck Freeland -- a tall, burly cop with whom I had a mutually antagonistic history -- jumped up, grabbed my shirt, yanked me from the tree. He slam-dunked me on my belly. He stepped on my ass and cuffed me tightly, then threw me on my back in the cruiser. The whole maneuver was breathtakingly refreshing.

There was a little more roughing up at the station. Freeland accused me of stealing one of my grandfather's company trucks. Grandpa had a pest control business with a fleet of company vehicles. One had been "borrowed" earlier the same night. It might've been me. Who can say? At any rate, I resented the accusation. I charged at Freeland, calling him a sonofabitch. His little partner -- a draconian dweeb, famous for giving his own mama a speeding ticket -- hit me across the collar bone with his night stick.

I landed on the floor and sat there, recovering.

"I'm gonna throw up."

Officer Runt Nazi slid the office trashcan over to me and I puked in it.

There's really nothing more to tell. My father or mother arrived and took me home. I think.

The story hung at The College Lunch for years. I didn't know it had been posted. I didn't drink there. I preferred demon-peopled midnight alleys, bushes under bridges, bikers’ pads, and other tourist spots. One night, my good friend Jack Hebdon, now dead of liver failure -- truly -- and I were exchanging war stories, and I mentioned the tree episode.

"That was you?" He told me about the posting. He'd been laughing for years at the story, and at the poor sap who’d been stuck up a tree.

I told him it was a fitting metaphor for my life.