G and I trecked up north to Camarillo last night, to have dinner with my folks. When we get together with my family, one fun game that my mom likes to play is “let’s all remember stories about my son Michael, and every stupid or embarrassing or illegal thing he’s ever done.” It’s supposed to be good fun, kind of like a sitcom episode, with the added benefit of building my character by forcing me to be humble. Or some crap like that.

So, I was reminded of an episode from my elementary school years, when I was hired by the next-door neighbor to feed their dog for a week while they were on vacation. As most of you probably know, being hired to dog-sit is pretty much an open invitation to rummage through the entire house, find out all of your neighbors naughty secrets (my first and last introduction to edible undergarments), explore their finances, things of that nature. The tricky part is figuring out exactly how much time you can spend in their house while you’re supposed to be feeding the dog before your mom becomes suspicious and sends your always-too-honest older brother over to check on you. It’s like an episode of 24, counting down the minutes of unrestricted privacy invasion before Jack Baur shows up and crashes the party.

On one trip, I was almost out of happy-fun time when I noticed that they had a fire extinguisher in the pantry. I pulled it out, tested the pressure by spraying it all over their kitchen, then put it back and quickly cleaned up. And by cleaned up, I mean I wiped off maybe 20% of the white powder from the counter with a single pass of a paper-towel. At age 10, this counted as your basic deep-clean. Still does.

The next day, our neighbors came home, saw the mess in the kitchen, saw the powdery footprints leading into and out of the pantry, and using the clever science of “Reason”, figured out exactly what had happened. They didn’t make a big deal out of it, but they wanted to let my folks know that they were going to deduct the cost of recharging the fire extinguisher from the amount I was being paid for the gig. My mom confronted me about the incident, and I, of course, did what every troublemaker kid does when confronted with obvious and overwhelming evidence of his misdeeds.

I completely denied it. Denied that I knew anything about it. Suggested that the neighbors were making the whole thing up.

My mom believed me.

She marched back over to the neighbor’s house, stated that her son was not responsible for the mess, and suggested that is was probably the neighbor’s own son, who had come home on leave from The Marines, thrown a party for some friends, and that the white powder was obviously cocaine.

Yes. Cocaine. My mom accused our neighbor’s son, the marine, not only of snorting enough coke to fill a low-flying Cessna, but also of leaving roughly 480 grams of the stuff in piles on the counter.

I, of course, said nothing.

It was not my finest hour.