Category: Motley Kruse

I love television. Loves it! The only thing that is better than watching television is eating while watching television. I especially love what I call “helper television.” It’s vulgar entertainment with a psychology lesson—all rolled into one fun-filled half hour.

Do you live in a filthy, dysfunctional, crap-clogged house? Then I guarantee one of your favorite shows will be The Learning Channel’s magical Clean Sweep. Each week, a team of attractive, non-judgmental strangers descends upon a burgeoning garbage house. This elite team consists of a carpenter, a perky-breasted hostess, a designer, and an organizer/life coach. They pick the two worst rooms of the hovel, enforce a mandatory yard sale, slap some paint on the walls, and run a Swiffer.

All the denizens of the remade cave cry and swear that they’ll keep it clean this time, and that they didn’t know organized living could be so easy. But we the viewers know that as soon as the cameras shut down and the carpentry truck pulls away, Tearful Emotional Mom will start ferreting away scraps of quilting fabric and dried flowers with all the spastic energy of a squirrel in late November. When there is no room left, she’ll stuff her cheeks with it. Why? Because she just never knows when she’ll see damask at that price again.

Not to be outdone, Gruff Dad in Ill-Fitting Shorts will begin re-hoarding NFL bobblehead figurines and antique stereo equipment. Why? Because half of his tunes are on vinyl, and those bobbleheads (still in the box, natch), will double in value forty years from now. Soon, their bedroom will be even more cramped than before because the TV carpenter left brand-new shelving to fill.

It’s like giving the house gastric bypass surgery. The doctor has cleared out the pipes, but the brain of the house is still a pathological overeater. And putting this process on TV is even more brilliant because people who are attracted to that kind of show probably know a thing or two about living in filth. (Not me, of course!) And people who watch that show are actively not cleaning their houses while they watch that show. Can you hear Satan laughing?

My very favorite helper television show has got to be the Food Network’s Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee. Semi-Homemade is the Insane Clown Posse of cooking shows—mediocre pre-made ingredients with a layer of busywork added. It’s a cooking show for people who cannot cook at all but love to pretend. Instead of raw ingredients, her recipes go something like this: Buy an angel food cake. Smear Cool Whip on top. Thrust a Barbie into the center. Presto: Barbie’s Hot Tub Party Cake!

Sandra caps off every episode by stirring up a big pitcher of girlie cocktails as a reward for all our hard work. Instead of just slapping grocery-store rotisserie chicken on the plate, Sandra will dump half a jar of salsa over it and accent the plate with a tiny plastic sombrero. And you know what would go extra good with that? Giant margaritas! Olé!

Sandra’s show always includes a signature cocktail related to the meal. For a birthday, it might be Sandra’s famous “Icing on the Cake” martinis (peach Schnapps, Kahlúa, and vodka in a sugar-rimmed glass). For a Halloween treat, the tantalizingly named “Witches’ Brew” (Mountain Dew and vodka served from a plastic jack-o’-lantern bucket, with a sugared rim). I wish they just called the program Half Baked, starring your favorite alcoholic neighbor … Sandra Lee!

For me, the only thing that could be better than watching TV and eating would be watching TV, eating, avoiding cleaning the house, and getting sloshed all at the same time. Because I am so good at this kind of multi-tasking, I should have my own show. I’d call it The Least You Can Do, with your host, efficiency expert Colleen Kruse! I would demonstrate the ultimate in streamlined existence. For my kitchen segment, I’d prepare a feast of box wine and Dinty Moore stew: Hobo party! For my housekeeping segments, I’d show my viewers how to use sheets and blankets as window treatments. You won’t use actual drapes or blinds because you’ll sleep in your recliner in your bathrobe, snug as a swarm of bedbugs. Now that you won’t be needing that bedroom, the home-finance segment will show you how to market that space as prime rental property. Working from home is so now.

And now a word from our sponsors: Febreze Air Freshener and Colt 45 malt liquor.

Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at mscolleenkruse@yahoo.com.

We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of—line dancing, acting innocent after unleashing something silent but deadly, heresy. If by chance you just thought to yourself, “Not me!” Well, the heck with you. Tell you what. Save yourself some time and page through to another article, because I think you’re lying.

Twenty years ago, I had a job saying suggestive things over the phone. I’d like to say that I only did it once, and that it was just that one time for the money … but I was good at it. I was so wicked good at it that I worked for two different syndicates simultaneously. I was a telemarketer. I sold quickie carpet cleaning in the afternoons, and a disreputable knockoff of Happenings Books in the evenings.

I started out innocent enough. I was seventeen, inexperienced, tired of waitressing, and I didn’t have the hair for retail. I saw a listing in the want ads: “Work in a rock ’n’ roll atmosphere.” Air-conditioned office. Base pay $6.50 an hour, with generous commissions. It was July and I was living in a fourth-floor-walk-up-one-bedroom microwave oven. It was the air conditioning that sold me.

Refrigerate hell all you want; it still stinks of sulfur. The new boss gave me a script, a stack of contacts, and a phone, and showed me the rack where I could hang my ethics. They didn’t order me to lie exactly, but unless you were pretty limber with the truth you wouldn’t ring the sales bell on the wall beside the manager’s desk very often. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thy integrity. And if it tolled three times before noon you’d get free pizza for lunch.

I couldn’t go back to my old grease-pit restaurant job. I had left, pompously boasting to my manager that I was leaving to work in an office. I had to keep the phone-bank gig for at least a couple of months, by which time the jerk would be fired. (Restaurant managers I worked for never lasted longer than a trial magazine subscription.) So, for the time being, my rent (and pride) depended on convincing shut-ins that they should invest in half-priced oil-change coupons.

Rationalization kicked in right away. People have to get their carpets cleaned, right? They may as well hire us—even if our rent-a-drunk servicemen were really off-season carnies. That’s not the way I pitched it, though. I did voice profiling. If I heard an age tremor in your voice, I filibustered about the eighteen kinds of sick that come from dust mites. Grandmas respond well to scare tactics. “Do you ever babysit your grandkids? Do they play on the floor?”

If I heard the voice of a tired man, my voice would turn warm and liquid. Once that lock de-icer went to work, I’d shove the key right in and twist it. Because you know, if you’re a weary, hardworking man, “you sure do have things you’d rather do on Saturday than suck crud out of your carpets.”

The evening gig’s “rock ’n’ roll atmosphere” was a portable radio set to KQ and a twenty-eight-year-old boss with a mullet and sport-coat sleeves jacked up to his forearms. The coupon-book tycoon’s office “adornment” looked like she was right out of a ZZ Top video. She wore tight miniskirts and heels, sucked on lollipops and used crayons to fill in supermarket coloring books. She could manage all this while cradling the phone to her ear and talking to friends for the entire shift.

But she did less harm than I did. She was innocuous. I hustled strangers, sticking on them like a burr, hyping mom-and-pop businesses in neighborhoods I knew nothing about. I told the callers about great deals right in their own backyards, available to them only if they bought this thirty-dollar book. “Do you ever go to Emily’s Pizzeria?” I chirped to one mark. “You can get a free pitcher of Coke with the purchase of a large two-topping.” “Emily’s has been closed for three months,” she informed me. I hung up to spare us both any more of my lies.

As penance for these crimes of my youth, I listen to every single sales call that I get. I don’t buy, but I do listen. I won’t be needing free Coke, anyway. I recently got an email from the widow of an African king promising me a fortune in exchange for a small, temporary loan.

People will tell me anything. I have that kind of face. I got it from years of practice. When I was a waitress, I’d listen to people all day long and smile at nice folks and nitwits alike. My livelihood depended on my genial expression. In time, it bled over into my daily life. My bland, Mona Lisa smile would win people’s confidence even if they hardly knew me. Maybe they were picking up that I’m interested in people. You know—I am you and you are me and we are all together. We’ve all got stories we’re dying to tell, even if it’s the kind of thing you pray won’t show up in your obituary.
At the greasy spoon where I used to work, one of the regulars was an old veteran with a face like five miles of gravel road. Late one night when it was just the two of us, he looked up from his drink and blurted out, “I’m a cross-dresser.” He would have been a better Charles Bukowski impersonator, but I just refilled his cup and commiserated about finding the correct undergarments for trapeze dresses.
After my standup comedy performances, people would often tell me stories that were funny tinged with awful, like they were looking for permission to laugh off the painful part. I remember one regular-looking guy, maybe fifty, thick-set, plaid wool jacket, and brown thinning hair. His blue eyes were dancing and he made a beeline to me and said, “I got to tell you a story.
“I got a dog, a golden retriever name of Gracie. She’s my girl, and she’s a good one. We go everywhere together, best pals. She’s a long hair, and every summer we got to get ’er a haircut. It’s better for when she swims, my wife says, ’cause that way Gracie can’t shake water all over the kitchen floor and then it’s also better in case of ticks.”
The guy was gearing up to tell me the next part.
“I can’t have money.” I let my eyes run a quick scan of the man. He was holding car keys. He could pilot a car, but he could not be trusted with money. Where was this story going? I held my smile. “It just runs through my fingers, and it’s better if my wife takes care of that side of things. She keeps us out of the poorhouse.”
He leaned in conspiratorially, looking from left to right to make sure no one else was listening in and then he continued.
“One Saturday last summer, she gives me a twenty-dollar bill and says for me to go get Gracie her haircut. Then she takes off for the day with her girlfriends. Well, I’m thinking I’d rather have the twenty, and I could just get out my beard clipper and cut Gracie’s hair myself.”
After he said that, I figured you could practically cue the disaster music, but the guy had to get it out. “So, I’m doing it in the kitchen, that way it’s easier clean up. The top half is no problem at all, even the tail. I’m talking to her the whole time and I’m thinking that this’ll be easy.
“Then, we get to the underside, a little trickier, because of the longer strands. I lean over her, kind of spooning her backside to keep her comforted and still. I’m doing all right, Gracie’s doing all right, and then the doorbell rings.
“Gracie jumps in my hands, and then … zoop! I just shaved one of her teats clear off. It’s an accident you know.
“And everything happened real fast after that.
“The doorbell rings again and I let go of Gracie to run and go get rid of whoever it is. It’s someone looking for a different address. Some lady, she’s going to a baby shower and she’s got a stack of presents in her hands.
“I open the door and say wrong house, but not before the gal hears Gracie howling to beat the band and zooming all over the house, trailing blood like a Friday the Thirteenth movie. All over my wife’s beige couch, the carpet.
“I slam the door on the lady, and I coax Gracie back into the kitchen with some raw bacon. She’s still bleeding, I’m nuts, still thinking that somehow I can get out of this. So, I get behind her and double up and hold her tight. I got a fistful of paper towels on the wound, pressing down to try to stop the bleeding.
“Old Gracie quiets down ’cause she’s got the open bacon package in front of her, and we just sit there for a while. Every time I took the paper towels off, the bleeding would start again. I couldn’t figure out how to Band-Aid it, so we just sat there. And, that was how my wife found us.
“You know,” he said, “Gracie forgave me a long time before my wife did.”
“I know,” I said. “I know how it is.”

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a lot of things. I wanted to be Carol Burnett. I wanted to be a trapeze artist, performing death-defying loop de loops high above the crowds while wearing a dazzling bikini made entirely of rubies and sapphires. I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. I also wanted to work with monkeys in some way, but I wasn’t totally sure what a person could do with monkeys that wouldn’t involve being a monkey doctor, which I was pretty sure would involve a lot of expensive schooling. I was also pretty sure that funny kindergarten teachers didn’t make that kind of money, even if they did moonlight as trapeze artists on the weekends. So, I figured I’d have to settle for being a monkey babysitter. On the upside, that would involve feeding monkeys from baby bottles. On the downside, it would also involve changing monkey diapers.
The point is: I never wanted to be a wife. I never dreamt about it, like you hear about some girls doing. I never once imagined my wedding, or honeymoon, or any kind of happily ever after with anybody but me, my circus friends, my tidy classroom full of brilliant children, and a smattering of mischievous primates.
I was a TV junkie. Watching television, I saw being a wife as just about the worst thing that could happen to you. It wasn’t as bad as today, when every TV wife is trim and sassy and confident yet married to a dump truck, but it was still pretty bad. In my TV adolescence, the wives yelled and were married to doofuses who were either controlling egomaniacs and/or bumbling bigot nano-wits. You know, inmates like Alice Kramden or Edith Bunker. Either that or the TV wives oozed a kind of sanitized, tranquilized, infantilized version of grown-up womanhood that spooked me to my core. Like Caroline Ingalls or Mrs. Cunningham.
There were times when I longed to reach my hand through the looking-glass screen and slap some sense into Carol Brady, tell her to wake up out of her suburban Seconal fog and go to school. Tell her to quit living vicariously through Marcia and get out there and live! Damn it! Live! She could afford to do it. And no one would miss her. Alice did all the work around that place, anyway.
I got older, and my dreams changed. I wanted to be Steve Martin. I still wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. I wanted to be a rock singer, wailing out my tortured yet stylishly sexy soul in an arena full of dancing fans. (I’d still be wearing the sapphire-and-ruby bikini, but now with Kiss monster boots.)
The point is, being a wife was still the last thing on my mind—even after I had my kids. Still, I eventually did get married…no sitcom, despite its cancellation after two seasons. And then a funny thing happened. I met this guy. We hit it off. He had a line for it—he said the rocks in his head fit the holes in mine. I wanted to hang around with him as much as I could every day, and getting married seemed like the perfect way to rope that dogie.
So I’m a wife. And I still have crazy dreams. I no longer want to be Carol Burnett or Steve Martin; I want to be me, but a better version of me. I would rather take a rusted ninja star to my windpipe than supervise a roomful of five-year-olds. Hanging out with my husband’s writer pals satisfies my desire to volunteer time with nit-picking chimps.
I haven’t surrendered all of my fantasies. I would still love to strut around in a jeweled bikini and dragon boots like some video-game babe. I will have to do this one on my own, since my husband refuses to wear his emerald codpiece and cape (except when the Packers are in the playoffs).
I even have new crazy dreams. I would like to own a solar-powered bed and breakfast. I would like to produce an evening news show for cable access where sock puppets deliver all the news. And of course, there is this guy I’m married to. I want to hang out with him, every day.

I just saw a television commercial for a self-parking car. I don’t know, folks, but it seems that if you just had one of these, you could add an automatic flushing toilet and a pre-mixed Smirnoff canned drink and Friday night would pretty much plan itself. If they could figure out how to apply the technology that lights those handheld neon glow sticks to heat up SuperAmerica bean burritos (Just snap and shake!), you’d have the complete date night.
When my family got its first microwave oven in 1979, I saw our brave new world as a hopeful place best typified by the vision of the tiny, expanding pillow of popcorn through a frosted glass window. But now, I am fearful of our future. Things are moving too fast. We haven’t evolved enough to deal effectively with all of these time-saving devices.
I don’t really have an issue with the self-flushing toilet. But it is not truly a time-saving device. (A combination self-activating bidet and toilet flusher would be a time-saving device, perhaps.) I’m all in favor of never ever again entering a public restroom and finding out the horrid answer to “What’s behind Door Number Two?” but I think we are doing ourselves a disservice when we create a civilization where we are losing, step by step, our will to perform basic hygiene. Flushing is what makes us human. We give up that responsibility at our peril.
As I cast this stone of judgment, I fully expect it to ricochet and hit me in the forehead. More than once, my husband has had to caution me that the Roomba will not work as a lint remover. It is a well-known fact that I once threw away an entire sinkful of dirty dishes rather than wash them. Although, in my defense, I can say the dishes weren’t mine. They were Bill’s. He was my roommate, and I was tired of cleaning up after him. In place of the discarded place settings, I got Bill a single dish shaped like a pie plate. I figured he could use it for both of his basic food groups: cereal and pizza. I was even thoughtful enough to have “Bill” inscribed on it so he could tell it apart from Tuffy’s dog dish. Shortly after that display of thoughtfulness, though, he threw me out. I’m not sure what he replaced me with, but I hope it was self-cleaning.
I have seen the future, my friends, and it isn’t pretty. We’re not soaring into a glorious new era of space travel and adventure. We’re puttering into the future on Segways, and carting our flabby butts around the mall on scooters, buckets of Mrs. Fields’ cookies in our hammy paws.
Cars are accelerating our decline. OnStar opens the door for us when we lock the keys inside. Rear-view video cameras spare us the discomfort of looking behind ourselves when we put the car in reverse. If the Global Positioning System told us to drive off a cliff, would we? Apparently so. A German motorist followed his map computer’s instructions and crashed right into a construction zone port-a-potty. (Luckily for him, it was a model without auto-flush.) We don’t need the HAL 9000 to kill us: We’ve got onboard navigation in the Benz.
So, what are we saving all this time and effort for? Quality life experiences with family and friends? Here’s my latest life-quality experience: My children don’t even get up and walk down two flights of stairs to ask me what’s for dinner anymore. They text message my cell phone.
I have “LFTOVRS” programmed into my speed dial so I don’t have to type it each time I respond. That saves me lots of time and effort every night.

The first time I smoked pot, I was in eighth grade. I smoked it. I inhaled. And I enjoyed it. The inaugural inhalation wasn’t planned or anything. My best buddy and I happened to be snooping around her older sister’s bedroom, and we happened upon her hookah. Holla! Just having that opium den artifact in our hot little hands was enough to make the to-smoke-or-not-to-smoke decision for us. It was a four-foot-tall, carved affair with tentacles jutting out all over—the stuff of Janis Joplin album covers and seventies cop movies.

If the events of that afternoon had been a syllogistic proposition, it would have broken down something like this: Hookah is to bored eighth-grade nerd girls as rabbit hole is to Alice in Wonderland. My friend and I looked at each other and wordlessly began rummaging through the dirty clothes on the floor of her sister’s bedroom for a Bic lighter.

Four hours after bringing that hookah to my lips for the first time, I was mapping out a plan for where I could purchase this magical substance, how much it would cost, how I was going to afford it, where I would smoke it, and, of course, how not to get caught. I soon deduced that the best time for me to do it was before my first class, back behind the convenience store in the strip mall next to the school. Conveniently, that was also where I could buy it.
What saves this story from being a script for an after-school special is that a couple of weeks into my rigorous self-medication regimen, my grades … shot through the roof! For the first time, it wasn’t at all difficult to concentrate, and all of my previously hated subjects (and their previously hated teachers) seemed infinitely and positively fascinating.

That year, I got my first A in math after toking up and stumbling onto the realization that all math is plaid—as in, all mathematical communications are interrelated grids of different values. Calculus is really just a specific pattern of tartan. Once you know that, you can figure out pretty much everything.

Full disclosure: I did become a somewhat less social creature than I’d been before starting to smoke pot, and I gained ten pounds. But that’s what happens when you’re holed up in your room—cranking Hall and Oates, reading Beowulf, and laughing like a bowl full of jelly while stuffing your face with Fritos.

It’s just been established that THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Before we all start mulching for the backyard herb garden, here’s a quote from the Scripps Research Institute (aka Team Ganja): “Our results provide a mechanism whereby the THC molecule can directly impact Alzheimer’s disease pathology,” the study authors wrote. “In addition, THC may prove valuable as a model for developing new and more effective drugs to treat the disease.” That’s a direct quote from the October 2006 issue of Molecular Pharmaceutics, which just happens to be lying around in my bathroom next to the National Enquirer.

So, it sounds like the big plan is to do what big pharmaceutical companies do: isolate the THC molecule, put it in a pill, and give it a crazy name that alludes to its function and contents. (I did some focus grouping and came up with Doobitral.) Then, charge senior citizens twenty bucks a hit for it. For the old folks who can’t afford it, I’m suggesting that the State of Minnesota organize a monthly caravan of gaily painted VW microbuses to Vancouver.

Of course, the company that comes up with the definitive formula for Doobitral should hire Willie Nelson as its celebrity spokesperson. Can’t you just see the commercial? Willie strolling in a waving field of cannabis, his guitar slung over his shoulder, a knowing smile crinkling in the corners of his eyes as the voiceover delivers the obligatory side-effects warning—Caution: Doobitral may cause the giggles, profound sloth, inability to sustain or even feign interest in sex or violence, a tendency to begin declarative sentences with “Dude,” and a craving for crunchy snacks.

Finally, a warning to kids who may be reading this: If you find yourself tempted to indulge, you can always talk to a parent, teacher, or school counselor. Dude, any of them can probably hook you up with some Adderall or Ritalin.

I’ve been going to the gym pretty early these days: Monday through Friday, 5:30 a.m, whether I want to or not. I’ve turned over a new leaf, you see. I now realize that abdominal muscles do not appear magically as a result of wishing on Starburst wrappers. I have now reached an age at which I have to do my best to protect what natural assets I have left rather than book a one-way ticket on the gravy boat cruise to an untimely frumpitude.

I go so early because, after much trial and error, I have found that it is better to hit the gym before my brain can fully register how much exercising totally and royally sucks.

Because I am a highly suggestible person—a vulnerable adult, if you will—I was initially afraid that I would lose myself in this candy-colored spandex universe and morph into the kind of person I have always regarded with scorn. Because I come from strong, dedicated, working-class stock, I could easily see myself swelling into a female Tony Little—tank-like and relentlessly, horridly FIT! Complete with a thin, creepy ponytail and bulbous calves. But I never should have worried. There is too much of the old me at the core. The old me who, left unchecked during a bad breakup, once polished off an entire fried chicken in one sitting. Fee, fie, foe, fum.

So, to get to the gym on time, I have to leave my house by about 5:15. I walk down a set of four concrete steps that lead to my driveway. Every morning, at the third step, I lurch face-first through a line of sticky spider web. Because I am generally tired when this occurs, I swat blindly at the air around my face like a half-hibernating bear and growl.

One day, I told my husband about the foolish spider in our backyard. I wondered aloud why it always builds its house in the same location when it just gets ruined every day.

And my husband said the creepiest thing of all.

“Maybe it’s not his house you’re ruining. Maybe it’s his trap. Maybe he’s just really ambitious. Maybe he sees you stumble out of the house every morning and thinks: ‘Hmmm … all I have to do is land that big clumsy one, and I’ll be set for life.’ ”

So, I’m the Moby Dick of South Minneapolis, hunted by Ahab the Arachnid. I’ve got an eight-legged, net-casting maniac in my backyard. I’ve seen the spider in question, and he’s damn near big enough to take down cetacean prey. He’s tan, big as a Jordan almond, and when I put on the porch light to spy on him as he sleeps, I swear I can hear him snoring.

I grew up in a house that had bugs. Not roaches, but millipedes in the basement, kitchen ants in the summer, and water bugs behind the washer—all sorts of extracurricular critters that weren’t paying their rent by being cute. My friends who grew up in newer, nicer houses turned out idiotically compassionate. They’re the ones who solicitously sweep up indoor spiders and gently place them outside. If I find one of those little crawly buggers near me, I flatten it with a hardbound copy of Charlotte’s Web. Why? Because I’m some pig. In fact, I would like to catch all those bug lovers in less-than-humane traps and set them free in Colorado.

I look at a bug inside my house and I say, “I know what you’re thinking. Is that can of Raid empty, or has it still got one squirt in it? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. So you’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Outside the house, the rules are different. It’s their turf. You won’t find me terrorizing them with a magnifying glass, only trying to stay out of their way. So when I’m on my way to the gym, I just hope old Ahab doesn’t immobilize me and suck out all my juices. But if he’d take about two pints off my keister, we could make a deal.

Max Marti’s bus ride home from Capitol Hill Gifted and Talented Magnet School in St. Paul is typically kind of boring—especially for a kid like Max, a budding rock guitarist who loves run-and-gun computer games and ValleyFair thrill rides. On September 15, the lanky fourteen-year-old was among about forty first- through eighth-graders aboard the bus. He was sitting in the very back, one of only three eighth-graders on the route that Friday. “The reason I was on the bus is because I didn’t have soccer practice that day, otherwise I wouldn’t have been there.”

He knew something was strange when the bus headed up Arundel Street, he said a few days after the incident. “It was a pretty steep hill, and there was, like, some dark-gray smoke coming out of the tailpipe. That was our first clue. We also heard some kind of grating or clicking noises—not really loud, but, you know, unusual noises.

“That’s when we started rolling backwards. We [knew we] weren’t backing up, because we kept accelerating toward the bottom of the hill. I don’t know why the brakes weren’t used. [The State Patrol later determined that the bus was mechanically sound but that the engine was unable to draw enough gas from its under-filled tank while it was climbing Arundel Street. When the engine stopped, so did the power brakes.]

“Kids started screaming at about the bottom of the hill when they realized that we couldn’t or weren’t going to stop. We hit a couple of sapling kind of trees. Flattened those. The chain-link fence that separates the curb from the [I-94] embankment, we just ran right through that. Then we started rolling down the embankment onto the freeway.

“We went over, like, a four-foot retaining wall—right out onto the freeway. Then we hit the metal guardrail thing and blocked off the entire exit lane on the side of the highway. And finally, the guardrail caught on something on the underside of the bus and stopped us. It was over in about thirty seconds.

“Subconsciously, you’re thinking that you might die. And that’s a pretty weird feeling. It’s a calm panic, I’d say. Your brain is panicking, but you aren’t. Once the bus stopped, the kids were just sitting there. Stunned, I guess. I was scared, but I didn’t, like, scream or panic at all.

“At ValleyFair, just a couple of weeks before the accident, I went on all the crazy rides—Steel Venom, Power Tower, all the good ones. A good ride has speed to it, and the feeling of your stomach floating up. I didn’t get any of those sensations on the bus—it was going too slow. Pretty much it was only fear, like if a roller coaster you were riding broke. There’s a difference between a thrill and fear.

“I tried to open up the back exit on the bus, but it was stuck. Another eighth-grader who was in the front of the bus opened up the front door, and I kind of yelled for everybody to grab their stuff to get them going.

“Once we got onto the highway, all these cars were screeching to a halt, and lots of people were getting out of their cars to come over to us, guiding us back up the embankment.

“It wasn’t that epic; it was kind of a short thing that happened. The next day, the kid who was in the front of the bus got interviewed on TV, and during his interview, he said he was a Boy Scout. Then the next day, everybody made fun of him.”

I had a garage sale a couple of weeks ago. I relish regularly purging my home of crap. However, I also think it is a special kind of hell to have to arrange crap artfully on card tables in the driveway, assign a value to each item of crap, and look at the neighbors with a straight face when one of them holds up a crappy McDonaldland-character glass tumbler and tries to whittle down the marked price of ten cents. C’mon, people. It still holds water, and we’re talking about the Hamburglar here.

So, okay. Maybe it actually isn’t hell. After all, it’s a beautiful, seventy-five-degree day spent out in your driveway. But it is purgatory. Because you can’t go anywhere else. All you can do is sit there on a lawn chair and stew in the lovingly hand-painted juices of your own tchotchkes.

I’ll tell you this. I hate figurines. I have never purchased a figurine for myself, but I have had them thrust upon me by people who claim to know and love me. Perhaps this hatred of ornamental figures stems from years of moving from apartment to apartment during my twenties, but I never collected stuff like that when I was a kid, either. Figurines have always made me feel big and clumsy, like King Kong with Fay Wray.

I remember a childhood pal, Shelly, who was abnormally fond of horse figurines. Fond as in boyfriend fond. Abnormal as in no one else could touch them but her! abnormal. These plastic replicas of real horses lived on her dresser in a specific formation, and woe be to anyone who dared draw so much as a pinkie finger across the glossy mane of the centrally positioned Clydesdale. If that happened, the usually sweet, retiring, Sunday-school-attending Shelly would screech, through bared, tinseled teeth, “GET OUT OF MY ROOM, YOU BUTTHOLE! THOSE ARE MINE!” And she would chase you out of her room, down the dangerously creaky, ankle-twistingly irregular staircase of her illegal attic bedroom, through the terrifying Lladro-ballerina-choked formal living room and out onto the religious-icon-ornamented front lawn. There she would grab fistfuls of your unattractive, gender-neutralizing bowl haircut and march you toward the legal property line of her yard, where she would throw you roughly to your knees on the sidewalk and explain that you and your dirty, oily, Ho Hos-icing-stained fingers were never, ever to cross that line again.

Not that this ever happened to me, dear readers, but this is what would happen if anybody ever dared touch one of stupid Smelly Shelly’s stupid plastic horses that lived on her stupid dresser in her stupid room in her stupid house.

Such is the dark power of collectibles, which is why I have made a concerted effort to keep my existence free from any item that requires its own display case or its own Certificate of Authenticity. I’m terrified enough by official documents.

I’m not sure where my dog’s breeding papers are right now. For all I know, his identity credentials may have been sold out of a van idling behind the mercado on Lake Street. Also unaccounted for are my marriage license and copies of my 2002 federal and state tax returns. There are autographed baseballs out there with a better paper trail than mine.

Do you get the feeling that the Certificate of Authenticity was dreamed up by people who feel the need for additional official documents in their lives? Are they expecting art historians to question the provenance of their Thomas Kinkade prints? Are they waiting for the moment they can whip out their certificate and say “Ha! Who dares question the validity of this painting of a lighthouse amid storm-splashed rocks?”

But the art historians could, of course, challenge the authenticity of the Certificate of Authenticity. And then there would be a war of “nuh-uhs” and “uh-huhs.” Feelings would be hurt, and there would be much emotional eating afterwards.

The woman haggling over the Hamburglar glass finally wore me down. I just gave it to her. Looking deeply satisfied, she greedily stuffed her treasure into her large pocketbook and sniffed, “For a single glass, it wasn’t worth much.” It would have been a totally different story if I’d had a set.

When Bruce Wry was a marine stationed in Vietnam, he spent some time studying the local language. He never would have guessed that, forty years later, the Vietnamese he learned during the war would come in handy for selling cheese at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market.

“It’s nice. When the Vietnamese come here I can talk to them,” he said. “Over the years the ethnic mix has changed. Once, you didn’t see any Russians, now, there are a lot of Russians. The Hmong, if you got it for two dollars they want it for a dollar, if you got it for a dollar they want it for fifty cents.

“There was one Amish family that sold cheese. They came up here and they only sat in their chairs, didn’t offer samples or anything, you know. They were right across from me, they were cheaper than me. They lasted about a month. You’ve got to sample and talk to people.”

Every weekend, he’s on his chrome bar stool at stall #248 in the long, tin-roofed arcade at East Lyndale Avenue North and Third Avenue North, sandwiched between Koa Vang produce and the Sleeping Cat Organic Farm, where the aromas of basil, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass intersect. In the multicultural hurly-burly of vendors, Wry is a standout: a towering, friendly fifty-six-year-old in an orange foam hat that resembles a thick wedge of Swiss. He sells twenty varieties of Wisconsin cheese, driving in every market day from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He’s not a farmer, but a reseller who understands merchandising and the value of brand identity.

“‘The hat?’ I started wearing this, I don’t know, six, seven years ago. Kids call me ‘the Cheesehead.’ They get up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go down and see the Cheesehead.’ I hear that from a lot of people. And I laugh all the way to the bank.

“They know I’m from Wisconsin. It gets bad during football season. People ask me, ‘What the blank happened to the Packers last week?’ from a block away. My wife used to wear the horns, for the Vikings. People would say, ‘I don’t want to buy from you,’ so I’d ask if they wanted to buy from my wife. People would ask her, ‘Are you horny?’ Then she wouldn’t wear it anymore. That was that.

“People want me to wear this so they can tell where I’m at when they walk up and down the aisle,” Wry said, but the rubber headgear proved impractical during this summer’s record heat wave. “If I fell over from the heat, there’s nobody here that’d want to give me mouth-to-mouth. They’d say, ‘Too bad, that’s the end of that story, you’re gonna die.’ ”

Wry has had one full weekend off in twenty-seven years and maybe three days off besides that. He gets up at 3:30 in the morning for the Thursday market on Nicollet Mall. For the weekend market, he gets to sleep in until 4:00 a.m. He drives fifty miles before dawn, when there’s hardly anybody else on the road, in his battle-scarred, rust-pocked blue GMC van. It’s got half a grille missing, and the right-headlight-and-turn-signal assembly is held in place with probably half a roll’s worth of duct tape.

On a good day, Wry sells five hundred pounds of cheese. A regular refrigerator, packed tight, holds around two hundred pounds. About eight pounds of each day’s inventory goes to tasters. Just as Wry has regular customers, he knows the moochers on sight.

“We have people who sample every week who have never bought in seven years. And the worst is downtown. On the Nicollet Mall. You know ’em. Here he comes again. They take enough to feed a whole family. But you have to give samples because some people walk on a little ways and come back again and buy.”

Wry counts people watching as one of the great fringe benefits of his job. “That’s why I enjoy selling here. I fall in love a hundred times a day,” he said. “Downtown it’s worse. You wonder where some of these gals are working at. They’re sure showing it off.”

Wry’s customers aren’t looking for exotic varieties; he doesn’t offer anything fancier than Gouda. “Everyone thinks it’s from Holland. It’s from Holland, Wisconsin, about fifty miles south of Green Bay,” he said with a broad, knowing smile.

“Provolone, Muenster, feta—they don’t move. You can’t carry everything. If they ask ‘Do you have blue cheese?’ I just tell ’em, ‘No ma’am, I just carry happy cheese.’ ‘You got any goat cheese?’ ‘No, they’re too hard to catch.’ ”

People sometimes ask for help choosing the right cheese for a certain wine, he said, “but I don’t know a damn thing about it. I haven’t drank in so many years. I’ve had twenty-seven years of sobriety. See how it falls in line with my job? Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I couldn’t get up that early.”

Does Wry have a personal favorite among his wares?

“Extra-sharp cheddar,” he said. “The older, the sharper it gets. Women, wine, and cheese get better with age. That was told to me by a woman. She was pretty old.”