The Sudden and Violent Death of What’s-His-Name

Or: How to get a Lifetime Supply of Free Bullets....

Last time out I told you about the police manhunt that recently took place near my hotel and I also made what now seems like a rash promise to tell you about the time the cops shot and killed an armed fugitive right outside my hotel window.

Considering the criminal activity surrounding the hotels I stay in you might think I’m picking hotels in 1970s Belfast, but swear to God these are nice hotels (or at least as nice as I’m willing to pay for) in OK parts of the Sacramento Metroplex (which sounds like a made-up word and also sounds like one of those car names that don’t mean anything…“Introducing the Brand New Nissan Metroplex!”) although now that I think about it, Sacramento just had a gang shooting outside their NBA arena so maybe my hometown is more dangerous than I thought.

Don’t look at me, I haven’t lived here since 1979 and don’t go to all that many NBA games.

Although…

The last NBA game I went to was a Sacramento Kings game and they used to be the Kansas City Kings and I think I speak for all of Kansas City when I say, Thank God and Greyhound they’re gone. And if you don’t get that reference to a Roy Clark song, here’s a video:

The NBA and NFL and MLB and quite possibly the NRA and IRS like to promote the idea that cities ought to bend over forwards and let Professional Sports have their way and we need to build them stadiums so they can charge us $50 for parking and $94 for tickets (which is what the internet says an “average” ticket for an NBA game costs) to get into the stadium we built and we need to do all that because having a major league sports franchise gives a city “prestige” but you gotta wonder how much “prestige” Sacramento got from a basketball team that just went 30-52.

Anyway…

Years of experience have taught me that when I come home to visit, despite invitations to stay in relatives’ houses, everyone is going to be much happier if I stay in a hotel and visit them in one-hour segments and get up and leave right before me and my loved ones decide to physically assault each other. 

I once told my mother I’d sit and talk with her up until she mentioned Jesus and made another unproductive attempt to save what’s left of my soul and we’d be doing just fine, talking about her childhood in Brownsville, Nebraska or the Model T they drove to California which took 21 days which means they averaged a whopping 76.3 miles a day and then she couldn’t stand it anymore and would start a sentence with:

“As the Bible says…”

And I’d respond with:

“Great seeing you, mom. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Having my own car and place to stay means there’s less chance we’ll get on each other’s nerves and despite pleas that I return home, I’m pretty sure if I ever come back home to stay they’d like me a whole lot less, which reminds me of the Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks song How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away.

Just in case you’ve never heard that song, here it is and maybe you could send this link to that certain somebody in your life and hope they get the hint:  

And it sounds like that could definitely work because while I listened to the song I also read some of the comments underneath and one guy said he knew his relationship was over when he played this for his girlfriend and she laughed way too hard.

Also, if you’ve never seen Dan and the Hot Licks in action, here’s an old Flip Wilson Show TV clip and it’s kinda nice to see a group perform live without the aid of Auto-Tune or a team of dancers or smoke bombs and lasers and just get up on stage with nothing but guitars and talent and sound great doing it:

And now the Somewhat Timely Death of What’s-His-Name

So I’m in my semi-OK hotel one evening, relaxing after a long day of avoiding Eternal Salvation, and I get a call from the front desk saying they have a situation and need me to lie down on the floor.

Logically enough my first thought was a couple front desk clerks had got drunk or high or some combination of both and decided to quit their horseshit jobs, but before departing started randomly calling hotel guests and making weird requests just to see how many of us would fall for it and I ought to be grateful that all they wanted me to do was lie on the floor because some other poor schnook was currently hopping on one foot through the hotel lobby while making chicken noises.

But what I didn’t know…

The names and dates are murky, lost in the Mists of Time and cheap Canadian whiskey, but some criminal the police were chasing checked into a hotel right across the street from my hotel and somehow the cops found out he was there and came and knocked on his hotel door and being trapped like a rat he jumped out the window – the kind of thing only a Criminal Mastermind or a nine-year-old would think of, so the police were caught flat-footed – and Brainiac ran across the street and checked into my hotel…and they gave him the room directly under mine.

But once again the cops somehow found out John Dillinger was staying in a local hotel, which seems to indicate the hotel industry is run by a bunch of snitches who will rat you out at the first opportunity, so whatever Hotel Hijinks you think you might want to get up to, just remember the people at the front desk seem to have the local constabulary on speed dial.

And think of all those movies where the private detective slips the front desk clerk a sawbuck to look the other way and let the detective rummage through your Fruit of the Looms and the most interesting thing about that last image is the fact that a $10 bill is called a “sawbuck.”

(Actually, I don’t think anyone under the age of 102 still calls $10 bills a “sawbuck” and when you google why they’re called that, the internet offers up the explanation that the Roman Numeral for “10” is “X” and that looks like a sawhorse and all I can say about that is someone must have been smoking the same weed those hotel clerks got into.)

I mean…WTF?

Having learned their lesson from their first arrest debacle, the cops put people outside Clyde Barrows’ hotel window, while some other cops knocked on his door and when Pretty Boy Floyd jumped out his window they were ready and I heard someone yell:

“Freeze, (Fill-In-The-Blank)!”

I’ve totally forgotten Fill-In-The-Blank’s name, but apparently he didn’t freeze nearly enough to meet police standards for freezing, because the next thing I heard was a bunch of pops which is what guns actually sound like when you shoot one in real life and not a movie.

After the front desk called and gave me the all clear to stand up, I went over to the window and looked out into the hotel parking lot and Fill-In-The-Blank was lying there on his back with one leg bent back up beneath him which looked really uncomfortable – although probably not as uncomfortable as multiple gunshot wounds to the chest – and even without a medical degree I reached an accurate diagnosis which was pretty much:

“That dude is dead.”

So what have we learned so far?

1. Don’t invite a hotel worker to join your plot to overthrow the government or kidnap the governor of Michigan because they’re a bunch of tattletales and you just can’t trust them to keep a secret.

2. If the police say “freeze” maybe you ought to listen because when you look up pictures of famous criminals you also see photographs of their bullet-ridden bodies surrounded by satisfied-looking cops and you realize going on a crime spree is good way to get a Lifetime Supply of Police Quality Ammunition.

3. And whatever else you do, you probably shouldn’t let me pick out a hotel for you.