If you're wondering why there is no exclamation point at the end of the title sentence, it's because the sentence is a direct quote, and it wasn't exclaimed. It was a statement of fact, uttered as such, with no hint of panic or anxiety. There was no tone to indicate the slightest bit of worry attached to what would normally seem like a worrisome scenario. The statement was said with a Tom Brady-like coolness which, looking back, was actually quite impressive, in an eerie kind of way.
At the same time it's the equivalent of walking home to your wife from a doctor's appointment, tossing your car keys on the table, looking at her, smiling, kissing her, and saying, "Hey honey, how was your day? What's for dinner? It smells delicious. The doctor says I have AIDS. Man, I'm hungry..."
Being in the private investigation industry can be interesting at times. You never really know who you're going to run into and what kinds of shenanigans you're going to either observe, or occasionally be a part of. On this night, the story lies not what happened with the particular surveillance I was conducting, or the guy I was watching, but what took place afterwards, on the ride home.
I was tasked with obtaining some undercover video of a bartender who owned his own place, a martini bar in northern Massachusetts. In order to get the best video in a low light situation, I had a camera that was hidden in a woman's purse, so I had to bring a female along. It was a Saturday night, so my girlfriend was likely out triple-teaming some Mexicans or something just to piss me off, so I invited my sister Trid along. She was much better company anyways, and she always wanted to come and do a surveillance with me, so this was perfect. It also fit because Trid was a bartender, and is friendly and personable. She would have no problem helping me talk to this clown and get him to tell us his life story. The more information you can get on these types of jobs, the better. Plus, I knew my sister would have no issue with tossing back martinis on my company's dime all night long, so, like I said, perfect fit.
I showed her how the camera worked and explained to her the game plan and told her that once we identified the guy, she'd have to go into the bathroom and start the camera, so on and so forth. Everything went smoothly to start, we went in, found the guy right away, sat at the bar and rolled tape on him while I used my Jedi mind powers to trick him into thinking we were best friends while in reality I was busting him for fraud.
(Side note, cause I've heard this before, I'm NOT an asshole for doing what I do. It's my job. I put a roof over my head and the heads of my kids. I put food on their tables. If you are on workers comp or disability, good for you. You should get every dime you're entitled to. If you're committing fraud, good for you too, I don't give a fuck. If you can get a away with it, awesome! If you're cheating on your wife and she pays me a thousand bucks to go watch you and tape you cheating on her...not my problem. Either don't cheat, don't be obvious about it, or don't give her access to your money so she can use it against you to hire a P.I., dummy. Same thing if you're claiming an injury. Don't be stupid about it. If you get caught and get your insurance money cut off, don't blame me. Either stop being lazy and go back to work, or don't get caught. That being said, I have several close friends and family either on worker's comp or disability. Trust me, for an insurance company to get to the point where they hire a P.I., you have to REALLY be throwing up some red flags. My point is, don't try to fight me if we're at the bar and I explain what I do for work, it's just a job. Now if I grab your girlfriend's ass and tell her I want to commit felonies with her, by all means, kick my ass...but I think my bar fighting days are over.)
Back to the martini bar. Trid and I ordered a martini from the extensive list of martinis from our new friend. We purposely didn't eat before arriving because if we ate at the bar, on the clock, I got to expense the food. The other reason is because it would look more normal if we sat there all night if we ate some dinner. Finally, and most crucially, having food in our bellies to soak up all the alcohol would clearly be beneficial. And here's where our problems began...no food. No menu. Not even appetizers. We had a small bowl of trail mix in front of us, and that was it. Trouble. We couldn't leave, we were invested. The game was already on, the camera was rolling and I was punched in. It's funny how alcohol seems to go down easier and faster as a night goes on. With martinis, this seems to happen twice as easy and twice as fast. Throw in the fact that we both have the last name McRoberts, and the jet fuel was officially poured on the bonfire.
At one point, Trid had to change tapes in the "purse-cam." I couldn't exactly bring the purse into the men's room myself and do it, so it was up to her. "OK, Trid, you can do this." I staggered. We were having fun trying out the different flavors of drinks over the last 90 minutes or so. We had walked outside and smoked a cigarette so that I could try to explain the steps without the guy we were taping standing right over us. It ultimately turned out OK, since she successfully changed the tapes, but it was a heart pounding 10 minutes or so as I waited for her to come out of the bathroom. I was convinced something had gone terribly wrong. By the way, if you're wondering why she didn't just do this in the car instead of a bathroom stall....good question. The answer: Alcohol.
When we reviewed the tape later that night or the next day, it was a comedy of ridiculousness. On the beginning of tape 2, the first 5 minutes or so was flashes of video from inside the bathroom stall. The back of the door, the toilet, the floor, and my sister's face were stars of the show. Drunken confusion was the best way to describe her expression. There was no sound on the tape, but at one point she appeared to be talking to the camera. It was as if she was asking in desperation for some help with this task. This was a task that would have been difficult to accomplish in a spacious office setting with a blood alcohol level lower than 1.6 coursing through the operater's veins. Someohow, she managed to pull it off. I think my sister works best when the levels of pressure and alcohol both go up.
When Trid finally emerged from the ladies room and made her way back to our seats at the bar, we had another martini waiting for us....this one was on the house. We had mind fucked this loser into not only committing fraud on camera, but now giving the people who caught him free drinks. What a country! As the night went on we were literally trapped there. I had to put in a certain amount of time due to my work obligation. There was nothing to do BUT drink martinis. They didn't even have beer or anything we could switch to. We were both supplementing our drinking with water and we were nursing each martini, but the guy was so proud of his new little shop and his gay little drinks that he INSISTED we continue to try. "You guys HAVE to check this one out, it's called strawberry balloon knot!" or "Here, have this one next, I call this one mint chocolate glory hole!" On and on it went.
Eventually we settled up but since I was working, we couldn't just go home and pass out. We had to sit out in my car and wait for him to leave so I could document that he was, in fact, the one to close the bar. So in my little Honda we sat, drunk off our asses, waiting for the guy to close up shop. Well over an hour had passed between the time we finished our last drink and exited the bar to the time the guy finally walked out, closed, and locked the door. This was huge, as it at LEAST allowed a little time to go by before I had to make the hour long drive home.
Our job was done. It was a success. We got the video I needed, we learned everything we needed to know about the guy, his family, his pets, his neighbors. I even knew his B.M. schedule. During the time we waited for him to close the bar, I frantically wrote down notes, since I knew that I'd forget everything he said the next day. I got all my notes together, put them on the floor of my car near my sisters feet on the passenger's side, and off we went. We had a fun ride home, especially because the adrenaline was going and my sister thought it was cool that we got so much video and we were laughing it up and having a grand 'ole time. She worked the purse-cam to perfection, even at the end of the night. She took it very seriously and did a good job documenting the guy's every move. My sister is a smoker and when she drinks, she's a SMOKER. Hell, I was even smoking cigarettes and I don't even smoke.
As we made our way towards downtown Boston on I-93, in the middle of a conversation about who knows what, Trid, smile on her face, uttered the words that are the title to this entry.
"Vinny, I think I lit your car on fire." Just like that. After a moment of this registering in my brain, I looked over. Sure enough, my car was on fire. Not smoking, though there was plenty of that too, but real life flames on the floor of my passenger seat. "Put it the fuck OUT dude!!"
Trid had sandals on or some kind of open toe situation, so her attempts at stomping out the fire were not where they needed to be. It doesn't take a surgeon to figure out that when you have a fire inside your car, while you're drunk driving through a major capitol city at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night, there's no 'half-assing' putting the fire out. I tried to pull the car over, but it wasn't an area that was conducive to such a maneuver. I'll spare you the explanation for this, you'll just have to trust me. I pulled into the right lane and slowed down. I helplessly watched my little sister try to extinguish a flame which probably seemed bigger than it really was. We had been drinking all night, it was pitch black, we were traveling at 65 mph, and it was in a very confined area, so who knows. It could have been very small, or it could have been the Hindenburg. The size of the flame, ultimately, was irrelevant. Finally, I grabbed a half-full bottle of water from the center console and dumped it on the fire and my sister's feet. That seemed to do the trick for the most part, but there was still some pieces of paper that were glowing. "Get them outta here Trid!" She rolled the window down and tossed a handful of burned paper out the window. It would have made for quite a site for a state trooper, had one been around to witness this scene. Luckilly for us, there wasn't. "Shit, WAIT!!" I just realized that the papers were all of my notes and the case information for the entire night. We salvaged what we could as she carefully went sheet by sheet and put out any glowing pages using the parts of her jeans near her shoes that had been drenched by the water bottle.
Miraculously, we were able to piece back together the night and re-write our notes when we got home. I was actually able to even make out some of the words on the charred, soaking wet pieces of paper. We could NOT stop laughing. A night that was sure to end in us passing out at our dad's house, turned into us laughing hysterically about the entire night and drinking Captain Morgan's until the sun came up. When it did, we went out to the driveway and took damage control. Miraculously, aside from the smell, you would have never known there was a raging inferno inside the car mere hours ago. Nothing had been burned aside from the paperwork and part of Trid's legs. She turned out to be a pretty good investigator, especially for her first surveillance. Aside from my vehicle careening down the highway, on fire, with it's two occupants loaded from drinking martinis all night on empty stomaches, it was a great success! We made a pretty good team.
My apartment at the time was only a few minutes away, and my sister's apartment was also nearby, but in the opposite direction. I would have had to drive one way to drop Trid off, then backtrack to get home. We were at my dad's house and there was a bedroom open, so Trid planned on going in there and my dad's couch was nice and comfortable, so I hit that thing about as hard as Peter McNeeley hitting the canvass. I wasn't about to drive again on this day, even if it was only a few minutes. As we made our way back inside to sleep it off, my girlfriend texted me. "Where are you? Why didn't you come home last night? I thought you were just gonna work and come home. I got home at 2 and you still weren't here!"
My response: "Go fuck yourself."
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