northsider

Foaming At The Mouth
Silver Linings

So things have been pretty good around here. I've reached a level of stimulation and relaxation that I haven't known in awhile, and I'm trying to prolong the whole feeling for as long as possible. That means I've been trying to look at things in a positive light. Now I'll tell you a story.

A few months ago I had my bathroom redone. The contractor was a likable guy in his forties named Chris, a Polish immigrant. He did a good job on the bathroom at a good price. The only minor inconvenience was the fact that he couldn't drive to my place for work and his travel schedule had to be worked around. Why couldn't he drive? Well, he got busted for a DUI about two years ago. When the cops pulled him over, he displayed questionable critical decision making when he decided to give the cops his foreign driver's license instead of his Illinois d.l. Then he ducked out of the court date and figured it would get lost in the shuffle.

Fast forward to last summer. Chris gets busted again by the cops (it might have been another DUI -- not sure) and finds out to his dismay that the police have computers and that those computers talk to each other. So Chris would sit in the lockup until the next court date. Unfortunately for Chris, all this occurred just inside the Cook County border so he was stuck at 26th and California 'til he could face a judge. The judge revoked his driver's license and had him on monitoring/probation.

Now the maximum sentence he was facing was a year in jail. That's just the way it is for a Class 'A' Misdemeanor: "punishable by up to a year in jail". Apparently the judge, somewhere along the line really decided to throw a scare into him and really underlined that possibility to him.

I don't know if Chris' foot slipped somewhere along the way; I didn't get all the details. But how do you suppose he handled the situation: He fled the country and went back to Poland. Instead of getting a good lawyer and getting the whole thing pled down to counseling and other shit then sticking with it to make it all go away, he's now a fugitive who will be arrested and jailed or deported the next time he hits Passport Control.

Ratcheting up the "Stupid" factor on this one is the fact the guy was married with a teenage kid. He basically divorced her somewhere along the way out the door. The kid'll make a trip once a year to visit Dad back in the old country.

Who the fuck did this guy think he was, John Dillinger? Michael Corleone after shooting a police captain? Ain't no one chasing your dumb ass! Pay the fuckin' lawyer and the courts and be done with it. Dumb motherfucker. I should have suspected as much when he kept trying to nickel-dime chisel the garage attendant in my building when my cousin had to leave the van parked downstairs. He figured a plane ticket out of the country was cheaper so he went that way.

And the real tragedy is that I was counting on this guy to redo my kitchen this fall! Dammit! He knew what he was doing and worked quick at a fantastic price. This is gonna cost me literally thousands of dollars.

But I'm feeling the optimistic vibe so I'm looking at it this way: At least he didn't run off in the middle of working on my place and he didn't run off with any of my money.