Friends Don't Let Friends Murder Their Neighbor's Pet Goose

Every word of that title is accurate. Read on, oh ye non-believers.

“Be careful who you call your friends. I’d rather have four quarters than one hundred pennies”

― Al Capone

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“Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

― George Washington

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“If you go into a market, and your friends pull out a gun and rob it, you’re as guilty as they are. And if the police arrest you, I won’t bail you out.”

― My mother

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The hole in the television was, in a way, beautiful—almost artistic.

The impact—accidental I assumed, possibly from a broomstick—had punched a perfect circle in the center of the tube, radiating a sunburst of fine cracks toward the screen's edge.

However, I was puzzled as to why there wasn’t more carnage.

All the TVs I’d seen smashed by guitars in bad ’80s music videos had exploded in an electric storm of glass. Yet, the lack of dried blood or bits of flesh on the shag carpet in front of the television cabinet suggested it was otherwise—and, I must confess, left me somewhat disappointed.

None of my roommates were home to help solve this mystery, but, intimately understanding the dynamics of a house shared by four twenty-something males, I could piece together a pretty reasonable theory as to why the only TV in the house was now inoperable.

And it wasn’t just any TV.

It was a 32-inch Sony Trinitron, arguably the best set you could buy in 1986. And even though my roommate got it for free by pulling a credit card scam at Circuit City, it was still a loss.

Occam's razor suggested an overly inebriated partygoer had backed into it while playing air guitar with a broom, but that’s as far as I took this mental exercise as I was tired and numb, having just arrived home after a six-hour drive from Arizona, where my girlfriend and I spent a week trying to make Castaneda-like connections with the spirits of dead shamans.

Instead, we got drunk, crashed in cheap motels, argued nonstop, and didn’t have sex, which revealed to me a Castaneda-like vision of us never getting married.

Had it occurred to me that Castaneda’s tool of transformation was peyote and ours was Crazy Horse Malt Liquor, we might be husband and wife today.

Shudder.

Assuming I’d clocked the plot, I went upstairs to my room to crash, and that’s when I first realized that the damaged TV was just the beginning of a tale that would end with the spilling of avian blood and a public shaming, the likes of which my hometown had never seen.

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Meeting friends of friends is problematic at any age.

Though we may acquire acquaintances later in life, it’s very rare to develop true friendships after forty. Rarer still at that age is meeting a true friend of your true friend—one you’ve never met before.

That’s because, by the time you’re forty, you’ve known your true friends long enough and have likely met anyone else meaningful in their lives.

Meeting friends of friends in your youth is as equally dicey.

That’s when your world begins to expand—first as you leave high school, then as you enter college or the workforce. When you start meeting people who don’t know your parents or siblings, aren’t familiar with your hometown, and don’t share a common history.

Friends of friends come with an implied approval due to their relationship to your friend—but it’s not a guarantee. After all, you haven’t really known your friend that long, so how can you be sure they are a good judge of character?

Allow me to illustrate this theory with an example from my own youth.

In my post high school and if-I-had-gone-to-college years, I picked up some new friends. One was from across town, another from one county north, while the rest were transplants from out of state.

Those were the ones you really had to worry about.

Transplants fall into two categories.

The first are the adventurous types, eager to meet new people, have new experiences, and expand their understanding of the world around them. They arrive with an open mind and baggage that is strictly physical.

Then there are the transplants who are trying to get away from something; a dysfunctional family, bad relationships, or a petty crime rap sheet. They arrive with suspect motives and mental baggage to spare.

Case in point: Snap, real name Sean.

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Sean was a good guy. A solid guy. He was intelligent and polite, even thoughtful at times. The type of guy you’d introduce to your mom and she’d tell you the next day, “I really like that Sean.”

But Sean was a different person when he drank—which happened quite a bit.

One moment everything would be fine. Everybody would be laughing, joking, and having a great time. Then in an instant, it would all go bad.

Suddenly, Sean would fly across the bar and crack some random guy in the jaw.

Or scream “you’re a fucking bitch,” to a girl whose only crime was to order a drink next to him at the bar.

Quite often, he’d break down and sob incoherently. And if any of us tried to console him, he’d explode—accusing us of mocking him, then challenging each of us to a fight

The worst part was that you never knew when it would happen.

On some nights it only took one beer before things went off the rails. On others, he could drink all night long without incident.

But when it did go bad, it always happened without warning. There were never any signs or telltale clues that he was about to go off.

He just snapped.

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As I came to the top of the landing, I noticed that three of the four doors to the bedrooms were open, an unusual occurrence in our house. Though all my roommates knew and mostly trusted each other, it was best practice to keep your door shut.

It’s a guy thing.

And it was no coincidence that the only door that was still closed had a lock on it.

Or that that door was mine.

As I passed each open door, more damage was revealed.

In Andy’s room, his pride and joy, a five-component stereo system, had been destroyed.

All the knobs on his tuner were on the floor, and the posts that held them in place were deformed. Both windows on his dual-cassette player were cracked, and the case of his five-disc CD player was riddled with dents.

“It’s as if someone attacked his stereo with a hammer,” I thought.

Hmm?

Glancing at his speakers, I noticed that they had multiple holes punched in them, both in the front and back, each the same size and circumference as the hole on the TV tube downstairs—as if from the head of a hammer.

Double hmm?

Then I passed Greg’s room and saw that the strings on his prized guitar were hanging by the tuners, as if ripped out from the bridge. There were also round impact marks across the face of the guitar which matched up with the stereo and the TV.

I sensed a pattern.

My third roommate, Geoff, got off light, with a few things in his room askew, but no serous damage as far as I could see.

Despite being deathly tired, I couldn’t help but modify my theory. Besides, the math was simple.

Andy worked five days a week and had to get up at 6:00 am.

And because of this, he was always in bed by 9:00pm.

However, Greg was currently in-between jobs, and liked to watch TV downstairs until the early morning.

On more than one occasion, Andy would come out of his room and ask Greg to turn the TV down.

Sometimes, one ask was all it took. But other times, it might take four or five “requests” before Greg complied, and by then, they were both screaming at each other.

Like I said, the math was simple.

Andy finally had enough of the loud late-night TV sessions, came downstairs, and in a fit of rage, smashed Greg’s TV screen with a hammer.

Greg then took the hammer, ran upstairs, and went to town on Andy’s stereo system. And after he was done, Andy took the hammer and attempted to destroy Greg’s guitar.

Geoff likely tried to break them up—physically—which is why some of the stuff in his room was knocked around.

Open-and-shut. Case closed.

And with that, I unlocked my door, went into my room, and crashed for a well-needed rest, unaware that the real culprit in this mayhem was “Goose.”

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I met Goose for the first and only time when I woke up from my nap.

His real name was Eric.

I never did get his last name.

He was a friend of a friend.

A transplant—not the good type, the bad type—who had been hanging out and partying at our house for the last three days.

Our house was on the corner of our tract’s outlet street, and adjacent to a main thoroughfare. Looking out from our front lawn, you could see a long wall across that thoroughfare, which ran along the length of our neighbor’s backyards.

It was on the Saturday in which I was trying to commune with dead Indians—sorry, that’s what we called them in 1986—that a honking sound arose from one of those backyards.

That sound was made by a pet goose.

Apparently, Goose—the friend of a friend, not the pet—was in our front yard drinking with my friends and roommates, and became annoyed by this sound. So he announced to anyone who cared to listen, “I’m going to go over there and kill that fucking goose.”

And with that, he threw down his beer, grabbed his weapon of choice from an abandoned and mismatched bag of golf clubs in our garage—a three-wood, I believe—ran across the street, and jumped the fence into a random person’s backyard.

And, as often happens when you jump into a random person’s backyard, he was immediately confronted by a full-grown Canadian goose, honking, and using its long neck to lunge and peck at him.

According to Eric’s deposition—yes, there was a police deposition—this freaked him the fuck out, and he took a wild swing.

There are grown men who have spent the better part of their lives and marriages trying to achieve the accuracy that Eric, who despite never having played a hole in his life, displayed as he connected flush with the goose’s head, immediately silencing it, and in the process, separating it from life.

Eric claimed that he never meant to hurt the goose, just to scare it, but when it lunged at him, he panicked, causing him to take the fatal swing.

But that wasn’t the end of it, and retaliation was swift.

After filing a police report, the owner of the goose got his brother and a buddy—who, if the gods of symmetry had their say, was a friend of a friend—some tools, including—c’mon, you’ve got to know where this is going by now—a hammer, then broke into our house and proceeded to do as much damage as possible to our fine consumer goods.

But he didn’t stop there. In addition to the police report, he called all the local newspapers—back when local newspapers were social media—to begin the shame campaign.

Not that Goose, er, Eric cared. On Monday he returned to the shithole from whence he came, never to return.

But week after week, the front pages of The Daily Pilot, The Huntington Beach Independent, and the Orange County Register were consumed with the story of his heinous act, always accompanied by a photo of our grieving neighbors, holding up a photo of Gary, their pet goose.

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The average person can read 250 words per minute.

If you made it this far, you’ve taken an eight minute break from an increasingly chaotic and unhinged world.

Come back here next week and we’ll do it again—or stay on break and check out The Best of ‘The Anecdote.’