waking up to breaking and entering

so i've been working the around the coyote festival, which is no small task ... the thing is a real beast, especially this year when we have 12 venues, and for some reason a ridiculous amount of bitchy artists and cheap patrons ... i might post something later about some of the encounters i've had over the weekend, but knowing the personality types i've been dealing with, they are definitely the type that are vain enough to google their own names, find this blog and sue me for libel or some shit ... anyway, so this festival means that i've had 3 days off in 3 weeks, worked a 24 hour shift (no joke, 10am monday to 10am tuesday with a 2 hour break to do a radio interview on wxrt and eat, and regularly work 16 hour days ... obviously that means i have no life and only about 5-7 hours of sleep per nite after bustin my hump all day (hauling 60 lb bags of trash, cleaning up overflowing garbages, carrying 40 lb boxes of catalogs to every part of wicker park, etc) ... and so (luckily) i do very little partying, drinking, smoking, etc mostly cause i'm too exhausted and i just don't care about it at that point, i know it will be a temporary release but the next day i'll be running even slower ... i say luckily cause if i had drank anything the night before i probably would not have heard the guy that broke into our apartment and come into my room at 7:30am and scare the bajesus out of me ... now, living' with sketchy musician types i'm used to people being around the crib i don't always know, but they usually carry a certain vibe thats easily picked-up-on that they are cool and belong there ... it took me about 30 seconds to even shake the sleep out of my head, find my glasses, and realize some dude was looking at me while i lay in bed, which is a really spooky feeling ... once i realized that this guy shouldn't be here i started yelling at him and he took off running back across the coach house i live in, down the stairs inside and then back across it again to the front of the house and then out the front door ... i didn't follow him too far out of the house, which in retrospect was foolish as there is a long gangway leading from the street to our coach house and could've at least gotten a better glimpse of what he was wearing or looked like as he had to run down a narrow corridor for a good 20 feet ... but instead i stopped shortly after my door, turned around checked the handle to see if it was locked, again stupid as it probably could've been dusted for fingerprints and went back inside ... at this point i didn't know what to do so i went upstairs and saw the light on in my upstairs-roomate's room which i remember being off when i went to bed ... upon peering into his room (which is a mess anyway, so it was hard to tell if his stuff had been sifted through) it was obvious that the bright new shiny laptop he had sitting in the middle of his desk was gone ... at this point i don't really know what to do as i've never been in this situation before, so i run downstairs and knock loudly on downstairs-roomate's door, and, much to my surprise, random girl answers the door sans downstairs-roomate ... i have a very fast exchange with her, "where is downstairs-roomate?" i inquire ... "oh, he said he was going to sleep upstairs on the couch" she replies ... "we don't have a couch upstairs" i shoot back ... i explain to her what just happened (or at least what i could make of what just happened) and she's either too hungover or too dumb to really grasp what i'm saying, so i run back upstairs look around upstairs-roomate's room again, come back down, and the bitch shut the door and went back to sleep ... what the fuck !? ... so i call upstairs-roomate, leave a message, he calls back, he comes back home (he had been stayin at his girls place) ... apparently the junkie (cause by this point i'm starting to think this guy was just a junkie rather then an actual thief) had turned out most of the drawers in upstairs-roomate's room lookin for cash or jewels or something ... ok, so the question still remains ... "where is downstairs-roomate?" ... i grab my phone and see i have a text from him at 2:30am saying simply "Call me." ... ominous, especially given the circumstances ... with no signs of forced entry i'm led to believe that downstairs-roomate simply took off instead of actually going upstairs to sleep ... he had to have left at 2am and either didn't close or lock the door in a drunken stupor (more on this later) ... so it's time to file a police report, always a good time when CPD are involved, and i mean it! the lady at 911 was super sweet and cool with me, and about 10 minutes later officer myron showed up at our back door ... he took stock of my drum sets and admitted to having just bought a gretsch set (jerk! i can't afford one and he prolly plays it twice a year) and came upstairs to get the story ... now this guy was the archetype of a chicago police officer, little heavy, little older, and the thickest south-side chicago accent i've heard in a while (think of SNL's "da-bears" skits and yer half way there) ... so he sits down at our kitchen table and we start going over what happened, i explain that not having my glasses on, it being dark, and the guy being 10 ft away from me its really hard to describe what the guy looked like ... but the best part came when the guy called in an ET (evidence technician) to come in and dust for prints ... i don't know if this is just the guy on the force no one likes, or what, but the conversation went like this ... NOW! you have to keep in mind the cops exaggerated chicago accent and the radio guy being totally dead-pan and somewhat insular ...

cop: yeah ... i'm gonna need to call in an ET
radio: ..... yeah ? ...... for what ?
cop: uh, yeah, why don't we call it a burglary ?
radio: ...... yeah ? .... what do you need ?
cop: eh, ya know, dust for prints, uh ... there was a computers stolen, and, uh, the assailant touched the cords and some drawers ... uhh, yeah, ya know, just dusting, and, uh, what have you ...

the cop then gives our address, etc to the ET guys, at which point this exchange takes place

cop: yeah, uh, i'm gonna need that ET for a specific time, uhh ... what times works for yous guys ?
uptairs-roomate: uhh ... 5's cool ...
cop: ... uhh ... according to the victim ... fivescool
radio: ... is that 5 am or seventeen hundred hours (said totally sarcastically)
cop: ... uhhh, yeah, why don't we try seventeen hundred hours, hey look, im a wagon guy, im under alot of stress right here

ok, so that conversation doesn't translate too well to type, but if you have the right voices and inflections in your brain, it should be pretty damn funny

so later that day ET rolls up and dusts upstairs-roomate's room in two spots and finds nothing ... so, we all think the guy got away, and its the end of our little adventure ...

until ... dun DUN DUNNNNNNN ....

i get a call monday morning, they caught some guy thieving in a house on the next block over from us and want to know if i'll come in and do a lineup since i'm the only one who saw him (from 10ft away, sans-glasses, just waking up), but still, they want me to come down ... ok, i dunno if anyone out there has done a police lineup but its pretty intimidating, and it is just like the movies ... walk into a dark room and there's a little window with 5 guys standing against a dirty concrete brick wall, they make each guy come up to the window, turn left and right and step back ... i wasn't that intimidated cause i knew they couldn't see me, and this room also seemed to serve as the lunch room for the cops as about 8 of them were sitting behind me chowing down ... i narrowed it down to 2 guys out of the 5, and im 100% sure it was one of those two, but couldn't finger the guy, and so thusly was of no use to the cops, and they were obviously not happy with me about that ... the only that was really scary about this lineup was that in the lower left hand corner of the window/mirror was a huge crack that was obviously from some high-impact object (fist) hitting the glass and shattering it ... that kinda thing can scare the crap out of ya ...

anyway, this blog post took me 2 days to write, at this point another ET guy came through, took pictures, and i don't know what will happen next ... oh yeah!