The World is in the Turlet

From 2003 to 2006, VITAL Source ran an occasional column we called “Rock & Roll Moments:” stories about the intersection of music with personal moods, turning points and epiphanies. We’re excited to re-introduce Rock & Roll Moments on ThirdCoast Digest and invite you to submit your own Rock & Roll moment by emailing us at info@urbanmilwaukeedial.com.  Rock on.

“Give me everything! Give me everything you’ve fucking got!”

It’s hard to argue with a man who has a silenced pistol digging into your rib cage. But, as I sat in the driver’s seat of my Volkswagen Jetta, gun trained at my left lung, I like to think that I handled things like a man.

“Ok, ok, ok!” I cried desperately as I handed over my wallet. My girlfriend at the time (who, out of respect for her privacy, will be referred to as Annie) reached across and handed the man a $20 bill, and instantly he climbed back in his teal hatchback and drove away with his three accomplices. I turned the key in the ignition as hard as I could and sped off, swerving from the surge of adrenaline, barely missing the other cars parked along the narrow street.

I traced the events leading up to the robbery. Five hours earlier, we had been in Pewaukee at my company’s Christmas party. After a drink and a plate of dry Mahi Mahi, we slipped out beneath the detection of my new coworkers. As we left, I made a joke about not wanting to get held up by the greasy high school kids who were smoking in front of the building.

It was only 11 o’clock, so we decided to stop at Comet Café and meet up with a few of my high school friends. We spent the remainder of the evening probing my friend Pat for details about his new job as a carriage driver. The conversation soon devolved into an obscene, extended joke about cleaning up “horse apples” on Wisconsin Ave. This went on for a solid hour and a half before we decided to call it a night.

A friend offered to drive Annie and me to my car. We turned down his offer, opting instead to walk two blocks to my parking spot in front of Fazio’s Automotive on Windsor Place. We immediately regretted this decision after stepping out into the freezing January morning air. Neither of us was dressed for the weather and, to be perfectly honest, we’re both major sissies when it comes to Wisconsin winters.

We walked at a hurried pace down Farwell Avenue. Seeing our breath hang heavy under the streetlights, we both swore semi-sarcastically that things could not get any worse. That’s exactly the point when things got a lot worse.

As I unlocked my car, a teal hatchback pulled up in front of us. The car’s diagonal position across the street blocked us into an already tight parking spot. The driver stepped out with a foreboding smile that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

“Get in the goddamn car and lock your door,” I said sternly to Annie, not breaking eye contact with the man as he stepped forward. She followed my advice, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to do the same.

To recap the next sequence of events: “Give me all you fucking got,” gun pointed at vital organs, my heroic act of not pissing myself, two cars speed off in opposite directions. It took a block and a half of feverish driving before I came to an unorthodox conclusion: “I think we’re supposed to call the cops now …”

We spent the next few hours sitting on the hard plastic backseat of a Milwaukee cop car. As we waited for the crime scene detective, the officers did their best to put Annie and me at ease.

“There’s three victims,” the driver said as a group of college-age girls walked alone down the street. “There’s three more,” he echoed pointing at a nearly identical group.

The detective arrived and questioned us separately from his SUV. I vaguely remember him sounding like a cross between Christopher Walken and any mellow-voiced public radio host. I vividly remember the shotgun strapped to the ceiling of his vehicle. Finally, at 4 am, the detective had all the information he needed and told us to go home.

I drove Annie to her mom’s place in the suburbs and stayed for a few hours until the sun came up. The drive back to the East Side was a complete haze, and before I knew what was happening I had pulled over on the side of the road, a block away from my apartment, struggling to breathe. The weight of what had happened suddenly hit me like a cart full of bricks.

I found myself having reprehensible thoughts of revenge. I wanted nothing more than to look in the Sunday morning paper and see a picture of a ratty, teal hatchback wrapped in a smoldering lump around a light post or being dragged out of the Milwaukee River. I felt like humanity wasn’t worth a damn, but maybe some horrible twist of fate could set the scales back in balance. Finally, I pulled myself together and made it back to my apartment.

By now I had been awake for over 24 hours. Exhausted, I wanted to collapse under my body’s weight and sleep until the snow thawed. But despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t sleep. A constant cycle of fear, anger and disbelief kept me from slipping into a state of unconsciousness. Finally I decided to do something to take my mind off of everything and went to my computer.

I pulled up an old archive of The Best Show on WFMU, a semi-surreal radio program based out of Jersey City. Normally I would read each episode’s description carefully and try to pick one with a guest like Patton Oswalt or Todd Barry. But at this point I didn’t give a shit what I was listening to, so long as I had something to occupy my mind.

The episode I chose just happened to feature one of my favorite bands, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists. The band had offered to take lyric suggestions from the show’s audience and, in 90 minutes, write and record a song based on whatever they were given. I focused every bit of attention I had on the show, listening intently as the host, Tom Scharpling, and his listeners pitched ideas to Leo.

The end result was entirely inappropriate for my situation. The song prophesied humorously the end of the world: Hipsters dropping dead on the streets of New York, rivers boiling and food supplies running dangerously low. The chorus especially resonated with my state of mind as the band growled “The world is in the turlet/ The world is in the turlet/ The world is in the turlet and we’re all gonna die.”

Yet the song struck an entirely unexpected chord with me. Maybe it was the idea of a group of strangers coming together and creating something that lampooned widespread human fears, stripping them of their power. Or maybe I had simply realized that things could have ended a lot worse that morning. For whatever reason, I didn’t feel angry any more. I didn’t see any benefit to wishing ill upon the man who could have put an end to me with a twitch of his finger, and I didn’t despise the state of world.

A few minutes later I slipped into what can only be described as a miniature coma. I slept for 14 hours and woke up wondering if I had slept half way through the workweek. I took the next few days to get my head together, replace everything that had been in my wallet and revisit that parking spot on Windsor. I still get the occasional phantom pain where the muzzle of the gun had been pressed, and occasionally I get vivid flashes of what could have happened that night. But the feigned gloom and doom of the Pharmacists’ WFMU bit oddly put things in perspective for me and proved that the world ain’t in the turlet just yet.