A Scanner Darkly: Part 1.

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I've listened to this conversation dozens of times, though I was never intended to be a party to it. While it brings to mind Raymond and Peter, it's a bit more disturbing because, after all, this conflict is between a grown man and his mother.

I intercepted this cordless phone conversation (and many more like it) on a radio scanner while living in a ramshackle apartment building called the The Sherbrooke on the corner of Franklin and Aldrich in Minneapolis' Wedge neighborhood. I didn't just happen upon these phone calls; I actively programmed the the cordless telephone frequencies into my scanner and routinely trolled them while relaxing with a beer or two after work.

Let me set this up for you: the guy, Matthew, is around 40 at the time (year 2000), a pale, fat schlub who drives a shitty red pickup truck and sets up folding chairs at the Convention Center for a living. He lives in a ground floor apartment in the roach-infested Sherbrooke with his heroin-addled girlfriend, Kathy. Matthew has just returned from the hospital where he has been recovering from a heart attack.

While Matthew was in the hospital, I heard Kathy on the phone many times. She was doing what any lovesick woman would do while waiting for her stricken beau to return home: calling tricks over to the house, getting high and selling drugs.

Upon Matthew's return, he spent an afternoon on the phone with every distant acquaintance trying to borrow money. His only success that day was a guy who barely remembered Matthew, in Waconia, way the hell out on highway 5, who was willing to write a check for ten dollars. Matthew drove the shitty red pickup truck out there even though it was Sunday and the banks were closed.

Shortly after this call from mom, Matthew robbed a bank and was quickly taken into custody by the FBI, plucked from The Sherbrooke on a snowy Minneapolis morning. I was there. It was cool.