Freddie Wasn't Much Help

Reading Sarah's post from yesterday got me thinking about my own experience with drunk guys trying to break into the house.

Journey back to 2001 with me, back to my little haunted cottage in Mankato. It is the middle of the night and I am fast asleep in my bed with the grumpiest Jack Russell Terrier ever. It was Freddie's custom to burrow under the covers down by my feet and God help you if you dared to roll over or wiggle your toes...she would put up a growl and eventually resort to barking and biting if the action was kept up.

I was probably having pleasant dreams about my new boyfriend Hans or maybe a slightly stressful dream about writing a paper for one of my college classes, or a nightmare about having to go to work the next day, if even for a few hours. Possibly a nightmare about how my phone was about to get shut off because I was so dirt poor that year...

Any which way, Freddie started in with her growling. At first I assumed that I had upset her rest, but then she came storming out from under the covers and started jumping at my closed bedroom door (oh yes, I always closed it, especially after Gen's encounter with the "crying child" ghost...as if the door could stop it from coming upstairs into my room!) and full out barking.

I'm a pretty jumpy and overimaginative person to begin with, so I started getting nervous, wondering what she was going on about, when through the racket, I heard it...someone pounding on the door and rattling the doorknob downstairs in the back entry. Surprisingly, instead of freaking out and (hello) calling the police, I felt a huge surge of adrenaline and started down to confront whoever it was.

I crept down the stairs, through the living room and kitchen and peered around the corner. The noise hadn't abated...the guy was still shouting to let him in and turning the doorknob incessantly.

It was about this time that I wish I would have had Greta in the house. The back door in my little old house was three-quarters wood with a glass panel up top. I'm pretty sure Greta would have been big enough to put her front paws up on the glass and bark in this guy's face. I still wonder if he would have wet his pants or what...Freddie was pretty much ineffectual except as an advanced warning system.

Anyway, I ascertained that instead of being a dirty hobo from the railyards as I had envisioned, the person trying to get in was a clean-cut college guy, probably not legal and so intoxicated that I could actually smell him through the door. So instead of backing away and calling the police, I got on the other side of the glass and started screaming at him to go home, to go away, that it wasn't his house. Using much worse language, of course--this is a family blog, I'll keep it clean. God, I was so mad! I was on the verge of getting my marble rolling pin from the kitchen and giving it to him good when it occurred to me that it might be wiser to just call the police.

By the time they finally showed up, I had convinced Mr. Drunk Frat Boy that it truly WAS NOT his home and he had wandered/stumbled off. The police did a half-hearted search around my little yard and behind my car and then left. They had had a hard time finding my house because apparently, it didn't show on the emergency grid or something. Comforting. Even though the house had been there since approximately 1876, good Lord!

I'm pretty sure that I actually went back up and back to bed that night...but my run-in with the drunk frat boy is something I've never forgotten. And it took about three days for the lingering miasma of alcohol to quit my back porch...!