COLUMN: Citizen's Arrest in the Pop Bottle Caper

By Tobin Barnes
My old man hated flies...for one thing.
   
Uh huh, you say. Okay, but doesn’t everyone hate flies, even the kinda pretty ones that are metallic blue and metallic green? Like, what good are they other than processing dead stuff?
   
Yeah, but not like my old man hated flies. At the motel, he hated them viscerally, like flydom was after him personally. Like they could buzz into his pocket and fly away with his money if they wanted to.
   
And he thought that’s they did...metaphorically speaking.
   
Back then, people drank their pop out of bottles. Wooden pop cases that fit onto wire stands were left beside pop machines so people could leave their empty bottles in them. And that was our setup at the motel, too.
   
Most people left their empties behind because they were worth only two cents apiece for trade in. Yeah, two cents. Big deal. Had to be a miser to hoard pop bottles for the prospect of someday cashing them in for maybe a buck or two.
   
Heck, that’d be thinking like my old man. That’s right. He loved pop bottles, but I’m telling you right now he hated them, too, almost as much as flies. After all, he had to sit there and worry about losing those pop bottles.
   
Maybe kids loved pop bottles as much as he did. Ten bottles were twenty cents for a kid back then, and twenty cents could buy a couple gobs of penny candy or even the big stuff like five cent Snickers or Milky Way bars. That made pop bottles worth stealing for some kids.
   
And so we had a problem with pop bottle theft at the motel. That’s right, we were suffering shrinkage in our projected pop bottle inventories. Drove my old man nuts to lose this kind of cash flow to delinquents.
   
So another one of my jobs as a seven-year-old at the motel was to keep an eye out for pop bottle looters.
   
Well, it so happened that one day I looked out the window while the old man and I were watching Jeopardy and sure enough, I saw crime in progress. So I dropped the dime to my old man who was sitting on the couch, and skewed justice was instantly set in motion.
   
He blew off that couch and through the door like someone had finally touched off the big one. That poor kid--a guy now, I assume--is probably still in therapy trying to get over seeing a 250-plus-pound former pro football fullback come roaring after him like someone had just hiked the ball.
   
Despite the shock of seeing a pin-striped, bibbed-overhauled ball of fury eating up ground in his direction, the kid made a pretty good effort at escape, bottles clanking around in the baskets of his bicycle.
   
He was just about to hop on the bike seat when my old man planted a perfect punt right in the seat of the kid’s pants. The kid instantly turned into a screaming mess, but, vengeance taken, my old man let him ride away with the bottles.
   
Thereafter, my old man suffered and hobbled a good week from the impact of the kid’s butt on his already inflamed ingrown toenail.
   
Enough said, I guess, except a grown man would probably find himself in jail if he pulled something like that today...bottle thief or not. 
   
So you can see my old man loved his pop bottles, but he also hated them for reasons other than worrying about losing them. It had to do with those pesky flies.
   
I’ll tell you more about that next time. (Sorry. I guess it’s going to be a while before I get to my perfect kid-job from which all this subsequently grows. It’s a therapeutic process, after all.)