THE LONG, BAD GOOD FRIDAY JON WESICK
It was late April, and the owners of cluttered homes were too busy thinking of chocolate Easter bunnies to employ a professional organizer. Even the criminals seemed to take the month off, preferring a walk in the flower fields to theft, extortion, or murder. All this left me with nothing to do. After reorganizing my case files, I drove to the Container Store in Mission Valley to keep up to date with the latest advances in household storage. For me, combining my passions of fighting clutter and fighting crime seemed natural. Like the old catalog you can’t bring yourself to throw away, the criminal takes up precious space, space better suited for the easy chair of economic prosperity or the throw pillows of art and culture. He needs to be stored where he belongs—jail, or better yet, the morgue. I left the storage room of Adolfo’s Mexican Bakery which housed my tiny office, drove down Roosevelt, and got on the I-5 at Carlsbad Village Drive. When my Volvo got up to 65 miles per hour, the steering wheel began shimmying like a topless dancer at a limbo contest, so I slowed down and pulled into the right lane. Until I caught some cases and earned enough money for Al from Al’s Auto Body and Copier Repair to fix the car’s torn rotator cuff, I’d have to put up with the blaring horns and extended middle fingers from my fellow drivers. Ah spring! It brings out the best in people. I took the Friars Road exit and parked in front of the Container Store. A boy dressed in a silk robe and dog-eared hat of a Taoist sage stood by the automatic doors. “Lao Tzu said, ‘A vessel is useful for what it is not.’” 82
Berkeley Fiction Review
