“Yo, dude,” Brewster said, looking out the glass doors at the back of my kitchen. He pushed back his baseball cap and scratched his head. “…Do you own a dog?”
I looked up from my Pokémon game, frowning. It was about 2am and the neighborhood was as quiet as death, but leave it to Brewster to find my empty backyard more interesting than Pokémon. He was a textbook jock; an impressively tan lax bro with muscles the size of Texas and a brain the size of a tube of chapstick. I was a black nerd. Somehow, we were best friends. I paused the game to grab a fistful of popcorn. “Hell no, my mom’s allergic. It’s probably a stray.”
“It looks really sick, dude. It’s creeping me out.”
“Just close the blinds.”
“I don’t want to,” he whined.
“Jesus, Brew, we see strays every day!”
“I don’t know, now it’s like foaming at the mouth…” He cringed. “Ughh.”
I rolled up from the couch, grumbling as I dropped the Pokémon game and walked up behind Brewster. “Look, you moron, the—” I stopped as I looked out the door and into the darkness of my backyard, lit by a few garden lamps.
That was definitely not a dog.
That was definitely a naked gray bald man crouched in my backyard, drooling and staring at us.
My face screwed up in confusion. Leave it to Brewster to think that some poor homeless man was a dog. “Aw, crap. I’m calling the cops. That’s not a dog, that’s a homeless guy. And he’s probably mentally ill, it’s not his fault.”
“But he growled at me!”
I was already dialing the Baltimore City Police Department, ready to explain that there was some naked guy in my backyard at 2am. Typical stuff for “The City That Bleeds”. The dispatcher clicked on the line.
“Baltimore City Police Department, state your emergency,” a calm female voice answered.
“Good evening, uh, I live at 126 Woodbird Drive.” I looked back to the glass doors; the homeless man was still firmly rooted on my property. “Um, there appears to be a naked man in my backyard.”
Static suddenly crackled to life in the background. “Could you give me your address, please?”
Frowning, I gave her my address again and waited for her to respond. Silence; except for static and an occasional pop. I thought that I had lost the call but there was still no dial tone.
“Hello? M’am? HELLO, M’AM?” I shouted into the phone. “THERE IS A NAKED PERSON IN MY YARD.”
“Where are you going?”
“What?”
A loud pop echoed on the phone before the same tone repeated itself:
“Where are you going?”
“M’am, are you on drugs?” I asked, that being the only plausible explanation at the time.
“Come back.”
“…excuse me?”
“Come back.”
