Sgt. Baldy, Civilian Special Ops

Baldy and I have been friends for many years and he's truly one of my favorite people in the world. Our relationship has evolved over many baseball games, late nights out on the town, bottles of Santa Margherita, and too many laughs to even count. We once got into a fender bender (my fault, I rear-ended a cab while we were jamming to Ratt, of all things) and somehow found the whole thing so funny that we had to turn our heads away from the cops in order to avoid going to jail for utter and complete disrespect because we couldn't stop laughing. He has this laugh that just makes you dissolve into hysterics where tears run down your face, even if you don’t get the joke. Kind of like a cross between a hyena and the naughty giggle of a junior high kid getting away with smoking cigarettes in the bathroom that he snitched from his dad (and Baldy, you know I mean that in a totally complimentary fashion because your laugh might just be my favorite sound on Earth, at least until I hear those golden words, “Divorce granted.”).

So Baldy, although he is an accomplished, smart, kind, sweet, and hilariously funny man, has had his share of heartache and more than his share of break ups. He’s the kind of guy who just attracts psychotic women. He’s a nutjob magnet, and I’ve witnessed it firsthand. He’s now going through the same process as I, but believe me, he’s gone through Hell and back about a thousand times to get to this point. Some of the things that Mrs. Baldy has done to him over the years make my marriage seem as if I was skipping through a field of daisies humming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Yet, Baldy has given her so many “one more chance”s that I’ve actually begged him to leave her more times than I can count.

Though he’s now feeling much more peaceful about it, he and Mrs. Baldy have separated over the years on several occasions. At one point, she moved to a town about an hour away and took his car with her, apparently to aggravate him and leave him without transportation. Baldy, the generous man that he is, didn’t protest and simply went and purchased another car. However, after several months of drunken, middle-of-the-night phone calls from Mrs. Baldy wherein she screamed obscenities at him generally accusing him of being a worse husband than O.J. Simpson, he got pissed. Baldy had had enough and proceeded to undertake action for which I think the Army Special Ops should give him a civilian genius award. He took a cab to her building in the middle of the night, slipped unnoticed into the parking garage through means that still aren’t clear to me (though I believe it may have involved squeezing himself through a locked window), jimmied the car lock open with a hanger, HOT WIRED THE CAR and drove it right back to his own garage. Now keep in mind, this is a professional man with no previous experience in this kind of behavior, so I don't know if he was temporarily possessed with the spirit of Grand Theft Auto or what, but I definitely now believe Baldy is some kind of reincarnation of McGuyver. Give him a gum wrapper, a piece of string, and a paper clip, and bam! You get your stuff back. (And yes, the car was in his name so he didn't break any laws.)

I think both Baldy and I would have paid a lot of money to see the look on Mrs. Baldy's face when she realized the car was out of her possession and once again returned to its rightful owner.