For the Street Sweeper, This Story's Only Hero

If you ever plan on going to an overnight Pasadena streetside Rose Parade party, let me give you a word of advice. Don't worry about the cops - they'll be too busy dealing with the dangerously intoxicated to care about the average party drinkers at the dozens of gatherings on the tarps and blankets that line the roadside. No, as in any good apocalypse story, the other survivors, not the calamity itself, pose the greatest threat. Once the rule of law breaks down and everything goes to hell, it's the other people who will break your bones, skin you alive, and pelt you with flour tortillas.

So as you might imagine, the sudden appearance of three tortilla-throwing children (a girl around eight and two boys around ten and thirteen) neither delighted nor surprised my five friends and I, who were trying to enjoy our mostly-sober-so-far curbside bash on Colorado Boulevard.

(A brief note: tortillas and marshmallows are the traditional ammunition of parade route children on New Year's Eve. They usually target cars and friends, but all conventions of decency vanish the moment it becomes temporarily culturally acceptable to throw foodstuffs at strangers.)

We all went dumb while the tortillas struck us, but Carlita regained her tongue once it ended.

“Hey! Stupid kids! Come back and apologize! Pick up your mess!” she yelled at the little pricks' backs as they tore eastbound into the night down the glittering street, past a dozen other noisy little gatherings, and towards Pasadena City College.

“Carlita, it's no use,” moaned Jimmy. “Let them have their fun.” “Fun?” I injected. “You mean running around throwing food at people? You gotta teach kids there's consequences for their actions.”

“Hey, they're gone, man,” said Jimmy, unhelpfully. “Can't do nothin' now.”

“They just went down the street. Let's go look for them and find their parents, tell them they can't let their kids ambush people. This isn't the wild west.”

“Little assholes,” the usually gentle Bud muttered furiously. “I'll come with you.”

I hadn't seen him angry in a while - the kids must have triggered some childhood bully PTSD.

“Buy me some popcorn if you're going,” Juanita drunkenly called after us.

“I want some too!” yelled Karen.

“Buy some yourself!” I snapped.

Carolina asked me to get her popcorn when we were here last year. She'd been lying across my lap and saw a vendor across the street, so she whispered that nothing would make me happier, honey, than if I could have some popcorn at this very instant.

Eager to please, I got up, walked to the crosswalk, made sure no cars were coming, crossed, bought the popcorn, and returned the same way.

“Why didn't you just walk straight across?” she said, smiling but a little annoyed. “The road's shut down.”

“Still would've been breaking the law.”

“You're always like this,” she said after a moment.

“Always like what?”

“Never mind.”

Juanita and Karen could've just picked up popcorn from the gutter if they wanted it. You could find just about anything in the street on New Year's Eve. It was filthy. In Pasadena, the city's social and political elite found themselves too occupied with the management and celebration of the city's biggest pride - the Tournament of Roses parade and the following Rose Bowl football game - to care about keeping the rest of us in line during the festivities.

Our particular party's territory sat across the street from Michaels, marked by a large orange-and-yellow quilt that straddled the street and sidewalk. Atop the quilt sat a small grill, a cooler of drinks, and six chairs containing us all. As Bud and I began our eastward hike to search for the little shits, we passed dozens more similar setups, all wedged together as tightly as possible. Many people had been camping out all day to save prime real estate - we'd gotten there at about four in the afternoon and had been lucky to find a spot big enough to fit us all.

Every last one of these parties had its own group of increasingly intoxicated revelers from all walks of life. Well, maybe not all walks of life - only the ones who couldn't or wouldn't pay for the pricey city-owned bleacher seating.

Everyone who didn't either camp out (which was free) or buy bleacher tickets (which were not) had three alternatives: watch the parade on TV, take your chances and show up the morning of, or have a connection to someone working or living at property along the route. And property along the route was expensive. My pal Filipe did landscaping for a few houses on Orange Grove Boulevard, right on the parade route, and those motherfuckers, he assured me, had it made.

After cutting across Holliston, where cars and people were now crossing whenever they felt like it (they disabled the stoplights for the parade), we passed a street vendor selling popcorn.

“Hey, Antonio,” said Bud. “Popcorn. For Juanita and Karen.”

“They can get their own, Bud. I'm not grocery shopping for them.”

“But-”

“We'll lose those kids if we slow down too much. Let's go.”

But about halfway across PCC, Bud saw another vendor and lit up. This one pushed a cart stocked with toys, mostly flying light-up spinners and marshmallow guns (with ammunition).

“I've always wanted one of those!” Bud whispered to me, watching the man rubber-band a flashing blue spinner into the air.

“They're not worth your money,” I whispered back, a little frustrated by his childishness. “You're just going to break it or lose it.”

It didn't stop him. After two minutes tapping my foot, trying to pretend I didn't know him, the vendor finished explaining the care and feeding of one's light-up spinner to Bud, who was now gleefully shooting his up in the air while we walked, running after it, and sometimes catching it when it floated back to his height.

“You're a child,” I told him.

“At least I know how to have fun,” he replied. “You're too uptight.”

He got it stuck in a tree two minutes later. “Still worth it,” he said.

Carolina decided she'd had enough right before the holidays.

For two whole years I held a steady course. Keeping between the lines, being a textbook good boyfriend. In fact, as far as I can remember, I didn't make a single mistake, or at least when I did make mistakes I cleaned them up quick. I followed every single relationship rule to a T, and it didn't save us.

She left suddenly and with surprisingly little animosity. I got home from work one day and she was nearly packed up. No amount of pleading would stop her. She was just finished with me, like some invisible timer had run out.

That was the last I heard from her. I tried to call her after she left in a futile bid to get some sort of closure. Went straight to voicemail every time. I spent the rest of the holidays seeing her in everything and everyone and everywhere.

Seeing her in every square inch of little old Pasadena.

We almost passed the kids before Bud saw them out of the corner of his eye. Apparently bored with their crusade, they had settled down to play on their phones and 3DSs on their blanket at PCC's northeastern corner. A fat, balding man with thin brown hair and a gaunt, curly-haired, nervous-looking woman wearing improbably many layers perched atop fold-up canvas chairs, looking bored.

“Excuse me,” I said, inflating my voice as much as possible. “Are these your children?”

I met the man's gaze. “Yeah. Do we have a problem?”

“I think you should know that, just a few minutes ago, your children threw tortillas at us and our friends.”

“Okay. And?”

And? And so his snotty little kids were harassing strangers! What didn't he understand?

The kids looked at me too, a little concerned.

“And? And it was really rude. And I thought you should know… for disciplinary purposes.”

His face reddened. “Disciplinary purposes? Listen here, buddy-”

“Are you telling us how to raise our children?” shrieked the woman suddenly. “You have no right! I bet you don't even have children yourself!”

“No, I don't, but-”

“I thought so,” she sneered. “So why don't you please mind your own business and-”

“Mind my own business!? I was minding my own business until your kids threw tortillas at me!”

“Look, pal,” said the man, “is this your first Rose Parade?”

“No.”

“Then you should know that that's just how it goes. Kids throw tortillas and crap. Sometimes, they get stuff thrown back at them. It's, you know, the circle of life. It's nature.”

“But this is Pasadena, not the fucking Serengeti!”

“Do not speak like that in front of my children!” shouted the woman, increasingly hostile.

“Okay, okay, geez. I'm sorry.”

Bud cut in. “Hey, uh, I think we should go,” he whispered

“Fine. Fine. Sorry to bother you. Good night.”

We turned left. The adults were still scowling at us. The kids looked triumphant.

Bud visited a few days after Carolina left. I guess he knew I wasn't taking care of myself. Unsurprisingly, I was in shambles.

“I always thought,” I moaned from the couch while he set the table with our Arby's takeout, “that everything had a code to crack. That there was some step-by-step process that, maybe nobody'll tell you what it is, but if you figure it out, everything clicks. If you know which cracks not to step on, the world just works.”

“Maybe that's how it goes sometimes,” Bud said calmly, clinking silverware against the table. “But I feel like more often, that kind of thinking makes people bog themselves down with made-up rules. The world doesn't run on rules. It runs on interactions.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know. I haven't really thought it through. But maybe it's like they say: rules were meant to be broken.”

“I hate that expression. Of course they weren't.”

“Maybe not. But maybe sometimes things work better with no rules at all.”

We were quiet while he gently placed our burgers on my china plates.

“I thought I did everything I was supposed to do,” I said.

“But is that all you did?”

The sky was dark and the streets were blurry with the orange streetlights as we trudged our way back. And then down the block I saw the toy vendor we'd passed earlier, and something came over me.

“Hey Bud,” I said as we neared the vendor. “Have you ever used a marshmallow gun?”

Ten minutes later, when the little shits left their blanket to go harass some cars on Holliston and passed an inconspicuous tree, we jumped out from behind it, marshmallow guns a-blazing, and went full Rambo on their asses. Marshmallows rained like there was no tomorrow. It was glorious, exhilarating, and seemed to unfold in slo-mo, a scene truly worthy of an eighties action flick. The little assholes were completely blindsided.

After a feeble attempt at retaliation, they dropped their tortillas and ran back home to their mommy and daddy. Their pop was wrong, and they'd learned the hard way. This wasn't The Lion King; this was Mad Max, bitch. And these punks had messed with the wrong gang on this here post-apocalyptic boulevard.

And just forty-three minutes after that, we sat, victorious, back in our chairs, counting down the seconds to the New Year with the rest of the crowd lining the street.

“FIVE! FOUR!” rang the entire parade route.

Juanita and Karen had their popcorn, my treat. It wasn't cheap, but it didn't matter. It was a special occasion.

“THREE!”

Half of it ended up in the street during their drunken countdown. But that was fine.

“TWO!”

You'd never see a street dirtier than this one on this night.

“ONE!”

But tomorrow afternoon, they'd sweep the streets, and you'd never see one cleaner.