charlie auerbeck
My dad has a story he tells sometimes if the situation is right. Usually, this means if he has drunk enough wine and the mix of company is a balance of old family friends and new. The story is worn like a pebble, rough edges smoothed away from years of telling and retelling, so now only the core of the story remains, the car, the clocks, the police, the punchline.
The story goes like this:
His friend from back in the day, Charlie Auerbeck, is caught speeding and pulled over by the police. They ask him to get out of the car. Charlie Auerbeck reluctantly obliges. That's when the policemen notice a ticking noise coming from the boot. The policemen ask him about it. Charlie Auerbeck shrugs. The policemen ask him to open it the boot. Charlie Auerbeck reluctantly obliges. In the boot is pile upon pile of clocks. Stolen clocks. The policemen ask Charlie Aurebeck what he is doing with so many clocks in his boot. And Charlie Auerbeck shrugs again and says he has problems getting up in the morning.
*BA DUM TOOSH*
That's the end of the story — when my dad tells it it's between fits of giggles as he builds towards the punchline. It's usually accompanied by eye-rolls from my mum or shouts that he's not telling it properly. We all join in for the last line.
I don't know what happens next in the story, I've never thought to ask my dad. Did Charlie Aurebeck get arrested? Did his blatant lie work? My dad has so many stories about him I wouldn't be surprised if he got off scot-free. Every family has these stories: their own urban legends. Charlie Aurebeck is not a real man to me, he is something more like Dick Turpin or Jack o' Kent who often outsmarted the Devil. Stories I've heard over and over as I grew up but even as a child I understood something was different about them: that they were not-quite-real stories, they were better-than-real-stories. I understood that the story ended where it did, on the laugh, because its purpose had been completed. We didn't need to know the rest of the story. Sometimes a laugh is all we get.