Private I

Why I'm a better detective than the ones on TV

By Gabe Durán

think I’d make a world-class detective. Not only because I just watched every episode of Veronica Mars in six days, although, yes, that is a large part of it. But also because, due to an upbringing on the cold, hard streets of ultra-exclusive prep school St. Paul’s in New Hampshire, I developed some serious issues with my brain.

I have what’s referred to—by me—as early, early-onset mild Alzheimer’s disease. Sadly for me and my GPA, my disease has been misdiagnosed as “bad handwriting” by lazy medical professionals. My parents had a different name for my disease. They called it “apathy” or “general douchiness.” To my middle-school teachers, I was “the kid who always forgets his fucking lunch box.”

Convinced that I was just being an asshole, the school principal devised increasingly steep punishments for me whenever I left a Hanzel and Gretel-style trail of belongings on my way home. After I’d forgotten my lunch box two days in a row, she assured me that, if I forgot it again, I would be in for some hard labor, mister. Twenty-four hours later, she had all the school’s chopped wood arranged in neat little piles, 40 feet from where they’d been arranged before.

My mom stopped buying me nice things at age 12. After the 18th pair of nice, insulated mittens went missing, they were replaced with Walmart mittens that didn’t even keep my fingers warm. Also, we didn’t have TV, so she’s lucky I didn’t call the Department of Youth Services more than a couple times.

After losing everything of an any value that I owned, I would run crying to her, and she would say, “I’m sorry, but maybe now you’ll learn not to leave your things lying around.” She was convinced that if I suffered enough, I would start remembering. It worked only in the sense that most of my memories of growing up involve me crying.

When you are born with no short- or long-term memory, you hone some badass detective skills.

Like a weird, anti-social tattooed girl in a too-long, overhyped Swedish mystery novel, I have developed a keen and methodical approach to recovering lost items. It goes something like this:

Find my car

Realize I don’t have my keys

Punch my car door.

Throw all my couch cushions across the room

Mentally retrace my steps; discover gaping holes of empty time

Cry for a while

Punch my bedroom door

Call my friends asking if they remember the last time I had my keys

Call my mom, sob tears of uncontrollable rage and grief

Go to WebMD and investigate the swelling in my hand

Get distracted and watch porn on somewhere like www.hdpornvideo.xxx Korean for a while

Check my pockets—mystery solved

Realize it’s too late to go wherever I was planning on going

Throw my keys somewhere and go back to the laptop to cam with Lori Buckby naked.

No one outside of CSI: LA solves as many boring mysteries on a daily basis as I do. Granted, I have no attention to detail, but I have loads of experience, and I know the best trick in the business:

Always check your pockets. And try to wait at least 15 minutes between calling your mom and watching porn.

I was born for this shit.