I just remembered I once knew a Ron. He was from Ireland, so I’ll call him Eire-Ron.
Eire-Ron was a cook at a restaurant where I was a hostess. He was working on getting his green card, and was very paranoid about anything that he thought might endanger that. For instance, a dishwasher/busboy gave him a ride once, and told us afterwards that Eire-Ron had said “If we get pulled over” (oh, thanks!) “I’m not saying a word.” To be fair, his accent was thick as a brick, but unless there was open liquor, which there wouldn’t have been, I don’t think he had anything to fear from getting pulled over as a passenger.
Now, I don’t know what kind of people he hung out with before he came to the US. It may have been simple cultural unfamiliarity that led him to befriend the scuzzier of the two other cooks. Imagine Stinky, from Hate comics, only not even as bright. Anyway, that led to hanging out with this guy’s whole crew. Which led to a fairly amusing anecdote.
Eire-Ron was on break and chatting with me and a waitress, and asked about attics and cellars. Did they have them elsewhere in the US? Because he’d been surprised to find out that houses in California don’t usually have attics or cellars. Just crawl spaces. I said yeah, that was a California thing, but plenty of American houses had attics and what we usually call “basements” instead of “cellars”…Why was he asking, anyway?
Well, apparently the cops had come to Stinky’s house while Eire-Ron and some other guys, some of whom lived there, were hanging out. Eire-Ron was in the kitchen when Stinky rushed in and told him to “hide somewhere”. What he thought was a cellar door led to the aforementioned crawl space, so that’s where he hid.
“Wait – cops? Uh…so they found you hiding in a crawl space?”
“S’oroight*; they were just there to arrest the one fella.”
“They didn’t find you?”
“No, I waited until I heard the car drive away, then I came out.”
“…Okay.”
So you might think Eire-Ron would start choosing better company from then on. Yeh. Shortly afterwards, we see him leaving work with Stinky, amidst much joshing and backslapping. The next time I saw him, I casually ventured, “So, you’re still hanging out at Stinky’s house?”
“Sure…S’oroight; I don’t smoke that stuff!”
I don’t think I ever found out what “that stuff” was. I hope it wasn’t crack or meth, because IME, everyone who’s said what he said either ends up smoking it, or stops hanging out with the people who do. But even if it was just weed, I should think he wasn’t helping his green card efforts. Which, I’m sorry to say, I don’t know the results of; I left the job before he would have found out.
*Same in every dialect. “But it’s okay.” “It’s cool, though.” “It’s all good.” Yeh.