Beer Steins Online

VACAVILLE (CBS SF) – It was instant karma for Vacaville firefighter Louis Jones when he responded Thursday morning to a medical call at a mobile home on Sunset Drive in Vacaville.

A home on Bishop Drive that Jones had been preparing to rent out was burglarized overnight last week. He discovered the theft on Friday.

A 4-wheel dirt bike, washer and dryer, tools, lawn mower, wood chipper, power tools, hand tools and personal items were stolen.

When he arrived at the mobile home this morning in response to a medical call, he noticed another missing item that looked familiar—a plastic, bright yellow wedge used to stabilize cars during extrications was being used as a doorstop on the gate to the mobile home.

“I recognized it right away. I became suspicious right away,” Jones said.

His suspicions were confirmed when inside the mobile home was the missing Whirlpool washer and dryer he intended to leave to the new tenants of his rental home.

Construction work was underway on the mobile home’s deck, Jones said.

Being a firefighter and medical responder, he kept his cool, he said. The man in the mobile home was transported to VacaValley Hospital.

“We took care of our business and left,” Jones said.

Ricky Mankini (Vacaville Police Dept.)

As Jones and the other responders were leaving, they encountered 47-year-old Ricky Mankini, who also lived at the mobile home park, according to Vacaville police Officer Debi Lopez.

“We didn’t confront him. I called the police,” Jones said.

Vacaville police contacted Mankini at VacaValley Hospital where he was visiting his housemate, Jones said. A search of Mankini’s vehicle revealed more stolen items and Mankini was arrested for possession of stolen property and booked into the Solano County jail, Lopez said.

Jones returned to the mobile home where he identified the property that was missing from his rental home.

“The only thing we recovered was the washer and dryer, a lawn mower, some paint, hinges, paint brushes and keepsakes—beer steins with firefighting related artwork,” Jones said.

The recovered property is worth about $2,300, Lopez said.

“Ninety percent of the stuff is still missing,” Jones said. He estimates it’s worth between $8,000 and $10,000.

Jones, a firefighter for 20 years, 10 of them with the Vacaville department, offered his perspective about his stolen property.

“It’s just stuff. It’s not like it’s a life-or-death situation,” he said.

(Copyright 2012 by CBS San Francisco and Bay City News Service. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Readers of the news of the weird may recall a contest sponsored some years ago by the Guinness beer company in which first prize was a pub in Ireland — title and deed, stools, steins and taps. You needed only to compose a clever essay, throw a few darts and demonstrate that you could pull the perfect pint. Those looking for escape — and unable to find it in the bottom of their mugs stateside — had their opening.

Swap Murphy’s Irish Stout for Guinness, and you’ll find, if not the full premise of Matt Bondurant’s haunting third novel, certainly the precipitating event. “The Night Swimmer” introduces us to an idealistic young couple from Vermont who take over the Nightjar, a moldering pub in a lonely corner of County Cork.

Fred and Elly Bulkington fell in love as graduate students in English literature. He harbors vague ambitions of becoming a novelist, while she longs to hone her skills as a deep-water swimmer (think of Lynne Cox and the English Channel). The isolation of this part of Cork, and particularly Roaringwater Bay, would seem to suit them both, but Bondurant suggests more ominous possibilities. Fred likens himself and Elly to the couple in “Revolutionary Road” — except, he adds, with empty confidence, “we actually make it; . . . we follow through and make it happen.”

Yet “The Night Swimmer” appears less influenced by Richard Yates than by John Cheever, whose journals supply epigraphs for each of its three sections — lines like “When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.” In fact, a comparison to Cheever’s most famous story, “The Swimmer,” is unavoidable. Neddy, Cheever’s privileged suburbanite, evinces an “inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools,” to which Bondurant’s Elly (whose name is clearly an echo) replies: “My natural state seemed to be damp and clammy, my hair stiff with salt or lake scum. It was my only true source of satisfaction, when I felt most complete.” Like Cheever’s, Bondurant’s characters are children masquerading as adults, unable or unwilling to brave life’s challenges.

Bondurant’s previous novel, “The Wettest County in the World,” is a model of tone and rhythm, and here too his prose teems with evocative detail and surprising metaphor, capturing the fervid mania of a couple spinning out of control. With Elly always in the water, Fred becomes hostage to a lifeless pub, ostensibly writing his novel but in reality scribbling bits of unconnected musings, a kind of madman’s commonplace book. (“You know when you have the image of something in your mind, but when you go to do it you can’t make it right? It just doesn’t match up? There is only one problem in this life and this is it.”)

Unfortunately, Bondurant isn’t satisfied with dissecting Fred and Elly’s increasingly troubled marriage. Rather, as his story progresses, it balloons with thuggish turf wars and streaks of magic realism: Cheever by way of Mario Puzo and Jorge Luis Borges. The mash-up of genres and an overabundance of half-sketched characters and cryptic plot turns threaten to neuter an otherwise powerful book.

Still, Bondurant’s lyricism redeems “The Night Swimmer,” especially in several passages describing Fred and Elly’s life before Ireland, a holiday gathering with Elly’s parents and a duck hunt with Fred’s father that throw light on a world the couple is soon desperate to re-enter. “We would start over, start a family,” an increasingly despondent Elly tells herself, admitting that “the sudden thought of a child filled me with a glorious kind of relief, like I was released from a net, like I was saved from drowning.” It’s a callow fantasy. Similar, you might say, to dreaming about what you’d do if you won the top prize in an audacious contest.

Readers of the news of the weird may recall a contest sponsored some years ago by the Guinness beer company in which first prize was a pub in Ireland — title and deed, stools, steins and taps. You needed only to compose a clever essay, throw a few darts and demonstrate that you could pull the perfect pint. Those looking for escape — and unable to find it in the bottom of their mugs stateside — had their opening.

Swap Murphy’s Irish Stout for Guinness, and you’ll find, if not the full premise of Matt Bondurant’s haunting third novel, certainly the precipitating event. “The Night Swimmer” introduces us to an idealistic young couple from Vermont who take over the Nightjar, a moldering pub in a lonely corner of County Cork.

Fred and Elly Bulkington fell in love as graduate students in English literature. He harbors vague ambitions of becoming a novelist, while she longs to hone her skills as a deep-water swimmer (think of Lynne Cox and the English Channel). The isolation of this part of Cork, and particularly Roaringwater Bay, would seem to suit them both, but Bondurant suggests more ominous possibilities. Fred likens himself and Elly to the couple in “Revolutionary Road” — except, he adds, with empty confidence, “we actually make it; . . . we follow through and make it happen.”

Yet “The Night Swimmer” appears less influenced by Richard Yates than by John Cheever, whose journals supply epigraphs for each of its three sections — lines like “When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.” In fact, a comparison to Cheever’s most famous story, “The Swimmer,” is unavoidable. Neddy, Cheever’s privileged suburbanite, evinces an “inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools,” to which Bondurant’s Elly (whose name is clearly an echo) replies: “My natural state seemed to be damp and clammy, my hair stiff with salt or lake scum. It was my only true source of satisfaction, when I felt most complete.” Like Cheever’s, Bondurant’s characters are children masquerading as adults, unable or unwilling to brave life’s challenges.

Bondurant’s previous novel, “The Wettest County in the World,” is a model of tone and rhythm, and here too his prose teems with evocative detail and surprising metaphor, capturing the fervid mania of a couple spinning out of control. With Elly always in the water, Fred becomes hostage to a lifeless pub, ostensibly writing his novel but in reality scribbling bits of unconnected musings, a kind of madman’s commonplace book. (“You know when you have the image of something in your mind, but when you go to do it you can’t make it right? It just doesn’t match up? There is only one problem in this life and this is it.”)

Unfortunately, Bondurant isn’t satisfied with dissecting Fred and Elly’s increasingly troubled marriage. Rather, as his story progresses, it balloons with thuggish turf wars and streaks of magic realism: Cheever by way of Mario Puzo and Jorge Luis Borges. The mash-up of genres and an overabundance of half-sketched characters and cryptic plot turns threaten to neuter an otherwise powerful book.

Still, Bondurant’s lyricism redeems “The Night Swimmer,” especially in several passages describing Fred and Elly’s life before Ireland, a holiday gathering with Elly’s parents and a duck hunt with Fred’s father that throw light on a world the couple is soon desperate to re-enter. “We would start over, start a family,” an increasingly despondent Elly tells herself, admitting that “the sudden thought of a child filled me with a glorious kind of relief, like I was released from a net, like I was saved from drowning.” It’s a callow fantasy. Similar, you might say, to dreaming about what you’d do if you won the top prize in an audacious contest.