Thumbsucker

by Walter Kirn

  Baird gazed at the back of one hand and flexed the fingers. “I’m David and I’m an addict,” he announced. He looked back up. “That’s my story, what’s yours?”

  I should have known that as soon I stopped hounding her, Audrey would start confiding in me. It happened suddenly. We were watching Eyewitness News one night and the anchorman stumbled pronouncing the governor’s name.

  “Speed freak,” Audrey said, nodding at the screen. “Beats his girlfriend with a tennis racket.”

  A few days later at the supermarket, I picked up a magazine and skimmed an interview with a British actress I had a thing for. Audrey leaned over my shoulder. “You think she’s cute?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “She’s okay.”

  “Her nose is plastic. A surgeon had to rebuild it. Too much coke.”

  At first I assumed that Audrey was trying to scare me, to warn me about the dangers of fast living, but as she continued exposing people’s secrets it became clear to me that she was bitter. Despite everything she did for them, she told me, most of Maple Glen’s well-known patients relapsed, sometimes within hours of being discharged.

  “Drama. They’re all hooked on drama,” she said. “Look at me. Love me. That’s the real addiction. We’re all in pain, but they make a big show of it. And we eat it up. The so-called little people. Which is what keeps us little, I suppose.”

  The morning of my driving exam I turned on the Today show in the kitchen and sat down to study my book of traffic laws. Audrey came in from work and put coffee on. She’d quit drinking herbal tea some time ago. She’d quit a lot of things, in fact: the candlelit baths, the lotions, the recovery books. It was over, her whole experiment.

  The host of the Today show announced a guest. When I heard his voice my head jerked up.

  “It’s him,” I said.

  Audrey put down her coffee cup. Baird, unshaven and dressed in a black muscle shirt, couldn’t seem to get comfortable in his chair. The interviewer asked if he was “back” and Baird crossed his legs and ran an index finger along the stitching of one cowboy boot. “Frankly, it’s been a struggle,” he said. He paused. “I’ve learned some tough lessons.” Pause: “About myself. But I like to think I’m a better person for it. More sane, I guess. A little bit more real.”

  “Baloney,” said Audrey. “He’s high right now. He’s loaded.”

  “You mean he’s lying?”

  “You’re watching a professional. This joker stayed stoned his whole time at Maple Glen. Total con man. Total sociopath. Handed out autographed photos to all the nurses and swore to each of us no one else had gotten one. Lost his mind when we took away his drug stash and started drinking Lysol from the cleaning closet.”

  I looked down at my book, at the silhouettes of road signs. I’d doubted her, I’d spied, and I’d been punished for it. But maybe my anguish had been unnecessary. If Baird was such a notorious liar, maybe he’d lied to me, too.

  I had to know. “Who found his drugs?”

  Audrey turned off the Today show. “I think I’m going to have to quit that place.”

  I repeated my question.

  “I did,” Audrey said.

  To stop halfway would be pointless. I’d gone too far. “Where were they hidden?”

  She avoided my eyes. “I honestly don’t remember.”

  Such love, such concern for my feelings—I didn’t deserve it.

  As usual, I took it anyway.

  4

  The deal was I could buy a car if I got a summer job, and because I’d always liked the smell of gasoline, as natural to me as the smell of grass or wood, I put in an application at the Standard station out on Highway 9. Within a few days the owner called me back and invited me to his house to chat. Thinking that hard, honest work and pride of ownership might be the things that would finally set me straight and end my dependence on the Ritalin, I wet-combed my hair and ironed a white dress shirt and rubbed a deodorant stick around my armpits. My body odor had never bothered me, but Mike said it had bothered other people who’d been too polite to let me know.

  “Now remember,” Mike said, “you have to sell yourself. No one knows what you can do but you.” This was a reference to Joel, the sudden boy wonder, who’d come in third in a St. Paul junior tennis tournament that no one had thought he’d had any business entering.

  “All this guy needs is someone to pump gas,” I said.

  “You never know. He might need more than that.”

  The station was owned by a man named Scott Dekalb, who’d moved to Minnesota just six months ago. According to the gossip I’d heard in town, he’d owned a Burger King franchise in Colorado which had been destroyed in a tornado. He lived with his wife in a glass-faced model home on the edge of the new golf course, Pheasant Bluff. The locals had said the place would never take off, but the lots had doubled in value in a year. A Minnesota Viking had even bought one.

  Scott was waiting in the arched front door when I turned into his driveway on my bike. He had on a polo shirt with a turned-up collar, khaki shorts, and a fat gold chronograph whose luminous dial lit his forearm green. Instead of shaking my hand he squeezed my shoulder.

  “Great. Come in. Terrific. Justin Cobb. He needs a summer job, we hear. Fantastic.”

  The floor of the house was beneath ground level; I had to walk down a short staircase when I entered. Spindly trees in brightly painted pots ringed the room. I smelled fertilizer, peat moss. From somewhere I could hear a woman’s voice counting slowly to ten and back to zero in what I supposed was a yoga exercise.

  “Eva, my wife, made some great fruit tea,” Scott said, directing me to a U-shaped leather sofa on which a couple of fat books lay open. “You can add sugar, but it doesn’t need it. It’s naturally sweet. You should try it without sugar.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Sugar’s a killer. It shrinks the glands. They’ve autopsied people who’ve eaten lots of sweets, and where their adrenals are supposed to be, there’s nothing. The American way of death.”

  While Scott poured our drinks I leafed through one of the books. The pages were heavily underlined in yellow marker, their margins covered in stars and exclamation marks. I glanced at the title: The Abundant Mind. The cover showed a unicorn with wings soaring over a rainbow toward a mountaintop. On the unicorn’s head was a radiant gold crown.

  The tea was sour, thick with grit and pulp, but I took long swallows to be agreeable. The interview went well, I felt. Scott did most of the talking, using strangely lofty language to describe his business. His name for the gas station was “the enterprise.” Gas and motor oil were “the product,” customers were “extended family,” and employees were “service channelers.” He also talked about money, which he called “inflow.” Most people, he said, had mixed feelings about inflow and thought that earning it required struggle, but nothing could be further from the truth. Inflow was like oxygen, Scott said.

  “I want you to take two breaths for me,” he said. “First, I want you to actually suck the air in.”

  I did this.

  “Let yourself exhale. Good. Okay. Now this time, instead of making a strenuous effort, I want you to gradually expand your lungs. Forget the air. Just open up your lungs.”

  I inhaled the second way.

  “Tell me now,” Scott said. “Which breath felt fuller, more satisfying?”

  “That one?”

  “Voilà,” Scott said, “the principle of inflow. You see, the universe wants us to be wealthy. It wants to fill us up. We choke it off, though. We choke it off because we worship scarcity, this man-made idea that the world is basically hostile.”

  “My father thinks that way.”

  “Don’t fall for it. So what are your goals for the summer?”

  “Nothing special. Mostly I’m trying to save up for a car.”

  Scott set down his tea, which I noticed he’d barely touched. “Personally, I prefer the German makes. Benz, BMW, Porsche.”

  “Expensive. Nice.”

>   “It’s all a matter of what you think you’re worth. When can you start? This Saturday?”

  “No problem.”

  Scott picked up The Abundant Mind. “I’ve hired a manager, Chris, my wife’s kid brother. He doesn’t start until next week, however, so in the meantime I have some homework for you. It’s kind of our personal bible around here.”

  He passed me the book and I tucked it under my arm. Scott put his hands on his knees. We stood.

  “Now, that was easy, wasn’t it?” he said. “Success is like sailing: sit back and catch the wind.”

  I couldn’t have wished for a better job. I loved leaning over windshields with the squeegee and drawing it squeakily across the glass. I loved unscrewing the plugs from oil pans and watching the glossy fluid drip through my fingers. Most of all, though, I loved my uniform: light blue shirt, red cap, and navy pants. My name was sewn into the pocket of the shirt, and the cap had a torch-shaped patch, the Standard Oil emblem.

  By my third or fourth day I had the job down cold, so when Scott stopped by to check on me one morning, I suggested that he could keep expenses down by delaying hiring his brother-in-law until I went back to school in the fall. I’d tested the idea on Mike and he’d said it showed initiative and guts.

  Scott frowned. “That’s the scarcity rut that I was talking about. Do more with less. Conserve. Scrape by. Scale back. Didn’t you read that book I lent you?”

  “I started it.” In fact, I’d misplaced it and couldn’t find it now.

  “Study the chapter on potential energy. Within every molecule, every human being, there’s a vast reserve of latent power.” Scott picked up a pencil lying on the cash drawer. “If a person knows how to tap it, there’s enough energy in this stick of graphite to heat every home in St. Paul for a whole winter.”

  “Really?” I said. “A whole winter?”

  “You’re skeptical. That’s because you’ve been programmed. We’ve all been programmed.” Scott held up the pencil near my nose. “Unfocus your eyes. The pencil splits in two. See how it splits into two?”

  “I do.”

  Scott nodded. “And what does that tell you? About reality?”

  I pretended to think for a moment, then said, “A lot.”

  Scott smiled, then presented me with the pencil as if it had some mysterious new value. I took off my cap and put the pencil behind my ear.

  Chris showed up two hours late his first day on the job. He pulled up next to the premium pump in a custom Chevy van whose sides were painted with desertscapes and stars. He walked around to the pump, unhooked the nozzle, and started filling his tank—all while holding a lighted cigarette. I shot him a look of warning. He shrugged and then stamped out the butt with a sharp-toed roping boot.

  “I’ve worked with petroleum products all my life,” he said. “Unless you drop a lit match in them, you’re fine.”

  Chris parked his van while I rang up his fuel. When I handed him his receipt he tore it up. His uniform shirt was unbuttoned and untucked and he had on one of those T-shirts underneath that show the anatomy of the human body: all the muscles, bones, and organs in their actual colors. The shirt repulsed me.

  “Void that. My gas is on Scott and Eva,” he said.

  “You pumped almost twenty gallons.”

  “Gas is water. There’s more of it than Standard Oil lets on. They jack up the price by holding back supply.”

  “As long as they gave you permission.”

  “I don’t need it. Nickels and dimes don’t interest them, believe me. Those two have bigger fish to fry. They’re players.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Chris said.

  I voided the purchase but kept the register tape in case there were questions later on. Chris spent the morning poking around the station and pointing out its flaws. “Check it out: this oil additive’s phony. It doesn’t increase your mileage, it lowers it.” Later, he raised the shop’s hydraulic hoist. “Hear that wheezing sound, that noise it makes? Just watch: this baby’ll fail and drop a car on me. Hell of a workmen’s comp claim—that’s the bright side.”

  At noon, Chris unlocked the station’s pop machine and helped himself to a can of RC cola.

  “It’s funny: these products that companies get rich on are basically just water. Colored liquid. It’s like we have this need to waste our money.”

  “So business is all a big joke to you?” I said.

  “I’m twenty-six. I’ve gained a certain perspective.” He held out a can of RC for me.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look thirsty,” Chris said.

  “I like to pay for things.”

  That afternoon Chris serviced a station wagon crammed with Little Leaguers in caps and jerseys. I watched him work as I filled a VW Bug. When he went to the car’s rolled-down window to be paid, the driver, a woman, pointed to a sign: “Declaration of Total Satisfaction.” It said that unless the attendant checked the tires, washed the windows, and offered to check the oil, the customer was not obliged to pay.

  “You forgot my tires,” the woman said.

  “I checked them visually. Your pressure’s fine.”

  “We’ll compromise,” the woman said. “We’ll split it.” She dug in her purse as the bratty Little Leaguers pressed their sluglike tongues against the windows. Chris flipped them the bird and the kids began to holler. The woman twisted around to shut them up and Chris grabbed her purse through the window, ripped some money out, tossed the purse back in the car, and walked away.

  Chris handed me a five. “For standing backup.”

  I gave him back the money.

  “I like your honesty. Leaves twice as much for me,” he said.

  Later, after five or six more cars, Chris stole another RC and lit a cigarette. He gazed out at a field across the highway where a Farmall tractor was mowing hay. The acne scars in his cheeks resembled fossils and his bony Adam’s apple looked like a skull.

  “My sister and brother-in-law are sharks,” he said. “I’ll take all the five-finger discounts I can get. Truth is, all I’m doing here is marking time while the game plays out on higher levels.”

  “What game is that?”

  “High finance. Tax shenanigans. You really think people get rich by selling gasoline?”

  “Rockefeller did. He founded Standard.”

  “Rockefeller was a crook,” Chris said. “His father was a small-time flimflam man.”

  The driveway bell rang twice. Chris flicked his smoke away.

  “I’ll take the Mustang,” he said. “You grab the motor home.”

  I was showering after work with Lava soap when Mike came in and sat down on the toilet. He bowed his head and spat tobacco juice into the bowl between his open knees.

  “How’s work?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “You sound unsure.”

  I scoured my armpits with the gritty soap. “It’s not like I expected.”

  “Never is.”

  “I have this manager, Scott’s brother-in-law. He’s stealing company property.”

  Mike spat. “A cost of doing business, I’m afraid. Half the price of milk these days goes to make up for shoplifting, they say.”

  “People shoplift milk?”

  “They shoplift everything. Milk is where they recapture the lost profits.”

  I held out my arms in the spray. Gray water rolled off. The grease wasn’t on my skin but underneath it—a spreading, shapeless black tattoo.

  “How much oil is there?” I asked Mike. “Chris says that Standard has wells in Lake Superior that if they ever started pumping them, gas would go down to a dime a gallon.”

  Mike flushed the toilet; my shower water ran scalding. “I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve heard these stories.”

  I scrubbed at the grease; I felt let down, betrayed. The company uniform had made me proud.

  By my third week of working under Chris, I was drinking my fill of RC cola and eating free lunc
hes from the snack machine. Chris was partial to pretzel twigs and corn nuts, but I was too modest to steal such popular items. I held myself to the peanut-butter crackers.

  Scott stopped in every few days to check the books. He smelled of VapoRub and cough drops and always seemed to be searching for a shop towel to wipe his dripping nose on. Chris said Scott had a problem with cocaine and hosted all-night parties at his house, whose guests included stockbrokers and bankers.

  “Basically, they’re the power elite,” Chris said. “You and me are just chits. We’re human currency.”

  “I’m saving for a car. That’s all I care about.”

  “Big Oil’s got you exactly where they want you, then. Another young American bites the dust.”

  Slowly, under the pressure of Chris’s teasing, I began to cut corners in my work. I ignored people’s tires. I left windshields bug-streaked. For three days running I put off cleaning the rest rooms, leading to a catastrophic spiral of plugged-up toilets, overflowing trash cans, vandalized towel dispensers, and flooded floors. The men’s room graffiti grew filthier and bolder, climaxing in a life-size drawing of revving chain saws attacking a woman’s crotch. I tried to erase the drawing with steel wool but only succeeded in scuffing up the wall, which made the image look more obscene somehow.

  One morning, during a cola and pretzels break, Chris informed me that he was dropping acid.

  “Leave me out of it,” I said.

  “Tough. I already slipped some in your pop.”

  A station wagon pulled in with three flat tires caused by driving over a construction site. While Chris put the car on the lift, the passengers—a mother, a father, and two cute little girls—leafed through old Road & Tracks in the office. We brushed the tire treads with soapy water to locate the punctures, then removed the rims. I sanded down the rubber around the bad spots, glued on patches, and remounted the tires. When I finally double-checked for leaks, soap bubbles formed where air was still escaping.