Pirates of the Retail Wasteland

by Adam Selzer

  “Hi, Leon!” she said, sounding awfully excited just to get a phone call.

  “Summit meeting,” I said. “Tonight at seven o’clock, Sip Coffee in the triangle.”

  She paused. “I’m not sure I can get there,” she said. “They’ll never let me out for that.”

  “Well, make it if you can,” I said. She said she’d try.

  I ran downstairs and asked my dad if I could get a ride to the coffee shop at seven.

  “Well,” he said, “we were going to be eating around that time, Leon.”

  “What are we having?”

  “I don’t know. Probably something from the grilling book.”

  This, of course, called for fast strategy.

  “Would it be all right if I just ate at Sip? They have pretty good sandwiches there, and I have to meet some people to work on a project.”

  “Well, as long as it’s for school,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

  I was the first to arrive at Sip; Dad took me a bit early so he and my mother could have whatever hideous crap they were planning to eat before all their TV shows came on. Jenny walked in a minute after me, wearing one of her Doors shirts over what looked like about three layers of sweaters, and decked out in gloves, a hat, a scarf, and earmuffs—the whole winter set.

  “You made it!” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, taking off her gloves and putting her “Jim Morrison’s Soul” bottle on the table. “If my parents ever ask, I’m running sprints to try out for track.”

  “In the middle of January?”

  She smiled. “According to the latest studies,” she said, suddenly speaking like the narrator of a PBS documentary about athletes, “wintry nights provide the ideal atmosphere for physical conditioning.”

  “Nice.”

  “Anyway, do you know what the meeting is about?”

  “No clue,” I said. “I know it was Anna’s idea, but I didn’t call to ask. There’s protocol to follow.”

  I don’t know why we were so formal about summit meetings. It was probably just more fun that way.

  Having set all her stuff down, Jenny climbed up and stood on top of the table.

  “All hail the American night!” she shouted at the ceiling. I assumed this was something Jim Morrison used to say. Apparently, part of being an obsessed Doors fan is trying to live on the edge, and to her, standing on a table was really pushing some limits. Had there been anyone in the café besides us and Trinity, I’m sure they would have stared.

  “Hey!” shouted Trinity. “Get down!”

  Jenny just looked over at her with a face like she was on a roller coaster. I’d never seen her so excited.

  “I made the blue cars go away!” she shouted down at Trinity.

  “Yeah,” said Trinity. “But there’s a ceiling fan right by you. Get down before it takes your head off.”

  “Oh,” said Jenny, a bit sheepishly. She jumped down and took a seat.

  “Living on the edge these days, huh?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Just being out at night like this…it’s like I’m busting out of jail, you know? I mean, my parents might disown me for this! It’s so exciting!”

  One by one, most of the rest of the group started to file in. Dustin and Brian came in at pretty much the same time, and Edie showed up a minute later. Most of the rest of the people weren’t as likely to show. Everyone in the pool could be counted on to do something that would raise eyebrows for our projects, and we could all be trusted to raise a little hell in the classrooms from time to time. But some of the other kids just didn’t get out of the house much, or were always busy with real extracurricular junk. Those of us who came to things like summit meetings were the ones who wouldn’t be caught dead joining the Spanish club—or, in Jenny’s case, would join but were always on the lookout for an excuse to miss the meetings.

  Anna was the last to arrive, and she sat down in the seat I’d quietly saved for her by piling my coat and bag on the chair next to me.

  “Good evening,” she said, sounding very formal. “Welcome to the summit meeting.”

  Before we could get started, Trinity walked, or rather, danced her way over to the table.

  “Wow, the gang’s all here,” she said. “What are you guys? Like, the Cornersville weirdo club or something?”

  “Gifted pool,” said Dustin, chuckling. “Same thing.”

  “Oh,” said Trinity, as though we suddenly made a lot more sense to her. “I was in the gifted pool in middle school. It was the weirdo club then, too!”

  “Cheers, comrade,” said Edie, raising an empty coffee mug that had been sitting on the table.

  “Yeah, whatever,” said Trinity. “You guys want coffee or what?”

  We all ordered cups. Jenny ordered a cup with two shots of espresso in it, which to her was probably the equivalent of ordering speed. Trinity brought them out a minute later on a tray. “I must be insane,” she said. “Bringing caffeine to a bunch of eighth graders.”

  “And eighth grade ne’er-do-wells, at that,” I reminded her.

  “All right,” said Anna as Trinity danced her way back to the counter. “I hereby call this summit meeting to order.”

  “Great,” said Brian. “What’s it all about?”

  “I have an idea for the next movie project,” she said. I leaned in closer. We all knew that if the next movie didn’t make a really big splash, no one would watch anything else we did. The Rooster in the Skating Rink had been our sophomore slump, and now we needed a real homer.

  “Something else avant-garde?” asked Jenny.

  “Not exactly,” Anna said. “I was thinking of a sort of documentary.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “The old downtown and Cedar Avenue.”

  “What about them?” Edie asked. “About how all those capitalist pigs exploit their workers?”

  “Something like that,” said Anna. “I was mostly thinking about how you said Wackfords was more of an office than a coffee shop last night.”

  “Yeah?” Edie asked.

  “I was thinking we could do a short documentary contrasting the style and substance of the old downtown versus the faceless corporate garbage of the new strip malls.”

  “Or better yet,” said Edie slowly, as though she was choosing her words carefully for once, “we could take over the Mega Mart.”

  Nobody seemed to take this seriously. What were we going to do—charge in and take the place over at gunpoint, then steal ourselves a couple of cheap shirts?

  But Anna nodded, considering the suggestion from the floor. “That’s an interesting concept,” she said. “Go on.”

  “We’ll take it over like pirates,” said Edie, grinning.

  “Avast!” shouted Brian, in his best pirate accent. The rest of us joined in with a chorus of “arrrr’s.”

  “I don’t know,” said Anna, even though she was smiling. “That sounds just slightly illegal. It’s not worth going to jail over.”

  “Jail?” asked Jenny. She had been leaning in close, but now she pulled away a bit. If being in a café under legal pretenses was risky to her, I could only imagine how far out of her league it was to even joke about something that could lead to jail time.

  “Then we’ll do it at Wackfords,” said Edie. “They’re way smaller, so they’d be easy to take over. Then we’ll turn it into an accounting office or something and see if anyone even notices!”

  “Maybe,” said Anna, laughing, “we can find a way to set up an office in the Wackfords without actually doing anything illegal.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “If we showed up with a watercooler and some ferns and set them up in the middle of the store and started handing out paperwork or something, nobody would even notice the difference. We could probably film a pretty good scene. And the most they could do is ask us to move.”

  “I could see that working out,” said Anna.

  “Well,” said Edie, “I suppose that might work. It would be better if we could tell customers they d
idn’t sell coffee anymore, though, because it’s just an office now.”

  “Anyway,” said Anna, “the point of the movie will be to make a monument to the old downtown, so we can use it as our pool project, and point out that Cedar Avenue sucks, however we go about it. And maybe we can have a scene showing a full accounting office being set up in Wackfords and not having anyone even notice. Everybody in?”

  “You know I am,” I said. “We could maybe even prove an actual point with this one.”

  “I’m in,” said Edie. “So’s Brian.”

  Right about then, we heard Trinity squeal, and she ran to the front door, where a curly-headed guy had just walked in the door.

  “Troy!” she shouted. She jumped over the counter and leapt up at him. For a second I thought she was going to knock him down, but he caught her and held her up by the butt while she wrapped her arms and legs around him. I hoped, for his sake, that all the safety pins on her dress were securely fastened. The guy—what I could see of him through Trinity—looked vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

  She jumped down after a second, then said, “Troy, come here, you have to meet these kids.” She grabbed his hand and practically dragged him over to our table. “Check it out,” she said, pointing at us. “These are the kids who are in the gifted pool this year.” She turned to us. “Troy was in it the same time I was.”

  “I know you,” said Troy, grinning at Edie.

  “You do?” asked Edie, looking confused.

  “Yeah,” said Troy. “You threw a piece of cheese at me last night.”

  That was why he looked familiar.

  He worked at Wackfords.

  “Corporate whore!” Edie spat with a sneer.

  Troy chuckled. “I just work there, you know,” he said. “It’s not like I have some vested interest in the company or anything.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Edie. “No one has to work there.”

  “No,” said Troy, “I could always go work at the Mega Mart up the street instead. Or at one of the fast-food places. Nobody outside of Cedar Avenue is hiring these days, and you gotta work someplace.”

  “But someplace like that?” Edie asked.

  “Hey,” Troy explained, “Andy, this one guy I work with, says that retail is, like, the modern equivalent of going to work in the mines. At least I’m in one of the nice, well-lit mines that doesn’t smell too bad. I could even get insurance if they gave me enough hours. Plus, if I die in a cave-in or something, they’d probably alert the proper authorities. Mega Mart would have my clothes up on the rack before I was cold.”

  “Why didn’t you just get a job here?” asked Brian.

  Troy laughed again. “You don’t get that lucky,” he said.

  “Trinity did,” said Edie.

  “That wasn’t luck,” Trinity interrupted.

  “She had to sleep with, like, five people to get this job,” Troy said. Trinity socked him in the arm. Hard.

  “I did not,” she said, while Troy rubbed his arm and mouthed the words “She did.” “I was bagging groceries for a year and a half while I waited for an opening here. And it was a pay cut.”

  “Hmmm,” said Edie, clearly not convinced.

  “Look,” said Troy. “Would you like me better if I told you I was bringing the place down from the inside by not working very hard?”

  “Well,” Edie said, “I guess so. In a way.”

  “You know, Troy,” I said, “we were just talking about Wackfords. Do you think anybody would notice if people set up an office in there?”

  He shrugged. “Not really. Everyone acts like it’s the office anyway. I’ve had people ask me to keep the noise down when the blender was running so they could talk on their phones.”

  “Edie wants us to take them over like pirates,” said Jenny, “but we think that might be a little bit extreme.”

  “Might be a little bit illegal, too,” said Troy.

  “Just let them try to stop us,” Edie muttered.

  “Actually,” I said, “we were thinking of filming a scene where we set up a regular accounting office in there, just to see if anyone even really notices. We could probably do it without getting in your way at all.”

  “That might be kind of cool,” said Troy. “I can maybe help you pick times to come in when it’s just me and Andy working. I know he’d look the other way and let you guys do what you gotta do. Even if you don’t do the takeover thing, you should at least come and talk to Andy. He’s a McHobo.”

  “What’s a McHobo?” I asked.

  “As I understand it, it’s anyone who bums from job to job and never stays anywhere long enough to specialize. But he gets really philosophical about it. You could probably make a whole movie just about him.”

  The music over the speaker suddenly changed from a waltz (I think) to something that sounded like a tango, and Trinity said, “Troy! Dance!” and pulled him up from the chair where he’d been sitting, then proceeded to lead him around the store, tango dancing. He looked like he was just following along as well as he could without falling on his ass, but he played along like a good sport.

  “We are so learning how to do that, Brian,” said Edie.

  Brian kind of shrugged sheepishly.

  “Well,” Anna said as Troy and Trinity danced farther and farther away, “I’d probably better get going in a minute.”

  “Me too,” said Jenny.

  So everybody began packing up. I hung around Anna as she bundled up. She’d be walking home, even though it was still hellishly cold out. She lived right near the triangle, which I don’t think was coincidence. I could imagine her parents wanting a place near the old downtown—if they had to live in suburbia, they probably figured they might as well choose the best location they could find under the circumstances.

  “That was a really good idea,” I said. “I think this’ll make a great movie. Even if we don’t stage a corporate takeover.”

  Anna chuckled. “Edie’s weird, that’s all,” she said. “There’s this fine line between being an activist and just mouthing off, and she wouldn’t know it if it marched down Venture Street at the head of an oompah band.”

  “Ha,” I said. I leaned in and kissed her, just on the cheek, which I figured was pretty safe. She didn’t stop me or anything, though she also didn’t kiss me back, I noticed. And it bugged me.

  “Nighty night,” she said, and I think she might have been trying to say it really sexily on purpose. Sometimes I just couldn’t tell. It certainly sounded sexy to me, but she could have been talking about cleaning her cat’s litter box and I probably would have thought she sounded sexy.

  She smiled and took off down the road.

  I decided to stick around a little while to make sure I missed the evening’s grilling adventure. Trinity and Troy were still dancing around—or anyway, Troy was hanging on to Trinity while she danced around. Pretty soon Troy was just sort of standing there while Trinity danced around him—all around him. There were times when it looked like she was rubbing her entire body against his; then her leg would wrap around him and she’d be rubbing specific parts of herself against him. I made up my mind right away that Anna and I were so learning to do that, too.

  Then George, the owner, came out of the back room carrying a bag of coffee beans. George was a good guy—he was in his forties or so, had a scraggly brown beard, and wore a straw cowboy hat. When he was the only one working, the music tended to be acoustic classic rock—the Eagles, James Taylor, early Elton John, Grateful Dead, and whatnot.

  “Hey, George,” said Trinity, pausing from dancing at a point when her crotch was pressed right into Troy’s side.

  “Consorting with the enemy, eh, Trin?” George asked.

  “If that’s what you want to call it, sir,” said Troy.

  Trinity pried herself off Troy and smoothed her dress. “I’m prying corporate secrets out of him the old-fashioned way,” she explained.

  “Well, do what you have to do,” said George. “Wh
atever it takes to keep us from going out of business around here.”

  “Can we do it on the counter?” asked Trinity.

  “Whatever.”

  “How about in the back, by the ice machine?”

  “Hey,” said Troy, “I didn’t agree to any of this.”

  “You’ll do as you’re told,” said Trinity cutely.

  “Six months,” said George to Troy. “Six months and we shut down. I’ll probably have to go on welfare and live in a box by next Christmas. Tell your manager.”

  What?

  “Yeah,” said Trinity. “So get back there, clean up the area around the ice machine, and take off your clothes. Move it!”

  She pushed him in the chest in the general direction of the back room.

  “Excuse me?” said some woman at the counter. “Can I get some service here?”

  “One second,” said Trinity, walking back over to the counter. “You!” She pointed at Troy. “Back there and strip. Now!”

  Troy just stood there for a second, grinning.

  “Move!” she said more forcefully as she got behind the counter.

  Troy headed for the back room.

  George snickered. “You crazy kids,” he said.

  “We’re seriously gonna do it, George,” said Trinity. “The things I do to save this store from the Wackfords!”

  “I appreciate it, Trin,” said George. “I really do.”

  I wasn’t sure which I had to process first—the fact that Trinity was acting so randy at work and getting away with it, or that George had said Sip was closing in six months.

  I looked around the place and didn’t see any going out of business signs, but there was also nobody else there, other than Jenny and the woman standing at the counter. Business wasn’t exactly booming. The tip jar on the counter looked pretty vacant. And six months is a bit early to put up going out of business signs.