Pirates of the Retail Wasteland

by Adam Selzer

  Maybe that was the way Jenny thought of me.

  And I couldn’t help being flattered.

  I quickly wrote her a reply.

  Jenny,

  Yeah, that cabdriver was all right. I’ve always heard that cabdrivers don’t speak English and don’t bathe. I’m not sure this guy bathed, exactly, but he certainly spoke English! Thanks again for the cab fare and the nice letter; I don’t really think I’m as rebellious as all that, but I’m flattered that you think I am. Don’t worry about things between us being weird—I’m sure they’ll be the way they’ve always been. Not weird at all.

  See ya,

  Leon

  I only wished I believed it.

  With the exception of the time I spent staring out the window at the green light of the Wackfords sign, there wasn’t a second on Saturday night or Sunday morning that I wasn’t thinking about Anna or Jenny. Anna, mostly. When my thoughts turned to Jenny, I’d try to steer them over toward Anna. But I couldn’t stop the things Jenny had written from running through my head. I thought—hell, I knew—that I should just call Anna and say, “Hey, what’s the deal with us, anyway?” but when it comes to things like that, I’m a total chicken.

  On Sunday afternoon, my dad offered to take me thrift-store shopping, and I readily agreed. I was not one to pass up a chance to hit the thrift stores, even with a guy with a Mohawk. And anything that would take my mind off of Jenny and Anna for a while was especially welcome.

  When my parents went to the thrift stores together, it was usually on a cookbook hunt, but when my dad went alone, he was usually shopping for scientific gear—or, failing that, junk he could get away with calling scientific gear. Anything made out of glass was pretty much fair game; it didn’t bother him in the slightest that real chemists probably don’t keep their chemicals in bear-shaped honey containers or jars shaped like Santa Claus.

  “I’m gonna need all the bowls I can get for this project,” he said as we got into the car. “It’d be easier just to use the nonstick ones from the kitchen, but, well, you know.” He snorted a bit. One of his least-favorite household rules was that he was not to use any of the kitchenware as lab equipment—he had to buy his own stuff for that. He tended to grumble about it, but it was one rule for which I thanked God daily.

  “Hey,” I said, “maybe you’ll find something with Teflon at the thrift store.”

  “Ha!” He snorted again, and I wondered if maybe having the Mohawk was making him snottier. “Forget that. You never find anything that nice in the thrift-store cookware. It’s mostly old, worn-out stuff. That’s why I go through it so quickly out in the garage.”

  Well, that and the fact that he used them to mix hazardous chemicals that ate right through them. I thought this, but didn’t say it.

  “I’m out for records,” I said.

  “Naturally.”

  My old project had been buying large speakers, which come remarkably cheap at thrift stores and flea markets. I’d originally planned to buy enough to cover a whole wall in my room, but I’d stopped after I got about halfway, since the noise half a wall of sound made was already enough to break circuits, start fires, and generally cause trouble around the house. Once I’d declared that project kaput, I moved into buying actual records. I didn’t own a record player or anything, but I needed something to decorate my other bedroom walls, the ones that weren’t covered in speakers, and thrift-store records were way cheaper than actual posters.

  I’d gotten the idea from Anna’s parents’ house. The walls in one of their hallways were lined with a bunch of framed jazz albums, which looked really cool and kind of elegant, in a way. It made me want to buy up old jazz albums and other artsy things like that to decorate my room, and that was my original plan, but I soon found that cool jazz records are a pretty rare find at thrift stores—they have records galore, but mostly Christmas albums, Jane Fonda’s Workout Record, copies of that one album by Boston, and religious stuff. The closest thing you normally ever see to jazz is Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which I’m not sure really counts as jazz.

  So, since the supply was much greater, I’d gotten into collecting albums with really stupid covers—which was not quite the same as cooking bad food on purpose, since I didn’t actually listen to the albums. They just functioned as conversation pieces in the room, and anyway, I got a kick out of knowing that I was the only head banger in town with an album on his wall called Satan Is Real, the cover of which featured a couple of preachers standing in front of what appeared to be a large cardboard devil that wasn’t likely to convince anyone that Satan was, in fact, real. Also, I didn’t really know all that much about jazz. Anyone who saw a bunch of jazz albums on the wall and questioned me about them would have realized I was a faker really fast.

  An hour later, we were back in the car, heading home. Dad had found a whole bunch of bowls, a few wooden spoons, and, to his great delight, an old chemistry set.

  “Look at this thing!” he said, practically bursting. “It’s just like the ones I had when I was a kid…and most of the chemicals are still there!”

  “Is it safe for them to sell it like that?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said, smiling even wider. “Not in the slightest. The instructions are missing, and if you mix some of these together the wrong way, you could end up with stuff that would eat right through your skin, or cause something to blow up.”

  My stomach turned a little bit. This was the kind of speech that gave me nightmares. Every time I heard a loud noise in the garage—which was not uncommon—I’d worry that it might be “the big one.” Even our cat acted like a shell-shocked veteran of World War I.

  “Anyway,” he said, “they’re sure lucky I bought it, instead of some undesirable sort who’s up to no good.”

  “Look at yourself, Dad,” I said. “The lady at the counter probably thought you were an undesirable sort.”

  “Oh yeah.” He chuckled. “I forgot that people tend to get scared of people with Mohawks. Well, let them think so. They have nothing to worry about. What did you get, anyway?”

  “It was slim pickings today,” I said. “Just this.”

  I held up a worn copy of something from the 1970s called The Wildewood Singers Sing the Beatles. It showed a bunch of middle-aged people standing in front of a tree, all of them looking as though they’d just robbed a hair-spray store and wanted to use up the evidence before the cops arrived. Dad made a nasty face at it.

  “Leon,” he said, “this thing looks awful. If you want to hear the Beatles, I have every one of their albums.” For my dad, this was exhibiting pretty good taste. I’d always imagined he preferred bland choral versions of the Beatles’ songs to the originals.

  “You do?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Have you ever actually heard them before?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Just checking,” he said. “Lots of kids nowadays are surprised to hear that Paul McCartney had a band before Wings.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “That might have been funny in the seventies, but if there’s a kid alive today who’s never heard of the Beatles, there’s no way that kid has heard of Wings.”

  “Fair enough,” Dad nodded. “But seriously, throw that thing out the window. It looks like a travesty.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I just got it for the cover; it’s not like I’m going to listen to it. That would be like buying a book of nasty-looking recipes and then actually cooking them.”

  He paused. “Point taken,” he said. I was a bit surprised by this; normally that’s the kind of mouthing off that would get me in trouble. I guess having an armload of chemicals just put him in too good a mood.

  We drove right past the Wackfords, but I refrained from whacking Dad in the arm. Cedar Avenue looked a lot different by day, when the signs weren’t glowing.

  “What do you think of all these new places?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “the newspapers keep
calling it the revival of Cornersville, like we were just a little dump before all the minimalls moved in. And I guess it’s good for the economy. It creates a lot of jobs, having all these places.”

  “Not very good ones,” I said. “They’re mostly just nametag jobs. I heard a guy last night saying that retail was sort of the modern equivalent of going to work in the mines.”

  He nodded. “That’s probably about right. Most of the people who actually make any money off these places’ being here live miles away in some fancy mansion, I suppose.”

  “So you don’t like it?”

  He shrugged one of his shoulders. “I like having some of the stores here, but on the whole, it’s just making the town look more like every other town, and it makes the traffic a hell of a lot worse. So no, I guess I don’t like it very much.” He chuckled for a second. “Or maybe having a Mohawk just makes you automatically bored with the suburbs. Did they have any albums by the Sex Pistols back at the thrift store?”

  “Hell no,” I said.

  “Rats,” he said. “Ever since I got my new hairstyle, I’ve really felt like lashing out at society.” He laughed again. I thoght maybe I should have Edie over—they could throw cheese at signs together.

  “Warren doesn’t like it much, either,” I said. Warren was Anna’s father.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose he would. How are you and Anna getting along?”

  “Fine,” I said, looking out the window. There were certain things I simply refused to discuss with my dad, but I knew he was ready to push the issue. I went for evasive action. “Speaking of the gifted pool,” I said, which we only sort of had been, “did I tell you about the new project we’re doing?”

  “Max Streich told me about it,” he said. “Building monuments?”

  “Yeah.”

  One of the main benefits of being in the gifted pool was that when my parents wanted to talk about school, I could just talk about whatever project we were working on for that until they were satisfied, and hence, I’d never have to bring up math, science, or any of the other subjects in which I could pretty confidently expect a C-plus, tops.

  “What kind of monument are you thinking of making?” Dad asked.

  “I’ll probably make a film tribute to something,” I said. I didn’t want to let on that the idea included possibly taking over the Wackfords.

  “Been a while since your last movie,” he said.

  “Don’t remind me.”

  James had written up a script for another film, called J’ai un Loulou Grand Comme le Montana Collé à Mes Fesses, which translates to “I Have a Booger the Size of Montana Stuck to My Buttocks.” The whole thing was going to be in French, which would have instantly made it all kinds of artsy, but it never really got off the ground. I figured that when the time came to make another film, it would have to be something other than avant-garde—we’d already been there and done that, and there was no sense repeating ourselves. Still, it was hard to come up with a way to do something less weird than an avant-garde sex-ed movie without looking like we were going mainstream. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that something that criticized the new downtown might be just the thing we needed. It might be more watchable than something avant-garde, but it could also be controversial. And it might just help Sip stay in business.

  When we got home, I stuck The Wildewood Singers Sing the Beatles on the wall next to Saved by the Voices of Carbondale, which featured even more middle-aged people wearing tacky matching suits and a whole lot of hair spray. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I really don’t know what the hell people were thinking in the 1970s. I mean, people in the fifties had a pretty good excuse for any bad album covers they made—they were all living under the notion that they were going to be blown up at any moment, a feeling to which I was no stranger myself. And in the sixties they were reacting to war and other forms of turbulence. But there’s just no excuse for the kind of crap they were putting on album covers in the 1970s. Maybe after the Beatles broke up, people found themselves leaderless and adrift.

  I spent the rest of the night thinking about Anna and Jenny and all that business. I tried to get my head back into the new movie, or even Sip, but it just didn’t work.

  Monday morning came around, and I got to school early so I could see Anna before she went inside. I waited by the flagpole until I saw her coming. It’s always weird when you finally see someone in the flesh after thinking about practically nothing but that person for a while.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling. “You do realize it’s colder than penguin shit out here, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just thought I’d wait for you.”

  She smiled. And I know this is the kind of thing that makes me seem like I deserve a good punch in the face, but when she smiled, it was like it wasn’t cold anymore. All the doubts I’d had, all the thoughts that I might be better off with Jenny, just vanished.

  “How was the city?” I asked.

  “It was okay,” she said. “I had to spend most of the day bumming around the university library while Dad worked. But after that we went and ate at this joint that had live jazz and really good espresso.”

  “Did you drink it straight?”

  “Three shots.”

  Espresso is sort of an extra-extra-strong form of coffee. It’s like concentrating an entire mug of coffee into a little plastic cup from a preschool girl’s tea set, and it tastes remarkably bitter. It’s not for amateurs. I could only take it if it was mixed into an insane amount of milk, and Anna was drinking it straight. I felt like a total wimp.

  Not to mention that a day with my dad would have involved bumming around the thrift store while he looked for new ways to blow up the garage, then eating grilled rabbit while he pretended to be a hillbilly, not studying history and listening to jazz. The closest thing to there being any espresso present would be if he and my mother decided to drink shots of ketchup.

  As I’ve said, sometimes with Anna, I felt like I was in over my head.

  And now I’d never learn to drink espresso, with Sip going out of business. I had planned on telling Anna about it that morning, but she seemed to be in enough of a good mood that I didn’t want to wreck it. It would wreck her day for sure, and I didn’t want her to think of me as the guy who had wrecked her day. I know it was paranoid and all that. But still. Seeing Anna helped me stop worrying about Jenny, but it also forced me to think about Sip and Wackfords again.

  My first class that day was history with Coach Wilkins, the most hyperactive teacher in Cornersville Trace. He was always jumping up and down, pounding his desk with his fist, and screaming at the top of his lungs. We’d made it as far into American history as World War I, an accomplishment he’d celebrated by doing an impression of a soldier being attacked by mustard gas.

  Toward the end of the period, Coach Hunter came into the room.

  “Hey, Gene,” said Coach Wilkins.

  “Ron,” said Coach Hunter, nodding. “I found this poem in my office, and I thought it might be by a suicidal student. Wanna give it a look?”

  I sank a little bit in my desk as he handed the sheet of paper to Wilkins, who read it to himself.

  “‘Locker Room Mausoleum Sutra,’” he said out loud. “This is pretty heavy stuff. But it’s about a suicidal gym teacher, not a suicidal student.”

  Coach Hunter looked right at me. “It was one of you punks, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “I’ll just bet you don’t,” he said.

  Everyone in the room turned and looked at me. They were probably sure I was behind whatever the problem was, too.

  “Now, hold on, Gene,” said Coach Wilkins. “I don’t think this is quite Leon’s style.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll bet you know who did it, right?” asked Coach Hunter, still staring at me. I felt like I was being interrogated. Maybe he’d drag me back to his office, sit me down in a chair beneath a bare, swin
ging lightbulb, and beat me senseless until I confessed.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “Can I read the poem?”

  “I’ll read it out loud,” said Coach Wilkins. “It’s pretty good.”

  And he did, snapping his fingers and trying to do a beatnik voice as he read.

  “Locker Room Mausoleum Sutra

  By No One in Particular

  “The marines didn’t want him anymore.

  Sent him packing with a cheap vinyl suitcase,

  two dollars, forty-seven cents,

  and an existential crisis

  that got him through three states

  on the bus home.

  And every locomotive that came rolling by

  said, ‘There sits a broken man,’

  and every siren sounded like a whistle

  until he knelt before the school board,

  who tapped his shoulder with

  an old birch pointer

  and said, ‘We dub thee Coach.’

  Instead of training recruits to go to war,

  he trained teenybopper girls to play volleyball

  and disinfected locker rooms

  until they smelled

  pinched and pungent, like the mausoleum

  in the veterans’ cemetery, where

  he knew he’d never rest.

  And every yellow school bus

  that came rolling by

  said, ‘There sits a broken man,’

  and the whistle sounded like a siren

  that he wished would come for him.”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” I said. “It’s just a depressing poem.”

  “Me neither,” said Coach Wilkins. “I don’t think there’s any rule against putting poems into someone’s office, anyway.”

  “Well, there ought to be,” Coach Hunter said. He fixed me with one of those classic “I’ll get you for this” looks that gave me the distinct impression that gym class wouldn’t be much fun for me that day. Less fun than usual, even.