by Adam Selzer
“Yes,” I said. “Coach Hunter was behind it.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Streich. “And I imagine you all know what he was looking for. Dustin, James, I’m looking at you guys in particular.”
“Did he find anything?” asked Dustin.
“No,” said Mr. Streich. “And for the record, I have a bit of a problem with him deciding to search your lockers because he suspects somebody’s writing poems. There’s nothing illegal about writing poems, and singling you guys out just on a hunch is a little dicey. So I haven’t told him what kind of project you guys said you were working on.” I imagine that would give him quite a clue.
“Thanks!” said James.
“However,” he continued, “I can imagine that you guys know pretty well who’s responsible for the poems he’s been finding in his office?”
“Do you know how many he’s found?” asked Dustin.
“As of lunch today, he says he’s found fourteen of them.”
“Fourteen!” I said. “That’s pretty impressive.”
“Well,” said Mr. Streich, “the problem is, you’re sort of walking that fine line between pulling a prank and stalking. I’m going to go ahead and let you guys do your project about making a tombstone for him, and I’ll refrain from ratting you out on two conditions.”
“I’m willing to negotiate,” said Dustin.
“Number one,” said Mr. Streich, “you have to stop sending him the poems and trying to depress him. That goes without saying. Number two is that, in addition to making the tombstone, you and James will both be delivering eulogies for him at the presentation—nice ones. And you can’t call him by name as part of the project, it has to be for an anonymous gym teacher. I could get in trouble myself over this.”
That, I had to admit, was pretty clever. Tough, but fair.
“That’s going to be hard,” said Dustin. “Saying nice things about him?”
“We always say nice things about the dead,” said Mr. Streich. “Even if you didn’t like them. If I speak at my mother-in-law’s funeral, I won’t be saying a word about her having horns.”
“Well,” said James to Dustin, “I’m game if you are.”
“Deal,” Dustin sighed.
“In that case,” said Mr. Streich, “congratulations on writing some fine poems. Hang on to them; I’m sure you’ll find a way to use them for something eventually. You kept copies, right? Somewhere other than your locker?”
“Yeah,” said Dustin. “And if he says that there’s been fourteen of them so far, then he still has three more to find in his office.”
We all laughed. “I’ll let those slide,” said Mr. Streich, nodding. “Anybody else making progress on their projects?”
“We are,” said Brian. “I have a sample ready to show.”
We had been working the whole week editing the takeover footage into something coherent, and we spent most of the rest of the class watching what he had. There were shots of Edie flicking off the the whole street in the snow—which turned out really well—shots of us walking up to the Wackfords and of the pirate flag flapping in the breeze. Then there were some scenes of annoyed customers, and scenes of us having business meetings and stuff, while that guy who was working on finances sat in the corner, not seeming to notice that anything weird was going on at all.
When the footage ended and Mr. Streich turned the lights back on, he looked pretty pale.
“So,” he said, “you guys didn’t tell me you were actually going to take over the Wackfords.”
“The shift supervisor let us,” said Brian. “We didn’t threaten anybody or anything.”
“And there were hardly any customers, anyway,” I said. “And the supervisor was trying to get fired. He already took the rap.”
“Did you get any of the customers to sign release forms?” asked Mr. Streich.
“Um, no,” I said, kicking myself for having forgotten that.
“Then all that footage with the customers is useless,” said Mr. Streich. “If you blur their faces out, you might get away with it, but even then, you could be in some serious trouble for this.”
“But this isn’t the whole movie,” I said. “It’s just a very rough draft of the part that takes place in the new downtown.”
“And that footage of Edie in the street is fantastic!” said Anna.
“Well, yeah, that’s pretty good,” said Mr. Streich. “I tell you what. Finish the movie, but let me see it before you show it to anybody, anywhere. Got it?”
“Okay,” I said. We still had plenty of work to do, anyway.
That night, we took the camera with us to Sip during the basketball game to film Dustin reading “Lonesome Whistle,” the final poem in his “Theoretical Death of a Gym Coach cycle.” He dressed in a black turtleneck for the occasion, and actually drank coffee instead of a smoothie, though he just nursed one cup the whole night, and I’m not sure he drank even half of it.
We shot a short interview with Trinity in which she talked about the coffee industry’s responsibility to local culture and talent, however questionable the talent may actually be, then filmed her introducing “the one, the only, the irrepressible Dustin Eddlebeck, poet laureate of Cornersville Trace Middle School.”
Dustin bowed so deeply I thought he was going to fall over, then began to read very dramatically, snapping his fingers the whole time.
“So long, Coach,
we’ll all remember you, how you
yelled yourself blue
while we ran in vulgar circles,
every time we hear that lonesome whistle blow.
We’ll think of the crack of the thick plastic mats
where the wrestling team got ringworm
every time we hear that lonesome whistle blow.
We’ll think of the scream of the rubber
machines,
the smell of old socks
that followed us through the locker rooms,
and the fundamentals,
it all comes down to fundamentals,
every time we hear that lonesome whistle blow.
When we’re walking along the
pockmarked sidewalks
down Seventy-sixth Street, on the way to Venture
and whatever’s left of the old downtown,
skeleton frames, gravestones
underneath a blanket of brown leaves,
and we feel like we ought to hurry,
run faster, jump farther,
before the last of it is blown away,
we’ll think of you, Coach. We’ll think of you.
Every time we hear that lonesome whistle blow.”
Brian and I then spent the weekend working our butts off editing the whole thing. In the end, the movie opened with a few scenes of Sip and the rest of the traingle that showed how cool the old downtown was, then contrasted that with shots of the retail wasteland on Cedar and some interviews and voice-overs about how the strip malls were taking over the town (like my slime that ate Cornersville Trace comment).
The takeover took up just a few minutes of the movie. We cut all the shots of customers getting harassed and edited it to look as though the place was practically deserted, which, given the weather, was no real trick, since the weather had kept most people away. The only customer we left in was the guy who’d stayed the whole time, looking oblivious while we acted like the place was an accounting office. Since he was there every day, Troy was able to get him to sign a release form.
To finalize the thing, Dustin and Anna recorded some piano and cello music to serve as background during the quieter scenes, and to serve as the music Edie was conducting with her middle fingers in the middle of Cedar Avenue as the morning snow fell. We ended up opening with that scene.
True to our word, we gave the first copy to Mr. Streich, who watched it during his planning period one day, then sent out messages through the office for Anna, Brian, Edie, and me to meet him in the pool room.
“You guys,” he said as we walked in the doo
r, “you’ve done a fine job on this. If I were a film critic, I’d say that I didn’t really understand what the whole thing about having an accounting office in Wackfords is, exactly, but you at least show that that one guy can’t seem to tell the difference, so it works.”
“Then our work is done,” said Anna.
“Well, one more thing,” said Mr. Streich. “I have to ask you to promise not to put this thing out for distribution online or anything. If the Wackfords guys get ahold of this, you could still get in trouble. You probably already would be, if more people had come in. You dodged some major bullets.”
“Why don’t we have it be sold exclusively at Sip?” I said. “In a way, the whole thing is a commercial for Sip, and just a few sales there probably won’t get back to Wackfords too soon.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see.”
Later that day, I gave James the stapler back, and he slipped it into Coach Hunter’s office that evening, hiding it in the corner under some papers, so that when Coach Hunter ran across it, he might just think he’d misplaced it. Sure enough, when I came into gym the next day, Coach Hunter was in his office, happily stapling things. His mood was so good that he only made me do a couple of extra laps that day. By the end of the week, between having his stapler back and noticing that the poems weren’t showing up quite so regularly, he was back to his old, slightly less-miserable self.
Two weeks later came the night when we all presented our monuments. Dustin and James had erected a large tombstone (actually Styrofoam spray-painted to look like a rock) marked COACH. It was an obelisk nearly five feet high. Dustin read his “Lonesome Whistle” poem, and James gave a little speech about how he’d always remember “the unknown gym coach” fondly as a man who really took dodgeball and square-dancing seriously—after all, when a person has a mission in life, it’s hard not to respect them for it. Most of the people probably didn’t know they were talking about a real gym coach who wasn’t even dead.
After everyone else had shown their monuments, we showed the movie in its entirety—and got a standing ovation.
For a formerly avant-garde filmmaker like myself, it felt very strange to get that sort of mainstream acceptance.
Naturally, Coach Hunter found out about the tribute a couple of days later. He had Dustin and James both brought in to the principal, but since there was no rule against sneaking poems into someone’s office, he had to content himself with being especially hard on them in gym class instead of having them thrown into reform school.
Right around the end of January, Mr. Streich decided it would be safe if we offered copies of the movie at Sip, so we printed up a few and talked George into selling them. We only sold a few in the first week, but it was a start.
In early February, word that I had a product on the market got back to Mr. Morton and the rest of his hangers-on at the Skills for the Job Market activity, and suddenly, I was the most popular kid in class. Most of the kids in the room thought that antagonizing big business like that was un-American (even though I knew that I was a True American, since I was a grilling one), but apparently, being able to market a movie, even just in a local business, meant that I had skills for the job market up the wazoo. In fact, I could probably use “wazoo stuffed with job market skills” as one of the bullet points on my resume.
Mr. Morton made me spend a whole class period telling the story of my success.
“Well,” I said early on, “when you start a venture like this, they usually tell you to have a mission statement or something.”
“Right!” said Mr. Morton proudly. “And what was yours?”
“Actually,” I said, “it was ‘Mission statements suck.’”
He seemed a bit put off by this, but I knew I was still getting an A.
To boost sales, we had a free screening of the movie at Sip. Troy and Trinity were both there, along with Andy, who was now working at a record store in one of the newer strip malls. Troy had managed to keep his job at Wackfords, where he planned to stay for exactly one more month before moving on.
Several people from the pool came, too, including Jenny, who had taken to following me around at a comfortable distance and staring at me from down the hall when she didn’t think I was looking. Clearly, she wasn’t over her crush. Just to be polite, Anna and I tried not to kiss in front of her. But since we’d both seen the movie several times already, we spent a good deal of the screening making out.
“This movie isn’t really avant-garde at all, is it?” I asked Anna midway through.
“It’s postmodern,” said Anna.
“What’s postmodern?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s a theory that you can make up as you go along, really,” she said. “But I know it when I see it, and this is it. We’ve moved on from our avant-garde phase.” And she gave me a quick kiss and went back to watching the movie.
We’d moved on, all right.
For our first Valentine’s Day as an official couple, Anna and I decided to spend the small amount of money we’d made off the sales of the movie on a trip to the city. Her dad drove us to a place called the Mercury Café, which was like a larger version of Sip that featured live jazz music. We sipped espresso and watched the band while her dad ate by himself at the bar to give us some privacy. Anna assured me that the band was pretty bad, as jazz bands went—in fact, her exact words were that they “sucked cheese”—but I’d never felt so sophisticated in my entire life.
“This is the life,” I said. “Hanging out in the city, listening to music, and sipping coffee. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Nothing against Sip or anything, but I prefer the city to any part of Cornersville Trace.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “And we’re stuck there until college, at least.”
“Just a few more years to go,” she said.
“A few long, long years,” I said.
She kissed me on the cheek. “We’ll make the best of it, I guess,” she said.
It was after midnight when her dad drove us back home, so most of the lights on Cedar had been turned off, and if it hadn’t been for the blue glow from the Mega Mart sign shining on them, I could almost have imagined that the street-lights were the vanished trees that had been there before, back when the early explorers and trappers came through and found nothing but dark, imposing wilderness where the Burger Box now stood.
The only trees now were the small ones that had been planted on the edges of the parking lots, where the cars of a few late-night employees were still sitting. I didn’t need a crystal ball to guess that my friends and I would probably all be McHobos ourselves by the end of high school, working one crappy job after another in the strip malls of Cedar Avenue, trying to make the best of it.
But if the movie had proved one point, it was that we could stand up to those places.
I was so lost in thought, thinking of all that and staring at Anna, with all of the blue and green and red signs reflecting in her glasses again, that if we hadn’t pulled to a stop at the traffic light near the Wackfords, I wouldn’t have noticed that Troy was in there, closing the place down for the night.
When I looked closer, I saw that Trinity was in a car in the parking lot, waiting for him. And I saw that he’d put Edie’s skull and crossbones flag up on the flagpole, where it was waving in the winter wind.
About the Author
Born in Des Moines and now based in Chicago, Adam Selzer worked twenty or thirty retail and restaurant jobs between eighth grade and the year after college. His first book was How to Get Suspended and Influence People, also published by Delacorte Press. Today he works as a “weird tour guide,” assistant ghost buster, and part-time rock star. Check him out on the Web at www.adamselzer.com.
ALSO BY ADAM SELZER
How to Get Suspended and Influence People
Published by Delacorte Press an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York
This is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Adam Selzer
All rights reserved.
Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Selzer, Adam.
Pirates of the retail wasteland / by Adam Selzer.
p. cm.
Summary: When eighth-grader Leon decides what to do for his project in the gifted program, it involves coffee houses, pirates, and filmmaking.
[1. Gifted children—Fiction. 2. Motion pictures—Production and direction—Fiction. 3. Middle schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S4652Pi 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2007027602
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
eISBN: 978-0-375-84650-2
v3.0