The Gum Thief - cropped Read online

  Roger, You've had a week to digest the custody results. I hope you're over it and not getting all maudlin or shaving your head into a Mohawk or some other crazy shit. I'm writing because of-oh Christ. A few days ago I was in the living room, picking up empty coffee cups, and I looked outside and there was this girl staring at the house-early twenties?-one of those Goth kids, pretty in a way, if she'd trowel off all the white junk on her skin. Why do kids do that these days?

  I didn't give it much thought, but an hour later I looked out, and she was still staring. So I opened the door and asked her what she wanted, and she blushed (I'm assuming, beneath all the white junk) and mumbled something and sort of half ran, half walked away. I told Brian about her at dinner, and he said maybe it was some kid who used to live in this house before we moved in and wanted to see it again. I've done that myself, at the old family place in Steveston (which, BTW, is a stack of condominiums now), and I left it at that.

  And then yesterday she was back out front. I didn't want to freak her out, and so I used my nice face and my nice voice and asked her if she'd like to come in. To be honest, I was curious about her, and I remember how happy it made me to see my family's old place.

  She was iffy about coming inside, and I was about to close the door, but then she said yes and came forward. I asked her if she used to live here, and she said no. I asked if she was selling something, and she said no, so I got exasperated and asked her what she wanted. She asked if I was Joan, and I said yes, and-she was so nervous-I felt sorry for her, whoever she was.

  So that's when she said she wanted to ask me about you, Roger. And I thought to myself, Dear Lord, please don't tell me that he's now into Harajuku death princesses, but she read my mind and said, "No, no, it's not like that. I'm not his girlfriend or stalking him or anything like that."

  So I asked, "What are you here for, then?"

  And she said, "To be honest, I was a little bit curious to see what you look like."

  I gave her my icy stare-yes, the one you know very well-and she said, "Actually, I think Roger's in a bad way right now, and I don't know what to do or who else to go to."

  I asked what sort of trouble, and she said, "Unhappy trouble-depression, maybe? Alcoholism? He hasn't been to work in a week."

  I almost smiled. It was so sweet of her to believe that your disaster of a life was something brand new rather than something that had been playing itself out over many moons. She was so green that I asked her to sit.

  I cleared away some of Zoe's toys, and we settled on the couch. I got nostalgic, almost, because she's obviously at that stage in her life where she's living in the second-hand shops and has rings of RIT Dye in shades of black and blue and maroon all around her bathtub. I didn't ask if she wanted coffee, because she was so fidgety. I simply told her I'd make herbal tea, but then I stopped myself and asked her if she wanted a glass of red wine. She said yes. It was two in the afternoon, but so what. Once a kid's in school, Roger, the days drag on forever, and I've never been much for housework. Drinking in the middle of the day must be a habit I picked up from you. Ha!

  So young Bethany told me about knowing you from work at Staples. Roger, you are truly the mayor of Failure City. The punchline? She says you're in customer service. She also tells me you're working on a novel, and that you're well into it. That does come as a surprise: you actually started something? Snowballs in hell, and all of that. She said it's a "sophisticated adult drama" featuring a pair of rival authors. You? Creative? Artistic? All I remember is you doing one failed walk-on in the local North Shore Players production of Same Time, Next Year. All you had to do was knock on the door and hand the lead her ice bucket, and you fucked it up. And then you had your fling with her. Oops, did I mention your fling? I guess I did. Well, that's all in the past now, and I've got custody, so all's well that ends well.

  Roger; Bethany's a sweet kid, and she's smart, but she's also young-young enough to think I might either care about you or want to help you. I told her that you go through "dark patches," but the moment the words left my mouth I regretted it, because girls love helping guys through dark patches and I don't want her lost in your orbit. I was then going to qualify my statement by saying, "There's no hope in trying to help him," but that would have been gasoline on the fire. So instead, I said, "He snaps out of these things almost like clockwork. You watch. He'll be right as rain within a few days." That cheered her up, and hopefully stripped your pity party of glamour.

  Speaking of your pity party, Roger, get on with your life, okay? We're divorced. I got custody. Brian and I are marrying in three weeks. You're living in the past. You're living on Fantasy Island. So you're writing a novel-that's actually good news, for once. Park all your emotional crap there. Quit your loser job at Staples. Get a real job. Get sober. You've probably decided that nothing can happen until you "bottom out." You're battling for last place, and you're the only person in the competition.

  On a purely technical matter, next weekend I'll be dropping off Zoe for her monthly three··hour visit. Do you want me to drop her off at your place, or do you want me to drop her off at a custody-visit hot spot like the aquarium? Your call.

  You have my numbers and email.

  J.

  Glove Pond

  Kyle paid the Chinese food delivery man, and Brittany carried the bags to the dining-room table, which had been dusted by Steve with several sweeps of a small throw rug.

  Gloria then opened each grease-blotted delivery bag with wonder, as though it might yield gold, frankincense and myrrh. She made no effort to fetch cutlery or plates; Kyle went into the kitchen to find some. He rifled through the cutlery drawer, where he found chunky pieces of sterling silver dinnerware. The silver was so badly neglected that its surface was like the oilcaked and smeared concrete bay floors at a Mr. Muffler franchise. Jesus, these people are disasters, he thought, looking for something, anything, that might be useable as serviettes. No paper towels. No tea towels. No cloth napkins. In the end, he found a three-week-old copy of a local shopping flyer, and around each knife/fork/ spoon he folded a paper sheet. He carried these four set-ups out to the dining-room table.

  "What are those?" asked Gloria.

  "Set-ups."

  "What's a set-up?"

  "It's a restaurant term. Instead of placing a separate napkin, fork, knife and spoon, you bundle them up in the back room and then simply put out one 'set-up' for each seat. It saves time."

  Nobody commented on the fact that they were using newspaper sheets as napkins. Brittany removed her cutlery. "This is expensive stuff," she said. "Sterling."

  "Wedding gifts," said Gloria.

  "You could pawn each of these suckers for a few grand," said Kyle. "Your cutlery drawer is worth maybe forty grand."

  Brittany said, "You could pay for a first-class trip around the world with just your serving spoons."

  And here, dear reader, is where time froze for Steve and Gloria-where their perception of the universe stopped, leaving them in a not unpleasant dimensionless limbo. And then, like a small rose seedling emerging from beneath the winter snow to be kissed by the sun's love, both time and reality returned to the couple with a trickle. And then tiny acetylene bursts somewhere in their reptile cortexes were followed by walloping endorphin rushes and a moment of satori bliss.

  "Kyle, we need plates," said Brittany.

  Kyle went to fetch some while Steve and Gloria remained almost tasered with joy. Only after another minute did they return to full consciousness. They unwrapped their set-ups and began to poke into the contents of the takeout boxes and flats.

  "Ooh!" said Gloria. "Moo goo gai pan. I love moo goo gai pan."

  "No," said Steve. "You merely enjoy saying 'moo goo gai pan. '"

  "And what if I do? Kyle, would you like some moo goo gai pan?" Gloria speared the largest, juiciest piece of chicken bathed in the foil tray amidst a flotsam of defeated mushrooms and vegetables.

  "Sure," said Kyle.

  Kyle was amazed at how much noi
se his putative hosts made while eating-their athletic slurping and brisk glottal vacuuming noises reminded him of nothing more than soft porn.

  "So," said Brittany. "Where is your son right now?"

  Steve and Gloria's forks stopped in mid-pounce. "Why do you ask?" asked Steve. "I'm making conversation," said Brittany. "Our son is a very special boy," said Gloria. "Special indeed," Steve echoed. Kyle assessed the data around him-the house frozen

  in time; Steve and Gloria's wrinkled skin; the absence of any evidence of human life under sixty-and pushing the limits of plausibility to the extreme, he asked, "Is he in college now, perhaps?"

  Too quickly, Gloria said, "Yes. In college. Happy as a clam. Studying his brains out. Study, study, study."

  "Can't believe how much he studies."

  "His little noggin overflowing with knowledge."

  "The brain is a marvellous thing."

  "Dear," said Gloria to Steve, "there's no soy sauce here."

  "There isn't, is there?"

  "I'd better go into the kitchen and get some. "

  "I'll come with you."

  Steve and Gloria got up from the table together and left the room.

  Kyle looked at Brittany. "These people are mentally ill."

  "It's all relative, Kyle. Maybe they're happy."

  "They have no food in their kitchen."

  "Few people do. They probably go to the deli once a day, like us."

  "No, I mean no food whatsoever. A jar of pickle juice and a box of weevil-infested pancake mix older than the civil rights movement."

  "You're exaggerating."

  "I'm not."

  "They appear well nourished."

  "All they ingest is Scotch and gin."

  "Keep your voice down. Maybe they can hear us."

  "Are you going to eat that last bit of sweet-and-sour pork?"

  "Be my guest."

  Kyle ate the last piece of pork.

  Toast 2: A High Seas Tale

  1I Nov. 1893 Though the Vessel shakes with incessant nauseating rolls & pitches, my faith in a Promised Land free of grills and devices that scorch our tender farinaceous flesh shakes not. The ship's Captain, one Cornelius Jif-a hideous, unschooled poltroon of questionable agenda-has almost entirely reduced our daily ration of both cinnamon & sugar, this over and above last week's complete withdrawal of butter. Some of the fainter slices on board have swapped logic with salt water and have gone delirious from the cursed sogginess that is the perpetual enemy of we who travel on the Good Ship Slice, registered in Liverpool but flying the Canadian Dominion's flag (though only, one might add, when nearing crafts touting flags of nations hostile to America's open-loaf policy-a policy that promises shelter to those slices who, like myself and my family, sit huddled in babushkas & mite-choked rags 'neath the fo'c'sle, dreaming of lives free of staleness and the Grill).

  Yesterday the Widow Bran surrendered Hope of reaching our destination and became a piteous sight on the aft deck, the angry gulls & skuas gobbling her fair carcass, their demonic cackles rousing Captain Jif from the afternoon round of chemin de fer he plays with the beweeviled ship's "Guests of Distinction": Lord Rye of Loafestershire, the Marchioness of Yeaste (said to have gone mad from a patch of mould on a raisin'ed slice) and the bellicose Herr Pumpernickel, heir to the fabled Knead fortune.

  The only notion that gives us plain slices in steerage any hope is our Dream of one day inhabiting a land where freshness can live in peace, free of the perpetual mania engendered by the overbearing presence of cheeses, relishes & tuna mayonnaise.

  But I neglect the most rousing of experiences, one that I must now here relate. We shored in Angra do Herofsmo, alongside the lava-domed Azorean coast, to restock a supply of durum wheat gone to mush from a leak in the prow-a leak caused by the unfortunate instance when Captain Jif-demented from a heady blend of liqueur-filled Yuletide chocolates and gambling wins-steered our vessel into a Turkish military ship, At Sheesh-Ke'h Bahb. 'Twas a fearsome puncture that interrupted our almost unceasing prayers to Saint Gwynevere of Cruste,

  Manuscript ends here.

  Bethany

  You're back.

  With a bang!

  Thank God.

  And "Toast 2" was epic. To be honest, I've been going through Roger withdrawal. Things aren't the same around here without someone a bit older than the rest of us to whip us into shape. Since the incident of the stolen gum (the QuickTime securi-cam loop of the event went viral all over YouTube), everyone's paranoid and grim.

  I hope you're feeling better. Eight days is a long time to have been away. It's Sunday today, but it feels more like a "generic" day-or rather, it feels like what days must have felt like before we invented the seven days of the week. Imagine waking up in the morning and not knowing what day of the week it is. What a strange sensation that must have been.

  Hmmm-what day of the week is it? It's nothing. It's merely a day, a plain old day with no labels or meaning or anything.

  Now go back further in time-to before humans named the four seasons. You'd go through life saying, "Gee, it's colder now-the cold weather usually follows a longish spot of good weather-and if memory serves me correctly, after a hundred more sleeps, the weather will be warming up again."

  People must have gone absolutely crazy, not knowing for sure how long the cold and warm patches were going to last-so crazy that they had to make a Stonehenge, to be sure. Archaeologists are always wondering why cavemen dragged those huge stones halfway across England-well, come on! They were totally freaked out by not knowing what season it was.

  It's slow at EI Shtoopo-I think there are three big football games on TV, and that always empties out the place. Kyle's got the day off and is watching them at a friend's apartment. I'm killing time by walking up and down the aisles with a purposeful facial expression so that people don't interrupt me to ask questions. I've been doing this great big infinity loop of aisles 4 and 5 all day. QuickTime that.

  La DeeDee is driving me nuts right now, so I signed on for some extra shifts. I can use the money either for Europe or for nursing school, though I don't know which it's going to be yet.

  DeeDee read this factoid that said one person in ten thousand commits suicide. She figured that if she knows maybe a thousand people, there's still only a one in ten chance she'd know a suicide-but instead she knows eight people who've done it, and four of them were pretty close to her. So she's wondering if knowing many suicides is, in itself, an indicator of herself suiciding. Not that she would. She lacks the necessary confidence and self-esteem. She figures she'd somehow botch it and end up embarrassed and in a wheelchair.

  You used to know the Deedster back before life crushed her like a bug. Do you remember anything about her that might prod her in a productive direction again? Something? Anything?

  At the moment, she spends her days leashed to a photocopier in a notary's office. It reminds me of those cartoons where there's a dog attached to a rope pegged in the middle of a yard. There's no hope of escaping, and she's lost the will to bark.

  Depressing!

  Bethany

  Joan

  Roger, now I know why your pal, Bethany, looked familiar. It was back at one of my Cancer Survival workshops. She was younger and chubbier, but it was her. Her aunt had breast cancer, and even near the end that woman was doing crafty things like appliqueing sequins onto denim pants. People who can achieve stuff even when they know they're goners amaze me, and when I think of Shakespeare keeping a skull on his desk while he wrote to remind him of his mortality? What a freak.

  Anyway, Bethany’s family used to argue constantly. The moment they walked into the room, everybody's T-cell count plummeted. And the noise they made! But Bethany always sat there dutifully and never got involved in the fray. If she recognized me from Survival workshops the other day, she didn't let on.

  Hey, don't feed Zoe any sugar, not even fresh fruit. It sends her through the ceiling.

  Brian will be back in exactly three hours to collect her.
<
br />   Enjoy your time together.

  J.

  Bethany

  Mr. Rant was in today. I saw him arrive (it was pouring rain out, so he was doubly irritable; he made a big show of shaking out a Dole pineapple promotional collapsible umbrella with two broken spokes inside the doors). Kyle and I followed him, waiting for an outburst, and we weren't disappointed.

  You know how every so often you get those guys in their fifties who walk up and down the aisles, whistling or humming tunelessly? There was one of those guys standing in Aisle 3-South, directly in Mr. Rant's way. The whistling guy seemed to be savouring Shtooples's premium selection of binders and Day-Timer products, humming that pointless, melody-free deedly-deedly music. Mr. Rant lost it: "What is with you people who whistle tunelessly? What is your problem! Why can't you either learn a proper song or simply keep your noise to yourself. "

  I piped up: "Are you finding everything you're looking for, sir?"

  "Tell Mr. Microphone here to shut the heck up."

  (Me, ingenuously) "Sorry?"

  Mr. Rant ignored me and directed his anger at the Happy Whistler. "I used to think that you guys who whistle or hum tunelessly in public were simply idiots, but I think the truth is that you were all molested by your Boy Scout leader when you were eleven, and you haven't dealt with it yet, so instead you tunelessly whistle. Go get some therapy and leave the rest of us alone."

  The Happy Whistler was obviously a therapy junkie. "Sir, you know, if you could keep your opinions to yourself, that would be really great."

  Mr. Rant exploded: "'That would be great'? God, I hate that expression. It's passive-aggressive, it's condescending, and what you actually want to say is, 'I want you to keep your opinion to yourself,' except you're too chickens hit to say it flat out, so instead you say, 'That would be great.'"