The Gum Thief - cropped Read online

  What keeps me going right now, DeeDee, is the notion that, stripped of any form of protective coating-of stupidity, of youth, of ignorance, of money-of anything that might allow me to delude myself, I still manage to hang in there and go to that wretched Staples and stack the reams of twenty-pound bond paper and direct customers to the Maxwell House coffee promotional kiosk. It's a wonder I don't arrive one morning and drive through the front windows in my car, taking out as many people as I can in one grand, glorious gesture.

  Strike that. I'm not a psycho. If anything, I'll probably drink too many vodka Breezers and get mellow out by the back door, where the girls take their smoke breaks. Guys don't smoke any more. Notice that?

  It's fun when I'm buzzed and throwing tennis balls to my dog, Wayne. The girls get such a kick out of it, and for a ten-minute window they can think of me as a real person.

  Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning.

  Imagine seeing the grocery store's checkout girl grow horns.

  Imagine growing younger instead of older.

  Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.

  Break time is over. I'm training to work as an aisle associate in the Personal Digital Assistant aisle. That's "PDA" in our high-tech world here.

  Roger

  Roger

  DeeDee, I thought over the letter I sent two days ago and realized it was a depressing pile of crap and you need something like that like you need a hole in the head. So I'm sending you these daisies-at least, that's what the picture on the screen showed. I was going to throw in a little silver Mylar balloon with "Sorry" printed on it, but that might make you retch. I promise not to write such a depressing letter again.

  Roger

  Roger

  To Bethany c/o YHA London-Hampstead Heath Hostel

  4 Wellgarth Road

  London, England VIA your secret FedEx number

  Bethany ... first things first: write your mother, okay? She's going nuts worrying about you. Enough said.

  Next: I'm glad you told me you visited Joan. The last while has been kind of rough and, yeah, I'm having trouble these days, but Joan isn't what you'd call a fountain of sympathy. I can make up all the excuses I want, but the fact is, I merely lie in my bed in the morning and don't get out. Especially at this time of year. I ask you, why do we even bother having wakefulness? Dreams are way more interesting than real life, and in dreams you never have to get out of bed. For that matter, why does life bother going forward? No matter what organism you look at ... an amoeba or an elk or whatever, it does everything it can to advance itself-it tries to not be killed, it tries to mate, it tries to not be eaten. What's the nature of this divine computer program that drives everything to go forward? Why doesn't DNA sometimes say to itself, "You know what? I'm tired of this survival shit. I think I'm going to pack it in. It ends here."

  Guess who had to put up the Christmas displays this year? You guessed it. God, how fucking depressing. I feel like Mr. Rant. Think about it: who cares a flying fuck whether or not an office superstore wishes them a seasonal greeting? I find it offensive. I'd prefer if, in December, a large office supply corporation held a "Just Pretend It's February" promotional campaign. If a company did that, I'd camp out in their stores all through December. The most seasonal thing you'd see would be a cardboard groundhog on a fake Groundhog Day reminding you to upgrade your PC's memory card.

  BTW, in the new year I'm going to be a PDA Associate. I took a three-day training seminar taught by what appeared to be an eleven-year-old who had no social skills; welcome to the twenty-first century. Everyone understood what the guy was saying but me, and man, did I feel old, so to make myself feel less old, I forced myself to memorize the entire PDA user manual to learn all there is to know about these suckers. I can now tell you how to program one into sending your mother a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call on her II7th birthday-assuming you wanted to. I truly wish to see the shock on everyone's faces when I effortlessly show users how to flip between the Gregorian calendar and the calendar used by the Japanese imperial family. I know they're all waiting for me to crash and burn, but they're not going to get that satisfaction. Using a PDA is easier than I thought it would be, and it's fun and gives me something to do when I can't force myself out of bed.

  I sound like I'm in a worse space than I am. I'm only mad at the world.

  You can't hear Wayne howling. He's got some kind of bug and won't eat properly. I'm probably going to take him to the vet this morning, which will sorely tick off Fearless Leader-we're understaffed today, Dell Day, no less. Oodles of shit is going to hit a massive fan 'blade.

  Fun sending a FedEx ... never done it before. I feel like a confident industry professional, and it's great having the drop-off box outside the store's front door. It's like we have our own private mail system.

  Don't happy, be worry. Oops ... other way around.

  R.

  Zoe

  Hi, Dad. I really love Mowie Maui and today I found a clam. We had a swordfish for dinner last night. I have my own room and it has free soap. I have to go now.

  Zoe

  The Epke Family

  At this, the most special time of the year, it brings great pleasure to wish you and yours the best for the holiday season.

  Dear Friends, Excuse the impersonal "mass mailing" of the family newsletter, but email is so mechanical and I don't want to handwrite a hundred Christmas cards!

  Chances are you were at our wedding mere weeks ago. Joan has made an honest man out of me. Our honeymoon was a blast, and young Zoe overcame her fear of waves and was a paddle-boarding fiend on our Maui "Wowie" adventure. Returning to the "real world" was pretty darn hard!

  The new house is coming along well, although we lost momentum fixing it up in spring and there are still several walls with unpainted plaster patches. One room we will certainly have to fix up is the nursery because, yup, there's a "bun in our oven"! Expect big things early next summer! And Joan wants to make sure I tell everybody that she's quit smoking, but only until fall, when she promises to be lighting up again. Between then and now, I'm sure we'll be having some pretty energetic debates on that topic!

  On the work front, all goes well. I've landed gigs on ten new productions, three of which were renewed for two seasons, but I don't want to jinx things and am trying to work hard and earn what was a great opportunity to show the company all I've got!

  Everyone is in good shape, especially Dad, who had his angio in September and is now 110 percent. He's discovered fleece jackets and likes to walk a mile every day. What next-marathons!?!?!

  Thank you to everyone for giving us such great wedding presents, and for making our wedding day the magical day it was. Let's hope that next year is as good as this year.

  Greetings from Brian, Joan and Zoe

  Bethany

  VIAFEDEX

  Hi, Roger. I hope Wayne is better. He'd love England-dogs all over the place, and they're darned sophisticated dogs too. Honestly, to see some of them, you'd think they read Elle Decoration magazine and do yoga.

  We met two guys from home-the exact same sort of guys Kyle would have met at a sports bar on Marine Drive-and so we have a posse, but they're jockish and not very fun, so when they're around I feel like a fifth wheel. Kyle is not quite the sweet young thing who once filled Ziploc bags with trail mix for me.

  Moan, moan, moan, grumble, grumble, grumble. When is the European magic going to kick in and rock my world? When am I going to befriend Count Chocula? The only people I ever seem to meet here are twenty-three-year old Australians named Tracy who got crabs in Prague and who have voices like the buzzer they use on game shows when you get the answer to a question wrong.

  Remember I wrote you awhile back about DeeDee telling me about meeting strangers in airport bars and spilling your life story to them because you know yo
u'll never see them again? That's actually what I'm hoping for here. Is that sick? Kyle should be the one I'm telling everything to. So I feel a bit disloyal. But I wish Kyle would revel a bit more in the fact that we're in a country that is not the one he grew up in. The only time he ever gets stoked is when he finds things or places or people that remind him of home. I now like to walk around by myself, mostly. When we got here, K and I were spending all of our time together, but I don't think you see things properly when you're with someone else. Instead, you're always being camp counsellor. I wonder if that's what motherhood will feel like should I ever end up in spawning mode.

  The Christmas decorations are all going up now, which is, let's face it, depressing, but at least they do it tastefully here. Christmas lights always bugged me growing up because it was like (literally) hanging up a big electric sign on your house that said, "I spent $18.95 on this electric sign."

  Tonight I've been in the local Internet cafe, and right now I'm back in the hostel. K is with his posse at a bar in Shoreditch that plays Canadian football on its TV. Now there's a smart business decision for some wise pub owner. He must truly lure in the locals with that. Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually here in London. Honestly, the best news I had today was an email telling me that you brought Wayne to work yesterday and Shawn spent her smoke break throwing a tennis ball to him. I got jealous.

  Weird noises down the hall. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? It's like a crack den without the crack. Never again.

  X

  B.

  PS: I have to add another way that Kyle is driving me nuts. He has a digital camera, and when he shoots something like a bridge or a thousand pigeons, he almost immediately scrolls through his pictures and looks back on what's basically the present moment and treats it like it's the distant past-even if the bridge or the pigeons are still right there.

  At the end of the day, I'll scroll through the day's photos with him, and even on the camera's dinky little screen the whole day comes back to me, which is unsurprising, but what is surprising are the background details I remember that I might never have remembered otherwise: an Evian truck blowing blue smoke; a woman walking three wiener dogs; a cloud shaped like a muffin. So imagine if you could scroll backwards and look at your whole life the same way. God only knows how many trillions of memories are stored inside us-memories we'll never retrieve simply because we don't have a device that allows us to browse them properly. With your mother, do you think the memories were still locked inside her and she couldn't retrieve them? Or do you think the memories were simply gone? Is anyone's existence only as good as their brain is at any given moment? And if so, what about the soul?

  BONUS TREAT: Another brief attempt to address the bread buttering issue is on the next page. B.

  The ToasTron Chronicles

  Neo-London, 2110 Slice Number Six informed his lieutenant of the entire gory tale behind the marmalade algorithms stolen from Baking Asteroid Teflon 32. Number Six-known simply as "Slice" to his SubLoafradiated manly confidence to his squad, who were exhausted from a century of warring with an alliance comprised of Beaten Egg regiments, Vanilla Androids, small factions of Milk and, of course, the French.

  "Lieutenant, sir, there's never been an uprising like it. And the Powdered Sugar cluster bombs at the end of the war were an insult to ToasTron and all its fair citizens. The final buttering wasn't war-it was slaughter."

  ... Roger, I just don't get sci-fi. How do you guys read this stuff? This buttering ends right here, thank you.

  Shawn

  Dearest Blair ... Boy did the universe hand us Staplers a bone today.

  Here's what happened: for once, Roger the alcoholic train wreck decided to actually come in to work on time. He's been on the bottle big time lately, like we don't notice-divorce or some depressing middle-age trip-Pete's been this close to firing him. So first Roger went and spent a half-hour reading the paper in the men's room, and then he walked around the store for a while looking more like a homeless person who found a Staples outfit in a Dumpster than a Staples employee. Then he went into the office, scrawled a letter or something, then told us he had to take his dog to the vet (which, okay, you can't really get mad at him about, but it was Dell Day and poor Fahad had to do the brunt of the loading work even though he has the muscle tone of a Jerry's Kid).

  So Roger went out to his car, and then he came inside maybe five minutes later and he smelled like ... the worst sort of ... shit . .. like a decaying fecal poo monster, and he was covered in the stuff. I was in the staff room and smelled it before I saw it and said, "Roger, what the hell?" and he said his dog had just shat all over the inside of his car, and so I said, "So, then, don't come back inside here, and jeez, take a shower!" He used the staff phone to call his vet and ... I mean, Blair, you should have seen the phone afterwards-it needed an exorcism. You remember Pigpen from Charlie Brown-how he always had that little vermin cloud following him? Well, that was the phone. Later on, we ended up dousing it with half a bottle of Windex, which fried its circuits, so now we don't have a staff phone-but I'm getting off topic.

  So Roger went driving off in his shit heap (ha!) and I was standing there looking at the phone like it was a six hundred-pound circus freak with a two-hundred-pound goiter when I noticed that Roger had left something behind on the counter. What, I thought, is this? It was (get this) a novel Roger has been writing. Can you believe it? Him, booze hound loser, writing a book. And he'd really gone to town on it, using all the products we flog here to make documents look better (acetate cover sheets; oak-grained binding strip; forty-pound cream vellum stock ...), but it still looked like homework. And what, you might ask, is the book called? Again, you won't believe it: Glove Pond. Yes, I can hear you thinking, what the hell is that? And you would be correct. At the bottom, on the footer, it reads: "Glove Pond, by Roger Thorpe. Currently negotiating representation." Gee, Roger, all of New York must be clamouring for this little Pulitzer contender.

  Blair ... it's the worst book ever written. It's about these two university people, a married couple, who do nothing but drink Scotch and shriek at each other; and then a young writer and his wife come over for dinner and they get sucked into the downward failure spiral of fighting and shrieking, and there's a mysterious child who the professors either do or do not have and ... well, I do have to hand it to Roger, I read through the whole thing as far as he'd written it. But here's the best (and worst) part, Blair: part of it is set here at Staples.

  Can you bear it? One of the characters works here-it's basically Roger, disguised as someone else-and he talks about how much he hates coming to work here (touché to that!), and I have to say, it's weird seeing your everyday reality, stupid and dreamless as it is, turned into a book. Suddenly it's not stupid and dreamless any more, it becomes different-even if it's a book by Roger Thorpe. And an interesting part of it is that he's used our close personal friend, Dawn-of-the Dead Bethany, and her studly duddly Kyle as models for his characters. (You and I have gone over the Kyle/Bethany thing a million times, and I'll never quite figure out why it happened), but old Roger can't be too clueless if he picked up on the World's Weirdest Fling.

  Well, whatever.

  What happened next is I took Roger's oeuvre over to the copy department and used my coffee break to disassemble the book and make twenty copies. It was a lot of work, and it reminded me of my two years in hell doing night time copier shift.

  And then the power went out-a seasonal windstorm always fun because we get to herd out the customers, lock the doors and slack off. Which is exactly what we did, and then we headed into the staff room and read Glove Pond.

  Did I say it was awful? It's horrific. After a few minutes, we all began doing Glove Pond impersonations. Kind of like:

  Steve: Gloria, hand me some Scotch.

  Gloria: No, because I'm drinking the Scotch.

  Steve: Let's both drink Scotch, and then we can say witty things to each other.

  Gloria: I hate you.

  Steve: I hate
you too, you hag.

  Gloria: I throw my Scotch in your face.

  Steve: I hate you.

  Gloria: Do we have more ice cubes?

  Steve: I don't think so.

  Gloria: Where are our guests?

  Steve: Let's drink more Scotch.

  After two hours, the power came back on, and we'd actually gotten pretty good at being Steve and Gloria. Around three o'clock, Roger returned to work, and he was a total basket case. He was wearing his old-model Staples shirt from a year and a half ago, before the new ones came out, and his hair had just been washed and gelled, but he looked like a street person with a totally deranged look in his eyes. Simon asked how his dog was, and Roger said he's okay. It ate some of his kid's chocolate (which is like poison to dogs), hence the merdeification of Roger's Hyundai.

  That was when I heard Tracy shout across the store to Geoff in the copier area, "Storeroom, pass me some Scotch! I need some Scotch!"

  Geoff shouted back, "It's my Scotch, you fraud. Pour your own Scotch." Roger's head perked up like a dog that hears his master's engine approaching from three blocks away.