Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (2 page)

I went into my house through the side door without calling out “I’m home” or anything like that, then made for the stairs and crept up them with the kind of swiftness normally found only in ninjas. I thought I was being pretty sneaky, but a minute later I heard my mother calling me.

“Leon?” she called. “Come down here for a second, will you?”

“In a minute,” I called back. I looked over at the mirror—yep. There it was, all right. A hickey. Super. Normally I’d be thrilled that Anna had done something like that, as it was a pretty clear sign that she really did like me, but she could have at least waited until a day when I was wearing a turtleneck or something. I couldn’t help wondering if maybe she really didn’t like me and had done it just to be mean.

“Leon, come on down,” said my father’s voice. “I have something to show you.”

I wondered what my father was doing at home. Normally he didn’t get back from the accounting office on Fridays until five or six, at least.

“In a minute,” I shouted as I dug through my dresser for something with a better collar.

I assumed that they just wanted to show me some new cookbook they’d found. My parents are “food disaster hobbyists,” which means they get their jollies by buying old cookbooks and cooking the absolute worst recipes they can find, then making fun of them. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that they also make a point of dressing up and acting like the people in whatever cookbook they’re using at the moment. It’s their concept of a family bonding experience, and my concept of torture.

Finally, my mother opened my door.

“What are you doing, Leon?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Geez, Mom!” I shouted, looking up from the drawer. “Would it kill you to knock?”

“Sorry,” she said. “But come downstairs. We have to show you something.”

I walked down the stairs, carefully standing on the side of my mother that left her facing the nonhickey side of my neck. Not that hickeys were forbidden or anything like that, but I knew my mother would go on and on about how “cute” it was. She had a real talent for thinking things were cute.

Downstairs, my father was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a ski mask that made him look like a bank robber. Maybe he was home early because he’d started a new career as a suburban mugger. The accounting world would certainly drive
me
to a life of crime.

“Hi, Leon,” he said. I could see him grinning even through the mask.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s with the mask? Did you stay home from work to hold up the Quickway?”

“How was school today?” he asked, ignoring the question and still grinning like an idiot.

“Same as always,” I said. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

He chuckled. “Can’t say the same for my day at work.”

Well, no kidding, I thought. People who have normal days at work usually come home
without
ski masks on. “What happened?”

I’d always suspected that my dad might be a bit unstable—I mean, anyone who gives a kid a first name like Leon—not to mention a middle name like Noside—after 1964 can’t possibly be playing with a full deck.

I wondered if maybe my father had finally tipped over the edge, gone to work in a ski mask, and busted the place up with a crowbar. Every possible reason I had in mind for his wearing the ski mask involved violent crime in one way or another. It seemed like my mother wouldn’t be smiling so much if he had done a thing like that, but then again, it’d be just like her to see bloodstains on the wall of the office and think they were “cute.” I could imagine her pointing at big blotches of blood and saying “Oh, honey! That one looks like a choo-choo train, and that one looks like a bunny!”

“Well,” said Dad, “in the middle of working on some accounts, I got an idea for a new invention, and took a personal day to come home at noon and work up a prototype. I’ve been out in the garage half the day working on it. And I don’t mind saying that it’s freezing in there.”

“Hence the ski mask?”

“Nope. The ski mask was just so I wouldn’t spoil the surprise.” My mother was covering her mouth with her hand, trying not to laugh.

“What surprise?”

“This!”

With that, he whipped off the ski mask, and I just about died.

My dad’s brown hair, which had formerly covered his entire head, had been replaced by a single strip of green hair down the center of his scalp. A Mohawk. And a green one, at that. And not just sort of a green tint, like my grandmother sometimes ends up with, but bright, neon green, so bright that he could have used it to guide Santa’s sleigh on a foggy Christmas Eve.

I stared at it for a second.

My parents both broke out laughing.

“You got a Mohawk,” I said, finally.

“How ’bout your old man?” he asked. “I look like a regular wild and crazy guy.”

All I could do was stare.

My father was not a wild and crazy guy. He was certainly crazy, of course, but I’ve seen wilder houseplants. I imagine that when he was a kid, the wildest thing he ever did was probably buying
Archie’s Double Digest
instead of the regularsized Archie comics on days when he felt especially saucy. Even now, with a Mohawk, he didn’t look terribly wild. He looked like a guy who’d just been beaten up by a gang of toughs who gave him a makeover while he was unconscious. Or like some guy who had been in a band thirty years ago and was now making a fool of himself trying to crack the nostalgia market.

“Well?” my father asked. “What do you think?”

“It…it’s certainly different.”

“Oh, Leon!” said my mother. “The look on your face is just priceless!”

“Does this make you the first accountant ever to have a Mohawk?” I asked.

“Probably,” he said. “You might say I’m a regular pioneer.”

“And they’ll let you go to work looking like that?” I asked.

“Well, they might be upset, but they know they’d be lost without me. When you make yourself invaluable, there’s no limit to what you can do.” I thought I recognized this from one of the motivational speech recordings he played in the car.

“So this is your invention?” I asked. “Being an accountant with a Mohawk?”

“Not exactly. The invention is a new kind of hair dye—it’ll only dye hair, and just rolls off every other surface.”

I looked at the skin around his Mohawk and saw that there were plenty of green stains all over his scalp.

“Doesn’t look like you’ve quite worked out all the kinks yet,” I said.

“Well”—he grinned—“obviously not. But it at least dyed the hair, so I’m on my way!”

I sat down and just stared for a second. My dad had a green Mohawk. This was quite a lot to consider. Like, did this mean they’d let
me
get a Mohawk? Or pierce any part of my face?

I was so busy staring that I didn’t notice that my mother was walking around to the other side of the table.

“And what have we here?” she asked, looking at my neck. “I do believe our young man has a hickey!”

Crap. So much for my ninja skills. I put my coat back on, trying to cover it up, fixing her with the most vicious look I could manage.

“Shut up,” I said. “Just shut the hell up.”

Normally my mother didn’t like me using words like “hell,” but I guess she was in the mood to find that cute, too.

“Don’t be bashful,” Dad said. “No one said you weren’t allowed to get hickeys.”

“I think it’s precious,” said my mother, while I fought the urge to barf, even though I’m sure she would have found that cute, too. “Our little boy is growing up.”

“Was it Anna?” Dad asked.

“No,” I said quickly. “We were working with vacuum engines in science, and one got stuck on my neck.”

“Sure it did,” said my mother. “Sure it did.”

“Listen,” I said to change the subject. “I’m gonna need a ride to the basketball game later tonight.”

“That’s fine,” said my mother. “I figured on making dinner early so you could eat with us. You’ll never believe what I found at the thrift store earlier today!”

I silently braced myself for the worst. The local thrift store was like a bottomless treasure chest full of cookbooks featuring awful-looking food from pretty much every decade. People in the 1950s were apparently obsessed with using Jell-O in everything, and, try as I might, I’ve yet to determine what people in the 1970s were thinking.

Sure enough, she handed me a cheap, spiral-bound book called
True Americans Are Grilling Americans.
On the cover was a blurry picture of a dirty-looking fellow wearing an American-flag apron and holding up a skewer with a chunk of meat on the end. At least, I hoped it was meat. If I hadn’t known it was a book about grilling, I would have thought it was a picture of a hillbilly who had just been fishing in a Porta Potti and was now proudly holding up the catch of the day.

“Yuck,” I said.

“And look at the title!” My mother beamed. “It sounds like a cookbook for patriotic cannibals!”

“Ha!” Dad laughed. “Patriotic Americans only grill other Americans! Only dangerous terrorists are grilling Canadians these days.”

“Isn’t it nasty?” Mom asked, handing me the book.

I flipped through it and saw that it was full of things like rabbit burgers, beaver skewers, and things like that. Either it was a cookbook for people who hunted for food near their own houses or for people who cooked roadkill—it didn’t really specify how you were supposed to get the meat. There were no pictures, and most of it looked like it was made from cheaply copied typewriter pages. Obviously, it had been self-published. By someone who thought “charcoal” was spelled “charcole.”

“We’re not actually going to eat this stuff, are we?” I asked. “I mean, they don’t sell squirrel meat at the grocery store, do they?”

“We’ll mostly just use beef instead,” said my mother. “But take a look at the recipes themselves—they’re hardly even recipes. You just grill the meat and add ketchup to most of them. Some of them have you mix the ground meat and ketchup together before you grill it.”

I said that I had homework to do as a means of escaping to my room—though I had no intention of actually doing my homework until I was back in class on Monday, in the final minutes before the bell rang. If I did it at home, I’d just forget to bring it, anyway. The real purpose of being in my room was so that they wouldn’t try to get me involved in cooking the meal. When they do food disasters, one of the rules is that they have to put on outfits from the decade or region in which the cookbook was published.

Sure enough, when I finally came downstairs, they were in “Grilling Americans” outfits. My mother had her hair messed up and was wearing a flannel shirt and torn jeans. My father was wearing a plain white T-shirt, a backwards John Deere baseball cap, and an American-flag apron of his own. At least the cap covered up the Mohawk. I wondered if getting a ketchup stain on the apron would be considered desecrating the flag.

My father was getting the meat ready while my mother sat on the couch, shouting at the television. Every now and then she’d turn and shout something at my father, who she was calling “Lester” for some reason.

“Lester!” she shouted. “Come see what they’re givin’ away on
Wheel of Fortune
!”

“Can it, Wanda!” Dad shouted back, though my mother’s name is Judith. “Why don’t you just stifle there and bring me a damn beer?” He then bundled up and took the meat out to the grill on the back porch, shouting something about how it was never too cold for a True American to grill.

On most food disaster nights, they spent the meal itself talking like normal people, just making fun of the food, but they apparently liked being Lester and Wanda so much that they kept it up right through dinner.

“Wanda, your fries taste like garbage,” Dad grumbled. “How do you expect a man to eat this?” The fries were indeed garbage, but she could hardly be blamed. They were the frozen, skinny kind of fries, which probably couldn’t be saved.

“Oh, come off it, Lester,” my mom said. “You couldn’t grill a hot dog if you had an automatic hot dog machine that was approved by the national hot dog council.” She leaned in closer to me. “Don’t mind Lester,” she said. “He ain’t been quite right ever since he had all them worms removed from his butt.”

Needless to say, I avoid having friends over for dinner whenever possible.

I don’t really know which prospect was more frightening—that my dad might drive me to the basketball game still talking like “Lester,” or that he’d have the baseball cap off and the Mohawk in plain sight. I would have given anything to just walk to the high school, but my mother would barely let me walk as far as the mailbox when it was dark outside, and certainly wasn’t about to let me walk all the way to the high school, since, in her imagination, the suburbs were crawling with gangbangers, pedophiles, and other undesirables who hid in the bushes by day, then crawled out and roamed the streets as soon as the sun went down.

To my great relief, Dad did the sensible thing and put on a knit cap to cover his head as we got into the car.

“Covering up the Mohawk?” I asked.

“Well, it’s about ten degrees Fahrenheit out there,” he said. “And I’m not used to having so much skin on my head exposed. I don’t want to freeze to death.”

“That’s very wise,” I said, putting on a knit cap of my own that was large enough to cover my ears. I knew I’d be spending most of the night outdoors.

We drove out of the house and turned down Eighty-second Street to get to Tanglewood Parkway.

“You know,” I said, “if I were walking, I could just go straight down August Avenue and be right at the school. You know I wouldn’t get lost or anything.”

“We know.” Dad sighed. He was a little more sensible than my mother when it came to imaginary criminals. “But there’s snow and ice all over the ground. You might slip and fall in the dark, and we wouldn’t even know you were hurt until you froze to death.”

“When was the last time anybody froze to death in this town?” I asked. “It’s suburbia, not a little house on the prairie. Surely one of the muggers or drug dealers would come along to help me.”

“Forget it, Leon,” he said. “Maybe next year, when you’re in high school, you’ll be able to walk, but for now, it’s out of the question.”

My dad may have been a bit more progressive than my mom—he didn’t really care if I walked home from Fat Johnny’s, the pizza place on Eighty-second Street, just a few residential blocks away, after dark or anything like that. My dad’s biggest concern was that the minute I was not under adult supervision, I’d be approached by every drug dealer in the state and wouldn’t have the willpower to say no. As though I could possibly afford drugs on my allowance.

“Be careful,” he said as we pulled into the parking lot.

“You know I will, Dad,” I said.

“I know you’re a good kid, Leon,” he said. “We just want you to be careful. I know all about how tough peer pressure can be.”

“Dad,” I said, “I don’t know what it was like when you were a kid, but when someone offers you drugs, they’re usually just offering to be polite.”

“Well,” he said, “you know what to do if the situation comes up.”

“Sure,” I said. “Save some for you. See ya!”

At the door of the high school gym, I paid two bucks to get in and found Brian and Edie already standing around by the concession stand.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “You want any drugs?”

“I don’t know,” said Brian. “What kind of drugs can I afford for four bucks?”

“Oh, I can get you all kinds of stuff for four dollars,” I said. “Didn’t you guys meet all the dealers hanging out on Tanglewood Parkway when you walked over here?”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “And they tried to get us to join their gangs, but we just said no and ran.”

“Good job,” I said. “Sometimes when you’re in a gang, they’ll ask you to smoke.”

I suppose we were exaggerating a bit—the town wasn’t
that
clean. James Cole may have been the first kid in school to smoke pot, but plenty of kids had done it since then. And I knew that plenty of kids at the high school were living on the chronic diet—a joint for breakfast, another for lunch, and then a sensible dinner, like animal crackers and cheese puffs. Whenever anyone mentioned potheads, Edie would go into a rant about how, to afford drugs, they had to be rich kids and should therefore be considered scum. Commies hate rich kids. Edie herself was not exactly poor—her parents were lawyers. But she claimed to have renounced them and everything they stood for.

A minute later Anna turned up, and we all sat down at one of the metal picnic tables set up near the concession stand and watched everybody coming and going. A few people we recognized from classes gave us the “I acknowledge you exist” nod, but they were all actually interested in the basketball game, and headed straight in for the stands, which were farther inside than we normally got. Per our custom, as soon as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was over, we were out the door. My mother would have been furious to know that I was actually spending the basketball games walking around town, but what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

As usual, we headed south, cutting through Da Gama Park. Sometimes we stopped at the pay phone near the gazebo—practically the last pay phone in all of Cornersville Trace—to make prank phone calls, since pay-phone calls are a lot harder to trace than normal calls, but it was cold enough to freeze a guy’s nuts off, and I didn’t consider my nuts to be a reasonable sacrifice for a prank call.

On the other end of Da Gama Park was the little triangle made up of Venture Street, Douglas Avenue, and Seventieth Street, which, when I was a kid, was the main downtown area. Now, though, we called it the old downtown. Most of the stores there were closed up; nobody really went there anymore, since all of the new strip malls had gone in on Cedar Avenue. It seemed like people hardly even went to the regular mall anymore.

As we walked down Douglas, the diagonal street, we passed Cornersville Grocery, the little grocery store that no one had ever gone to. It had been the first business to close down, and had been sitting empty for years now. An oldtimey sign painted on the window said
SINCE
1957, and under that some joker had scribbled in “until 2002” with a permanent marker. It might as well have been a gravestone for the old downtown—all around the triangle, and all down Venture Street, there were hollowed-out shells of stores that had closed and never reopened.

But Sip, the coffee shop on Venture Street, was still in business, and had become our usual base of operations outside of the gifted-pool room and Fat Johnny’s. Friday nights were the open mike nights, and though there were usually only two or three people with anything to read or play, Dustin Eddlebeck, poet laureate of the middle school men’s room wall, was almost always one of them. We thought it was important that we be there to support him.

Inside, Sip had the look of a basement that someone had started trying to turn into a rec room in about 1982 but never quite finished. Its walls were the same shade of green as my grandmother’s teakettle, there was artwork painted by customers on the walls, and most of the lighting came from the little stained-glass lamps that hung from the ceiling at odd angles. Some were low enough that you hit your head if you weren’t careful. A sign on the wall invited mean people to “piss off,” and now and then there would be a cat on one of the tables. I suppose you could say it was the last bohemian enclave in suburbia.

Some kind of classical music with accordions was coming out of the speakers mounted on some bookshelves. I thought it sounded like a tango, which meant that Trinity, our favorite waitress, was probably working that night. She went to the high school, and dreamed of running away to become a ballroom dancer—she was into tango, in particular, because it was so sexy that the Pope once declared it a mortal sin.

When things were slow around the shop, she was often seen tango dancing across the store with an invisible partner. Officially, though, she was a punk rocker. Her hair was dyed deep blue, and though she dressed in vintage ball gowns most nights, she had them covered in safety pins and punk rock buttons.

Dustin and James were already there at one of the larger tables, and we sat down to join them.

“Evening, escapees,” said Dustin. Neither he nor James bothered to show up at the basketball game ahead of time—if they’d said they wanted to go to a sporting event, their parents would have known right away that they were up to something.

“
Bonsoir,
butt-sticks,” said James. If it wasn’t the French that qualified him as gifted, it was probably his genius at inventing his own slang terms. The guy was an artist.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“We were just talking about my class project,” said James.

“The one about Coach Hunter?” Anna asked. They both smiled.

“That thing about getting him to kill himself over the course of the semester was a masterstroke, Leon,” said Dustin.

“You guys
do
know I wasn’t serious, right?” I asked. “I was just messing around.”

“Of course we do, ass monkey,” said James. “But we happen to think you were on to something. We probably can’t get him to kill himself, but maybe we can depress him so much that he’ll pull a Mrs. Smollet and resign.”

“I’m in charge of the depressing poetry,” Dustin said, twirling a pen like a baton. “I can make most of the depressing poets in the literature anthologies look like Groucho Marx.”

Dustin had spent sixth grade writing naughty limericks on the bathroom wall, and in seventh grade he had graduated to writing naughty sonnets, which were much longer. He’d written a pair of sonnets that had served as the narration for
La Dolce Pubert.
Shortly thereafter, he’d gotten interested in Rudyard Kipling, whom he described as a “hard-core badass” who wrote things like

When you’re wounded and left on

Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut
up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

He was really into that for about a week, until someone described Kipling as “the kind of poetry your gym teacher might write.” It was true; his poems tended to go on and on about how to “be a man, my son,” and you could easily imagine him shooting you in the knees and telling you to walk it off. After that, Dustin quietly renounced “badass poetry” and discovered free verse and beatnik poetry, which was rambling and weird and tended to be about walking around the city, having sex, and drinking coffee with jazz musicians. I think the day the first beatnik poem appeared on the bathroom wall, all the teachers took a field trip to the nearest church to pray for their lives.

A minute after we sat down, Trinity came to the table.

“You hoodlums again,” she said, sounding thrilled. “You want the usual?”

We all nodded. Small cups of coffee all around.

Trinity nodded and brought out our drinks, the pins on her dress rattling all the way. She acted like she hated us, but we sort of suspected she liked us better than she liked most of the customers. Edie practically worshipped her—she thought that covering ball gowns with pins made a profound statement of some sort, and for once, I think she might have been on to something. Shortly after meeting Trinity, she’d gotten into punk rock, which she considered appropriately communist friendly, and had dyed bright red highlights into her black hair.

Anna had practically been bottle-fed on coffee, and she and her father had made it sort of a mission to get me into it. When I’d started drinking it, I was filling up my cups with more cream and sugar than actual coffee, but I was trying to wean myself off the cream until I could drink it black, like Anna did. I was getting pretty close.

The coffee at Sip was not the “gourmet” kind, but Anna and her parents were of the opinion that “bad” coffee was actually a lot better. There was a certain taste that coffee could only acquire by sitting in the urn for a really long time. And anyway, those jazz guys in the fifties probably weren’t drinking coffee made from only the highest-quality Colombian beans. They were drinking sludge.

A few minutes later, Dustin asked Trinity to turn down the music so he could read his latest poem, which he’d been scribbling on a napkin. She nodded, and took the stage herself.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, as though she were announcing that they would be closing down due to a gas leak, “it is with deepest regret that I subject you all to the poetic stylings of Mr. Dustin Eddlebeck.” Dustin stood up to bow, then walked to the mike.

“I’d like to read a new piece,” he said, “entitled ‘The Final Push-up.’”

He cleared his throat and began to read.

“O Coach, where is thy sting?

At the bottom of the empty bottle

of Gatorade, the last few drops are

turning into crust,

like the last drops of blood

in your cold heart,

pumping slowly, like

a seven-hundred-pound sixth grader

trying to do that third and

final push-up,

wobbling a bit

and then crumpling on the mat

like a crushed paper cup,

discarded, scattered to the four winds,

et où sont les neiges, et où sont les neiges?

If it’s better to burn out than fade away

like an athlete dying young on the finish line,

his heart bursting like a sudden solo

in a Miles Davis record,