Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (6 page)

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, swinging 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.

A few seconds later, Hunter was out the door. I leaned over to where this kid called Jonas was sitting. Jonas was one of those people who try to be funny but are actually just annoying. But I couldn’t help talking to him—he always laughed at my jokes.

“Gee,” I said, “now, who at this school would possibly want to harm the kindly old gym teacher?”

“Ha ha ha,” Jonas laughed.
“Leon.”
That was the way Jonas laughed. He’d actually say “ha ha ha,” then he’d say the name of whoever had told the joke, with so much emphasis that he could be described as saying it in italics. He even laughed at Coach Wilkins. Every five or ten minutes, I’d hear him going “Ha ha ha…
Coach Wilkins!
” But I couldn’t help trying to crack him up from time to time. It’s like, that’s what he was there for.

At lunch, I told Dustin and James all about it, and they acted like I’d just told them their army had won the First World War.

“So he not only got it, but he was depressed by it? Croll!” said James.

“Hey,” said Dustin, “I don’t mess around. If I write a poem to depress someone, you’d better believe they’re going to be depressed.”

“How did you even get it into the office?” I asked.

“It’s almost never locked,” said James smugly. “I collect things from it.”

“No way,” I said, though I honestly wasn’t surprised.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s the sport of Spanish kings!”

“Like what kind of stuff?”

“Little things like whistles,” said James. “Not stuff that could really get me busted, like his grade book or his computer. You can really get it for that.”

James wasn’t really the shoplifting type or anything—I never felt like I should count the change in my pocket after he left—but he sure did pick interesting things to collect. His other hobby was collecting Neighborhood Watch signs.

Toward the end of lunch, I talked about getting
The Wildewood Singers Sing the Beatles
for my wall.

“You know, Leon,” James said, “I gotta say it. The bad album covers are fun and all, but your thing last year of covering a wall with speakers was more…ambitious, you know?”

“It was more dangerous, too,” I said. “The first time I tried them I knocked all the electricity out, and the second time the garage caught fire.”

“Yeah,” said James. “But it was still cooler.”

“Well,” I said, “these albums are uncool by definition. That’s what makes them cool. Camp value, you know?”

“I’m not saying it isn’t,” said James, though he still sounded skeptical.

“It’s not as bad as my parents’ hobby,” I said. “This week they’ve been dressing like hicks and calling each other Lester and Wanda while they cook food out of this nasty cookbook about grilling.”

“How’s that so much worse?” asked James.

“It is…,” I said. “At least I’m being ironic. I’m not sure they are.”

“I don’t know,” said Anna. “The whole grilling thing sounds kind of fun.”

I felt a few of my inner organs churning. Like she’d just crammed her hand into my stomach, going in through my belly button, and was jiggling my guts around.

“But it’s dorkier than the album covers, right?” I said.

“Well, the album covers are funny,” said Anna. “I mean, they’re a bit dorky, too, but they’re funny.”

At that moment, I wished she’d just move up from jiggling my internal organs and squeeze the life out of me altogether. Just find my windpipe, squeeze, and hang on.

I mean, even my dad knew that the album covers weren’t as dorky as the food disasters. Here I was, trying to feel like I could keep up with Anna and her dad, in terms of overall coolness, and she had to go and endorse my parents’ embarrassing hobby while calling mine dorky. When I thought about it later, I realized that she hadn’t actually been bad-mouthing me, or really even giving my parents a ringing endorsement, but it felt like she was. Combine this with the fact that Sip had six months to live, which I still hadn’t gotten around to telling anybody, and I was starting to feel way worse than any of Dustin’s poems could ever make a person feel.

As fate would have it, my next class was gym. And as I’d suspected, Coach Hunter made the whole class feel like an interrogation. When we ran laps around the gym, he ran alongside me.

“Who was it, Leon?” he asked. “Which of you put that poem in my office?”

“I don’t know!” I sputtered.

“Then you won’t mind dropping and giving me twenty, will you?”

Four times over the course of the class, he made me drop and give him twenty. I wished I had been carrying enough cash that I could just drop down and give him a twenty-dollar bill—I would have gladly paid it to get out of the push-ups.

And he kept making it rough on me. All through class, all I heard was “Harris! Let’s see those arms!” and “Harris! Get that butt in the air!” It was almost exactly the way my grandfather described the army. But I didn’t crack. He couldn’t make me talk.

I was practically delirious by the end of the period, feeling half dead, and nearly ready to just give up on trying to be with Anna, if it could make me feel like this. I wanted to just bury myself in the nearest hole and let worms come and suck my eyes out of their sockets. If I were with Jenny, I would be the cool one, not the wannabe. It would be a much easier pace to maintain.

But I wanted Anna.

I know it sounds incredibly geeky, but I wanted her to think I was cool and sophisticated and intellectual. I wanted her to think I was gutsy and dangerous and dark. Maybe the reason we hadn’t moved any further than occasional kissing and the whole “are we or aren’t we” crap was that she wasn’t sure I was ready for that kind of thing. What would happen if she met someone who was? Surely it wouldn’t be hard for her to find a guy who knew better than to think there was anything cool about
The Wildewood Singers Sing the Beatles.

After the school day ended, I waited for Anna outside as I usually did, but I didn’t say much to her; we just walked along to the edge of the parking lot and she acted the same as ever, as though she hadn’t implied at lunch that I was just as dorky as, if not dorkier than, my parents. I didn’t try to kiss her, or make a move like I was going to. When she turned to go, she smiled, and I offered a kind of a weak smile back, and I walked straight home, going in through the front door and up to my room, where I stared up at the bad album covers above my bed.

The Voices of Carbondale. The Wildewood Singers.
Satan Is Real.
I felt like I should tear every one of them down from the wall and take them back to the thrift store from whence they came.

Maybe it was true. Maybe I was just too much of a dork for Anna. I wasn’t dangerous enough. I was going to end up just like my dad—working some dull job, killing time with embarrassing hobbies. I probably wouldn’t even have the nerve to get a Mohawk.

I was the biggest dork in school. I looked up at the albums on my wall and tried to do a Jonas-style laugh. “Ha ha ha,” I went.
“Satan.”

Damn. I was good at it.

Dad got home from work shortly thereafter, delighting Mom with stories about how his boss freaked out when he saw the green Mohawk and started saying he was going to fire him. Dad had threatened to quit accounting to become an accounting consultant, and his boss had immediately shut up and let him get back to work.

A short while later, he put on his John Deere cap and started pretending to be Lester, walking around and talking about how he’d “kilt him a barr” for dinner that night, just like either Davy Crockett or Jed Clampett. He wasn’t sure which. My mother, in her Wanda outfit, said he’d better not make too much noise while he grilled it.

“I’m sick and tired of hearin’ you talk while I’m watchin’ my stories!” she said.

“Woman!” said Dad/Lester, “I got a story for you! The story of a True American who kilt him a barr to keep his fam’ly fed!”

While I was being called a dork for my hobbies, this guy had been out scoring points on his boss after showing up with a Mohawk.

If I’d felt so inclined, I probably could have written the poem that would push Coach Hunter over the edge right then and there. But I didn’t. Instead, I made up my mind that things were going to be different, and decided to act before I chickened out and changed my mind.

I picked up the phone and called Edie.

“Yeah?” she said. Telephone manners were not her strong suit. It’s entirely possible that she was morally opposed to them.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Leon. I’m in for your movie idea. The takeover. And not just setting up an office in Wackfords, but taking it over. The pirate thing.”

“No way,” she said, incredulous. “You and Anna were saying it was all illegal and too risky and stuff.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but what good is security, anyway? In today’s job market, it’s not like we’d be throwing away promising futures.”

“Security is superstition, and you must live a daring life, or not live at all,” said Edie. “Helen Keller said that. Did you know she was a Socialist?”

“Can’t say that I did,” I said. “But seriously, I think we should take over the Wackfords and turn it into an office, and stop people from buying anything. And make a movie out of it.”

“Seriously? You think we can do it?”

“I think we have to,” I said. “You know George, the owner of Sip?”

“Vaguely.”

“I heard him talking to Troy and Trinity. And he said Sip is going out of business in about six months. Because of the Wackfords, I assume.”

“Well, all right, then!” said Edie. “We have to take them over—maybe we can stop them before Sip closes! Is Anna in, too?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to convince her, I guess.”

“No kidding?” asked Edie. “I figured she probably talked you into it.”

“Well, she didn’t,” I said. “You think I’m not enough of a risk taker?”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I believe you.”

“I’ll talk her into it tomorrow at lunch,” I said. “Just leave it to me.”

When I hung up, I was already starting to feel good again. Or better, anyway. Maybe getting out of that in-school suspension alive a few months before had made me sort of complacent. Deep down, maybe I’d felt that since I’d already made a bit of a splash with
La Dolce Pubert,
I could just relax for a while. Maybe I
was
getting to be a little bit dorky. Helen Keller was right—you have to do something daring every now and then.