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| There was this haunted house on the outskirts of
town where all the high school and college kids used to go and do drugs
and hangout. They said that a Methodist preacher used to live there with
his family until one Christmas eve about twenty-five years ago, the paper
mache Santa Claus sitting on the mantle told him to dress up like an elf
and murder his family and then cut them up and cook them. Once, I was sitting
in the basement of this very house with this guy named Sully. I was all
sleep deprived and stoned, hopped up on God knows what, and I saw this
guy dressed in green tights with those shoes with pointy toes walking around
with an axe saying “Momma loves her little boy . . . ” over and over again.
Sully was sober and said I was just wigging out. I didn’t believe him and
I thought the crazy elf guy with the Oedipus complex wanted to turn me
into fajitas, taking revenge on the soulless and immoral student that I
was; because I was the cause of all of society’s ills.
Around three in the morning, I was cold and sweating and shaking and screaming. The evil cannibal Jesus freak elf had asexually reproduced itself into several dozen lawn gnomes who were hell bent on eating me alive. Sully finally dragged me to the car and took me home. I remember this clearly, but the truth is it never actually happened; I had hallucinated it when I had a really bad case of the flu when I was a first year, and I didn’t even have a friend named Sully. Not everything happens the way you want to remember it. The thing is, I’m telling you a story and you have to take it on faith that I’m telling the truth. How many things can you take on faith? The mercy of God or the righteousness of your cause? Your mothers love, your father’s devotion? Can you believe every word I say ‘cause I’m the story teller? Well, story tellers throughout the ages have made exaggeration their bread and butter and half truth their opiates. Can you take this with a grain of salt because in the middle of the story teller’s tale, in the meat, there is a little nugget of golden truth that makes all the lies and tall tales worth it? That little copperplate reflection of you? Have you ever paid enough attention to see it? Everything around you is a fun house mirror distortion of everything else and there is no clear representation of the reality of our surroundings. The world is a metaphor for something bigger. Is that a fact? We can see through the fog if we want to, but most of us don’t, or can’t. Maybe that is where God is; underneath the surface of the silver and rippling water. Maybe when we can’t see through it, that’s when we become to feel empty. The funny thing about metaphor is that it only works on real big ideas and grand gestures; like God or Dreams or America, not the country but that intangible idea, the myth that feels like heartache and calms you with a melancholic euphoria. That’s what I’m talking about, telling you stories about, that sorrow in the middle of the party, the contradiction, the bright shining light before a thunderstorm. The machine that makes our dreams come true. The last two generations spent their youth desecrating the grave of the grand experiment, angry at the hypocrisy, building their suburban fiefdoms where everything they whined against grew like mold on wet bread. They were given the dream, had it handed to them on a silver platter and they said it wasn’t good enough, so it crawled off into the sunset to either die or wait for someone pure enough to find it and love it. The American Dream is a cathedral to the spirit built upon the ashes of hope and the bodies of immigrants who lived lives that will never be lived again. We are just living on the stardust residue of their dreams and loves and nightmares. It all started the day Elvis died. Yeah, it happened when I was a kid, but I'd like to think that I have enough insight into the human condition to know that the end of all things good and pure began with the death of the King. The downfall of our modern society can be attributed to a general lack of motivation in the average citizen, which is directly related to the quality of art or entertainment readily available, which, sadly, decreased immensely the day the King died. Everyone secretly knows this, they don't consciously think about it, but in the backs of their minds, all the time is the single solitary void that screams "The King Is Dead.” It is this sense of universal loss that all Americans have, that angst that makes us go out and seek that nebulous idea of the American Dream. This is what I think about when I'm trying to find ripe anjou pears at the supermarket four blocks from my apartment at half past midnight on a Thursday. I decide while walking away from the produce due to the lack of ripe pears that I must seek the American Dream, and I must lose myself in its metaphor. I happened to glace at my watch and it dawned on me that it was half past midnight and I was hungry and that I had to work in the morning so I walk the four blocks back to my efficiency apartment thinking even more about why the disenfranchising occurs. My name is Jack Lawrence Williams and Home Sweet Home is a one room, one bath efficiency apartment in the bad part of downtown. You walk up three flights of piss flavored stairs, past the crack head who lives in 3A who always manages to pass out in the stairway and shit himself, to the back north wall. 3F. Home. Home smells like sandalwood. Home is dim lights, curtains and low music and a futon. My prize 1972 leather Barka Lounger and my bed shoved into a corner. Home is a couple of lava lamps and bookshelves crammed with books and newspapers, CDs and LPs, ‘zines and chapbooks and scrapbooks, a coffee table and a rug with a sun and a moon making a yin yang and the bathroom. I never feel at home, though, that feeling is gone. Home now means only where I sleep and rest. Marty Brownstone got back from his stint with the Peace Corps in Africa a couple of months ago. He occasionally gets trashed and knocks on my door to crash on my futon, I let him, ‘cause I’ve known him since he was sixteen and he was in the shit in Africa; I saw it on the news. He wasn’t passed out on the futon when I got home, so I was very relieved and somehow lonely. I threw on an old Rachmaninoff LP and made myself some crab ramen. Crab ramen always makes me think of Kate. Kate Andrews had a meticulous way of doing everything, from doing her laundry to shopping for vegetables. Her delicate hands floated through the air with the precise grace of a surgeon. She even laughed precisely, a smile, an eye glint and a laugh. She had large light brown eyes like cool sand. She loved crab flavored ramen noodles, but she hated Rachmaninoff. Not everyone is perfect. One night, the power got cut because of a thunderstorm and she tripped over the crack head and beat on my door until I woke up. She was wet and smelled like rain and she said that she was dying. The cold that wouldn’t go away was some type of terminal cancer and it wasn’t fair. Nothing is. The water boils over the side of the pot. My best friend was a guy named Geoff. He was one of those superbly dorky guys that were so enormously dorky that he was cool, but not very many people knew this ‘cause they thought he was dorky and uncool. All the jocks picked on him and did the same old jock stuff that happens all over the place, the beatings, stuffing him into lockers, stealing his clothes. I remember just about everything but what he looked like exactly. I remember how he always wore thick gray sweaters in the winter and fall and in the summer he wore grubby old hand-me-down band T-shirts that his brother gave him. One day, after an excessive beating by a jock, he went home, put on a Mudhoney album real loud and ate two loads of 12-gauge buckshot. No one was home and they didn’t find him until morning. Of course, the next day at school the people who hated him and wouldn’t give him the time of day were the ones huddled in groups crying their eyes out in the dusty October air. The Fakers. The only people who didn’t cry were me and the same jock who gave him the beating. I think the jock felt too guilty to cry. I’d like to think that for a moment in the brisk fall air everyone stood toe to toe with the fragility of life and the thought of their own mortality, that the kids huddled together like schools of jellyfish learned something. I know that it’s not true, but I like to think it. Instead, what happened was Geoff’s memory became a catch all excuse for getting out of things that they didn’t want to do and a wonderful topic on college entrance exams. In high school I dated this girl named Maria. She was a sweet enough girl, I suppose, with a nice laid back disposition and bushy red hair, bright pale blue eyes. She sun burned real easy. I met her through Geoff, who said that I needed to meet her and that we were a lot alike. We were nothing alike, but I still thought that she was cool and we ended up seeing each other. But this girl wasn’t the one who got away, the love of my life or anything, she was just Maria who I dated in high school and had some good times with. I remember clearly a night in the August before we were seniors. Geoff, and his friend Lauren, myself and Maria were driving around in Maria’s car. We had a quart of everclear, a bag of weed, a bb gun and a 6 foot tall inflatable Frosty the Snowman. It was one of those end of summer nights that last forever, and you can see every star in the sky, hear every cricket, breathe all the fresh air, everything was okay and it was going to last forever. The rising tide of Adulthood was being held back by the impetuousness of youth. That indestructible idiocy. Remembering nights like this when you’re 23 is not necessarily healthy. It keeps you awake at night, wanting and wishing for it to happen all over again. I think I can honestly say I can understand mid life crisis. Around midnight we pulled the car into the parking lot at the Quick Mart on the boonie side of town where there weren’t any cops or people around ‘cause it was next door to a gated community where nothing ever was committed by outsiders passing by, but by its own residents, mostly on account that it was out in the boonies. Everyone in high school has a special skill that their social circle needed. It was sort of capitalism/production line training, specialization. The smaller the social group the larger the need for areas of multiple talents and the larger the chance of them being a bit on the weird side (Geoff could say the Chorus’ opening speech from Henry V in Spanish). Geoff could get us into movies for free, Maria had the car, Lauren had the drugs and I had the ideas of what to do, which usually consisted of go see a movie, get fucked up, run around a field. We were parked under one of those almost dead sodium street lamps that spewed forth flickering piss yellow light next to a dumpster that blocked the view from the store. We had the joint doing its rounds when a car load of jocks pulled up next to us. They started talking to us friendly and all, but they were mostly drunk. Whenever one of them moved inside the truck, you could hear the clatter of empty beer cans. They saw the joint and asked if we were holding, and of course we had to say yes. Geoff passed them the J and they both took a hit and thanked us as they passed it back. It’s kinda nice, peer groups being brought together by illicit substance abuse. One of the Jocks names was Derrick and he had the reputation of being a bit of the belligerent type of drunkard. He was the party type, and loved nothing more than inebriated females. So this Derrick guy chimes in with: “Hey, your name’s Maria, right? You’re in my chemistry class.” Maria stared him down, trying to make her face a statue of stoicism. She never could get that ‘I hate you’ look right, she always ended up looking nervous. “Yes,” she said, voice shaking, too. “I never noticed it before, but you’re pretty good looking.” You could say she smiled a little under the flattery, but she wasn’t just some girl out there looking for a little acceptance. She knew it was nothing except a horny guy trying to get into her pants. “Why don’t you come and ride around with us? “Maybe ‘cause we bummed you the weed,” Geoff said. “Shut up patzer, I’m talking to the lady.” There was a penetrating silence as Derrick rolled his eyes and then looked at Maria with wet lips, all wolf. With a single smooth movement, Maria brought the bb gun up at arms length and pointed it straight at Derricks head. He froze. She shot. We all looked on in horror. Derrick’s eyes seemed to get sapped of all color as a trickle of blood ran down between them, the copper bb, half sunk into the flesh of his sloping forehead, glinted in the street lamp light. He passed out from the shock of the unexpected. We jumped in our car and headed for the other side of town. On the far side of town was nothing but open fields dotted with New Victorian style ranch houses that yuppies had built on them. Rich people like the idea of surrounding themselves with acres and acres of perfectly good farmland to separate themselves with the middle class undesirables that they really don’t like. They usually show up in town as tourists trying to enlighten themselves to something, they cruise around town in their rented BMW and they see all the farmland, and they think to themselves; “how quaint, farmland, with farmhouses and farmers. We just gotta move here, buy their land and fuck up the tax bracket for the entire region and ruin the farmer’s lives!” So they come back a year or so later, buy some land from a farmer that’s been in his family for years and years, who ends up buying a nice brownstone in the city and managing a hardware store. The rich folk tear down all the buildings on the property, build a house that’s way too big for their three person family. To beat some income tax loopholes, they start a tree farming company and plant fir pines all over their property and hire the farmer’s teenaged son to look after them and mow their now-enormous lawn. They use the extra income from selling Christmas trees to buy their kids cars so they can have an even bigger free ride and have the opportunity to get into more trouble that they can buy their way out of. The disenfranchised group I hung with really hated these people, as did I, so we made it our mission to do very bad things on their property. Once we kidnaped some poor rich folk’s cat, got it stoned and shaved it. But this night was just one long period of relaxed ethereal bliss underneath an infinite bowl of stars. We stupefied ourselves and spun like tilt-a-whirls over the endless rolling hills of someone’s backyard and through the tall grass like Shakespearean nymphs celebrating something we couldn’t quite put our fingers on, but we knew it was leaving soon. We ran with arms outstretched like banshees and howled and yelled for no other reason than because it felt right. On the edge of a wood at the top of a hill under a full moon we respited. On nights like those, a calmness covers one’s mind and body, and lying in the tall grass, stoned and drunk, surrounded by friends. It was about as calm and perfect a time as I have ever had. This was when the dreams were still attainable and love came easy, like rain. The time of life where you weren’t aware of the passing weeks and your own uselessness. Besides the people you were with, nothing existed, everything meant something and nothing was wrong. An epoch of naivete that as soon as you leave it, you know it, and its never coming back, but while you’re in it you don’t know it. We floated above the grass and in and out or ourselves as we watched the universe digest itself. Off in the distance, across the rolling hills topped with tall grass we could see the dark gray silhouette of a three-story house of castle like proportions. The porch light, as if a beacon for wayward sailors, drew us in. It was almost too picturesque. The moon bright and full, high in the sky and a house, empty, with no one around for miles. We waded toward it through the tall grass as if we were just sauntering down the street, talking, joking. The house was paneled with wide, thick, and knotty planks of oak, and the chimney was a conglomeration of riverbed rock and mortar. The gardens that encircled it were full of roses and hyacinth that swayed back and forth in the breeze and talked to you through their soft fragrance. We walked around to the front and across the crushed and hard packed gravel driveway to the large oaken door. It loomed above us, nine feet tall, five feet wide, and each plank fastened to the other with thick, hand wrought iron clasps. We backed away from its imposing demeanor and looked at the house in awe as it glistened like the Holy Grail in the moonlight. Geoff lit up the last spliff and pulled the six foot tall inflatable Frosty the Snowman out of his back pack. I held in my hand a ten-foot length of heavy hempen twine I took from the garden. Lauren pointed out that from the top of the garage it was only an eight-foot travel to the top of the house, and they were connected. Geoff went up first, his sneakers squeaking slightly on the wood planks. Within a minute and half, most of which was spent passing the joint around, we were all on the top of the house, bathed in the bright, white moonlight. We sat around, drinking, taking turns inflating Frosty. Imagine whoever owned that house, coming home from their holiday in the Carribean, hoping for their nice, comfortable and familiar beds, and finding Frosty the Snowman lashed to their chimney like Odysseus, fighting off the siren song. We all laughed for hours. We watched the sun come up and back light Frosty like some bastardized image of a martyr on a cross. Imagine Geoff, dead in three months. When you leave the arms of your friends, you are forever changed. When someone dies, you see the completeness of the uselessness of life. You realize that everything you do is all for naught because it will be forgotten. It is said that within twenty years of one’s death there is not a single person alive that ever knew the deceased. The way one lives one’s life can only be for the enlightenment and enjoyment of that one person. You cannot please anyone, you cannot leave an impression on everyone. Anything you do is useless ‘cause no one will notice. Then you’ll die and the trying will have been in vain. Maria and I split up after high school. I went east and she went west. Lauren’s a nurse. Geoff is dead. We all died a little when he did. Marty got back from the Peace Corps a few months ago, he’s 20 and lives in his parent’s basement. He wandered around in a drunken stupor for a few weeks after he got back until I, in a fit of nostalgia, got him a job at the coffee shop. I’ve known Marty since he was a Junior in high school, about the time I dropped out of college, he and his friends hung out in the same area so we ended up hanging out together. I really like that Kid that was Marty Brownstone, and I really felt sorry for the Man that is Marty Brownstone. He saunters into work all blearily eyed, mussed hair and crumpled clothes. “Jack, I don’t wanna deal with people today, so can I pull and you work register?” his voice was like a broken air conditioner. “Yeah.” We relieved the opening crew, and Marty Slumped behind the espresso machine like a limp scarecrow, all dead grass and tired. “Jesus, Marty . . . what the hell happened to you?” “Went to that show last night . . . got real thrashed.” The masses come in like the tide for their drugs, their caffeinated fix. We are the drug dealers for the yuppie sect that likes ‘clean living’. We push the acceptable drug. We see the cross section of humanity while we are permeated by the steam and burned corn smell of coffee. Marty frothed and steamed the cream and pulled the joe with the effortless ease of a toy maker building a hobby horse. A nice looking blonde came into the shop and ordered a tall skinny latte in a thick cockney accent. Marty smirked, and watched her walk around the shop looking at the bad art on the wall. I watched her legs. This girl had nice legs. Marty steamed the milk extra careful as to not bruise it. He called out her order and she walked over, her high heels clicking on the hard wood floor. “I met you at the Einstein’s Love Child show last night,” he said as he handed her the cup. I stopped what I was doing and watched her reaction, which appeared to be complete moral deconstruction. She almost dropped her coffee as her eyes went wide and her face went bright red. “Oh, we did?” “Yes, you were very drunk.” “Oh, I guess I was.” “You appeared to be having some fun.” She sipped from her coffee and swallowed hard. She looked as if she was just in a car accident. It was beautiful. “What is your name?” “Marty . . . ” “My name is Ju . . . ” “Your name is Julien but everyone calls you Jules.” I think she almost cracked a smile before she went from beet red to concentration camp white. She leaned in real close and motioned for Marty to do the same. I was holding back laughter. She whispered: “We didn’t . . . well . . . did we . . . ” Marty got that shit eating fuck with people smirk on his face that only he gets. “No, you’d remember.” She smiled, she had a nice smile, honest, wide, and she didn’t have a stereotypical British smile; she had all her teeth and they were a bright and blinding white. “Yes, I suppose I would. Thanks.” “Don’t mention it.” She turned and walked out of the shop, swinging her hips in her fuzzy, gray skirt. When she got out of ear shot, Marty started gut laughing. “I guess I just don’t leave an impression on people.” “Nope, you just leave impressions on their couches.” “Fuck you, Jack.” Marty leaned against the machine, crossing his arms across his chest, letting his bushy black hair fall haywire across his face. He was always posing, trying to achieve that level of cool unseen since Echo and The Bunnymen’s publicity photos. He looked at my scuffed up, resoled, ripped up combat boots. “How come you don’t ever wear different boots?” he asked me. I looked at my prized Marine Corps jungle boots while I thought about it. The answer was kind of disappointing, even for me as I said it. “They’re the only ones I have.” “That’s a lack of variety.” “I don’t think I could handle the responsibility of having many pairs of shoes.” “That may be true, but still, look at them. They’re ratty, man.” “That’s just the sign of well-worn love.” “That’s the sign of needing a new pair of shoes, Jack.” “I don’t need new shoes.” “What d’you mean?” “I can fix these up. I’ve done it before.” “That may be true, but what about a change . . . I know I get tired of wearing combat boots. You never see Army guys on their day off wearing them.” “But I like my boots.” “I’m not saying throw them out, I’m just saying have some variety.” “I wouldn’t know what to do with a variety of footwear. My wardrobe is based on the fast food ethic; few choices equals expediency.” “What you’re saying is you don’t trust yourself with making decisions.” “Nor do I trust the general populace, either.” “You are depriving yourself from the spice of life, my friend.” “Variety doesn’t spice up anything, it just confuses me.” “That’s too bad. You’re missing out.” Marty took up his usual spot on the futon and poured himself half a pint glass of whiskey. “Jack, we’ve got to watch some anime or something, man.” I was standing at the mini fridge trying to find ginger ale and only coming up with dijon mustard. “What is it with you and nude cartoons,” I asked him, completely in a state of distaste for anything tentacle porn-like. Behind the mayonnaise the green label of a bottle of Canada Dry beckoned to me, only to disappoint me by being empty. I resigned myself to drinking the whiskey straight, all the while, with every sip, wishing for a highball. Marty sat his glass down on the coffee table and pulled out his stash box. I gave him a look that said that I wasn’t in the mood for weed and he gave me one of those Han Solo “you know me” smirks. The box found its way back into his pocket. “Do you still have that one with the plant that has a dick for a stamen that kidnaps the virgin?” Marty said, not giving up on the anime. “No.” “How about the one with the machine that’s supposed to make the really frigid girl have an orgasm?” “You just described every anime plot. How ‘bout a title or something?” I threw on a Vivaldi LP and walked to my closet. The door opened with a raspy sigh and I stared at my modest wardrobe like a Renaissance painting. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Marty saunter over. He stood behind me, one hand in his pocket, the other holding his whiskey and rocking back and forth on his heels like some philosophy professor making a grand point about tree-ness. Then he made a clicking noise with his mouth. “See what I mean about variety?” he said as he sprouted that shit eating grin again. Two over coats, four pairs of pants in various shades of gray and black, a small selection of black button down shirts and a fedora. “Look at this,” Marty reached into the closet and held up one of the black button downs, “This is superbly pathetic. You don’t have any T-shirts.” I wordlessly point to the pile of black T-shirts on the floor of the closet. “They’re all solid black, aren’t they?” “Except for the navy blue one I bought by accident.” Marty turned away and wandered through the apartment, looking at my bookshelves with the contrasting eye of a critic, as if my mental state could be discerned from the state of my wardrobe and the condition of my possessions. “This place seems a lot different from when I was in high school. It’s dustier, more like a museum than an apartment.” Marty took a long pull off his glass and made a wide eyed exasperated child’s face. “What happened, Jack? Where did all the flowers go?” He started gut laughing and sat in the recliner. I was still staring at my closet wondering why I felt so . . . flat inside, as if I were a sixty-five percent gray card or an overcast Sunday morning. I didn’t feel like my age, I didn’t feel like a man. “Jack, my friend . . . you have an existential void,” he couldn’t say it without laughing, at least. “When I look at you, it’s like I’m looking at a run down church through a pair of binoculars; backwards. It’s all hazy and you can’t see the detail.” I managed a shrug, flipped the Vivaldi LP and sat on the futon. “Marty, don’t take your problems out on me.” “Problems, I don’t have any problems. Shit, I’ve got a free ride. I’m an international hero to the downtrodden.” He said it with such dissatisfaction that you could almost make out the blood dripping off the words in midair. “This isn’t what the Jack should be, there used to be the myth, the indecipherable that was Paranoia Jack.” “You grew up.” “So it’s my fault, then?” and another sarcastic grin. “If you really want to lay down some blame.” Marty sank into the chair and smiled at me. “Yeah, you are the same,” he yawned and finished his glass. “But I think you’re a little sadder.” “I’ve always been this sad, just not this sober.” I blame all the misconceptions about me on AA meetings, ‘cause like the man said, Alcoholics Anonymous will be the cure for American Individuality. I have, however, never been to an AA meeting in my life. “You can tell a lot about a person by their shoes,” he said, “One pair of ratty old boots, what does that say about you?” “I dunno . . . ” “It says, ‘I’m boring . . . ’” “But I am.” “Hey, if that were true, you wouldn’t wear that fedora, now would you?” “I want to be Bogart, man.” Marty lifted his foot to the dashboard and almost took out a sidewalk full of nuns. He pointed to his shoe. “Look at that, what d’you see?” “An accident waiting to happen.” “No, it’s the American Dream in a nutshell. The spice of life.” “I thought it was just a Doc Marten.” “That’s your problem, Jack, you can’t see what you’re here for.” He slid the car to a steaming stop in front of the store and hopped out and bounded toward it like a hobbit on crack. Big Choice Shoe Store is a monument to consumer culture sight unseen since the shopping malls of the 1980's. Stack upon stack of all different types of shoes, set around a huge room lit with sickly green flourescent lights. The entire place smelt of rubber and processed leather. After entering through the obligatory ringing door, Marty and I sneaked around through aisle up aisle of women’s shoes, over to the aisle and a half of men’s shoes tucked away in the shadowy back corner of the store. Marty’s hand instantly snaked out and grabbed a pair of ox blood wingtips with a wooden heel and leather sole. “These,” Marty said, “Say ‘Look at me, I have taste, sophistication and an appreciation for 1925.” I held the price tag up to his nose. “This says one hundred twenty-five dollars that I just wasted on shoes I don’t really need.” “Man, you got way to many principles.” “Every principle you have is ass backwards.” At that moment a cute blonde wearing tight clothes to show off her ample chest and other shapely curves popped around the corner, flashed her sky blue eyes at us and melted Marty’s heart in less than a second. It is every suburban male’s dream, to fall in love with a shapely nineteen year old shoe sales person, at least for an afternoon. “That’s a very nice choice. Those were made in Italy. Top quality leather.” She said. “I think,” I replied, “That they are out of my price range.” Marty took the shoe and set it back on the display stand, gawking at the girl. “Is there anything in particular that you’re looking for?” She asked me. I just shrugged: “My friend brought me here to make me buy shoes against my will.” “Really?” “Yeah. He says that a variety of footwear will make me a happier person.” “I take it you don’t believe it?” “Not one bit.” She flashed her blue eyes at Marty again. She’s getting ready to play him like a cello, use his instant infatuation to make a good thirty percent commission. It was like being out in the bush of Africa, watching a Lioness begin to size up a herd of gazelles to kill. I should either play along or help save Marty’s soul from the consumer culture disease. “I’ve only owned one pair of boots for the past four or five years.” She looked down at my boots; frayed nylon uppers, almost completely flat soles, scuffed beyond recognition leather toe caps that are splattered with every type of liquid imaginable. She was almost frightened. “Are those comfortable?” “More so than they look.” Marty finally got his brain to shift gears from thinking about all the things he could do to the girl with a cucumber to being able to talk to her. “My friend here just needs a little variety . . . ” he said. “What is his price range?” “Money is no object,” Marty drawled. “I only have forty bucks,” I corrected. “Then I think wingtips are a little out of your budget,” she said as she leaned against the shelf with one hand on her hip. She motioned to the casual tennis shoes. “Those are more your speed.” I reached over and picked up a pair of suede and rubber skate shoes with gum soles that were a dark blue color that clashed with my outfit. “Those clash . . . ” “I have other clothes.” “Jack, let me . . . ” Marty said. “Jesus . . . ” “You need a basic black model.” “He wears a twelve and a half.” “I don’t think we have any black in that size.” “What about those gray ones over there?” “Possibly.” I just stood there, watching the exchange like a car accident. “My friend just needs a change, you know how it is, years and years of being apathetic have taken its toll on his wardrobe.” The girl pointed at the shoes in my hand, never taking her eyes off Marty, licking her lips, ready to suck marrow out of his bank account. “You should try those on, see how the feel,” she said. “Okay.” I sat on a stool and pulled my boots off and slid my feet into the skate boarder shoes. I was used to hard soles, steel plate and safety toes and fourteen eyelets. “Wow,” I said out loud, “It’s like my feet are enveloped in clouds.” I looked up and saw that the girl was now blatantly flirting with Marty. I stood up and walked to the check out, bought the shoes and ended up sitting on the hood of Marty’s car for about half an hour watching Marty and the girl flirt through the huge store front winow. I looked down at the shoes on my feet, dark blue and soft, and then to the boots in the bag. Two pairs of shoes. I’ve never owned more than one pair in my entire adult life. I had the sensation of being in an area of complete surreality. It didn’t feel like me. Back when I was a first year, I knew this guy named Harris. Harris was an indie rocker who swore by thrift and army surplus stores. We were sitting out on the lawn about a month into school and he looked at my Nike Airs. He suggested that we drive out to the nearest surplus and get me a pair of combat boots, ‘cause my Nikes where dying and combat boots are comfy, utilitarian, they last forever and if properly maintained, they can go with any outfit. Ever since, I have owned just those boots. The boot, be it Marine Corps Jungle, Israeli Commando or Corcoran Jump, is a symbol of a person’s growth into a proper member of . . . something or other. We used to sacrifice animals to the gods who controlled weather and the harvest, now we pierce our bodies and buy second hand clothing. Where is the Bar Mitzvah, the tribal tattoo, the great hunt, dodging the draft? Most kids don’t even smoke weed anymore. What happened to the rites of passage? Marty came out of the store with a huge bag filled with several shoe boxes. He looked confused, like a chimp with its hand stuck in a pickle jar. “What happened?” I asked. “I just bought three pairs of dress shoes.” “And . . . ?” “I just spent three hundred and twenty-five dollars.” “A small price to pay for variety.” “I just got suckered.” “I bet you didn’t even get her telephone number.” “Nope.” “You just got suckered.” “Well, at least my feet are well dressed,” he said with a hint of disgust. My Father always wanted me to be a writer, so I wrote, everyone thought I was good at it, but when Kate died, I spent six months writing the same thing over and over again, so I quit writing, saying that if it were meant to be, the pen would find me again and force my hand to the paper. Marty was pulling and running the reg when I ran into the shop, all dust clouds and curses. He tightened his eyes at me and stood in the corner by the machine, waiting for me to call out orders and take money. I pressed the record button on the Dictaphone and set it between us. He looked at it like I had just set a dead marsupial on the counter. “What in the hell is that?” “A Dictaphone.” He sighed and went back to pulling coffee and was wearing those ox blood wingtips. “Nice shoes,” I said, nodding to his feet, with only a hint of sarcasm. “Shut it, Jack.” “You do realize that she’s probably laughing her ass off right now?” Marty swung around and stared me down, like he was reprimanding a child. “Do you realize that you’re probably fired right now?” “I am?” “Yeah, just wait for Joe to come down stairs and see your sorry ass here an hour and a half late. He was already pissed about it, talking all kinds shit about what he’s gonna do to you today.” It’s a little on the odd side, working in a coffee shop for a guy named Joe. Joe is really pent up and uptight, he gets his jollies by taking out his uptightness on his staff. He says that’s the way the world works, so everyone ignores him ‘cause he’s full of shit. I didn’t really think I’d get fired, maybe a stern talking to; other than this incident I’m a model employee. Maybe he’d dock my pay or put me on suspension, but as I was taking an order for two decaf soy cappuccinos, I remembered that his graduate student girlfriend had just dumped him for a rugby player and he was in a pissed off funk. It’s odd how high school ends up being the real world without paychecks. Joe came down the stairs and looked at me like he
wanted to cut my throat. He sauntered over to the counter, pointed at me
and then to the kitchen, where he pushed the door open so hard, it slammed
into the wall and bounced back at lightening speed, making a horrendous
racket. I palmed the tape recorder and followed. The kitchen wasn’t all
that well lit, but during the day, we only used the Hobart.
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