The Gum Thief Read online

  I have to wear this red shirt at work. We all do. It's like scientists got together and selected the one colour from all the known colours in the universe that makes everybody's skin look bad. In any other shirt, I look white as a ghost. When I put one of these things on, my skin pinks up like a strawberry milkshake-my mouth is a black olive.

  Shtooples lighting was selected by the same scientists who chose the shirt colour. It possesses strange powers. For example, if you have blackheads, as Rudee does, this lighting actually amplifies them. If you have other blemishes, this lighting acts as a lens to make them larger and far more apparent. At least we people who work here know this and can cover up the worst of things with concealer. One of the few joys of this job is seeing how bad some customers look when ambushed by the lighting system. We're like a species of beige toads.

  Roger's skin is okay, but only barely. It's all that booze he soaks up. And he's the world's worst shaver. Women have to spend half their lives indignantly shaving hair off legs and armpits, while guys only have to shave their faces-how hard can it be?

  It's weird shaving your legs when you're not in a relationship, or there's not even a possibility of becoming close to someone. Who's going to see me? My mother, I suppose.

  Did I mention that I'm in my twenties and still living at home? Yes, that is correct, I am a loser.

  Here's something weird: Roger went to high school with my mother. That's how old both of them are. I wonder if they jointly won the yearbook award for Most Likely to End Up in Depressing Lifestyles?

  Oh God, I just imagined the two of them on a date, at some generic place like Denny's, and they're both trying to be nice to each other, and they're both trying to figure out how much booze they can order, and how quickly, without looking like lushes. And then they stare at the menus-the laminated ones where all the food in the photos is pumped on steroids and sweating nervously, like it's lying to you. My mother knows that if she eats one and a half pounds of food, she will gain one and a half pounds; she has no metabolism. She's trying to see if she can order only a celery stick, and then realizes she can order a Bloody Mary with a celery stick, so she's happy. Roger picks up on this momentary happiness and uses this little happy window to order a double rum and coke. The two of them are practically dancing like Snoopy in their orange banquette seats.

  But then they have to make conversation and the mood vanishes. They talk about where their old friends are divorces, money woes, surprise careers, the odd death and they both feel sadness not simply for themselves but for the planet. They feel sad because life is over so soon. They feel sad because they've blown it. They feel sad because they have to order food, except suddenly the photos on the menu aren't food any more. They're dead animals and chunks of starch. The two of them aren't vegetarian, but they're off meat for the time being.

  But back to me.

  I had a thought today-not an original thought, but it's better than no thought at all. Wouldn't it be great if stars turned black during the day-the sky covered with dots like pepper?

  Bethany (for real)

  Thanks for being me again, Roger. Does my mouth really look like a black olive? My mouth is too small. I hate it.

  It's weird to describe how it feels, walking around the store knowing that you're walking around these same aisles imagining your way into me-like being possessed the sensation that there's a ghost or something slipping in and out of my body whenever it wants. I don't mind it. It's what people probably felt like all the time before TV and the Internet. People probably tried harder to get inside each other's heads in the old days.

  So you're that guy my mom dated last year. She came home piss drunk and howling like she'd lost her favourite piece of jewellery. You took her on a date to Denny's? That's so recovering alkie. What were you thinking?

  She can't help but admire my frugality?

  Hubba hubba! Sexy, Roger!

  For that matter, what was my mother like in high school? Was she always angry? Was she the goody-goody she always pretends she was? If I saw her at seventeen, would I be able to imagine the way she turned out? Pink eyeballs. Sno-Kone cellulite. Mood swings like a Slinky pulsing between left and right hands.

  Last New Year's we both sat on the TV room carpet and finished a bottle of Kahlua while we figured out how much time and money it would cost her to get a total surgical makeover, from the daunting English ivy varicose veins on her calves right up to silencing her forehead with Botox. The full meal deal came to $80,000, which actually doesn't seem that expensive for a whole new everything in life: teeth, eyes, skin, nose, cheeks, chin, hairline, boobs, stomach, hips, thighs and knees.

  Oh, and she'd have to go to the gym, stop smoking and start eating food that doesn't come in cans or boxes. And she'd have to meet people out in the real world doing real world things like dog walking and swimming and line dancing. And in order to afford it, she'd have to sell or mortgage the condo, and I think she should. She needs escape velocity if she's ever going to get out of her present life and into a new one.

  But let's talk about you. Maybe you're not a total alkie, but booze does explain things about you. Let's face it, Roger, you're a disaster. I thank my biological father for teaching me all about that alkie shit before he flaked off with Cerise when I was a kid.

  Maybe I should try being you on paper for a while. I'll think about it. It's actually a fucked-up thing to do, trying to stick yourself into somebody else's head. I've never done it before, though I did this pathetic two-year stint at a local community college that shall go unnamed, and I had to take an English course in creative writing-it was hippie stuff like, "Pretend you're a piece of toast being buttered. Write it from the toast's point of view." All I remember from the course is everybody almost going insane having to wait until it was their turn to read their stuff out loud. And when people started reading their stuff, it was like they were taking the class hostage. It didn't matter what slop people wrote, everybody had to be nicey-nicey to them afterwards. I don't think anybody learned a thing, and I don't think you missed a thing by not finishing college.

  You're really good at pretending I don't exist here in the store. What happens next in Glove Pond?

  PS: You nailed my feelings about having to say Did you find everything you were looking for? I have this fear of being seventy and having a stroke, and the only thing I'm able to say is, Did you find everything you were looking for? Shoot me if that happens.

  Glove Pond

  Steve sat in the living room, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Gloria was upstairs changing her lipstick colour. Steve stared at his five critically successful, financially disastrous leather-bound novels, third shelf up in his walnut bookshelves, a wedding present from Gloria's family. Being head of an English department in a large university was no salve for the source of his pain: his lack of fame and the fact that he had to have a day job. He thought it odd to be so successful yet not successful at all.

  He looked at the top of the piano, where a swath of polished wood shone through a cloak of dead skin cells and burrowing micro-organisms.

  When will the doorbell ring?

  Using the same part of the brain he used to try to make jets explode, Steve willed the doorbell to ring.

  It didn't ring.

  Steve thought about how hard life was as director of the English department of a large, prestigious university. He was exhausted from being a pit bull, always protecting the English language within his faculty, guarding it from a never-ending onslaught of change. The English language was noble to Steve. It should never ever, ever, ever, ever change, no matter what. If Steve could have his way, English would have been frozen with Henry James. 1898? Somewhere near then. Steve rather daringly thought of Henry James as his favourite writer because James defined the cut-off point after which the English language was never to be permitted to shift. Steve wondered if his faculty members had ever trashed him behind his back for his daring taste. Maybe he should opt for Poe. Poe died in 1849, while James, dying in the t
wentieth century, had a taint of modernity about him.

  Steve also felt sorry for Poe because of something that had happened on the way home when he'd stopped to buy some pens at an internationally franchised office supply megastore-a colossal exercise in horror and bad taste. After drifting through a dozen aisles-assaulted by endless cardboard pop-up point-of-purchase displays and totally ignored by the churlish deaf, dumb and blind children who ran the place-he finally found the pen aisle. Of course, the small pieces of paper people use to test out new pens were littered with FUCKS and SHITS and satanic emblems.

  Then he heard two young women behind him restocking the Cliffs Notes. One of them said to the othe1; "Tales of Mystery and Imagination was okay for someone who had the misfortune of being trapped in the nineteenth century. Back then, the range of metaphors was pretty limited. The only high technology they had was staircases. And windows. Windows were as high-tech in 1849 as nanotechnology is now."

  "Poor Poe."

  "I know. What he needed was a PlayStation and some Zyban."

  The doorbell continued not ringing.

  Steve was drunk and decided to shift perspectives now he could care less about the language. The sooner it was destroyed by geeks, mathematicians and TV producers, the better.

  All the English language has ever netted me is five novels that never sold and a wife who worships literature the way deep-sea insects are drawn to the glow-in-the-dark dangling thingy that hangs in front of an ultra-deep-sea angler fish.

  Steve took another sip of Scotch, which at last turned off the buzzing part of his brain. All that remained was the realization that his own written words were generic. They could have emerged from any creative writing workshop in North America in the late twentieth century. Hell, his words could have emerged from a creative writing program taught at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The critical praise he'd received-it wasn't real. It was from people who merely needed to suck up to him. Poor Gloria-she wickedly resented his feeble book sales. She hated the way she and Steve consistently failed to garner dinner invitations from people in other cities who might somehow drag them out of their appalling yet prestigious university town.

  Poor Gloria. She might as well be wearing a ball and chain, the way her husband's failure has tethered her to this shithole.

  Wait ... can a ball and chain tether a person to a hole? Well, whatever.

  More staring at the front door.

  More willing the bell to ring.

  Gloria called from upstairs, "Is the doorbell broken?"

  Roger

  I'd run into Bethany's mother, DeeDee, one afternoon around two o'clock. It was last year, a few months after Joan left me and maybe ten minutes after I realized she wasn't coming back. I was in Aisle 5-North, restocking high lighter pens, and DeeDee asked me where she could take her toner cartridge for recycling. She asked without looking at me-which is pretty insulting and oh so common. I knew it was DeeDee Twain from high school, so instead of ignoring her as I would have done with other people, I told her I'd show her the recycling bin but first she'd have to fondle each of my butt cheeks. To see her face! When she realized it was me, she smiled and swatted me with her purse, and it was sweet, like we were both cutting class. I seized the moment and asked her out to dinner.

  It started out well-a few drinks and each of us blowing off steam about our jobs. Halfway through the meal, she was drunk enough to be lighting the wrong end of her cigarette, but not drunk enough to become indignant when told that smoking in the restaurant wasn't allowed.

  Of course, we discussed changes in our lives and the world. In particular, we discussed all of the ugly houses and apartment buildings that had been built here in the city in our lifetime. Back when I was young, I told her, I assumed that within my lifetime they'd all be quickly demolished and replaced by something newer and better. "Imagine all of our dumb, ugly, contractor-built little houses standing there long after we're gone."

  "You're being depressing, Roger."

  "All they'll ever do is draw attention to our narrowness of ambition and vision." "I'm ordering another drink." DeeDee changed the topic and told me that her condominium's co-op board was on her case for keeping a cat. I said I didn't see why cats were such a big deal, but she told me it wasn't the actual cat that was the problem; it was the $600 plumbing bill to snake out the clots of kitty litter choked inside the bathroom pipes. She confessed that this had happened not once, but twice.

  You have to remember that two years ago my freefall had just begun. I'm used to it now, but it was all very fresh then. A chronology of my life would read:

  Thorpe, Roger

  • Wife's cancer diagnosis: 2003

  • Totally cancer'ed out: 2004

  • Seeks diversion as stagehand in local theatre production of Neil Simon's Same Time Next Year: 2004

  • Canned from desk job at insurance firm: 2004

  • Makes one stupid mistake he pays for the rest of his life: 2004

  • Dumped by embittered wife: 2004

  • Learns the disturbing financial cost of anything legal: 2004

  • Old friends pretend not to notice him in a checkout line: 2004

  • Rents basement suite from condescending yuppies: 2004

  • Seborrhea inside hairline: 2004

  • Begins work at Staples: 2005

  • Ugly phone calls with Joan: 2004, 2005, 2006

  • Unable to afford Halloween candy, so he sits in basement apartment with all the lights off: 2004, 2005, 2006

  • Weekend highlight: learning how to use a photocopier's collating function: 2005

  I was hypnotized by the speed of my life's implosion, but DeeDee was having no truck with my self-pity. She said, "Guys forget that women have to make their peace with their half-assed lives too, and earlier than men. Women get more realistic far faster than men do, so don't expect tears in your beer from me, Roger. To me, you're a rookie at this failing life shit."

  I reached over to touch her hand, and she yanked it back.

  "I want to go home."

  "But ..."

  "Roger, I feel so ... old."

  "Tonight was supposed to be about making you feel young again."

  She slid a twenty under her water glass. "Nothing about the past ever makes me feel young."

  I watched through the window as she got into her car and drove away. I got sloshed.

  Glove Pond

  Gloria was in her boudoir-a delirious vision of a 1930s Hollywood set director, pushed to the farthest, pinkest extreme. Not a hard surface existed anywhere in the room. What was not carpeted was covered in velour or velvet or star bursts of ostrich and marabou feathers. The room smelled of violets and tuberoses, breezeless and claustrophobic, as though heaps of rotting blossoms were concealed behind drapes and beneath the divan.

  Gloria was trying to decide which colour she would try on her lips, but the sound of the doorbell not ringing was driving her crazy.

  She reached down to touch her spleen, which was puffy and irritable. Fortunately, she'd paid attention during her Vassar biology Lessons and knew that a spleen is a ductless gland not strictly necessary for life, and which is closely associated with the circulatory system, where it functions in the destruction of old red blood cells and the removal of other debris from the bloodstream.

  A puffy spleen-what could that mean?

  She looked at her artillery of lipsticks. She remembered how her mother always used to throw out all her old makeup and how it drove Gloria crazy. As an adult, she overcompensated by never throwing out anything. Steve once told her that her makeup table resembled the road tour makeup kit for the entire cast of Cats. To punish him, Gloria withheld sex for several months.

  Falling Blossom Pink. Perfect.

  She looked for some Kleenex to blot the previous colour from her lips, but realized she had run out. All that remained were some used sheets hastily stuffed into her dresser drawer the previous spring-long enough ago that any microbes they once harboured would hav
e disintegrated, thus making them reasonably safe to use again. So she blotted her lips, sipped a gin and tonic, and wondered about the evening's guests-an academic and his wife. This young chap had recently published a novel that was selling countless copies and was receiving wonderful reviews. He was handsome, and his wife was good-looking. Steve's nerves were in ribbons over his very existence, let alone his imminent arrival in their home. Gloria was going to savour every minute of it.

  She looked at the Kleenex box. Is the plural Kleenices? I do love words and writing and art and music.

  The doorbell continued to not ring.

  Silence disturbed Gloria because of something she had once heard on PBS. Apparently, the first thing a baby hears upon being born is silence. It's spent its entire life prior to that surrounded by heartbeats and valves gushing and liquids sloshing to and fro. And then, suddenly, it's born into a new world, deprived of everything its ears have ever known. Who invented that?

  Babies .. .

  Children .. .

  No time to think of that now.