The Gum Thief

by Douglas Coupland

  Glove Pond, once again

  "We can't serve guests canned soup for dinner. I'll be the laughingstock of the English department." "You're not already? And besides, we don't have any canned soup."

  "Jesus, Gloria, you're supposed to be witty. At all times. Hey, what's in here ... ?" Steve fumbled through the tin foil drawer and found a bottle of gin. "Gin?"

  "It's for when I'm too lazy to go to the liquor cabinet." "Let's peel and boil some potatoes." "We don't have any potatoes. We're broke. We spend all of our money on Scotch. We can't even order pizza." "Let's get the guests so drunk they lose their appetites." "I'm for that," Gloria said, "but we have to at least offer some token food." "There's cheese in the fridge. It's covered in blue fur. It's having babies." "Scrape off the fur," Gloria said. "There are some Triscuits in the cupboard above the sink." "They've been there since September 11,2001." "Why do you remember that?" "I bought them to eat while watching CNN all day,

  and now, whenever I look at Triscuits, I get that sick-for-the-fate-of-the-world feeling."

  Gloria nibbled a corner of one. "They're soft. I'll broil them and make them crispy again."

  Steve resuscitated the cheese while Gloria began broiling up the stale Triscuits. The couple was having what other people might call fun, but then Steve cut his

  finger. "Aw, shit."

  "You're bleeding all over the cheese."

  "Where are the Band-Aids?"

  "In the drawer below the phone."

  Steve opened the drawer and found Band-Aids and a box of liqueur chocolates. "How long have these been here?"

  "Since three Christmases ago."

  He bandaged his hand and then peeled the foil from the chocolates and ate five in a row before Gloria shrieked, "Don't eat them! We can serve them to our guests."

  "Dessert?"

  "Exactly."

  Steve sat down and stared at the phone. In his head, he was pretending he had super powers and could magically make the phone ring. It didn't.

  Steve was always looking out the window and up at the sky for planes-he liked to think he could stare at a plane and will it into exploding before his eyes. They never did. The only thing that made the endless departmental meetings bearable was that, from his seat, he could watch the flight path to the airport, and on a clear day could practise his pyrokinesis while his underlings schemed and backstabbed. He didn't know it, but when he put on his "pyrokinesis face," he looked wise and handsome. It was this illusion of wisdom and virility that kept his underlings from mutiny. Steve never made the connection that on clear days his staff were much better behaved and agreeable than on cloudy days.

  "Goddam hot water spout!" shouted Gloria.

  Steve woke up from his reverie. "What about it?"

  "It's not powerful enough to blast your blood from the nooks and cracks in the cheese. And now the cheese is starting to get squishy."

  Steve turned the faucet to cold. "Rinse it quickly, then let's put it in the freezer for a few minutes. When it comes out, we can scrape away the squishy outer layer of cheese, and the bloody bits with it." Steve flared his nostrils. "I think the Triscuits are done. We have barely enough cheese to cover them."

  Gloria felt a harp's gentle glissando of love for her husband. It swelled from nowhere; it was unexpected. She decided not to battle for the next five minutes. "I think I'll change gears from Scotch to gin," she said.

  "You do that, baby. Hey, check it out-we've got pickles in the fridge door shelf-two of them. There's our vegetable. I think we've nailed all four food groups."

  Bethany

  I love Glove Pond.

  Steve and Gloria's lives are so small. I can't believe how small life can become. I sit on the bus and the world becomes as small as the dot at the end of this sentence. And then I wake up, as if from a spell, and look out the windows and see that while I've been obsessing about how my mother threw out my old cosmetics, the rest of the human race has been out there designing microchips and collecting money for orphans in faraway lands.

  I think I need to see more of the world. I've only ever been to Seattle twice, and Banff once. Last year I went to see this lame death-metal band over in Victoria, but Victoria doesn't count. Europe's been on my mind lately. I go online and concoct dream tours of London and Paris, which is a total escapist girly thing to do, and it's kind of embarrassing-but I want to go somewhere some day!

  God, it's reached the point where I look at my shadow, and it feels like a ball and chain anchoring me to this stupid store in this stupid suburb in this stupid new century. My question of the day is, "What if my shadow became unattached from my body? What if one day I went one way and it went the other?" Wouldn't that be strange if my shadow moved off to some other place and began leading a separate life-if it got its own apartment and a job? Maybe it'd shack up with those hitchhiking souls who've left their owners' bodies. Maybe they'd have a way better time than they ever did being stuck to us. We'd try to instigate legal proceedings to make them come back to us, but no way, Jose.

  Today's big news is that I swiped a pack of Wrigley's Orbit White chewing gum from the rack up front and then spent the morning chewing every piece, one by one, placing the resulting gum wads underneath the Bic Soft-Grip display racks. Talk about life on the edge. And let's be brutally honest here: can gum actually whiten your teeth? Kyle's teeth used to be yellow. That was before you started working at Shtooples. And then one week we all noticed his teeth were bleached paper white, and instead of everybody razzing him, they all went out and got white teeth too.

  Sheepy-weepies.

  Does anybody have off-white teeth these days?

  Oh, and before lunch these two gay guys came in to buy price stickers for their garage sale, and they went for the expensive ones with little strings and grommetted string holes. I got their address because if they take that much care, they probably have some pretty good stuff.

  Back to you.

  Who's Joan? And even if you've had fifty jobs, you seem like you could do better than working here. And you mentioned a car crash way back. Who was in it? What happened? Funny how I can ask you these questions on paper but not to your face. BTW, it's fun pretending I don't know all this stuff about you. Are you getting off on it as well? Let's keep it this way. It keeps life interesting.

  Five minutes later: Kayla came in and asked me the strangest question. She wanted to know if it was true that tomatoes grow at night. I said, "What?" But she said that tomatoes are members of the nightshade family, and one of their main characteristics is night time growth. I asked why she was asking me this, and she said, "Well, you act and dress like you're totally into death, and nightshade is a poison, and all that."

  "You asked me this because I wear black lipstick?" I said.

  "Pretty much."

  I told her to go ogle it.

  Ten minutes later: Just back from the PC aisle. I couldn't wait for Kayla-the idea of being able to generate nutrients without needing sunlight was too exciting not to immediately investigate. Alas, I couldn't find the answer online, but now I'm determined to make a garden out of plants that only function in the dark.

  It's so quiet here in the staff room right now-I like being in here alone. I can only concentrate when things are totally quiet, like being in a forest with no people. I did that growing up-I hiked into the watershed for miles so that I couldn't hear anything man-made. It was so perfect. I look back now and can't believe I didn't end up as cougar chow.

  But I'm thinking about what you said right at the start of all of this-about people wanting out of their lives, even if their lives look great from the outside. I saw this picture in a magazine of this family in some flooded place down in the South. There they were, up on their roof, having a barbecue and waving and smiling for the camera crew in the helicopter. It was like they got a Get Out of Jail Free coupon and had change imposed on them rather than having to change themselves.

  Blairzilla just walked in. Break over. Pretend you're me again.

  Roge
r

  A few years back I had to organize my son Brendan's funeral. Joan was completely wrecked, and I was barely keeping it together. I remember sitting there with the funeral director, trying to think of what to say in the death notice or whom I could invite to speak. I drew a blank, and the director, an older guy-white hair, a head shaped like a stone dug out of a Scottish field, a guy who'd been through a trench or two-suggested that no one had to speak and we could recite grade school stuff like the Lord's Prayer. He said that most people know it by heart, and we could all get through the proceedings with a sliver of dignity.

  He must have smelled my breath-tequila-because he looked at me a moment, then went to his desk and pulled out some very peaty Scotch, almost like soil syrup, and poured both of us a few fingers. He told me that most people who come to arrange services don't believe in anything. He said that if he's learned anything from doing his job, it's that if you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis. He said we're told by TV and movies and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change-and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. They become messes and tend to remain messes. Having a few default hymns and prayers at least makes the lack of crisis-born insight bearable. The man was a true shepherd of souls. Why don't men like him run for public office?

  The car crash. Okay. It was the early eighties and we were in two cars; Jeff was ahead of me driving his ex-stepfather's hotwired Cutlass. He was with Corrine, Laszlo and Heather. I was following in my Monza 2+2.

  Jeff was this low-life I met during my one month in community college. He may have been a low-life, but he was an amusing low-life and you could always count on him to do something, anything, to enliven a day, even if it meant throwing a milk bottle out his fifth-flam-apartment window while seated in a beanbag chair by the TV, not having a clue what the bottle would hit. He could shock you. We got high on mushrooms and walked through Stanley Park one summer, and he began breaking the flowers off roses and evergreen magnolias and used the petals to write the word E-N-E-M-A in six-foot-high script outside the park's central cafeteria windows, where all these families with their kids were staring at him. Then he had a screaming contest with a peacock. Ever heard the lungs on those things?

  That night we were all baked on weed and we'd been having a group hug in the parking lot of the Fraser Arms when I suggested that Laszlo drive, not Jeff. That was all it took to set Jeff off. Suddenly, I was a jerk and a bring down, and then I was in my Monza by myself, gunning the engine to keep up with the others-no one had told me the address of the next party. It was raining, and they went off a bridge into the river between the airport and Richmond. The last thing I saw was the car going down quick, Corrine banging the rear passenger window, looking me in the eye. The interior lights were on. And then the car was too deep to be seen. And then there was just water, like the dawn of time.

  That's how quickly things happen in cars. They shatter time. They destroy it. The car sinking took fifteen seconds, but it's stretched for nearly twenty-five years.

  The fortune-telling lady was right: I did change my ways for a little while after the accident. But I got lazy, and also, other things changed. I'll leave it at that for now.

  Glove Pond

  Steve decided to take an interest in dusting. To this end, he pulled a cut-up pair of Y-front underwear from the rag drawer and a can of lemon Pledge from under the sink. He went into the living room on his quest, and he was richly rewarded.

  "Jesus, Gloria, have you looked on top of the piano lately? You could shoot pool here. There's so much dust it's like a goddam billiard felt."

  "People are starving in Africa and you fret about dust?" Gloria said. "I hate dusting. Worrying about dust is so middle class."

  "I saw a show on TV." Steve was inspecting the piano's top at eye level. "It was all about dust. A layer of dust is like an ecosystem. It has burrowing creatures and organisms that live on top of it. It decomposes and mulches itself, and that attracts more organisms. Dust is ninety percent dead skin."

  "Steve, you're making me sick. Put that rag away. Don't upset the dust. It's happy the way it is."

  "This place is a dump, Gloria."

  "Steve, we used to be able to afford a maid."

  "Yeah, well, we used to own tech stock."

  "We've been through this a thousand times. I'm not going to become a parlour maid because Pets.com went south. One needs to have standards. First I'm dusting and before you know it, I'm out selling matches on street corners. Sit down and have a drink."

  "I think I will."

  Steve and Gloria drank in silence-silence that Steve shortly broke. "Let's have a few of those cheese and crackers. I'm hungry."

  "Me too."

  "But only a few. We have to save some for the guests."

  "Right."

  Within minutes, all the cheese and crackers were gone, and Gloria had eaten the two pickles. Now what would they feed their guests? Steve remembered some pancake mix at the rear of the cupboard. Was the mix beweeviled? That's okay. Heat will kill them.

  Roger

  Some basic info: My name is Roger Thorpe, and I'm the oldest Staples inmate employee by a fair margin. I'd divide the staff into two groups: the no-hopers (serial twelve-steppers and the terminally clueless) and the kids who are making a quick pit stop before they head off to something real. I read in a newspaper last week about this scientist who claims that the human race will, over the upcoming millennia, split into two distinct species. One will be a superhuman race, the other, Gollum-like hunchbacked retards. His argument is that selective breeding will produce an underclass that will then become a distinct race. Scientists have already isolated part of our DNA that "intelligent," "sociable" types have and others don't. I think these scientists should come into Staples and do some DNA swabbing. I think we've already leapt into that future and the rest of humanity needs to catch up with us.

  Me? I like to flatter myself that I represent some form of third option, the invisible forty-three-year-old man.

  I like the fact that I'm invisible to my co-workers.

  Strike that.

  It kills me that I'm invisible to them. The fact that they don't see me means that I'm truly old, and it's hard to grow old in a place-a city-where everything is so young. Being old means no sex. Being old means never being flirted with. Being old means that Shawn and Kelli make spooked eyes at each other when I come in from my smoke break and grunt a hello in their direction.

  Psycho!

  I miss sex. Once upon a time I could take off my shirt and walk down by the beach carrying a Frisbee and there wasn't a girl there I couldn't confidently chat up. That was my prop, by the way, the Frisbee. Couldn't toss one worth a damn, but people see you holding one of those things and in their minds you're suddenly this well-balanced person who's never had gonorrhoea or police issues-and you can probably summon a well-groomed, cheerfully dispositioned golden Lab with a single whistle.

  Last month I plotted out how I'd win the attention of these junior shits here who speak and think like chimps. I was going to work my butt off, totally kiss ass with the regional boss and thus win Employee of the Month. Imagine the no-hopers coming in and seeing my picture on the little wall plaque. Dear God, it might actually give them hope. Hey! If Roger can do it, then I can do it!

  I don't know why I work here in hell at Staples and not someplace else. Bethany here is confronting me on this issue, and I don't know what to say. I've had so many real world jobs-in offices where people have their own parking spaces, and where biweekly meetings are held, and where they have Christmas parties. I drank my way out of all of them. Pre-Internet, I could get away with it. These days, if you type "lush" into Google, I would likely be the first hit.

  Fucking Internet. I can't even move to someplace remote
where they still speak English, like Tasmania or South Africa. They'll know my dirt.

  They.

  So until I figure out an escape clause, it's Staples for me. It's okay in its own way. It demands little of me and I demand little of it. I like being rude to customers. I like starting to serve them and then vanishing for a smoke break for fifteen minutes. They always ask for the supervisor, Clive, but Clive knows that I'm here for a longer haul than the younger workers, so he doesn't discipline me. Even on the days where I get hosed on vodka and stack cartons of twenty-pound bond all day, not a shred of discipline. Hah!

  Discipline me.

  Master! Master! Beat me!

  I'm an adult. Discipline me and I'll bury you alive.

  Roger as Bethany

  I'm Bethany.

  Did you find everything you were looking for today?

  That's this dorky phrase I have to say every time I ring in a sale, even to kids. It'd be great, for once, if somebody looked me in the eye and said, "Well, I wrote the word 'Fuck' on a piece of paper in the felt pen section, and then I drew an anarchy symbol, and then I stopped thinking or breathing or anything, and I had this experience where time stopped and I wasn't on this planet any more-like I was sucked out of myself-and I didn't have to care about the world or people or pollution, and instead all I had to do was be in awe of the stars and the colours and the effort that went into making the universe safe and warm like a womb. And then I snapped out of it and I was staring at the Crayola boutique and the moment was gone. After that, I walked around the aisles like I'd been clubbed. I was going to steal the felt pens instead of paying for them, but I'll steal them some other day. Right now I'm still in the afterglow of experiencing the universe. And you ask me, did I find everything I was looking for today?"