Pirates of the Retail Wasteland

by Adam Selzer

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Many thanks to Nadia, my fantastic agent, to Stephanie, my…

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Selzer

  Copyright

  For Howard.

  No hard feelings, man,

  but enough already!

  Many thanks to Nadia, my fantastic agent, to Stephanie, my wonderful editor, and to Colleen, the copy editor by whom nothing gets. Also, thanks to Nancy Angelopoulos and everyone at the real Sip Coffee on Grand Avenue in Chicago, to Jen Hathy and everyone at the Mercury Cafe (near Ashland and Chicago), and to Carol White (for all that tea at the Java Monkey in Atlanta). And thanks to all the good people I worked with in my years as a McHobo (during that long period when minimum wage remained stuck at $5.15). Also, of course, heartfelt thanks to my family, who drove me to and from work on the many, many days when my car wasn’t running.

  It’s getting harder and harder to get a bad cup of coffee…and damn it, I’m mad!

  —Tom Waits

  There are rare times when school isn’t such a bad place to be, and chief among these are the times when you’re sitting on a couch with a girl’s butt pressed into each of your arms.

  Granted, this isn’t the sort of thing that happens every day, but it was known to happen to me on Fridays during the gifted-pool meetings. At the first meeting of the second semester of my eighth-grade year, all twelve of us were piled onto the old green couch in the room above the gym, as was our usual fashion, while Mr. Streich, our fearless leader, took attendance.

  I was trying to pay attention to what was going on. Or, anyway, I was trying to look like I was—but I had Anna Brandenburg’s butt pressing into the lower part of my right arm and Jenny Kurosawa’s butt near my left shoulder, which was somewhat distracting. It’s hard to imagine a situation more preferable to math class, where I spent sixth period the other four days of the week.

  Mr. Streich was at the front of the room, running his fingers across his mustache—he did that quite a lot, as though he was trying to make sure it was still there or something—and pointing his pen at odd spots on the couch, trying to figure out if we were all present. It was no small task, considering that a couple of people were buried so deep that all he could see of them was their shoes. But he took it in stride.

  “Well then,” he said, when he had decided we were all there, “are you guys ready to hear what the first gifted-pool project of the semester is going to be?”

  The noise that came out of the couch probably just sounded like a low rumble, but most of us were saying “Sure,” “Yeah,” or something like that.

  “Your first project…,” Mr. Streich said, pausing to let the suspense build, as though we were all on the edge of our seats, “will be to create…a monument!”

  For a second, no one said a word. This wasn’t the kind of announcement that would get people cheering or anything, but from the look on his face, Mr. Streich had clearly expected some kind of reaction. I figured I ought to say something before he started to feel bad. We liked Mr. Streich just about enough to try not to hurt his feelings.

  “A monument?” I asked. “What kind of monument are we talking about here?”

  “Well,” he said, “it can be anything. You’ll each pick someone or something that you think deserves a monument, and build the monument yourself. Then you’ll present it at an assembly, as usual.”

  This didn’t sound much different than the project from the previous semester where we had to dress up like some notable person from history and give a speech about their life—most of the projects were something along this line. The school was careful not to give us projects that might lead us to blow anything up or incite any riots; even the “dressing up as a notable person from history” assignment had led to a veritable spree of cross-dressing. Dustin Eddlebeck had only been stopped from dressing as Sally Rand, a notable stripper who used to dance wearing nothing but a large fan, at the last second by some chumps from the school board.

  I’m not exactly sure how they came to decide that those of us in the pool were “gifted.” You normally think of the gifted kids as the ones who tuck their shirts into their underwear and spend their free time talking to their plants about algebra. At my school, it was mostly a bunch of miscreants—commies, perverts, and pyros who happened to score well on standardized tests.

  “How about a gravestone?” asked James Cole, who spoke fluent French and was the first kid in school to smoke pot.

  “Would that be considered a monument?”

  “Well,” said Mr. Streich, “maybe you could make a gravestone for someone who didn’t have one, and try to have it actually put up where they’re buried! I’ve heard of people doing that for old blues singers who were just dumped under a plywood marker someplace.”

  “Actually,” said James, “I was thinking about one for Coach Hunter.”

  Coach Hunter was the gym teacher, and James Cole’s natural enemy. If anyone ever makes one of those public television nature documentaries about potheads, it’ll probably have a scene of them pricking up their ears and getting scared when they hear a whistle blowing in the distance.

  “Coach Hunter isn’t dead,” Mr. Streich pointed out, as if we didn’t already know that.

  “I know,” said James. “I was thinking we would have to kill him as part of the project.”

  We all laughed, and Mr. Streich tried to calm us down, though I could see that he was trying not to smile. “I don’t think he’d be very keen on that, James.”

  “Well,” I said, “you’re supposed to be challenging us to use our gifted intellects, right? Why not challenge us to spend the semester convincing Coach Hunter that life isn’t worth living anymore? That way, we wouldn’t have to kill him ourselves.”

  “Heck,” said James. “It probably won’t even take that long. I start thinking life isn’t worth living after about five minutes in his class.”

  “We could learn a lot about psychology,” said Edie Scaduto, the school communist.

  “You guys, be serious for a minute,” said Mr. Streich.

  “You know I can’t let you kill anybody, and I certainly can’t let you try to convince anybody to kill themselves, because if I could, I would have assigned you to take out my mother-in-law by now.” He paused for us to laugh, which we did, a little. It might have been funnier if he were married in the first place. “If you want to make a monument like the Tomb of the Unknown Gym Coach, that might be okay. Just be careful.”

  Mr. Streich may have been the last man alive to use the word “keen,” but he wasn’t such a bad guy, really. He was about a million times better than Mrs. Smollet, his predecessor, who spent most of the meetings going off about how we all lacked family values and moral fiber, until I’d finally pissed her off so badly the previous semester that she’d quit the job. At the time, Mr. Streich had been teaching the “advanced studies” morning activity, where we’d been assigned to make a health or safety film to show to the younger kids. My entry, an avant-garde sex-ed film called La Dolce Pubert, had frightened Mrs. Smollet so badly that she’d had me suspended for it. Shortly thereafter, she’d resigned, and Mr. Streich took her place.

  Mr. Streich wasn’t as easy a target for us, partly because he didn’t find us quite as shocking or
terrifying as Mrs. Smollet did. Every time she saw us piled up on the couch in one big heap, she was ready to march us to the nurse’s office to have us checked for STDs.

  “Leon,” he said, picking my face out of the lump on the couch, “maybe you could make a monument to Thomas Edison. I’m sure your dad would love that.” He grinned.

  “Ho, ho, ho,” I said.

  Mr. Streich was a science teacher by trade, and was a friend of my father, who was an accountant who wished he were an inventor. Hating Thomas Edison’s guts is sort of Dad’s hobby. He even gave me the middle name Noside (“Edison” spelled backwards) as some sort of insult to his memory. I can only assume that sane people don’t do this sort of thing to their kids.

  “I know,” said Anna, who was a little next to me and a little on top of me in the pile, with her butt now against my upper arm, near my shoulder. “You could do a monument to the elephant Edison killed!”

  “Great idea!” said Mr. Streich. And he grabbed a marker and wrote “dead elephant” on the board.

  Edison once tried to prove that his competitor’s brand of electricity was dangerous by using it to electrocute an elephant. Seriously. I hate to admit my dad is right about anything, but it’s true that Edison had some serious issues.

  “Anyone else have some good ideas for things that need a monument?” asked Mr. Streich. “Just shout them out.”

  “Karl Marx,” said Edie. Mr. Streich shrugged and wrote it on the board. Mrs. Smollet probably would have made a real stink about that one, but Mr. Streich was a lot better at picking his battles.

  “Nikola Tesla,” said Brian Carlson. Brian was Edie’s boyfriend, and while he wasn’t a science genius or anything, he was pretty good at turning ordinary objects like pens and address labels into deadly weapons. He wasn’t really the violent type; a determined third grader could probably kick his ass. But many of the local office supply stores had his picture up behind the counter above the words “Do not sell to this boy,” and some people said that the reason the school had never made a big deal about having a zero-tolerance weapons policy was that they knew that as long as Brian was allowed to have a pencil, there would always be weapons.

  After a few minutes, we’d suggested monuments for Chef Boyardee, Satan, Captain Hook, the Trix rabbit, and Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors. No one knew exactly how Jenny Kurosawa, whose parents didn’t let her read or listen to anything that wouldn’t look good on a college application, had become an obsessive Doors fan, but ever since Thanksgiving break, she’d worn a Doors T-shirt every day, and she’d taken to carrying around an empty Mountain Dew bottle on which she’d written “Jim Morrison’s Soul” with a permanent marker where the label used to be.

  One of Mrs. Smollet’s catchphrases had been “This is the gifted pool, not the weirdo club.” Clearly, she’d been fighting a losing battle.

  When the bell rang, we all slowly worked our way off of the couch. Anna grabbed me by the arm.

  “Basketball game tonight?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “Brian and Edie coming?”

  “I assume so.”

  Brian, overhearing, looked over and gave me the thumbs-up with one hand while he tried to get his hair out of his face with the other.

  Going to the basketball game—the first few minutes of it, anyway—was one of our regular winter habits. We’d meet up at the high school, where we’d stay until we were sure my parents had driven away, then leave and spend an hour or two roaming around the town until it was about time for the game to be over, at which point we’d head back. Sometimes we went to the Laundromat to play their old Pac-Man machine, sometimes we went to a coffee shop, and sometimes we just hung around the park, making prank calls from the pay phone. It was without question the highlight of my week.

  Anna and I were going out. Sort of. In a way. Neither of us had ever officially declared that we were a couple or anything like that, and when someone asked me if we were, I sort of danced around the issue. But we were more than just friends. Or, anyway, we made out from time to time. We’d filmed a kissing scene for La Dolce Pubert, and the next avant-garde film we made, The Rooster in the Skating Rink: A Musical (Based on a True Story), had a whole bunch of kissing scenes. Every now and then, we even kissed when we weren’t on camera. Not as often as I would have liked, but it was kind of a tricky situation—I mean, what if I asked her out officially and she got freaked out? It could make things weird between us forever. I worried about this sort of thing a whole lot more than I worried about my grades.

  We all headed out the front door of the school. Edie, Brian, and practically everybody else headed for the buses. Anna and I both walked home. We normally walked together as far as the end of the parking lot, then went our separate ways.

  “So I’ll meet you tonight?” I asked, trying to look her in the eye, though that was sort of tough, as her head and face were covered up by her furry hood. It was like looking at someone through a thick, fuzzy veil.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I’ve got something for you first.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” She grinned evilly, pulled back her hood, and grabbed me by the back of my head. She pulled me closer to her, then attached her lips to my neck. For a second I was so startled that I didn’t know how to respond, and even when I came to my senses, I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t kiss her back, since she had my face pointed away from her and was sucking so hard that I couldn’t really move. It actually hurt a bit, but I couldn’t bring myself to squirm away, even when I heard a passing car honk at us.

  Then, all of a sudden, she let me go. I moved in to kiss her back, but she backed up and grinned again.

  “Have a good evening,” she said sweetly. And she ran off across the street, cutting through somebody’s backyard to get to the neighborhood on the other side of the street.

  I was about halfway home before I realized what must have happened—she’d given me a hickey. And now I’d have the distinct pleasure of hiding it from my parents. This was probably her idea of a great joke—and I must admit that I liked her sense of humor.

  For the life of me, I wasn’t sure why Anna would be with a guy like me. For my money, she was the coolest person in school. Even her parents, who she called by their first names, were cool—her dad was a professor of eighteenth-century European history at the college in the city, and her mom was an art authenticator who flew all around the world doing tests on paintings to find out if they were real works by famous artists or just old paintings by some nobody.

  Neither of these seemed like jobs people in the suburbs ought to have. In my head, art authenticators lived in cool old town houses in Manhattan with chamber music playing all the time, but Anna and her parents just lived in a regular split-level house on Horton Street. When I was in her house, surrounded by weird paintings and shelves full of books about rich jerks from the eighteenth century, I found myself wanting to make something of my life, something extraordinary, far away from Cornersville Trace. My parents tended to decorate with pictures of babies sitting in flowerpots. Those made me want to live far away, too, but for very different reasons.

  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?”