Play Me Backwards (2 page)

“Pleased to meet ya,” I said.

“I'll probably be putting Leon in charge of you when you get to Hell,” said Stan, “so I'd tip well if I were you.”

“I'm not going to Hell,” the guy said.

Stan smiled and wiped down a spot on the counter.

“That ain't what God told me,” he said.

That's when the guy got mad.

Now, normally when we messed with customers, they actually seemed like they could take a joke, if they realized we were messing with them at all (which was fairly rare; most of the customers were a little slow on the uptake). But this guy decided to raise a bit of Hell of his own. He threw such a fit that there was practically smoke coming out of his ears. There are probably still tiny bits of spittle and pink shirt lint in every sundae they serve at that place.

Even Stan couldn't save our jobs after that one.

But getting fired turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to us, because he got us both jobs at the Ice Cave, the B-list ice cream parlor in the old part of town, nestled away in the old Venture Street triangle near Sip Coffee and Earthways, the new age store.

The Ice Cave was nothing like Penguin Foot Creamery. For one thing, there weren't many customers to deal with. And George, the owner, wouldn't have dreamed of making us sing songs about ice cream while we worked. He'd owned the place forever, and it had never been a moneymaker on its own—honestly, I was pretty sure it was just a front that he used to launder meth money or something. He only ever stopped in to see if there was some beer in the walk-in cooler, and if he found us sitting on the couch in the back instead of mopping something, he didn't write us up. He didn't worry much about inventory, and didn't have a problem with employees wearing name tags that said
SATAN
and
MINION
, or with us helping ourselves to all the mix-in candy we could eat. After he graduated, Stan got himself promoted to manager, which meant that Satan was officially my master during my senior year of high school.

To call what we did at the Ice Cave “work” at all would be a stretch. The back room, which contained a couch, some folding chairs, and a little desk with a computer, served as the office, the storage area, and the break room. We spent most of our time at work holed up back there, listening to old-school metal and helping ourselves to the Reese's Pieces and gummy bears that were stored in big plastic barrels along the wall. Over time it became a sort of a haven for the dredges of teenage suburbia—the headbangers, the
minor criminals, the stoners, and assorted lost souls and hangers-on. Some days—a lot of days—we'd get more people coming into the store just to hang around in the back than we'd get coming in for ice cream.

I felt like I had found my calling. It was the kind of job you'd think you had to sell your soul to get, and I imagined myself growing old in that back room. I mean, I could go to college, but what for? To get some crappier job that I didn't like as much? When you get a job you like, you should lock it down.

Now, that Stan is a genius cannot be restated too many times. Stories of his unholy powers are numerous and legendary. Like, for instance, there's the story of the time Dustin Eddlebeck drank enough vanilla syrup to kill a wampa.

On that day Stan, Dustin, and I were hanging around in the back room, just killing time during a slow day. There hadn't been a customer in about an hour, which was not unusual. Stan was eating Cheez Whiz right out of the spray can. At some point, Dustin noticed that the big vanilla syrup containers listed “alcohol” among the ingredients.

“Bet we could get drunk off that stuff,” he said.

“I doubt it,” I said. “You'd probably have to drink a ton of it.”

“It's worth a shot,” said Dustin. “Let me open one.”

We could have easily acquired some regular booze—there was probably even some hidden in the cooler someplace. But I guess Dustin was bored and in the mood to experiment that day.

Stan got some paper cups, and we all had a swig of the thick vanilla gunk. It tasted about like maple syrup, only sweeter, and with a hint of something that tasted like engine oil. It was thicker than
most maple syrup too. You literally had to choke it down.

Stan and I quit after one chug, but Dustin kept going. Over the course of the afternoon and most of the evening, in between several trips to the bathroom, he drank about half a gallon.

Let me just repeat that: The man drank
half a gallon
of vanilla syrup.

He said he was drunk, and I believe him, but I think he was too sick to enjoy it. After he drank his last shot, he wandered around looking dizzy for a minute, then collapsed on the couch in the fetal position.

“Kill me,” he groaned. “Either turn down the music or kill me.”

“Headache?” Stan asked.

“I feel like The Slime that Ate Cleveland is on my frontal lobe.”

“Don't worry,” said the dark lord. “I know how to handle this.”

And he went up to the front and came back with a glass of something that he forced Dustin to drink. Dustin downed the whole glass without taking a breath, then shivered for a second before hopping up onto his feet and shouting, “Holy shit!”

“How do you feel?” Stan asked.

“Like I could pull the ears off a gundark,” said Dustin. “Damn.”

“What did you put in that?” I asked.

“Trade secret,” said Stan. “I got the recipe from Sinatra when he came into my place.”

“He went to Hell?” I asked.

“Oh, I got just about the whole Rat Pack,” said Stan. “All of them except for Sammy Davis Jr. But I let him come hang out sometimes. The parties are better at my place.”

Stan always makes it sound like people in hell have a pretty good
time when they aren't being stabbed in the ass with pitchforks. It seems believable enough, because in addition to his mastery of hangover cures and retail managers, Stan is a bit of wizard when it comes to planning parties. He is probably the only person alive who can make a heavy metal vomit party seem authentically Christmasy.

Dustin shook his head, like he couldn't believe what had just happened, and looked over at Stan with all due reverence. “Should I, like, sacrifice a goat to you or something now?”

“Nah,” said Stan. “It's cool.”

“I'll be damned,” said Dustin.

“Just be careful when you come to Hell,” said Stan. “That last step's a doozy.”

*  *  *

So, yeah. The guy is a genius. I don't know how I ever managed to get through life without him. Obviously, I knew
intellectually
that Stan was not really a supernatural entity, but sometimes it was hard not to believe it. Any cop at a Mothers Against Drunk Driving assembly will tell you that the only thing that can actually sober you up is time. The concoctions Stan whipped up defied all known laws of biology.

But he
did
get on my nerves from time to time, which brings us to the day he showed up late for work on Valentine's Day. A day when I really needed some help.

It wasn't that I couldn't handle what passed for a rush at the Ice Cave alone, or that I actually needed supervision from a manager, but I didn't want to be by myself if any couples came in. I couldn't deal with being around couples that day.

Also, there was a pounding in my head that I was pretty sure
meant that I was hungover and needed one of his miracle cures.

The day before, February 13, had been the “unofficial” Valentine's Day at school. I had sort of hoped that having Valentine's Day fall on a Saturday would mean I'd be spared watching all the couples at school having balloons and flowers and shit sent to each other, but I guess I was just being an idiot. Girls weren't about to give up the chance to have someone deliver them a giant thing of flowers in class just because the real Valentine's Day wasn't until the next day—people just did all that crap on the thirteenth instead. Between classes you'd see girls walking around with teddy bears bigger than they were, and couples were making out everywhere you turned. Every couple was trying to outdo each other for the gold medal in PDA. I was generally happy with my life as a perpetually single retail bum, and just about content to resign myself to that sort of status for life, but watching all the happy couples rubbing it in my face just made me feel lonely as hell.

Whoever made the laws about underage drinking clearly never had to get through a high school Valentine's Day. I'd rarely had more than a sip or two even in the back room of the Cave, where drinking stuff stronger than vanilla syrup was not exactly unheard of, but on Valentine's Day eve, alone in my room, I'd broken my own drinking record by a decent margin. And now, at work, I was feeling the results.

Stan emerged from the back room wearing his apron.

“Sorry I was late,” he said. “I didn't think there'd be anything you couldn't handle alone.”

“There wasn't,” I said. “But can you mix me up a glass of that hangover concoction of yours?”

He smiled. “Rough night last night?”

“You could say that.”

“Coming up,” he said.

And he got to work mixing stuff from the soda machine, the cabinets, and some mysterious Tupperware containers from his backpack.

Meanwhile, I looked down at my phone to reread the e-mail I'd gotten the night before. Far more than the Valentine's couples it was the e-mail that had pushed me over the edge and into my dad's liquor cabinet.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subj: Iowa

Hey, Leon! My parents were talking about coming back to Iowa the other night; maybe even moving. Not definitely, but maybe. It'd be good to see you (and the rest of the “gifted pool” hooligans) again, so I'll keep you posted. Happy Valentine's Day.

Anna B.

Anna B. Like I'd ever think it was some
other
Anna. It was the most I'd heard from her in almost three years.

And it scared the green shit out of me.

It might seem clever to say that my life started to go to hell when I started hanging out with Satan, but it really started three Valentine's Days before, when Anna Brandenburg kissed me for the last time before she moved to England with her parents. She took my heart with her. She probably left it in that pouch behind the seat in front of her on the airplane, squished between the airsick bag and a copy of
Sky Mall
.

Now, three years later, it was probably out in a landfill someplace. Or one of those garbage vortexes in the ocean.

On the couch in the back room of the Ice Cave, I gulped down the concoction Stan had prepared for me. It tasted like corn flakes, coffee, and some sort of chemical, and made me feel, for just a split second, like someone was flushing my body down a toilet of fire. But a moment after swallowing the first sip, I felt as good as new. Unbelievable.

“Hail Satan,” I said.

Stan sort of nodded, like “yeah, yeah,” then went into psychiatrist mode on a folding chair as I lay down on the couch.

“So,” he said, “you only actually went out with this girl for, like, two months, right?”

“It was about a year,” I said. “We were friends since fourth grade and I had a crush on her all through middle school.”

“Were you thinking of her the first time you whacked it?”

“Probably,” I said, though the real answer was
definitely
.

I sipped up the last of the drink and stared up at the ceiling.

Back in middle school I was in the “gifted pool,” which is what they called the “smart class.” When a kid on TV gets put in one of those, it's always a bunch of dorks who tuck their shirts into their underwear and speak in palindromes and shit, but at my school it was a bunch of commies, perverts, and beatniks who just happened to read from the adult section at the library. I was no slouch in those days. In the time I saved by not doing homework, I was watching foreign films, listening to jazz, and getting involved in protest movements and shit. And I liked that stuff. I really did. But it probably never would have occurred to me to do any of it if it hadn't been for Anna Brandenburg.

Anna came from a whole different world than I did. Her parents, whom she called by their first names, were both professors. She played the cello better than Stan played video games (which is saying something), and knew the difference between avant-garde and neofuturist art when she was in seventh grade. She sat in on college courses sometimes, including the art class where you draw naked people from live models.

My parents were just a couple of basic suburban dorks. Like me.

Even when Anna and I were going out, I never stopped feeling like she was out of my league. And that was three years, about fifty pounds, and billions of brain cells ago.

Stan lit up a cigarette as I grabbed another handful of Reese's Pieces from the only barrel I could reach without getting off the couch.

“How far did you get with her?” he asked.

“Not very.”

“Was she in that pool thing with you and Dustin?”

I nodded. “We were the terrors of middle school.”

And we were. The teachers feared our names.

Now most of my teachers probably didn't even
know
my name. It was the tail end of my senior year, and I hadn't taken the SAT or applied to a single college. I was telling my parents I was going to work for a year or so to save money, then get all the required courses out of the way at junior college or something, but I was really just planning to keep on working at the Ice Cave and hanging out in Stan's basement. I wasn't even sure I'd be graduating at all; I had to serve a whole lot of hours of detention time that I'd earned skipping gym before I'd qualify.

But I was generally satisfied with my life as a complete slacker. And why wouldn't I be? You show me a man who wants more out of life than an easy job that provides unlimited candy, and I'll show you a greedy bastard.