The Gum Thief (23 page)

On the work front, all goes well. I've landed gigs on ten new productions, three of which were renewed for two seasons, but I don't want to jinx things and am trying to work hard and earn what was a great opportunity to show the company all I've got!

Everyone is in good shape, especially Dad, who had his angio in September and is now 110 percent. He's discovered fleece jackets and likes to walk a mile every day. What next-marathons!?!?!

Thank you to everyone for giving us such great wedding presents, and for making our wedding day the magical day it was. Let's hope that next year is as good as this year.

Greetings from Brian, Joan and Zoe

Bethany

VIAFEDEX

Hi, Roger. I hope Wayne is better. He'd love England-dogs all over the place, and they're darned sophisticated dogs too. Honestly, to see some of them, you'd think they read
Elle
Decoration
magazine and do yoga.

We met two guys from home-the exact same sort of guys Kyle would have met at a sports bar on Marine Drive-and so we have a posse, but they're jockish and not very fun, so when they're around I feel like a fifth wheel. Kyle is not quite the sweet young thing who once filled Ziploc bags with trail mix for me.

Moan, moan, moan, grumble, grumble, grumble. When is the European magic going to kick in and rock my world? When am I going to befriend Count Chocula? The only people I ever seem to meet here are twenty-three-year old Australians named Tracy who got crabs in Prague and who have voices like the buzzer they use on game shows when you get the answer to a question wrong.

Remember I wrote you awhile back about DeeDee telling me about meeting strangers in airport bars and spilling your life story to them because you know you'll never see them again? That's actually what I'm hoping for here. Is that sick? Kyle should be the one I'm telling everything to. So I feel a bit disloyal. But I wish Kyle would revel a bit more in the fact that we're in
a country that is not the one he grew up in.
The only time he ever gets stoked is when he finds things or places or people that remind him of home. I now like to walk around by myself, mostly. When we got here, K and I were spending
all
of our time together, but I don't think you see things properly when you're with someone else. Instead, you're always being camp counsellor. I wonder if that's what motherhood will feel like should I ever end up in spawning mode.

The Christmas decorations are all going up now, which is, let's face it, depressing, but at least they do it tastefully here. Christmas lights always bugged me growing up because it was like (literally) hanging up a big electric sign on your house that said, "I spent $18.95 on this electric sign."

Tonight I've been in the local Internet cafe, and right now I'm back in the hostel. K is with his posse at a bar in Shoreditch that plays Canadian football on its TV. Now
there's
a smart business decision for some wise pub owner. He must truly lure in the locals with
that.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm actually here in London. Honestly, the best news I had today was an email telling me that you brought Wayne to work yesterday and Shawn spent her smoke break throwing a tennis ball to him. I got jealous.

Weird noises down the hall. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? It's like a crack den without the crack. Never again.

X

B.

PS: I have to add another way that Kyle is driving me nuts. He has a digital camera, and when he shoots something like a bridge or a thousand pigeons, he almost immediately scrolls through his pictures and looks back on what's basically the present moment and treats it like it's the distant past-even if the bridge or the pigeons are still right there.

At the end of the day, I'll scroll through the day's photos with him, and even on the camera's dinky little screen the whole day comes back to me, which is unsurprising, but what
is
surprising are the background details I remember that I might never have remembered otherwise: an Evian truck blowing blue smoke; a woman walking three wiener dogs; a cloud shaped like a muffin. So imagine if you could scroll backwards and look at your whole life the same way. God only knows how many trillions of memories are stored inside us-memories we'll never retrieve simply because we don't have a device that allows us to browse them properly. With your mother, do you think the memories were still locked inside her and she couldn't retrieve them? Or do you think the memories were simply gone? Is anyone's existence only as good as their brain is at any given moment? And if so, what about the soul?

BONUS TREAT: Another brief attempt to address the bread buttering issue is on the next page. B.

The ToasTron Chronicles

Neo-London, 2110 Slice Number Six informed his lieutenant of the entire gory tale behind the marmalade algorithms stolen from Baking Asteroid Teflon 32. Number Six-known simply as "Slice" to his SubLoafradiated manly confidence
to
his squad, who were exhausted from a century of warring with an alliance comprised of Beaten Egg regiments, Vanilla Androids, small factions of Milk and, of course, the French.

"Lieutenant, sir, there's never been an uprising like it. And the Powdered Sugar cluster bombs at the end of the war were an insult to ToasTron and all its fair citizens. The final buttering wasn't war-it was
slaughter."

... Roger, I just don't get sci-fi. How do you guys read this stuff? This buttering ends right here, thank you.

Shawn

Dearest Blair ... Boy did the universe hand us Staplers a bone today.

Here's what happened: for once, Roger the alcoholic train wreck decided to actually come in to work on time. He's been on the bottle big time lately, like we don't notice-divorce or some depressing middle-age trip-Pete's been
this
close to firing him. So first Roger went and spent a half-hour reading the paper in the men's room, and then he walked around the store for a while looking more like a homeless person who found a Staples outfit in a Dumpster than a Staples employee. Then he went into the office, scrawled a letter or something, then told us he had to take his dog to the vet (which, okay, you can't really get mad at him about, but it was Dell Day and poor Fahad had to do the brunt of the loading work even though he has the muscle tone of a Jerry's Kid).

So Roger went out to his car, and then he came inside maybe five minutes later and he smelled like ... the worst sort of ...
shit .
..
like a decaying fecal poo monster, and he was
covered
in the stuff. I was in the staff room and smelled it before I saw it and said, "Roger, what the hell?" and he said his dog had just shat all over the inside of his car, and so I said, "So, then, don't come back inside here, and jeez, take a shower!" He used the staff phone to call his vet and ... I mean, Blair, you should have
seen
the phone afterwards-it needed an exorcism. You remember Pigpen from Charlie Brown-how he always had that little vermin cloud following him? Well, that was the phone. Later on, we ended up dousing it with half a bottle of Windex, which fried its circuits, so now we don't have a staff phone-but I'm getting off topic.

So Roger went driving off in his shit heap (ha!) and I was standing there looking at the phone like it was a six hundred-pound circus freak with a two-hundred-pound goiter when I noticed that Roger had left something behind on the counter.
What,
I thought,
is this? It
was (get this) a novel Roger has been writing. Can you believe it? Him, booze hound loser, writing a book. And he'd really gone
to
town on it, using all the products we flog here to make documents look better (acetate cover sheets; oak-grained binding strip; forty-pound cream vellum stock ...), but it still looked like homework. And what, you might ask, is the book called? Again, you won't believe it:
Glove Pond.
Yes, I can hear you thinking, what the hell is
that?
And you would be correct. At the bottom, on the footer, it reads:
"Glove Pond,
by Roger Thorpe. Currently negotiating representation." Gee, Roger, all of New York must be clamouring for this little Pulitzer contender.

Blair ... it's the
worst
book ever written. It's about these two university people, a married couple, who do nothing but drink Scotch and shriek at each other; and then a young writer and his wife come over for dinner and they get sucked into the downward failure spiral of fighting and shrieking, and there's a mysterious child who the professors either do or do not have and ... well, I do have to hand it to Roger, I read through the whole thing as far as he'd written it. But here's the best (and worst) part, Blair:
part of it is set here at Staples.

Can you bear it? One of the characters works here-it's basically Roger, disguised as someone else-and he talks about how much he hates coming to work here (touché to that!), and I have to say, it's weird seeing your everyday reality, stupid and dreamless as it is, turned into a book. Suddenly it's not stupid and dreamless any more, it becomes different-even if it's a book by Roger Thorpe. And an interesting part of it is that he's used our close personal friend, Dawn-of-the Dead Bethany, and her studly duddly Kyle as models for his characters. (You and
I
have gone over the Kyle/Bethany thing a million times, and I'll never quite figure out why it happened), but old Roger can't be
too
clueless if he picked up on the World's Weirdest Fling.

Well, whatever.

What happened next is
I
took Roger's oeuvre over to the copy department and used my coffee break to disassemble the book and make twenty copies. It was a lot of work, and it reminded me of my two years in hell doing night time copier shift.

And then the power went out-a seasonal windstorm always fun because we get to herd out the customers, lock the doors and slack off. Which is exactly what we did, and then we headed into the staff room and read
Glove Pond.

Did
I
say it was awful? It's
horrific.
After a few minutes, we all began doing
Glove Pond
impersonations. Kind of like:

Steve: Gloria, hand me some Scotch.

Gloria: No, because I'm drinking the Scotch.

Steve: Let's both drink Scotch, and then we can say witty things
to
each other.

Gloria: I hate you.

Steve: I hate you too, you hag.

Gloria: I throw my Scotch in your face.

Steve: I hate you.

Gloria: Do we have more ice cubes?

Steve: I don't think so.

 
Gloria: Where are our guests?

Steve: Let's drink more Scotch.

After two hours, the power came back on, and we'd actually gotten pretty good at being Steve and Gloria. Around three o'clock, Roger returned to work, and he was a total basket case. He was wearing his old-model Staples shirt from a year and a half ago, before the new ones came out, and his hair had just been washed and gelled, but he looked like a street person with a totally deranged look in his eyes. Simon asked how his dog was, and Roger said he's okay. It ate some of his kid's chocolate (which is like poison to dogs), hence the
merdeification
of Roger's Hyundai.