The Gum Thief (4 page)

It's amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you. Souls ought to have the legal right to bail once you cross certain behaviour thresholds:
I draw the line at cheating at golf; I draw the line at theft over $100,000; I draw the line at bestiality.

Imagine all the souls of the world, out on the sides of highways, all of them hitchhiking to try to find new places to live, all of them holding signs designed to lure you into selecting them as a passenger:

· .. I sing!

· .. I tell jokes.

· .. I know shiatsu.

· .. I know Katharine Hepburn.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

However, earlier today at the Oasis Car Wash I bumped into an old friend from high school, Teddy, who had become a psychiatrist. While ex-cons buffed our rear-view mirrors and stole sunglasses and pocket change, I asked him if he'd reached any broad conclusions about humanity.

He asked me, "What kind of conclusions?" "You know, that everybody on earth-not merely your patients-that everybody's a mess." He perked up. "Oh, good God, man, get real. Everybody's a
disaster."

His Chrysler 300 popped out of the buffing bay, and we said goodbye. I felt a thousand percent good for the first time in months. Having the same illness as everybody else truly is the definition of health.

Why, you may ask, do I spend the peanuts I make at work on a car wash? Because it makes me feel good. Because it was payday. Because my car is the one thing in my life that's working. It's a Hyundai Sonata, and nothing ever goes wrong with it. It's drop-dead boring but it
works.
I identify with it.

I just looked up and out the staff room door to see that Shawn is dressed as Wonder Woman. She's tit-proud, and she works it. I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. Wouldn't life be more interesting that way? And now that I think about it, why the heck don't they? Who made the rule that everybody has to dress like sheep 364 days of the year? Think of all the people you'd meet if they were in costume every day. People would be so much easier to talk to-like talking to dogs.
Hey, cool costume! I dig vampires too. Let's
go
out for a beer.
Halloween costumes are another disinhibiting device, like fortune-telling and talking to dogs that belong to strangers.

Me? I'd dress like a matador. I can still cut a figure if I skip sugars and carbs for a month. Carrying a sword would be a kick. I'd always be wondering what it's like to stab a large animal, to see blood on the steel. I'd be ... man, I reread the last two sentences. Psycho time.

Maybe all I want to do is carry a visible weapon.

There, that would be my costume. I'd be dressed the same way I am now, but I'd have a holster with a handgun. I'd be the Guy Who Mayor May Not Go Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs at Any Moment.

Yet again, psycho time. I am not psycho. But I caught a glimpse of myself in the men's room mirror, and what I saw did disturb me: a puffy-looking forty-three-yellowing skin under the light of the lone fluorescent tube; dandruff; red patches on my scalp where I scratch my seborrhea. No wonder I've become invisible to people under thirty. Put my body inside the Hyundai and I'm the Invisible Man. I could commit any crime, and when cops interviewed witnesses and asked them who did it, all they'd remember is, "Some guy in a car."

Some guy dressed as Cupid just poked his head in the door and asked where we sell the jumbo cans of Maxwell House coffee. (Question: who buys coffee at an office supply store?)

And then Cupid left for Aisle 3-South, and I'm sitting here wondering.

Wondering what?

Wondering about Cupid and his arrows. Wondering if I still have the capacity to fall in love. Did I write that last sentence? What's next-growing breasts? And yet again I'm reminded of the pursed-lipped fortune teller I met on the street corner years ago.
If
you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.

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."