The Gum Thief (12 page)

What other books did writers like? Oh yes-pornographic stewed cabbage by that pederast ... what was his name-Nebulov? Nunavut? Nabokov? Yes, Nabokov and his book
Lolita-the
masturbatory rantings of a deviant perpetuating his unclean, lustful ideas.

As Kyle continued to speak about whatever it was he was speaking about, Steve's mind drifted back to an incident involving the novel
Lolita-an
afternoon a decade before, at the university, when a crazed den of love starved lesbians from the Women's Studies Department had organized a seminar dedicated to removing
Lolita
from the school's reading lists. Steve had entered the room by accident, to avoid another professor approaching from down the hall. The Women's Studies ringleader, upon seeing Steve at the back of the room, asked for his view on the book, and Steve said it was pure filth.

"Did you read it when it first came out, or have you read it recently?"

"Read it? I've never read the thing."

"Let me get this straight," said the woman. "Here,
in a university, you're denigrating a book you haven't actually read?"

Steve mumbled something about papers in need of marking and quickly bolted .

. . .
Blink!

Steve emerged from his brief academic reverie and was once again in his living room.
Oh God, I asked this Falconcrest fellow his opinion. Now I have to actually listen to it. Okay, Steve, brace yourself. Open your ears .
..

Kyle was saying, "I guess I'd have to say that I have trouble believing in the future, and I think the past is largely an embarrassment. In general, I don't trust people. There's very little to believe in, and all I've ever been able to believe in are a few cherished books by a few people who I suspect feel life is as fleeting and ghastly and cruel as I do. I think Truman Capote's
Answered Prayers
documents this sensibility as it occurred in a variety of long-vanished, almost mythically privileged cliques. I admire Joan Didion's
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
and
The White Album,
and pretty much everything by Kurt Vonnegut testifies to the wretchedness of life, with an occasional sunbeam sent along to brighten things up."

Who
are
these writers he's speaking about?
Steve's mind again drifted off, and he tried to remember who was sitting beside whom at the previous day's intramural Dewey Decimal System workshop. Something as simple as the wrong seating plan could undo decades of political work, and since the introduction of stacking chairs in the eighties-after much bitter and angry debate-meetings had never been the same.

Falconcrest prattled on.

"I guess I like work that examines unexpected crisis points in modernism. Sherwood Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio
examines the collision between rural and industrial life in the early twentieth century. Bret Ellis's
Less Than Zero
chronicles the implosion of secular middle-class values in pre-digital California. Chuck Palahniuk's
Fight Club
is a brilliant assault on consumer culture, while everything J.G. Ballard has written can't but make us rethink the path our world is taking-particularly
Running Wild,
a book that makes me wonder if the only hope for our world is to spawn children who have mutated so far beyond our present selves that anything we have to offer them as a survival tool is pointless and quaint."

Steve was mentally day-planning the upcoming week: a dozen meetings, perhaps write a letter pleading for an advance from his publisher for a book he'd been on the cusp of starting for-how long was it now?-fifteen years? twenty? Maybe a trip to the liquor store and, if he was lucky, the delivery of a black-and-white photo magazine from San Bernardino, California, dedicated to the healthfulness of unclothed sun worship.

Steve once again tuned in to Kyle's words ...

"To be honest, I'll read anything, even the four-point warnings on pharmaceutical packages-I like looking at the lines on product bar codes and pretending I can judge which number a line represents from its comparative thickness against the others."

"Bar codes?" Gloria was puzzled.

Kyle continued, "I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints. I'm always kind of suspicious of young people who, when
asked who their favourite writer is, say Henry James or someone equally as dead. Imagine if you asked a young person who their favourite musician was and they told you Vivaldi. Would you trust that person? I think that, as you age, you tend
to
gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."

Steve looked across the table and noticed a mosquito like insect landing on the Scotch bottle's snout.

"You know," said Kyle, "I wish, I really, truly wish, Steve, that people were honest with you when they were asked which books influenced them. I think that a lack of honesty about this one question is the shame of the literary world. I ask you, which books held a light for you in the darkness?"

Brittany looked at Steve. "Kyle's given that same speech twenty times this year."

Kyle smiled. "But I still mean it."

"You could at least stop trying to pretend it's the first time you're doing it every time you do it." "What are you getting at?" "Kyle, right now you've given that same speech

twenty times already. But in twenty years you'll have told it thousands of times ... won't you have? Doesn't that exhaust you in advance ... knowing that you'll one day become this anecdote robot?"

"How sweet!" said Gloria. "A spat between a writer and his wife.
Look
at them, Steve-aren't they darling? They remind me so much of you and me back when we first started out."

Roger

I like booze.

Booze makes me feel the way being in a womb must feel.
If
fetuses aren't getting alcohol, what
are
they getting in there that makes the womb everybody's dream vacation spot? I bet they're floating around and getting wasted on fet-ohol. Imagine the withdrawal newborns must go through when their supply of fet-ohol leaves their bodies and their nervous system's alarm bells go off:
Hey! You're part of the world now!
Brutal.

I think scientists should be trying more than anything to find the formula for fet-ohol. Imagine taking a hit of "F": "The Security Drug"-you'd feel like you were safe and happy, even if you were doing boring everyday crap like collecting spray-painted shopping carts from the ditch across the road by the Indian reserve or haggling with some pathetic senior trying to scam an extra twenty percent off the purchase of a Maxell CD twelve-pack using an expired coupon.

But then, fet-ohol would probably have some backfiring aspect. That predictable monkey's paw: official key fob of Saint Teresa of Avila, patron saint of the answered prayer.
If
you became a fetus again, you'd become autistic or a zombie, or would pull so far away from the world that people looking at you would think you were a vegetable. Fet-ohol would convert your brain back into the brain of a fetus.
It
wouldn't be the same thing as brain damage instead, your brain would sort of erase itself, like a CD or a tape. You'd be unborn.

Why do I mention any of this? Because of my mother.

Years ago, I visited my parents' place on a Saturday afternoon. My dad was downstairs, my mother upstairs. My dad and I said hi, and then he called upstairs, "Honey, your favourite son is here for a visit!" and my mother came downstairs, almost skipping like a girl. "Chris, I've made your favourite peanut butter and raisin cookies," she called, and then she saw it was me and the temperature dropped to zilch. "Oh. Hello."

"Hi to you, too, Mom."

She stared at me, and-okay, it's not like I haven't done enough shit to merit a frosty reception-but this time was different. She seemed afraid of me, definitely something new, and after a few seconds of locked eyeballs, I realized that something new
was
going on here. She didn't recognize me.

My mother's Alzheimer's was more rapid than that of most people with the disease, and it struck her in her late fifties, which is rare but by no means unheard of. One week she couldn't find her car keys. A month later the police phoned to say she'd been found cowering in the women's bathroom outside the Bay cafeteria and had no idea who she was.

When Mom started wetting herself and that kind of thing, Dad had to get a live-in helper, Dolores, to help out. Dolores was Mexican and treated Mom like a child, which Mom definitely seemed to prefer to being treated like an adult. Six years after it all began, Dad divorced Mom and married Dolores, and by the time Zoe came along my mother was completely gone. She died of pneumonia a month after Zoe's birth, and I really have to wonder why we went to all the effort to keep her going. Were we cruel to elongate her time on earth? Was her life enhanced? Did she suffer-especially on those nights when she'd start hollering and screaming and we couldn't figure out why? And is the world a better place for her having gone through it all?

The thing with Alzheimer's is that the patient and everybody in their life knows all too well what's happening; the walking-on-eggshells factor is remarkable. Simple lapses such as forgetting a phone number create tension like a storm's about
to
break, which triggers denial, which often triggers fights and tears. In a weird way, only when the disease is in full expression is there any form of relief. A sufferer forgets who he or she is, and where he or she is-everything. What do they dream of at night? Do they dream the dreams of a fetus? Are they back on fet-ohol?

Bethany

Roger, the funniest moment in my short history in this dump of a store happened this afternoon, and you missed it. This middle-aged guy totally lost it in line. Kyle was at the till, and, well, let's face it: God never intended for Kyle to be working at a till. He was meant for other things. But anyway, this guy comes in-forty-five? Dockers. Dorky sage green checkered short-sleeved sports shirt, like something a left-wing politician would wear to a golf course and after waiting in line for a while he starts shouting, "You incompetent brats. For God's sake, if you're a fuckup at your job, either quit or get fired. But don't ask me to subsidize your uselessness with my good will. I am not here to be your learning curve. I am here to pay for my purchase without having to watch you learn new product code numbers every single time you ring in an item."

Kyle was unfazed by this-he's got psychic Teflon. So he kept on plugging away in pursuit of correct code numbers until he found the right one.

I was taking down the Halloween displays by the window. Shawn whispered to me, "That's Mr. Rant. He's nuts. He hasn't been in for ages. He can actually be fun if you get him going." So I figured, what the hell, and I asked the guy, "Is there anything else that annoys you, sir-I mean, while we're on the subject and all?"

And he totally got into it. "Potato skins," he said. "I
hate
them. They're ugly, they taste shitty, and let me dispel one pernicious myth right now: not only are there no vitamins or minerals in them, they're supermagnets for pesticides, fungicides, larvicides and other agrochemical residues. Restaurants that serve unpeeled potatoes are too fucking lazy to peel them. End of story. Potato skins are pure laziness crystallized into earthly form, and if you want science
to
back this up, check out recently skyrocketing cancer rates in the intensive potato farming areas of Prince Edward Island."

I said,
"I
know exactly what you mean. Potato peels taste awful, and people always try to make you feel bad about yourself if you don't do a little happy dance when they put them in front of you."