Read The Gum Thief Online

Authors: Douglas Coupland

Tags: #Humorous, #Fiction, #Diary fiction, #Divorced men, #Humorous fiction, #Authorship, #General, #Fiction - Authorship, #Love Stories

The Gum Thief (8 page)

So I guess the point is that our brains are rigged to respond to what's natural, not what's man-made. Snails will always win over sitcoms. And the dead will always win over the living.

And that's why I am the way I am. It's why I shun the sun, wear my black lipstick and don't give a shit if my

weight exceeds norms established by the government.

And guess who got reprimanded for the dust all over the cardboard mechanical pen display? Yes, that's correct, me, even though it was technically Shawn's job to fix it.

My voice is shot today-a cold or flu-and it sounds so damaged, but I like the sound of damage. It's like Patty and Selma from
The Simpsons.

I love
Glove Pond
more than ever.

Hey-again, what happened with your family?

Roger

I'm sitting in my car in the parking lot, and the weather is changing outside; the sky's going from dry, crazy thrashing in all directions
to
something slow and wet, and my eyes are wet, and where did that come from?

My Hyundai got keyed this afternoon, and I know who did it. I didn't get their licence plate number because I was too busy cutting them off in traffic. I guess they followed me to the lot here at work, which is all to say that I deserved it, but at the same time I'd like
to
kill the bastard. My Hyundai
is-was-the
only unflawed thing in my life. I'm actually more sad than I am pissed.

No, I could kill.

Death.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want. I'm so tired of never getting what I want. Or of getting it with a monkey paw curse attached. All those Hollywood people are always saying to be careful what you wish for, yeah, but at least they first had a wish come true.

Hang on, I'm venting here.

One more breath.

I imagine myself sitting in a glade surrounded by woodland creatures that rest on my arms and shoulders, sleeping, utterly comforted by existence.

Breathe once more.

Who am I fooling? I merely did whatever everyone else seemed to be doing. It'd be nice if we had a course in school called Real Life. Forget don't-drink-and-drive videos and plastic models of the uterus. Imagine a class where they sit you down and spell everything out, deploying all of that information delivered to us by our ever-growing army of wise, surviving ninety somethings ...

· .. Falling out of love happens as quickly as falling in.

· .. Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters. · .. Animals spend time with you only if you feed them. · .. People armed with shopping carts who know what

they want and where they're going will always cream clueless people standing in the middle of aisles holding vague shopping lists.

· .. Time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your mid-thirties.

My Theory of the Day is that the moment your brain locks into its permanent age, whoosh, it flips a time switch and your life zooms forward like a Japanese bullet train.

Or the Road Runner. Or a 747. The point being that your soul is left behind in a cloud of dust.

And all of those dead people in your life. I dream about Brendan every so often, but when he was alive, I never dreamed about him. Ever. How sick. When he was a toddler, I remember worrying about the fact that I never dreamed about him.
If
someone's big in your life, you dream about them. Is their absence from your dreams disloyal? Is it cheating? I dream about my old high school locker twice a week. I dream about our old next-door neighbour's poodle-dead twenty years now-twice a month, and I'm sure if I stared at snails, they'd become a nightly feature with me.

The thing about dreaming about dead people is that you don't know they're dead-your brain makes you forget that one key fact. And then you wake up and remember they're dead, and you feel the loss all over again, every single time. You feel scooped out and hollow. I do. It's been three years now. Hit by a car while he was riding his bike.
It
was instant. Joan couldn't handle her Brendan dreams. Unlike me, she'd been dreaming about him since the moment she knew she was pregnant. Her counsellor kept trying to tell Joan that she should look at Brendan's dream visits as something wonderful, treasures to remember him by. That's when Joan stopped going to see the counsellor and went on autopilot taking care of Zoe. And then she was diagnosed with spleen cancer and she never really changed gears along the way, and the two years wore us ragged and we never recovered. Or, rather, I didn't-I
think
Joan did. Who knows? I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life. They merely get used to it.

Glove Pond

"You answer the door."

"No,
you
answer the door."

As their guests waited on the other side, no doubt bored as well as chilled by gusts of arctic air whooshing in to refrigerate the fall evening, Steve and Gloria bickered.

"Why should I?" Gloria was indignant.
"You
heard the doorbell first." "We both heard it at the same time." "That's not true. I was upstairs, so technically you heard it first."

"No, I didn't," Steve said. "The doorbell's ring mechanism is directly beneath your makeup collection, and as sound travels more quickly through solids, chances are that
you
heard the doorbell ring first. And tell me, your Grace, why
won't
you answer the door?"

"Because it's my role to be walking down the stairs in a gracious manner while you answer the door. That way, I can work on my character of Lady Windermere too. My devotion, my dear, is to my craft. And, tit-for-tat, why won't
you
open the door?"

Steve was matter of fact: "I think it befits the director of a highly prestigious English faculty to be seated near the fireplace when his guests arrive, perhaps holding a snifter of highly exclusive brandy."

"Let me get this straight," said Gloria. "You'd put your petty vanity ahead of my need to be an artist?"

"Tell me, Gloria, does Lady Windermere actually descend a staircase in the play?"

Checkmate.
"No."

Steve felt he could already taste Gloria's opening of the door. Then a voice inside his head said,
Wait-can one actually taste the opening of a door?

Gloria, however, surprised him. "Steve-if I agree to discuss your five novels with you, would you consent to opening the door?"

It
had been years since they had discussed his five critically acclaimed yet poorly selling novels. "Maybe." He was wary.

"Is that a yes?"

He chewed the lower knuckle of his right index finger. "Yes." Gloria climbed the stairs to position herself. "Not so quickly, Meryl Streep. You agreed to discuss my five novels."

Gloria shrugged. "Very well, then. Shall we go in chronological order?" "Please." "Okay, novel number one,
Infinity’s Passion."
Steve's face bore the expression of a kindergartner

just moments before the commencement of an Easter egg hunt. "Yes?"

"Potent but impotent. A cuckold's vagina."

Steve protested, "What the hell does
that
mean?
Infinity's Passion
established my career. Without
Infinity's Passion,
how would we have been able to live in a stately home built of Connecticut slate, with a steep staircase that allows you to descend to the front door like a hostess from another, more gracious era?"

"Novel number two:
Less Than Fewer.
Forced. Anticlimactic. Emotionally arid and repetitive."

"Nonsense. Critics compared it to Henry James."

"Yes," taunted Gloria.
"If
I remember correctly, an
embalmed
Henry James-inasmuch as words can be embalmed." "Jesus, Gloria," shouted Steve. "Why do you have to be so caustic?"

"Novel number three:
Gumdrops, Lilies and Forceps."

"That was a good book!"

"Yes, well, whatever. Novel number
four-Eagles and Seagulls-the
story of my family, which you pilfered as easily as if it were a pack of gum."

"Not true.
Merely
because its heroine has copper tinted kiss-curls like your mother's does not mean I strip-mined your family for material."

"If
you need
to
believe that, then please do. Let's discuss novel number five,
Immigrant Living in a Small Town,
which began your final decline into the creation of meaningless compost mounds of spew."

Steve removed his hand from the door handle. "How dare you!
The Times Literary Review
called it a masterpiece of miniaturization. 'A Five-Year Plan of the Microscopic.' "

"What have you written lately, my dear?"

"Oh, for God's sake, is it that important to you that I be the one to answer the door?"

"Yes, it is."

The doorbell rang again.

They looked at the door as though it were a coffin, with two bony claws about to crash through in pursuit of living souls upon which to feed. "You know I've had writer's block for a long time,

Gloria."

"Open the do01; Steve."

"Yes, dear."

Steve did.

DeeDee

I don't understand the human heart.

Only pain makes it grow stronger. Only sorrow makes it kind. Contentment makes it wither, and joy seems to build walls around it. The heart is perverse, and it is cruel. I hate the heart and it seems to hate me.

Roger, you stay away from my daughter. She tells me you've been writing letters or something back and forth. Well, put a stop to that right now. She could be the only member to escape the curse of my loser family, and I won't have you stepping in and setting her on the road to failure. Bethany has not had an easy life, and much of that is my fault, and somehow she's managed to rise above it. She lives at home and is the only thing that keeps me going. I dread the day she leaves, because once she's out that door, I'm out the door too, except my body is left behind, here in this crummy condo, forever wondering what it was that walked out the door with Bethany.

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