"Don't like Mondays, huh?" Emmett asked me, his big finger jamming down on the G elevator button while he balanced two huge coffee take out cups and a white paper bag. I stared as the doors slid closed, then used the flimsy hospital bracelet around my wrist to scratch my eyebrow.
My head still hurt, it was like the hangover from hell that wouldn't leave. My stomach still hurt from the pumping and forced ejection of everything I've ingested since the mid nineties and my mind was sore from the past seventy two hours of suicide watch.
I ignored the Geldof line and stood quietly next to Emmett, who'd come to pick me up. He was also the one to bring me in.
Apparently, Tanya had called Emmett and said to check in on me because she was worried and by the time Emmett got there, I was resting nicely in the bed notch and my own vomit.
Over the past three days I tried to explain on three separate occasions I wasn't necessarily suicidal, but no one really accepted that. Instead, I stayed in a room for three days while some guy who I'm pretty sure isn't a doctor made sure I didn't strangle myself with my bare hands. Because that would be the only suicide option as they took away my shoelaces and my keys and everything else.
I didn't mind staying there, I would've preferred being at home, in the notch, but it's not like there was anything pressing I needed to get out for.
Just across the hospital parking lot there were a few benches and even some round tables covered huge, yellow sun umbrellas, in case anyone just felt like hanging around the back of a hospital parking lot, I supposed. When we sat there to wait for a cab, it occurred to me the seating might have been a good idea; for people who didn't have anywhere better to be. People like me.
Emmett dumped the contents of the paper bag on the bench between us and shoved a sandwich wrapped in mustard stained wax paper toward me.
It crinkled in my lap when I un-wrapped it and it didn't taste like much of anything, aside from a big brick I was trying to shove down my throat.
"Remember when my grandpa was dying of Alzheimer's and he'd sit in his wheelchair in that nasty old sweater that smelled like piss and he looked confused, like, all the time? And he was quiet but then all of the sudden he'd freak out and go ballistic and his favorite new word was fuck-face?" Emmett asked, eyeing me carefully.
"Yeah?"
"And he forgot who everyone was and tried to hit on my mom and we'd laugh at it all until shit would hit the fan and he'd do something really crazy, like the time he lit his own face on fire trying to light a non-existent cigarette or the time he got lost and tried to take a plane to my grandma who died in 1987?"
"Get to whatever you're getting at," I told him, watching the cars in the lot pull in and pull out, carefully navigating around one another.
Emmett leaned over and tugged on green wool of my scratchy, tattered cardigan and narrowed his eyes.
"You look exactly like him."
"What does that even mean?" I asked.
"It means," he said, "if there's a deep end, you're laying face down right at the bottom of it."
I stared out at the parking lot while Emmett stared at me, then I pulled a tissue some nurse had balled up and stuck up my sleeve to wipe my nose.
"I've got a cold," is what I told him by way of explanation.
Emmett looked at me with this dubious expression, slack jawed and everything before he picked up my uneaten sandwich and chucked it in the overflowing trashcan next to us.
"I think that's our cab," he said, standing, nodding to where a taxi was idling across the lot, waiting.
In the taxi, I looked out the window, watching everything pass me by while Emmett spoke about our underwater business that was now an underwater business soon-to-be bank owned.
"You remember today is Saturday, right?" he asked, his knuckles tapping on the back window.
"We have calendars in the deep end," I remarked and he paused, with a surprised smile.
"That was funny," he said gently, like I was a toddler telling my first knock-knock joke.
I put my head in my left hand and used my right one to wave along his conversation.
"The doctor at the hospital said not to leave you alone in case you decide to use a meat cleaver to cut your own heart out or something so you gotta come in to the shop, we can't postpone the big Everything Must Go sale, unless we want to be in two hundred percent debt, instead of just a hundred percent debt," Emmett said.
I knew all of this.
The Pull-Out Kings went under, going, going, gone for the last year or so. All inventory must go in order to try to pay what we could off, before the bank came in and turned it in to a Home Depot. I shit you not, a Home Depot, because it's only right that people use our busted up, broke down dream to improve their home sweet homes. It was only right that some J Crew newly-married guy named Chip or Chad or whatever pick out the perfect vinyl siding with his pregnant real-estate agent wife right where the Gangsta Rap collection used to stand.
Maybe I was bitter.
It just seemed like a dart in the neck, man, to have a chain home-dream-life improvement establishment planted right on top of everything I failed at.
But that was fine.
We knew going in to this venture four years ago we probably wouldn't make it.
It was fine.
It was only every cent I'd ever earned and every cent I had yet to earn and my teenage dream and the only thing I'd ever put any kind of effort in and my life plan and I was now in romantic and financial ruin by the age of twenty four and all that; but it was fine.
"That's fine," I told Emmett.
"You don't have to do anything," he told me, "just hang out in the back."
"I'm in the middle of organizing R&B," I said.
Emmett gave me a funny look and smiled.
"Okay, you just keep…doing that. But you know it doesn't really matter anymore, right?" he asked slowly.
That, it seemed, was the problem with everything lately: It doesn't really matter anymore.
"Just don't, you know, stress out about it. Any of this shit," Emmett said. "We already been through all that. Just…it is what it is."
I leaned forward so my forehead rested against the back of the vinyl passenger seat.
"Tanya is screwing that douche bag from Epic Records," I said, trying for a change of subject but I didn't really have a subject that wasn't part of the destruction of my life.
"I know it," Emmett sighed. "You alright?"
I was still wearing hospital issued socks, the kind with the rubber grips on the bottom with cuffs that didn't even reach my ankles. I had a clinically painful headache, my girl left with some asshole who actually knew how to conduct a successful career and I was headed to the one place I had left, only to close it up.
"I don't think I love her anymore."
"Well," Emmett laughed, "that's probably a good thing."
But was it? I don't even recall falling out of love and four days ago, I would've said I did love her, but it was hard to say if that was habit, comfort, true or a lie.
"She said to fight for her," I went on, rolling my forehead along the vinyl of the seat now, my eyes on my knees.
"So? You don't love her so you didn't fight for her?" Emmett asked.
"I was too tired," I sighed and the taxi fell silent for a moment until my whole body was jolted with Emmett's loud, boisterous laugh.
Looking up and out the window again, I noticed the police were starting to tape up the streets, the kids were all coming out with their tattoos and piercings and hand woven clothes, slopping and shuffling up and down the streets with poorly concealed, cheaply mixed cocktails in various water bottles.
"The street fair," I commented, my fingertips touching the pane of glass. I felt a nostalgic smile tug my lips as I watched them all, the freaky individuals all exactly alike, full of this idealistic kind of wonder, possibility and hope.
I remembered the first time I heard Eighteen by Alice Cooper I felt the same way; the way I felt when I met Tanya at a Social Distortion concert and fell for her dread locks and her views on shock art and the way she sucked dick; the way I felt when Emmett and I sat down with a composition notebook and drew up a rough, uneducated business plan for The Pull-Out Kings—the way I felt when I felt anything was possible. The way I felt before I knew better, that there aren't possibilities, only impossibilities that are rarely surmountable.
Suddenly, I wanted to save all those kids from certain heartbreak, so I rolled the window down, stuck my head out and screamed at them.
"It's all bullshit!" I shouted. "Start flipping burgers and wear condoms, because whoever, I mean WHOEVER you love is probably going to give you heartbreak and syphilis! It's all bullshit!"
A group of kids raised their water bottles to me and started cheering and someone told me to piss off. I sat back in the seat and sighed.
"Oh, good. You haven't gone completely crazy," Emmett said, leaning over me to roll the window back up.
"Look at them," I said, jerking my thumb over my shoulder. "They're just so…naïve."
"Would you have listened?" Emmett asked. "If someone told you all that shit, would you have listened back then?"
I blinked at him. Of course I wouldn't have. I was going to change the world and live my dream, using my parent's twenty grand in start-up capital that I have yet to pay back, which they gave reluctantly, along with a speech about how small businesses rarely succeed, especially in this economy, and even if they do, it's years before you see profit.
I just had such energy, then. I just was so sure.
"Don't go piss on their idealism," Emmett told me. "It makes the world a better place."
Maybe. But it also makes it crappier when you fall from your ideals.
"If we could go back…would you have just stayed in school?" I asked Emmett, lolling my head toward him to wait for his answer.
"No. I learned a lot—"
"No, don't give me bullshit about character building and lessons learned. We're fucked. Would you change it?"
"No. And you wouldn't either."
I cast another glance back at the kids in the streets, hooping and hollering, sunshine or youth lighting up there fresh faces, and suddenly I was so damned nostalgic for that time in life. I didn't want to know better anymore.
"I don't know," I mused in response to Em. "Is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?"
"Are we back on Tanya again?" Emmett asked, thoroughly confused.
"No," I sighed. "I don't know. What I mean is, I don't know if it's better to fall from idealism or to have never known it at all."
"Of course it's better to fall. Those were amazing days," Emmett shrugged.
That was the point, I thought, but I didn't say it.
We pulled up in front of the shop, a red bricked warehouse, covered in local band fliers, bumper stickers proclaiming every band from Unwritten Law to Kenny Rogers, posters, graffiti murals and one huge, black and hot-pink neon sign shouting "CLEARANCE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! DOORS CLOSING!"
Underneath the sign, someone had scrawled RIP in thick, black marker. I put my eyes on the sidewalk and shuffled past all of it.
"Cullen?" Em asked, side eyeing me as he swung the door open, our little bell jingling.
"Hm?"
"You're gonna be okay," he said, nodding his head, ushering me in.
I nodded back, not too sure about anything.
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I sat in a stool at the register counter and Alice sat on the other side of me, her elbows on the counter top, her fists holding up her little face. She had a neon green, cloth flower in her black hair, hurting my eyes, but I stared back at her anyway.
"I heard you caught her blowing Radioheads roadie," Alice said.
"That's not true. Well, it's not true that I caught her, but she might have."
"Is it true you put arsenic in your orange juice?" Alice asked.
"I'm allergic to oranges."
"All the better to suicide yourself," Alice shrugged.
I shrugged back, she made a good point, though I was pretty sure "suicide yourself" wasn't grammatically correct.
"You should've called me, I would've told you you were better off. She was a terrible person. Once she ate half a sandwich I had in the fridge. It was labeled with my name," Alice said, narrowing her eyes. "You can't trust someone that will eat someone else's labeled lunch. She wouldn't mind if I starved, that says a lot about a person."
"I guess."
"But that's not why you did it," Alice went on, then reached across the counter and scratched the top of my head. "Work on your headsick, please, I couldn't stand it if you died."
"Okay, Al," I said.
I felt so small right then. Like tiny. Little Alice, who I'd actually hired in myself (kind of), was leaning across from me, looking all concerned, like she wanted to give me a glass of milk and cover me with a blanket.
Alice had first clomped into the shop three years ago, when she was sixteen years old, with ripped up jeans, a torn up Debbie Gibson t-shirt, a rather painful looking piercing through her septum and a pissed off scowl.
She'd asked for an application and I told her we weren't hiring. We weren't. Emmett and I were barely eating ourselves, there was no way we could pay anyone to actually work for us.
She actually flipped me the bird and started alphabetizing the albums that were misplaced in the shelves. The next day the kid came in with a feather duster and dusted the place down without a word. Every day Alice came in and just made up work to do; by the end of that month she was on the payroll which meant Emmett bought lunch back for her and she ate with us at the table in the backroom. Her home life is shit. She doesn't bitch about it or go on about it, but there's this kind silent understanding that it is, so sometimes, she sleeps on the couch in the back and a few times Em or I have bought her home to crash on one of our couches.
We eventually got around to putting her on the payroll, but then, things went full circle and we were pretty much right where we started.
Alice leaned on the counter again and beckoned me forward. She had a huge purple hickey on her neck from Jasper, our business accountant. I had deep disdain for Jasper based solely on the bad news and warnings he was always spouting at me and Emmett. I pointed at Alice's hickey, but she slapped my hand away then slapped her hand over her hickey.
"Does he shout tax exemption codes when he comes?" I asked, but my heart wasn't really in it. Didn't matter anyway, it's like, impossible to offend Alice.
"You should be nicer to Jasper," she sniffed, "he tried like hell to save this place."
With that my forehead went back on the counter and I tightened my sweater around myself, I wished I could wish to be someplace else, but the truth was, there was nowhere I really wanted to be at all. I didn't couldn't even imagine a nice place to be, I mean.
"I'm moving in with him," Alice announced and I rubbed my hand across my chest, hidden in the sweater. Jasper wore tortoise shell glasses and blazers with elbow patches over vintage work shirts, like they were his uniform. They always had name patches that said "Bill" or "Stuart" or "Mick" on them. I used to think Jasper was a coward because by day, he's an accountant, but we all know he's a face melting drummer; my line of thinking was Jasper was too chicken shit to try to make a career out of drumming, but I'm beginning to realize Jasper was just smart to go to school to be an accountant. I mean, sure, he settled, but he's got a place with furniture and somewhere for Alice to go. Which is more than I could ever offer her. He played the game of life safe and smart and it worked; hell if that isn't the most depressing revelation I ever had.
It just isn't supposed to be like that, but that is exactly how it is.
And that's what depresses the hell out of me.
"I have to go pull the cassettes off the shelves and toss 'em in the nickel bin," Alice told me, hopping off her stool. "Doors open in five. Look alive."
I lifted my head, showed my teeth and put it back down until a finger poked my cheek. Without actually lifting my face, I turned my head to meet the gaze of Rosie, Emmett's very pregnant wife and original investor in The Pull Out Kings. And by original investor I mean she emptied her college fund and gave it to us.
It was hard to look her in the eye; I had no idea how Emmett was still sleeping with her without crying in humiliation.
"Breaking up is hard to do," Rosie said, her chin in the palms of her hands, her smile limp.
"Thank you?" I responded.
"I have to ask," she said, "did you want to die?"
I put my chin on my folded hands atop the counter and tried to come up with the right answer, but there wasn't one. Saying what I meant, which was "it didn't matter" would only serve to raise red flags; I knew that, I suppose everyone would know that. I mean, things like intending or not to die should matter.
"It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out," I told her with a wry smile.
Rosalie smiled and put her hand on the top of my head.
"You can't Lennon your way out of your own bullshit, Edward. But I adore you for trying."
I shrugged and pulled my sweater closer.
"You can always call me or Emmett. We love you, you know that?" she asked, too softly.
"I know it."
And I did. It had nothing to do with not feeling loved.
"I brought breakfast," she said, standing back up and holding a white paper bag up. "It's full of grease and nitrates. I figured if you were okay with killing yourself anyway…"
"Death by bacon would be a divine way to meet divinity," I smiled. "I'll be back there. Soon."
She cast one last look and wandered to the back, where Emmett and Alice were packing us up to shut us down.
I looked around the store for a second, and to anyone, I suppose, it'd look like an eclectic, mod warehouse, shelf upon shelf of genres and sub-genres, autographs scrawled on steel beams, various Polaroids of me, Em, Alice and Rosie, posing with local and a-bit-better-than-local musicians, posters and stickers, buttons, tags, framed ticket stubs, a mural Tanya had painted of treble clefs, piano keys and an Anarchy symbol—this was my home.
Tanya leaving sucked. And not because I'd miss her or because I was broken hearted, though maybe I was, but because it was just one more failure. It was just one more lost love this week, she was one more notch on my belt of "over." But the good news was it was already Thursday and I really didn't have much else to lose.
I was pulled from the septic tank of my mind when the bells chimed and I looked up thinking, "I swear to god, I'm going to miss that noise." It probably would be too pathetic to take that little bell with me and hang it in my apartment door.
Sometimes, you think you realize a defining moment or a pivotal point in your life, like when you wake up under suicide watch in a hospital or when your long-term girlfriend walks out on you for a Latin Lover.
And sometimes, you don't even know anything is happening at all, and only in hindsight does it become clear that that was the moment that everything changed.
This was one of those moments.
She had short hair, tucked behind her ears, but the front of it was combed like a greaser from the 1950's, bright red lips and the head of a chrysanthemum tucked into the button hole of her worn, red corduroy jacket. Underneath that jacket was a mustard yellow t-shirt, and underneath that was no bra. Her tarnished belt buckle wanted to shine brightly in the sun, but all it could manage was a muted, coppery glare.
I watched her hesitate before squaring her shoulders, taking a deep breath and walking with purpose toward the counter.
"I have to return something," she said, loudly.
"No refunds aside from faulty merchandise and even then the best I can do is offer an exchange as store policy has been amended due to our imminent demise, though as part owner of this establishment I'm proud and pleased to inform you that we don't have faulty merchandise though that has never stopped anyone from claiming otherwise, so please have your receipt available upon stating your complaint," I gave her the stock response with a few amendments before she even reached the counter.
"No, no," she said quickly, then dumped the contents of her multi-colored crocheted bag on the counter, her eyes flicked to mine, then I turned mine to the junk-mess on the counter. Gum wrappers, a few Dum-Dum suckers, random pieces of scribbled on scrap paper, about four thousand matchbooks, a key-ring with sixteen million keys attached, a pad-lock, and a rolling red bouncy ball now littered the already littered space.
"Don't arrest me," she said, quick and cautious, holding both hands up, her eyes wide, like she was talking to a wild animal caught in barbed wire or something.
"For making a mess?" I scoffed. "I don't think this is an offense that warrants incarceration."
She pulled a pinched, wincing face and started picking through the junk, finally holding up a black and red key chain that looked almost familiar.
"I stole this from this store four years ago," she blurted out, shoving it at me. The keychain hung between us, still in her extended grasp.
"Okay?"
"No, that's just it. Not okay. I love this place and two days ago I'm waiting in line at that sandwich place on Steele Road, you know, the new one that claims if you aren't satisfied with your sandwich and their daily fresh deli meats they'll give you a free one, which makes no sense, like at all, because if you didn't like it in the first place, why the hell would you go back for another round?"
"I think the theory behind the concept is that—"
"Shh. This is really hard for me so don't talk, okay? Okay. I'm in line because they forgot the avocado on my sandwich, note my dissatisfaction by the way, and on the corkboard I saw a flier for The Pull-Out Kings Everything Must Go, close out, near death, doomsday sale and it's possible, well, I mean, it's probable the entire thing is my fault. I stole this four years ago, I was eighteen, I don't think I'm a kleptomaniac, but maybe I am, either way I stole this," she said again, shoving the keychain closer to my face. "Take it back. Please. It's killing me. The things been a huge weight in my purse since I found out about your closing. And I'm sorry, okay? Don't look at me like that. I'm sorry. I was in a weird place emotionally at the time, okay?"
"You stole from me?" I asked, my eyes narrowing as it sunk in. I don't recall ever having such a shitty week.
"Yes. And I'm taking responsibility for it, like a decent person. I'm of the opinion that under certain circumstances the conscience is able to police itself. So don't have me arrested. Please."
"I'm pretty sure there's some kind of statute of limitations on petty shoplifting."
"Right…about that whole petty thing. I mean, did you know charges change from misdemeanor to felony based on the dollar amount worth of said stolen item?" she asked, with a nervous shrug of her shoulders.
"Yes."
"Oh. I didn't know that," she kind of hummed and I leaned across the counter to snatch the keychain from her grasp.
"This store didn't go under because you stole a ninety-nine cent keychain four years ago," I told her, not to comfort her, but because I had a sinking feeling she had plenty more to confess.
"Haven't you ever heard of the butterfly effect?" she asked, incredulous. "What if I stole this keychain that I could have paid for with a buck and a nickel, but I didn't, and like, a billionaire walked in seconds later, looking for singles for one of his thousand dollar bills or whatever and you were short singles because I didn't pay for the keychain, but had you had the singles he would've stuck around and waited for the change and when he did he'd notice what a really fucking amazing thing you've got going on here and offered to invest, like, a million dollars into the place? But I didn't buy that keychain so that never happened and it's probable this place going under is entirely, completely my fault," she ranted, then crossed her arms over her chest. "It is, you know. Amazing."
"You're full of shit. What else did you steal?" I asked, crossing my own arms, my mind racing back to the time Emmett and I got into it about what on earth could've happened to the framed napkin signed by Kurt Cobain and Pat Smear or the time we ripped the entire stock room apart searching for the Live at Leeds album signed by both Daltrey and Townsend, or when Emmett and Rosalie went on their Honeymoon to Cali and somehow gotten their hands on a piece of paper Tupac Shakur had written never recorded lyrics on or the time Elvis Costello stopped in, took a Polaroid with us and left The Pull-Out Kings a love letter, both of which were now missing, written off as lost in the abyss of my irresponsible, disorganized pool of many, many fuck ups.
"About that," she said, clearing her throat, "altogether, there were five items."
I knew exactly which five they were. I put my head back in my hands and rubbed my eyes, having a pretty good idea of why she was here with a fucking chintzy keychain and not the four that were worth anything.
"They're all gone?" I asked, because I had to.
When I looked up, she was just standing there, chewing the side of her cheek, digging in her jacket pocket. She handed me a coupon for a free sandwich from the crappy sandwich place, I tossed it on her pile of junk.
"Just…get out," I told her.
"You sure? The sandwiches aren't crappy, they just forgot the avocado and everyone makes mistakes," she said, a nod of her head.
"I'm aware," I dryly commented, looking her up and down.
"Well. Thank you for understanding. I'm really sorry. About this place going down and taking the stuff and all of it. I'm really sorry."
"Just…it doesn't really matter. Just go because it might matter to my partner, who is in back and has no problem pressing charges."
She quickly picked up the pen, which, ironically enough was actually hooked to the table by a small, beaded chain so no one would steal it, then scrawled something on the back of the coupon.
I watched as she folded the paper and leaned over to toss it in to the "win a free album of your choice once a month" drawing jar.
I didn't bother to tell her that contest was no longer in existence.
"Seriously?" I asked instead. She stole a bunch of crap and now she wanted free crap, too?
She shrugged, tossed her junk back into her bag and left without another word.
All day long the Street Fair kids came in and out, waving their friends over when they found their treasures for ridiculously cheap. A couple of guys came to the register and actually gushed about how fucking excited they were about their finds. I rung them up with the kind of resent that made me reconsider my position on homicide in general.
Their really good fucking day was the demise of my financial and emotional well being.
So that was awesome.
There was a stretch of day I used to not organize the R&B inventory, but instead chuck it all into dust covered orange milk crates.
Jasper stopped by with some guy and they put a For Sale sign, a big vinyl sticker on the front windows. I took down the one No Smoking sign we had in the place and chain smoked cigarettes until finally, the lights went out and the sun had long set.
Then we piled on coats and Alice wore the same bright orange hat she always did in the winter and we all walked down a few blocks to a little pub that's just on the outskirts of downtown. I didn't particularly want to go. Emmett, Rosalie and I went there after our first full day at the shop, five years ago. Emmett and I sat in the back right corner of that dark, smoky bar talking for hours about huge and small details when we were still in the planning stages of Pull-Out Kings. We celebrated our highs there, we drowned in the lowest lows there, Tanya and I had made out like horny kids countless times there and now, it seemed, like it was ending there. I mean, it wasn't. We still had another week or so to go, but it sure seemed like it would be a fitting place to go and die or whatever.
