The Stationery Store Considered as an Analog of Cocaine Addiction, and other stories

Today’s story is a theme and variations on “is this place real or invented?” The first such place is almost certainly an amalgam of both: a plaza in the middle of a semi-urban area, maybe compassing two city blocks, crammed with as many space-efficient amusement park rides as possible. Tucked under this but still at ground level, somehow, is a retail district with restaurants. My brother and I and some other folks—not sure who—are riding the rides and, later, eating in a swanky restaurant, the kind whose ugly lighting screams money, that caters to organized crime. Throughout our time together we are discussing the local area and how long it used to take us to walk hither or thither.

Enter Regina Spektor, or at least a little bag of cocaine. (Brain will keep singing "Hotel Song" these day.) This is in what I guess is my bedroom? but is really a public school classroom—I’m guessing the home ec room at Hammonton High (I never actually took a class there but geographically that is where it feels like). It seems I am a cocaine user, and I am almost out: I check my jar and it contains only a wee bit, all pressed together into a small disk, like the stub end of a piece of chalk that someone has used to scribble on a sidewalk, getting it down to the last bit they could safely scrape without burning their fingers. I shake this out of the (baby food) jar and into the mortar; I break it up with the end of an umbrella. But after that I apparently don’t do anything with it, except muse, as cluelessly as IRL, about the current cost of the stuff and how much it must cost those assholes you see in movies with enormous mounds of coke on their coffee tables. Necessarily given this mental image, someone sneezes. And we have a scene change.

I am carrying a stack of black plastic take-out containers to another, bigger, classroom space in which family and friends are gathering for a meal. It is an enormous square room, far bigger than any classroom should be, but it has a chalkboard along its, I dunno, 150-foot front wall. En route I realize the little cup-lets of sauce or dressing that I’m bringing are superfluous because so-and-so will have made her famous sauce that everyone must love and praise. Indeed, my bringing commercially bought sauce will be an insult. So, just as I’m getting to the classroom door, I compile the insulting sauce into another container (yay dream arms!); just inside the door there is a standard black classroom/office trashcan where I deposit my redundancies—then immediately worry that someone has seen me putting recyclables in the trash, but also worried if I make a big deal of the act of discarding it will come to light that I brought sauce. I grab them back out and take them to the recycle bin, which is all the way across the room by the fryer.

Speaking of which. I have also brought potatoes, a huge bag of them, and they are suspiciously uniform in shape, like cigars—or better still carrots with a few inches of point knocked off. Anyway, I set up to chop them and somebody volunteers to do it for me; so I take the few I have already chopped over to the fryer, where somebody else volunteers to fry them. “Unless you want to…” he says, and I admit that I really don’t fancy standing by the fryer in this heat. Because it’s hot.

Later, we’re on a bus ride home, and while I don’t remember exactly visiting a particular, beloved stationery store whence we have just departed, Bob and I are discussing its history. This is an amalgam of Dan’s Stationery on Bellevue Avenue, Hammonton, some stationery-specializing vendors at the Berlin Farmers’ Market (née Berlin Auction), and at least one dream store. I am running through the establishment’s names in reverse chronological order, and I’ve gotten through maybe four different names and owners when a guy across the bus aisle (I’m in the windows seat, Bob on the aisle) volunteers the next one: Tapper’s Stationery. Neither of us go any further, even though IRL the next older iteration (and, in my lifetime, the original, magnificent stationery store) was Dan’s Stationery. In this case, however, the establishment we’re talking about is a competitor that opened up across the street (and in some sense, across the mall) from Dan’s—a much more compact store, probably in what used to be Albright’s Shoes. (A few doors to the right of this:?)

The bus ride ends and we are, in whatever sense, “back home”. It now appears to have been a chartered bus and we are all one party; my mother (but not Mom) is at least in part Shirley Partridge. (Shirley Jones is still alive and working, BTW, 84 this year!) She is exhausted from the trip; we all know the script calls for me to be mightily pissed off about something and to take it out on her, briefly—a situation for end-of-reel resolution—but my dander and I are honestly not up to it. So, once off the bus and across the street, on the sidewalk in front of the park, I line up with the other children (Marcia Brady appears to be in the mix) to hug mom and thank her for a fabulous trip.

A Night at the Diner / A Day at the Cockfights

“Mark Tomasello, how come I ain’t never sucked your dick?” I ask Mark Tomasello just as he’s finishing up getting his dick sucked by some guy whom either one of us may or may not know. I’m hanging in a conference room with Mark and two other old friends. While Mark has been getting his dick sucked, the other two friends and I have been chatting about old times; but from across the conference table I cannot help noticing Mark’s dick sure looks like it would be nice to suck.

I honestly don’t know the answer to the question I asked, and I’m guessing Mark doesn’t either. We have always been friends. (IRL zero clue about Mark since shortly after high school.) I guess I am just now finding out he lets guys suck him off. Anyway, accommodatingly, he beckons me over, so I slide across the table on my belly. As a matter of teasing or reward system, Mark postpones the actual event by giving me other things to suck first: a squishy white latex buttplug-looking thingummy—it feels like a Stretch Armstrong in squishiness; it is obviously intended primarily for butt play because it sucks nothing like a dick—and then an actual dildo, which is much nicer to fake with. I guess Mark is playing with his own dick under the table while I’m demonstrating technique and getting myself hot with the toys, because when he finally says, “Ok, here ya go,” and stands up, his dick is huge and beautiful: not rock hard but exactly at the best stage of engorgement to suck on; the foreskin is pulled back and the top of the glans is dark purple and flat and sleek. The whole thing is a small Italian sub and I immediately put every centimeter of it in my mouth.

Timing is everything, and of course Mark is called away almost immediately with the others in the conference room (except me); but in a genuine act of kindness he leaves his dick with me so I can keep sucking it. And believe me, I do.

I spend an entire evening at an establishment that is part punk rock bar, part '50s style burger joint, and part Grandmom and Grandpop’s house on Edgewood Drive, Collings Lakes, N.J. At various points throughout the evening:

• I hang out at a big circular table in the starkly lit main diner space with Mark McKinney, Breck Young, Spike, surely a bunch of dead people like Ray and Chad. Possibly Dan BigBooté, though he is less welcome in my dreams and he knows it. It is an ordeal trying to decide which empty seat to sit in. Whom do I want to talk to most? Who actually likes me? (I am fairly certain Brain still has 40-year-old PTSD from a particularly cold and purposed experiment in ostracism Brain’s two best “friends”, not to be named here, ran in grade school.) Not that any of this matters much because the dialog from this scene, like the dialog from the cited experiment, is entirely lost.

• I go outside, where some of the seating is in little cars that move, slowly and continuously, along a track around the patio area, maybe 5 feet off the ground. I guess there are steps leading up to the track somewhere, but I don’t investigate. I just think it’s a neat idea for a diner/bar.

• I realize my party has run out of good steak, so I wind my way back into Grandmom’s kitchen, and further back down the hallway into a prep area that is where the little antechamber with the bookshelves should be. Here I find, on a white polypropylene cutting board, an already cooked prime-rib looking roast thing just begging me to carve it. This is perfect! Just what my friends and I were looking for. I take a knife that looks precisely like a scale model of a 2-person saw, and cut off a good, thick slice to try. Unfortunately, when I do so, some kind of sweet goo, like barbecue sauce but not quite, leaks out from the center, whereupon it becomes apparent that the slab as a whole was somebody else’s preparation that I have just violated. People have been wandering by me the entire time and nobody has hollered at me; I decide I have done minimal damage at this point, so I make myself scarce.

• I find myself at the bar across from Dave Silverman (the bar in this section appears to be in a long, narrow figure-8, with service areas in the loops on either side and between the loops, in the center of the 8, bar space where customers sit directly opposite each other). I have ended up with two beers; both of these are in what look like 24- or 32-ounce plastic iced tea jugs. In fact, the labels on the jug-handles have a sans-serif beige font against exactly the tannish-brown color you expect from iced tea labels. I have just got round to noticing that one of these beers in particular sucks; and when I consult the label I discover this is because it’s near-beer. “0% alcohol”, it tells me. Yuck. Dave is warning me about my social interaction with the guy on my left. Maybe he’s here fresh from Mos Eisley or something, but apparently I’ve already done something to piss him off, so I take my >0% alcoholic beer and go away.

Abruptly—no footage of the setup remains—I dash through the exterior door of the school or whatever public or institutional building where I earlier sucked Mark Tomasello’s dick. I instantly notice shadows and voices of colleagues in the hallway around the corner from this hallway; so I duck through an open doorway on my right into the same conference room from earlier. It occurs to me in rapid succession: They must have heard the exterior door open and close, mustn’t they? If they do not discover me here I will have the unique opportunity to be in this building after closing, which, well, who knows what I might find? But I believe they have already come around the corner of the hallway, so I cannot shut the conference room door behind me; and I expect one of them will almost certainly check this room, or at least lean in to grab the door and shut it, and there is no place for me to hide so quickly, and enough light is coming in that I will certainly be discovered if anyone leans in.

So I decide the thing to do is jump out and yell “BOO!” and scare them. So I jump out and try to yell “BOO!”; but because Brain is in dream mode trying to work actual vocal chords, it comes as out a vague moan with no chance of scaring the empty living room.

I'm afraid of Americans

I have been driving for a while in upstate New York and it occurs to me with increasing urgency that my car feels "funny" driving. I have just left a retail establishment of some sort whose public spaces are semi-open to the outside: actual structures, sturdier than tents, but still exposed, sort of an indoor-outdoor hybrid space where people can come, hang out, and not feel like they've cooped themselves up. 

The place hosts public events of whatever kind: they definitely have at least one bar—but not even one usable bathroom (the one I did find was marked "Staff only" and was locked). After hunting around the whole joint for a bathroom, I finally asked, was denied, and threatened to and then actually did piss on the barroom floor, which was suddenly, unexpectedly dirt. I soaked as much of the sod as I could—it was a good, long, horsey piss—but the bartender, the same slack-jawed yokel who had denied me bathroom use in the first place, was not impressed. But he was fairly nonchalant about it, so I didn't even get the satisfaction of pissing anybody off.

Anyway, now, something is weird about the car. Specifically about the front left (driver's) quarter, the very place I just had extensive work done (no really, 36 days in the shop, IRL, pursuant to a black ice slide into a yield sign). I pull into a petrol station and turn the car off. Well, there's your problem, says Brain, as soon as I get out of the car and look: The entire front wheel on this side is beat to hell and the tire is completely flat. No, wait, that's not a tire at all; it's a badger.

Sure, the nice man at the petrol station (of course they do repairs as well; this is upstate) can fix it, but it'll take a couple days. Meanwhile, I need to figure out how to get home and then get back up here when it's ready to be picked up. This is more worrisome than it needs to be; for some reason it takes me a long while to realize I have plenty of available credit and that Americans with plenty of available credit are fucking gods in the marketplace. Until that realization, I am stressed out, boggling at the logistics of the ordeal ahead of me.

Part of this stress is that I am starting a new job—in preparation for which I am looking through an old spiral notebook, octavo sized like I used to use in high school. This notebook might actually be that old but it appears to have mostly occupational rather than educational notes. I come across an incongruous zip-lock plastic compartment with a few pens and pencil stubs. This is clearly from the early part of my life where I thought free ball-point pens were a Good Thing.

I am sitting at the breakfast counter in the house where I grew up in Folsom, N.J., setting up my new work station. As always, there is detritus in the drawers from the last employee. But the plastic organizer tray fit into the top of the drawer does not have a compartment long enough for a full-size pen or pencil. Apparently it's a secondary tray, for paper clips and erasers and staples and things...? Roze is here with me; she has her own drawer, which I note has an appropriate organizer for writing implements. While we're setting up our work stations I am running over in my mind all that I need to do in order to accommodate the inconvenience of having my car broken down in upstate New York. This involves a good deal of shopping—or so Brain assures me, though I can't imagine now what contingency supplies I could possible need in this circumstance. I think Brain just wants retail therapy.

Somebody gives me chicken dinner; but it's clearly not a winner. (Wait, strike that. Use instead: Someone gives me chicken luncheon but it hits me like a truncheon.) It actually looks like it's some other kind of fowl, probably something just made up, because I can see in its cooked skin remnants of a row of feathers that looks like a Native American headdress rather than something that occurs naturally on an actual bird. I am more and more grossed out with the offered luncheon and my stomach has begun to complain. Little stabs of pain here and there. 

Maybe there is a temporal gap at this point in which someone offered me some stomach medicine, because the next thing is that I look at the cylindrical jar of medicine I have taken and I notice it has a label stuck on it with some kind of arcane warning about its use. Perhaps this printed material is just the typical side-effect notices, but someone has also scribbled on the label a notation, in effect saying "discard ALL this stuff". 

I walk through the workplace until I find one of the staff nurses that I like (this place appears to be Division of Federal Occupation Health or some such, where nurses teem abundant) and I show her the jar and the label. She looks at the product and the label and fairly quickly declares that it's fine; that we'll be fine. Petra has also had some of the stuff and speaks up as well, with concern about her own well-being. I have to point out "no really, don't use this shit" notation scribbled on the label, at which point the nurse changes her mind and confiscates the product; but she says we will still probably be ok.

Without segue I am working next to R. Michael Hodges, which entails lying in a bed next to R. Michael Hodges. (Brain never did care for subtlety.) We are still in the workplace and we are fully clothed; but I clearly have not gone through sexual harassment training.

I am deeply in love with R. Michael Hodges, as I have unalterably been since the day I met him; and, as has been the occasional case IRL, he tolerates physical affection and attention up to a point but does not pretend to be anything other than straight. Anyway, I kiss him twice behind his right ear, and that is clearly enough for the time being. We chat about work and I tell him about my broken car, my plan to retrieve it in several days, and the shopping I need to do in the meanwhile.

Later and without seeming relation to anything previous: I am at a house on a large, flat property, with a long dirt driveway coming up from a road that seems a mile away. This could be a prairie—it looks vaguely like a Western—but it could also be the tidal plain of South Jersey in a particular dry summer season. I am halfway up a ladder in front of the house (why? dunno) when someone comes up the driveway and give me the mail. It is a fistful of letters, almost all of them hand-addressed, some of them in sweetly decorated envelopes—sunsets and kittens and things. 

I flip through them and quickly find one that has been misdelivered: the street name and the town are the same, but this is addressed to Whatever Terrace West, not plain old Whatever Street. Then I find one that should have been delivered to Arizona; and another bound for the U.S. state of Occiput. I toss these misdelivered envelopes into a pile on the ground. Most of the rest of the stack are similarly, wildly misdelivered: several should have gone to India, Austria, and New Zealand.

I am still on the ladder when one of the residents comes out of her house (or her part of the house; it appears to be subdivided extensively) complaining that her mail didn't come. Someone has delivered mail to her door but it did not include what she was expecting. She asks me about the stack of mail I have been sorting and I explain it's almost all misdelivered and none of it was for her; I invite her to look at the stack to be sure.

I come down off the ladder and go into the house. Residual from my sorting of the mail, I now have three gummed form pads to dispose of, in landscape format with the gum on the left side, like an old-fashioned book of checks. I believe I need to return them whence they came, but they seem not to have come in an envelope or with any information attached. Meanwhile a woman and a man are talking quietly in the front room by the window. She becomes I as we both tell the man: "I totally understand your concerns about how bad things are in America."

¡ONOZ Diego nunca me perdonará!

I just realized I missed Diiego Lauzen Rodriguez's birthday last week. We cannot have that.

Late nite shenanigans

It's getting pretty late. Paul and I have been hanging out in the Park Ranger—Brain's "pun" on the Deer Park, I guess—and I'm getting antsy. For what feels like the last 4 hours and 18 minutes Paul has been at an adjacent table gabbling with a twink he's clearly smitten with, and I'm moping at the table he abandoned. Luckily, this is a dream, so I have only to think about the practice of upscale eateries distributing free happy hour munchies, so as to encourage folks to stay and drink more, et voilà, here's some now. Even though it's long past happy hour. 

The onion rings are recently out of the oil, perfectly done, cooled just enough. But the first one I chomp down on makes it clear the onions themselves are not to be trifled with. The skin on the ring is unbreakable, so after a struggle, I end up with all the onion in my mouth and all the breading on the table.

I fucking hate that. Not just the ipso facto food fight but because I am convinced everyone in the joint was watching me lose to an onion. And I'm certain my face is absolutely covered in frying oil and crumbs.

Fuck this, I'm out of here. I perfunctorily napkin myself, stand, and walk the few steps over to the table where Paul and the twink are talking. I tell Paul I'm heading out. He barely acknowledges me, but as I'm turning to go, the twink says, "Seeya, loser." I wheel around and fix him with a look I hope is withering. He shrugs and says, "Why not?" He's playing it like "We're all friends now, why not joke around?" but he really means, "You're a loser, so why not say so?" I respond with, "I can think of one or two reasons." I give Paul exactly 1.5 seconds of the same ocular death ray, then turn again and stalk out of the joint. It is a good flounce.

The environs are American Capitalist Festivity: part Disney park, part Mardi gras, everybody drinking and hollering and drinking. I decide not to go back to the hotel right away; I want to be up on a balcony watching the celebration. I head around the side of the building, up an exterior flight of stairs, and I come to a closed gate, behind which is the second storey balcony, completely empty. I am momentarily confused, trying to remember whether I have heard or read something about the balconies being closed. I try the gate (it is unlocked) just as a voice from behind me says, "Oh, are we going upstairs?"

It is a stranger, but she is apparently being played by Betsy Arledge. She wants to accompany me in my dangerous mission to scout out the balconies. We head up another flight to the third storey balcony, and it quickly becomes apparent why the balconies are closed: they are basically made of hammock material, securely suspended—this isn't a frightening experience, just surprising—but extremely... stretchy. We walk close to the outer railing and the balcony sags down so far we are only a yard or so above the heads of folks walking on the sidewalk. (Where the second storey balcony went in this moment is not clear.) 

"This is fun," says Stranger Betsy, and indeed it is. But of course we are discovered traipsing around off limits and shooed off the balcony by Park Ranger staff.