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.