“Well, go ask at the bar.” Michael points to the rectangular wood countertop with glasses hanging from the ceiling that serves as a bar in this place. “You’re supposed to ask for people and investigate stuff at the bar. Haven’t you seen movies?”
“Yeah, okay. Thanks.” I walk over there. There’s a woman with red hair and nested wrinkles behind the counter.
“You gotta be kidding,” she huffs.
“Don’t worry,” I say, putting my elbow down on the wood and covering my mouth. “I’m not trying to ‘drink’. I’m looking for somebody.”
“Get your arm off my bar. You’ve still gotta be kidding.” She takes a glass down from the ceiling, fills it with ice and pops a cube in her mouth. “Who are you looking for?”
“This guy who, ah, imports leather from Ghana,” I explain. “He’d probably be a black guy.…”
“Would he?” asks the only other character at the bar, an Asian man opposite me and Ms. Bartender.
“Right.” I stare at this man, this new entry in my database.
“Why don’t you come over here?” he sneers. “I know you kids. You’re all after the same thing. You think you’re the first one to go snooping for them?”
Whoa. I sidle over to the guy. He isn’t too old. Badly dressed in a T-shirt, biking shorts, and an Eagles hat. White spiky hairs on his chin and little cuts on his cheek. Dull black eyes, all pupil.
“Hi,” I reach my hand out. “I’m Jeremy Heere.”
“You in it to win it?” he shoots back, holding his drink. “You in this for real? You want to change your life with this thing?”
“Yes,” I nod.
“Well you’re late,” he says. “They’re all gone. Latest shipment got dispersed, and I’m not sure about the authenticity of the next batch. Things are getting tight. Pretty soon you might not be able to get one anywhere. Until a few years, of course, when they’re mass released.”
“Uh-huh. I can’t wait a few years.” In a few years, I’ll be old and then I won’t need to be Cool. Just rich. I think it’s harder to be Cool than rich. I move to stand a little bit behind the guy’s barstool so I won’t get Ms. Bartender in trouble.
“Who told you about me?” he asks out the side of his mouth. “Keith? Rich?”
“Rich.”
“Idiot. Shouldn’t be sending kids over to me. Tell him I’m gonna cut him off if he forwards any more kids to me. No, wait, don’t say I’m gonna ‘cut him off’; say I’m gonna ‘cut him.’” The man chuckles. “That’s good, right?”
“How do I get my squip?” I whine. “I was going to buy it from Rich, or from you!”
“Do two things,” the man says. “Go to my cousin’s store in the Menlo Park Mall. He works at Payless Shoes in there. Well, actually there are three Payless Shoes, but he’s at the one opposite Sam Goody. Well, actually there are two Sam Goodys, but anyway, his name’s Rack, like a spice rack. Talk to him about where the last coupla pills went. And try eBay.”
“eBay?”
“Yeah, you have a computer, right? You’d be amazed.”
“One more question,” I look at my shoes. “Once I track a squip down, is it really going to cost six hundred bucks?”
“Maybe five. But c’mere,” the man swivels toward me in his stool. “Look.” He opens his wallet and an accordion of photographs, like the one my grandmother used to have, spills forth. They’re photographs of him inside large, elaborate casinos—I guess it’s Las Vegas, but you never know; it could be Foxwoods or some offshore place or something.
“Check ’em,” he instructs. “Take a good look.”
Each photo is a shot of this ragged man winning large amounts of money—or chips, I know in casinos it’s all done with chips, but he has piles of chips: red, white, blue, yellow, stacked up like freshly unveiled games of Jenga. Women with large breasts surround him, and their breasts are feathered, like peacock breasts, and they smile and pat his hat, the same one he’s wearing now.
“Do you have any idea what it does for you in blackjack?” he asks, nervous. “I taught mine to count cards. Forget about it. Six hundred is a bargain. You’re too young to gamble, but I’m sure you can work something out some other way.” Finally, he looks me in the eyes and smiles, his front top teeth a row of gold shingles, like a zipper in his mouth. “It’s the greatest thing on earth. It’s the only way to live. Go where I told you. Get one.”
“eBay, huh?” Dad asks as I sit at the computer in the dining room. I don’t want to be distracted by porn sites while I’m looking for squips, so I’m here. Dad puts a hand on my shoulder. “eBay is just amazing, isn’t it? You know who would have loved it? Ben Franklin.”
Dad has this thing about Ben Franklin (for Ben Franklin?). Give him any technology—the Internet, the postal service, Seeing Eye dogs—and he’ll go off on how if only Ben Franklin were alive today, he would be overjoyed to see it and use it, because Ben Franklin was a “forward thinker.”
“Ol’ Ben just wouldn’t have been able to believe it, this entire worldwide community of individuals safely and happily trading their wares. I think he would have loved it even more than air conditioning, which would have been one of his favorites.” Dad eats peanut butter with a potato chip. I don’t know what to say.
“So what are you looking for? Hmm…Beanie Babies?”
“Yeah. That’s right.” It turns out there’s a Beanie Baby named “Squip” (a small, blue squid) so when I typed squip in the eBay search box, I got, like, sixty Beanie Baby listings, all for the same stupid doll. Now with Dad leaning over my shoulder assuming that I’m looking for Beanie Babies, I have to legitimize myself by typing “Beanie Baby” in the search box and sitting back for all 9,781 results. Each Beanie Baby is listed as, for example, “2000 Holiday Teddy Bear MWMT,” where MWMT indicates that the animal is “mint with mint tag” so you know precisely what kind of lemming or snail it is. Most listings also assure a “smoke-free environment” for the Beanie.
“Seriously, are you gay, son?”
I click through the Beanie Babies—when will he leave? “I’m just looking for something, Dad.”
“You lookin’ for something at that dance last night, too?” Dad puts his hand on the wall, leans close. “Looking for some poonanti?”
“I’m sorry, what?” I stare at the bridge of Dad’s nose.
“You know what I mean, Jeremy.”
“Well, um, I guess…but no. No ‘poonanti’ last night, Dad.”
“Hmm.” He straightens up, gesticulates. “You want some, though, don’t you? Don’t you have that drive?”
I grunt. It’s not a manly grunt—more like a grunt/sigh. Dad disapproves.
“You know, you’re a real depressed kid, you know that?” He turns away, pacing. “Back in the eighteen hundreds, any kid as surly as you, his father would take him to the whorehouse and that would be the end of it. The kid would come back grinning. The madams, they were very familiar with the process—they’d make sure young men got girls with no diseases who’d show them how to perform.”
I’m ignoring Dad. This tie-dyed Jerry Garcia Beanie Baby is worth $71! How did these things get so expensive? I knew there was a craze years ago, but I thought it had died out.
“Don’t you know your Aunt Linda has, like, ten thousand of those things?” Dad asks.
“Really?”
“Yeah. She’s got a whole atticful. Hang out with her more often. Keep her away from me.” He smiles.
“Does she have the expensive ones?” I re-sort the Beanie Babies by price: $9,999.99 for a lot of 1,600.
“Jeremy, c’mon, you can’t expect me to know too much about stuffed cats—oh, Miller Time.”
Yeah, Dad actually says “Miller Time” when he decides to get a beer before watching a football game (college only, “less steroids”). He leaves for the kitchen; I continue the search for a real squip. I can’t find anything, but damn there’s a lot of money in Beanie Babies: $8,500 for 252 Nectar the Hummingbirds (“I am a full-time Beanie dealer and investor who
sells worldwide. This is NOT my hobby. This is how I try to earn a living and support my four children.…There are whole states in this country where you won’t find 252 NECTAR! THAT’S BECAUSE I HAVE THEM ALL!”), $222 for ten Mom-E Bears. It’s insane. I note which Beanies are most popular—any kind of actual bear is a big draw, as are creatures sponsored by hotels or baseball teams. I used to be into baseball cards, so I slip easily into this world of collectibles, this mentality where the only thing that’s important is the planet you control and analyze and understand. I look at Beanie Babies for an hour. For the first time all day, I don’t think about the squip.
When Mom gets home, I ask her if Aunt Linda might be interested in having me come by to clean her gutters, which I promised to do last year, but forgot. Mom asks why—I tell her it’s because I’m a nice guy who loves my family. She gets in touch with Aunt Linda and we make arrangements for next week.
“Jeremiah!”
I’m at Aunt Linda’s on a Sunday afternoon. In my back pocket, next to the ratty and overused Humiliation Sheet from Friday (a bad day, but I found out Christine’s favorite band is Portishead and we talked about that at rehearsal, since Jake wasn’t around), there’s a list of Beanie Babies I’m after. I hate my aunt and no matter how you slice it, I’m going to need some money to buy a squip. It’s not right, but it is, really.
“Come in!” Aunt Linda ushers me through the screen door. She’s Mom’s sister; her husband, Ray, isn’t around, since he’s a fire watcher in Montana—he’d rather sit alone in a giant tower and look for forest fires ten hours a day than live with Aunt Linda.
“Oh! Oh!” Click. Whirr. She takes a picture of me shambling through her kitchen. “There goes the young handyman! My gosh.” Click. She’s got pictures of me vomiting, pictures of me naked peeing in pools…they all go on her refrigerator. “My darling nephew! Would you like some peach-ade?”
“No thanks, Aunt Linda.”
“Okay, well, you tell me if you change your mind.”
“I will. So should I go upstairs now?” I shift back and forth on the balls of my feet.
“Jeremiah! My goodness! You’re not going to talk to me? Look, I’m practically an old woman! I want to hear all about your school and your family and your handsome father.…” Aunt Linda pulls a stool up to the kitchen table and motions for me to sit on the milk crate that her cat Hiroshima is currently occupying. “Tell me, tell me!”
I sit on the crate, scooch up to the table. I can feel the skin of my butt being stamped into a checkerboard pattern. “Well, I hate school, Aunt Linda.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I’m not Cool and I can’t get with any girls. So I’m going to be purchasing a supercomputer that will reside in my brain and tell me how to be Cool all the time.”
“Oh, goodness.” Aunt Linda flips her wrist at me, her orange hair twitching under the shade-filtered light. “You are such a comedian, Jeremiah. Have you ever thought about doing standup?”
“No.”
“My husband, God bless him wherever his skinny ass is, would have made the most terrible standup comedian. But I would have been quite excellent.”
“Huh.”
“I’m too old now, of course.” Aunt Linda smiles. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Now, why is that, Jeremiah?”
“I don’t know. Can I please clean your gutters now?”
“Let’s talk more about you not having a girlfriend.”
“Let’s not.”
“My my. Testy testy.” My aunt gets up and paces around her table, then pulls a long metal pole out from behind her refrigerator.
“Let’s see how you like this, huh, testy boy!” She starts poking me with the pole! She’s six feet away jabbing it at me! It looks like there’s tetanus on that pole! I get up very quickly.
“Aunt Linda!”
“Oh, I’m just having a little fun.” She pokes again, then stands with the pole at her side, like a pygmy.
“Ahm, I really think I should go up and take a look at your gutters now.”
“All right, Jeremiah, you take yourself upstairs.” Aunt Linda jabs more as I move out of the kitchen and up to the second floor of her house, which smells like the rim of a big bottle of milk. On the second floor—she still has that spear—I mount a thin stepladder that’s attached to the ceiling by, like, one screw from the 1950s and clamber through a trap door into the attic.
“You okay up there?” Aunt Linda asks from below, her face a fat pudding pie.
“Yep.”
“You know what you have to do?”
“Go outside and clean the leaves out of your gutter?”
“Yes! Get to it like a good boy. And behave yourself!” Aunt Linda shakes her pole at me—I think it used to be part of an outdoor clothes-hanging apparatus. I close the trapdoor on her fearsome image. God.
I find a pull-down switch and light up the attic. It’s not like I have to look hard: sitting on a pyramid of newspapers by a pile of Time magazines are a couple of hundred Beanie Babies. I pull the list out of my pocket and start cataloging.
Nectar the Hummingbird! A full set of Asian Pacific Bears! This is the frickin’ motherlode! I can’t believe it. I grab enough Babies to net a clean $500 on eBay—that’s enough—I can furnish the last $100 myself—and carry them, cradling them in my arms, over to the attic window. Now comes the tough part: getting the Beanies out and nestling them into the lone tree in Aunt Linda’s yard, where I can climb up and rescue them later. Ideally, I’d rather not have them fall to the ground and lie there for any period of time…that’s sure to downgrade their value.
I press my back against the window and use my coccyx to work it open. Maple is the first to go; I give him a light toss about 15 feet and he lands right in a crook of the tree, as if he were having sex with it. I’m awesome. I throw out Nectar the Hummingbird, the Patriot LF bear, Prickles the Hedgehog, and Prinz von Gold, but I’m not as lucky with them; they fall right to the grass below. I hope Aunt Linda doesn’t notice any bear suicides from her kitchen window; I bet not; she’s probably torturing Hiroshima with her pole/Jeremy goad.
Once I get the desired Beanies vacated, I clamber through the window and hoist myself onto the roof. It’s beautiful up here; any time you can get high in New Jersey it’s beautiful because the country is so flat, you can see everything—or at least, Piscataway. It looks natural, like Mother Earth intended for Jersey to be colonized by suburbanites. She grew roads and power lines to welcome us. The tops of her trees and our houses mesh like lichen.
I turn to the gutters; they’re less pleasant, filled with leaves so old and black they look like they came from the bottom of a lake in a horror movie. There’s no way I’m touching them with my hands, so I pull off a shoe and use it to dredge them up and push them down to the lawn below; making sure no leaf refuse hits my Beanie Babies. Plat plat plat. It’s forty minutes of numbing work and then I’m done, with the sun setting on me and me sitting on the aluminum siding, taking a drag from an imaginary cigarette. I’m accomplished.
I get back through the window, avoid Aunt Linda as best I can, say my good-byes, and make off with a backpack full of Beanie Babies. (I have to duck down and walk like an army commando when I pass the kitchen window so she won’t see.) Once Mom picks me up, everything is secure, and I’ve even managed to take a digital photo of the Beanies sitting on a bush for my eBay sales shot. Mom asks me how it went, and I tell her I’m always cool with doing family stuff.
Even without the squip, a week later I discover one way to be Cool—walking around with lots of money. Heading into the Menlo Park Mall with $640 in Beanie Baby-derived cash (more than expected! I put them online Saturday, priced them to move by Tuesday, got payment Wednesday, got the eBay ATM card Friday, withdrew the money Saturday) I feel like Jake Dillinger must feel when he strides across the lawn to Christine’s house, knowing he’s going to get some. I’m in control of everything. Even if I don’t find a squip at this Payl
ess Shoes, at least I’ll have wised up to the joys of sauntering around with lots of cash.
Michael drove me here; he’s off in HMV listening to music in one of those kiosks where one of the buttons (or headphones) is always busted. I head to the first Payless Shoes I can find: no customers, briskly over-air-conditioned, no attendants to help you try shoes on, and that familiar ’80s black-yellow-and-orange Payless color scheme. There’s one cashier, an Asian teenager. This might be it!
“Hi, I’m looking for Rack,” I approach.
“Yeah.”
“You’re him?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Rack has the Asian Wolverine haircut with the two oversize bangs, bleached, hanging down across his eyes; his hair is short and buzzed in the back. He’s probably eighteen, although I tend to think kids my age are eighteen because I have such a warped self-image; he could be fifteen. He’s not from Middle Borough, though; I’d have him cataloged.
“Yeah, hi, um, I got sent here by, ah, the…” Jesus, I never got the guy’s name. “By the guy over at B. Bowl-Town lanes. You know who I mean?”
“Oh yes.” Rack smiles, polishing a shoe. “My cousin. So you’re looking for a squip, right?”
“Yeah.” I bite my lip, duck my head into my neck, wary.
“Well, do you have the money?”
“Sure.” I grip the wad tightly in my pocket.
“What’s your name, then?”
“Jeremy.”
“Well, all right, Jeremy. I’m gonna be your guide today. C’mon.” Rack gives a well-toothed grin, shakes my hand, and opens a gate that I didn’t even know was a gate in the Payless countertop. I step through into his world: exotic topless calendars on the inside of shelves that hold shoe polish and extra laces.
“The squips got moved in back with the legit merchandise,” Rack explains. “We got a bunch of new ones in and we’ve had lots of people asking for them so we had to secure them, y’know? Let’s walk.” We leave the counter unattended and venture back into the Payless inventory hangar, full of shoes in boxes that lack the insignias and celebrity faces that get you to buy them in the first place.