The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [0]
a novel
Douglas Coupland
Contents
Cover
Title
About the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint
Q: Brother, are you headed home?
A: Brother, aren’t we always headed home?
—Question used by Masons to identify themselves among strangers
Roger
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age—regardless of how they look on the outside— pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don’t want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cast members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It’s universal.
Do you want out? Do you often wish you could be somebody, any, body, other than who you are—the you who holds a job and feeds a family—the you who keeps a relatively okay place to live and who still tries to keep your friendships alive? In other words, the you who’s going to remain pretty much the same until the casket?
There’s nothing wrong with me being me, or with you being you. And in the end, life’s pretty tolerable, isn’t it? Oh, I’ll get by. We all say that. Don’t worry about me. Maybe I’ll get drunk and go shopping on eBay at eleven at night, and maybe I’ll buy all kinds of crazy crap I won’t remember I bid on the next morning, like a ten-pound bag of mixed coins from around the world or a bootleg tape of Joni Mitchell performing at the Calgary Saddle-dome in 1981.
I used the phrase “a certain age.” What I mean by this is the age people are in their heads. It’s usually thirty to thirty-four. Nobody is forty in their head. When it comes to your internal age, chin wattles and relentless liver spots mean nothing.
In my mind, I’m always thirty-two. In my mind, I’m drinking sangria beachside in Waikiki; Kristal from Bakersfield is flirting with me, while Joan, who has yet to have our two kids, is up in our hotel room fetching a pair of sunglasses that don’t dig into her ears as much. By dinnertime, I’m going to have a mild sunburn, and when I return home from that holiday, I’ll have a $5K salary bonus and an upgraded computer system waiting for me at my office. And if I dropped fifteen pounds and changed gears from sunburn to suntan, I could look halfway okay. Not even okay: hot.
Do I sound regretful?
Okay, maybe a bit.
Okay, let’s face it—I’m king of the exit interview. And Joan was a saint. My curse is that I’d rather be in pain than be wrong.
I’m sad at having flubbed the few chances I had to make bold strokes in life. I’m learning to cope with the fact that it was both my laziness and my useless personal moral code that cheated me out of seizing new opportunities. Listen to me: flubbed chances and missed opportunities: I gloss past them both in almost the same breath. But there was no gloss when it was all coming down. It’s taken me what—five years?—to simply get used to the idea that I’ve blown things. I’m grieving, grieving hard-core. The best part of my life is gone, and what remains is whizzing past so quickly I feel like I’m Krazy-Glue’ed onto a mechanical bull of a time machine.
I can’t even escape in my dreams. My dreams used to be insulated by pink fibreglass, but maybe two jobs ago my sense of failure ripped a hole through the insulation and began wrecking them. I dreamed it was that Monday afternoon in the 1990s when my high school buddy turned vampire stockbroker, Lars, phoned me a week after my mother’s funeral—a week!—and told me to put everything and anything I might have inherited into Microsoft stock. I told him our friendship was over. I told him he was a parasite. And if Microsoft had sunk into the earth’s crust and vanished, I might have actually forgiven Lars, but that didn’t happen. Their sack-of-shit operating system conquered the planet, and my $100,000 inheritance from my mother, put into Microsoft, would currently be worth a smidge over $13 million.
I get the Microsoft dream about once a week now.
But okay, there’s some good stuff in my life. I love my spaniel, Wayne, and he loves me. What a name for a dog, Wayne