The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [60]
“Lieutenant, sir, there’s never been an uprising like it. And the Powdered Sugar cluster bombs at the end of the war were an insult to ToasTron and all its fair citizens. The final buttering wasn’t war—it was slaughter.”
. . . Roger, I just don’t get sci-fi. How do you guys read this stuff? This buttering ends right here, thank you.
Shawn
Dearest Blair . . .
Boy did the universe hand us Staplers a bone today.
Here’s what happened: for once, Roger the alcoholic train wreck decided to actually come in to work on time. He’s been on the bottle big time lately, like we don’t notice—divorce or some depressing middle-age trip—Pete’s been this close to firing him. So first Roger went and spent a half-hour reading the paper in the men’s room, and then he walked around the store for a while looking more like a homeless person who found a Staples outfit in a Dumpster than a Staples employee. Then he went into the office, scrawled a letter or something, then told us he had to take his dog to the vet (which, okay, you can’t really get mad at him about, but it was Dell Day and poor Fahad had to do the brunt of the loading work even though he has the muscle tone of a Jerry’s Kid).
So Roger went out to his car, and then he came inside maybe five minutes later and he smelled like . . . the worst sort of . . . shit . . . like a decaying fecal poo monster, and he was covered in the stuff. I was in the staff room and smelled it before I saw it and said, “Roger, what the hell?” and he said his dog had just shat all over the inside of his car, and so I said, “So, then, don’t come back inside here, and jeez, take a shower!” He used the staff phone to call his vet and . . . I mean, Blair, you should have seen the phone afterwards—it needed an exorcism. You remember Pigpen from Charlie Brown—how he always had that little vermin cloud following him? Well, that was the phone. Later on, we ended up dousing it with half a bottle of Windex, which fried its circuits, so now we don’t have a staff phone—but I’m getting off topic.
So Roger went driving off in his shit heap (ha!) and I was standing there looking at the phone like it was a six- hundred-pound circus freak with a two-hundred-pound goiter when I noticed that Roger had left something behind on the counter. What, I thought, is this? It was (get this) a novel Roger has been writing. Can you believe it? Him, boozehound loser, writing a book. And he’d really gone to town on it, using all the products we flog here to make documents look better (acetate cover sheets; oak-grained binding strip; forty-pound cream vellum stock . . .), but it still looked like homework. And what, you might ask, is the book called? Again, you won’t believe it: Glove Pond. Yes, I can hear you thinking, what the hell is that? And you would be correct. At the bottom, on the footer, it reads: “ Glove Pond, by Roger Thorpe. Currently negotiating representation.” Gee, Roger, all of New York must be clamouring for this little Pulitzer contender.
Blair . . . it’s the worst book ever written. It’s about these two university people, a married couple, who do nothing but drink Scotch and shriek at each other, and then a young writer and his wife come over for dinner and they get sucked into the downward failure spiral of fighting and shrieking, and there’s a mysterious child who the professors either do or do not have and . . . well, I do have to hand it to Roger, I read through the whole thing as far as he’d written it. But here’s the best (and worst) part, Blair: part of it is set here at Staples.
Can you bear it?
One of the characters works here—it’s basically Roger, disguised as someone else—and he talks about how much he hates coming to work here (touché to that!), and I have to say, it’s weird seeing your everyday