The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [61]
Well, whatever.
What happened next is I took Roger’s oeuvre over to the copy department and used my coffee break to disassemble the book and make twenty copies. It was a lot of work, and it reminded me of my two years in hell doing nighttime copier shift.
And then the power went out—a seasonal windstorm— always fun because we get to herd out the customers, lock the doors and slack off. Which is exactly what we did, and then we headed into the staff room and read Glove Pond.
Did I say it was awful? It’s horrific. After a few minutes, we all began doing Glove Pond impersonations. Kind of like:
Steve: Gloria, hand me some Scotch.
Gloria: No, because I’m drinking the Scotch.
Steve: Let’s both drink Scotch, and then we can say witty things to each other.
Gloria: I hate you.
Steve: I hate you too, you hag.
Gloria: I throw my Scotch in your face.
Steve: I hate you.
Gloria: Do we have more ice cubes?
Steve: I don’t think so.
Gloria: Where are our guests?
Steve: Let’s drink more Scotch.
After two hours, the power came back on, and we’d actually gotten pretty good at being Steve and Gloria. Around three o’clock, Roger returned to work, and he was a total basket case. He was wearing his old-model Staples shirt from a year and a half ago, before the new ones came out, and his hair had just been washed and gelled, but he looked like a street person with a totally deranged look in his eyes. Simon asked how his dog was, and Roger said he’s okay. It ate some of his kid’s chocolate (which is like poison to dogs), hence the merdei fication of Roger’s Hyundai.
That was when I heard Tracy shout across the store to Geoff in the copier area, “Storeroom, pass me some Scotch! I need some Scotch!”
Geoff shouted back, “It’s my Scotch, you fraud. Pour your own Scotch.”
Roger’s head perked up like a dog that hears his master’s engine approaching from three blocks away.
Jen was up at the till and called out over the PA system, “Gloria, we need a price check on Scotch,” to which Geoff PA’ed back, “Not for you, you old battle-axe.”
“Aren’t we being witty today?”
“You shrill witch.”
Of course we were all laughing—it was funny! And Jen and Geoff kept it going, too:
“You failure! You’re a failure of a teacher, and you can’t hold your liquor.”
“And you’re a failure as a woman, you Scotch-drinking, unwitty person, you.”
(Okay, I’m not getting the dialogue exactly right, but you get the picture.)
So what did Roger do? He turned purple is what he did. Obviously, we were all clustered at the ends of his aisle—the pen aisle—to gauge his reaction, and he went totally apeshit and picked up basket after basket of pens and slammed them down on the floor—tens of thousands of pens, Blair—it looked like blue, red and black hay.
Of course, nobody wanted to go near the guy. Would you? So after he’d completely trashed all the Bics, he leaned over to catch his breath. At this point, he could have pulled out an assault rifle and we wouldn’t have been surprised. But what did he do? He looked up and then started walking to the front of the store. The people on that end of the aisle quietly split apart, and Roger went up to one of the tills, stared at the gum rack for maybe fifteen seconds, selected a pack of melon-flavoured Bubblicious, pocketed it, then started walking to the staff door out back. Pete, who’d just then come in from that direction and had caught the tail end of all of this, screamed, “Roger, leave—now!”
And so Roger walked out of the store, surrounded by his invisible poo warp and carrying