Pirates of the Retail Wasteland (11 page)

What bothers me most about
The Slime That Ate Cleveland
is that I don’t understand the main character’s motivation. If I were a city-eating slime, I would probably be more inclined to eat Anaheim, California, or Aspen, Colorado. Someplace touristy and clean. Or maybe I’d head to Little Italy in New York, which I assume would be delicious. I would certainly not start anywhere in Ohio.

The night before we took over the Wackfords,
The Slime That Ate Cleveland
was on
The Late Movie with Count Dave
on WOTT, a station loved throughout the entire metro area for its tireless devotion to low-rent crap. On Friday nights, they have this guy called Count Dave who dresses up as a vampire and introduces old horror movies. Before the commercial breaks, he comes on and makes fun of the movie. My dad watches him religiously.

The Slime That Ate Cleveland
sucked. Really, really sucked. And not even in that “so bad it’s funny” way. The slime just looked like chocolate syrup, the dialogue was boring, and they tended to spend a very long time showing scientists doing experiments that never seemed to end in an explosion. However, I found that it had exactly three redeeming qualities.

Number 1: Saying halfway through that I couldn’t sit through it gave me an excuse to go up to bed. My parents had only been watching bits of it while they worked on cleaning out the fridge, but they couldn’t blame me. Hence, I was able to get to bed fairly early.

Number 2: The first guy to get eaten by the slime looked a lot like Coach Hunter. In fact, the first guy to see the creature in the movies Count Dave shows almost always looks like Coach Hunter.

Number 3: It gave me a great idea for something to say during the movie. I could describe Cedar Avenue as “The Slime That Ate Cornersville Trace.”

Just a few hours later, I was out of bed, showered, dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, and trying to figure just how the hell one goes about tying a necktie. In the end, I just left it hanging loosely. I wandered downstairs to the closet in the den, where I found Dad’s stash of motivational posters. He’d put them all over the house a year or so before, including in the bathroom, but I’d taken them down myself. Every now and then he’d try to sneak a new one up, but I never let them last long. I gathered them up, along with the video camera.

Just before I left, I got Coach Hunter’s stapler out of my backpack and slipped it into my pocket.

It was pitch-black out, and remarkably quiet. Most of the time, when I stood in my driveway, I could hear the dull hum of cars on Eighty-second Street or up on Cedar Avenue, but at four o’clock on Saturday morning, the only sound was the wind. Somewhere off in the distance, I thought I heard a train whistle, which must have been coming from a long way away—I didn’t know of any train tracks between Cornersville and Preston that were still in use. As I crossed August Avenue, it suddenly occurred to me that this was really the first time I’d been out alone when it was dark. It was a little bit scary, frankly. I mean, everyone knows what to do if a drug dealer comes out from behind a mailbox and offers you some crack, but there are no commercials or after-school specials about what to do in the event of a ghost attack.

I’d only gotten about a block, though, when I heard Anna coming up the road. She was carrying a large fern, and hurried to catch up to me.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” She smiled. “All set?”

“Everything but the necktie,” I said. “I couldn’t figure it out.”

She giggled and put down the plant. “Here,” she said. “I can do it.”

She reached out for the zipper of my coat and started unzipping it, and I nearly died. Call me pathetic, but even though it was only my coat, in some small way, Anna, a girl, was undressing me. It was all I could do to stay standing up.

She got my coat undone, grabbed the ends of my tie, started wrapping them around each other, and a few seconds later had them worked into a regular Windsor knot, or whatever you call knots in neckties. Then she pulled the end to tighten it, grabbed it to pull me closer, and kissed me on the nose.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” I asked.

“My mom’s in Europe a lot,” she said, “and my dad couldn’t tie his own tie to save his life.”

“You don’t kiss his nose, though, right?”

“Nope.” She smiled. “I only do that for cute pirates.” She kissed it again, then stepped back and said, “Is that a stapler in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

“Stapler,” I said. “But I’m happy to see you, too.”

Between the wind hitting my cheeks and the blushing, my face must have been as red as my necktie. She picked her plant back up, and we proceeded north toward the Quickway. By the time we got to Cedar Avenue, the snow was coming down pretty hard.

Brian and Edie were at the Quickway already, standing under the lights by the gas pumps in a way that made them look strangely glamorous. Brian, dumbass that he was, wasn’t wearing a coat, just a sport jacket over a shirt and tie. Edie was wearing some sort of shawl over a long black dress. They were both shivering. There were another fern and a filing cabinet sitting next to them.

“Avast!” Brian shouted.

“Yo ho ho,” I replied as we walked up to join them. Brian grabbed a stapler out of his pocket as though he were drawing a gun and pointed it at me. I pulled Coach Hunter’s stapler out of my own pocket and pointed it back at him.

“Careful!” said Edie. “If some cop sees you doing that and thinks it’s a gun, he’ll shoot you, like, fifty times before you hit the ground!”

“Oh,” said Brian, putting the stapler back in his pocket.

“Check out what I brought,” said Edie, opening the filing cabinet. She pulled out a sheet of fabric that turned out to be a skull and crossbones pirate flag.

“Perfect!” said Anna. “Someone can wave it as we walk up to the store.”

“Any sign of Troy yet?” I asked.

“Nothing so far,” said Brian. “You want to go ahead and start filming?”

I nodded, and he pulled out a camera from his bag and turned it on.

He pointed the camera at me first.

“Mr. Harris,” he said.

“That’s Captain Harris,” Anna said with a giggle.

“Fine. Captain Harris, how do you feel?”

Coming up with original questions was clearly not Brian’s strong suit.

“Well,” I said, “Cedar Avenue is sort of turning into the slime that ate Cornersville Trace. It’s been too long since we had a good piracy around here.”

He turned the camera to Anna. “How about you, First Mate Brandenburg?”

“Cornersville was designed to have a centralized population,” said Anna. “The new downtown and the subdivisions around it are an example of poor city planning at best, and the very thought of replacing Sip with a chain of stores that are more like an office than a coffee shop is a sad cultural loss for the town.”

It sounded a little rehearsed, honestly. But it was pretty professional.

He turned over to Edie. “And First Mate Scaduto?”

I wasn’t sure you could have two first mates, but I didn’t bring it up.

“The revolution is coming,” she said. “Soon the people will control the means of production.”

I assumed we’d be editing out a lot of Edie’s scenes.

Just then, we heard someone shouting “Ahoy!” and turned around to see Troy leaning out the window of an old blue sedan. Andy was sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Morning,” Troy said, climbing out of the car and walking up to us. “You guys ready?”

“Sure,” I said. “Can you follow us and take some shots of us walking up?”

“No problem. Unless I freeze to death.”

He took the camera from Brian and walked along backward in front of us as we marched up to the Wackfords, carrying ferns and a filing cabinet. In addition to keeping you from being able to tell whether sandwiches glowed in the dark, the lights in the gas station provided perfect fill lighting for the shots.

Andy drove on ahead, and we trudged down Cedar Avenue through the early-morning snow. I could practically hear marching music playing in my head. It was just four of us, plus a guy with a camera, but I felt like we were an armada closing in on the enemy ship.

As we got up closer to the store, Brian shouted, “Wackfords!” and whacked me in the arm.

“Not anymore it isn’t,” I said. And we all socked him back—that’s one of the rules of the Wackfords game. If someone calls out “Wackfords” when there isn’t one in sight, everyone present gets to whack that person.

And there wasn’t a Wackfords—it was
our
place now. An office. As we walked past the sign and cut into the parking lot, I waved the skull and crossbones high.

In the parking lot, Andy was waiting for us, standing beside the open trunk of his car. “Check it out,” he said. “I got you two card tables and a watercooler.”

“Card tables?” Anna asked. “Will they look all right as desks?”

“Sure,” said Andy, “I have some tablecloths to cover them up with. They’ll look decent, and you can pack ’em up and leave pretty quickly if you have to.”

“Sweet.”

Brian and I helped unload all the gear from the back of Andy’s car, which sported a bumper sticker that said
I’VE WORKED EVERYWHERE, MAN
. Then Troy filmed Edie running the skull and crossbones up the flagpole attached to the building near the door.

“I claim this vessel to be the property of the HMS Pirate Ship,” she declared. This was exciting stuff—I’d never taken over a building before! Few among us have, I imagine, and even fewer have done so in a bloodless coup.

We waited around on the patio for a minute or so, filming more shots of the flag waving in the snow, while Andy got the store unlocked and shut off all the security thingies; then we boarded the vessel, as it were. Brian and I set up the card tables right in front of the main counter, and Edie set the filing cabinet on top of the condiment bar. Then Anna and I erected the watercooler right next to it. I loved that we had a watercooler. We could gather around it and talk about television.

The ferns were set up in front of the desks, which helped a lot to create the office effect. Then I unrolled the motivational posters and put them up to cover anything that had the Wackfords logo. Over the menu board behind the counter, I put up a poster that showed a pebble falling into the water, underneath which were the words
A SMALL THING MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE
. It didn’t look remotely out of place; I could see a day coming when Wackfords would be making their own line of motivational posters to put up in the stores.

In all of fifteen minutes, we were done. We pulled a couple of chairs over to set up behind the desks, and the takeover was complete.

It didn’t look much like an accounting and midlevel management strategies office, in all honesty. It looked more like a Wackfords with some new posters on the wall and some tables set up. I figured we could make it look better during editing.

“All right,” said Troy, handing the camera to me. “We’d better get the store set up for real.”

“You can’t!” said Edie. “We’ve taken you over!”

“Yeah,” said Troy. “But we’ve gotta get the machines fired up and the pastries unwrapped anyway, so we can serve the people who make it past you guys. Unless you’re threatening our lives or something. Are you?”

I shook my head. “Nah.” I knew we couldn’t halt sales completely, after all.

“Okay,” said Troy. “You guys want some coffee, or what?”

“No way!” said Edie. “We can’t drink Wackfords coffee!”

“Oh, come off it!” said Anna. “You won’t die. It’s not poison.”

“It’s not like I’m asking you to pay for it,” said Troy. “You can say you plundered it.”

“Just as long as nobody has any of it on camera,” I said. “Stash your cups out of sight.”

“Arr!” said Brian.

I didn’t care where it came from—it was five in the morning. I wanted coffee. The fact that we had it in plentiful supply was awfully convenient.

I wandered around, getting some establishing shots. The snow was still coming down hard outside, and the snow directly in front of the store glowed green from the light in the Wackfords sign. Off in the distance, the blue Mega Mart sign shone like some sort of lighthouse.

“Well, now what?” asked Edie while the coffee brewed.

“When do you guys open?”

“About half an hour,” said Andy. “When you open, the first hour is usually about the same ten people every day, but it’s different on Saturday, especially when it’s snowing. We won’t get many people this morning. No one’s on their way to work, they’re just going to the mall, and that’s not open until ten. We’ll pick up in the early afternoon, when they’re done shopping, if the snow isn’t too bad.”

“Well, that’s just as well,” said Anna. “If we don’t have too many people to deal with, we can focus more on making the movie.”

“But we have to make every customer count,” I said. “Every scene has to be good. We should end up agonizing over what we have to take out, not just patching together a few good scenes.”

When the coffee was ready, I drank mine black, which I was starting to get used to doing. It did seem oddly, well,
fancier
than the Sip stuff—not as much of the metallic taste of the coffee urn, and not as earthy. I didn’t like it as much, either, but it woke me up, which was the important thing. Even Edie sipped hers, though she loaded it up with organic milk. Brian used heavy cream and about half a bottle of hazelnut syrup.