Stickup
A short story
This short story appears in my new book Clare’s Boutique, which you can order here. It takes place in a late-nineties music store and has many musical references; I thought links to the music might benefit some readers. — Eric
I didn’t always make movies. For a few months after college I ran a small store in the Lowell, Massachusetts, suburb where I’d grown up. The store sat on a shuttered parcel I had inherited from my father, who had once owned a store there and had died that spring, as long expected. What did Slipt Disc offer the discerning consumer of the late 1990s? Appropriately, dead and dying things: used records, tapes, and CDs, with a specialty in rap, the music of my childhood. There was also some blues and folk that I had whimsically included in my bulk order from a similar joint in Haverhill that was failing. I played it a lot on the store Hi-Fi. I liked Bo Carter’s raunch and Jean Ritchie’s chaste soprano and how Lead Belly sang that when he woke up in the morning, blues was all in his bread (got it). Fresh to me, the old music seemed to carry me along like a bindle to the future.
That future, as I saw it, was “the law.” I’d been admitted to a Midwestern law school with a partial, need-based grant and planned to start, on a delayed basis, in the spring semester. I’d found it oddly gratifying at my father’s wake when Mr. Hitch, a libertarian social-studies teacher with whom I’d once butted heads like rhinos over gun control, congratulated me on my practical career choice.
“Good for you, Clare. Wish I’d done that. I know your dad would be proud.”
He was, but Mrs. Greene, my favorite English teacher, showed up at the wake with a different opinion.
“Do you want to be a lawyer?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t go to law school if you don’t want to be a lawyer.”
She bear hugged me and, in addition to apologizing for my father’s death, muttered in my ear: “You’ve changed.”
A teacher’s curse if ever there was one—I wanted to bolt like Fredo! She must have been so disappointed. She’d favored me as a student writer. I reminded her, she once confided, of her hero, Lowell-boy Jack Kerouac, and, by extension, of her own freewheeling days in 1950s Hoboken. Jack Kerouacs don’t go to law school.
I was speechless but could hear my father’s ghost rise up in my defense. She just wants nobody to grow up like she didn’t. It was a view he held of most teachers, and I’m not sure my mother was an exception. If I was becoming a practical man—if I was going to dodge the shoals of the whole “Live Your Dream” ethos painted across the high-school theater department’s long concrete wall—I owed it to my father and these kinds of hard-nosed sentiments. I knew that. I was grateful for it. But then why the recurring nightmares?
I had another one after the wake. I was standing (naked, of course) at a chalkboard at the front of a crowded law-school lecture hall. Mrs. Greene rose from her seat near the back. She pointed at me with her claw and released a screech that sounded exactly like—spoiler alert—zombified Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). The next morning I stared in the mirror and tried to imagine myself, grayed and wrinkled, as a law-firm partner at the advanced age of fifty. Had it all been worth it, this life of hours (est. total: 55,000, spread out over twenty-six years) billed for commerce?
As you may have gathered, the store wasn’t a big part of my plans. It was just a holding place while my mother and I mourned. (No wallower, my sister had driven straight from the lawyer’s office to her flight back to Madison and her grad-student hovel.) My nominal goal was to build up the store and sell it for a small profit before I started law school. If I was lucky, I would gin up enough cash to keep me in pizzas and escapist trips to the movies for a year. In the meantime, I would survey my customers for girlfriends. Or at least a date, if only to distract me.
One day, in an unpleasant break from the store’s monotony, Uncle Mike, who had skipped my father’s funeral, dropped by with flowers.
“Rich yet?”
“You made a killing.”
“We lost a killing. Repeatedly.” He smiled his everyone’s-always-screwing-me smile as he slid the vase onto the counter. “People won’t come here for anything.”
“I would’ve paid anything for your stickers.”
“You didn’t have anything.”
“Still don’t.”
“And soon you’ll have less.”
He looked about my woefully barren store like he was sizing up a dog turd to fling at me.
“Remember when we used to have candy and toys all up and down here? All the way up: up, up to the ceiling. All sorts of goodies.”
“Baseball cards, too,” I said, to jolt him.
It was a sore point, the reason my father had fired him. Before that break—a more definitive rupture than it seemed at the time—the store had been Uncle Mike’s, or seemed to be because he ran it day-to-day. My father was buried in his real work, as an actuary for the auto-insurance company. He didn’t much like it but felt it was normal, as in typical or to be expected, to dislike your job. Meanwhile, Uncle Mike, who palpably did like his job, paced the aisles like a panther, aggressively hawking a fantastic assortment of comics, stickers, cards, hobby kits, magic tricks, tin robots, college banners, sports paraphernalia, earth clay, penny candy (“Chinese” gum), gags—you name it. To us kids, it was Uncle Mike’s stuff. Why didn’t he take it all home for himself? Or live here? (Depending on your age, you may need to extrapolate from Minecraft to grasp my nostalgia. This type of shop, with its avalanche of boyish kids’ stuff, is gone now—vanished, except maybe in Vermont.)
To my surprise, none of this splendor made money. And after a while, Uncle Mike had brought on his crafty “associate” Lenny, who cooked up a good cop, bad cop scheme to screw little kids out of their baseball-card wealth with dirty trades. A boy came in with a Yaz, and Lenny laid right into him.
“I don’t know what daddy said but that’s a second-year card. Practically worthless.”
“Best Sox player ever,” Uncle Mike interjected.
“What about Ted Williams?” the kid asked.
“Or Cy Young,” Lenny said.
“The Babe,” the kid said.
“I’m an idiot,” Uncle Mike said. “Forget I breathe.”
Eventually they beat the kid’s Yaz down so far he was willing to trade for a Steve Lyons rookie, which really was worthless.
“Screwed myself again,” Lenny said, while the kid was in earshot.
“You can’t help it. No one can. Why do I try?”
I’d watched this play out a few times. Lyons for Yaz. Yaz for Mantle. Mantle for a ’62 Maris. The heady climax came with a failed Ty Cobb “Bat Off Shoulder” deal. The grandfather had the wits to step in (after all, it was his card), and he reported it to my father via Mr. Odell, our neighbor, at a V.F.W. spaghetti dinner. That night my father cornered me in the kitchen and pumped me for details. The next day he fired both men, said he wanted them out of the store, pronto. Uncle Mike mounted a belated defense from behind the counter.
“You’re so self-righteous. Your whole business is arbitrage. And now you’re mad because me and Lenny do it better?”
“I can’t have this stink. Mikey, you’re done.”
Now I knew whose store it really was: my father’s and, at one remove, mine. This brought me little immediate joy, though, because that night at dinner my father was still fuming.
“This is how he thanks me!” he shouted, and then blurted out a family secret that he’d held in for years but would now speak of freely till the day he died, so that Uncle Mike and all around him would think about it when they heard his name. “Clarence Renault: What do we think of a deli clerk who swipes hams from his elderly boss’s beleaguered grocery store and then trades them out of a pickup truck for drugs? Is that a good man? Is that someone we’d like to emulate?”
“No, sir.”
“I gave him that job and he screwed me!” His eyes blazed at me.
“Clare didn’t do it,” my mother pleaded.
“Yeah, Dad. Lay off,” my sister said. “And language: please,” she added, before looking me dead in the eye and gratuitously calling me a shithead again.
To replace Uncle Mike and Lenny, my father hired a recent high-school grad whose probity had impressed him at a Rotarian of the Month luncheon. He let me help that dope after school, my sweet reward for ratting.
~
Incidentally, my father would not have liked that I’d returned to open a store on the old site and scout girls there. Illness and work had stranded him, he said, in this defunct hog town and he’d move back to his classier, seaside hometown of Hingham in a flash if he could. That his antipathy extended to local girls became clear one night during high school, when my girlfriend Dana dumped me in a baffling way and I returned home in tears to tell all. (I was abnormally obliging and confiding for a teenager.)
“She doesn’t want to see me again. Not only that. She said she never was my girlfriend. Which is nuts. We made bracelets to prove it. Look.”
I rolled up my rugby shirt’s sleeve.
“It’s a fine bracelet, son.” He pinched my sleeve, rubbing the fabric between his fingers. “Nice shirt. Cotton?”
I wore that ugly shirt, khakis, and boat shoes to look like a preppy, my idea of how a boy impressed his date as on-the-way-up. This worked except when it spectacularly didn’t. I’d also seen a youthful picture of my father dressed like this, back in his Hingham salad days.
“I didn’t know you could even do that. Nullify a relationship. Like, at that low a level.”
He scrunched up his face, preparing, I feared, another lecture on the actuary’s tools. So helpful, he claimed, for assessing risk in every situation, not just gruesome death and maiming. After those lectures, it was like he had darkened a few more of the many light-framed doors that opened to my future. And yet his firm warnings brought a kind of relief that settled in later, the relief of decision. The same feeling rushed over me again years later when I dropped my Hollywood dreams and set my bow for law school.
When my father finally opened his mouth, it wasn’t an actuarial lecture that came out but something else constricting and familiar (and to the Bay Staters of today about as musty as hose-and-breeches): a Kennedy-family parable.
“Old Joe told the boys don’t run in Massachusetts. You’ll get tied down in petty local issues and Beacon Hill corruption. Even if you reached the Corner Office, they’d sink you. No, he told Jack and Bobby, start national and run for Congress. Stay above the fray.”
He gave me “a meaningful look.” I stood up shaking and pointing.
“Kennedy’s a snob! You’re a snob! Dana’s great—and I love her!”
My Hollywood dreams, I should explain, had not been trivial. I already had them back then, in high school. Spike Lee’s glorious early run from Do the Right Thing through Malcom X got me started. Then I signed up for the high-school musical, and in college I directed a stage play. The summer after junior year, I wrote a semi-autobiographical screenplay called Ghettoblaster. It concerned a nerdy white boy roaming Cape Cod blasting rap and his parents’ Beach Boys while having some preliminary success with a girl he met at the beach. (The girl was wholly fictitious.) I rode the creative high through the grueling manual process of formatting and binding it, then entered it in some costly and hopeless contests. Later, it embarrassed and disgusted me, all that vulgarity and naked self-disclosure. But I’d enjoyed writing it and knew I could do better. (Still like the title.)
~
The old bells jangled and a girl walked in—a ghost, of sorts, of the very night I just mentioned. Uncle Mike raised an eyebrow.
“Come on,” I said.
She was too young. Late high school, was my guess. Uncle Mike gave a take-what-you-can-get shrug and returned to flipping through CDs. He knew I was looking for a girl and supported it. It added zest and intrigue to his life.
“Is that your car outside?” the girl asked. She took off her sunglasses.
“I don’t have a car.”
“You’re blocking me in.”
“I’ll move it,” Uncle Mike said. He squeezed my shoulder and slid past me to the door.
The girl looked confused. “Aren’t you going too?”
“Why would I go?”
“Aren’t you, like, his nephew?”
“We aren’t making sense,” I said. But something else was coming into focus. “You look like Dana Burns. Are you little Katy?”
“In the flesh.”
This wasn’t entirely happy news. Even years later, the breakup with Dana left a taste. I still had our bracelet in my old room, somewhere in my desk.
“Can I get you something?”
She looked at her sandaled toes.
“How old are you? I mean, what grade are you in now?”
“Fourteen, if there was one. Only I’m not in school. I’m broke.”
There was something dusty and browned about her, like she’d camped all day and night on a beach. She looked like a smaller and damaged version of her sister, but no less attractive for that. I recalled the May weekend when I had kissed Dana for the first time, in their driveway while my “Creep” single played. That was Saturday night. On Sunday morning, I rose early and hiked from our house up the steep hill for a newspaper as spring charged forward all around me, leaves blooming full and verdant beneath a bright-blue sky and neon pollen dusting the streets. I thought (nerdly), “With this kiss under my belt, I’m not a boy anymore. I’m a young man!” And now, standing in my dusty store across from Dana’s kid sister, I suddenly felt like an old one.
“Actually,”—she looked up, round blue doe-eyes framed by black hair crossing smudged cheeks—“actually, I came here to rob you.”
“Will you?”
“I don’t think so. I thought that was your car.”
I pieced it together. She would trick me into leaving the store unattended, then raid the register—or fail to (it was locked). It was such a poor plan that I wanted to rescue her from it. I thought of another blues lyric. If it wasn’t for bad luck, she wouldn’t have no luck at all.
“We don’t have much,” I said. Our stock, like the Steve Lyons rookie, was proving damn near worthless. The best stuff, the blues and folk, didn’t sell at all. It made no sense. I had begun to suspect I wasn’t cut out for business.
The bells jangled again and Uncle Mike was back. He squinted and wagged his finger at Katy.
“I know you. What are you doing here really?”
I opened the register and removed its sole contents, a twenty I had slipped in there at the beginning of the week for good luck.
“Donations,” I said. “For the food pantry.”
“A shakedown.”
“It’s not a shakedown.”
Katy plucked the twenty from my fingers. “It’s a stickup.”
Uncle Mike paused to take this in. “You’re both crazy. I’m going to lunch.”
This meant Charlie’s Wings. Moments later, Uncle Mike reappeared on a stool over there and was biting into a fat drumstick while staring out the window back across the street at us.
“Some people don’t care how silly they look, as long as they can snoop,” Katy said.
I hoped she might linger and talk now, but after briefly picking through my counter rack of tapes, she left. Okay, I thought, I’ll call her. It was her sister’s number and carved in my brain (I could dial it even now). I counted back—one, two, three years—to calculate her age: nineteen or twenty to my twenty-two. Not so creepy.
“Crack whore,” Uncle Mike said when he got back.
“What do you know? That’s right: nothing.”
“She’s been a pest for years. Got hooked up with this fried-dough seller in Lowell. Round guy with a big black beard like Bluto. Had a truck and everything. Did a nice business at games and fairs but a whole lot better with this sideline. And Miss Katy here, the things she’s done.” He looked out the window. “Still pretty though.”
I followed my uncle’s gaze to the town center, where Katy had crossed the traffic and was examining, with apparent care, the cast-bronze Union solider.
“Very,” I said.
~
That night my mother made our favorite, chicken parmesan. She ate slowly, and I didn’t rush to leave her. I think I was the only person she’d seen all day at the house, except maybe Dayle the mailman in his one-doored blue Jeep. I considered asking her about Katy, but I’d heard enough for one day from Uncle Mike. Why did I need to pry into her troubles, if I wasn’t going to help her?
“Hand me those bills,” my mother said.
I nudged the Lazy Susan so the bills and her checkbook and pen were in front of her. She set her half-eaten pasta aside, removed this bit of work, and started in on it.
“You’ll be pushing off soon, then,” she said while signing a check.
“Not yet, Ma. It’s June. We have months.”
“Forgot that. You’re starting late.” She sealed the envelope with a lick. “Phone,” she said, then opened the next one. “Electric.” A bill or two later, she repeated, apropos of nothing, something that she’d said to me at least twice already, in slightly different ways, since the funeral. “Your father would be happy with your plans.”
As far as I knew, she was too. But then she was cut from an older cloth. It was rare that she’d second guess my father in our presence.
I covered her hand. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sick.”
“Good.” I scooped up the bills. My humble contribution was dropping them in our mailbox and raising the flag. “In a few years, I’ll be able to help you.”
“Won’t need it. You and your father had it built up that I’m desperate. I have seven more years, and then it’s my pension and off to St. Pete. All my girlfriends will be there. I even insured a grave. Bought it on a lark when I was a spring chicken.”
She smiled at this. Her habitual punning had confused and frustrated my father to no end.
~
I didn’t call Katy but thought about her so much that a week or so later she stopped by again. This time she brought flowers. I added them to the spooky stash growing on my counter. No store, not even a florist’s, should recall a mortuary.
“Where’s my twenty?”
“What twenty?”
She wandered the aisles, then returned to the counter and said, “Hey, guy, remember that time you saved me?”
“I wouldn’t call it that.”
“You did. I was drowning, and you pulled me out.”
“It was just a crummy pool. Anyone could have done it. Anyone would have done it, if I didn’t.”
“I couldn’t swim and no one else was paying attention. No doubt about it. You saved me.”
Maybe, but it had caused me trouble back home. “You could’ve slipped on that wet plastic and snapped your spine in a heartbeat,” my father said. “You know you only have one, right? There isn’t an extra.” “I was careful enough,” I said, part of me thinking, “You can’t think like that and do much,” while the rest of me agreed I’d been stupid.
“What kind of music do you like?” I asked her, to change the subject.
“Different stuff. Cibo Matto, Daniel Johnston. Have you heard Elliott Smith? I still like old-school rap.”
“Define ‘old school.’”
“That’s not old school. Doug E. Fresh is old school. Slick Rick is old school.”
“Ricky D is old school. Slick Rick is new school.”
“You’re right,” I admitted, impressed by her distinction. Slick Rick was Ricky D, just a new name. But a larger change had happened right around then. “I miss those days when rap was like a fun sport with colorful personas.”
“Like pro wrestling?”
“Yeah, but I liked the more serious stuff, too. Like ‘Fight the Power.’ Or the reflective ones on everyday topics. Do you know ‘Friends’ by Whodini?”
“Don’t become lovers until you are friends!” she paraphrased, impressing me again.
Some context for this banter may help. We didn’t have a lot of older rap fans in our town, which was nearly all white. Especially rare were older girl rap fans. It was only blind luck, in the shape of loving neighbors, that brought the music to me. The Odells, one of the town’s few Black families, lived across the street and joined us each Christmas Eve for cocktail wieners and Swedish meatballs, the exchange of gifts, and my mother’s rare electric-organ performance. The Odell twins, who were ten years older than me, knew about rap because they’d kept up their connections to East Cambridge, where they used to live. As rap blossomed in the mid-to-late eighties, they gave me a long train of inspiring cassettes, from Whodini’s Escape (1984) through De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989). I played them all the time. I even played my rap tapes while doing outdoor chores (though I had the good sense not to blast the more profane entries, such as N.W.A. or 2 Live Crew—my own additions to the collection—while painting the Odells’ porch). I introduced the music to my friends with great success, and even to Dana, who hated it. The impact went beyond my taste in music. More consequentially, the Odells’ gifts led me indirectly to Spike Lee, and to a deeper love for film.
“You don’t hear stuff like that anymore.”
“It is good. But you’re an old deaf man.”
“Def?”
“Deaf: D. E. A. F.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Find new music.”
“I did.”
I put on “Death Letter,” the Son House song about getting an early-morning letter that his wife had died. He visits the morgue and sees her on the cooling board. Then he goes home miserable. Finis.
“New to me,” she allowed, adding, “I like that sad song.”
I played another, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” about a man running out of time, and let it hang over us like a curse.
“Oooh, this gives me chills.”
“Me too.”
“It happened another time at Point Sebago,” she said, when the song was over.
That was the camp that the teacher families went to. My mother taught high-school French. Dana and Katy’s mother managed the special-needs room in the town-hall basement.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, though I had an idea.
“I was on a boat. A kayak. A storm blew up and I floated away. And you were there, with my moronic sister who ignored me. But you saw and rushed out to snag my rope.”
“They had lifeguards. I’m sure you would’ve been fine. It was just a little wind.”
“Not by my lights. There was an evil black cloud all across the lake.”
“How can a cloud be evil?” I asked, though knew how things can flash intent. In my father’s last months his medical equipment ensnared him. It was there to buffer him on a thin cushion of life, but it looked like a strangulation. Even the life-saving function seemed tainted by malice. It was as though it wanted to extend his pain. To stretch it out, like the long emerald tubing that connected him to the oxygen pump and chased him through the house.
“It can. It was,” she said, defending her cloud. “You saved me from that storm and from drowning.”
She picked up my Introduction to Contracts hornbook, which, with another touch of poor salesmanship, I left open on the counter, and flipped through it.
“Why would you read this?”
“I’m going to law school.”
“Jeepers creepers: this is dry. Can you actually really truly like this?”
“I don’t know.”
She eyed me skeptically. “I don’t know either, bub.”
“It’ll be nice to have something to fall back on.”
“But you’re not ‘falling back.’ This is Plan A you’re talking.”
She set her hand down on the counter like she was chopping it, her fingers pointing directly at me.
“Look here,” she said. “I go straight forward like this, and ten years later, I go through you to that wall. But I turn like that”—she shifted her hand to the left by just a few degrees—“and I’m way over there at that Wu-Tang poster. Shift right”—she moved her hand again—“and I’m over there sucking a wing at Charlie’s next to your mean old uncle who needs to wipe his face again.”
I looked up across the road. Sure enough, Uncle Mike was back over there. Was he following me? Was she? Were they coordinating? All these judging eyeballs. Why did they seem to care more about my future than I did? I’d been out of a small town for too long and had forgotten.
“A small change now makes a big difference later,” I said, reducing her statement to its moral.
“Bingo and don’t I know it.” She pitched a thumb over her shoulder. “And if you aim the wrong way, you can’t just hit reverse to fix it. Not without one big hairy mess. And hate to break it, pal, but I don’t see lawyer here. I see artsy-fartsy type. Which reminds me: you were great in Brigadoon.”
“So you were stalking me in high school, too!”
“Maybe,” she said, grinning.
I had a sudden, forehead-smacking realization. I knew who had made her a rap fan: me.
We talked music some more after that (we both liked Beck and wondered where he’d go next) but I believe she had said her piece because soon she begged off, saying, “Tonight’s karate. I’m snatching a nap.” Uncle Mike watched her leave and marched right over with his commentary.
“You can save someone but maybe only once,” he said, a balanced-sounding yet obscure line that my father might have given and would certainly endorse. I think Uncle Mike said this for my father, because he couldn’t be there to shield me with his caution. I knew where that caution had come from: parental fear and love. But it also came from a quiet pain that was personal to my father and that I did not have to inherit or share, even if he had wanted me to (he didn’t).
With this gesture, perhaps penitential, Uncle Mike headed for the door. When he opened it, the bells snapped off and one broke loose and rolled into the street. Uncle Mike watched it go.
“I do believe this store is jinxed,” he said.
He may have been right. My little shop folded at summer’s end. In September, I told my mother I’d be gone all day at the UMass Lowell library. “To study,” I said vaguely, but I’d tossed the law books and was plotting my move out West.