Carpe dinero

Carpe dime

In which I relate how I learned the lessons of life in just one day

Submitted for Austin Chronicle 2003short story contest

In the youth of my dreams, my fourteenth year was the most formative. As far as you know, this is true. Probably, The Wonder Years and Married, with Children have more to do with what I remember than what actually happened. Isn’t that always the way with eyewitness testimony? At least, I’ve been skating on that for some time. Just one of the perils of living in the era of digital cable and always-on wireless broadband.

I had the sort of family that people like me tend to have. My mom and dad were prosperous middle-class professionals who were divorced, or not quite yet, though I don’t recall any particular distinction. Sometimes, when we were going to the movies on Saturday, my dad would automatically drive to his office instead, which I thought was pretty funny until I did it a few years ago. Of course, there’s no danger of making that mistake these days.

My sister was older. When a man not yet (or ever to be) her husband impregnated her only a couple of elderly aunts, uncles, and crustified church members thought they had any standing to pass judgment. There was an abortion or adoption in the languid hazy days between her sophomore and junior years at Some State University; if you think me callous for failing to remember the difference, the result was the same for me, and I’ve been through worse, since.

There was some monkey business in the news that summer, perhaps a Chandra or a Paula or a Mary Jo. As far as you know, everyone actually called me Alex P. Keaton. That’s probably all you really need to know, but – since this is my story and not John Ashcroft’s Justice Department – I’ll tell you the rest.

I either worked that summer, or didn’t, and instead spent it learning to play one of those sports that children of people like my parents learn to play. It might have been golf, or tennis, or maybe even bridge. Not that it matters, since I can’t afford to do it any more. I probably would have been better off learning to type – at least one job skill that’s usually in demand – but my mother was of the generation of women who got to work outside the home precisely because they did the same thing at work as they did at home. She advised me not to learn typing, since that’s all I’d ever do if my boss found out I could (as if I were a girl, like her). So, now – except when jotting a short note on the back of a deposit slip – I have to use one of those illiterate voice recognition dictation engines that makes you wish Gene Rodenberry’s wife was as smart as the computer she plays on TV.

At this point you may think I’m digressing. Trust me when I tell you that you don’t know whether I am or not.

So, in that formative fourteenth summer, I was doing backbreaking labor either in the fields or on the links. My father’s business placed him on the periphery of an inconsequential but growing chain of family restaurants based in our small city. I won’t confuse your observations by telling you which restaurant, but you’d recognize it if you had a child obsessed with epilepsy-inducing lights and large cheery rodents.

I didn’t really consider myself a child then, nor did I possess any particular curiosity about bland pizza or the mouse that personified it. However, when my dad told me that his colleagues were looking for young people to appear in a television commercial for the restaurant chain, and asked after my level of interest, my particular curiosity increased. Television could make someone famous, because there were only four channels back then. Five, if you considered the ghostly independent UHF from Metropolis that you could receive if the weather and the lepine gods were in the mood. Perhaps the commercial would play during Speed Racer and I might somehow meet and fall in love with Trixie. Or, drive the Mach 5 before I died – life’s pretty short, you know, and you have to seize the day.

There was also sum of money – which is rather circular to this story, in a karmic sort of way – that seemed substantial to a pre-teen in those days. Trixie or Mary Anne/Ginger or Marcia Marcia Marcia could hang. The rat is paying for young people? I’m a young person. Alex P. Keaton could hang, too. It either was or was not the first time I sold out. You may guess whether it was the last, though I will tell you that, sometimes, I wish I still had the opportunity to choose.

Mom or dad dropped me off at the local edition of the chain on her or his way to work. It was the kind of day that I would have carried a packed lunch, except I assumed I’d have access to plenty of pizza. Even at that tender age, free outweighed tasteless, preparing me for graduate school, though not, apparently, for unemployed homelessness.

The restaurant was in one of those strip malls that sophisticated urban types sneer at. Which is funny, because – except for this restaurant – everything else in this center was exclusively local – which is to say, parochial – since all the Generica stores had moved out to the Ye Olde Foxxe Runne Malle and rent here was now cheap enough that every soon-to-fail entrepreneur could afford to fill a space with porcelain unicorns and used books and off-brand greeting cards and an astonishing array of locally produced crockery and macramé. The kind of grocery store you know more euphemistically as a “convenience mart” dominated traffic.

The asphalt in the parking lot was gray and wrinkled with sun-blasted age, and the painted lines really only showed up after rain, a half-hearted, ethereal attempt to bring order from chaos. As was to become more frequent as I grew more mature – or, at least, older – I was on time and, therefore, alone. Have you, for example, ever noticed how frequently banks do not open when they say they will? But, since I never went anywhere without a book, I wasn’t actually alone, so I began to read even before dad or mom told me when he or she might be back. C.S. Lewis? E.B. White? A.A. Milne? Probably Stephen King or Robert Ludlum. I think some contemporaries were passing Erica Jong around that summer, but it might have been later, when we were riding the bus to high school and could use backpacks and winter coats to conceal in our laps any particular fear of flying.

I waited a while, which I guess means I grew up somewhere safe, since at least one of my parents wasn’t worried about leaving me in the middle of a parking lot for an indeterminate time, where I might be preyed upon by someone like who people think I’ve become.

I quit reading to watch an elderly woman picking her way through the trenches of the parking lot. Youth distorts one’s ability to calculate age with any accuracy, though I recall knowing then that she was really old, even for an old person. She had a two-wheeled shopping cart like no one in my town used, though we may have recognized them from movies about non-Caucasians in New York City. She used the cart as a kind of walker, which was pretty impressive considering the treachery of the exploded pavement.

Between boredom and the Boy Scouts, it occurred to me that I ought to help this old lady across the street. I dog-eared the page – something, now, I know better than to do – and triangulated an intercept point for the old lady, so focused on her path of progress that I don’t believe she knew I was coming until I got there. She jumped when I asked if I could help, and asked me to repeat myself.

I waited for the traffic noise from the bus stop to fade. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“Young man,” she whipped me, “I am a ninety-two year old Russian survivor of World War One, Nazi work camps, and decades of teaching in American public schools.” She adjusted her glasses as she peered at me. “I have been alone twice – three times! – as long as you’ve been alive. If I needed help, where were you yesterday? Last week? Where?”

Her wizened vitriol did not compute. “I just thought –” She was already motorvating toward the market; I saw a panel van pull up at the restaurant. “I just thought –”

“You are too young to think,” she instructed. “And you are slowing me down. If you don’t leave me be, I will miss my bus and life is too short for that.”

The panel van opened and artistic scruffy people began unloading spidery and exotic hardware.

Although I am quite confident that my mouth was hanging open, I am far more composed in the scene I recall. “Pardon me, ma’am. I apologize for troubling you and wish you a very good day.” And, do you need a handkerchief? You may need it to swab the drool dribbling down my chin before I embarrass myself in front of the film crew and the other actors.

There were six of us who needed roles in that commercial. One of the six was the untouchable cheerleader queen of the prom, whose dad owned the restaurant chain. She didn’t remember me from the year that our lockers adjoined. I was the youngest. There were three boys and three girls. The prom queen – I call her Domino because I don’t remember if she actually had a name – had carefully selected the other two rivals for her attention, Mitch Strongjaw and Dash Riprock.

Neither wore glasses, which made me a minority in essentially every conceivable way.

The prom queen arrived with her summer nanny – old enough to drive and eclipsed by Domino in that ugly duckling way that will never have a happy ending – and another vivacious female also chosen with care equaling or exceeding her selection of the knights in shining football pads. She just wasn’t quite enough to draw Lance’s and Dash’s attentions away from Domino, even though I found her fantastical. If this lineup sounds like a Nero Wolfe melodrama, the mystery was simpler: how did I learn the ways of the world in just a day? The clues:

1. Domino, Lance, Dash, and the other cute one were always closer to the camera than the nanny and I.

2. The Gang of Four were carefully made up and lighted. The nanny and I were asked to remove our glasses, which I suspect made us better looking to each other as well as the viewing audience, and lit with a candle at the far edge of the scene.

3. While many young, attractive, perky people wanted to come to the restaurant, not many normal people actually considered it a romantic date destination.

4. A few months later, I got a check (considerably less than union scale) – and what I wouldn’t do for a check like that today? – and had to think for a couple of days before I could remember why someone would mail me a paycheck in the middle of the school year.

As far as you know, I was precocious enough in my fourteenth year to puzzle out why the nanny and I were barely visible non-entities on the periphery of the small screen. Truthfully, I don’t know if I figured it all out that day, or if it dawned on me during the following years of similar, if occasionally gentler or less subtle, treatment at the hands of people in positions of authority or possessing better looks. And if I don’t know, both you and I can be damn sure that you don’t.

But here is what I do know: a pre-teen debate geek leaving a pizza restaurant after a few hours of figuring out that beautiful people are valued more than dorks is in no mood to help a little old lady across the street. There she was, all ninety-two years of her, trundling back to the bus stop – late, because I made her late – sort of trying to push and steer and wave and hurry all at once. I was glad to have an excuse not to want to help her. I once had to look up schadenfreude in the dictionary – and, of course, couldn’t find it, because I didn’t know how to spell it then – but I had it that day. And you can’t blame me, even if we all know it taught me the value of her life lesson, that life’s too short.

I settled in with my book and the curb to wait on whichever parent was coming back to fetch me. I kept half an eye on the old lady, back when I could still do two things at once without losing track of my place in this line, or where the note and gun are. She was probably calling after the bus, but no one could hear her over the big diesel in first gear. All I heard was the fingernails on chalkboard of all-year radials biting into the street as some guy in a green Mustang tried to swerve around the old lady as she stumbled into the street after the bus. In my mind, it’s like the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones knocks that Nazi under the wheels of the truck, and the truck with the Ark in it bounces like it’s going over a speed bump, even though the Egyptians weren’t known for their desert road speed bumps in the 1930s, and there were no gaily colored consumer products cartwheeling through the air in that movie scene. At least, none that I recall.

I don’t know if that’s what it really looked like, but – as I mentioned before – I’ve been counting on incessant pop-bombardment to alter the testimony of eyewitnesses for a while now, so I know how confusing actual memories can be, and I don’t really trust my own any more. But that’s how I remember it. And that’s how I learned the important lessons of life in just one day: there’s always someone better-looking than you for people to care about and, even if you’ve lived through eight or nine decades and a couple of world wars and public school, you can still get hit by a bus – or, a car following the bus – on any given day. You can also lose your job on any given day, though it’s usually a Friday.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m counting on the soon-to-be-befuddled memories of this nice teller to make sure I can pay my rent and credit card bills on time despite my lack of gainful employment. Because, you know, life’s just too short.