Pirates of the Retail Wasteland Read Online Free Page B

him to kill himself, but maybe we can depress him so much that he’ll pull a Mrs. Smollet and resign.”
    “I’m in charge of the depressing poetry,” Dustin said, twirling a pen like a baton. “I can make most of the depressing poets in the literature anthologies look like Groucho Marx.”
    Dustin had spent sixth grade writing naughty limericks on the bathroom wall, and in seventh grade he had graduated to writing naughty sonnets, which were much longer. He’d written a pair of sonnets that had served as the narration for
La Dolce Pubert.
Shortly thereafter, he’d gotten interested in Rudyard Kipling, whom he described as a “hard-core badass” who wrote things like

    When you’re wounded and left on
    Afghanistan’s plains,
    And the women come out to cut
up what remains,
    Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
    An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

    He was really into that for about a week, until someone described Kipling as “the kind of poetry your gym teacher might write.” It was true; his poems tended to go on and on about how to “be a man, my son,” and you could easily imagine him shooting you in the knees and telling you to walk it off. After that, Dustin quietly renounced “badass poetry” and discovered free verse and beatnik poetry, which was rambling and weird and tended to be about walking around the city, having sex, and drinking coffee with jazz musicians. I think the day the first beatnik poem appeared on the bathroom wall, all the teachers took a field trip to the nearest church to pray for their lives.
    A minute after we sat down, Trinity came to the table.
    “You hoodlums again,” she said, sounding thrilled. “You want the usual?”
    We all nodded. Small cups of coffee all around.
    Trinity nodded and brought out our drinks, the pins on her dress rattling all the way. She acted like she hated us, but we sort of suspected she liked us better than she liked most of the customers. Edie practically worshipped her—she thought that covering ball gowns with pins made a profound statement of some sort, and for once, I think she might have been on to something. Shortly after meeting Trinity, she’d gotten into punk rock, which she considered appropriately communist friendly, and had dyed bright red highlights into her black hair.
    Anna had practically been bottle-fed on coffee, and she and her father had made it sort of a mission to get me into it. When I’d started drinking it, I was filling up my cups with more cream and sugar than actual coffee, but I was trying to wean myself off the cream until I could drink it black, like Anna did. I was getting pretty close.
    The coffee at Sip was not the “gourmet” kind, but Anna and her parents were of the opinion that “bad” coffee was actually a lot better. There was a certain taste that coffee could only acquire by sitting in the urn for a really long time. And anyway, those jazz guys in the fifties probably weren’t drinking coffee made from only the highest-quality Colombian beans. They were drinking sludge.
    A few minutes later, Dustin asked Trinity to turn down the music so he could read his latest poem, which he’d been scribbling on a napkin. She nodded, and took the stage herself.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, as though she were announcing that they would be closing down due to a gas leak, “it is with deepest regret that I subject you all to the poetic stylings of Mr. Dustin Eddlebeck.” Dustin stood up to bow, then walked to the mike.
    “I’d like to read a new piece,” he said, “entitled ‘The Final Push-up.’”
    He cleared his throat and began to read.

    “O Coach, where is thy sting?
    At the bottom of the empty bottle
    of Gatorade, the last few drops are
    turning into crust,
    like the last drops of blood
    in your cold heart,
    pumping slowly, like
    a seven-hundred-pound sixth grader
    trying to do that third and
    final push-up,
    wobbling a bit
    and then crumpling on the mat
    like a crushed paper