LUNKHEADED

Part 13

Our first show with Ron was a huge comedown after the last VFW show, but a show was a show. Even if it’s in a crappy Kenosha apartment at a crappy Kenosha party. We played during the day for some reason to about 10 or so mildly interested Kenosha punks who were wired up on gas station speed and wished we sounded at least a tiny bit like The Exploited. Afterwards, Ron was delighted to report that he’d seen Renee, the parties hostess and quite the little nugget, running around naked. Me and Pete and Tom had been out back smoking and missed the whole thing. Typical.

We went on a weird streak of house shows for a little while after that. We played this basement thing with THE ODD NUMBERS from California that was kinda cool and kinda lame at the same time, ya know? Played an attic at PAULIE THINK’s house in Milwaukee. An empty pizza place in Evanston. Did one at Potato Kalinowski’s house in Wildwood that featured, among other atrocities; Arnold wearing only FILTHY boxer shorts, and beating the living shit out of some doofusy, neon-clad snowboarder kid.

Things at the bookstore had been getting weird, too. Ron and I had been catching a weird vibe. The owners, two lawyers from Milwaukee, had been lurking around more than usual. Plus, there were rumors that some of the Wisconsin stores were going under and that wave might ripple all the way to our information desk in Gurnee. It seems Barnes and Noble were openly targeting our Wisconsin store, opening up a block or two away and then suffocating them out, just like Wal-Mart does.

Sure enough, a couple weeks after the most recent invasion to our territory, my boss Virginia called me into her office. I had been working there since damn near day one, and Virginia and I had a great relationship. She respected my goofball views on literature and life, and I hers.

We’d really gone nuts with the store inventory computers. We had gone past merely changing the names of the books in the system (“A Tale of Two Cities” became “A Sale of Two Titties”, “Tess of The D’Ubervilles” became “Tess of The Doobie Brothers”, etc.), to actually creating fake books ‘written’ by various members of the staff. One of my bitchy assistant managers had found out about her autobiography, “I Wake Up Screaming”, and was NONE TOO AMUSED, so I figured that was what this was about. It wasn’t. Virginia told me Dicken’s Books was getting downsized. And that I was the down getting sized. She was nice about it and asked if I’d rather get my hours cut and go part-time, or get fired and collect unemployment. I picked the latter and decided it was the perfect time to go back to college. And, much more importantly; not work.

I’d always fancied myself a writer and had been long enamored of the Columbia College. It was in the city, great ciriculum and teachers, andit had a three year journalism program. So I drove down to the loop in my smoky, sputtery Renault Alliance to sign up. The thing about the Appliance was, if you went over 50 miles an hour; the light smoke whisping from the tailpipe would thicken into a fire-extinguisher-like, road-blocking fog like the video game Spy Hunter. So, the hour-and-a-half round trip took four, smelly, humiliating hours.

Moving back to the city was my only option if I wanted to make my second college go-round last. I had unemployment and Pete had some money he’d saved up and he wanted to get out of his moms’. Our buddy Ray had recently been kicked out of his parents’ house so he got in on the action. More people means more money towards rent, right? Yeah. Right.