Though
it pains me to admit it, I was baffled by the events that had taken place so
far, which was in itself puzzling. Compounding
this was the ever growing despair that all of these things would make just as
much sense – that is to say, none – when this whole mission was over, cleverly
and maliciously avoiding the neat tie-in that would explain everything.
Kind of like the movie Eye of the Beholder, where you watch it the whole time thinking
that it’s stupid and makes absolutely no sense but you stay with it till the
end because you know that it has to be a good movie since Blockbuster had a
whole section reserved for it and you’re confident that if you just see it
through something will happen to make it all come together and make sense and you’ll
say “Ahhhhhh! I get it!” but then it just ends and you wind up staring
at the TV as the entire credits roll by thinking “What the hell was all that
about?” and simultaneously being pissed
that you just wasted $3.00 plus two hours of your non-refundable life and yet
greatly relieved that you didn’t blow $7.50 and the same amount of your life
(plus gas for the car) and risk having someone you know see you coming out of a
public theatre where the same credits happened to be rolling. And I’m in Europe so that is the correct
spelling for “theater” over here so pack
sand.
“Hay,” slurred Jimmy.
“Thas
‘Hey’, not ‘Hay’ you shtupid . . . ,” Simon corrected, kind of.
They
were both seriously drunk. Jimmy was as
polluted as the Hudson river and Simon looked like a manatee that had recently
been hit by a speeding Boston Whaler.
“I was
thinking,” Jimmy continued, “how many
boxes of staples have you thrown away?”
“What?” I replied.
“Staples. Boxes of staples. Don’t you think people wind up wasting them?”
“Jimmy,
what are you talking about?”
“I’m
talking about staples, dude. You know, staple, staple, staple. Where you click paper together.”
“I know what staples are, I just have no
idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s so
simple,” he said. “What I mean is that staples come in boxes of
like, what? Five thousand, right?”
“Yes,” I replied cautiously.
“Well,
does anybody ever use all of the
staples in a box? Heeelll no. You wind up loading your stapler one time and
then you put the box in a drawer somewhere and you forget where it is. So then when you need some more staples you
can’t remember where you put them so you buy a whole new box – another five thousand – and go through the same
thing all over again. And then before
you know it, you’ve got, like, boxes and boxes of staples that you can never
use in your whole life and nobody else can use them either ‘cause they’ve all
got boxes and boxes of staples too. So
you wind up throwing them all away. I mean,
what else are you gonna do with them, right?”
“Maybe
build a steel Barbie fort?” Simon
offered.
“I mean,
if you keep them,” Jimmy continued, “they’ll just all wind up in
the same drawer again since you won’t need them right now and then when you do
need them you’ll have forgotten where they all were and buy another box. I’m telling you guys, it’s a vicious cycle
man.”
“Jimmy,” I said, “you’re starting to frighten me. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well,
here’s the deal. I’m thinking about this
problem and how to fix it, right? And
the only thing that I can think to do is to fix it myself. So I’m gonna start my own staple business.”
“I
thought you just said that the world is already overpopulated with staples as
it is.”
“No, no. I said there are too many staples. But that’s
because they make you buy them in boxes with thousands of staples in them, and nobody needs that many. That’s
how they get you.”
“So?”
“So, with my business, you’d only buy the amount of staples that you need.”
I felt
like a kid in a grocery store who spent too long looking at the back of the
Cap’n Crunch box and then suddenly looks around to find that his parents are
nowhere in sight.
“They
buy what they need,” I echoed.
“Yeah,
man! Isn’t that an awesome idea? Like, say you’re this dude and you need,
maybe, I don’t know, eight staples. Instead
of buying a box of 5000 and throwing almost all of them away, ‘cause you only
need eight, right?”
“We got
that part.”
“Well,
with my business, you could just place an order with me and I’d sell you – guess
how many?”
“Uh,
well, I’m going to think outside the box on this one and say, I don’t know,
maybe, eight?”
“Yeah! Exactly!
Staples to order. You need eight
staples, you buy eight staples. You need
twelve staples, you buy twelve. You need – ”
“We get
it Jimmy.”
“Yeah? Well, what do you think?”
“I think
it bears more research into the marketplace,”
I said. “Focus groups, risk
analysis – ”
“I think
it’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,”
said Simon.
“Oh
yeah?” Jimmy said. “Well, what do you know?”
“What do I know?
I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you
make a list of what you know, and
I’ll make a list of what I know, and
then well compare the length of my
list with the length of your list and
– ”
“Alright,
alright, shut up the both of you,” I
said. “Let’s square up the tab and find
a place to stay.”
I called
for the waiter and he placed the check on our table. We all looked at it but no one had a clue
what it said. Taking into account that
we probably only had 12 or 15 rounds, and the fact that the U.S. dollar was probably worth at least 20 times
whatever they used for money here, we figured a cool five-spot would cover it
and also provide a healthy tip.
We
walked outside and surveyed the street from the sidewalk.
“So what
do you figure a hotel would look like in this town?” Simon asked.
But
before we had time to really look around, we heard a soft rumble in the
distance which quickly turned into a loud roar in the near vicinity, and
suddenly a massive wall of water came rushing down the street, sweeping away
everything – including us – in its path.
“Surf’s
up!” Jimmy yelled and he caught the
front of the wave from a standing start on the curb and immediately started
shredding the lip. Simon and I cleverly
clutched our bags in terror and just tried to stay afloat. We moved down the street quickly, bumping
into cars, signs, and debris, coughing & sputtering in the salty water.
“Hey,
there’s a hotel,” Simon pointed out as
we drifted past a Holiday Inn.
Mile
after mile we rode the torrent until we finally got dumped, bruised and
dripping, onto a hillside in the outskirts of the city. Jimmy, of course, wasn’t bruised or, for that
matter, even wet. As Simon and I were
recovering from our shock and dragging ourselves to higher ground, he zipped up
to the embankment, turned a final 360, and stepped gracefully onto dry ground.
“Cool!” he shouted, obviously pleased by the
impromptu inland surf and the lack of locals to fight off.
“What a
weird country,” I said, still coughing
water from my lungs and dripping like a ....a.... a... uh,
I don’t know, a wet guy I guess.
At that
moment a boat came through the water and sped over to us. Apparently a police boat if we were to pay
any attention to the high pitched warble of the siren, the flashing red &
blue lights, the big POLICIA sign, and the half dozen or so uniformed men on
board all pointing guns at us. A small
boy – strangely familiar – stood on the bow pointing at us (he didn’t have a
gun) and yelling a lot of gibberish that we couldn’t understand (big surprise).
We were
soon transported to the boat with much aggression and a general lack of
hospitality. Jimmy told them to quit it,
but they didn’t. We were unceremoniously
plopped down on a bench along the aft end of the boat (yup, just like aft on
airplanes) with plastic zip ties securing our hands behind our backs.
The kid
was still bouncing around excitedly and waving his finger in Jimmy’s face and
the cops were jabbering away at us too; probably reading us the Netherlands’s
equivalent of the Miranda warning and explaining what we had apparently done
wrong. But of course we couldn’t
understand a fucking thing they were saying, so we just smiled, relaxed, and
enjoyed the ride back into town.
We spent
the night in jail.
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