Gumbyman Returns!

There is no air conditioning in my house. We have those old fashioned window units in the bedrooms, but for the basic living spaces we are SOL. In these heat waves like we’ve been having in New England of late this translates to me relocating to coffee shops to work. My local coffee shop crowds pretty quickly on weekends, so I usually end up at the Barnes & Noble Starbucks just over the NH border. When I discovered Gumbyman’s existence last weekend, I really didn’t think I’d ever see him again. You can imagine my surprise on Sunday when he pulled up a chair at the table next to me and began a variation of what I have concluded is routine. Of course, we’re practically B&N café family now so I had no problem staring and taking notes.

            I don’t know why he only needed one table and one chair this week. Perhaps it was because he was not wearing his Gumby shirt. Without Gumby along for the ride, naturally he wouldn’t need as many chairs. His shirt was clean and pressed, a grey t-shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders. No deviation from the forest green shorts. There was little rustling as he settled into his chair. No nerves. Just easy squatting and a plopping down of four books and a brown paper bag of a shape that would indicate it contained a sub like sandwich.  The literary choices were A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart in hardcover, The Three Stooges Scrapbook, The Color Companion to Walt Disneyworld, and a paperback of title that remained covered at all times. The only words I could see were “full of coupons.”

            Gumbyman got up not long after he sat down and walked to the condiment/straw station on the other side of the café. He grabbed a hefty portion of coffee stirrers (again), two packages of salt (again), a two-inch stack of cocktail napkins, and seven small plastic dixie cups clearly meant for other customers to use for water. He split the seven cups into three stacks. Snap and fizz, a can of Pepsi was poured into one of the cup stacks. Hgggckkkk spit, into a second stack of cups, followed by a crumpled napkin. (Gross, by the way).

The next activity disturbed me a bit. Gumbyman seemed to pull out of air two $5 scratch tickets. Of course, they were Three Stooges scratch tickets. The Three Stooges scratch tickets in Massachusetts are only $2. Why do I know this? Because I am a compulsive gambler. This is why I am disturbed. Gumbyman and I now have two things in common. That is two too many.

            Rub rub, scratch scratch, foil filings are droppings on top of the coffee stirrers, which would soon touch food, and the pile of napkins. Every so often Gumbyman’s top lip would pull back and curl up away from his teeth as if he were a billy goat chewing sod. He shook his head after he stopped scratching and stuck the ticket inside the dust jacket of A Ship Without A Sail. I gather he did not win. He then reached inside the paper bag and pulled out his snacks. Cheese Doodles, M&M’s, potato chips, and Fritos. Brand names must have been on sale at the gas station where he picked up his scratch tickets.

            Cheese doodles and book pages aren’t friends. My heart started to race a bit. Do not fear - Gumbyman had a plan. His right hand reached and grabbed three of the coffee stirrers as if someone else were racing to them, and he snapped them like a chicken’s neck. The splintered edges of the stirrers were violently used to rip a hole in the cheese doodle bag so that the bag could be opened into a flat plate. The stirrers were then used to stab the doodles as if they were cocktail wieners. He shoveled them in as quickly as he turned chunks of pages of Ship Without A Sail from right to left, unaware that it was in English not Arabic.

            New snack, new book. The M&M’s didn’t last very long. Gumbyman tore off the corner of the bag and poured them all into his mouth as I dreamed of pouring adult beverages down my throat to cope with what I was witnessing. The Three Stooges Scrapbook would have to make it through M&Ms and potato chips. I wondered if he would use the coffee stirrers to try and stiletto the potato chips. He didn’t. He did stiletto the bag though. I also hoped to see him pour the salt all over the table, but was disappointed that he didn’t use it at all. Perhaps brand name potato chips use more salt than the store brand he had the week before.

            For the final act he shoveled the Frito’s into the trap while paging through the book about Disneyland. He never made it to the fourth book with the coupons in it. Perhaps its purpose was just to act as a shelf for the other books. As soon as he finished the Fritos he finished his Pepsi, which he had been drinking from the plastic cup, not the can. He tried to empty more from the can, but it was dry. He forcefully smacked it down on the table in such a way that it leveraged his body up from the chair. Purposefully and with great speed, Gumbyman turned and, belonging-free, walked straight towards the public washroom, never to return to clean up his mess.

The Adventures of Gumbyman and The Crapstore

            I am a dinosaur living in a modern age. I cling to old ways like a toddler clings to his favorite stuffed toy or blanket. Perhaps it’s neuroses. Perhaps it’s the medications I’m on. Perhaps it’s a fear that once the old ways are gone they can never be retrieved. I recently acquiesced and bought my first laptop – not just a laptop, a MACBOOK. I must stress that the last computer I owned personally was loaded with Windows Millennium edition (and what a shitshow THAT was… for those of you blessed enough to have not experienced it, I must share that it was not even compatible with Itunes). And within the last year or so I also gave in and bought a “Smartphone.” I did buy it unlocked, off of the Internet, from England (it has a Euro and Pound key, but not a Dollar sign – fancy) and both immediately and intentionally befuddled the settings so that it doesn’t use the data functions, and my wireless carrier can’t detect it. Effectively, it’s like having an old school phone that looks like a Smartphone. What I’m trying to say here is that I DON’T LIKE CHANGE!

            I take greater issue with some change over other change. New England Patriots lineup? Don’t give a flying pig’s arse; I really don’t like American football. Change the menu at Friendly’s on the other hand, and I might throw a toddler-sized temper tantrum. It used to be the case that if you were to name a store something like “The Paper Store,” that store would sell paper. Seems logical, right? JoAnn Fabrics would sell, I don’t know, fabric? And Barnes & Noble BOOKSELLERS would sell BOOOOOOOOKS.  Sadly, this is no longer the case. It has become a point of needling irritation in my side, between the ribs. The bookstore is now a crapstore with a side of books. To make matters worse, they don’t even have the books that I want. I’m not talking esoteric, obscure, out-of-the-box wacky books. I’m referring to the classics, such as the poetry of Baudelaire, the complete dramatic works of Henrik Ibsen, catalogs of great artists such as ANYONE OTHER THAN Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s not that I have anything against Toulouse-Lautrec, but a lot has happened in the art world that was created by artists other than Toulouse-Lautrec… you know, like, maybe Monet, or Renoir, or… I don’t know, Da Vinci… But DAMMIT, THEY HAVE Toulouse-Lautrec, and Fifty Shades of Pornographic Vampire Trash, and psychedelic-colored Jonathan Adler pencil cases, and toddler toys, so it is ALL GOOD! And DON’T FORGET THE JUSTIN BIEBER CDS!

            Clearly, I am less than enchanted with the stock at Barnes & Noble. I am also not thrilled with their organizational skills. When I took the half step to move from the Drama section (a meager three shelves smaller than my person, where I erroneously hoped I could replace my copy of Jean Cocteau’s Infernal Machine) to the Poetry section, I discovered utter pandemonium. The shelves said “Alphabetized By Author.” There is absolutely no way they used the Roman alphabet to organize this section. Maybe it was a Romanized version of Urdu or Farsi, or better yet Hmong. I found Rilke between Apollinaire and Beowulf. A few shelves down from that were the works of Dante. I’m not sure, but I think whoever was responsible didn’t realize Dante had a last name. Then I turned around to the next shelf to find more Rilke followed by some C poets, then more Beowulf (I guess if you’re written by Anonymous that means you should be filed under many different letters so as not to offend), and a lot of Tomas Tranströmer, whom I like, but he’s no Baudelaire. Then I gave up. While I was wandering around, I overheard some employees discussing how they were going to make more room for the teen fiction sections. Great.

            I do enjoy that there is a Starbucks in the bookstore. I like a side of coffee with my books. It gives me a chance to decide if I actually want to purchase the goods or put them back. It also provides some interesting people watching. I’m not sure why, but bookstore coffee shops seem to be a feeding ground for society’s ultra strange in what seems to be their natural habitat. Yesterday I observed GumbyMan, sporting a green Gumby t-shirt with the caption “Gumby, buck naked since 1956” and also a pair of forest green sweat shorts. He dragged two tables screech to screech across the tile floor to meet each other and then assembled three chairs around the tables for himself, as if to sit in all of them at once. He pulled four different snack-sized bags of grocery store brand potato chips and a can of coke out of a plastic bag and arranged the items on the table before settling himself down in one chair. He really just couldn’t get comfortable or find an arrangement of chips that was agreeable. Then, out came a one inch tall stack of cocktail napkins, about six paper coffee stirrers, and two small packages of salt (the double tube kind with red printing on the outside) that had clearly been taken from a fast food restaurant. 
            I looked away so as not to stare, maybe for a minute. When I turned my head back, Gumbyman was gone. All four potato chip bags were torn open down the center like a book and emptied. There was salt sprinkled all over the table. All coffee stirrers had been used, but not in a liquid, and folded up and strewn over the potato chip bags. The coke was gone. And the books he had brought to look at were in a messy pile. THIS is what happens when bookstores stop selling books. People lose their minds and turn into Gumbyman. I cannot prove this with any scientific evidence, but how can we prove that it’s not true? Perhaps that is what he’s trying to say with his t-shirt? Gumby hasn’t changed in 56 years. The mega-bookstore did. And it sucks. Oh how I miss the independent bookstores…..