I am now alone behind the Wal-Mart with a keen sense of the amateur’s disadvantage. These are the moments that call for strength and fortitude.
I have not realized, until this moment, how dependent one’s psychological power is upon slacks.
That’s me. Always learning.
I find that there are other subtleties in the situation to pick up on as well. Like, for instance, the heretofore hidden power of the un-panted man, the force of which, enhanced by the incongruity of the well-pressed shirt, allows me to breach the fortress of retail, meet the eyes of the greeter and ride around the store on an electric scooter like I own the place. Somehow, a man in his underpants in public becomes invisible.
On my way to the men’s section I drive by the wine aisle, hoping to parlay with my pal and share the wonders of my newfound power. Alas, he has already been escorted out. No matter. I am my own man, after all, and can make my own way in the world.
Especially atop this scooter, whose basket I am filling with items as disparate as the happily exploited can produce.
Scooter-cruising pantless at the local Wal-Mart is everything you imagine it to be. Filling your basket, towing a cart, blocking aisles, driving backwards for extended beeping periods – all activities to fill a day with joy – but I am on a mission. I am not here to steal but to take what is mine, or what will be mine eventually. After I steal it.
Instinctively, I know that a pantless man should not draw attention to himself. I find that a careful, downward expression on my part, in conjunction with the unease that others feel when making eye contact with a half-dressed man, makes it possible for me to motor through the store unimpeded. And when I find the slacks I am looking for, I can put them on as if I just took them off, leave the packed scooter and cart behind, and leave the store on foot.
Today I exit via the loading dock, greeting workers and mooching cigarettes along the way.
Jeremy is waiting for me in our little clearing. He has apparently put down a fair amount of Night Train prior to taking his leave from the store and is therefore cheerful and ready to begin his day.
And quite a day it is going to be! The addition of new pants has really put the finishing touch to my ensemble. I feel like a new man, a completely dressed male of the species, out for the hunt. Today we will stalk and take down the delicate but speedy American dollar, perhaps a whole herd of them. I and my hunting partner intend to sneak up on them at their favorite watering hole.
But first we must adapt to the unexpected.
A bold man seeks to make things happen, and the events he sets in motion are meant to serve his best interests, but the universe will have its way with him despite his fair intentions. Presently, a police officer is visiting our humble clearing, mouthing nonsense about property and proper moral behavior in a public setting. It is a sermon we have heard before, but that doesn’t make it easier to understand.
What, exactly, are these rights that we do not have? Who are these children that should concern me when I am less than fully clothed? There is a collective hallucination at work here, and officer Righteous Man in his (admittedly) crisp uniform is another babbling sufferer.
We let him blather on, though, as the fellow is packing heat and offering free rides. My schedule, however, will permit neither endless lectures nor side trips to County, so it is now up to me to bend the arc of events away from the officer’s deluded notions and toward a narrative more suited to the goals I have set myself for today.
Jeremy, of course, is on the ground laughing because he can see, on a different, possibly made-up level, what is truly happening. It gives him great joy, and not the derisive, ridiculing joy of unhappy drunks, but the pure, child-like joy of a man who has found enlightenment by pickling his brain.
I admire and respect his functionality. I will let him handle this one.
By now the store manager has arrived, and with him a cohort of back door smokers is arranging itself behind the police officer, who is about to take control of the situation by requiring me and Jeremy to assume an uncomfortable and humiliating posture.
Jeremy is nearly paralyzed with laughter though, and his helpless guffaws are so genuine that his world begins to shine through the concrete barriers of the cop and the store manager. His giggles are so infectious that the smokers are all hacking and choking. The cop sees that he is attempting to tame a world that is best left wild, and the store manager, as humorless as any man alive, feels Jeremy’s unbridled joy washing over him in waves. He is helpless against its onrushing power. He grasps at one last shred of his own reality, “Just give me back my pants,” but this utterance only batters down the last barrier to Jeremy’s laughter and now we are all just a bunch of strangers standing in a litter-strewn swamp behind a chain store, laughing at our collective struggle in an uncaring cosmos.
It was a private moment, a temporary cessation of conflict like the Christmas day soccer match between trenches in the Great War. The store manager gestured the smokers back to work, the police officer got in his last words, “Be careful,” and the whole group dispersed before Jeremy could stop laughing.
This freed us up to rob the bank, which I was eager to finish before the day got away from us.
