The Secret Society of Demolition Writers Read Online Free PDF Page B

hit-and-run in the crosswalk in front of the stationery store where she worked. Let’s be honest, he’d done the tonsil thing when his wife was still alive, and now it was unsettling, but who’d refuse him? Sad man with a mustache, unhandsome until he smiled, which he almost never did. He had a billboard cowboy’s smile, open-mouthed to show his perfect white teeth. He rocked back on his heels in a silent impression of belly laughter. He even touched his stomach then, as though to ask it,
D’ja hear that, buddy?
Smiling scrunched his eyes up till they matched. His voice seemed made of pencil shavings: grubby, sneezish, insinuating. People thought he was making fun of them when he said what his name was.
    His wife was seven years dead, enough time for a sense of humor to regenerate, at least a little. Babe liked puns, palindromes, horror movies. Family pleasures, in other words. What is so sad as a solitary punster? His friend Mal, a doughnut-shop owner and giver of dinner parties, cocktail parties, surprise parties, invited him to everything.
    So what if Babe sometimes had a few drinks and turned to somebody else’s wife and suggested, “Say ah?” So what if he put his hand on her neck and inhaled, in a professional way, her patient, personal breath. He was tactile. He was a letch, but in an old-fashioned cocktail-napkin way. Harmless.
    He was a decent guy! He was still in love with his wife, poor thing. Everyone knew
that.
    THE SMALL FLOCK of pharmacy assistants filled most of the actual prescriptions. Babe checked them, argued with insurance companies, consulted with customers, gave advice, worried about the string of Oxycontin holdups in the area. Mostly the store was prey to teenage theft of condoms, pregnancy tests, protein bars, Dramamine for the dimenhydrinate, Robitussin and Coricidin for the dextromethorphan. A group of local high schoolers held a Robitussin Round Table by the dumpsters. They cracked jokes about their hallucinations, they announced they were tripping, they informed each other they were tripping.
    Yo, dude: you’re tripping.
    I am, I’m totally tripping.
    In the afternoon you could hear them laughing. Later, you could see the tiny unused cups, the plastic wrappers, and slicks of vomit.
    “It’s called Robodosing,” said Hilary, the pharmacy assistant with the rusty-bedspring hair. She was sorting NutriNate, a chewable prenatal vitamin that smelled disconcertingly of merlot. “Or Robocopping. Or plain Roboing.”
    “I know,” said Babe. He didn’t know what was more depressing, kids getting high on motion-sickness pills and cough syrup, or coming up with slang for it. Teenagerland. Adolescent Narcissiville. Some days Babe longed to travel there with shoplifters, look around. The land of teens, its mufti and customs, Babe understood none of it. He hadn’t even when he was a teenager himself.
    The teenagers never approached him. They merely squinted at him standing at the pharmacy counter as though he were the goalie of the opposing team and he better watch out for flying pucks. Then they left by the far door.
    A pharmacist is fluent in mime. Fingers flutter around cheekbones to explain one kind of sinus pain. They straddle the nose for another. Some symptoms can’t be articulated except by pulling faces. Some need both arms and one foot. In the fluorescent lights of the pharmacy, Connie-from-the-party had a sugar-cookie complexion. She wore pants in a lavender-based plaid and a bulky, bumpy sweater that seemed carved out of dirty snow. In her hand she held four hot-pink daisies wrapped in blue tissue paper. Babe stood on the raised flooring behind the Drop-Off counter.
    “The florist said they’re very masculine flowers,” she said. Maybe she wanted a second opinion. He couldn’t tell whether she’d be disappointed to have the diagnosis confirmed.
    “They’re pink,” he said.
    She sighed. “Pink’s pink, I guess.”
    “A manly pink!” he answered. “The color of Sylvester