I tried stamp collecting once. This old guy, Bernie, from my grandma’s retirement home kept bugging me about it. He’s a really nice guy though; just lonely like hell. All he does is collect stamps. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do.
“Have you started collecting your stamps yet?” he would ask.
“A little.” was my usual reply.
His own grandson said he wasn’t interested, so I would probably be inheriting most of his stamps when he dies. Actually, he really said "Buzz off lame-stain, you're cramping my swag!"
“You know, if you start collecting now you could be able to sell them for college money later.” That’s where he sold me. But he kept on talking about money for college. “To make it so that your dad doesn’t have to pay for your entire education, you should play a sport. Do you play anything?”
“I ran a season of cross country, but I don’t anymore.”
“Oh. You should be a football player. That’s the way you’ll get yourself a scholarship.”
“I don’t like sports that much really. Besides, academic scholarships are where it’s at.”
But he didn’t even listen to me. He went on and on about sports scholarships. Especially those enormous football players. Academics didn’t seem to make any difference to him.
What angered me the most was that he seemed to think that only my dad had a job. What about my mother? Did he even consider the thought of women having careers? My mom has a crazy job where she works all day and most of the night hoping someone will take notice of her business. He didn’t know that though, that poor senile bastard.
Either way he convinced me to start stamp collecting when he mentioned money for my college fund. That’s something all kids these days have to worry about. After all, the career counselors shove it into our very impressionable minds. Also we have to apparently “battle” with our peers for college seats. We even have to put our GPA’s up against kids all over the world!
I went onto a couple of websites to learn more about stamp collecting. You started by slowly peeling them off of letters and placing them in water for twenty minutes to get the glue off. So I did just that with a plain Forever stamp from a car advertisement we got in the mail. I realized this was a boring and stupid activity, so I took the stamp out of the tiny paper cup full of water after five minutes and stuck it on the wall. It’s directly in front of the toilet.
While I was relieving myself on the toilet and staring at the postage stamp on the wall, my father called for me downstairs.
“Ted, help me take the trash out to the dump!”
“Be right down!” I shouted in reply as I flushed the toilet.
My dad had his own way of disposing of garbage. He would throw all of it in the bed of his pickup truck leaving nothing tied in with the tailgate down. By the time we had driven to the dump all of our trash had fallen out of the truck onto the road. It wasn’t a hazard because we had to drive home on the other side of the road anyways. It wasn’t like we were the only ones littering the road!
After we passed the dump we kept going.
“Where are we going?”
“To your mom’s office. She’s having computer problems.”
“Oh.” There was a pause and then he asked, “Why aren’t you going to run cross country again?”
“I got enough of that question at school.”
“I know you did. But why?”
“I don’t know.”
“There has to be some reason.”
His phone started to buzz and beep. He took it out examining whatever message he had received.
“I have to go back to work at five.” he said.
“I thought today was your day off.”
“It is.”
“You’re a tool.”
“I know. But you are too.”
“What?”
“You’re as big of a tool as I am, if not bigger.”
“How so?”
“You waste your summer at home not doing anything. You may not have any friends or anything to do, but you should at least try to make the most out of each day. You are a tool for letting yourself be trapped by your surroundings.”
“You work for a toilet tissue producing company. People literally wipe their asses’ with their work.”
The rest of the drive to the office was silent. I must have really struck a blow. My dad had been working as a desk jockey for Wipe All Toiletries Incorporated for the past thirty years. Originally he thought he was only going to be working there for a few months until he got back on his feet. And look where he is today, hating it more than ever.
You know how people have nine-to-five jobs? He has a five-to-nine job. That’s what you get for going to college for eight years.
He was right about me though. I had been wasting my entire summer. I would fall asleep on the couch, wake up the next morning, and just put on a clean t-shirt. I had been a tool my entire life. Even I am willing to admit that.
When we got to the office I hugged my mom. Afterwards I walked over to the coffee shop down the street. There wasn’t anybody there other than two employees behind the counter and a motorcyclist on a laptop. He had a Harley Davidson shirt on and there was one parked outside uncoincidentally. He had a single golden earring and a full head of matted gray hair.
To make it seem as though I wasn’t loitering, which I was, I ordered a small iced coffee. I sat on the curb and watched cars speed by, sipping my coffee. The purpose of this trip to the coffee shop was to find company and there was obviously none here. I chugged the rest of by drink and chucked it into the road. Instead of returning to my mom’s office I went to the next coffee shop just a block away.
It was called the Bookstore where aside from selling coffee they sold books you couldn’t get anywhere else. From unpublished cookbooks to manifestations, they had it. Students were more often dwelling here than any other coffee house on campus, even during the summer. Once again I ordered another coffee to get out from under the loitering radar. This time it was just a regular black coffee.
I took the nearest seat to the counter next to a young Caucasian man with a black beard. I made the inference, as I had with everyone else in the shop, that he attended the local university. He had a few notepads and a small book in front of him.
“Hello. What’s your name?” he asked immediately upon my sitting down with a cheered expression.
“Ted. Yours?”
He went on to explain that his name was Dre’ Childress. He had graduated from college last semester and had two part times jobs at Wipe All Toiletries Inc. and at New Ways Church. For the next half hour he talked nonstop about Jesus and New Ways Church. It was soon revealed that the book in front of him was indeed a Bible.
“Sounds like a great program.”
“It sure is.” Dre’ smiled.
“Tell me this though. It’s nothing personal but I’ve always wondered this. What are the chances of an atheist getting into Heaven?”
“None.”
“Why. I know a few. They’re great people.”
“But they don’t have any faith in God.”
“But they have no reason to. Why have fear in going to Hell if you don’t believe in it?”
“That’s their problem.”
“What about the other religions? The Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists. They were born and raised that way. Why would they want to convert?”
“Because Christianity is the path to Heaven.”
“But to them their religions are. Are you saying that they, some of my own friends included, are going to Hell?” He replied by using an extremely vulgar word followed by "off".
“I thought you were a religious guy.” To this he replied the same as he had to my last question, but with more feeling.
My dad had texted me that it was time to go and people were starting to watch us. I grabbed my coffee as I walked out. At least Dre’ had given me a free New Ways pen and some information before our brawl. My dad picked me up in the parking lot. Man, was I wired on caffeine.
When we got home I retreated to my bedroom to listen to the radio and jump on the bed, you know, to blow off some steam. After ten minutes or so a John Lennon song came on. I had never heard it before, but I could tell it was his voice. I was tired so I stopped jumping and sat on the edge of my bed; it was really just a mattress on the floor with a sheet over it. The song had a big impact on me. When it was over I was crying.
The lyrics said “I don’t believe in-“something different each time. When he said he didn’t believe in magic or Jesus that didn’t bother me so much. Tons of people don’t believe in either of those. What bothered me was when he said he didn’t believe in real people. He sang that he didn’t believe in Hitler, Kennedy, Elvis, and a few others.
How could he not believe in real people? What angered me the most was when he said “I believe in me and Yoko.” Yoko was his wife. So he didn’t believe in everyone else in the world? He didn’t believe in me?
For some reason I cried my eyes out over this. I was furious at John Lennon, an ex-Beatle who had been dead seventeen years before I was even born. I love the Beatles too! But at that moment I was too depressed to care. I fell asleep crying.
I awoke a few hours later I really had to use the restroom. As I sat on the toilet, I pondered the events of today and everything else that had happened so far this summer. It was really boring and downright depressing. Not to mention pathetic. Especially lonely.
I hadn’t seen anybody I knew from school for weeks. Most of my friends were doing cross country right now. That’s when I decided that I would write a letter to the coach asking to join. Realizing I wasn’t going to be leaving the bathroom anytime soon (I had eaten some bad burritos for breakfast), I addressed a square of toilet tissue to the high school’s athletic department using the pen Dre’ had given me. I wrote a good pleading letter on four squares.
Postage was my only issue. My mom had all of the stamps at her office. But then I saw it on the wall in front of me. I peeled the stamp from my former collecting failure off the wall and stuck it on the top right corner of my letter.
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