paid you two hundred on the first and the other hundred on the fifteenth?”
“Nicky, if the rent is late you have to pay an extra thirty dollars. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to hold you to that.” She said.
“Okay. Oh Kate, one more thing,” I said, “Jason, my boss, um, he asked me to try to get some new landscaping jobs on my own. Everyone who works with him does it. And anyway, I put an ad in the classifieds. Since I don’t have a credit card I had them put it on our monthly bill…”
“Our monthly bill? You mean my monthly bill.” She interrupted.
“Right, sorry. It’s an extra seven dollars, so I can give that to you now if you want.” I said.
“Well, just leave it on the coffee table. And Nick, next time, ask.”
On my way to the mall, I skated past Kinkos and saw Jeremy behind the counter wearing a black apron. I decided to stop in and say hi. I could tell right away that he was a little drunk. “Drinking on the job?” I asked. “What if you have to use the big paper cutter over there? You might cut a finger off.”
He looked around to see if any of his co-workers had heard. “How could you tell? I drank a forty with lunch -they never card at that zipperhead deli around the corner. I did mouthwash an’ everything… You think the customers’ll notice?”
“No,” I said, “I know you. I can tell when you’re lit, I doubt these fools could.” I looked over at a college boy with bad posture who was collating slowly.
“So what’s new Nick-man? Your mom still a cunt?” He asked, a bit too loud.
“Yeah, but she’s not giving me any headaches at the moment. Me an’ Michael were coming to see you last night, but we got sidetracked with Julie and Mya.”
“Ouch. Bad combination. Why were you coming to see me?”
“No reason really. We got some herb and we were gonna smoke you out.” I said.
“Yeah? You still have any? I need to smoke a joint. I been stressed about work. My manager’s all on me about stupid shit.”
“Really? That’s not fair. Take malt liquor out of the equation and I bet you’re employee of the month.” I said.
“Fuckin’ A.” He said. “So where’d you get the bud?”
“Crazy Jessie. Me an’ Michael went over to his house. He has guns and explosives and crank and confederate flags and the TV’s blarin’ and it’s like, fuck Jessie! Nice atmosphere you’ve created over here. I love what you’ve done with the place.”
“I know. Last time I went over there he scared the shit out of me. Steven was there and they had a shotgun and a handgun just sitting on the table like they expected a gunfight to break out at any moment. Remember when his mom was running that house, how nice it looked?”
“Yeah, now it looks like the set of a snuff film.” I said. “He was telling us some funny shit though. Have you ever heard of the Ho Chi Minh trail?”
“You mean like in Platoon?” He asked.
“No, in the neighborhood. Him and Pat had a whole network of backyard trails to get away from the cops. I guess Pat was running one of the routes when he dropped dead.” I said.
“Huh. I never heard that. Did it work?”
“I guess so. He said no cop could catch them. They used to race each other from Mendocino to Woodbury all through backyards. He said they could do it in a half hour.”
“A half hour? That’s not that fast. I could do it faster.” He said.
“I thought that was real fast. I mean through backyards, on foot? You gotta take into consideration all the fences to get over and shrubs to go through and shit. There’s no way you could do that in a half hour, I’ll bet you twenty bucks.”
He was about to answer when a co-worker, a short guy with spiky hair, interrupted us. “Jeremy,” he said, “I’m going to the Rite-Aid. Gimme two of the forty nines and a ninety nine.” Jeremy handed him some small squares of paper and the kid left.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“Oh, there’s this really stupid lady who works at the Rite-Aid, so we copied some bar codes from the store onto sticky paper and now we pay whatever we want for anything in there.” He held up a pile of various sized squares of paper with bar codes on them. “Wherever the bar code is on the product, we just put one of these stickers over it and it rings up forty nine cents. We have ninety nine centers, and a couple dollar sixty fours. One of these days I’m gonna see if they’ll sell me a clock radio or a fancy cooler for a dollar sixty four.”
“Do you realize how brilliant that is? I mean, that’s huge. We could make some serious money off that shit.” I said.
“Nah.” He said, shaking his head. “I think the only reason it works is because it’s small amounts of money, no one really cares. I mean we’re getting king-sized candy bars for regular-sized prices. I think they’d notice if their most expensive item rang up one sixty four.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” I said. “But they sell Walkmans in there. On a busy day you could buy a couple of thirty dollar Walkmans for five or six bucks each and then turn around and sell ‘em for fifteen or twenty and pocket the difference.”
“Bad idea. You’d get caught and they’d figure out where you made the stickers and I’d get fired.” He said. “I hope you’re not that hard up for money.”
“No. I’m not hard up. You don’t have to worry… I just think it’s cool that you found such a genius way to get over on the Rite-Aid.”
“Well, whatever you do, don’t tell Michael about it, he’d be cleaning the fucking place out tomorrow.” He said. “What the fuck were we talking about?”
“The Ho Chi Minh trail.” I said. “You think you could do it in a half hour, I say you can’t.”
“Oh yeah, well, maybe I couldn’t do it in a half hour, but I sure as shit could do it faster than you.” He said.
“Alright, alright, I’ll race your ass. We’ll spark one up at your place and do it tonight.” I said.
“Alright. Tonight then.”
When I got to the Science Store Mr. Bennett was leaving. He still had on his Science Store T-shirt but he was wearing a baseball cap and saying his goodbyes to the pear shaped woman. He looked surprised to see me and we stood on the tile walkway outside the store for a moment. “Nick, hi. I was wondering if I’d see you again.” He said.
“Hey Mr. Bennett. I hope I’m not bothering you, I just had a couple of questions about that stuff we were talking about the other day. Are you in the mood for another strawberry Julius?”
“No, I don’t have time. You can walk me home if you want. I’m only six blocks away.” He said. We began walking toward the exit. We passed the easy-to-shoplift Sam Goody. “I’m glad you’re taking such an interest in this.”
“I’m hoping it will make me a world-class skater.” I said, half joking.
“Oh, how interesting. I’d never thought of that one. Track, skiing, automobile and horse races, even football, they’re all excellent examples of time compression, but skateboarding hadn’t occurred to me. The object of skateboarding is to execute more and more elaborate tricks right?” He asked.
“Uh, not really. Maybe. I’m not sure there is an object to skating.” I said.
“Oh, self expression then? I think I had this conversation with a surfer once.” He said.
“Yeah. Self expression. That, and scaring old women.”
He smiled. We exited the mall and were out on the sidewalk. It was a hot day. “Well, what do you need to know?” He asked.
“If I concentrate, I can see space as time. And I can feel the difference between the hidden present, and the one my brain creates like you said. I can even feel like I’ve slowed down time, or at least my perception of it, but it does me no good. I can’t react to things any faster. See I was skating down a big hill, and there was a car coming. I thought I was going to hit it, so I ditched onto the sidewalk and jacked up my arm, look.” I showed him the large scab on my forearm. “I’m sure there was some path I could’ve taken to not crash and not to get run over, but I
couldn’t see it. I had time moving very slow, but my reaction was slow too. Does that make any sense?”
“Who’s the best skateboarder in the world?” Mr. Bennett asked.
“I don’t know. Natas Kaupas I guess.” I said.
“And he can do things you could never dream of doing right? He can do the seemingly impossible?” I nodded. “And do you suppose he’s discovered and mastered the things we’re talking about?” He asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t either. You want to control time, well I’ll tell you, it takes practice. Many people have learned to do it without knowing. If someone practices something every day, A skateboard trick for example, they’re compressing time. What they do is break a movement into increments and slowly train their body to react to minor variations within those increments. They put more and more markers in time, bringing them closer to the hidden present. Eventually they’re able to speed their body’s reactions up too, so that they can accomplish everything they need to in an incredibly small amount of time. Of course the mind and body resist that. It takes lots of practice. The body has set speeds that it likes to work at, like default settings, and even if you can slow your perception of time, that’s not the same thing as speeding up your reaction.” He said.
“I guess I’ll never get sponsored. So, Mr. Bennett, what happens if you catch up to the hidden present?”
“I’m not sure it’s possible, but I think time would stop for you.” He said.
“And if