Sammy looked. His eyes were shiny black beads, like a mouse's eyes,
solid save for a subtle tracery of Mickey Mouse heads at the
corners. The trademark infringement made him grin, hard and
spitless. He looked ten years younger, like those late-teen hipsters
whose parents dragged them to Walt Disney World, who showed up in
bangbanger threads and sneered and scratched their groins and made
loud remarks about how suckballs it all was. His conservative buzz-cut
looked more like a retro-skinhead thing, and his smooth-shaved, round
cheeks made him boyish.
"Those are good for two days tops -- your eyes start getting itchy,
you just toss 'em. You want a pair that's good for a week, twenty
dollah with the Mickeys. I got Donalds and Astro Boys and all kinds of
shit, just have a look through my flash book. Some stuff I drew
myself, even."
Playing along now, Sammy let himself be led on a tour of the
flash-book, which featured the kind of art he was accustomed to seeing
in tattoo parlor windows: skulls and snakes and scorpions and naked
ladies. Mickey Mouse giving the finger, Daisy Duck with a strap-on,
Minnie Mouse as a dominatrix. The company offered a bounty for turning
in trademark infringers, but somehow he doubted that the company
lawyers would be able to send this squatter a cease-and-desist letter.
In the end, he bought one of each of the Disney sets.
"You like the mouse, huh?"
"Sure," he said.
"I never been. Too expensive. This is all the ride I want, right
here." He gestured at the dead Wal-Mart.
"You like that huh?"
"Man, it's cool! I go on that sometimes, just to see what it's turned
into. I like that it's always different. And I like that people add
their own stuff. It makes me feel, you know..."
"What?"
Suddenly, the vendor dropped his hard-case bangbanger facade. "Those
were the best days of my life. I was building three-d printers, making
them run. My older brother liked to fix cars, and so did my old man,
but who needs a car, where you going to go? The stuff I built, man, it
could make *anything*. I don't know why or how it ended, but while it
was going, I felt like the king of the goddamned world."
It felt less fun and ironic now. There were tears bright on the
vendor's black-bead eyes. He was in his mid-twenties, younger than
he'd seemed at first. If he'd been dressed like a suburban home-owner,
he would have looked like someone smart and accomplished, with lively
features and clever hands. Sammy felt obscurely ashamed.
"Oh," he said. "Well, I spent those years working a straight job, so
it didn't really touch me."
"That's your loss, man," the vendor said. The printer behind him was
spitting out the last of Sammy's contact-lenses, in sealed plastic
wrap. The vendor wrapped them up and put them in a brown liquor-store
bag.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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