John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van

So I have to say that I miss shopping. I miss it because it’s something I rarely do for myself at all now, and I miss it even though the thing I miss is not actually shopping, but shopping with Mom, when I was young, before anything happened. Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it’s no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can’t miss shopping like you’d miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.

I give a list to Vicky once a week; that’s how I get what I need. Stores where I live are as big as college campuses. But sometimes I’ll get stir-crazy, and I’ll start to resent that I can’t put my life through the same paces everybody else takes for granted. So I’ll go out in the morning, out the door by nine o’clock at the latest, and I’ll substitute the liquor store for the supermarket, since early-riser liquor store shoppers are people who wouldn’t raise their eyes to you if you had a gun pointed at them. Besides which, I have a special place in my heart for the Pomona liquor stores that face the empty boulevards. I grew up in them, kind of: they used to have comic racks.

I needed to stock up on candy. I don’t like asking Vicky to buy as much candy as I actually want to eat; I am ashamed about my candy habit. I will eat it until I feel sick. Once I get to the candy rack I can’t control myself; I buy chewy Swee-Tarts and Red Hot Dollars, and I buy Magic Colors bubble gum cigarettes, which I like even though they don’t have any actual taste at all. I go home and I eat them all straight from the bag while watching The People’s Court or something, and I make noises like an octopus feeding underwater.

I pulled into the liquor store parking lot in the warm early-summer air and I took one of those big yoga breaths the rehab techs encourage you to take when they think your spirits are sinking. I went in, and I brought a good haul of candy up to the counter, about twenty dollars’ worth. When I paid for it the clerk didn’t even look up. I had a memory as I passed the dirty magazines by the front door, but I tamped it down. I looked away toward the sun still coming up over the Carl’s Jr. across the street.

Coming back around the side of the store to the parking lot, I saw some teenagers hanging out in the bed of a white Toyota pickup. They must have pulled up while I was inside. They were smoking cigarettes in the deliberate self-conscious way of smoking teenagers: two of them, long-hairs. They were also openly watching me as I carried my bag toward the car. People like me prefer teenagers to other people. They are not afraid to stare.

The taller of the two, sandy blond hair and a wispy mustache on his upper lip, popped himself out and over the side of the truck like an athlete landing a long jump, and stopped himself when I’d thought he was going to come directly at me. “Dude!” he said, lifting his head. It was early. I felt good. Usually I ignore the few people who call out to me when I’m in public, but I looked over toward him and lifted my head right back.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Dude, your face ,” he said.

I read a book called Stardance when I was thirteen years old. It left a big impression on me, though it’s hard to say exactly how, since I don’t remember much about the plot. It had something to do with zero gravity and people dancing in space, maybe in order to communicate something to an alien race. It is probable that when I remember Stardance , I am inventing several details as I go along.

Still, it was Stardance , or my memories of it, the ones I can either access or manufacture, that exploded momentarily in my mind just then as my eyes looked out from under the bulging reconstructed folds of skin that seem to hold them in place. I thought of dancers up in space, trying to stop aliens from enslaving or destroying the earth. I was turning the key in the lock on the car door but it felt like a kind of dancing to me.

“Dude, come here,” said the sandy blond with the mustache. “Not trying to be a dick, just … can I see?” He blew a little smoke and turned his head off to the side as he did it; I saw this as a gesture of deference, of trying to make me see that he wasn’t blowing smoke in my direction. It may have been, though I wonder, that he thought smoke might hurt my skin, which has a fresh-scraped look to it at all times.

Nobody ever asks me if they can look at my face. Except doctors and nurses, I mean. People do look at it, quite often, but usually only if they can convince themselves that I won’t notice they’re looking. They try not to let their eyes stop wandering when they look over in my direction; they pose as if they were surveying some broader scene. I understand, a little, the social dictate to not stare at misshapen people: you want to spare their feelings. You don’t want them to feel ugly. At the same time, though, even before I became what I am, I used to wonder: Isn’t it OK to stare if something seems to stand out? Why not stare? My own perspective is probably tainted by having spent long hours before mirrors after the accident. It would be pretty hard to make me feel “ugly.” Words like pretty and ugly exist in a different vocabulary from the one you might invent to describe a face that had to be put back together by a team of surgeons. My face is strange and terrible. It merits a little staring.

If I were to scream right now, these two would jump straight out of their skins. Just open up my mouth as wide as it will go and start shrieking. Watch them run or freeze in place or just start screaming right back. These urges are still present sometimes. They rise and pop like bubbles on the surface of a bog, and then they’re gone. They don’t trouble me. They are voices from a distant past. “Sure,” I said. I set my bag of candy in the car and I walked across the parking lot toward their truck.

We talked for a long time. The guy who’d called me over was named Kevin and his friend was named Steve, and Kevin said the Koreans at the liquor store were known to not card anybody who had a mustache. He slapped a brown bag in his flatbed as he said this and the full cans of beer gave off a muted thunk. I told him that when I was a little younger than he was now, we didn’t even bother to try buying, because the owners knew our parents: we would chug beers off in a corner of the store behind the dusty greeting cards. Steve laughed and said they still had that greeting card rack in there and I told him I knew, that the cards in it were the exact same ones from when I was his age. Kevin offered me a beer. I told him I couldn’t without a straw, and the quiet that fell onto the conversation for the next few seconds was like a great canyon in a desert landscape. Steve reached inside the window of the truck and flipped on the stereo, and the radio came on. It was KLOS. They were playing “Renegade” by Styx.

Kevin crushed his cigarette underneath his shoe and came close enough to me to really get a good look, and he asked me if I was sure this was OK. It would be hard for me to describe how badly I wanted to smile. I could imagine myself in his position, out there on the other side of me, confronted with the scars and the shapes, all the lines that look like they were left on the canvas by a careless or distracted hand. What are we frightened of? Things that can’t hurt us at all. I told him it was fine, it was kind of cool, that most people don’t even ask when you can tell they want to. He looked up from the stretch of former cheekbone he’d been scrutinizing to make eye contact and he smiled, I think because he understood that I was telling him I thought he was brave. Steve stepped up behind him but kept a little distance. Two might have been too many.