Chapter 1: Buh Loop
THE FIRST EMAIL ARRIVED with an electronic Buh Loop— the sound a goldfish might make when it surfaces to gulp a shrimp flake.
Malcolm told Teddy to read it later.
Malcolm Vance spoke over his shoulder. Turning around completely to look at Teddy would have required an awkward and inconvenient redistribution of weight, because Malcolm’s 420 pounds were not so much sitting in his chair as they were merged with it. Like Michelangelo’s Pieta or the Iwo Jima War Memorial, Malcolm and his cushiony base described a sculptural triangle, a bottom-heavy and untippable monument. Under the strain of all that mass, the chair’s armrests pulled inward while its claw-feet splayed outward, like the spindly legs of a loyal but exhausted cartoon pack mule.
The apartment in which the first email would be read later was the home-office and shipping hub of Malcolm and Teddy’s new internet store, FantiqueShop.com, whose 6,300-item inventory had been hauled up recently from the old brick-and-mortar Fantiques Shop storefront downstairs. Teddy did the hauling.
Squatting under the Myrtle Avenue El, on the treeless corner of Palmetto Street and Cypress Avenue, the old store had never done any real walk-in business. Most people in the Brooklyn-Queens border town of Ridgewood weren’t interested in what Fantiques had to offer. It sold no clothing or food for the adults; no candy, comic books or PS2s for the kids; and for the teenagers, no pornography or rolling paper. The store carried merchandise that nobody in the neighborhood could use or, in some cases, pronounce. It sold Memorabilia. Old stuff. Junk. And not banged-up tools or toasters that could be tinkered back to life, but the most useless junk of all. Movie junk. TV junk. Showbiz junk: Shirley Temple dolls, Hop-Along Cassidy wristwatches, ray guns, ViewMaster slides, super-8 movies, Roy Roger lariats, holsters, hats, T-shirts, Beavis & Butthead junk, Star Wars, Star Trek and Matrix I, II and III junk.
Maybe this kind of store would fly with the collectors and cinephiles in Manhattan. but here on Palmetto and Seneca, nobody was spending good money on a chipped Howdy Doody cookie jar from 1958—from back when Malcolm and Teddy were kids.
Among all this moldy memorabilia was one item that could technically be considered memorabilia only to Malcolm and Teddy themselves, because only they remembered it. Five bookcases facing the cash register sagged under 2,500 copies of Malcolm’s 15-year-old, self-published, undistributed, unread novel, Blood Is Sicker Than Water. And while the stickers on everything else in the store were scribbled over with steadily deflating prices, Malcolm’s novel was never discounted. The original $12.95 tag never budged and neither did a single copy.
For a while, Fantiques had been kept out of the red—if not in the pink—because endless Jaws, Star Wars and Rambo sequels had disgorged enough merchandise to attract enough kids who had enough money to buy enough “vintage” light sabers to keep the doors open.
McDonald’s hadn’t hurt in the staying-afloat department, either. Their movie tie-in giveaways enabled to further stuff its shelves without spending a penny, as long as 45-year-old Teddy didn’t mind ordering himself a kid’s Happy Meal whenever he picked up a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal for Malcolm. And Teddy didn’t mind at all. A Happy Meal was plenty for him. If his mother were still around, she’d still be calling him String Bean. And she’d still be looking at Malcolm and shaking her head. Malcolm Vance was a whole different story.
Eventually the combination of a bad location, location, location, and Malcolm’s tendency to verbally abuse and physically threaten prepubescent customers who insisted on calling the place “Fatman’s,” motivated Teddy to suggest they go for a broader market from a safer distance, over the World Wide Web. And so FantiqueShop.com was born and Teddy dragged the junk upstairs into Malcolm’s apartment.
When the email buh-looped into his life, Malcolm told Teddy to “read it later” because it was time for the eleven o’clock news and a snack. They had eaten dinner a couple of hours ago, but that was a couple of hours ago. So Teddy prepared the bouquet of rippled chips in the gap.) He unfolded Malcolm’s TV tray and set it up before finally grabbing the remote and switching on the television.
Teddy nibbled his own sandwich by the computer on the kitchen table behind Malcolm’s big easy chair, and now that everything was in order, he checked the email that had popped up earlier.
From: j.posner@caa.com. Subject: Urgent need.
Urgent need? Teddy thought that had to mean porn and was ready to hit delete, when Malcolm exploded in front of the television.
“Groundhog day?” he hollered. “Children are performing oral sex acts on each other in elementary school bathrooms. Terrorists are drinking arsenic and urinating in our reservoirs. Museums are shutting down. Nobody reads anymore. Nobody can read anymore. Everyone, from the President to the postman, is full of…full of… it’s outrageous. And you spend five minutes on Puxatauney Phil? This is insanity. Teddy, listen to this. Five minutes on a rodent? These, these scoundrels are…are…” When Malcolm got worked up, his language became as archaic as Fantiques’ inventory. As though he dragged his words out of an old trunk.
He was having his nightly argument with the nightly news, concerning the shallow grave being dug for modern society.
Which is why Teddy prepared for the worst when the next news segment featured Stevon Hedd, that pretty-boy actor from PowerGrid, and PowerGrid II: Overload. The clip showed Stevon fronting his band, “WonderBelly” at last year’s Oscars ceremony. Malcolm’s wrath was about to reach new heights. Teddy decided to retreat to his computer monitor.
Buh-loop.
Another email popped up, just like the first: j.posner@caa.com. This time, when he read the subject line, Teddy double-clicked it, triple-clicked it, quadruple clicked it.
When he was done reading, and about to tap Malcolm on the shoulder, Teddy saw a very tan man on TV saying his client Stevon Hedd was taking the recent setbacks in stride. Because of Malcolm’s constant interruptions, Teddy had a hard time follow everything, but he picked up “much needed rest…rehab…resting up… new projects.” The man speaking was identified along the bottom of the screen in large white type as Michael Orleans, Celebrity Artists Agency.
Teddy looked back at the email.
From: j.posner@caa.com
CC: m.orleans@caa.com, shedd@wonderbelly.com
Subject: Blood Is Sicker Than Water
Dear Fantique Shop:
I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour and there’s a time element here. You don’t have an express delivery option on your site and I need to order a rush copy of item number 0001BISTW, “Blood Is Sicker Than Water” by Malcolm Vance.
Our client is laid up in the hospital for a while and would love to have this novel to help him through the difficult time. Would you please FedEx Priority Overnight a the book to the address below? Any extra charges incurred are not a problem.
Thanks in advance.
He can hardly wait.
This was followed by shipping, contact and billing information for Celebrity Artists Agency in Hollywood, California. Teddy looked at the TV again: Michael Orleans, Celebrity Artists Agency. For good measure, he reread the email’s cc line: m.orleans@caa.com, shedd@wonderbelly.com. Then, while the news cut back to Stevon Hedd shirtlessly blatting into a harmonica in front of WonderBelly, Teddy cleared his throat and tapped Malcolm on the shoulder.
“Uh, Malcolm?” Teddy said. “Look at this.”
[...] Continued from Chapter One [...]