The Toilet Paper Caper: Chapter 16
A Stark Mystery
And, in the blink of an eye — seven blinks to be exact — I was back in 1982.
The year when everything changed. You could call it a near-cataclysmic seismic shift if you wanted to have fewer friends. Believe me on that one.
Without asking too many questions for a change, Rebecca had dropped me off on the corner of 15th and Elm and then had taken off for a bit of “me time”. Something about wanting to watch as she was being born or gambling on a dog race or returning an old library book she had laying around in the Pinto before it was printed.
I didn’t care, I was just happy to have some breathing room. I also would use the room to finish off a few-days-old energy bar I had in my back pocket.
Having no idea how close behind those Whipple twins were, I broke into a light jog. I couldn’t remember the last time I had jogged seeing as my doctor had long ago advised against exercise of any type. Years later, it turned out my doctor had been an inanimate mannequin the entire time and his medical training was suspect at best.
It was seasonally warm for an early Spring day and, in moments, I was sweating profusely. I stood there, panting like a large dog or, like several smaller dogs — it’s actually quite similar — and mopping my brow with the frog in my pocket. A smile crossed my face — years back a scorned girlfriend’s final cryptic words were “you are horrible in bed” and “you’ll never mop your brow with a cloth frog”. Seems she was wrong on exactly one account.
1324 Elm Street.
It had been so long since I’d been back.
It all looked the same. Memories flooded over me similar to how water floods over me when I fall asleep drinking bourbon in the bathtub and forget to turn the water off or, as I call them, Fridays.
My old stomping ground and, after the multiple noise complaints, my old lightly-tapping ground and, after my mother screamed at me to “stop with all the tapping, Fred Astaire!”, my old standing-in-one-spot ground.
My family home. The place I’d lost my first tooth and, after enjoying the exchanging-objects-coated-in-enamel for money, the start of my short-lived-trading-objects-coated-in-enamel part-time job. The site of my as-yet-incomplete coming-of-age story that the local psychology department at the state university showed great interest in. The house where I’d had my first kiss and, shortly after, my first black eye and, shortly after that, my first inkling that maybe I wasn’t the ladies man my Barbie dolls told me I was.
And then, as if on cue, while I was lost in my thoughts, there was my dad parking the old car and walking up the front steps just feet away. I could also have described his distance from me in inches or miles, but I was trying to limit myself to one measurement when describing distances. Can’t say that expensive therapist was a total waste of money after all.
Not sure what it was, an out-of-breath stranger literally making a small pool of liquid that the neighborhood kids could soon enjoy a dip in or maybe he sensed something on a cosmic level, but my dad turned and we locked eyes. If this had been a scene in a movie, I would have started crying or singing or speaking in tongues. On a short aside, I’d always wanted to learn to speak in tongues in case this whole private investigator thing didn’t work out.
My father’s mouth opened and he paused — my heart skipped a beat and I remembered that I’d forgotten to make that appointment to see the arrhythmia specialist that Helen said was “killer”. Was this the moment I had dreamed about all these years where my hard-as-nails father finally professed his undying love for me after years of emotional responses that school counsellors referred to as “the best one could expect in 1982” and “robotic” and “not robotic like those sexy female robots teenage boys fantasize about”. I closed my eyes and waited for a warm embrace that passersby would begin to feel uncomfortable due to its length and accompanying soft audible noises. Instead, he took a disgustingly large bite of his apple and continued up the stairs.
“Dad,” I called out, voice rife with feeling, forgetting that I wasn’t the 14 year-old version of me he was used to who, at the time, was probably sitting in the backyard deciding between making a tree fort, some self-flagellation or finally exploring the wonderful world of breaking and entering.
My old man stopped in his steps — but, I mean, who else’s steps could he stop in without tons of phone calls, coordinating schedules and rehearsing — and dropped his apple as he looked over his shoulder at me. His mouth wide open as if he was at the dentist’s office or the chiropractor but pretending he was at the dentist (as he often did which resulted in his burning through every chiropractor in town).
“Look, dad, I don’t have much time. Those crazy twins might show up at any second and, no, I’m not talking about the red-haired girls with the mild speech impediments across the street who I had a not-so-secret crush on. Yes, I’m all grown up and, I’ll kindly ask you not to stare at the obvious signs I have more-or-less let things go.
“I’m from 2020. I can’t spend the next 30 minutes explaining time travel — hell, I couldn’t explain it if I had 300 minutes, one of the thinking caps you gave me for birthdays 6 through 11 and a dry erase board — I also can’t go into the details about the worldwide panic buying of toilet paper in 2020 or convincing you to hold onto your large collection of shirts that mom will attempt to donate to Goodwill causing them to block our number for all future donations as they will be eventually considered vintage.”
“Starky! I can’t believe it! It’s really you, as a significantly-lower-than-average-on-multiple-scales-and-metrics adult man. I knew it! I always told your mom that I didn’t know when and I didn’t know why, but someday a future version of my son would travel back in time to visit me and give me the guidance I needed to make something of myself. She mocked me and teased me and taunted me and even more so after I suggested she didn’t need to use so many synonyms when she’d already made her point.”
“So, dad, you believe it’s me?”
“Sure, I mean, why not? Especially because you should probably get to the point as if this was a chapter in a book it would already be running a bit long almost like the writer had an ongoing issue with being succinct.”
“Ummm…okay.”
With as much gusto as I could produce after a long day, I produced the paper and showed him the code.
It was as if someone had punched him in the face. He stumbled backward, landing on his keister and sat there rubbing his eyes, staring up at the code in disbelief. After a moment, his eyes lit up and he shook his head so rapidly and for so long it was almost like he was trying to make me feel badly about the current state of neck tightness.
“I can’t believe it! That is the code!”
“You know what this means?”
“Yes, it’s the answer to the problem I’ve been spending my days and nights and those periods of time between days and nights that aren’t really one or the other and don’t really have an adequate name, searching for exactly this code.”
I handed the stained and much travelled paper over to him and he looked as if I had handed him a million dollars in 1982 money or a Get Out of Jail Free card or just a really really pristine piece of excellent stationary.
Without warning, he abruptly grabbed my hand and pulled me up the stairs and into the house. It smelled of liver and onions and middle class suburbia which, for those unfamiliar, also often smells of liver and onions.
“Hey sweetie, this is Starky as a grown up adult. Yes, yes, you need to suspend your disbelief which, as our couples counsellor told you, all aspects of our marriage has been preparing you for. And, yes, yes he clearly needs some dietary and skin care advice plus some of your Tupperware you are always trying to sell to friends as a parting gift, but we just don’t have time. We have to rush. The future of the world, or at least the future of the world directly connected to toilet paper availability, hangs in the balance.
“Everyone laughed at me when I said I’d crack the code! Everyone laughed that one time I misspelled “code” when we were playing Scrabble and everyone also laughed, appropriately for once, that one time I went to amateur’s night at the local comedy club which, to use your words, ‘you weren’t quite as horrible as one would expect; I mean, you were, by all neutral accounts, quite horrible, just that I had set my bar so low, that in some strange way, it was funny’.
“C’mon, Starky, let me show you the great plans that I was always working on upstairs in the attic that your mom thought was just hours looking at poorly-lit-clearly-low-budget-illegally-imported pornography. Yes, I also looked at poorly-lit-clearly-low-budget-illegally-imported pornography — I mean what warm-blooded man trapped in a suburban lifestyle in 1982 didn’t? — just that I wasn’t only doing that.”
As I was inundated with the memorabilia of my youth, I was whisked away to his private room in the attic that was always under lock and key.
The interior of this private room was covered with the nearly unreadable scrawls of a lunatic but, as I reminded myself, he was my lunatic. Close facsimiles of the code on the paper with huge, red, very well drawn question marks covered the walls. Words like “WHY” and “HOW” and “ORANGE MARMALADE ON TOAST” were all over the ceiling. The floor covered with shag rugs that had seen better days and an endless stream of numbers.
And, in the very center, circled in what appeared to be mom’s Clinique’s Black Honey Almost lipstick that she lost in the winter of ’82 “STOP THE WHIPPLES!!!”.
At that exact moment a loud pounding almost knocked down the front door.
“We know you are in there, Stark! We know full well what your father is planning, what he was working towards, what he was on the edge of doing! We won’t let him take this from us. But, it doesn’t have to end like this. We can all work together. Join us and we will share the money and the TP! Come out now and we promise we won’t hurt you or your dad!”
I looked at dad with a look that said “I have a lot of questions about your involvement in all this, plus, I wish we had time to go outside and play catch and for you to give me some of the life tips you never gave me that ended up in me turning out like this”. What can I say, I’m a pro at giving extremely precise looks.
My dad put a finger to his lips and, with a twinkle in his eye, turned on his IBM PC and with a few clicks, typed in the code and pressed the button.
To be continued in Chapter 17:
Previous Chapters:
Chapter 1 • Chapter 2 • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4 • Chapter 5 • Chapter 6
Chapter 7 • Chapter 8 • Chapter 9 • Chapter 10 • Chapter 11 • Chapter 12
