Wackos to Obliterate: Book Two (Chapter 3)

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“Weren’t you in the TRinkets?” an old woman, who daily pushed a wheelchair to the store, asked as Trink scanned her purchases. He glanced quickly at Emily to see if she was listening.

“You have me mistaken for someone else, miss,” he replied in little more than a whisper; a rare choice from his vocalization repertoire.

“My husband was looking at an old picture of the band on his tablet and is sure you’re Trink Mars.”

“That’s his name,” Emily butted in. “So, you mean to say he’s someone famous?”

“No, your husband is mistaken,” Trink said in a louder voice as a grin began to creep across his face.

“He may be confined to a wheelchair, but I assure you he’s rarely mistaken,” the little lady replied with a haughtiness that appeared out of place in a frequent customer of a convenience store.

Unfortunately for Trink, there was currently little happening in the store to keep Emily occupied, so the high school graduate was more than willing to focus on this strange turn of events.

“Well, there’s always an exception to everything,” Trink said.

“What were the TRinkets?” Emily asked.

“Just a group,” Trink replied a rather too abruptly.

“They were very popular when our children were your age,” the old woman elaborated, addressing the cute but tubby cashier with curly brown hair.

“I’ve got to check it out.”

“I’m sure Brad has it on his machine,” the old woman said, pointing towards the old man waiting in the wheelchair outside. As Emily left the counter, on her mission to ensure that someone she knew actually had his turn on the Warholian 15-minute-of-fame carousel, Trink chided himself for not using an alias when he took the job.

“Why did you say that?” he asked.

“Say what?” she said, paused then continued, “I don’t know, I guess we were just curious. Like she is,” the old woman smiled, nodding toward Emily as she said something to the old man who pointed at the tablet in his lap.

“But isn’t it a little too personal to ask a perfect stranger a question like that in front of another perfect stranger?”

“Sorry honey, I just never thought about it,” she replied as they watched the old man handing Emily the tablet. A huge grin covered her face as she looked down at the picture and then back to Trink and the woman standing inside. Her grin grew even larger as she came back inside with the tablet still in her hands.

“It’s you!” she said. Much like a police inspector trying to force a confession, Trink thought, the closer she got with the incriminating image. When she thrust the back-lit photo at him, a cold shiver shot up his spine. He did not know why he was reacting with such trepidation, but he feared what his verification would create.

As he looked at the flash from his past, a publicity photo taken of the group during an interview with a major tabloid at the time, he asked, “Which one is supposed to be me?”

“You’re so full of shit, Trink. You can’t deny it. If anything, that beak of yours gives it away.”

“That aquiline nose is not a ‘beak,’ my dear, but, yes, the resemblance is undeniable,” replied the old woman, looking at Trink as she spoke. Just then, several young men wearing blue jeans and T-shirts entered the store.

“Ya sell micro-brews?” One of the men asked.

“We sure do,” Trink replied. “In the cooler over there, to the left of the corporate labels,” he pointed.

While Emily rang up the beer, Trink helped the old woman with her shopping bag as she carried the tablet back to Brad.

“Why’re you working here? The music business must be in the pits like everything else, eh? Outsourced overseas, I suppose,” Brad muttered as Trink placed the bag in a storage compartment behind the chair.

“Man, you’re two nosey people, aren’t you? Hell, I should ask why you force your wife to push you around.”

“You just did. You probably wonder why we’re so cheap not to at least motorize the friggin’ chair,” Brad replied with a cracked but booming voice.

“Yeah, why are you so cheap? At least, get a used car or something.”

“He’s pissed off that we blew his cover, isn’t he Chelsea?” Brad said through a grin on a face that was little more than a skeleton with a paper-thin, pale, plastic material hanging loosely over it.

“What do you care who I am or what I do?”

“Just a couple of old farts with too much time on our hands.”

“Speak for yourself, Chelsea. I’ve got very little time left.”

“Anyway, thanks for your patronage and have a nice day,” Trink said as he looked up and saw Emily staring at them just as she finished up with the young dudes.

“You still didn’t answer my question. Surely you’ve got better things to do with your energy than to slave away at a Daily Stop?” Brad shouted back.

“Look old man . . .”

“The name’s Brad, Bradley Marden!” Brad shouted.

“Marden?”

“Ya know, A&R for Summit Records!”

“No shit . . .” Trink muttered as he walked back inside.

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“Says here that he retired in 1984,” Trink read from the screen of his desktop.

“Just when all that mid-80s vocal crap began to predominate,” Madelyn replied, sitting beside him in her matching, leather-backed office chair.

“He must have had a premonition that Live Aid was in the offing; time to call it a day.”

“You stuck around a little longer, though, didn’t you love?”

“At least, I didn’t get railroaded into singing a verse on that early hymn to globalization: ‘we are hope’ or whatever,” he said. “That’s because I wasn’t a Bobby, a Bruce, a Jackson, or a Darryl.”

“You weren’t a George M or a B George either,” Madelyn said through giggles.

Trink turned his head toward her and jutted his chin out a little as though he was offended. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say by that sexist comment, but we’ll let it pass. I’ve never known you to be very empathetic with the LGBT community.” After he said that, he began to giggle as well.

She pulled her arm back from around him and pushed him on the shoulder. “I never had to worry about being PC.”

“Well, it’s probably your off-color comments which made ‘the powers that be’ push us into ‘the shadow lands of the performing arts.’”

“So you think lines like ‘domestic pussy-pumpin’ decreases beaver-hunting, Baby’ didn’t keep you off the top-of-the-pop charts?”

“You think they played a factor?” he grinned. “I wonder how Emily will react after she goes online to check out a couple TRinket videos.”

“Either you’ll have a groupie on your hands or she’ll never speak to you again. Either way, it’s good you’re leaving that job soon.”

“Do you think Bradley could pull a string or two to steer us out of obscurity?”

“By the sound of it, he can’t even navigate his own wheelchair,” she said as she pulled a very slim, hand-rolled cigarette out of a small silver box she picked up from the large wooden desk on which sat the desktop computer they were using. She lit it and soon the earthy and slightly skunky scent of potent cannabis mingled with the nebulous remainder of the perfume, she applied that morning, and the sour smell from Trink’s mouth. As the THC crept into their brains, they both stared at the desk, which led them to muse over why they loved it so much.

They had purchased it at a county-government auction a few years back. It had been used for years in one of the local elementary schools, but reminded them of the style of desks their own teachers had used in primary school. This did not bring with it nostalgia for a more innocent time, but they both loved the way it represented the pursuit of knowledge, the attempt to gain secrets they had yet to obtain; although, the teacher behind the desk may have had it hidden somewhere in the desk drawers – forbidden for them to open and observe – something special. This type of desk seemed to represent a motif embedded in its boxlike, sturdy presence containing a key to the tree of knowledge and its fruit of secrets.

The pens, chalks, markers, rulers, reams of paper, books, and anything else that the teacher magically produced from the bowels of the desk in the course of a school day seemed especially pregnant with expertise and confidence. Both felt this awe in the early years of their schooling and they had carried it with them through adulthood.

After the desk had been delivered and they got high in front of it for the first time one evening, Madelyn started to share her rationale for the purchase. Trink was amazed to hear her state almost the same thoughts as his own. To this day, this sharing of a feeling from early in their childhood had become, strange as it may seem, one of the small things in life that made them comfortable around each other and stay together regardless what periodic problems they faced.

“So, what’s his claim to fame?” Madelyn asked once they finished smoking the pinner.

Trink was a little startled. “Who?”

“Wheelchair man, whom else?” she replied, shaking her head, amazed that he was already spacing out.

“Mostly surf groups initially, but later got into some of the folk-rock bands; no one major. His biggest discovery was Macabilly in the 70s and produced some of the funk/new wave/reggae hybrids. He retired in the early 80s with a couple of bands who were trying to blend DJ sound from disco with funk/reggae and fusion jazz. I guess you could say he was a little influential in the development of rap or hip hop,” Trink rambled on.

“Hey, this I really want to know,” she said, abruptly. “What do the two of them buy at the store every morning?”

A big grin spread across Trink’s face. “Mostly, cupcakes, fruit pies, and other junk food.”

“No shit.”

“No, really, salty tortilla chips and chewy cookies.”

“Marden is 80 going on 18?”

“I think this makes it a little clearer why the munchies.”

“What does it say?”

“Well, this wiki claims that for the past several years, Marden has been fairly active in promoting marijuana decriminalization.”

“That explains the interest in reggae,” Madelyn said.

“Hell, all of them, even surf.”

“I have a strong feeling, this is just the beginning. . .”

Trink interrupted by asking, “Of the end?”

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Links to the previous chapters of Book Two

Chapter 1
Chapter 2

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Copyright (©) by Kenneth Wayne