(no subject)

[mallorys_camera]

Moody, broody, rainy day. One by one, all Robin’s neighborhood pals are moving – Jake to Seaside, Halen to Salinas, Richie and Joey to the circumscribed safety of the Pacific Grove school district. By temperament and affinity Robin is the most social human being I’ve ever met so this is a source of some consternation, particularly on weekends. Robin gets very bored. I get very frustrated. All it would take is 72 caffeine-fueled hours – me alone in a room with my laptop, a French press, a couple of pounds of espresso beans and a carton of Camel Wide lights – and voila! the web page would be complete. But that ain’t gonna happen.

On Friday I took the morning sales shift at the store. Two firemen drove in all the way from Fresno to buy $50 worth of hot sauce. They’d been in once before. “Hey! It’s a beautiful day,” the tall one told me. “We’ll stop by Castroville for some French fried artichokes on the way home.”

A soldier from DLI and his wife stopped in to buy an Xmas present for his father. He’d been in three times before. “This Saddam Insane is pretty hot, isn’t it? Do you have any of the politically themed ones that aren’t so spicy?”

“Well, we have a bunch of anti-Bush sauces that are Level 8’s,” I said. “But I doubt that your father would admire the sentiment.”

“We do, but he wouldn’t,” the wife chimed in.

We all shook hands and exchanged first names.

Then a school bus driver showed up to buy a cookie jar and a set of matching salt and pepper shakers, and all of a sudden, we were minting money. Biggest retail day of the year, of course, so maybe that shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The cash register was playing show-tunes. Br-r-ring! That’s the PG&E bill. Br-r-ring! And that’s the phone.

I came home around one to find Robin and Kodiak holed up in the Robintorium in front of the computer, the same place they’d been when I left four hours earlier. They were playing some complicated online role-playing game and no doubt, consorting with known pedophiles. They had that wan and feverish look that I remembered from my days as a WELL addict. I sighed: no web design for me today. Instead I loaded them up in the car and drove down to Dennis the Menace Park where I stalked them with a camera for a couple of hours while they ran the wrong way up slides and talked trash to the skateboard kids.

I downloaded the pix this morning. In every shot, Robin’s face assumes the perfect sneer of the Cool Kid. His social façade, I suppose – he’s clearly the alpha in the Kodiak/Robin duo although Kodiak is a year older. Something about that expression chilled me. I felt as though I was looking at the source code for a portrait of Dorian Gray.

“Your artist came by the shop looking for you,” said Ben when he came home later that night.

“He did?” I said. “He was looking for me?”

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” said Ben.

To the best of my knowledge, Ben hadn’t met him before and the thought of that meeting made me very uncomfortable.