Chapter 10 "Pokemon Lunchbox"

Dear reader, at this point I feel as if I need to back up a little, because there will be a moment where you will inevitably wonder about certain details of my life, and how or why I came to be in certain situations. Since the need to explain this fact of my being, my livelihood, will come up later; this small fact must be addressed.

I am a highly successful small-time crook.

I am serious.

I make about 24,000 dollars a year at my straight job.

I make about 20,000 dollars in four to five nights a year.

I am a thief. I am a con-artist. I don't really have a conscience about it either, it troubles me very little. At some point I decided that these minimal paying jobs that I went to and from on a weekly basis, were not responsible for me. I couldn't blame my lack of education or moral upbringing on them. I decided that if my credit and capitalistic requirements were sub-par, that I would enact furious retribution against institutions and persons that I would blame, if I cared to.

Insurance companies piss me off. Banks piss me off. Big box retail outlets really piss me off. Rich real estate agents piss me off. You know the kind of credit strapped suburbanite dwellers, that ride their Harley's on the weeked, so they can rebel against...WHAT? Themselves?! People suck. And I will rob them.

I'll rob people that will never miss it, companies that can't keep track of it, and entities that are too stupid to know what they have. Life is survival. You know how much those shoes are that you're wearing? A hundred bucks?! No, I mean on the street. Thirty. That's the bottom line.

To me, anyone with enough sense to figure out the bottom line is smart, not cheap or underhanded.

The first time I ever committed a felony, I was desperate. I wasn't quite out of college, yet. I had no money, and no prospects and all that crap that goes along with being poor, up to your eyeballs in debt, for a peice of paper you don't really need, for the promise of money you will never make with your degree in whatever-the-fuck. So, I was desperate.

I walked into the smallest 4-plex movie theatre in Parker, a town on the outside of the suburbanite wasteland of Denver. I walked into that place with a carrot in my coat pocket and a .25 caliber pistol strapped to my ankle. Right before, I decided to leave the gun on my ankle for emergencies only. I felt as if I was stepping into a dark world that I may never come back from, this was my way of justifying my humanity. I walked in there, and grabbed the manager and told him to use the keys. I had timed it so that they had taken in all of the money for the seven-o-clock movies on the weekend that one of the Lord of The Rings movies came out. I grabbed the twenty-something manager, and poked that carrot into his back and pushed him into the box office door screaming, "Use the keys! Don't look at me!"

He was crapping his pants, but he got that door open lickety split. When we got into the box office, there were two teenagers sitting there with blank looks on their faces. One was a small blonde girl, and the other was a fat blonde pimply faced boy. I didn't want to scare them too much, so I shoved the spindly manager into a corner and said, "Tell them!"

"Were being robbed," he said coldly. "Do whatever he says." The kids were frozen. This was no good, so leaned in and whispered to them.

"This is just a big prank," I hissed, and then showed them the carrot. I was impressed, they didn't laugh, and they went straight to work emptying the registers with smirks on their young faces. The fat kid even emptied out his Pokemon lunch pail to put the money into. (He was some kind of D and D raver type kid. However, I was thankful for his forethought. I hadn't really planned for this eventuality.)

After that, I ripped the only phone I could find out of the wall and said, or rather hissed, "Stay here." I closed the box office door and locked the top lock with the manager's key. It took me two tries because I didn't know which key was which, but once I did that, the adrenaline was driving me mad. I was going to get caught. I knew it. I turned around to the lobby, and the concessions. There were a couple late-comers milling around, getting popcorn, playing a video game. Nothing. No one saw and or reacted to my presence, what-so-ever. Creepy.

I walked into the concession aisle and declared, "THIS IS A ROBBERY! OPEN YOUR DRAWERS NOW!" More blank looks from the cashiers, all teenagers, two girls, one guy. I saw one late-comer take cover behind a full length cut-out of Gandolf and another one, a Hispanic, short, pregnant woman, she whimpered and cowered against her tall Hispanic boyfriend. He was just staring at me like the cashiers, as were the other handful of occupants. At this point, it had occurred to me that I should have worn like a ski mask, or pantyhose over the head or something, but, nope. There was a long silence. My mind was turning cartwheels. I was still twitching this carrot around in my coat pocket like an idiot, holding a Pokemon lunchbox. Still, this eerie silence. It felt like it lasted for about seventeen minutes, but in fact, it probably only lasted like seven seconds. I shrugged, "Get over here," I whispered exasperated to the teenagers; I motioned at them with my gun-carrot-coat hand. We huddled behind the popcorn thingee.

"This is just a huge prank on your boss; it's his birthday present from some very sick friends." The guy teenager, whose name badge said BRENT, piped up.

"But his birthday was last week!"

I inhaled sharply, oh the horror, but I recovered well and said, "Exactly! Ass dick!" And then I smacked him on the back of the head. I showed them the carrot. They all sniggled a bit. "Empty the drawers." This was getting fun.

"We can't." It was EILEEN from her name badge. Eileen was a beautiful little Asian-white girl kid with green eyes. "We can't open the drawers by ourselves!"

I glowered at her for a second and said, "Let’s just pretend..." I looked up at the menu board and put my carrot and my hand on her shoulder and continued, "I ordered a 'Colossal Tub' and paid with a ten, okay?" They all nodded and went to work. My Pokemon lunchbox was filled to capacity.

I dodged out into theatre number four, through the darkened capacity crowd watching god knows what preview, for god knows what. I had tunnel vision. I had planned this exit. All sound was a wash of static in my ears and I only had one goal. My eyes were fixated on that side exit door. I knew exactly where to go and how many steps were required. When you're sprinting, you can actually speed time up. I'm much better at slowing time down, but when you're running for your life, there is a certain lack of detail, a certain white smoke around the edges of the frames of every waking moment. When you’re running for your life...

I slammed through the exit door, and found the bike. It was an old cruiser that I had actually restored to some working order, just for this moment. It cost me fifteen dollars. It was a Schwinn. I bought it off of a friend of mine in school up north, in Greeley. The bike was tied to the railing on the up ramp into the parking lot from theatre four. It was held to the fence by an old U-lock that didn't work. When I tugged the bike from the railing, the U-lock fell apart, breaking the bike free. I tugged off my sweater, with that; my thin jacket easily came with it. I stuffed the sweater, jacket, carrot and the two halves of the U-Lock into the basket on the front of the red and rusted Schwinn, and walked it the rest of the way up the ramp. I pulled an orange hunter's beanie from my back pocket and tugged it over my head. Finally, I stuck the Pokemon lunchbox on to the top of my Schwinn basket and rode into suburbanite oblivion, trailing my misty hyperventilating breath as the only clue that I had committed a crime, a felony.

I glanced at my watch as I pedaled into the subdivision where I had parked my car. There was a police cruiser that passed in front of me at a high rate of speed as I crossed a neighborhood intersection. My watch said 7:37pm. If my calculations are correct, it had taken me a mere four minutes to rob that theatre. I passed street after street, like a merry paper boy tossing item after item into different brown and crusty, snow dappled lawns. First was the sweater, which I easily separated from the jacket. I put the jacket back in the basket and tossed the U-lock barrel, next. Shortly after that, the U-rod. Then, as I drove past a mailbox, I lightly draped the jacket over it, then, finally, the carrot. I took a huge bite of it as I was riding and tossed it over my shoulder. It tasted good. It tasted a little coppery, like money, maybe, if you were so inclined, like blood. I parked my car near a large cul-de-sac that headed downhill. I grabbed the Pokemon lunch box and sent the Schwinn down the hill to oblivion. I had secretly hoped some boy or girl would find it and make it their own. I hopped in my car. At that point, I was leasing a new Chevy Cavalier, and took off into the chill night air. My take for that night was four thousand, nine hundred, and sixty eight dollars. I still have the Pokemon lunch box.