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Three Cents


I am drunk. You must forgive me but I have to write somthin, ….I have a few things to say about a few x family members , but I dare not.. it would only be embarrassing and it seems I am too much of a glutton for punishment…well maybe not at this moment. I will write this thing anyway.


My dad picked me up from my grandfathers and I was hoping for a nice weekend. I noticed a new roll of masking tape lying in the seat between us and I liked it very much. I always used it to tape my toys back together because I was always breaking them. I loved my toys more than anything, but they always ended up in multiple pieces. I lived in a fantasy world and projected myself into the toy’s kingdom.


If I wanted to kill somebody, I would take a G.I. Joe doll and use it to kind of pick up another G.I. Joe doll that I temporarily didn’t like and smash it to the carpet. The good thing or sometimes bad thing about carpet was stuff just bounced off it. The hearth of the fireplace was much better, because it was limestone; it would actually leave scratch marks on things, If not break them! The one that I convinced myself was evil, got a hellish beating. I made sure to turn his head around backwards so he couldn’t see what was coming. I would always take his army boots off and undo his clothes a bit because prisoner of war movies always showed the captives scraggily and barefoot. It was so painful to watch myself smash up the things that I loved, but there was no other choice. The one that I was beating up would alternate between some bad guy and ME. I was beating myself up and I would go nuts about it.


I loved Evel Knievel and I put all my trucks, motorcycles, and the rest, to the TEST. I made big ramps either in the house or outside and zoomed these various things over the ramps. I always put things between the ramps to mimic a real daredevil show, like line up a bunch of Tonka toys in the middle or something and then I was set. Something always was broken after I was finished with my show. I wanted to be rich and buy a movie camera and film all this and play it back in slow motion. The crashes would be much more realistic that way, and I was amazed when a car or motorcycle left the ramp, flew through the air, and landed on the other ramp perfectly. It was almost as if the toys actually became alive for a brief moment and figured they better do all they could to land safely. But the majority of the time the ambulance crew was called out and there was a lot of fixing to be done. So like I said, I liked masking tape because it could quickly do the job. It would repair vehicles and act as bandages for the dolls.


I asked my dad why he had this roll of tape and he said he bought it for the school where he taught. He needed another roll so we were going to stop at Target on the way to his house. He went inside and I stayed in the car. My dad was gone a full half an hour if not forty five minutes, and I was about to die from boredom. I can guarantee it was that long because I had a watch. My mom would go into a store and I would always time her as I sat in the car. She always said she’d be back in a half an hour and it was always a full hour later that she’d come out with arm loads of packages. I was always timing people, but like I was saying, my dad was gone forever.


He was a ragging maniac when he came back. He had another roll of masking tape in his fist and smashed it down on the seat between us with such force that I thought he might kill me. He said, “Look at this!” I didn’t know what to do. He was a madman. He kept saying, “Don’t ask me what I am talking about, and tell me the difference between these two rolls of tape!” He was crazy mad and I kept telling him I didn’t know. I was scared for my safety and he just got angrier and angrier until he looked at me like I was toying with him and he kept pounding his fist down with the tape and finally said, “Look at that!” He had put the two rolls of tape together and aligned them so the red price tags were side by side. He was pointing to the price tags and said, “Now tell me what the difference is!” I was so scared that I couldn’t think. He kept pressuring me to answer and told me, “Your smart enough to figure it out, aren’t you?” He said that a few more times and then finally gave me the answer to the sixty-four thousand dollar question. “This one is three cents more!” He explained that the roll he just bought at Target was three cents more than the roll at K Mart. He said they were trying to rip him off. “Do I have the word SUCKER written on my forehead?” I told him of course he didn’t, and he said the two stores probably bought their tape from the same manufacture somewhere overseas and SOMEBODY was sure taking a lot of payola.


I dared to ask him why he was in there so long. He told me he was going through the checkout line, and when he got his receipt he saw the price difference. When the cash register rang up twenty-five cents instead of the twenty-two like at K Mart, he went ahead and paid the girl without thinking about what he was doing; it was too late so to speak, and it was a stupid mistake on his part. He said he asked for his money back and the girl refused. He then said it was too much money because he could buy it elsewhere for less and he’d pay her the twenty-two cents like at the other place but not twenty-five. He even asked her for the difference back and said that was only fair. She again refused and he made her call the manager!


It supposedly took ten minutes for the manager to show up and my father told him the story. My dad said the manager explained to him that Target always sells its tape for twenty-five cents and maybe K Mart was having a sale or something. “I told this manager guy that he probably raised the price a little on everything and was putting the extra money in his own pocket. I told him I should call the main headquarters and tell them about illegal activity going on and I said if I did he’d sure as hell be fired by the end of the week!” All this talk was frightening me and I asked if this manager guy could beat him up if they saw each other out on the street and my dad said he sure as hell could whip him because he use to be a wrestler and wrestlers are some of the toughest people around. Well I knew my dad was tough but at least I new for sure NOW we wouldn’t have any problems. I then dared to ask him why he didn’t go to the return counter to take it back because my mom was always doing that somewhere, and he told me the manager also said to take it back to the return desk but he’d told him he was so mad that he didn’t want to wait in line for another minute and he’d let them rip him off this time but he’d never step foot in there again.


Just as my father started to calm down I made a terrible mistake. I told him as far as I was concerned three cents wasn’t that much to get real angry about. I said if they would of taken your wallet without your permission and grabbed maybe a dollar and said this is what you have to pay all of a sudden, then that would be one thing, but it wasn’t that much of a difference, and I told him my grandpa, {The one I was living with} wouldn’t of got that angry about it. And then all hell broke loose. My father was outraged. He told me in the nastiest way he could that HE wasn’t rich and also threw in that HE wasn’t my grandfather.


The weekend was spoiled. I couldn’t wait to be taken back home. Everywhere we went somebody got the masking tape story poured down their ears and he was trying to get people to boycott Target. He told them he had nothing against Target in general but this Target store was probably connected to the mob. When he told my aunts and uncles this stuff they would laugh at him and told him to calm down; if of course they thought they wouldn’t get a punch in the ribs so to speak. Before my dad dropped me off at my house he told me that when I grew up I should never let people take advantage of me. I guess he was talking about the freakin tape thing again. I can tell you he was one of the last people I was going to take advice from!


Years later when I was in college, an art teacher of mine, who I had just met, saw that I needed a piece of tape to mend a drawing I was messing with and handed me a whole roll. I tore off a piece and handed him back the rest but he refused it He said it looked like I could use some more and told me to keep it the entire roll. I was thinking about the old masking tape story, and I couldn’t believe someone that I hardly knew was going to give me an entire roll of masking tape for free. This stuff was a precious commodity and it was like being given gold for God’s sake! At least my father would have thought so. But anyway, this roll of tape almost made me cry and I said, “This is one of the nicest things a person has ever done for Me.” and he said, “Oh, I surely hope not.” I thought about it and it wasn’t the nicest thing anybody had done for me, by far, but at least that was a person I could respect.


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