Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland

Author:Douglas Coupland [Coupland, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-05-27T18:05:32+00:00

Part Three 2002: Heather

Saturday afternoon 4:00I met Jason in a line-up at Toys R Us. He was in front of me buying a pile of toys, looking slightly sad, slightly damaged and slightly naughty. I had some toy plastic groceries for my sister's kid, who never really cares what I give her, and I just wanted to escape the store. But instead there's this sad guy in front of me - no wedding ring, straight looking, and no apparent tattoos - and so maybe I didn't want to leave too quickly after all.

The cashier was changing the paper tape - why does that always happen in my line? Standing on the counter was a plastic giraffe model someone had abandoned. Some wiseacre had strapped it into a little sheepskin coat with a fleece lining; it probably came from the box of one of Barbie's gay boyfriends.

I said, "I think our giraffe here is a bit sexually conflicted."

Jason said, "It's that fleece-lined bomber jacket - always a dead giveaway."

"Manly, and yet more like a prop than a garment."

"I bet you anything our giraffe friend here is always buying Shetland sweaters for the younger giraffes, but he doesn't even understand why he does it."

"The sweater-buying impulse baffles him more than it frightens him."

Jason handed his toys to the cashier. "He's, like, a vice president of Nestlé operating out of Switzerland, but he's totally clueless, and he always misses the parts of the board meetings where they do all the evil stuff to third world countries. He sort of bumbles into the boardroom and everyone indulges him ..."

"His name is Gerard."

Jason said, "Yes. Gerard T. Giraffe."

"What does the 'T' stand for?"

" 'The.' "

We rang our toys through the till and kept right on talking. I don't even know who was steering whom, but we ended up in the Denny's next door, and we kept expanding Gerard's universe. Jason said Gerard had this real fixation about being manly. "He wears the sheepskin coat as much as he can. He worships George Peppard, and buys old black-and-white photos and scrapbooks about him on eBay."

"And he decorated his apartment in rich tobacco browns and somber ochers in maybe 1975 and has never changed them."

"Yes. Manly colors. Burly walnut furniture."

"Hai Karate aftershave."

"Yeah, yeah - he still uses words like 'aftershave.'"

"And he invites his friends over for dinner parties, but the food is from some other period in history. Cherries Jubilee."

"Baked Alaska."

"T-bone steaks."

"Fondue."

I asked, "What are his friends' names?"

"Chester. Roy. And Alphonse - Alphonse is the exotic one with a hint of 'the dance' in his past. And Francesca, the beautiful but broke fifth daughter of a disgraced Rust Belt vacuum cleaner tycoon."

"Possibly someone, Francesca even, is wearing a cravat."

I thought Jason was the most talkative man I'd ever met, but I later found out he'd said more to me in those two hours than he'd spoken to all the people in his life in the past decade. He was obviously a born talker, but he needed a ventriloquist's dummy to speak through.

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