MILF Money

Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

Anna was a partner in the bookstore. She had a degree in literature from a nearby university. She could quote Sartre, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Milton, Montesquieu, and Marramao. She was also versed in left-wing philosophers, even though she preferred the doers among them to the philosophers. There were pictures of Emma Goldman on all of the walls of the bookstore. The poster on the wall near the door was eight feet tall. It was Che Guevara and was the first image customers would see when entering the store. Che was smiling with a broad grin and smoking a cigar. Beside the poster was a three inch sign, "We support revolutions, have a cigar."

The coffee bar area was decorated to look like a border crossing checkpoint from Berlin during the height of The Cold War. Barbed wire hung above the menu on the wall; a woman's torn blouse was caught on it. Painted on the wall was a large mural of a turret with guards holding machine guns. There were sandbags at the base of the picture. Beside it, printed in large letters, ING SOC and the warning "Big Brother is watching you."

Coffee came in four sizes - Demonstration (small), Insurrection (medium), Revolution (large), and Oh Shit, It's Stalin (extra large).

Near the cash register was a sign, "No, we don't have a religious section, try mythology instead." Hanging from the ends of a few bookshelves were gas masks that were completely functional, NATO filter equipped masks, grab-and-go ready. There were overstuffed, cloth covered chairs with wide arm rests littered all over the store. Sink into them with a good book or a coffee and a muffin. One wall was lined with booths. The table tops were thick, two-inch wooden slabs. In a glass jar on each table, were colored markers. Customers were encouraged to write whatever they wanted on the tables.

Over the last few years, one booth had developed into the "Fuck You" table. The messages on the table top were attempts to write the world's most popular two word English phrase as artistically as possible. Green and blue flourishes for the letters; cerulean swirls from the end of the letter K; one clever artist even constructed the phrase from sketches of naked humans. The vertical portion of the letter F was a naked man. Coming off his lips at 90 degrees was a naked woman kissing him while coming off his penis was another woman, sans clothes, with her mouth likewise engaged. You get the picture.

J. Edgar had come to work with the small dumb one and had never left. He did not want to go home at the end of the first day, and thus hid deep in the recesses of the bookstore. He loved the size of it and all of the possibilities for exploration. Plus, there were plenty of sun bathed windowsills. Sometimes, he would sneak into the rooms with the trees. He had been there for almost two months, and it would be another month or so until he would be ready to go home. In the meantime, the gray cat would enjoy life in a way that only a satisfied cat can. Once everything was investigated and catalogued, he'd need only to reappear at the appointed time in front of the door to catch a ride home with his favorite dumb one. That was their agreement. For a cat, J. Edgar had it good and could usually be found on the mystery and thriller aisles of the bookstore. Anna spent a lot of her time there too. J. Edgar liked to spend time with the small dumb one.

Anna had a sweet tooth, a mental sweet tooth. Her mental sugar wasn't the putridity of reality television shows about housewives with too much time and money on their hands. Nor was it the moral narcolepsy of the talent contest with celebrity judges and the weekly elimination of contestants. Like animals judged at an auction, right at the moment of their most crushing failure, life collapsed around them with a horribleness worse than the nightmare of being naked at the school assembly. When the contestants were told that they are simply NOT GOOD ENOUGH as a human being, at that precise moment, cameras are recording the trauma so that millions can experience joy from their pain. No, it wasn't that either.