Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
(Art by spoon+fork.)
We had to use the bathroom in the lobby of the Seahorse Hotel because the burger shack didn’t have one. In exchange for such a privilege, we had to pick up trash in the hotel parking lot, most of which was from our customers.
The hotel was run by the hindu couple, Mr. and Mrs. Angrywall. I thought it was a weird name, but I asked Mrs. Angrywall and that’s what it sounded like. She looked like she was my age, but she spent the whole day slumped like a grandmother behind the counter dressed in her colored togas. Mr. Angrywall was usually prowling the rooms on the top floor of the hotel. The ceilings on the top floor had caved in a few winters ago, before they bought it, and he was fixing the rooms himself.
“The dots are taking over, man,” Howard told me. “Have you been to our old elementary school and high school lately? They have totally infiltrated.”
“Why the hell are you going to our old schools for? Are you trying to abduct little boys?”
“No, I’m not a pedophile. I’m just saying, you’ve got little curries running all over the place. Our grandkids are going to have to wear turbans.”
“When are you going to have grandkids?” I asked him.
“When I give up on being a free man and decide to settle down.”
(Art by spoon+fork.)
Once a week I flossed my teeth and went to downtown Highlands to meet my parole officer. The Shore Points border was the mushy intersection of the Shark River delta with a sand bar that separated the river from the Atlantic Ocean.
I had to take a bus over three bridges to get out. My driver’s license was revoked when I was convicted, but one thing I will swear to is that I had always waited at least half an hour before getting behind the wheel when I was high.
Highlands was the old administrative center for the British when New Jersey was a colony. It was as close to the beach the British were willing to come. Over the years I’ve seen and heard tourists from all over the world, but not Britain, although we do have fish and chips on the boardwalk if they showed up.
Highlands looks like Legoland. Everything’s square, blocky and plastic. They did a good job of trying to make the district parole office look like a dentist office from the outside, with fake brick walls, trimmed hedges and white gravel. It didn’t fool anybody. Cars going both ways would slow down to look at the people getting off the bus at that stop and walking into the building.
My parole officer was a black man named James O’Keefe. He was about 35 and had short hair that was curled tightly to his scalp, and he had a bald spot near the back. If you stared at it, he’d glare at you like he was going to hit you with a left hook. The other parole officers had family pictures or fun little things on their desks like snow globes. O’Keefe had nothing. You had no indication what his life outside the office was like. But the nameplate on his desk was the biggest I’d ever seen, bigger than any of my principals’.
The first time I met him, he said, “Sean Kerry. . .are you Irish?”
“Mostly, yeah,” I said. “James O’Keefe. . .are you Irish, too?”
“Well, not that I’m sure of, but obviously, somewhere along the line, there was a slave master who was.” His face told me that he was thinking about how he could rip my head off and make it look like I’d committed suicide. Luckily for me, he kept talking.