Tom Wawzenek’s short stories have been published in Think Ink, Planet Roc, and Chicago Quarterly Review. The three-minute stories featured here have not been previously published. These stories on WordBeat, serve to give a glimpse, a snapshot of sorts, into people’s lives.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, institutions, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All stories: © 2024 Tom Wawzenek
Rainy Day Man
Mitch looks furtively for cops as he sets up his umbrella stand on Michigan Avenue near Water Tower Place. He doesn’t have a license to sell on the street, but for the last few years he sets up his stand on rainy days or those overcast days when rain is in the forecast. He sells compact and golf-sized umbrellas and even rain ponchos. Most of the downtown cops know him by sight and usually look the other way, but the younger cops who are new on the beat tell him to pack it up and move along. Mitch figures his age helps. Most cops don’t want to harass an old man trying to make a few extra bucks to supplement his social security.
“Umbrellas! Umbrellas! Don’t let it rain on your parade,” he barks as people pass by.
A couple of teenage girls come up to him and buy ponchos. They tell him they are going to an outdoor concert in Grant Park and don’t want to get wet.
“A concert? Who are you going to see?” he asks.
A lot of groups they tell him, it’s Lollapalooza.
He then tells them he has never heard of that group, in fact it’s a strange name for a group, and then tells them he was once in a country rock group called, Lock, Stock and Barrel. They had gigs all over the country and made five albums. And did they know that Joni Mitchell wrote a song about him? Both girls give him quizzical looks — they’ve never heard of Joni Mitchell.
Mitch likes to talk to his customers. He tells young corporate types that he was once in the advertising business, yes, he was one of the original Mad Men, planning ad campaigns and developing TV commercials for Ivory Soap and Bayer Aspirin. He tells them how he once knew Hugh Hefner and even dated a Playboy bunny.
When women with kids buy from him, he tells them how he just loves kids, loves kids so much that he and his now deceased wife, may God rest her soul, had nine of them, but they are scattered all over the country now, but they come to visit him now and then. And he always adds that he has 26 grandkids.
To the service men, he tells them that he was once a boxer in the middle-weight division, boxed for eight years, and fought with the best of them like Terrell Baines, Jack Lubbock, and Sonny McCrae. He tells them he finished with a 72-21 record and proudly show his fists that had KO’d twenty-three opponents during his career. Mitch will always ask if they can spare a couple of bucks for an old boxer. “It’s a damn shame old boxers like me don’t get a pension. I sacrificed my body for the sport and what do I have to show for it?”
When a priest buys an umbrella from him, he tells the cleric that he’s a devout Catholic, and that he was once a film director in Hollywood, but he went broke because he refused to direct films that showed any nudity or used profanity. “I tell you Father, it was tough trying to be a good Catholic in Hollywood.” Some priests would not only give him a couple of extra bucks, but also a blessing.
The tourists are his best customers because they never pack an umbrella on a trip. He tells them that he is a retired firefighter and had saved eighty-five people from burning buildings in his career. “I once carried a mother and her baby down the ladder at the same time and their apartment was on the third floor.” He tells them no firefighter in the US has ever saved more lives than he had, and to commemorate that feat, he was invited to Washington DC by Barack Obama to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Some tourists would be in tears, telling Mitch he was a hero, and they would slip him an extra dollar or two.
Mitch loves selling umbrellas on overcast or rainy days. He knows that most people don’t like carrying an umbrella even if the weather forecast calls for rain. And there are some people, those eternal optimists, who believe it won’t rain despite the dire predictions of precipitation. But many of them come to him once the rain drops begin to fall. Mitch knows that no one likes to get wet.
© 2024 Tom Wawzenek
Lujack’s Hardware Store (circa 1986)
Helen Lujack has a hard time adjusting to the idea of working behind the candy counter. It was her sons, Pete and Rich, who came up with the idea of putting a candy counter at the front of their hardware store. They told her it would be good for business to sell candy in the store, but she scoffs at the idea — who ever heard of a hardware store selling penny candy? She knows the real reason they installed the candy counter was that they no longer trusted her selling merchandise to the customers or ringing up sales. They never said it in those words, but she knows they think she has slowed down and that she isn’t as sharp as she once used to be. But Helen doesn’t believe it for a second. She still feels confident, that even at the age of 88, she can pull her own weight.
Helen believes that she knows more about home improvement than most people. Her now deceased husband started the hardware store some 60 years ago and through the years she learned a lot about home repairs by working at his side. And now she sells penny candies displayed behind a glass case — Tootsie rolls, candy buttons, Smarties, satellite wafers, Mary Janes, Slo-Pokes, and assorted jawbreakers and gum balls —but they don’t cost a penny anymore.
The days are usually slow until the kids start trickling in after school or when they come in small groups on weekends. There are also the few adult customers who will buy candy before heading out with their purchase, telling her that they are amazed to see penny candies being sold, telling her they feel like a kid again.
Helen often makes mistakes when selling candy. Sometimes she drops in more candies in the white paper bag than what was requested, sometimes she puts in the wrong candy, and she often charges the wrong amount. Because the candies are so cheap, customers usually don’t know that they are being under-charged or over-charged by a few cents.
What bothers Helen even more than working behind the candy counter is the talk that she hears from Pete and Rich about their store having trouble. Something about these big box stores coming in and taking away a lot of their business. She once asked them what are these big box stores and after they explained it to her, she couldn’t imagine a hardware store that is 20,000 to 30,000 square feet in size and has some twenty aisles of merchandise. Why does a hardware store need to be so big? How many choices did people need when it came to buying paint, tools, or plumbing supplies? And why are these stores open until nine o’clock on weekdays and open for business on Sundays? Who needs to go to a hardware store on a Sunday?
Helen wants to see one of these big box stores, but whenever she asks Pete and Rich to take her to one, they always put her off, promising to take her sometime in the future. She needs to see these stores for herself, after all they are the competition. She doesn’t like seeing the grim faces on her boys. They think she doesn’t hear them when they talk between themselves as to how long they can keep the store open. She doesn’t understand why they would have to close the store. If you treat your customers good then you should always have business, she thinks. That’s what her husband Vince did. Treat the customers good — give them credit if they need it, order special merchandise if they didn’t have it in stock, and have special sales every so often. Running a store isn’t so hard. Just treat the customers good.
But Helen has noticed that they have had less customers in the last year. There aren’t as many customers in the early morning that was once hectic with contractors and homeowners coming in to buy materials. And Saturdays were no longer as busy either.
Helen couldn’t believe it when Rich and Pete told her about the other hardware stores in the neighborhood that had closed in the last year — Beckman’s, Grohl’s, and Musio’s — they were her competition for years. How could things change so quickly, she wonders.
Helen decides that she will give Rich and Pete some kind of pep talk. They have to see they have a good store. You just don’t close a store after being open for sixty years. But in the meantime, she will sell candy and hope for the best. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea selling candy, after all, every penny helps.
© 2024 Tom Wawzenek
The Book Will Write Itself
Libby talks in monologues. Words spit out rapidly, stringing together into long sentences, breathless sentences that are briefly punctuated by her quick hack of a cough, a cough that seems to emphasize, highlight, something she has just said. A cough that creates a brief pause, a beat or two, that makes the listener feel this is a signal to at last speak, say something, take part in the conversation. But that pause is merely a tease, because it lasts only long enough for the listener to utter a sound, a syllable, because Libby quickly starts up again where she left off.
One aspect of her life leads to another. She is never at a loss for material. Libby has the ability to dive into a topic that is either directly related or barely related to something that someone has just said. If someone mentions a good seafood restaurant, she will talk about how she loves swimming and was once a lifeguard in high school; if someone mentions that they just bought a house, she will talk about how she once dated a contractor, but they didn’t date for long because she found out he was married; if someone mentions a good book they are reading, she will launch into how she once worked at a bookstore but was fired when she was caught stealing books.
Libby needs a good listener and has uncanny ability, a radar of sorts, to spot one. But there are those rare occasions when she chooses someone who she thinks is a good listener, and finds to her surprise that they don’t want to listen, they want to talk instead. She believes it’s getting harder to find a good listener, blaming people’s poor attention span on the Internet, cell phones, Twitter and Facebook, although she indulges in all those things herself.
Libby thinks it’s time for her to write her memoir. This way she will never need to find a good listener, each reader would be her captive audience. A memoir. The book will write itself. She had so many stories to tell. Her parents died when she was young in a factory explosion where they both worked; she and her two brothers were raised by an aunt who had no love for them; her kid brother ran away from home when he was 15 and worked as a gay hustler in New York and later died of a heroin overdose. The book will write itself. Her oldest brother got a girl pregnant when he was in high school, but this same girl had another boyfriend on the side, a jealous boyfriend, who in a drunken rage, killed them both with a shotgun. The book will write itself. She is the survivor, the strong one, lucky enough to escape poverty by marrying a major league baseball player although he only played professionally for just a few years. She thought their first night together was just going to be a one night fling, but they got married, had three kids, and he recently left her for a younger woman, but she sees justice coming because he is facing prison time due to all his fraudulent real estate deals. The book will write itself. She is an animal lover because she has a rescue dog, three cats, a parakeet, two corn snakes, four turtles, and aren’t animals so much more dependable than people? The book will write itself. Sex on a plane; sex in department store changing rooms; sex in a museum; and sex in a public bathrooms. And yes, she can even describe her scent that women find appealing, men find intoxicating, her scent is a subtle mix of something that is smoky and spicy. The book will write itself.
But she needs to write her life stories, her observations, and life lessons. Libby tells anyone who will listen that she needs to lock herself in a room with just bottles of water and stale bread and force herself to write, write until her fingers bleed and fill all those blank pages with words. Then everyone will read her life story. She will have her captive audience. And of course, there will be interviews on radio and TV, there will be book signings and book readings. Maybe a film adaptation. The book will write itself. How hard can it be? The book will write itself.
© 2024 Tom Wawzenek