THE BACK ROOM

Our understanding with Brenner was psychic-level sympatico. When someone was on the same drugs as you (meth), you had that instant brotherhood, even when he’s fifty years your senior; and we knew he was a freak because at 2am we saw him coming out of the bathroom at the beach with Sexual Pablo, the estranged father of a boy in our gang. So when we would go to harass Brenner for free clothes – creating free trade from our safely distanced, exposed flesh – it was our weird immature way of attempting fraternity, making constellations of our town’s seedy underbelly even more complex. I mean, we could have told him we had all made out with each other by this point, but he was likely too old to understand we weren’t queer – we only did it on dares, because we had run out of stuff to do, already used up all our rebel tokens at sixteen. In similar spirit, we visited Brenner every day just because we were fucking bored.

Old Glory was the name of his non-curated incongruent downtown vintage store, but only we called it ‘Old Glory Hole’ due to its hidden language and secret opportunities. Brenner’s shoulders jumped every time we swung the door open — it rang a happy little bell that made his head twitch, eyes blink, his whole-body anxiety-cracked like we had just caught him doing something he shouldn’t, even when he wasn’t. He would wave a quick hello, head nodding in defeat as we paraded in five, sometimes ten teenagers deep. As we circled the interior – our daily casing of the joint – he busied himself by straightening the stacks of curio on his glass counter, picking things up, putting them back down again, fidgeting nervously before he’d resign to white knuckle the glass, surveilling us the best he could from the strobe of his compulsive blinking. Brenner was a modestly dressed sixty-year-old thick accented German man, but like the shrunken-head character from Beetlejuice, he had a perpetually terrified expression on his face — eyes so wide and bloodshot they seemed to incriminate his own skull.

We’d rifle through the clothes rack, throw them on the floor, ransacking every corner of the cave-like store like we were trying to bust him for something – really, we were just trying to score some cool threads, find some jewel he didn’t know he had. Since we were scared of the labyrinthian dressing rooms, all the way down a dark hallway in back, we’d have to eyeball our size, hold it up to our still developing bodies that seemed to outgrow everything weekly. Our gang was its own moving, shaking organism, a huddled mob whose muscle lie in our sheer number. Since we knew he was a total perv, we’d either steal or hustle him out in the open in various degrees of manipulation.

“Hey Brenner! If I try this on out here in front of you, can I have it for free?” became the high-volume currency, yet hush hush outside the store. Some of us were modest, hastily stripping down to our boxers to score a decent pair of old Levis. Others took it to more precarious levels, getting totally naked when we just wanted combat boots, helicoptering our cocks, chanting, taunting Brenner until he’d crack into a smirk, pretend he wasn’t really looking. It became our own rite of passage, how far you were gonna go to see if you could break Brenner until he told us all to get the fuck out, looking both ways to no one, blinking, blinking…

Brenner was a sort of time-traveler, inexplicably stuck in the 50s – a decade that became his desperate and phony gold standard. Everything in the store was “from the 50s,” especially items that weren’t, items he couldn’t even give away. We’d test his limp pitches for things we wouldn’t be caught dead with, then hustle him back. “Hey Brenner, how much for these gross fucking bell-bottoms?” “Oh, those are $100, vintage, from the 50s!” “Hey Brenner, how much for this stupid fucking Village People record?” “Oh, that’s a real collector’s item — $25. It’s from the 50s, you know…” “Fuck you, Brenner. Lying sack of shit. Give me this leather jacket for free — it’s from right fucking now ‘cause I’m taking my t-shirt off for you so I’m gonna wear it right out of the store, fucking perv.”

It became an intrinsic relationship of our own command, the kids completely in charge of the amoral exchange. Soon, each of our wardrobes were comprised strictly of tasteful vintage clothing, a strip tease story for each item. The rituals became more organized, choreographed — when one boy couldn’t imagine leaving without a shirt or slacks he knew he’d never see elsewhere, we’d form a half-circle, a protective layer around him, with just an opening towards the counter so Brenner could get a show. Our arch would holler, cheer on the teenage stripper as he took it all off, hamming it up, flossing his naked ass with the object of desire, the universal stunt which transcended cash, deeming him the proud new owner, his puberty stink as the final seal of the deal. Brenner would pretend he didn’t like what was going on until this daring finale, where his smirk would beam fearlessly, stretching out to finally relax. We were worlds apart, but on his level, an understanding you couldn’t explain to any other adult without worrying them sick.

One day we barged in typically boisterous, the same way we always would – satirically Sieg-Heiling the poor old German bastard as we marched in single file to see how much we could get away with. But there was no one manning the counter, no one’s lineage to ridicule, no one’s private sexual preference to brazenly take advantage of. The place appeared empty until we found out we weren’t alone — when a large, bearded biker clad in leather iron cross vest with red and white patches emerged from that back room where we never ventured. His face stoic, ominous with Aviator shades; he hauled a paper grocery bag overflowing with what appeared to be magazines. His presence, while transient, harbored unmistakable bad vibes that choked us to silence long after he walked out. The chimes on the door rang as it shut behind him, signaling Brenner to materialize from the deep dark hallway, coming up for air. He entered the main show room where we stood, head down to adjust his clothing before he looked up in horror, all of us in intimidating formation, unintended.

“Get out! All of you, get out right this second!” he screamed, his voice cracking. We had exposed a new vulnerability we couldn’t put our finger on; so we grabbed handfuls of whatever we could get our whole hands on as we filtered out of the shop, knowing he wouldn’t stop us. When we reconvened in the alley, one of our gang was missing. “Where the fuck is Keith?” We saw him walking slow and somber towards us from the end of the block, his straggling no accident. “Where’d you go?” we asked. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” he said.

#

Keith, the loveable inquisitive runt of the gang, had gotten too curious. Since he was closest to the back room, he slipped back there once Brenner was telling the rest of us to scram. We finally convinced him to cough it. “There were these, like, magazines back there with, like, kids? Little kids,” he said. “What kind of fucking magazines, like Highlights?” we said. “No, not like Highlights, like… fucking magazines, you know…” The speedbump here: Keith was also a compulsive liar. He even lied about harmless things, inconsequential things… so it was hard to take him seriously with this extreme claim.

We just forgot about it, as fast as we could, but even Keith beat us to denial. “Yeah, I mean who knows, it was totally dark back there. You know, I don’t even know what I’m talking about,” he said, a nervous chirp of laughter following his shrug.

But after that day, everything felt different. Brenner began to look sickly, increasingly paranoid, not as friendly to go along with our court jester gang chaos; he would only allow us in the store for five minutes and only two of us at a time. He only took cash now, cash we didn’t have. The more his eyes turned into sunken caves, the more his lips quivered, the less fun he was, so the less we showed up. Until the day we were faced with a closed sign that no one ever took down because we checked back every single day.

#

“Fuck, did you hear Brenner died? Brenner is fucking dead.” We weren’t surprised but we couldn’t believe it, none of us prepared for the void he would leave behind. Except for Keith: “Ha, ha, that’s cool I mean he was kind of weird though!” We scolded him for his lack of sentimental fortitude. “Well, I mean I did go by Old Glory this morning when I heard he died and there was this flyer on the door for his funeral, I guess everyone’s invited,” he said, unfolding, then presenting the notice not meant to be removed. “I don’t wanna go though, you guys have fun,” he said.

The open air, closed-casket ceremony was the who’s who of our elder small-town freak underground: roughly fifty aging burnt-out misfits we had somehow never seen before. Since we were the youngest ones in attendance, our very presence was a distraction – heads turning, mouths whispering, piercing eyes, pointing. Until the Catholic Priest gave a redemptive sermon heavy on sin and forgiveness, how no one is born perfect, therefore no one dies perfect, how nothing in between it all is perfect, something like that.