Ruth’s Room is located just off of Carroll, and is barely noticeable if our mission wasn’t to reach that very place.
“Collin.”
“Yea?” he said, nine at night the previous morning.
“You wanna go to that place that has the glasses. That was you I was talking to right?”
“Ruth’s Room.”
“What? Ruth’s Room?” I said, “That what it’s called?”
“Yea.”
And that was that. Tumblers look so good in a set of sixteen, but in the very case that life doesn’t come cheap, and my friends don’t add up to sixteen, what was the point? Besides, tumblers usually don’t stack and I had just brought home cups in the dozens from people who wanted them trashed at work. No one feels like wasting anymore.
So I want to look like a man in a suit; isn’t that what we all want? The chance to prove I’m old enough to fill in my shoes is the only thing I’ve wanted. This was just a step in the right direction. So combine the need to rise above something I could not determine and buy something I could scarcely afford and the answer is: a trip to a thrift shop for tumblers. Yes I said it. I imagine it a little more formal, with a stand with a mirror in the apartment room. What drink would I like sir? Of course fan that I am of certain Jon Hamm, I would request Old Fashioned, because by this referential point we are indeed at no return. Besides, they gave me the directions when I bought season four.
Alarm! Alarm! Alarm! Alarm! Off. Off. Off. OFF! 9:30 AM and I’m calling. No answer. Instead of me thinking I would have to think of some charming but elusive way to wake up Collin, he was actually beating me to the punch. Popping off from the shower just as I arrived, we quickly exited the rapidly warming air and drove towards a place I must have passed over a hundred times and never noticed until now. Ruth’s Room is like your grandmother’s attic if you had a price tag on everything and enough shelves to push the vertical limit to six foot. It’s got everything a thrift store needs: mismatched clothing, odd magazines, Christian books that plead, “how can we be bad?” But yet there’s hundreds. Somewhere along the line, soup wasn’t cool for the college soul. The romance/mystery novel actually looked exactly like Kroger’s. All those books by all those same authors, with most having flashy women to make up for a grand mistake within. There are rows of VHS’s in bookshelves that plead to children, “how do you not know of me?”
There are pictures of random actresses with absurd poses. There are random magazines with random dates. The top magazine is the president with a coat in his hand. The magazine? Vanity Fair. I look and he looks back pleading, “how can I be bad?” I look in and laugh at advertisement after advertisement. I just wish the cover would’ve been a little different from the filler.
There are two choices for the tumblers: there are four in a sage green, thicker color at the bottom for cheap, and there are two identical ones with a thick bottom. The second pair are clear heavier glass. The first quad are light, but there are four. Collin chooses the second pair for their feel. I agree.
“Will this be it?” a lady past middle age asks as I carefully place the pair on the platter.
“Yes ma’am.” I said, and look a different direction. There is silence for a short while and then Collin recognizes a book on their table.
“Are you reading that?” Collin asks. “That book right there.”
The second lady wrapping the glasses in newspaper from exactly one week ago answers politely, “Well I tried, honest I did, but I couldn’t get through it.”
“I was just wondering,” Collin said, “because I’ve read it and wanted to know what you thought.”
“Oh I couldn’t really tell you about that.” she said. The first woman has completed my purchase and grabs the book. She turns to the back, reads silently, and laughs.
“Well it’s about a man’s soul. Of course you didn’t finish it.”
The first woman laughs overly hard and replies, “If I would’ve known men had souls I might’ve finished it!” The laughing continues.
“You know it says ‘Wild at Heart’, but I didn’t know they had a heart.”
The laughing continues.
“I wasn’t aware they had a heart to break either.”
The laughing continues. We left politely.
Of course, I thought. Immediately when I put up the tumblers she must’ve thought I was some raging lunatic young up and coming drunkard who would be just like her bad decision and rise someday and smack her face and smear her lipstick and I bet she hangs around in hate men clubs and decrees that a good man is hard to find and after a while I bet she changed the hard to impossible because of the same drink that got her there in the first place but of course she judges me because all I did was buy a product from her store that she didn’t make so that she could eat another day and I bet through all of this she has probably seen Jerry Maguire and agrees with those girls and disagrees with Jerry and somehow through all of this I am the reincarnation of a drunk Tom Cruise who didn’t have a heart to break.
Women my age think that all boys are stupid. What do I have to say for myself? I only wanted to wear a suit, and fill those damn shoes? You think we aren’t going through an identity crisis? The geography is gone. All those tales of the Rough Riders and lion hunting are gone and the only thing that’s left is a business trip to Tampa. The search for unknown lands has been replaced by the search for unknown social triumphs. Pull the friends closer, only to recoil in horror as both gaze at each other for what they are: human.
I look. Up. And see. The rot-at-ing. Fan. That. If you. Look. At. One. Blade. It. A-ppears. Station-ary. In. The. Cons-tant. Cha-os. Of. Spin-ning.
I just wanted to by some tumblers.
