Fiction

I’ve decided to open a new thread here entitled “fiction”. It will consist of stories that, while often based on actual events, are embellished significantly for the sake of entertainment. If anyone who I mention in some of these stories happens to run across this blog, please don’t be offended if the events described differ wildly from your memories or (as is more often the case) are purely inventions of my own. They are supposed to be fiction. Anyway, I hope you enjoy them.

The Well Planned Heist of Alycia Silverstone

So I had a friend in high school (Shea Chwialkowski…not that that matters, but I just wanted to type his name so I could imagine you trying to pronounce it in your head….it’s “Shay Fill-kowski if you’re curious…goddamned Poles and their crazy names…) and he was OBSESSED with Alicia Silverstone (from the movie Clueless). He had all the celebrity magazines with her, owned every movie she was in, watched her every time she came on anywhere, etc.

Well one day I get a page from him with “911 911 911” at the end. Yes, I had a pager in high school. No, I wasn’t a doctor…so no, I can’t justify it. Anyway, three 911s indicated a MAJOR emergency, so I stopped whatever I was doing and called him back immediately. Turns out that he and another friend of ours (Adam) were at the Ridgedale Mall where they had spotted a life-sized cardboard cutout of Alicia at the Sam Goodie, and they were planning to steal it.

Problem was, they had developed a plan, but it required 3 more people. So my job was to round up 2 more of our friends (John and Grant) and proceed immediately to Ridgedale to act as accomplices to this magnificent heist.

So here was the plan:

Sam Goodie had 3 employees working that afternoon. These three employees tended to congregate near the front of the store where the cash register and (unfortunately for our would-be criminals) one life-sized cardboard cutout of Alicia Silverstone was. However, in a brief period of reconnaissance, Shea and Adam discovered that it wasn’t too hard to distract the staff of Sam Goodie, all one needed was to ask for help finding a CD.

So Shea and Adam had already done the homework for us by the time we got there, and have found 6 CDs, two per accomplice, all of which are housed near the back of the store.

So Grant goes in first, grabbing one employee and asking her to find one of the predetermined, ingeniously placed, faux CDs. Johnny is second, and I’m third. Shea is waiting, like a ninja in the night; pressed up against the wall in the entryway to the Sears around the corner…making it obvious to anyone who was watching that he was up to no good.

But, like the seasoned veteran leader of a team of mastermind criminal geniuses, Shea waited the prescribed 45 seconds after I entered the store (30 would have been too little time, we decided…I mean, what if small talk carries over?) and then stormed in to the store, grabbed Alicia under his right arm and, without so much as a look back to make sure that we had done our jobs and that there were no employees near the entrance, took off like a bat out of hell, sprinting through the food court toward the nearest exit and in to Adam’s waiting pickup truck. Alicia got stored in the bed, according to the story.

My employee looks at me, and then at the front of the store, then back at me.

“Did you see that?” he asks.
“Yeah, what the hell was that all about?” I reply.
“Not sure” he says. “So, do you want to buy this Seal album?”
“No,” I say, “I don’t think I’m ready to pull the trigger on that just yet. Thanks for your help.”

We leave as we came, separated by a few seconds so as to not appear together, and meet in the food court.

And off we go, back to my blue 1969 Volkswagen Beetle with the broken muffler to make our very noisy get-away.