ESSAYS FROM SILICON VALLEY
Omnibus Volume 1
Essays by C.D. Reimer
Copyright 2012 C.D. Reimer
Smashwords Edition / February 2012
A shorter version of “The Cabbage Patch Doll Fight: A Christmas Shopping Tale” first appeared in Soft Whispers Magazine (November 2009).
All other essays were previously published as individual ebook titles.
The cover art images were licensed from http://www.istockphoto.com.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
About The Author:
C.D. Reimer lives and works in Silicon Valley. His interests are ceramics, painting, tropical fish, and web programming. These keep him out of trouble when he’s not fixing broken users and consoling hurt computers.
After serving two tours through The Twilight Zone as a child and a young adult Christian, he writes about everyday reality that he often finds weird, twisted and absurd for being so normal.
He’s currently
working on various short stories and his first novel, and blogs about
writing
and everything
else when he's not busy playing video
games writing fiction.
Connect With Me Online:
Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/cdreimer
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/cdreimer
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cdreimer
Website: http://www.cdreimer.com
CONTENTS
The Cabbage Patch Doll Fight: A Christmas Shopping Tale
Death at a Hell’s Angels’ Funeral: Driving Past the Memories
Experiencing the Death of Elvis: Another Childhood Tragedy
KGO Radio Jumps the Shark: More News, Less Talk
THE CABBAGE PATCH DOLL FIGHT
A Christmas Shopping Tale
Have you ever wondered how far a grandmother would go to get the hottest Christmas toy for her baby granddaughter? I never did until I witnessed how desperate my mother was to get a Cabbage Patch doll for my baby niece in the early 1980’s. A violent incident that would forever change my life.
We stood outside the Toy “R” Us store on a bitterly cold November morning, waiting for the doors to open early at 8:00AM. I don’t remember if this was Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the first official day of the holiday shopping season. If it was, I was still comatose from the all the deviled eggs that I ate the night before. Nineteen other mothers with their sleepy kids were also standing around waiting for the doors to open.
My father waited in the car to smoke his cigarettes and listen to the radio. He never came into a store with my mother if he could avoid doing so. My mother took forever to look at everything in the store, even if she knew she was only buying one or two items. Since I was several years shy of being a rebellious teenager, I was stuck going into the store with her.
Every mother grabbed their kids by the hand and ran pell-mell into the store when the doors were unlocked and the store manager jumped out of the way. We flew across the worn white floor tiles without our feet ever touching. Somehow we all converged on the same spot in front of the long shelves of board games: a mountain high display of Cabbage Patch dolls that sat between the sports and video games aisles.
An impressive sight considering how difficult the Cabbage Patch dolls was to get. There was no Internet and eBay back then for the fortunate few to put up their rare treasures for others to bid an obscene king’s ransom. If you weren’t able to physically take possession of a Cabbage Patch doll in the store, you were so out of luck.
Our mothers let go of our hands to leave us children huddled together as they assaulted that mountain of doll cuteness—and each other.
When feral cats get into a fight, all you see is a blur of raised fur and sharp claws, and hear the loud screeching that goes with it. Imagine twenty feral cats getting into the same fight. Imagine one of those feral cats being your mother. Imagine a group of shell-shocked children watching their mothers fight like feral cats over a display of Cabbage Patch dolls.
It was awful.
Elbows went jabbing and punches were thrown. One Cabbage Patch doll was torn to pieces before my eyes. I saw my own mother punch and be punch by two other mothers while all three of them held on to the same Cabbage Patch doll.
I wandered away into the video games aisle, feeling sick to my stomach from what I saw. The other kids soon wander off into the store to find a safe place to be alone. (Not that Toy “R” Us was a safe place to be after what we saw.) Our mothers were like the pod people from The Invasion of The Body Snatcher; they looked very familiar but acted very alien. Could we ever trust our own mothers again?
My mother found me and jerked my hand again. She had a Cabbage Patch doll under her arm like a football, snarling at anyone who dare try to tackle us. We ran over to the checkout stands, where the teenaged sales clerks gave my mother a funny look. Maybe it was the broken sunglasses, swollen eye, smeared makeup, disheveled hair, and torn clothing. The appearance you would expect from a wife battered by a drunken husband, not a grandmother buying a Christmas present for her baby granddaughter. I don’t think the store management had any idea of the mayhem that was going on inside the store yet.
We were in and out of Toy “R” Us in ten minutes flat, surprising my father by our sudden reappearance. He wasn’t expecting us for another hour. We had driven out of the parking lot and down the street when police cars blared past us. I don’t recall if my parents ever talked about what happened inside the store. I was so numbed by this experience that I didn’t remember what happened until I was in therapy two years after my mother had died from breast cancer in 2004.
The evening news on TV showed a reporter standing in front of the police cars outside the store we had visited, explaining how an entire display of Cabbage Patch dolls was demolished by a mob of feral mothers. That was followed by grainy surveillance video footage from different Toy “R” Us stores across the country that showed feral mothers attacking each other to get their hands on a Cabbage Patch doll. I wasn’t the only kid who lost his childhood innocence in this national tragedy.
My mother’s black eye was long gone by the time Christmas arrived. My baby niece liked the Cabbage Patch doll well enough to thrill her grandmother. But my brother was wise not to have his wife’s family over until after we were gone. The other grandmother had gotten a hard-to-find Barbie doll that was the second hottest Christmas toy that season, which my baby niece liked even better than the Cabbage Patch doll. If these two grandmothers had given their presents at the same time, even feral cats would have cringed from the ensuing catfight for a granddaughter’s affections.
THE END
DEATH AT A HELL’S ANGELS FUNERAL
Driving Past the Memories
The death of Jeffrey “Jethro” Pettigrew, the 54-year-old president of the San Jose chapter of the California Hell’s Angels motorcycle club, gunned down at a Nevada casino on Friday, September 23, 2011, meant nothing to me. A curious news item among many that caught my attention on that particular day while browsing a dozen news websites to satisfy my news junkie habit. Since I write speculative short stories, and I started focusing my efforts on becoming a California regional writer (i.e., the West Coast version of Stephen King, although much poorer and less prolific), I filed this news item away in the back of mind and forgot about it. The best ideas always float up like a dead body in a calm lake to demand to be written into a short story. Besides, I haven’t thought much about the Hell’s Angels since the early 1970’s, where they were less feared than the sheriff deputies that patrolled my childhood neighborhood.
On October 15, 2011, I found myself going into work at a Fortune 500 technology company in north San Jose on a bright Saturday morning. As a technician on a Windows 7 refresh project, I started the data transfer between the old computer and the new computer with the expectation that it would be done before I left work on Friday night. Most of the systems on my list had completed a few hours after I had started them, and I went around collecting the old computers to leave behind the new computers with a new operating system. But one data transfer was still copying files with no way of knowing when it will be done. Since I was approaching forty hours for the week and wasn’t allowed to go into overtime, I left work a half hour early to have enough time to finish up the next morning.
The campus was deserted except for the security patrol SUV driving through the empty parking lots. I stopped by the conference room that served as the office for the Windows 7 refresh project, booting up my work laptop and checking email. Not surprisingly, the completion report email for the final data transfer arrived ten minutes after I left work. I crossed the interior courtyard of the compact campus, avoiding the pair of feral cats that claimed this area as their own dominion and seemed more menacing without any people around to distract them.