Porous Was She
While channel-surfing the other day, I happened across an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. I hadn’t seen the show for a while and as I was watching it, an amusing memory surfaced.
I used to work in a video store. This was before the DVD revolution, so we trafficked mostly in tapes. After several years behind the counter, I was promoted to assistant to the owner, which was a blessing as it minimized my exposure to the clientele, leaving them primarily for the younger employees to deal with. And owing to certain factors, the demeanor of said clientele undoubtedly being one of them, we had a relatively frequent turnaround in counter staff during my tenure. Some of them came from a pretty well-known acting school around the corner - in fact, speaking of Nickelodeon, one of them went on to host a very popular show for pre-schoolers - and some of them came from the neighborhood. Lizz was one of the latter.
Most of the people who worked there over the years were, at the very least, nice. We did have some bumps in the road, including a guy who it turned out was slowly spiriting tapes out of the store for his private collection and who only returned a small portion of them when he was caught (the loss of Blood Freak hit me particularly hard) and a guy whose standard argument whenever there was a disagreement about the quality of a film was that he had a different (read: better) perspective because he had been to film school; not an invalid position, but also not an inviolable trump card either, especially coming from a guy who’d probably never even seen Blood Freak. But Lizz was something special. A whipsmart, creative, quite beautiful punk rock chick, she was pretty much what I would have custom-ordered in a fellow employee, if such a thing were possible. Actually, fuck ‘fellow employee,’ she was pretty much what I’ve always looked for in a girlfriend, and if there hadn’t been a significant enough age difference between us to kind of matter, I might have explored that possibility.
(Side note. They did screw up my order in one way: she was, improbably enough, a Republican. This was actually the second time in my life I felt affection for a punk rock chick only to find out she swung to the right, though this one was slightly easier to take, as the first one had been a bona-fidey love situation. Interestingly, both instances also resolved themselves the same way. In each case, it turned out that the impressionable young woman had basically been aping her parents’ beliefs, and a little independent thought eventually sent her 180-ing towards good old humanistic liberalism. But I digress.)
Having Lizz around the store made the place a lot easier to take, and even fun at times. Case in point: her decision one day to cast the assorted employees as characters from Spongebob. Two of her choices were remarkably a propos. The store subbing for the Krusty Krab, the owner would be Mr. Krabs, and, boy, did our boss live up to his, shall we say, rigid pecuniary attitude. Similarly, one of the other clerks had both the dour disposition and shiny be-stubbled pate of Squidward. To be fair, he wasn’t actually a miserable person at all, but when he was in complaining mode, the resemblance became far greater. Never more so than when Lizz informed him of her casting choice.
Lizz herself would take the title role, and the thought of her in that outfit was both hilarious and disconcertingly sexy. But as this reminiscence washed over me, I realized that I couldn’t remember which role I was supposed to occupy. I thought maybe Patrick - not the most becoming assignation given the limited brainpower of Spongebob’s starfish friend - but that didn’t seem right. The smallest and most evil of Bikini Bottom’s residents, Plankton, could have been fun, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it either.
And then I remembered that she had given me a part of particularly high prestige indeed. She wanted me to be Gary, Spongebob’s pet snail. I believe she even justified it by saying that Gary tends not to say too much, but is actually the smartest one in the room, a flattering if undeserved comparison. Now while I would have gladly worn a shell on my back if it meant I could have sat in Lizz’s lap while she tickled my eyestalks, the truth of her choice probably lay within the fact that, even though she was in high school and I was pushing 30, she seemed to connect with me more than with anyone else in the store. Despite Gary’s comparatively infrequent appearances, it was a matter of the significance of the part overshadowing its size, which took a small joke meant to kill a little time during a dreary routine and turned it into a genuine moment, a pleasure both to experience and remember.
And so, Lizz, from Warped Memory Lane to wherever you are now, I hope you are happy, prosperous and well, and I say with all sincerity:
“Meow!”