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popcanspopcans · 7 years

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The Stands

It was hotter than the ends of a microwaved burrito the day the war ended. But the relationship between neighbors, Jimmy and Mike, was more like the middle of that burrito. Cold and partially frozen.

Jimmy woke that morning to the soothing sounds of Chumbawamba coming from his AM/FM clock radio. I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down. The song was being played on his preferred station - GOLD 88.8 and Tubthumping was one of his favorite songs in their rotation.

His parents never let him listen to 88.8 when they were all together. They often lamented how there wasn’t a station that played music from the 50s and 60s anymore. At least not since GOLD 88.8 changed formats, so they refused to listen to the new GOLD standard that emitted from the airwaves. I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down. Jimmy didn’t understand.

He thought the station was perfect and why anyone would listen to music from when his great grandparents were kids was beyond him. To Jimmy, music didn’t get any better than this. I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down. “Sing it, Chumbawamba,” Jimmy thought to himself, “Sing it.”

After a much needed stop in the bathroom, Jimmy walked into the kitchen where his father was cleaning the stove and drinking a cup of coffee. “Good morning, Jimmy. How’d you sleep,” he asked. “Not too bad, dad,” Jimmy replied. “Where’s mom?” “She had to work early this morning and didn’t want to wake you before she went went.” Based on the look on his dad’s face when he said this, Jimmy knew there was a joke somewhere in that line, but he couldn’t figure it out. Going to work early wasn’t funny, waking a sleeping child wasn’t either, so it must be in the repetition of the word “went,” but Jimmy didn’t find it to be humorous at all.

Moving past the terrible dad joke he just heard, Jimmy was reminded that he had no clue what his mom did for a career, he just knew she worked in the tallest building downtown and whatever she did allowed his dad to be, as he often said, “a trophy husband.” Another dad joke that Jimmy didn’t quite get, because his dad looked nothing like the figures on any trophy he ever saw.

“Dad, mind if I turn on the radio to 88.8?” “Sure thing, Jimmy. I was just leaving anyway.” As he walked out of the kitchen he added, “If you have clothes that need washing, bring them down to the laundry room. I have a load of towels in now, but after that it’s nothing but colors as far as the eye can see.”

Now that his dad left the room, Jimmy got up and turned on the radio. I get knocked down. (We’ll be singing.) But I get up again. (Pissing the night away.) You are never gonna keep me down. (When we’re winning.) ”My favorite part,” Jimmy said aloud to the toaster, then echoed, “Pissing the night away.”

Breakfast was his standard: a bowl of Kix and a glass of milk, because a growing boy can’t do better than dairy on dairy when it comes to nutrition. When finished with his breakfast, Jimmy rinsed his glass and bowl, and then added them to the dishwasher half-full of dirty dishes. Once Chumbawamba left the airwaves, the DJ came on to remind him that it was “going to be a scorcher and to keep his animals inside as much as possible.”

Well, Jimmy wasn’t worried about animals, because he didn’t have any pets, at least not since the Guinea Pig calamity from two years back. He often thought about asking his parents for a dog or a cat or something really cool like a giraffe, but he didn’t think it was fair to Buckets and Bruno. He could never replace their love and wasn’t sure he was ready to move on just yet. Jimmy shut the radio off and went to his room to change.

It was Friday, so Jimmy allowed for casual attire. He may be his own boss, but that doesn’t mean he was going to look unpresentable while working. He had an image to uphold, but it was Friday, so instead of the Monday through Thursday khaki shorts and polo, Jimmy opted for jean shorts and a t-shirt that simply said, “Be Nice.”

He didn’t particularly like the shirt, but he figured he’d sweat through it before business really picked up and would need to change eventually, so he reserved his good shirts for when the customers started rolling in and business was booming.

On the way to the garage, Jimmy crossed paths with his dad. “Looking sharp, kiddo, I love that shirt.” “Thanks, dad. It’s going to be a big day.” “Yeah, how do you know?” “Well, dad, it’s hard to explain, so let’s just say, I can feel it in my loins.” Jimmy didn’t know what loins were, but he heard the expression on TV and understood it within the provided context. But none of that mattered; there was business to be done.

The garage door opened with a somewhat unpleasant whir and Jimmy muttered, “Must need some WD-40. I’ll get dad to look at it later.” He went to his corner of the garage and started hauling his supplies to the curb - a folding card table and chair, a cooler for ice, plenty of red SOLO cups, and his well-stenciled sign that read, “Lemonade $2.00, tax included.”

Jimmy’s parents thought $2.00 was a little steep, but Jimmy did his research. He knew that approximately 10 ounces of lemonade in a 16 ounce cup being sold for $2.00 would cover his expenses, plus net him margins that would allow him to go on Shark Tank and easily get the funding needed to expand to other markets, should he have the desire to do so.

With the stand now set up, it was time to bring out his wares. He went back inside and headed straight to the kitchen. He washed his hands, dried them, and then went to the fridge where the lemonade he prepped the night before was waiting. Jimmy liked to leave a few cut up lemons in the pitcher. This served two purposes. Not only did it non-verbally express to his customers that his lemonade was, in fact, homemade, but it also infused a little extra flavor into it. He thought his customers appreciated and deserved that.

It was 10 a.m. when Jimmy had everything ready to go. He quickly sold a few cups to some of his regulars. Mrs. Johnson who was about halfway through her daily run, Cleo, his babysitter, and Old Man Davies, who never missed a chance to greet Mrs. Johnson with a “hate to see you go, but love to watch you leave.” Jimmy once asked his parents what that meant. They both agreed that it was just something creepy pervs like Old Man Davies said and it was best to simply ignore him. After all, he’d probably be dead soon.

That was a rather bleak outlook on life for Jimmy, but as long as the lemonade was selling, he was happy.

When the door across the street opened and Mike walked out carrying a bag of lemons, it was already 11:10 a.m. Jimmy laughed internally at the horrid work ethic his neighbor and competition displayed.

Mike’s daytime babysitters/nannies exited the house after him. One carried a collapsible lemonade stand that Mike’s parents bought him online. The other had two pitchers of blasphemous lemonade in her arms.

Mike’s manufactured sign read, “Fresh-Squeezed Lemonade,” but there was nothing fresh about it. It was watered down Country Time and the bag of lemons was Mike’s clever way of deceiving people into believing his no good, lying sign. Jimmy knew it, the whole neighborhood knew it, but the others didn’t. And that was the problem.

The ingredients for Jimmy’s lemonade were simple: lemons from the local farmer’s market, which were then hand sliced and squeezed, a little bit of sugar, and of course water from the purest, most delicious source of drinking water there ever was: the garden hose. It was his secret ingredient and he went so far as to collect it under the cover of night from the hose in the backyard so no one would see.

Then there was Mike’s lemonade. Made from tubs of Country Time purchased online in bulk and mixed with way too much tap water. Jimmy wouldn’t have even been surprised if he learned that Mike used toilet water on occasion. He wouldn’t put that sort of thing past a sleazy turd like Mike.

It was appalling to such an honest businessman as Jimmy. He once called the Better Business Bureau on Mike, but they said, “they were too busy with a sting operation involving the Girl Scouts to bother with a neighborhood lemonade stand.” After that call, Jimmy waxed to his parents about how “government bureaucracies are apparently more concerned with cookies than fraudulent lemonade.” Ever since, he’s been looking for a lawyer who’d take his case. No such luck as of yet.

Back to the real problem of this war, If Mike wanted to sell second, no, third-rate lemonade that was his prerogative. Jimmy wouldn’t stand in his way, but deceiving customers was just about the dirtiest thing a salesman could do and that he would never tolerate. Plus, Mike had the inherent benefit of living on the right side of the street when workers at the nearby business park left for lunch. This resulted in Jimmy only being patronized by Mike’s flow-over clients when his line was too long.

Jimmy tried curbside service for a few days, but that involved hiring an employee, which cut into his profits and threw his margins out of whack. And that was something the Tank would not respect.

When he shared his quandary with his parents, his dad said, “You can just get them on their way back to work.” But his mom thought that wouldn’t be a viable option, because “they’ll probably be too full from their martini lunches to stop for lemonade,” then added, “Unless you start adding vodka to it.” Once again Jimmy’s mom was right. The business park was primarily filled with advertising and marketing agencies and those employees loved “liquid lunches.”

The sales kept ringing in for Mike and Jimmy’s trickled in at best. Perhaps, his next course of action was caused by a mixture of desperation and heat or desperation coupled with the beginnings of dehydration. Jimmy drained his water bottle filled with hose water an hour ago and he was parched. Yet, he never dared to get “sugar high on his own supply.” Regardless of the cause, Jimmy left his stand and crossed the street. A confrontation was afoot.

The Jimmy versus Mike feud was never only about lemonade. Four years ago at Jimmy’s birthday party Mike was a pest and a bully. Jimmy’s parents hired a clown who worked in the medium of balloons. He was capable of making anything, so by request he transformed multiple balloons into a coat of armor and a crown for Jimmy, which fit perfectly with his Knights of the Round Table themed party.

When it was Mike’s turn he asked the clown to fashion a sword, but not just any sword. It was to be the “biggest, longest, mightiest balloon sword” the clown ever created. The clown was a smart clown and not merely a sad clown as his visage indicated. He knew what Mike was doing and tried to convince him to maybe go with a balloon horse or balloon wristwatch, because “even knights needed to know what time of day it was.”

But Mike persisted. He was adamant about his sword and held up the line for far too long, so the clown caved. He made Mike his sword and Mike used it like any little shit would. He began stabbing and beating Jimmy with the balloon sword, all the while screaming, “who’s going to be with Guinevere now?” Jimmy knew it would be Lancelot, but semantics would hardly get him out of this situation. No, it was something else that did the trick.

The practical and deft hand of Jimmy’s father brandished a thumbtack pulled from the nearby corkboard. He casually pricked Mike’s balloon broadsword before slyly disposing of the tack in a potted plant. The weaponized plastic popped with an all too satisfying sound for Jimmy. Mike looked stunned, then began to cry and quickly ran out the door, across the street, and to his front door, which was locked, so he had to ring the bell for the housekeeper to let him in.

The exteriorly visible sad clown was in figurative stitches from the whole situation. Laughing so hard he snorted a half-dozen times and was forced to excuse himself to the bathroom in order to check on his facial portmanteau. The party was saved and the feud had begun.

After looking both ways, Jimmy crossed the street and strolled as intimidatingly as a stroll can be towards Mike. “Well, look at this jerk,” Mike said to his nannies and added, “Uff da! This lutefisk is limp!” His nannies forced a laugh as if their annual bonuses were tied into laughing at the stupid things Mike said.

Caught off guard, Jimmy suddenly became aware of how he looked. As he assumed would happen earlier, he had indeed sweat through his “Be Nice” shirt and forgot to change into one of his better ones. And now he was frozen, everything he wanted to say to Mike escaped his short-term memory and he just stood there, slack-jawed.

Mike broke the silence. “Why don’t you turn around and take your stink fish face back to your stupid lemonade stand, ya baby.” Jimmy quickly blurted out the only thing that came to mind, “I know you are, but what am I,” then sprinted back across the street, eschewing all safety measures one should follow when crossing streets.

Just like Donkey Kong, it was on. Jimmy was about to sink to new lows and fight jerky behavior with jerky behavior. At the end of the day, he wouldn’t be proud of his actions, but desperate times call for desperate measures. He retreated to the safety of his bedroom and contemplated his plan of attack. Jimmy’s eureka moment hit him like that fateful balloon sword so many years ago and he knew what must be done.

Jimmy opened the top left drawer of his dresser and pulled out his favorite shirt. The front read, “Chumbawamba” and the back “Tubthumping,” complete with the lyric, I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down. “Truer words have never been read before, T-Shirt. Mike Anderson, I’m coming for you. You might knock me down, but I’ll get up again. Oh yes, you’re never gonna keep me, Jimmy Stanton, down. It’s tubthumping time.”

With a Chumbawamba aided flurry, Jimmy ran to the computer room and opened his browser, typed in “yelp.com” and he was off. Jimmy’s dad walked by with a basket full of clean clothes, “what are you up to, sport,” he asked? “Slander,” Jimmy replied, “slander.” “Well, have fun and don’t forget to bring your dirty clothes down to the laundry room.”

Thanks to Mavis Beacon and a summer camp gone oh, so right, Jimmy typed at a furious 50 words per minute. He barely knew what he was doing other than creating dozens and dozens of fake accounts and giving as few stars as possible to Mike’s lemonade stand.

Jimmy must have given at least a tri-baker’s dozen of ratings to his nemesis. Each one exposed the world to Mike’s dirty, little Country Time secret and a few of them even mentioned Jimmy’s toilet water theory. When his Internet salvo was expended, Jimmy happily returned to his lemonade stand, just in time to see the aftermath.

A line of cars had stopped at Mike’s stand and when Jimmy sat down ready to sell his refreshing treat again, it started. The dinging of cell phone alerts was almost deafening. Each patron reached for his or her phone and Mike had no clue what was about to hit him. One customer after another shouted some variation of, “Country Time! We have this garbage at the office. I’m not paying for this, I’m going over there” and pointed at Jimmy and his virtuous lemonade stand.

Mike, once again, looked stunned, began to cry and ran back to his front door, which was locked, per household guidelines, as home safety was a priority for the Anderson family. A tenet Mike would often forget throughout the years. Mike’s two nannies hastily packed up his stand and followed the brat. They left the bag of lemons in the grass, and poured out the pitchers full of lie juice before returning to the door to let Mike in.

It was not a pretty picture, but Jimmy had his best day of business ever. It allowed him to open up that second stand a few streets down the following summer and he did it without the help of Shark Tank. Best of all, it would be a cold day in Helena, Alabama before Mike Anderson messed with Jimmy Stanton again.

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