Kick Me Read Free

“Army-Navy Surplus.” Apparently, if you’re a person who’s looking for stuff the army doesn’t want anymore, the first name in the book is good enough for you.
    If a kid’s father could own any kind of business, an army-surplus store is about as good as it gets, falling short only of a toy company or a roller-coaster factory. Ark Surplus was packed to the rafters with every kind of tent and hat and canteen and army uniform ever made, not to mention all kinds of low-rent sporting goods, products that were a name brand only if you lived in Taiwan or China. Spelling and syntax mistakes on the packages were more numerous than in a first grader’s “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay. Items such as rubber rain ponchos sold in packages emblazoned with phrases like “Puncho to keeping rain off arm and logs” and “Super hi-fi re-inforce zipper tooths,” which featured artists’ renderings of a man in a poncho whose ethnic grab-bag of a face indicated that his parents must have been an American GI and a Vietnamese prostitute, were but the tip of the iceberg of merchandise for sale in my father’s store. He was fond of saying that he had made most of his money off the “hippies and yippies” who, in the mid- to late 1960s, descended on his store to buy all his army jackets, shirts, and fatigue pants as part of their protest garb. The Vietnam War was a dark period in our history, but to my dad, it was all green.
    His store was also where almost everything we used in our house came from. For years my father had brought home small bottles filled with a yellow liquid that the army had produced as insect repellent for soldiers in the jungle. It had a toxic smell and turned your skin into an arid wasteland within minutes of application. However, it definitely kept the bugs away. Whenever I’d see my friends’ mothers spraying them with Off!, I’d feel a sense of superiority, knowing that I was warding off mosquitoes courtesy of the United States armed forces. It wasn’t until I was sixteen years old that my father informed me the government had made him stop selling his bug repellent several years earlier because no one knew what was in it, and indications were good that whatever its active ingredient was, it wasn’t something that should be put on human skin.
    “Why’d you let us keep
using
it?” I asked incredulously.
    “I don’t know—it just worked really well” was his disturbing answer. And that was my dad in a nutshell.
    I also never encountered a real piece of toilet paper until I went away to college, because my father would stock our bathrooms with the industrial toilet tissue that he bought at a discount from his government wholesalers. It had all the softness and absorbency of typing paper and acted more like a frosting spreader than a piece of toilet tissue. Once, while on a sleep-over at a friend’s house, I went in his bathroom and for the first time in my life used a piece of quilted toilet paper and had a religious experience. It was around this time that I started to curse the day my dad ever owned an army-surplus store.
    However, as a first grader who was simply trying to get an elf costume for the Christmas pageant, I knew exactly where that costume was going to be pieced together.
    “All right,” said my father with a sigh. “I’ll take him down to the store this weekend and we’ll figure something out.”
    A few days later, we went into Ark Surplus and started scouring the aisles for anything that was vaguely elflike.
    “This looks like a hat that an elf would wear,” said my mother, picking up an olive drab green watch cap, similar to the one worn by Mike Nesmith of the Monkees.
    “What kind of pants do elves wear?” my father asked as he poked through a shelf filled with hunting clothes.
    “I think they wear shorts,” offered my mother.
    “Yeah,” I chimed in. “They wear shorts with suspenders.”
    “Well, I don’t have any shorts here. At least, none that’ll