issue77aspecialpta

                                   ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM

***BIO*** Taylor Collier: I'm currently the Poetry Editor for DISPATCH LITAREVIEW, and I'm a native of Lubbock, Texas. My fiction has appeared at Bewildering Stories and is forthcoming at Giggle Water Review, New College Review, Turnpike Gates, and Main Street Rag. I also have poems in a number of journals like The Oklahoma Review, AntiMuse, and Cherry Bleeds.

Home

Submit

A Special PTA Meeting

by Taylor Collier

When my brother, Andy, went away to college, he left me his fishing
pole, a well-read copy of The Wind in the Willows, and a stack of
Playboys. I got home from work one day, he was gone, and his shit was
in my room. I had to get rid of it (except for the Playboys). I
always knew Andy was headed for college, but he was trying to make me
feel bad for being the deadbeat of the family. So what if my little
brother went to college and I didn't? I took the fishing pole and book
outside and tossed them in the dumpster. Fuck him. College might
have been the place for Andy, but there was no way I was going to
go—and I was not going to feel guilty about keeping his famous
collection of Playboys.

Andy had started his business when he was a freshman in high school.
He was the Blockbuster of Playboys, and eventually other magazines, he
just started with Playboy because it was the first thing I passed his
way. All his friends lined up at school to borrow his magazines, and
he charged them five dollars a piece for each night they wanted to
borrow a magazine. And he made them each promise to keep them
stain-free—he had a no return policy for magazines that had been
tainted. If you tainted one of Andy's magazines, you had to buy it,
and the way he saw it, you were preventing him from passing that
magazine around to five or maybe even six other guys, so he charged
twenty dollars a piece for them. That guaranteed you wouldn't have to
look at some other guy's cum-stain when you went through Andy. After
his first few customers, he had gone to the store and bought a huge
stack of folders. He made sure to put all his magazines in folders at
home, and, when someone wanted something, he just handed them the
folder and they thanked him for the notes in class. Andy had cornered
the market and built up his own demand. How else were those kids
going to get their porn? Their parents had all learned to guard their
internet—they wouldn't have had come to Andy otherwise.

He had learned to inspect each magazine upon its return after one of
his little friends complained about the naked pictures being ripped
out of one of the magazines. Andy kept records and saw that his
friend, Garrett, had been the culprit who had stolen the pictures.
Andy hunted the kid down and made him pay twenty dollars for the
magazine and then five dollars to the kid who had complained. I had
to hand it to him—he really knew what he was doing, a true businessman
from the get go.

After freshman year, his friends made other friends who were over
eighteen, and they had a new source for their skin mags. Andy had
started hustling out to the freshman, who eagerly fueled his business.
After a while he even outsourced some of his business to one of the
older middle school kids, who really took his business to new levels.
This eighth grader, Ron Collins, had started placing orders through
Andy for multiple copies of the same Playboy, which Andy had never
even considered, but there was high demand in the middle school market
for the newer issues, and Ron realized he could make more money by
having several copies of the latest issue circulating at the same
time. Even the two or three month old issues were in high demand,
which convinced Andy that his money wouldn't be wasted by buying up to
four copies of each issue.

After Ron had exponentially increased the size of Andy's business,
Andy agreed to let Ron keep a copy of the latest issue solely for
himself, which was the only real demand Ron had. Ron had requested
that they start lending out more than just Playboys, which would bring
in new business. Andy had agreed, and he sent me to the store with a
list: five copies of the latest issue of Hustler, Penthouse, and
Perfect 10. I didn't mind. Andy always paid for everything, let me
keep a copy of each magazine, and he always slipped me some extra
cash. Andy and I were in business together at that point—me being his
main supplier. Whenever he couldn't get in touch with me, he would go
to our cousin, Jeremy, who was twenty. I tried to be available for
him though because I never liked him going to Jeremy. I could always
use the extra cash, but I was afraid of what else my brother might get
from Jeremy, who was known for peddling weed. Andy was smart and knew
he didn't need that shit, but temptation's a bitch—Jeremy got me to
smoke and drink for my first time. I didn't want him to pop Andy's
cherry too; he'd have plenty of chances to do that on his own once he
got to college.

Andy had been saving his money, and he'd always been careful who he
dealt with. He didn't want people finding out about his business, and
he had always done a good job of keeping everything private. During
his senior year, he used some of the money he'd made to buy a laptop.
Once he got his computer, he started giving me orders for DVDs at the
porn store. I just assumed he wanted the movies for himself, but I
saw a stack of blank DVDs on his desk. He was making copies of the
porn movies to sell. That kid was always looking for opportunities.
Andy sold the DVDs for ten dollars a piece, and his business was even
better than it had ever been. However, his magazine business dwindled
after he started selling DVDs. Ron kept the middle school business
steady, which Andy appreciated. He stopped magazine dealings with the
high school kids and sent all his magazines to Ron. Andy slipped a
few DVDs to Ron as payment for help him move the magazines in the
middle school market. But Ron made the mistake of selling some of the
DVDs to the middle school kids, and several of the kids were caught.

The parents were furious and even held a special PTA meeting about the
pornography that had been circulating around the school. When it came
time to point fingers, everyone pointed at Ron Collins. Lucky for
Andy, Ron took the blame and was punished with in-school-suspension
for two weeks. On top of that, Ron was grounded by his parents for a
month.

Andy was more upset that Ron had gotten into trouble than he was about
the collapse of his business on the middle school level. Andy
couldn't risk getting caught with any kids in middle school, so he
increased his DVD business on the high school level. Even the kids
who were old enough to buy porn bought from Andy because his prices
were cheaper than any of the stores'. At Andy's high school
graduation, one of the kids he had sold DVDs to hacked into the
projector and slipped in clips of hardcore pornography into the
footage of the graduates walking across the stage. The expressions in
the crowd were hilarious, and, since the person running the projector
had no idea what was going on, she had no idea how to stop it, and so
the ceremony continued for thirty minutes with small interruptions of
hardcore porn after each kid walked across the stage.
They finally decided to turn off the projectors.

Andy had always been a good brother, and I was going to miss him. I
grabbed the first Playboy in the stack, and I wondered where all of
his other magazines were. I knew he had gobs of Hustlers and
Penthouses somewhere. Playboys weren't nearly as good. I opened the
first magazine and found a note from Andy:

John,
I figured you would look here first. That's why I put the note in
here. You've always been a great brother, even though you used to
hold me down and spit on my face. I'm going to miss you a lot while
I'm in college, and I'm passing my business on to you. I've got the
names and phone numbers of all of my clients written in the back pages
of The Wind in the Willows, and there's three hundred dollars rolled
up on the inside of the fishing pole to get you started.
Love,
Andy
P.S. I hope you enjoy the Playboys. They were all yours at one time.
I kept track of the ones you gave me, except for the two I lost to
stains.

I dropped the note and ran outside to the dumpster. I peaked over the
edge, but it was empty—the trash man had already come. I jumped into
the dumpster anyway to make sure the book and fishing pole were gone.
I looked all around the inside of the dumpster, but I couldn't find
either of them. Like Andy, they were off to a better place.

Jan. 2007