the tape section
I was in the tape section. I needed tape for my car. The bumper had been hanging off for two years and I kept trying to patch it back up.
The Home Depot offers a bountiful selection of tapes, all priced opportunistically. To be in a Home Depot looking for tape is to be in a very particular and urgent situation. Something in your life needs patching up.
I hear Buff’s voice; grating, nasally, unnecessarily sharp. A butcher knife hacking through butter. He’s arguing with the cashier. The sour Skittles are ten cents more than the regular Skittles and he wants to know why. He cannot let it go. I just know he is leaning on the counter like he’s owed something. I don’t even have to turn around to picture his smug face. I’ve seen it. He’s the level of gainfully unemployed that makes one taunt hourly wage employees. Buff’s glasses cost more than the cashier makes a day. I’m sure of this. I don’t know how or why I fuck him.
My phone buzzes. It’s Ears. I’d sent him a photo of the entire tape aisle with the text:
which 4 car pls
It’s important to make him feel important.
Ears has been even more obsessed with me lately, ever since I told him I wanted to start an OnlyFans. He doesn’t need the money, but he likes the danger of it. He could lose his practice. He could lose everything.
Happy to help babe. Which tapes are you looking at?
I send a selfie with all the rolls I can cram into the frame, pouting.
sooo which one big boy?
Any on the shelf behind you will work. Let me know how much $$$ to send.
I thumbs down the message.
Lol ok then. Are you at the one on Vine?
I thumbs up the message.
I’m coming babe. Be there in 10.
Buff is still at the register. I hear him go back and forth with the cashier, raising his voice about store policy, about how it’s not right, about principle. Skittles, ten cents. A performance of grievance. A line is forming behind him.
Once, after a night of drinking with Buff, I woke up in his bed to find a handwritten manifesto on the nightstand. He was already outside doing his morning sulk on the porch, so I went ahead and read it. It was about how he hates being rich. How nobody understands him. How it’s impossible to make real friends when you have all this money, all this mansion. That was when I really fell for him. A baby of a man.
Ears shares the same concerns.
“What if you’re just with me for money?” he asks, incessantly.
“Who says I’m not?” I tease back.
He worries about everything. A “what if” type of man. He can’t stop imagining the ways he might lose me. Brain on overdrive.
Now the cashier is telling Buff if he doesn’t lower his voice, he needs to leave.
He looks around, exasperated and we lock eyes. Shit.
“YOU!” he shouts. “What the hell are you doing here?” He stomps over, arms crossed, eyebrows furrowed. The cashier mouths “thank you” at me. I am her sacrificial lamb. Happy to help.
Buff scoops me up in a hug that invades my insides. My stomach does backflips as I put my mouth behind his ear and inhale. He smells like an Abercrombie and Fitch model. I like it and I hate him. I want to make him cry. Then it hits me. I need to keep him here for only what, eight more minutes now? That should be no problem. I’ll just ask him a single question about himself.
Buff and Ears don’t know each other. I’ve kept those worlds separate. But here in the tape section of the Hollywood Home Depot, I start to imagine them colliding. I want to boss them both around. Together. I want to make them buy me every tape in this section, until the workers have to cut them off because they are depleting inventory. I want the whole store.
I bend down to pick up a roll of duct tape I’d dropped. Buff beats me to it, his colossal arms glistening under the fluorescent lights. He grins like he’s done me a life-altering favor. Big baby of a man.
I ask him to describe the latest movie he’s seen to me.
Then I look at my watch as the seconds go by.
Six minutes down to five to four to three. Buff is still monologuing. He loves Paul Thomas Anderson.
A text from Ears lights up my screen,
This lot is insane. Everyone is offering to do yard work for me LOL!
Still in tape?
I heart the message.
Buff has stopped his story and is staring at me.
“Are you even listening?”
“Of course.”
I see Ears in the distance, in his navy blue tailored blazer, gold Apple watch, Ferragamo loafers.
This is it, let the games begin. Time for my big dumb boys to meet.
Emily Woods is a writer and former SoundCloud rapper from Virginia currently living in Los Angeles. She co-produces a new script reading series called OFFSCREEN with her friends and is working on her debut short story collection about her prolific career as a petsitter.