Brown Paper Bag

Brown Paper Bag

“Go ahead kid, open the bag.”
“What’s in it?” I asked; my ten-year-old curiosity piqued.
“What do you think is in it?” The strange man responded.
“It looks empty.”
“To the naked eye, to the unimaginative, to the dreamless, it appears empty.”
The man swept his fingers down his jaw line and pulled his black goatee to a point.

“Pick it up. If it’s empty, as you say, then you have nothing to fear.”
I did not pick it up. I just stared at it, indecision paralyzing me. The man made no attempt to pick it up either. He just smiled and waited.

I did not like the looks of this man. His sea-green eyes were outlined in black, his teeth were too white and his smile too wide. He wore a black derby upon his head. Equally black hair cascaded from under the hat and down his back. He wore large, silver earrings, one in each ear. A black tuxedo jacket over a white, sleeveless t-shirt covered numerous tattoos that made themselves evident in places; a tentacle crawled from under his shirt and up his neck, green and black vines crept out of his sleeves onto the back of his hands. Another man, half his size and several inches shorter than me, with adult sized head and hands, stepped forward.

“Look kid, the bag is empty,” the smaller man squawked. He walked over and stepped on the bag, flattening it to the ground, proving it to be empty.
“If the bag is empty, then there’s no reason for me to pick it up.” I replied, coming to the logical conclusion.

I looked back through the automated doors into the A&P Supermarket. My mom busied herself unloading groceries onto the conveyer at the check-out as the cashier punched in the numbers from the pricing labels. My three brothers and I could eat quite a bit of food in a week. That made for some heavy-duty shopping excursions for my mom, full shopping carts, lots of bags, and lengthy purchase transactions.

Mom always let me play out front of the store when she reached the cashier and began unloading the cart, knowing she would be out shortly. The big storefront windows enabled her to keep an eye out for me, too. A chain-link fence partitioned off the parking-lot from the shopping cart area, keeping me safe from vehicles. An older, wooden stockade fence, standing about two feet high sat directly inside of the chain-link fence running the length of the store. I enjoyed balancing upon the beams of this fence and walking their length for self entertainment. On this day, I was confronted by the strange looking man and his half-sized cohort as soon as I exited the automated doors.

I looked back at the object lying upon the ground between us. The brown paper bag seemed empty. Far from new, I imagined the lunch-sized bag had once held a sandwich or two, a bottle of soda-pop, and perhaps, a small bag of ‘tater chips.

“What are you afraid of, an empty bag?” the tuxedo man said.
“He’s a yeller-belly chick’n” his cohort chided.

I no longer wanted to play this game and I looked to the shopping cart area, resetting my original intention of traversing the wooden beams out in front of the store. The man saw my disinterest, telegraphed by my facial expressions.

“What if I told you,” the man stated, “That the bag is not empty, but it only looks empty, and if you were to pick it up, I can assure you, it will not be empty.”

A thought blossomed in my juvenile head. It must have bloomed on my face also because I felt my eyebrows raise and my mouth open to an oval. I reeled in my thoughts to a cohesive stream, realizing the game my strange confronters were enacting.

Every summer, the carnival would pull into town and along with it some very strange and uncommon looking folk, with unfathomable accents, irregular clothing and odd hair styles and jewelry. They would fan out through the town, using a multitude of scenarios and attention grabbing activities, to garner interest in attending the carnival. No doubt, within the bag, I would find a free pass to a ride or for a sideshow viewing, at the carnival. The carnival owners had full knowledge that anyone they would give passes to, would not attend the carnival alone and would certainly not indulge in just one ride and leave, but would indeed make a day or night of it and spend a small fortune in pursuit of fun.

“I know what you guys are up to,” I said in my smug gotcha’ now voice. “You’re from the carnival. What do’ya got in the bag, a free pass to see the monkey-boy, or the two-headed goat?”

The strange man smiled and looked to his partner who also smiled. “I can assure you. We are not Carny folk.”

My brief spark of brilliant deduction was quickly doused. I knew the man was telling the truth. It was very early in spring, much too early for the festivals and carnival that pervaded the summer months in town. A long pause of silence fell between us then. The stalemate seemed unbreakable, a deadlock of wills. Finally, the man spoke.

“Pick up the bag, kid, before someone comes and runs it over. Because then, the deal is off!”

“What deal?” I snapped. I could feel my face flush with heat. All I wanted to do is pass some time out front of the supermarket, like I had done so many times before, but I was stuck in this ridiculous episode of unknown reason.

“You know…” he said. Then he stopped, just letting the words hang there.

I did not know! For what seemed like the millionth time in my short life, I did not know what these adults were saying. I did not know what was going on. I did not know what I was supposed to do or what was expected of me.

A sudden anger burst forth in me and I was done with these two men. They represented more adults with lies, fallacies, offering me false hope; like my parents who always assured me everything was fine but then my mom and I were dumped off at my grandmother’s house and my father was gone, likely on a ten-year gambling spree - like my teachers who assured me everything was fine as they lead me, by way of trickery, to the school psychologist, who in turn asked a bunch of dumb questions that were none of his damn business. I was young but already had enough bullshit in my short life, shoveled and heaped upon me until I was nearly buried, leaving me suffocating in the stench of arrogance and selfishness, until I could not stand it any longer.

I decided to pick up the bag just to shut their mouths and be done with this ordeal. A rage erupted in full color upon my face, burning red, like the hot coals at the bottom of a campfire. As soon as I touched the bag a snake slithered out and scurried away. I didn’t care; I picked it up anyway, determined to end this game of psychological torment. The stranger and his pal were taken by surprise and stepped back from me. Another larger snake began to curl up out of the bag and ascend my arm. The bag suddenly seemed full, writhing with life, its surface rippling like ocean waves in a storm. A third snake sprung forward, jumped to the ground and raced away at high speed. I threw the bag at the two men, suspecting all along that this was their big joke, that they knew the bag contained snakes and they had meant to scare me for their own amusement. It wasn’t so funny now, was it?

I turned and ran into the store, tears streaming down my cheeks, not because of the snakes particularly, but because these men, who I did not even know, chose me, derailed my playtime, in order to test my patience and poke fun, to treat me like a target as if I had a sign on my back that read, “kick me.”

My mom listened to my tearful recount of the event, asked the cashier to please hold-on one minute, and took me by the hand toward the exit. Outside the men were gone; there were no snakes, no paper bag, and no trace of any part of the tale I had told or the tormentors I had described. She looked up and down the street, seeing nothing.

I wiped the tears from my face with the back of my shirt sleeve. My mom took me by the hand and escorted me back into the store, to the patiently waiting cashier. A few steps before we reached him, my mom said these few words:
“We’ll talk when we get home.”

It would be another speech about my overactive imagination and how these fantasy worlds I created and pretended to live in, were not good. She would explain how I was getting older and it was time I planted my feet on the terra-firma, embrace reality, despite how disappointing and how boring real life may be. That was her version of the event, that was my teacher’s version, and that was my school psychologist’s version. But, I knew what I had seen and what I had experienced, and If I had lied, then, let there be snakes, bags full of snakes, because for better or for worse, I was done taking bullshit from adults. What came out of that bag were not snakes at all, but a jaded ten-year-old, with a barely contained rage smoldering under his boyish features and the gleam of contempt in his eye, ready to challenge the wisdom of adults.