Dotty Parker

the nefarious helmet man

It's a JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts kind of day. How could that be since I no longer work at JoAnn Fabrics and Crafts (although I do work inside of it) and I wasn't there today?

Hmm. That's a mystery!

Well! I was shopping at the mall completing a birthday present for Mr.Guy. I went into A. C. Moore to get a specifically colored pen and to cruise its my-T-fine selection of paper cutting methods. So that got me in the mind set of, "Remember when you had to do stuff like this? Remember all the things you learned? Remember that from October onward there was no way of going home without having glitter on you? There was glitter on everything!"

I escaped that store glitter-free, wandered into Target, and later wandered out. There, sitting on the bench before me, was the helmet man.

Helmet Man!

Helmet Man used to come into JoAnn's around 8pm when there were only two of us working. It was kind of creepy. He had these staring eyes, the kind that look too long at a person so the person starts to back away or they look somewhere else and start talking fast. He almost always had on the same clothes and, until Lizzibear talked to him, we didn't know what the deal was at all.

Apparently he was living in his van. I don't remember the reasons, but he was. He was buying sheets of thin, dense foam so he could construct a helmet that would keep out noise during the day. He was awake at night because he was afraid of being robbed and he slept during the day because he felt relatively safe.

Helmet man kept coming to the store even after this helmet was complete. I never saw the helmet (or the inside of the van, tee hee), but I took his word for it that it was done.

Sometimes when a person works at a relatively mindless job, that person begins to laugh at relatively mindless things. I called it punch drunk since it always happened at the end of the evening when we were almost by ourselves and everything was funny.

One night, I decided to wear the sticker that was on the glitter bedecked poinsettias. The sticker was an oval shape and the words were

Touch me!
Feels so real!

Here is a reasonable facsimile thereof. (The poinsettias were something I just put in to make the reasonable facsimile less ugly.)

Lizzibear and I were working together. I was totally amused all by myself, singing that song from Cats and making up new words. She and I were talking about helmet man because he was awfully weird and he'd hung around a few days ago when she was closing and he didn't want to leave and she called her husband to come and pick her up in case Helmet Man was waiting outside!

Just then, Helmet Man came in. I didn't want to get silent right away. He'd think we'd been talking about him, which we actually had been. I imagined how we must have sounded to him, though. Stifling laughs, asking him about his helmet, if it was working well. I walked him over to the kids' toy aisle where we'd just got in more of the extra thick stuff in red. He was making the helmet in red.

He said, "Hey, Svaava, I like your sticker." (I was wearing the Svaava nametag because it was more fun than wearing my own. People would ask me how I got the name and I'd tell them that it was left over.)

"My sticker? Oh! Must have gotten stuck to me when I was putting out the poinsettias. I've got glitter all over my hands, too. So much stuff just sticks around here."

I turned and left, feeling like those cartoon characters who stand in one place while building up enough friction to rocket them out of there.

What the hell does this have to do with the mall?

Well! I saw Helmet Man sitting in the mall reading something. It isn't the first time I'd seen him. And maybe I'm mistaking him for someone else. But here's the thing. Helmet Man disappeared for a while. Then, someone resembling Helmet Man and wearing clothes that I thought I'd seen on Helmet Man came into the store with a girlfriend. He knew the layout of the store. I'm pretty sure it was him.

When he got to the checkout, Lizzibear and I asked, "So, is the helmet working for you?"

He said, "What helmet?"

Posted by dotty at September 1, 2004 06:22 PM