Parking Lot Thievery and Cabbage Patch Genealogy

 

As usual, I don't know where this dream started, nor where it ends up, but I recall some salient details of the middle, so I am compelled to write them down. Here are the "facts," as I remember them:

I was walking across the K-Mart parking lot, and I dropped a ballpoint pen on the ground. As I reached down to pick it up, a group of street urchins surrounded me. One of them snatched the pen up before I could get it. They had a nice game of keep-away, passing the pen back and forth to one another as I grew more and more frustrated. 

They circled me, and the circle grew wider and wider until I was chasing them all around the parking lot. They laughed at the ease with which they were able to manipulate my sluggish senior brain with their tricks. I was such an easy mark. 

I soon noticed that my backpack was lying on the ground about 50 feet from me. I forgot about the pen and ran towards it, hoping to snatch it before the kids noticed. But of course, one of them beat me to it. He was a snarky little blond boy of about twelve, a real Dennis the Menace. 

I chased him out of the parking lot and through some apartment buildings. Something told me that I'd never catch him, but I really needed to get the backpack back. It had my wallet and credit cards and every other bit of important personal data. A perfect one-stop for an identity thief.

He climbed over a fence, and I followed, but I lost him before too long. They had practiced this routine many times, and I was clueless as to where he might have wound up. I gave up the chase and went back to the parking lot to search for clues. That's where I met the first of several young females who were associated with the little band of thieves.

 

I don't remember her name, but she looked like a young Rhea Pearlman, no older than 25, but still retaining the less than refined features of the 80's sitcom actress. I asked her about the group of kids who had stolen my wallet, but she wouldn't give them up. She did say that one of them was her brother, so I kept her as a person of interest in my investigation.

There was no tactic that was below my ethical standards, no ruse I was not willing to employ, in my quest to retrieve my wallet. I began by begging, but soon resorted to a more effective means: I came on to her like a teenager on a first date. That strategy seemed to work, and soon we were making out, right there in the parking lot. 

She told me all kinds of things that I found interesting, but still I was no closer to getting my wallet back. For one, she bragged that she was the owner of a rare Cabbage Patch doll of immeasurable monetary value. Something about its genealogy made it a highly prized possession. I stored this information for later use.

When it became apparent that I was going to get no additional wallet-related information from her, I extricated myself from her arms, leaving her there to protest my rather abrupt exit. I left the parking lot and went back to the apartment buildings where I'd last seen the young wallet snatcher.

Inside my apartment, I commenced a campaign to discredit the parentage of the girl's Cabbage Patch doll. After a few phone calls and viral internet posts, a controversy began brewing, then a scandal, surrounding the girl, the doll and some kind of antiquities fraud. Her parents were implicated, and the mother, in particular, became enraged and sought to destroy me.

In the meantime, I tried my strategy of meeting with young girls who were peripherally involved with the group of young thieves. If nothing else, I was perfecting the intel extraction process: meet with a young female, start making out with her, and wait for her to spill the beans. I didn't care how far I had to go, I was committed to my cause. Goal oriented, yes, but the process was pretty enjoyable, too.

The next girl threw me for a loop, though. She was a knockout, with long blonde hair and a shapely figure. I wasn't able to get any information out of her, but she was winning me over with her wiles.

"Why do you want to go with that Ugly Betty, anyway?" she said, referring to the Cabbage Patch owner I'd interrogated earlier. 

Catlike, she straddled me in the bed of her El Camino, pawing her way up my chest and giving me kisses as she disrobed. Soon, we were a fully involved tangle of naked limbs, engaging in the most enthralling of illicit parking lot activities. She was good. I was beaten at my own game, and I knew it.

"I don't know," I said dumbly, having already forgotten her question. All I could think about was how good she felt, how good she was making me feel.

"I can do this for you all the time," she said. "Just stay away from that Cabbage Patch girl. She's trouble." I got the feeling that she was the one who was going to be trouble, but I didn't care. 

Soon, however, I was back my apartment, where I saw my stepdad Greg outside, retrieving a bicycle from some bushes. I jumped from my window into the bushes to help him out. He was not just a little concerned about my recent activities.

"You're going to have to cease and desist with the slander, Andrew," he said pointedly. "And your investigatory techniques are highly unethical. This is reminding me of when you were a teenager." 

I smiled. It was reminding me of those days, too. 

We shared a laugh over what we both knew was an incorrigible aspect of my personality, perhaps a universal aspect of any perpetual teenager. "The dog returns to its own vomit..." as King James crassly puts it. I like to think of it as a perverse form of integrity. I may be bad, but at least I'm consistent, a scoundrel through and through. I am dependable like that. There is no jelly in my peanut butter, as my mom would say.

We still had to solve the problems that my slanderous accusations about the Cabbage Patch family had caused. Rhea Pearlman was heartbroken, and her mom was pissed. She was threatening a lawsuit that could take down me and my family. And I still didn't have my wallet. 

"So let's start at the beginning," Greg said to me. "You were in the parking lot at K-Mart, and you dropped your pen..."