MONICA!

I’m on the blower reviewing my Wednesday slew of meaningless phone messages. I particularly love the ones that congratulate me on winning my vacation in Scotch Plains, New Jersey if I sign on board with them for Cockroach Collision Insurance.

I rarely collide with cockroaches because even they do not consider my basement apartment to be fit for their habitation.

I’m sure the incoming beep on my call waiting is just another request for some of my non-existent finances to further a meaningless enterprise..

Norman is on a much needed vacation on Alpha Centauri, catching some once in a millennium gravitational collapses. I told him to send me a post card, and make a note to pick up some Tullamore Dew.

Tempted as I am to ignore it, the giddy optimist that still squats in the cellar of my soul insists that I pick it up.

"Hello?"

"Weasel! You know who this is."

"Oh Jesus, Monica!"

Break out the party hats. It’s Monica! The only person in human history, to my knowledge, who had her name legally changed to include an exclamation point.

Any man who has not had a Monica! In his life, will never be fully capable of appreciating what a jewel he has in a wife. The Monica!s of the world have always been with us and already charmed the men of the world out of their pants and a greater portion of their money.

Monica!s usually are already on the boat waving Bon Voyage to the guy in the pier before the poor sap realizes he forgot to get his penis back. They have already hocked said organ to pay off a credit card bill.

And it’s not that they steal it, although some of the world’s Monica!s do. Nor is it because they flatter and manipulate it out of us, although many of the world’s Monica!s do.

And despite the fact that sex is not necessarily a final reward for the guy, if it were not for sex, the Monica!s of the world would not have a leg to stand on. So to speak.

"My" (and wow do I ever use that one "my" circumspectly) Monica! is a walking cross between a train wreck and the finest porno flick I’ve ever had the pleasure to have lived in for some years or two.

Add to that a precocious and genuine interest in the fine arts and poetry, including even the brilliant Andrew Marvell (She loved to read The Nymph Complaining on the Death of Her Fawn), and any misgivings I may have are goners.

We met when she was eighteen and I was twenty eight, making me feel like a bit of a child molester at the time. When a man is twenty eight he starts seeing himself as thirty, and at thirty, "loser" is the only word conveniently a propos for somebody hacking an eighteen year old..

However, under the circumstances I was about as blameless a piece of virtue as Sir Galahad had ever been. Monica! already possessed a full three years’ resume worth of epic adventures with men far older, sadder, and wiser than I was.

At five feet eight inches she was a little short to make a big niche in the model scene. And her chiseled features were a little too exotic for the cookie cutter. There was nothing bland there for the machine to work with.

To make matters worse, her generous tits were not quite generous enough because she also was a natural track athlete from eleven onwards. Her eyes seemed to oscillate between green and hazel in bright sunlight.

Red hair and milk skin with a feather dusting of freckles. Really not quite right for the star machine, but physically irresistible.

I met her at two a.m. with about a case worth of beer goggles I’d been donning across the day and into the evening. My band, The Positronix, were pulling $75 a man at STAINZ, a seedy Babylon, Long Island shotgun bar where the management was trying to pack three hundred under age drinkers into a 150 capacity shithole.

It was a roaring delight by then, as long as you didn’t mind ducking random flying Budwieser bottles on the way in.

The Positronix were a post punk heavy metal "progressive" band a la early Metallica meets The Stranglers. We worked clubs where most of the patrons were between seventeen and twenty five, and were either into the Goth look or the Black leather look.

Either way there were a lot of black leather jackets and tight black jeans. All pretending to be "living on the edge" behind a back stop of suburban Long Island money

When I jumped off the shabby wooden stage in search of a beer, I almost walked right through her. The only anxiety I have known worse than stage fright is dealing with people after I no longer have the crutch of music to rely on.

Unlike my sales trained retail professional self today, at that point, I was virtually a social cripple without a guitar in my hand.

Surrounded by her female compadres in the de rigueur black leather, Monica! looked like a Boccacio goddess in some kind of flower silk screened summery dress thing.. She stuck out like a side of ham in a synagogue. How could I do other than to overlook as petty a canyon’s worth of distance like age and background?

At first, easily. Due to my background in the sex industry in my early teens and then later twenties, I despised the vanity of middle aged men who would rather shark teen agers than take on the challenges of a woman in the full bloom of her sexuality. Why not leave youth to the young?

The twenty three year old woman who used to pimp me to discreet Upper East Side matrons, used to joke about how pathetic such men were in their toupees and combovers trying to "charm" a freebie out of one of the working girls.

In between social butterflights she dropped her number with me on a postage stamp sized scrap of beer napkin. Her laughter bubbled in my ears, and I wondered if she was doing it as some kind of elaborate joke with her friends. Call it a round of "play the thirty year old geezer and see if he acts the chump."

As I watched her willowy red ponytail do a little horsy dance into the dim and smoky bar horizon, I stuffed the napkin scrap in my pocket and figured it was a fake.

It wasn’t.

When I woke the next morning in Danny Baldwin’s van, I felt like a case of #4 ball peen hammers had been dancing Giselle on my head all night. My hands were shaking and I promised myself for the 10,000th (or was it 10,001?) time that I would not drink to conquer my stage fright.

After a breakfast beer to settle my nerves and shakes, I remembered her dryad like presence. Hopeless as it seemed, I gave her a call.

"Hello?"

The voice of a mature woman blew back at me."

"Is Monica (without the exclamation point and before her legal name change) there?"

"No she’s not. This is her mother. Can I take a message?"

Despite my delicate hungover condition, I certainly know better than to say that it is Weasel from the Positronix calling. Probably better to leave STAINZ out of this too.

Little did I know how well mother knew daughter. Or how well Mother had trained daughter.

"This is Darius Wheeler the third calling, and could you please let her know I will try her later?"

That got her interest. That the third bit has gotten me past many a phone screen.

"Is there a number she can reach you, Darius?"

"Yes, 718-696-0666. However, I won’t be available at that number until tomorrow."

"Okay. I’ll let her know."

"Thanks."

"Goodbye, Darius."

"Thanks again, and goodbye."

Unlike most rock and roll geezers, I had no shortage of female company as it was. Most of them either my age or older, which was exactly as I preferred it. Again, not so much due to my Godlike form or brilliant political insights, and more due to a simple combination of desires to be giving in the sack and dignified in company. Dignified by CBGB cultural standards.

After two days went by, I figured she would never get back to me. I gave her one last courtesy call, and left another message with her mom.

Another day went by, and I had just about written her off, when my answering service informed me that Monica had called back and wanted to know what I was doing a week from Saturday.

My brain was screaming "NIP THIS IN THE BUD, BROTHER! Think of all the reasons why someone this tall, young, and beautiful will get no good from you, and you will get no good from her."

But my dumb foolish heart was singing like the lark at daybreak. Not two days before the gig I’d had a dream about a beautifully willow of a lady for a companion in Venice under the Doge’s Palace. An evasive dream of a love with an unremembered face. Faceless because love has a thousand faces.

Within twenty four hours I had written three pitiful love songs. A bit of a stretch for a band whose most requested tunes included Surfin’ in the Sewer, Television Drilled a Hole in My Head, and French Kisses for the Mushroom Cloud.

My two fellow Positronix, bass and drums, saw right through me, and dropped Monica’s name with arch, knowing tones. Before taking up with me, they had worked the same circuit with another power trio, Toxic By Nature. Monica and her extended circle of female cronies were already a well known set of variables.

The drummer, Tony, the Tank, Tancanello signaled for a break after we had practiced a particularly grueling two hour set. Sweat was pouring off of all our bodies, soaking through our cheap black tee shirts.

The sound proofed room was suffocating. The air conditioning had once again fulfilled its reputation for existential non-existence in the mid day August swelter.

He eased his furry, ape-like five eight two hundred pounds of Sicilian football muscle and beer fed belly from a drum throne that his butt cheeks could have swallowed whole. A permanent five o’clock shadow and bushy beetle brows further darkened his brown oval of a face. Without a word of preliminary he spoke his mind.

"Those bitches are poison, man. The whole gang of them. But especially Monica and her hell dyke partner, Zolfanello. Ron, fill him in. I need to take a dump. See you in ten."

The bassist, twenty year old Ron Adonis, sucked on a Marlboro red through razor sharp serpentine lips. His cheeks hollowed his chiseled features into beveled facets. His head was bald except for a two inch tall Mohawk running the crown of his rhomboid head.

His permanently coke dilated eyes shone glossy black in the shadows cast by the minimal lighting of our squalid space in Plastic Armageddon Studios. He dropped his six foot gymnastically trained body onto a tattered couch facing the ratty wooden stage on three foot risers.

Three microphones, a guitar stack, and a bass rig hummed in front of a stain dappled black back drop. Beer cans and cardboard quart orange juice containers litter the stage. I pop open a warm Budweiser and brace for the onslaught.

"Tank on the porcelain. Not a pretty sight. But he’s right, man. Those chicks are havoc. You’re the oldest guy in the band, you should know better. You know the type. Cut your balls off."

My mouth waxes cynical while my mind takes a job at Hallmark.

"What’s the big deal? I talked to the bitch a couple of times. She gives me her number. It’s not like I’m slamming her yet."

"And if you’re lucky, you never will. Watch out for Zolfanello. She gave five guys a case of the crabs in one weekend."

"Ron, I don’t know what you guys are worried about. Her friend’s a pig, and she’s just some flaky eighteen year old who happened to corner me in the bar."

The smile that seemed to bathe the sleazy bar in silver moonlight. The floral dress whose violet petals shimmered visions of the innocence of Eden’s Garden in the ripe radiance of a pink spring background. Uggh! How can I be thinking stuff like this? It’s like my brain is dumpster diving in the Barry Manilow songbook. Ripe radiance?

"Well, don’t come crying to me or Tony when you start pissing green slime and your dick falls down the bowl. You were warned. The only reason we’re worried is that this project is starting to sound signable, and the suits won’t buy a band with a guitarist who’s getting led around by a dick he lost in a Long Island sewer."

"You got nothing to worry about, Adonis. She’s too damn tall for me anyway."

Gold even in an imaginary after glow. If we were to be lovers, that is to say, If I were lucky enough that she were to consider the possibility that she might want to be an older man’s lover, and IF this whole thing is not some hideous and colossal prank which my band members are pulling on me-

"Damn right about that, Skippy. You’d need a ladder to get a dose of the clap off her."

-and if there is to be anything to this wwhole phantasmagoria of new emotions exfoliating before me, we need to be wonderful friends before any real physical contact.

"You know what else? She used to fuck Jimmy Panatella, and he beat the shit out of the last guy that touched her, even though they broke up six months ago.

"That guy’s fucking nuts. If it weren’t for his old man in the mob, he’d be doing twenty upstate already. I bet she gets off on that kind of shit. You want to be next victim? Take a number."

If there is one thing that horrifies me in this infatuation’s possibilities, it is that I might act as a corrupting influence on her.

But Panatella? Now there’s something to throw ice on your dick. He started a two hundred odd participant bar clearing brawl that resulted in thirty five arrests. Even after breaking a cop’s wrist, he was not one them. A one seventy coiled spring of five foot ten catastrophe.

As we used to say in my previous band, the porno driven Erotics, "Women rape men for their wallets, but men rape women of their innocence."

I could imagine her as nothing less than a demigoddess of pastoral nature, unselfconscious in its radiating beauty, bestowing the divine more by its presence than any skill. Brilliant with the possibilities of fulfillments yet to come. Hope making bail does not turn into one of them.

However, as it turned out she felt like a has been that never was in the lunatic world of modeling. And in fact, she was more jaded than half the matrons who used to hire me as a lap licking dog du jour.

I found this out after we finally had a real conversation. Three wild sweaty Kama Sutra weekends into our relationship.

This girl’s idea of foreplay was fellatio while I was driving her car down Sundown Highway at about fifty miles an hour. I could swear her neck must have been double jointed.

"Everyone else has contracts and I’m still doing go sees."

"What do you mean "everyone?"

"In the magazines you moron! Anyone I really talk to."

"Oh, that bullshit."

At the age of twenty eight, I knew better than to express contempt for the local idols of the Bitch Marketplace. Especially given my Bitch Goddess needs. But somehow the idiot truth had wriggled out from between my teeth, and slimed its way straight into her ears.

"Bullshit, huh? That’s just sour grapes because they wouldn’t have any of the likes of you. Some of these girls make more in an hour than you’ll see in six months.

"I’ll show you bullshit, look in your wallet. And while you’re at it why don’t step out with me into my car? You gotta joint?"

"As a matter of fact I do…."

And the night ended happily ever after. Monica exhibited a peculiar variant on Attention Deficit Disorder. There was no topic, no matter how deeply she may have felt about it, which she could pay any attention to for more than the time that it took for her to notice that she had an itch that needed scratching.

She’d be checking her vibrator for batteries in the shadow of the mushroom from a Hydrogen weapon burst.

Nevertheless, despite these failings, and no doubt due to my own, I fell for her like the Roman Empire before Osiric the Visigoth..

Meanwhile, back in the present - where the future’s something that’s already happened - here we are six years separated, and she’s got me on the blower, sure as a fireman that she’s going to hose me. She’s right.

The fact that I know better is not going to stop me. I don’t need Norman’s neckless disembodied nose to smell my future.

The memories of her enduring charms rise to the nostrils of memory like August dog shit smoldering in Frankincense and myrrh.

Let the shit fleck the fan, baby.

"So what’s Monica! Been doing lately?"

"Selling beauty products and making a killing at it, Weasel. How about you? Same ol’ same ol’? Slinging guitar licks for the bar chumps and feeling old?"

Starting right up where we last left off: condescension to the nth power.

"It’s been a while, Monica! I’ve had a regular job the last few years."

"Finally knuckled under, huh?"

"Yeah, you bet. Now I weigh 300 pounds and everybody knows me as "Turtle." Did I mention I was bald from the chemotherapy treatments, too?"

"Ah, Weasel, always the kidder. You’re probably healthy as a horse and hate the world more than you ever did."

"Well, I never was quite the same after I busted up with you, but I’m about eighty per cent."

"Well, talk about a surgical approach. You split for a weekend and came back married. What’s a girl to think?"

"That was just a pretty fine example of the axiom that marriage and an eight day bender don’t quite mix."

"My father wanted to have you killed, you know. The only thing that saved you was he had a heart attack on a week long blow spree trying to come up with the cheapest way to wax your butt."

"You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve thought about how wrong that was, but still, our relationship at that point was a sewer line."

"I’ve got to give you credit. It really was the best thing over the long haul, but…."

"But I was a first class asshole-"

"Don’t flatter yourself. Second class asshole. First class would have left me with a Porsche."

Ouch, ouch ouch. It’s the Monica! Masochism test. The things a man will endure just for the memories of some good loving. . And it’s not so much that she’s a bit of whore, it’s more like a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement.

"I guess you’re right about that. And I’m happy to talk to you too. So, what’s up?"

"I’m coming into New York. What are you up to?"

Warning! Warning! Hosing Radar klaxons! But, I’m already mentally canceling every plan I have for the next two weeks. What can I say? It’s Monica! You only live once.

"Nothing exciting really. I’m on a five day schedule. When are you blowing into town?"

And I do mean blowing.

Of course that’s if "nothing exciting" includes two band rehearsals and several dates with women who like to sleep with me. But, of course, they are not Monica!

"Next week. The company’s putting me up in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Want to hook up?"

"Enough about bears, woods, popes, and Catholicism. Done deal. Let me know when your schedule tweaks up."

A little on the too easy side, but why bother pretending?

"Will do, Weasel. I’ll keep you posted."

With a song in my heart and a lilt on my tongue, I prepare for another day of rainforest pimpery at the greatest company in the world to work for.

As I scramble up the escalator for the God knows how manyth time, I consider what a challenge lies ahead for my manager at the afternoon shift’s sales meeting. He has to find a way to ruin my day. On the other hand, of course, so any options there reside.

This manager, the tenth in my time at GSI, is "new," and he is a professional terminator. He has just been brought in from the Macon store, with the express purpose of "turning the store around."

As a grizzled veteran of over three and a half years, I know that my elimination is high priority. This is not the first time I’ve danced in the crosshairs, ducking the termination bullet.

The company’s model is based on "growth." If an employee does not "grow" into management and the six day, sixty hour weeks which that entails, this indicates a failure to assimilate the values of the corporate culture.

Of course I don’t really give much of a mind to all this, I’m going to be seeing Monica!

Experience and product knowledge be damned. Product keeps changing, and experience breeds skepticism. With a pivotal component of the corporate sub-text being military, skepticism ill becomes a retail soldier.

One of the most frequent reasons cited for termination of the longer lived non-management employees is "insubordination." The actual cause of this is generally said employee losing their temper with an "order" to perform a patently absurd act.

There is the famous story of two year "veteran" Bob, "Sarge" Sargonoswki from the Baltimore Galaxy, who melted down after a fourteen hour Memorial Day stretch. At ten p.m. the Guitar Matrix Manager told him he couldn’t leave until he had applied 100 price tags (AKA "POP’s") marked "June Clearance."

When "Sarge" pointed out that the "Clearance" prices were considerably more than the original ones, Matrician Mark Malefactucci told him to "get it done anyway, before you go."

Although none but the brave would suggest it was anything other than an overdose of caffeine speaking, Sargonoswki was terminated the next day for having shouted at the manager, "Mark, this is all bullshit, Goddamit. Let me go home to the wife."

And none but the stupid would assume that this kind of trap is not embedded in the game by which the company eliminates long term employees who otherwise would be eligible for long term benefits.

Blowing "good mornings" like howitzers to keep the Hun at bay, I hurtle past the stirring but still dazzling Disney world of Deafening, stupefying inchoate noise with practiced aplomb. The first person I will stop for is just behind the warehouse door next to the guitar counter.

Of course I don’t really give much of a mind to all this, I’m going to be seeing Monica!

"Diamond" Dave, warehouse worker par excellence will be typically found in the morning at the "Store Ship House Intake Template." Many have noticed an acronym here, but only the terminated have dared to utter it. One is supposed to pronounce it with a serpent’s hiss followed by the word HIT.

The store is brilliantly designed with economy and efficiency in mind. And with retail rents what they are, this is a good thing.

The SS-HIT space cleverly gerrymanders easy access to the metal warehouse shelves themselves. There are ten aisles of metal shelving that tower thirty five feet high and extend for two hundred feet..

It is worth noting about the Greatest Company in the Universe, that they have exo-structurally solved an enormous number of time hardened retail problems, and only require common sense human activity to maintain it. The business model is strong on paper. It is also quite profitable, despite and/or because of its carnivorous relationship with its employees.

Enter the human animal.

We are in an area that should be "open" since it is just past the receiving doors, and is designed to act as the staging area for the shrink wrapped ten foot pallets of merchandise that arrive from the Central Distribution Mother Ship.

Right now, this fine Monday morning, it looks like the aftermath of a tornado. The store did great business, but nobody cleaned up after themselves.

Diamond is a beautiful ebony bear of a man with a box cutter in his hand, who at 5’6" is as broad as he is tall." He’s looking at a disconsolate coffee spattered hill of uncrushed empty boxes strewn over with plastic packing material, soda cans, and fast food containers ripe with half eaten lunches. A mouse rockets between his feet to safety under a bank of steel shelves.

You don ‘t have to look under the modest short sleeves of his red tee shirt to know that he knows that a God he believed in made him strong. And so he is.

I can see him up against prison muscles twice his size. Get a tape measure for the dimensions of Mr. Prison Muscles coffin.

His coal hairless broadly elliptical head wears a Central African face with a flat hunter’s nose that makes a frown look like an unnatural act. He is a high school drop out who believes in work and dignity.

He has no sense of entitlement at all. How he’s managed to survive into his second year is a mystery to all but those who realize that we would have to hire two people to replace him.

He looks down at his dirty sneakers snaked with gray laces. I see a bewildered child. The same one I sometimes catch a glimpse of in my own morning mirror, hiding underneath the pocked and pasty dough mask that answers to "Pops" Weasel.

He speaks with lips as flat as an ox blood slug oozing along a mahogany desk. and looks at me with luminous pearls for eyes.

"I hate this place, Weasel."

We’ve had more than a few conversations like the one I can feel coming already. Dave has a temper due to on overly developed sense of moral expectations. A man who believes in his work ethic relies on a work place to be fair. He feels like he’s on the edge of a meltdown I give him some leeway.

"I hear too many people say that, Dave. I don’t usually hear it from you. Why?"

"Pops," reaching for a five and a half foot keyboard box, one of five hurled willy-nilly among the ten garbage cans and six stacked empty pallets that define the warehouse input theatre.

"Look at this shit."

The perfect place on paper to put today’s incoming pallets.

We stand up to our shins in paper, six foot styrofoam moldings to hold the keyboards, and countless shipping boxes for guitars, keyboards, drums. These are interlaced with about twice as many smaller boxes, more miserable in the breaking, which once contained the ever multiplying accessories and accoutrements. Somewhere underneath this reeking mess are the pallets the store needs to receive the incoming deliveries.

I whip out my own trusty Stanley cutter, donated to me by the warehouse crew themselves.

"Yup. Up to our ears on a Monday, pal. Throw me that box will ya? Let me cut that one down. Another day in service of the needs of the mediocre and the damned. Or is that the damnably mediocre?"

"See that’s what I mean, Pops."

"What do you mean?"

"It’s not your job.

"Sure it is. Right in the handbook it says that the warehouse is the responsibility of sales staff as well. So, I am doing my job."

"You know what I mean, Pops. They were supposed to take care of it when they made the sale and the money, not you."

"I know. But hey, I’m not perfect either. I’ll bet there are a couple of my droppings in there, too.

I toss a box and slash its tape with a practiced sweep, thinking, "well it beats twenty five to life in a Bolivian prison." It comes apart with a quick rabbit punch.

I stack it in an orange warehouse wagon that still has Home Despot stenciled in black. It had been borrowed for the store’s Grand Opening eons ago in retail time. Five years human time. It’s ours now.

"But when a man’s not treated like a man, when you have people that get off on giving orders to people and don’t even treat them like people. I mean, like, what do you think of Steve? "

Ah, the real issue. Stephen "Roy" Lopez, the new warehouse manager, brought in from the west coast to "turn the store around," and damn pissed off about it. He and the Terminator, Rodney ("Balls") Cracker are here to bring the store back to Galactic Handbook standards. An express train to employee Hell without benefit of scenic local stops.

When the company wants to clean house the business model usually retools both the store manager and the Operations/Warehouse Manager. Although rarely seen acting together, they are a hand in glove coupling.

"Dave, Steve is a company man. You know everything has to be done by the book with him. You’ve been here long enough to know that."

Mike, the previous warehouse manager was a hands on, easy going guy, who had a knack for solving problems and running a tight ship intuitively and elegantly. When the store was receiving pallet loads of merchandise, one would usually see him in his undershirt, exuberantly engaged in the process of taking in the goods.

He had a habit of saying things like "a good deal on toilet paper and garbage bags is more important than a great deal on clipboards."

He was eighty sixed along with the previous store manager, because same previous manager had turned a blind eye to inferior used instrument purchases and incompetence since the store’s basic profitability numbers were looking so good.

This was exposed by the end of Mike’s "hard count" of February which showed that the profits indicated for the previous November and December were offset by the store’s possession of about one hundred thousand dollars worth of obsolete Pro-Audio merchandise acquired as a result of trade-ins.

Mike wanted the store to put on paper the losses represented by merchandise that could only be unloaded for dimes on the dollar, if at all. Mark "Captain Ahab" Josephson wanted to "insinuate it in across the next quarter."

I was in the office at the time, still invisible in my role as garbage emptier, bathroom cleaner, and door geek.

Mike was sitting across the desk from Mark, whose lanky six foot frame was slouched in a swivel chair. There were raccoon like circles under his steel grey eyes. Cave like shadows lurked in the hollows below his chiseled cheek bones. His normally "charm the ladies with my still boyish good looks" face looked coffin bound.

His every gesture seemed disconnected from the previous one, lending his normally graceful body language the impression of a bundle of tics.

A mute commentary festooned on the wall behind Mark blazed in the form of a three by four foot promotional poster from Gibson Guitars. It featured a cherry red bat wing SG electric guitar mated with a red "devil’s" pitchfork. Obligatory flames and orange streaked smoke undulated behind. Tres chic. Tres bleak.

A hell whose infernal character is defined by its ersatz substrate. A hell built from the bricks of a grade B central casting agency. A hell which makes its misery more miserable by its self-disqualification. A misery demanding gratitude that things are not any worse. The oldest behavioral modification tactic in the book.

Seated on a folding chair, Mike’s fire hydrant shaped five feet eight inches worth of coiled spring worker muscle sat stolid and immobile. His square twenty five year old face seemed driven by the canyon like topography of a man twice his age. His skin was ash gray under the harsh fluorescent lights in the office.

About forty pages of item by item matrix inventory reports fresh out of the office computer hung limp and heavy in the left of his blocky hands. Hands of the kind worn by centuries of peasants from eastern Europe. Hands whose primary instinct is to count that which they know is there.

Mike’s right hand went up and down as if it held a hammer to emphasize his points.

"Mark, if we bite the whole bullet now, we get the rest of the year to make it up. All we have to do is tank January and February. Attrition will drive payroll down. We can use the real soldiers on the staff to pull the extra hours. With any luck at all, by March the store should already be converging on the black if we keep it tight."

"Mike, don’t cross the thin red line from Boy Scout to moron. Do you realize what that does to our bonuses? Chrissake, we’ll be working at minimum wage for those two months."

"But, Mark, we’ll have the rest of the year free and clear, and you know this is going to catch up with us anyway. What’s really the difference in the long run?"

"I’ll tell you the difference. After my mortgage, car, and insurance, I’ll have nothing after the draw. You’re operations. You make less per annum and work a little more, but you make a steady salary regardless. I don’t.

"My position is solely based on my performance commission. No growth for the store, no money in my pocket."

"Mark, we still had a brilliant Xmas. Better than any the store ever had before. If we come clean now, maybe the company will even help the store out-"

"Mike, I practically love you like a brother, but sometimes you talk like you only visit our fair planet in your spare time. Just what kind of "help" do you think the company will provide when we tell them that our Million dollar December is followed by a two month flat liner?"

"But, Mark. Look at the big picture. Chris Belkowitz played the whole chain for a fool. For ten months he was the big swinging dick of pro audio. The guru at the top of the mountain that everybody turned to. Everybody trusted him."

"We had to trust the bastard. His buys were accepted because he was basically the only one on top of the curve in the ten headed snake monster that’s the pro audio product. Some of that stuff is obsolete in six weeks. We had to either take his call or walk the deal to a competitor."

"Mark, that’s my point. Corporate knows that a lot of profit margins will stay in the tank on some pro audio items until we break the back of the internet guys, and dominate market share.

"These losses can be assimilated as part of the market penetration process. We’re branding ourselves. Maybe Promotions can come up with-"

"East Coast Promotions has its budget already committed to opening another store in Manhattan. A bigger store. They have neither time nor interest in sending some sugar our way."

"When we found out he was taking kickbacks on bad buys to sell the good stuff practically at cost, we got rid of him. But hell, in the music community they see him as a Robin Hood.

"Stole from the big bad GSI monster to make the digital revolution affordable to the poor indie companies. But that part has been played. If we play the wounded gentle giant, we could scrape some copy out of the whole thing too. Hey, we empower our employees to a fault, and he’s living proof of it.

"Did you see the article in this month’s New American Eco-Warrior devoted to his "guerilla marketing" designed to "bring hi tech into the reach of the masses of American discontents quivering at the brink of a new vision of blah blah blah reuniting the American spirit with her polluted body and ending war and hunger with electronic empowerment?"

"It says he wants to cross-pollinate software with health foods, creative visualizations, and Wiccan products.

"Yeah, and he took his clients with him. Now he’s pulling the bucks calling himself a consultant by capitalizing on losses he left in our back yard.

"Everybody from Sidney on down was glad enough to at least have the goods moving so that we were grabbing the market share. It‘s not that this is a total loss from the corporate point of view at all. We have more leads and more clients than ever. It’s not like we have nothing to build on."

"The bottom line is that one hundred and twenty two thousand dollars is one hell of a lot of eating, and that’s on the StoreShip’s table.

"These numbers practically take money out of my pocket."

By doing his job honestly and well, Mike wrote his own death warrant.

By mid-March both Mike and the store manager went on vacation followed by a "family leave of absence."

Both were transferred within weeks. Mike slipped and broke his arm and left the company not long after.

(All it takes is two top sales performers of dubious integrity to cast a shadow on the entire store. Thus, there is also a need to shotgun the entire staff before the make or break months of November and December, should any irregularities emerge across the summer months.)

This new Operations Matrican, Steve "Cannon" Ball, was Mike’s diametric opposite. A classic "Company Man." He installed clipboards in every Matrix, and walked around with his own, leather bound "Master Matrix Compiled Clipboard."

His pants were-shave-you-in-the-morning creased whites that defied you to even suggest he touch a thing. That failing he never failed to provide one with intimate details of his relationship with his chiropracter.

Leadership by delegation, and the best leader delegates everything and does nothing. The zen of eighties style management still haunting the house of twenty first century retail.

The Store Matrician is the head and face of the store, but the Operations Matrician is the digestive tract. And more often than not, the tail end of same. Terminations usually bring the two of them together in the office with any doomed employee. Each one is a witness for the other, if anything is contested in court.

"Dave, you have to remember that life is ultimately a performance, and we all play our parts."

"Pops, I get all that. But still, how are you supposed to take it day in and day out? Why can’t they just talk to you like a man?

"Dave, the system is not about accommodating our humanity. We have to accommodate it. Remember what the Carpenter from Nazareth said? Render unto Caesar. Our employer is like unto Caesar."

"Listen, Pops, St. Paul said a slave should be obedient to his master, but that still don’t justify slavery do it?"

"Dave, for a man who didn’t take much education, you sure know how to ask the hard questions. No it doesn’t. But it still doesn’t change the mess in front of us."

"No it don’t, Pops. And it don’t change the kind of attitudes and behavior that bring it every god damn Monday."

"But you know together we’ll kick this garbage in the ass twice as fast as any four of the rest of these assholes, and that’s why we’re the better men. Throw me another box. I want to pretend I’m punching a different face.

"Or clock, Pops. Or clock."

"Which reminds me. Unless you really want to terminate your relationship with this giddy isle of delightful enchantments, remember to be careful how you talk to Steve.

"You’re coming up on two years here, and that qualifies you for more benefits. Last another year you get vested. Don’t give them any reason to toss you."

"I know they want to get rid of me. They want to be rid of you too."

"You should have seen what they put me through on my second anniversary. It was almost like they planned to set you up for humiliation and angry outbursts. The manager then, Dean-no, wrote me up for being two minutes late for a meeting that was called half an hour early at the last minute."

"What keeps you here, Pops? You should be a professor or something."

"Academic world wouldn’t have me. I have an addictive personality, and I’m addicted to a paycheck and doing good things by the people I work with. So I’m here. I work. Nothing special."

"Well maybe yeah maybe no. Seems like I hear your playing’s kind of special."

"Nothing more than strings, fingers and a lot of time."

"You can’t be standing there with a cutter in your two fingered right hand, already through six boxes, and not be telling me you got some kind of talent with your hands."

"Lotsa people got talent. The creative intelligence of nature had to make sure there was more than enough talent to spare. I figure in a nation of millions there has to be no shortage of people with potential. I just happened to devote an inordinate amount of my time on guitar."

"But Weasel, that inordinate amount of time might very well be what makes you special.

"I’ve seen how they look at you . What do you think, nobody’s got eyes around here? Sometimes it’s envy, sometimes hatred, and sometimes I think they just figure you to be crazy. But I’ve seen how they pass you over and write you off."

"Dave, just because I’m not management material-"

"It ain’t about that, and you know it. You got plenty of leadership. But you don’t ever treat people like things. They’re treating us like things. They talk to you like their voice is a string and you’re nothing but the puppet."

"Dave, these are only people too, and they’re just passing a message along. It’s all about fear of losing the job. They’re puppets too."

"So what’s that supposed to justify? Puppet people making puppets out of men?

"Oh, Jesus look at this!"

In the course of extracting a full liner’s worth of garbage from the 400 gallon garbage can, the liner gave up the ghost. Twenty five square feet of slimed over fast food leftovers smattered before us.

The cause of this Valdez garbage spill was about twenty pounds of tightly wrapped obsolete promotional product literature.

Illustrating the kind of thinking that makes retail America the greatest menace to a world fit for human habitation that human history has ever known, some thoughtless Pro Audio Matrician had begun the prior Saturday by chucking this densely compressed garbage bullet straight to the bottom of the barrel. The whole mess had had an entire weekend to percolate.

The bundle’s sharp corners had sabotaged the thick industrial grade polypropylene. I see no point in reminding Dave that that was the reason why an astute garbage handler always puts the can on its side and tilts the bottom up a little - a precaution that should be practiced unwaveringly.

No. At this point I am seeing a more red with rage than black man busily saying "motherfuck" enough to manage the fornicative needs of a major Chinese City/Industrial Complex. Silence is now far beyond golden. It has gone multi-platinum.

I reflect that on more than one occasion I had "saved the garbage" by this very means. If the liner has torn from the bottom, an adept garbage handler can slip a fresh liner on the lip of the can and empty the enter slop contents, liner and all into the fresh one. If God is a senile lesbian drunken keyboardist, this would be a drop of Her Sacred Drool.

"Back in the day," The Grade 1 Planetary Manual congratulated me on my "golden opportunity to gather performance based points on your centripetal wood product conversion rates.

I never could figure out the the "centripetal" part, but I definitely figured out how to pull an extra ten bucks by hurling box cut cardboard crates at a lethal rate, when I took the closing shift at the StoreShip..

In the Time of the Ancients (Two years retail time.), my responsibilities as door geek, (Master of the Door Pavilion in the language of empowerment), included the evening’s garbage. That practice had fallen into disuse with the hiring of young women for the job as well.

In the interest of Door Empowerment, and no doubt also due to a high Promotion to Customer rate at the Door Pavilion, the garbage and bathroom cleaning Eco-Modules had devolved upon the Sales Troopers.

This latter change was the one that made enormous sense, since no testicle carrying man with even one final putrefying gobbet of self-respecting gentlemanly pride would allow a woman to clean the Ladies Module after a busy Saturday.

The StoreShip’s first female Pavilioneer sprinted her way back to customer status at Saturday’s end babbling incoherently about a mouse, a tampon, and a recently employed condom.

Despite countless snickered ignoble speculations nobody ever quite pieced the whole scenario together. Nevertheless, the second of "Angie the Two Day Door Girl‘s" days had unambiguously come to a close.

The sales model has become a malignant mutation wedding the conniving facets of thievery with the basest forms of beggary, to arrive at a new improved garbage factory. Perhaps we are fated to mutate down just a little bit. The happy gibbering consumer anthropoid blob.

It takes somebody even more disconnected from reality than you are to question yours.

"You know, Pops, sometimes I wonder if we’ve all died and already gone to some kind of weird hell, that’s somehow not so bad, but still is Hell.

"Not fire and all that childishness, but more like an eternal maze where we’re some kind of tortured lab rat."

"It can’t be hell."

"Why, Pops?"

"Well, one could say it’s Hell on your feet.

"Yes."

"And for some, it’s hell on your back."

"Indeed, any ten pallet day can do that."

"For many, it’s hell on their family relationships."

"Yes, but what family? For most of these managers, it’s either divorce or company leave within three years. That‘s why they have no heart and start treating people like things."

"Dave why are you diverting the conversation? You want to equate our situation with Hell."

"Which means we got all the time in the world to prove it. And garbage to keep us company."

We’re stacking the cut cardboard into the twenty foot orange Home Despot hand truck. Except for a couple of rancid grease spots from the weekend’s uneaten fast food containers, the front half of the floor looks almost ready to receive the next load of merchandise.

I gather up the last of the area’s cardboard into one arm and am slightly overloaded. I’ve cut a corner too. I’ve just smushed some of the boxes together, and failed to cut them down properly.

My foot finds one of the grease spots, and I burst into a Bolshoi Ballerina quality pirouette. Unlike the ballerina, I am completely out of control. With the detachment only the truly helpless know, I watch the orange steel bars hurtle into my eyes.

A deft tug on my belt, and the next moment finds me on my ass, covered in cardboard. I am looking straight into the full set of Dave’s grinning pearly whites.

"Your skinny ass okay, oh great white weasel?"

"How could it be anything but, since my butt was in your loving black hands. All good, except I hope I don’t stink too bad."

"And you were saying about here and hell, oh Guru of cardboard and garbage?"

"Logic dictates that it’s not."

Dave gives me a wan and wry glance. "And why might that be, good sir and wise elder, Pops?"

"Because it’s not fucking perfect."

Box cutter slash, bottom punch.

A resigned chuckle combined with a soft shoulder shrug.

I put my hand flat across my forehead like an Indian scout, scope the diminished but still formidable trash panorama, and break into a mock stentorian mode.

"Still there’ll be more."

"You‘re one of a kind, Pops."

The phone is ringing in the background, but neither of us notices until there is a page for "Dave in the warehouse."

"Hello?"

I focus on the box at hand. This one is a monster sized Keyboard box. Must be expensive. There is another box inside this one with heavy duty, finger lacerating " brass staples" reinforcing every seam.

With a practiced short punch I loosen them just enough so I can break the industrially tough bottom of the double cardboard.

"What do you mean you didn’t pay the Con Ed bill, Naomi?"

"I gave you the fucking money! How could you be that irresponsible?"

"And where were you this morning? Sheena said she had to make herself breakfast. Didn’t you make it home last night?

"What do you mean you forgot about the interview? How long has it been since you had a job, now?

"What do you mean overqualified? You didn’t bother to go because you’re overqualified? How overqualified can you be to put some food on the table?"

I take some extra interest in a five foot speaker crate and apply my hostilities and appetite for destruction to same task.. I wish Dave well. I don’t know how the hell he does it.

You hear from all the black demagogues and then look at the fellow in front of me. He‘s breaking a sweat and going back at the boxes with a renewed intensity that belies the man I heard kicked in the stomach by the other end of the phone..

"This fucking place. These fucking fucking assholes."

But then I don’t know how the hell I do it. To walk everyday through this environment we call "work" to maintain for ourselves is to witness a laundry list of that which is wrong with our exosociety.

With the aid of Television, Computers, Cell phones, movies we also have an endo-society (end o’ society?) constructed from psychic icons derived from a machinery that performs our visualization for us. The monstrous cartoons of a KISS or a Michael Jackson: one step away from and below Mickey Mouse.

And you’ll never call it an improvement on any divine template for the original human mind, if you try telling it to a a Veteran of The Sales Floor of Moron Island: port of call- Guano Bay.

Meanwhile, Dave’s sweating so hard, his trusty Stanley Boxcutter goes flying out of his slippery hands and misses my nose by inches.

"Shit! I’m sorry, Pops. I hate this place so fucking much sometimes, I lose all control."

Work is intrinsically alienating, but hatred is nothing but a dangerous energy draining diversion. By this time, I figure there’s space to and need to break back in. I don’t think I can get Norman to go back in time to get me my old nose back.

"I wish I could find anything wrong or illogical about what we’re driving at there, Dave, but don’t forget that anger’s one of the seven Moby Dicks riding the oceans of sin. "

Two beats,.

"The heart’s too small a place to make any room for hatred, Dave.

Another two beats.

"What’s it going to mean in a week?"

Finally.

"I know, Pops, I don’t know how you do it sometimes. I see the way they treat you. The way they hate you for the fact you play a better guitar with two fingers than most of them can play with ten.

"Dave, they don’t hate me. They don’t care enough for that.

"Let’s face it they would rather have intimate knowledge of a dead squirrel than see me get a break. So you know a man still has to find comfort-"

Slash and punch box.

"-with the object at hand, despite whomever’s face you see-

Seam slash.

"-with box cutter in hand. "

I hold the shredded box flats aloft and prepare to pitch it in the Home Despot wagon.

"Now who do you think I’m thinking about now?"

We’re getting a snicker out of Dave now.

"Perhaps some anonymous creature for whom the phrase ‘lying sack of shit’ would be an insufficient exaltation."

I deliver a gratuitous kick to fold the flat cardboard one more time.

"We, the people of the empty wallets and bad credit, who cannot afford contempt, will serve that which festers beneath contempt."

The warehouse door opens, as if on cue, and the tall, olive, triangularly featured specter of the Terminator, Rodney Cracker, drops the humor temperature by twenty degrees-despite a hot cup of steaming Starbucks coffee in hand.

Vengeance is a dish best served cold. Even if the setting is a bakery in August. Despite my mystical background and Catholic upbringing, I wanted nothing more that morning than to hear that ol’ Rod Cracker had bitten the big one on his recently implemented three hour each way monster commute from the Pocono’s mountains. Of course, such had not been the case today. But one could still dream.

Nothing mangling, mind you, nor slow and obscene, a mere headless torso creaming on Rte 22 will suffice. No shortage of opportunities for the Angel of Death there.

The company seemed to do this with every manager. But it was never the company’s direct doing. Sooner of later an individual put into the store manager position underwent a supra human commute lasting anywhere from three to ten months.

We’re talking Zombie manufacturing experiences here. Out of the house at five thirty at the store by eight thirty. Out of the store around six thirty, back home by ten. Six days out of the week.

Crackpot types argued that GSI was another example of corporation as cult. The job subsumes the personality and becomes the individual’s sense of identity. Exhausting experiences of this kind eradicate personality in a task driven work environment. It is like a very diluted brainwashing. All the more insidious because it is nothing more or less than performing the job description.

At any given time, the sheer number of task directives is humanly impossible. Every manager is reduced to a psychological triage condition. There is no energy for personality.

The manager is reduced to corporate mouthpiece and motivates the employees to achieve sales goals by whatever means are possible. Since the environment itself is so amoral the only appeals management has are fear and greed. In other words, what else isn’t new?

Good King Clusterfuck and his ravaging hordes. It’s, Sheriff Cracker, here to stick his nose wherever he can find a good butt uncracked.

He has a natural athlete’s body whose coiled spring has only slightly gone to softness and rust. An untrained and superficial eye might assume he had once been a basketball player. Especially with his meticulously razored goatee and lanky frame.

He could be anything from a seedy twenty eight to a well preserved forty. I would lay money on the former. I’ve caught him plucking white hairs out of his pointy curls when he catches sight of them in one of the sales floor’s many mirrors. Oh sweet optimism of youth.

I suspect from his walk and stances that he’s better at golf, but probably took obligatory martial arts courses after being bullied as a kid. I would suspect him of a mean game of pool as well, albeit with a little cheating to level any threatening competition.

His hair has a loose Latino curl to it, and has a tendency to form horn-like spikes when he’s under particular stress. I can’t help but think Pointy Headed Boss, and he can’t seem to help but reinforce that impression.

In the great American Buppy tradition, Rodney plays the race card like Itzahk Perlman plays the violin. At this point his most memorable remark to me has been,

"This store needs another white boy like Clinton needs another blow job."

For the moment, all I get is-

"Hey, Barney Fife, what are you doing goofing around back here? Get out on the sales floor."

Accursed by God, man, beast, and come to think about it, probably vegetation as well, the employee will arise and go. With an ache in my body, disgust in my heart, and loathing in my soul, I leave Dave to his ministry, and go to pimp my piece of the rainforest on the American retail public.

There’s something deeply primal about when a man goes out and pays upwards of thousands of dollars, to buy a stick with metal attached to it. And more times than not, there’s a wad of cash involved. Emotions and the Limbic system are in full force.

When I worked the door at the Queens Store-Ship, The Saturday Afternoon Male Swagger reminded me of the kind of body language I see in gun shops and the power tool section of Home Despot on weekend afternoons across our fair nation.

Yup. It’s Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton here to prove how stupid anyone can look when they’re trying to look like they know what they’re doing. I had opportunity as ample as the waistlines under examination to witness its unvarying manifestation in the middle aged Peter Pans of the massed Marshall stacks.

First and foremost ,the body language must be that of a practiced master taking that guitar in hand, just as one has done millions of times before. A familiarity as deep as an officer holstering the sidearm, coupled with the flair of a rodeo cowboy swinging a lariot.

Of course, one unfortunate who was not quite so familiar went running past the door "pavilion" with tooth in hand and blood running down his chin. I never quite figured out how he managed to holster the headstock in his mouth.

Nevertheless, the proof of the idiot is his capacity to discover stupidity in new and innovative ways. All we can do is hope his genius dies with him.

Secondly, there is a simpering of the lip which must be mastered and maintained in all its nuances. Half pout and half sneer, it represents a Tao-like balance between the vainglorious and the snob.

At all costs this must be executed with a delicate jut forward of the chin, disguising conditions of chinlessness in all its thirty plus year glory.

Let us not be so distracted by these delights, that we forget the cherry on this cupcake of interactions: One must know ridiculously intimate details of the piece in hand. The first unspoken step in the grinding process.

"Hey, listen to this one, man. They want two and a half grand for it. Whaddaya think?"

"Oh, that’s probably a ‘57 semi-swamp cedar. If it had an alder body, and the third furred tuning screws were brass, then it’d be worth something. Those things have an amazing tone.

"They got the wood for the necks on them from some trees that died next to a North Carolina nuclear power plant. The reason the third screws were brass was that the wood was so hot out of the sawmill, that the finishing guy got radiation sickness. "

Rare is the creature who can fail to take pride in a knife well turned to serve a righteous vengeance. Let no man go un-one-upped.

"But that one? I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of hundred for it. Better off with the Chinese knock-off."

Let the onus of garbage sacking fall to the trader. How did we get here? How did China, in a matter of a few short centuries, go from the priceless land of the Ming Vase to the purveyor of the once and future mountain slopes of trash?

Has anybody ever even tried to count the sheer tonnage of all this shit flown from the Pacific Rim? If the archeology of war involves any kind of calculation of projectile motion, historians may interpret that we’ve been giving away perfectly good currency to receive catapult loads of trash that almost immediately become a recycling challenge.

The Third World war is being won. The excrement of the Third World and the Pacific Rim heaps itself at the retail doorstep. As urgent as a baby’s mega-diaper load in its screaming need to be emptied into the consumers‘ brainless hands.

Back in the old days it was old fashioned horseshit vaulted in with festering body parts of fallen siege warriors.

I can see the shade of Genghis Khan hoisting a fermented goblet load of goat product, surveying the whole thing, and nodding with approval.

If our baby boomer guitar experts devoted even half the time they spend chasing the mystic components of the heavy metal butterfly of tone to practicing, we’d have a nation of Hendrixes.

Of course, considering how little knowledge they have managed to cram into over twenty years of studious application therein, we are well advised to steer them away from any discussion of post-9/11 current events.

" I think we should drop a bomb on those Arab fuckers."

Always nice to see how the love and peace generation learned from Reagan to stop worrying and tongue kiss the bomb. As long as they are not the ones who have to shoulder the rifles.

"The biggest mistake we made in Iraq was not going after the whole country in the first place."

And it’s always a pleasure to listen to those who will never have to see any combat, discuss the possibility of younger men going off to get their body parts shot off.

"That’s the trouble with kids nowadays. They watch too much TV. The army would get that flab right off them."

This from the mouth of a moron who once couldn’t start his day without his morning dose of Captain Kangaroo and a spliff of Panama Red. And hey, I think you could use a couple of sit-ups yourself, pal.

All the "how ya doin’?" howitzers in the world cannot protect me from my first incoming casualty of the day.

It is the blocky, six foot muscular Korean Adonis, the Right Reverend Poon Le Hong from the Church of the Righteous and Prosperous Ambitions Presbyterian Pentecostal Korean Ministry. The entire congregation uses its tax-free status to avoid New York’s ludicrously high sales tax.

"You cheated a poor old man and sold him bad guitar. Bad Guitar. Very bad guitar."

"Hey, no problem. Maybe I made a mistake. Let me see the piece."

I open the case and look into the bowels of horror. The headstock is broken, and there is an almost perfect circular hole with four little nodular humps, gracing the soundboard just below the bridge. But the back of the guitar and all of its joining seams are brand new. The bridge itself is still perfectly seated.

This makes no forensic sense. For a $400 piece of plywood glued to other pieces of plywood using industrial strength epoxies to take a hit with that kind of force, there would be other stress cracks and separations elsewhere on the musical corpus delectum.

"I need return guitar. Want money back. Or give me new one in box. This floor model."

Boy am I ever happy that this is not my sale. Customers always say "you" sold me the piece even if you were off that day. All the more so if the transaction were snaked by Robert "The Cobra" Cabalovich. Swallowed whole again.

He has not even put me on for the courtesy 25 per cent. In any case, the good news is that I get to wash my hands of this garbage. With the greatest of blandness I can maverick, I start laying it on.

"I see you closed this one with Bob, Poon."

"Yes, he give me special "Righteous Ambition" price. Said you not tell me about it. Where.Bob? I not want to talk to you. Get, Bob. My thin is growing very patience."

Every time Poon stops by with one of his congregants he shows off his increasing mastery of "Idiomatic English American." He’s wobbling at his average deviation from comprehensible kilter.

It was a Saturday Afternoon sale that I had lost control over to Bob, and I barely remembered whom the Right Rev Poon had bought this one with. I peered over the counter and remembered with a spasm of disgust.

I had lost interest in the sale for the perfectly good reason that the only way the recipient would ever play the guitar would be in the righteous afterlife. He was a wizened toothless drooling creature who looked like he’d been wearing skins and fighting the Korean Saber tooth tiger back in his day.

He looked like a three foot grain of brown rice and never said a word. I’ve always suspected that the community treats both the very young and very old with equal kindness. They beat them when they speak.

"Today’s Bob’s day off, I think."

"I not believe. You get check up on him."

I dutifully go to the schedule screen, and sure enough Bob is off.

"Sorry, Reverend Poon, but Bob isn’t here today." He’s due for a molting.

"You lie. Now I know why you called Weasel. But I am tiger and I in you my jaw take."

He gives me a mincing self satisfied close lipped smile. The Reverend also gives English of Righteous Ambition classes for a mere $1000 per quarter. He spends an ambitious tithe thereof on gym and Tae Kwan Do classes. He has the chiseled triangular physique to prove it.

No doubt the God of Righteous Ambition alone can comprehend his students‘ discombobulating utterances. I suspect he practices his own righteous creative expressions in front of a mirror for hours on end.

"Poon, why would I lie? Here. Look on the screen. There it is. He’s off today.

"Truth in mouth of liar wriggles like worm in lips. I see you right. No problem. Return very bad guitar and give new one. Hop chop!"

"Oh listen, Reverend Poon, there’s nothing I want to do more. So what happened here?"

"This no time for questions, Weasel in mouth of tiger. This time for actions! You bring better guitar, so poor old man feel happy and proud in Church of Righteous Ambition."

I look down at old Brown Rice and see he’s drooling a righteous river that’s spattering the rug. I see we like our chewing tobacco, which we clearly gum.

"Don’t worry Poon. I’m already building our return ticket. So, just for the notes on the return, what would you say was wrong with the guitar?"

Other than the fact that it looks like it may have been used as a Cricket bat.

"It fall in Church. Headstock must be bad. It just break. You gave me righteous discount on unrighteous garbage. We want better guitar for our six hundred dollar, and we in hurry for church service. Hop chop, Weasel. My thin is growing patience!"

He crosses his arms and pouts. Too bad I keep my guns in Jersey. I can already see a 30-06 flying up his buns of steel.

"We’re moving right along here. So I’ll make the notation that the guitar fell and broke during church services. Say, what’s that other hole."

"What hole?"

The greedy black hole in your head you soul sucking, narcissistic scumbag.

"This one here on the soundboard. "

We’re both looking at the hole now, and I realize that it matches his meaty manicured fist to a tee. Oh goody. So now we are dealing with the Reverend greedy lying sack of shit Poon Lee Hung. What the hell was he doing? Using it in a Martial Arts program?

"Oh, that." Here’s that mincing smile of smugness. "This my mark of righteous indignation. See. It matches my highly trained ambitious knuckles."

"Okay, Poon. Mark of righteous indignation duly noted. How did the guitar fall?"

"Why all these questions? You question me like I black man and you police. You sell bad guitar give us better guitar for our inconvenience. You make poor old man have to skip his Timely Death Prayer and Meditation Services."

He looks down at the drooling three foot raisin with a benevolent simper. I flash back to a conversation I had with one of my Korean English as a Second Language students who told me about one of the more interesting aspects of the community.

"The old people have too much cash. All they have done their entire lives is work sixteen hour days six and seven days a week. They have no idea of retirement. They’ve been saving since their twenties. The average cash bank account for them is well over a million dollars."

I wonder if they serve arsenic in the Complimentary Ambitious Tea and cookies for them at those Timely Death Meditations.

Time to pretend I didn’t hear his last remark.

"Say, I think I have another of these brand new in the box."

"I say better guitar."

"We’ll do whatever we can to accommodate you." Oh God, and how I wish it was your timely and ambitious death,. "Is there one you have in mind, Poon?"

"Not yet, we go make our discriminating now."

This guy is to English what the Enola Gay was to Hiroshima.

At this, he turns on his heel and waltzes back to the Acoustic Matrix, trailed by his shuffling protégé and occasional tobacco juice spoor.

I shudder, realizing there is no way this is going to get better. Time to page a manager, and Cracker struts condescendingly over. Looking for another opportunity to either humiliate me or terminate me.

"What’s up?"

"Well, the Reverend Poon, that fellow walking into the Acoustic Matrix, wants to return this guitar and exchange it for a better one. I display the wreckage of the $600 righteous disaster.

"What the hell happened to it?"

"The reverend feels that the guitar was defective. He says it shouldn’t have broken when it fell."

"What kind of bullshit is that?"

"Rodney, to the best that I can tell, it’s more properly the purest corn fed horseshit I can imagine possible. By the way, that hole you see, is his "mark of righteous indignation." Just in case you were wondering."

Guitars are Rodney’s weakest point of experience and understanding, but he’s enough of a natural born con man to have worked this kind of angle himself. He once gleefully described one of his clever teenaged tricks.

After damaging the front bumper of his dad’s Cadillac in the course of settling a high school grudge, he covered for himself by rear ending a Mercedes Benz, claiming that the driver had stopped short.

When it comes to the noble art of hurling feces at the barn wall and seeing which one sticks, Rodney is a World Series class pitcher.

Nevertheless, his thick Latino ruby lips curl into a sphincter like circle of bewilderment. This is retail body language for being slack jawed stumped.

"Well, is it possible that the guitar broke because it was defective? Can it be repaired? Is there any way we can accommodate the customer without losing money?"

The reverend Poon brought in lots of business. PA’s, power amps, Drum kits, ad nauseum. If one ran a history of The Righteous Presbyterian storefront operation, one would have thought they were pulling off weekly Woodstocks out of the place.

The yearly sales tax alone they’re dodging as a consequence of these righteous purchases comes to over 50K. And let’s not forget a hell of a lot of gifts getting UPSed overseas avoiding our unjust and ungodly export duties. Very righteous indeed.

"C’mon, Rod. We both know what happened here. The goddamn guitar was dropped and landed on the headstock. Everybody knows that’s the weakest part of the instrument, and the repair would cost more than the base price of the instrument. All we’re looking at here is bright shiny brand new kindling wood."

That "O" lip posture purses to the kind of tightness I only see on TV, when the president is about to hurl some mighty cow pie lie at the ovine American public. His eyes tighten. His chin juts forward. With a soft sidelong whisper he cries from the depths of his retail management florescent darkness:

"Get Cannonball."

Cutting to the chase. It happens that the Operations manager is in today. The Antichrist of Sales will see you now. Abandon hope 99% of you who step up his blood streaked pyramid.

Steve "Cannon" Ball has convinced customers that after being ripped off by the Storeship, they really should be making a charitable donation on its behalf. The Anti-grind.

His template hails back to the caves, when some guy name Gog sold some guy named Magog, used clubs. Gog’s older brother, Blingog, was the prototypical Gogian Customer service Specialist. He hid in a tree with a large rock.. A win-win situation.

Cannonball’s razor creased slacks slice into the situation with preternatural velocity. I could swear I never even heard the intercom page. Diamond Dave, the ebony nose tackle, already has Poon and old three foot raisin back at the guitar counter.

Ball looks up at Poon Lee Hung from his unimposing, but wiry, five foot seven. He smiles blandly. I almost feel like I’m looking at an oiled hangman’s noose standing in spotless white high end sneakers. His onion bald head glows like a bunker light bulb.

"What seems to the problem Reverend Poon?"

Was that a momentary wince I saw streak through those high, wide, and imposing cheekbones? A torch for the Korean Frankenstein’s monster?

He stiffens back into the sticking point of his role playing. The wounded customer seeking honest redress.

"You sell poor old man dishonest guitar. Take advantage of poor Kim Chi here."

With a benign paternal flourish, he presents ou our drooling cross-eyed specimen of the preservative powers of a life counted out in sixteen hour days of washed vegetables and neatly sorted fruit. His eyes are focused on some imaginary cantaloupe no doubt. The stench of rotten cabbage seems to linger like an aura around him.

And now just why do they call him "Cannonball?"

"Let’s have a look at the defective guitar."

He turns the pieces over in both hands, turns around and holds them up towards the ceiling and it’s bank of flourescent lights, as if scrutinize them very closely.

"Reverend, I certainly do see a problem with this piece. I want to take it in the back to verify the serial number and we will formally accept the return immediately. I’ll be back with you in a moment."

Old Poon is rocking back and forth between toe and heel. He barely acknowledges me, except to say, "I glad they finally catch up with you, dishonest little man.

"Not even give me righteous discount for dishonest piece. No wonder my thin grew so patient. If grew more patient would have vanish away."

Cannonball comes hurtling through the door, with a return receipt.

"Reverend, we’ve accepted the return and now Guitar Systems International has taken possession of the piece in question. By law I am required to inform you that we will be surrendering it to the 103 precinct as being a weapon that may have been used in the commission of a crime.

"I found what looked like small bloodstains on the headstock. I noticed that it had been cleaned because they left residues around the tuning gears.

"I’ve seen this before. I think one of your parishioners may not be the finest sheep in the shepherd’s flock.

"I think it was pretty darn decent of you to punch that hole to cover up for one of your congregants, but the blood and the fracture pattern on the wood gives it away even to a regular guy like me. If it’s in our possession, though, we have to pass it on."

The noose tightens. Poon’s bulk looks like a Zeppelin that’s just been hit by a TOE missile. The chin comes right back up, though. Gotta respect a fighter.

"Mister Ball. I humbly apologize, but not real deception. Guitar not good. Not sufficient capacity for grip of champion martial artists. But no crime. I tell you what. Just give me guitar and we forget all about petty crime.

"Bad for church business. By the way, did I mention we want buy another more Bank of keyboards and lights for new Church of Righteous Reconciliation?"

"I tell you what Reverend. Even though I’m not supposed to, I’ll just re-transact the piece into the ownership of the Church. I’m sure your people will work the right thing out among themselves. By the way, don’t tell the cops. Cause now I’m the one breaking the law."

They both chuckle at that. So with a final grinding whir from the receipt printer, ol’ Rev Poon strolls off into the sunset of the exit door.

He carries the carcass of the guitar re-coffined in its case, trailed by his prehistoric cash cow, who is in turn trailed by a sticky rivulet of chewing tobacco and drool.

I turn to Cannonball.

"That was ungodly quick."

"Yeah."

"What was up with that "commission of a crime" riff?"

"Pure bullshit. I was just giving him an opportunity to save face."

"What do you mean?"

"Simple. You know that 24 hour Sushi joint over on Abilene and 155th st?"

"Yeah."

"It’s really a front for a whorehouse. I happened to see him there a couple of weeks ago, pleasantly engaged in entering the Temple of Unrighteous Gynecology. When I passed him the guitar with the return receipt, I had written his wife’s cell phone number on it."

"You’re evil, Cannonball."

"Just doing my job. And let’s not forget that evil is nothing more than live spelled backwards."

"Darius Wheeler, line twelve. Darius Wheeler, you have a call on line twelve."

I’ve never been able to figure out what frequencies GIS coded into the address system to make it so effective at cutting even through a sales floor worth of Marshall wanking Metal-kateers.

My God, I’ve been here less than an hour and I already have a headache that’s like a railroad spike straight to my soul.

"Darius Wheeler, you have a call on line twelve. Darius Wheeler, please pick up your call on line twelve."

I grab the phone and pray for painful twitching deaths to befall any and all of dotted across the sales floor in a maze of amplifiers on risers, all cranked beyond musical recognition. Truly a cacophonic symphony from the local mass of self absorbed sub demons in training.

I’m still chuckling about how good old Poon has been righteously tanged.

"This is Darius in Guitars, how can I help you?"

"You can start by slipping that nice fat dick of yours inside me, Babe."

"Monica! Hey, any way you want me to add value to that transaction?"

Nothing like settling in for some good news about the future for that nice penis o’ mine. So many fingers so little music. If they only knew what they’re missing.

I’d suggest that anyone contemplating the monkey-typewriter-Shakespeare experiment gaze upon this anti-Sylvan scene for even a bare half hour. And perhaps if there is just the right combination of guitarists and amplifiers, we’ll get Beethoven. And perhaps President Bush will be remembered for his integrity and leadership.

Again I am reminded how our corporate culture operates by exhausting a perfectly decent set of musical gifts and ideals into an empty shell of an 80K/annum personality, devoid of any love of music whatsoever. Most of the managers I have worked for had more basic talent for music than I might have dreamed of. But, as per Shakespeare, lilies that fester…

Mark "Loophole" Lupenberg did Hoboken to Queens for six months. That’s a mighty daunting commitment. A train from Hoboken could involve as few as two connections and as many as six, depending on the vagaries of mass transportation.

There are two bodies of water that have to be crossed: the Hudson to get from New Jersey to New York; and then the East River to get to Western Queens. If everything occurs optimally, it could be as little as an hour and fifteen minutes. A bad case scenario with about a one in thirty probability could turn that into twice the time. Something really bad could easily turn it into three hours.

For a manager with the keys to the store, every commute in must assume an above average quality of transportation cluster bollixes. Therefore Mark left his home at five to ensure that he would be at the store at 8:30 am, Monday through Saturday.

Mark was a talented and determined young man with no small degree of energy, musical talent, and persuasive talents. When he started working with GSI he had real credibility as a bassist in the LA metal genre. No small accomplishment.

He finalized his commitment to the company during the period of his long commute. On a fine spring morning he picked up a used twelve string bass to demonstrate the product. He had had no prior warm up or practice in days. He overplayed the instrument, and severely damaged his wrist. The company man self baptized with the destruction of the musician.

Power is the pay off. The StoreShip managers often describe certain moments as being godlike, and that’s what makes it all worthwhile.

The store manager is like the captain of a ship. He is there at virtually all times. If his cell phone rings and the store is on the other end, he will pick it up immediately.

He is the final recourse regarding any and all transactions. A manager can and has terminated employees on the spot. A manager can set any price on any piece of merchandise. A manager can give away the store if he so chooses.

But rare, if not never, is that kind of idiot. The more likely scenario of a manager thieving on a grand scale for almost a year has happened once or twice however. They usually leave the company a few weeks before the hard count Operations performs every February.

These managers throw about a quarter of a million dollars of store merchandise down a mystery rabbit hole before their house of cards comes down on them..

Like the American Government, but far more effectively, GSI has a system of checks and balances that keep such disasters to a bare and legendary minimum. No StoreShip Matrician has ever been prosecuted for theft, on rare occasions one wonders what went on behind closed doors.

Joe Vargas was an operations manager who had been working on the inside with a ring of high end guitar thieves in the Las Vegas StoreShip environs. In a case of being hoist on his own department’s petard, the company’s Operations Matrix caught him by setting up a buy for one of the stolen pieces.

Vargas’s guy ratted him out minutes after the cops arrived. Joe abruptly left the Company, but he was never arrested. Despite the fact that he had masterminded a three month spree where ten stores had been hit for a total of forty five guitars representing a retail value of three hundred sixty thousand dollars.

The GSI Guaranteed Universal Micro Price had been a total of two hundred fifty two thousand dollars. . Actual likely negotiated sale price would be more like two hundred ten, and cost would be one sixty.

Since GSI does almost half a billion dollars in business per year, this number does not sound as catastrophic to the uneducated as it really is to a retail enterprise. The leaner the operation, the greater the impact of a loss of sellable assets.

Almost any retail operation has to maintain a significant paper profit margin because on a transactional level it will take a lot of hits at the point of purchase. And there’s always the monster of overhead and merchandise devaluation waiting in the wings.

Guaranteeing a lowest price is only the beginning of getting and keeping customers. Each person wants a "little more" to personalize their experience. They expect the sales associate to "throw in" a couple of small items, even on the purchase of a two hundred odd dollar guitar.

Why and how this was done had me completely baffled at first. When I worked the door of the Queens StoreShip, checking each receipt to verify that the customer left with what he/she had purchased, I figured I must be working with a collection of either idiots or thieves.

I would routinely see a two hundred dollar guitar, twenty dollar gig bag, and a set of six dollar strings for two hundred dollars and the tax. How does it make money?

As it turns out, the guitar at one ninety nine makes about ninety six dollars. The gig bag at twenty dollars makes about ten and the strings at six make about four. Therefore pulling the guitar down to one seventy three and adding on the other two items for a total of one ninety nine means that the entire transaction still makes the store eighty four dollars.

The sales associate gets ten percent of that, eight dollars and forty cents, plus two percent of the entire sale which is four more dollars. This leaves the store with seventy two dollars out of a simple two hundred dollar transaction in gross profit.

A thirty six percent profit margin sounds like a very hefty one indeed, and it applies to a great many of the transactions that any StoreShip does across a routine day. However, the cost of running a store remains a quarter million a month.

This means the store needs to do six hundred ninety four thousand four hundred forty four dollars per month to break even or twenty three thousand one hundred forty eight dollars per day at that rate of profit.

Each major piece of stolen merchandise represents a projected profit that has evaporated. Each piece potentially represents a customer that may have to go somewhere else to get what they desire. It represents a concatenated loss of add on transactions and profits.

This is a loss that the rest of the store’s merchandise, taken as a whole, needs to compensate for. This kind of loss translates its way up the spread sheet columns to imply that for every dollar lost that way, a store needs to make thirty more to maintain its goals for growth projected from the prior year.

Again, considering that the average cost of keeping a store open is approximately a quarter of a million dollars a month, the chain took on almost three weeks worth of an entire store’s overhead with no transactions to support it at all

No matter how you look at it it’s a major felony.

Vargas was never even sued. Three months later Costco hired him. There is an unspoken law of retail. A thief in management is never punished. They just go to work somewhere that it’s harder to steal from.

I interrupt these reflections to wonder where ol’ Pee Jizzle, as he currently likes to call himself might be. Oh God, you heavenly keyboard playing dyke, could he please be luxuriating in pine?

Once again I am amazed at the power of my inner automaton to completely dissociate my inner workings from my external activity. I have walked my way through the warehouse, checked for new stock, greeted the noble and contemptible alike with humor and courtesy, and am already on the sales floor of the Acoustic Mini Matrix.

This is by far my favorite place. There is no music piped in here, and although not sound proofed, the chamber is walled with actual lumber and is a formidable buffer to the never ending cacophony of high end shrieks and low end flatulence of the main floor.

The Mini Matrix itself is divided into three separate chambers: a tiny six by ten classical room, a twenty five by twenty five luxury show room and the fifty by fifty main room.

Here I log into the computer terminal and scope the ten odd customers thrashing away on some of the eighty acoustics under five hundred dollars which line the walls from floor to ceiling.

There is a central pillar with a five foot diameter engirdled by lumber benching sufficient to hold between eight and ten customers. Drum stools in search of the wandering buttocks of the talent challenged also dot the gray carpet .

I see my usual complement of six refugees from the local high school earnestly trying to decode a lugubrious Metallica ballad that has to be at least ten years older than they are.

Tough as my childhood may have or have not been, I am sure these kids have it far worse than I ever could have imagined..

My fellow sales associates say they detest them as disruptive. I think they really hate them because they envy them their youth. How quickly do we forget the misery and anguish of being young. I’m lucky ot be at an age where you could not pay me to be their age. Especially in these times. Mine were quite bad enough thank you.

But hark? Is that yon customer I see as yet unclaimed by any of my greedy colleagues?

The ebony middle aged man of indeterminate age, middle height, thinning black hair, and belly tortured faux gold satin shirt pulls down a $150 Yamaha guitar from its hook on the wall. The cheapest one we have. Pock marked oily dark features betray an origin somewhere on the great Indian subcontinent. It is a face all circles and ovals.

Thick resentful lips form a perfect O and belch over the soundboard. Curry and cheap meat ooze from his every pore. There’s a silent sphere of pudgy shadow behind him. A short me-sized kid about twelve with a shaven head is dressed in baggy jeans and a black sweat shirt emblazoned with a conga line of cigar smoking skeletons in top hats. The backdrop is a beach littered with fifty five gallon drums bearing bio-hazard and nuclear warning logos.

The red and white detailing is sufficiently crude that it takes me a couple of glances before I realize the skeletons are dancing on top of blood spattered bikini clad caricatures of breast heavy women. The caption reads "Cannibal Corporate-Revenge is Tasty. "

The spherical dark face with incipient double chin holds intelligent brown eyes. Anger is in a knife dance balance with awkward embarrassment and desperate unfocused yearning.

We can both smell that dad’s been saving his landlord a fortune in water bills. The man’s armpits haven’t tasted soap in week. He stares again at the instrument as if it is the signifier of one of the great enigmas of the universe.

This is a cross-eyed look I know well. It is that of a man who will try to pretend he has any idea of what he is talking about for the benefit of a son he will treat like a helpless idiot. I can expect him to grind me for every penny he can.

With each advancing step, I stifle another gag reflex. This man truly packs a mighty stench. This is unusual for the local Hindi types, who usually reek of some kind of botanical oil or in the case of the more westernized, the latest dreadful designer cologne.

Thus I have learned that in the case of Calvin Klein’s Eternity, there is truth in advertising. Try standing next to someone who has practically bathed in the stuff. The thick cloying funeral quality floral scent enters your nostrils like a gooey paste and hangs in the air like a pirate on a gibbet.

But what the hell, Weasel. A sale is a sale. Greet. Qualify. Pitch. Close. He saves me the greeting with a jabbing finger and a fixed malevolent stare.

"What kind of wood is this?"

Whatever he does for a living I can feel his hatred for it. If he works for a car service he probably loathes all of humanity. This is his day off. It’s payback time, and it’s my ass in the shower. Dance Weasel, dance.

I relax my shoulders into a servile slouch. I feed his ego by wrinkling my brow and opening my eyes to a pitch whose body language expresses my recognition that I am in the presence of a man of discrimination, and duly impressed.

For a wild rebellious moment, my intellect teems with the truth I would like to say…..

Well sir, god only knows. Everything at this price point comes out of the Pacific rim and is manufactured plywood. For all I know it’s recycled Hong Kong newspapers with just a slight tinge of Dog turd, lending it this lovely autumn brown hue.

The poor bastard who cut the wood in some Indonesian back woods area probably gets a dollar per chainsawed acre. No doubt he hates us and hopes his oldest son will provide for the family by becoming a suicide bomber.

Then they run the lumber from all these chainsaw toting poor bastards through a massive robotic manufacturing plant that spits out guitars faster than an AK-47 blasts out .223 shells on full auto.

At certain points along the finish line, some underpaid bored creatures have to do the final hand work. No doubt said creatures sign off on each piece with hatred in his/her heart and fear of injury in his/her souls.

Most of the imported non-Chinese guitars, regardless of brand, have the same point of manufacture. There is a city sized factory complex in Korea that is home to Min Dik guitars. Raw wood and metal come in, shiny guitars and toxic waste come out.

It is a facility so huge that it is divided into "neighborhoods," where teams specialize in manufacturing pieces to the specifications of each "brand" that they cover. Twenty years ago it barely existed.

The prodigious development of Korea’s manufacturing system has been much trumpeted in a slew of puff pieces in trade and business publications. But the Korean industrial "miracle" was at an unspeakable human cost.

During the course of its early development in the mid-eighties, Korean industry was nothing short of a human rights nightmare. The Korean worker was in about the same position as a coal miner in nineteenth century France.

Lost your hand due to sub-standard safety? Thanks for doing your patriotic duty. You are now retired. Collect your clothes and go home to your family. No compensation in any form. The wise Korean saw the advantages of sixteen hour days and seven day weeks in America. Thus, the equally prodigious success of Korean delis in urban America.

However, among the industrial monstrosities that litter east Asia, Yamaha has such a strong system that the quality of the product is remarkably consistent and high in value for the buck. As I understand it, their employees are better off than the average. If so, God bless them.

In fact, their product will last for at least forty years with little or no maintenance at all. It would not surprise me if they are one of the better examples of the globalized leviathans that we call manufacturers and/or vendors. They’ve made a lot of mistakes already, and since business is ultimately trail and error, they are on top of the curve.

Meanwhile, back to reality land:

"That’s an excellent and important question. In this case, sir, what you are looking at is a plywood guitar. This is a very durable piece, but it is true that whatever tone it has will not change over the course of time. Solid top guitars, however, develop over time into instruments with richer and more complex tones."

The man digs into his nose with a right pinky endowed with a half inch worth of extended nail. I hope this means he feels comfortable with the rapport building process. Junior is watching him sideways, pretending not to notice. Turtle-like, his head retracts a little deeper into the sweat shirt of cigar smoking skeletons. We avoid eye contact.

"Naturally they cost a little more, although we still always guarantee the lowest price in the universe. If you are interested in one with a solid spruce top, I have them starting at two hundred dollars."

He studies his booger free pinky with a quizzical, disappointed look. Maybe his Gods ate it for him. Or maybe my dyke keyboard god cheated him of his nasal salt lick, just to stay in practice.

"Oh no. This one is already too expensive.. Don’t you have anything used that’s cheaper?"

"Actually, sir, most of our pre-owned merchandise is considerably more costly, due to its vintage nature. In fact the store just took in a used HD28. It’s a work of art dating to the seventies. That one’s only eighteen hundred. Would you like to see it, just for fun?"

That was a gratuitous shot. Dad probably hasn’t had fun since that fatal fornication that brought junior into the world. And I’m insinuating that he is the miserable small time grinder that he is.

Speaking of the consequence of his wife’s failure to choose, said poor fornication product is squirming with misery. He knows what I’m in for, but he doesn’t know that I know what I’m in for too. He still thinks his old man is unique.

"No. Forget about that. What about this one I have here? Is there a warranty?"

To myself-

In the Pacific Rim, where most assembly work is done, Warranty apparently means the same as retirement program. Tough shit, pal.

And, should you happen to be the lucky customer who gets the one guitar in one hundred thousand bazillion that implodes with such harmonic dissonance that the cascade effect brings down the entire northeast power grid, we‘ll sue you too.

But not to worry, Homeland Security has a secret plan for that very contingency. It will involve your skull, two metal coat hangers, and a lot of aluminum foil. A whole lot of aluminum foil. Better stock up now.

To him-

"Everything has a warranty, but did you ever try getting a major corporation to honor one on a small purchase?"

"Why are they so expensive? Don’t you have anything cheaper than this?"

Oh how the truth hangs by the neck until dead on the noose of my tongue.

So fucking expensive huh? Two years ago the same model was going for 199.99. It’s called deflation in the prices of consumer goods. Read any newspapers lately? They’ve been writing about it for only the last five years or so. The profit margin is eaten at the point of purchase. Meaning I have to sell more guitars to make the same money I did two years ago.

But again, not to worry. The idiot in the White House is going to make sure that problem goes away. Imports will start costing more as the cost of transporting them goes up. And of course, maybe, just maybe, the folks involved in their production may want something closer to a living wage.

Act nonchalant. Go back to what he thinks you forgot about.

"And come to think of it, actually, Yamaha has a generous two year limited lifetime warranty policy which they support better than most manufacturers. However, to accommodate our customers, GSI offers our world famous Quantum Leap Guaranteed Assurance program."

"Sounds great. I not interested in extended warranties."

"This is anything but an extended warranty. Our Quantum Leap program is a full scale insurance policy on the piece. It provides a check for the full price of the product, written out to you and GSI, should anything go wrong over the next two years.

"You can spend that money any way you want it. Sometimes people have used the check for an upgrade on the instrument if they file their claim towards the end of the two year period. Wouldn‘t you like to have coverage that‘s as good as money in the bank?"

"What do you have to do? Mail them the guitar and wait?"

"Not at all. You just bring the guitar to any GSI, and file the claim. They send the check within fourteen business days."

"So how do they verify that the claim is valid?"

"We take care of that, mister…, uh. .Say. Excuse me, I must have left my manners back at the hot dog stand. I completely forgot to introduce myself."

Oh good. That got us a decent condescending chuckle. I look up at big daddy directly in the eye and notice a pearl sized weeping carbuncle under his left cheekbone. His pug nose is bulbous and liver colored.

I give him my best retail harlequin simper. "My name is Darius Wheeler. And what are you folks names?"

Given the nose picking business, I’m holding off on the handshake. In lieu I provide a manual flourish-a wave of the hand for both their benefits.

"Bhubaneswar Tandoli, sir. Nice to meet you. This is my son, Rawalpindi."

Cannibal Corporate takes an awkward step forward. Those eyes are very intelligent, but feminine. Probably a mama’s boy. I wonder how much shit this kid has to take every day in the public schools.

Simultaneously I wonder if the old man is a wife beater. He has all the earmarks of a control freak. It’s common in that sub-culture’s "life style." Like homosexuality in America, it might be viewed as normal. Unlike homosexuality in America, I find it a sickening loveless thought.

"The pleasure is all mine. Is this a first guitar for Rawal-"

"Just call me Ralph, sir."

Nicely done. Kid’s got some starch in his collar after all. And saved by the bell to boot. I was about half way into butchering the pronunciation.

"Sure, Ralph. So is this a first guitar for you?"

Dad butts right in.

"We’re not sure whether this is not some passing thing. I don’t want to spend a lot of money for something that is just going to be forgotten in a month and gather dust in the closet."

He gives the kid a pointed look.

"Like the oil paints your mother bought you against my advice that you let dry up in the bottom of your underwear drawer."

"Dad, I was five years old-"

"It doesn’t matter. You did not stick with the gift. That is lack of character regardless of age. In fact, it is a very American notion not to have prejudice regarding age."

He shoots me a triumphant glance, and an arrogant, less than winning grin. Like myself, he is missing a few teeth on the back right upper quadrant.

"So I will show none. Five or fifty, you showed lack of character by losing interest. I wonder if you will lose interest in this too, and this all just money down the drain for weak willed boy again."

Now it’s my turn to want to shrink into the background. This is going to turn into one of the all too many sales where I’m getting far more information than I need to perform my job effectively. One again a ten minute conversation about music reveals more family issues than ten therapy hours.

But a sale is a sale. So rather than kick dad in the nuts and take the kid out to the rifle range, I enter the road most frequently taken-blandness.

"Let’s have a look at the guitar your dad picked out. I don’t know how much you know about guitars, Bhubaneswar" (skillfully remembered as Bub and his war, by thinking about our idiocy in Iraq and Afghanistan), "but I have to assume you either know people who do, or you have excellent instincts. Were you ever in a band yourself?"

To ice the cake I play some of my better blues phrases on the Yamaha. True to form, the instrument, although bottom of Yamaha’s price point, still sings.

The fact that I am notorious for being able to do this with almost any instrument in the store is more than these folks need to know to get through our episode. Nor does it change the fact that the kid is going to get a solid, economical first guitar, barring any of a thousand unforeseeable idiocies.

"Just call me Bub, for short. I was never in a band, but I always loved music."

The old man is beaming. I don’t know what button I’ve pushed, but I can almost feel ten pounds of hostility melt away. His pock marked complexion seems to glow.

If there is one aspect of music retail that is utterly predictable, it is that it is impossible to predict. Suddenly the kid seems more relaxed too. His old man is cool. Time to keep the questions coming.

"Did you ever play anything yourself?"

"Back in my country my father bought me a guitar when I was ten. He gave me some lessons-"

His voice softens and trails off. He seems to be looking at something a thousand yards away. I think about what an emotional minefield any conversation about music can be. The skeleton key to the yearnings and unfulfilled dreams of even the most heartless.

But blah blah blah. I’m a salesman, and I need a good sale. The fact that I have standards does not change the fact that I have needs.

The important thing is to keep the old man away from any of the even cheaper merchandise on the guitar wall. Much of that is sufficiently close to unplayability as to make any intelligent kid give up in less than a month.

Even though some of those pieces can make me more money by virtue of wider profit margins, I can’t live with guaranteeing someone a ticket to a self fulfilling prophecy of musical despair. Even at a guaranteed lowest price. I can’t even do that with people whom I detest, and I’m starting to like these folks.

Enter the chubby bronze balloon from the shadows.

"Why don’t you tell him about the famine and the war, dad? The pictures of you with the guitar next to the medals on the wall?"

To me-

"He was a real hero, but now he never talks about it-"

Interrupted by a voice one part stern to two parts soft-

"Son, how many times I have to tell you there are no heroes in war? Just lucky brave idiots and lucky cowardly idiots."

The kid deflates. His old man just called himself an idiot in public. The unpredictable kicks in hard.

Call me a whore. Call me a pragmatist. Call me a GSI guy. But whatever you call me, make sure you all me the guy who’s not going to let this sale grow feet and walk out the door. It’s Whatever It Takes time.

"Ralph. Did you know that a true hero never brags, and knows he got lucky?

"And did you know that we both heard your father express a truth that they never teach in school or show in the movies about the truth of war?"

To the father-

"Bub, I want to start all over again here, and tell you for reasons I don’t want to go into, that I feel doubly honored to be talking to you right now. I want to remind us that there is no hurry or urgency to make a sale today."

Oh for the love of God buy everything at full pop, that is to say our guaranteed lowest price. Right now.

"Make yourself at home. Unless you’re in a hurry to leave, why don’t you feel free to sit down, and enjoy any and every guitar we have?"

Oh. Thank you God. They’re sitting down with the guitar on the bench that wraps around the central column.

"And, hey, whatever you do, don’t let the fact that you’re working within a certain budget make you deny yourself the experience of anything here. Can you think of any reason why you shouldn’t go into the high end room, pretend you just won the LOTTO, and find out for yourself why Gibson has the reputation it has?"

And, Oh God, please keep Rodney Cracker, the Manager who manages by needling and termination, away from managing me. Give him every opportunity to engage himself in the righteous pursuits he so dearly loves: sixteen year old chicks he finds on the internet. In other words, give me this sale, and get him off my tired back.

"The store doesn’t close till nine o’clock tonight. Believe me, you’ll be in a hurry to either buy or leave sooner than I’m going to be in a hurry to make a sale."

Yeah, sure. And I’m from a nation of war heroes too.

And speaking of wars, I’m experiencing a distinct failure to grasp this latest one.

At this point, how can the United States possibly claim "victory" in the war on terrorism? We’re playing Darth Vader buffoons to Osama Bin Laden’s Luke Skywalker.

The upcoming show trials for Saddam Hussein will convince no one of anything other than the fact that the man was a thug. No better or worse than any of the of the other ogres who dominate mid-east and African politics.

God help us all, if he turns out to be a second rate Marshall Tito type, who’s been keeping the hands of a synthetic nation off its own throat with an iron fist.

The destruction of his thugocracy has inflated the spot prices of oil and acted as a global call to arms for disenfranchised oil poor Arabs everywhere. Of course, the easiest targets are symbolic.

These include all the big multinationals, who have done nothing but impoverish our way of life and erode cultural values like education here. Hey, why support American literacy when we can outsource it to India? Nevertheless, to the mob thinking on the Arab side, they are the fruits of our tree.

Now we ice the cyanide cupcake with moderate Islam kicked back into marginality, just when it was getting a foothold in Iran. The new guy is the only real threat in the area, and Bush acts like he doesn‘t exist.

And this after naming Iran as one of the three countries in the Axis of Evil so many moons ago. Want to talk about weapons of mass destruction? If they don’t have a nuclear weapon already, it’s in the pipeline. Ha, ha.

Meanwhile, back in America, intelligent people are asking how we can move a quarter million troops across the ocean faster than the few thousand people who need to be evacuated from New Orleans?

Intelligent people are asking why there is no one in the government who is taking direct responsibility for the victims to have water?

And those same intelligent folks are failing to see most of the problem as a failure of the young men of the community to seize an opportunity to be heroes.

Instead they saw fit to loot stores rather than help save the live of the vulnerable in the community. Maybe they should be glad my kind of government would not get involved in that aspect. Then, shooting to kill would be an imperative measurement of a unit’s performance.

The National Guard had to be sent into impose order at gunpoint. Most of them felt very uncomfortable, and genuinely conflicted. On one hand the idea of firing on Americans they were trained to defend was repugnant. On the other hand, the behavior of the thug community was revolting and cowardly.

At what point would "shoot to kill" become tantamount to war on a desperate and under serviced set of American citizens in need of a five year prison sentence?

At the same time approximately 15,000 people are basically trapped in a football stadium. A place completely inadequate to serve any long term sanitary needs. In many regards they are in a state of greater danger and disorder than they would be if we had simply carted them all off to prison.

As Bush’s theatre becomes increasingly ineffectual both internationally and domestically, Hillary and the left wing cormorants, are licking their chaps at the gobbets of our constitutional rights and liberties.

Frank Zappa’s Totalitarianism: The government that will save you from yourself, now that you‘ve voluntarily paralyzed yourself with ignorance and media driven illusion by turning your back on intellectual values..

Although you have a right to cut corners in such a manner, I don’t think you should want to.

I try not to stay too much in touch with my Inner Jew right now. He’d empty a couple of Uzi magazine loads on Congress and dial up Morty’s for Glatt pizza.

When Joyce wrote the leitmotif of HCE (Here Comes Everybody) into Finnegans Wake, oh, how right he was. Prophecy is forever doomed to be understated, nonetheless. The relentless, yammering, picayune, over stimulated buying public rings the phones of the StoreShip from open to long after the final customer has been sent home "delighted" an hour and a half after "closing."

Central casting could not dream of the some of the names that people really wear throughout their lives.

Whoa whoa whoa. Stop staring at the computer screen pretending to read email. Get back to-

"Guitars, pick up line eleven."

"This is Darius in guitars, how can help you?"

"Hi. How are you doing?"

Just fine. I’m laughing my balls off thinking about that bastard preacher Poon. And I’m wondering what kind idiot you are.

"I’m fine, buddy. What do you need today?"

"I need the Gibson Death Guitar."

Say what? I know about 200 different kinds of Gibsons, and not one of them is called death, although one sometimes wonders. I consider the poster of the Gibson SG crossed with a red pitchfork that dominates an entire wall of the Front Office, AKA Storeship Control Module.

"I’m not sure I know what you mean."

"Hey man. Don’t you know anything? It’s the one Sphincter plays in the Napalm Babies in Afghanistan video.

Time to fake it.

"Oh that one. Is that the one shaped like a pitchfork with the skulls on it?"

Just guessing.

"No. That’s the one on last year’s album. And it’s not a pitchfork, it’s an M-16 with the bayonet headstock."

"Sorry man. I’ll check it out for you. By the way, in case we get cut off, could I get your name and number while I check it for availability?"

"Sure. You’re a Dick."

"Huh?"

Oh, God, what did I say to offend, this time?

"You’re a dick. 917-098-9867."

Oh my God, could it possibly be?

"I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing you over the floor. Could you spell your name for me?"

"It’s in the system. You’re a dick. I buy a lot of stuff there. Check my name."

"No problem, could you spell it for me?"

"No problem geezer. I-m-a U-r-a-d-i-c-h. Check it out and get back to me, burnout."

A quick check of his spending habits confirms that I’ve got a major buyer. Thank God I didn’t hang up on his arrogant high spending eminence. He’s run this drill before and probably laughing about it right about now.

Once upon a time when I was idealistic and laughed at poverty (not laughing anymore), I would have sneered at the self satiric proliferation of different "types" of guitars.

In my naiveté, I felt that great artists like Andres Segovia and Robert Johnson needed nothing more than a well crafted construction of wood and metal as a platform for their unique combination of sensitivity and skill to accomplish work that would cut across time beyond their death.

I neglected to factor in the great Here Comes Everybody coefficient. In order to create a demand for purchasers of ever increasing amounts of guitars and gear, one has to convince the customer that their dissatisfaction with their musical output derives not from a lack of talent or practice opportunity, but that they need the "perfect guitar" for them as an "Artist."

I wonder if Vincent Van Gogh ever had the perfect brush, or Michelangelo the perfect chisel. But somewhere in the twisted folds of ever changing boxes behind the steel file drawers in the Accessories Matrix, is the perfect box to fit the needs of every one of the fifteen million odd guitarists of the GSI universe. Trouble is that there are about a million different gadgets.

The accessories matrix is a terrifying labyrinth of ever increasing numbers of gizmos and signal processors. The purpose utterly bewilders me. How many different ways does one need to make a note seem to echo?

And this effect alone is only the beginning. By my last count the Matrix contains over two thousand different products: finger strengtheners, polishes, cables of ever skyrocketing costs, picks of unspeakably multitudinous thickness and shape, tuners, (how many different ways could there possibly be to tune six strings? And why is it impossible to find a pitch pipe?), mike stands, mike clips, and finally the two things most dreaded of all: effect pedals and strings.

As if that’s not plethora enough, there is probably thirty times that number in the form of virtual inventory: everything in every catalogue, and all the vendors’ stock. Discontinued items. Items on the verge of discontinuance. Used pieces that the store may have had for all of three days before unloading.

With every passing year every major manufacturer comes out with a new line of foot pedals to put filters and enhancements on the original note.

Perhaps people are subconsciously compensating for the deterioration of the lumber that goes into the making of instruments. Or perhaps it is nothing more than blind expediency in search of an illusory individuality through novelty.

The amount of creative energy invested in finding different ways to make a "new" distortion pedal sound like an improvement would be sufficient to land a city on Jupiter.

All distortion pedals under the feet of the vast majority of practitioners end up homogenizing the sound of whatever guitar is plugged into it. The end result is disconsolately uniform.

It makes the thing sound like a very loud kazoo with indefinite sustain. I find it no coincidence that when I am occasionally asked whether we have kazoos, I have to direct them to Toys ‘r Us.

I remember back as a Trashtown adolescent, laughing along with my buddies at some middle aged mandolin player who was trying to convince us that he was an improvement on Hendrix with his own bank of jury rigged pedals.

Despite his undeniable skill on the instrument, scales and arpeggios ripping off his fingers like sheets of torrential rain, the effect was that of tepid oatmeal being poured into our ears. Very loud tepid oatmeal. Unlike Oliver Twist, one did not want more, sir.

After ten minutes of his impassioned tedium we were concentrating our attention on his pitiful toupee, badly dyed goatee, and inevitable "geezer gut" hanging over jeans at least four inches shy of his actual waistline.

Had to make you wonder how he made his way through the day in these horrors without suffocating. Good news for the gene pool! Those testicles are starving for blood cells.

And now that "loser" is my customer. Who’s the loser now?

The market is so diverse that no matter what one’s degree of legitimate knowledge, one is guaranteed to to be overwhelmed by one’s ignorance of the vast minutiae, which are amplified into urgent significance because that piece of trivia is what the customer wants to pay for.

And the Lord said unto his angels, descend now from this celestial jewel shop to my terrestrial toy box and gather from the infinite corners that the round globe encloses every wind that exists and blow them through your vast and ineluctable silent trumpets the notes that will cause the feet of every moron born to find their way to GSI this very day.

And the angels choired in cacophony, "as thou wilt Lord, so have thy faithful servants done."

The secret obscenity of the prison experience resides in how long people thrive there. There may be a type of human born to the cage. The secret obscenity of consumer culture parallels this. There may be a certain sub species of human born to over stimulated idiocy.

Prison, retail, military: Amplified Pavlov all the way home, wagging its tail behind it.

This accounts for some degree of the horror and despair that immediately knots the pit of my stomach when Rodney comes up from behind me and pulls me aside.

Keeping close touch with his inner asshole, he opens his mouth in a perfect circle and intones, :

"Hey man, I need you to cover accessories and burn to close. We have nobody in accessories."

I think of Monica! Thank God for that. I compose my face like a Bach Chorale and reply:

"I’d be delighted, Rodney."

"Make sure you make the one o’clock meeting too, man. Corporate has some special promotions in Accessories."

"I’m looking forward to it, Captain."

"Take lunch early and make sure you’re on time for that meeting."

I am a fluent speaker of Crackerese by now. I leave immediately before any of his Assistant Matrix Officers can grab me for any of a number of tasks which need to be done no later than yesterday. And there goes that sale to another of my ever changing cast of colleagues.

Being a "Veteran," I can usually accomplish about three times as much effective work in an hour as most of the new hires, and they are a constant steady stream. The price I often pay is that I lose sales to the FNG’s (Fabulous New Guys/Gals) I should be training how to do tasks.

Since I am not a manager however, I have no authority to do this. Once in a rare while, one of the ever changing assistant managers decides I need some assistance from one of the drones, and tells me to show them how to prepare one of the pieces fresh from the pallets for the sales floor.

To the untrained it might seem a pretty straightforward thing to get a piece of wood out of a box and slap a price on it, but the more sophisticated an operation, the more formalities need to be adhered to.

Add to this the miserable fact that most of these folks have all the work ethic of a senile southern dog on a hot August afternoon, and one can see why I’m often better left to do the job alone.

Sales Assistants have a distorted notion of work that still defies my imagination, even after several years of witnessing.

The better someone is at selling, the worse they are at executing any sequence of tasks all the way to their conclusion. Perhaps this is based on logic that calls greeting to a customer and talking to them for more than a minute or two as "working."

I have yet to meet top writers who do not refer to their learning disabilities. Attention Deficit Disorder is the favorite. This almost always comes into play when I find myself finishing their tasks at the end of the day.

At 10:00pm on any given weekday the store is one hour past closing. We are locked in until the closing manager decides otherwise. Ten of the hooks on walls of the Acoustic Chamber are empty of merchandise. These were the responsibility of the Sales Associate who sold the piece that occupied them.

The choice is simple. Do things by the book and hunt down the perpetrators, more often than not superiors, point this out to them and wait for them to break out a guitar, dispose of the packaging, thread a security loop through the strings at the neck, the eyelet of the cardboard tag for the SKU tag from the box, and the hole at the top of the plastic envelope which will hold that tag as well as the three by four inch paper with the piece’s retail price and the GSI Absolutely Lowest Price in the Universe.

That course of action would ensure two things for me. The undying hatred of said mid-level superiors, while they are trying to do the routines of closing down the StoreShip. I would get the added value in the undying resentment of my fellow Associates because this would mean we will not escape for at least another forty five minutes.

Plan B is to blast five to ten instruments in one clip. Properly prepared, I can do this in little more than three times the time it takes to do one. This insures me at least two minutes of gratitude from those superiors, as well as all of us getting out of the store earlier.

Plan B is nothing more than Plan A in disguise because Plan A has never happened.

This is really nobody’s fault except possibly the drunken lesbian goddess of retail. Should I start to educate one of the FNG’s in my mysterious warehouse related art, I can be sure that my client will misread this.

The customer sees me explaining procedures and assumes that I am a manager, or some kind of boss. They don’t want to "bother" me with ringing up the very item I have demonstrated to be the best for them.

"Should I take this to the front to ring up?"

With the best nonchalance I can muster, I answer negatively.

"Oh no let’s do that right here at this computer."

Anyway, might as well hit the lunch thing now. I opt to shoot the financial moon and scarf roach and rodent part pizza in the mini-mall across the street. I’ve got at least ten hours to go.

Give my body a little treat for the punishment ahead. As for my mind, I’ll let it feed itself on its own meanderings. But right now, let me grab my jacket from the warehouse and get out of here.

I exit under the blank bovine eyes of tall, tattooed, and spindly Felicia, one of the longer lasting of the "Revolving Door Girls" under the Cracker regime. She’s wearing a clingy black something on top that clearly delineates the contours of her jutting grapefruit breasts and peanut sized nipples.

Black jeans are painted on. The seam goes an inch deep into her baseball sized butt cheeks. God damn that’s got to hurt.

Her bare toothpick arms are festooned with brightly colored tattoos depicting spiders playing poker, a leering skull in a top hat, razor blades and a dog with the head of a goat biting the ankle of the old Grim Reaper himself..

She looks down from the pavilion at me with a benevolent, round, avian face. A tiny silver skull grins at me from a stud on the right nostril of her conical nose. Meeting her, I joked to myself that I almost expected her to twitter.

Sure enough she did, and clapped her hands together like a black clad seal. "Happy to meet you," she squeaked. When she extended her hand, I was delighted to find it wasn’t a fin.

Luxurious black hair cascades perfectly down her unblemished pale olive skin. I never dare ask what possesses people to take such a complexion and pierce its eyebrows, ears, nose, and tongue with so many cheap silver rings and studs. She has eight little circlets going around the rim at the top of her ear alone. No point in trying to count them all.

After decades of lurking in the shadowy world of circuses and carnivals, Tribal Culture seemed to ignite in the early nineties and was in full fire by 1999. Body Art claimed itself to be a genre, asserting the freedom of consciousness to employ the body itself as its canvas. HBO did specials on it. They were characterized by high toned voiceovers coupled with gratuitous artsy nudity.

But what tawdry hypocritical Puritanism lies beneath the theatre of those who would critique the hypocrisy of a white bread America that fails to see their dubious point.

Suppose I were to treat someone’s body as a work of art and give it the attention I might give to a painting at the museum.

The concentrated act of staring while making a final audit of piercing, including lips (upper and lower), navel, and nipple, would be an indictable, and possibly disgusting act of sexual harassment.

Felicia is typical of the young women Cracker has been hiring for the door. Thin, attractive, and barely out of high school. What I can’t figure is why he keeps flipping through them so quickly. I refuse to learn their names, unless they are the unusual who survive three weeks.

After a day or two into the game, most new hires go out for a lunch break from which there is no return. And then the rest of us have to pull the slack. However, such a policy keeps his payroll down. That raises his performance bonus, as long as nothing gets stolen.

In view of the fact that I am close to twice most of their ages, I take refuge behind the theatre of eccentric older guy. This keeps me a safe distance from the theatre of attraction and flirtation that is an inevitable component of a work environment based on dreams of becoming a rock idol and sexual god/goddess.

Quoting or alluding to great poetry works like a charm. Nobody recognizes it. Most barely understand it. I enjoy a momentary relief from the tedious catechism of product features in pidgin English that composes most of my day.

I decide to make one of my traditional "he must be particularly nuts today" remarks. I drop my leather motorcycle jacket on the security counter for her to pat down before I leave. Hey, I might be sneaking out with a carefully disassembled three thousand dollar Les Paul.

"We, who once were warriors with our heads erect and proud to salute the golden dawn, now pass these portals like snakes on their bellies worming free of the shadow less fluorescent wasteland of cacophony."

Felicia barely bats a blank brown eye and gives my jacket a cursory pat. She‘s on her cell phone. I get the kind of smile she probably reserves for a long winded tipsy uncle after a holiday dinner.

"Enjoy your lunch, Darius. And, whatever you’re smoking, don’t smoke too much of it."

"Not to worry, Felicia. I’m strictly an alcohol, tobacco, and firearms kind of guy."

"Sure, Darius. And I’ll keep my day job after I win the lottery too."

I almost open the Plexiglas door into a disaster. A wandering five year old boy is standing directly in the path of my escape route. Nothing but my retail reflexes keeps the handle from gouging the tot’s vacant eye. I check for likely parental candidates. The fifty odd adults in the Cheese line today take no notice.

"One more for the Serpents’ Cradle," I shout back at Felicia‘s ocular vacancy, before making my dash to the escalator.

I’m surprised I haven’t been written up for saying some of the things I do, but no one understands them. That keeps me safe.

Nevertheless, Rodney’s after my ass, and I’m not so arrogant as to believe that one way or another he’ll rig the game to put mine in a termination sling. Perhaps it will be one of those "blessings in disguise," but again I am addicted to my regular bowl of monetary ALPO. Spare me such blessings, oh blind idiot lesbian keyboard God.

Apropos of nothing, I flash on something Norman said. "Temporal manipulation opens up possibilities for the human will that make the industrial revolution look like a set of full body shackles."

Trouble is that the industrial revolution looked like a full set of body shackles cleverly disguised as freedom from slavery anyway. Led to population explosions of disposable folks instead. Which in turn led to wars of increasing magnitude and horror.

People still fall for the same old gags. Wear a uniform, go to strange places, and improve your love life.

With the same old omissions. The unforgettable stenches. The stomach wrenching knee buckling horror the first time your nostrils get within five meters of a corpse three days ripe in 85F plus heat.

Your body rears back with a mind of its own the first time you attempt to move such a body, because a battalion of fat, cinder black insects, monstrous fattened hornet sized species you’ve never imagined, flares out from beneath the rotting entrails of something you used to call a buddy.

You resist the temptation of cliché, and cannot describe their buzz as "angry," because you know that theirs is a joyous noise of welcome. They hope you’re next.

The cramping spasms of vomit from a stomach long emptied. The fear you surrender to because you know that only fear might get you through this garbage alive.

And then the return to civilian life, and the certainty that you’ve gone through this to defend a nation of idiots driving a market of baubles.

Which reminds me, I’m almost through the door of Tony’s Bakla-Pizza-Teria. The portmanteau name nods to Greece with its Baklava offerings, and Italian pizza, of course. The motto bannered beneath the address and phone number on the menus reads "Italy with the good taste of Greece."

Doesn‘t take a lot of SCUBA diving to fish out the truth. Good taste of grease, maybe. As long as your taste in good runs to rancid.

GSI employees affectionately shortened it to "Bacteria," after a pair of particularly lethal sausage and onion pizzas cut short the shift of any who dared dabble there.

The establishment is three stores away from a Discount Pet Plaza outlet. Speculations abound regarding puppy into pizza possibilities.

A copy of the Village Voice on one of the tables has a front page banner about the latest racist hate crime in Brooklyn. I grab it and the attention of the squat stone faced illegal Mexican dwarf behind the counter cash register..

He lets a smile crack across his chiseled blocky visage. He knows me. The infrequent opportunities I take to eat here are luxuries. I tip accordingly. God knows what the cheap bastard owners underpay the guy.

"Give me two slices regular and a sixteen ounce diet Pepsi, amigo."

His adult sized skull is mounted on a three foot body that stands on a stool behind the register. With the practiced grace of a circus performer, he hops from the stool and penguin walks his way across the oven’s catwalk. In a matter of seconds he has grappled his way atop another of several stools he has strategically set up to facilitate his work serving the customers.

His tightly cut biceps work the wooden bread board with the slices into the oven faster than when I have the usual complement of two sullen normal sized morons working the same station. Thank God morons take long lunches. And thank God again that my lunch coincides with theirs today.

The front page of the Voice is illustrated with a tree that has a hangman’s noose dangling from a branch. I flash through the pages to the story, and it turns out I am familiar with the newspaper account of the case. It’s a true idiot’s delight.

The facts? Who/What? We have one of two Afro-Americans, ex-military, gets the living daylights kicked out of him by a gang of mongrelized Caucasians in Bay Ridge. He ends up in the hospital, critically injured.

Where? This basically white neighborhood has a long history of Italian-American ownership and siege mentality.

When? After midnight.

Why? The neighborhood has had a rash of automobile break-ins. Bay Ridge has long believed that all such perpetrators are black. When our local gang’s path intersected with that of the Afro-Americans, they deputized themselves guardians of the community and began interrogating the blacks with racial epithets. When our people of color tried to escape, that established their guilt, and the inevitable beating occurred.

In the details stupid gets uglier, and ugly gets stupider. This villainous gang of late adolescents, which does not like to call itself a gang, just a social circle with parallel interests, consists of some natural born bullies who watch too many episodes of The Sopranos.

They are Mafioso wannabes for a Mafia that has not existed for quite some time. In fact, the Mafia they wannabe, never existed at all. Nevertheless one of them was in a picture with one son of one noted capo. At nineteen, he considers himself the made man in the crew. His name is Fernando Garcia-Lopez. His friends call him Fat Fred.

Our victim, the twenty seven year old Afro-American war hero, took a leave of absence from his military career to pursue independent research on the phenomenology of selfhood in the presence of crack cocaine and network television. His name is Mustafa Shabazz. His friends call him Moose the Mooch.

The mothers get involved and both paint their sons with broad angelic strokes. Mr. Shabazz’s mother poses for the newspapers with her son’s military portrait. Fat Fred’s mother portrays her son as a misunderstood choir boy with mafia connections that have led him astray. Both are insane with grief, but do not recognize their common bond.

Al Sharpton jumps in and makes matters worse for all parties but himself, which is what he has always done best. The next thing you know this mess has jostled the war in the mid-east out of the local headlines.

The court has a brutal assault on its hands and a media circus. We can’t show ourselves partial to the white folks this time. Fat Fred gets hit with a bail that could bankrupt a Dominican drug lord. He’s remanded to Rikers Island.

Enter the wild card. The middle aged mothers of Bay Ridge get into the act, and they are surprisingly effective. They find out about the war hero’s crack habit, and the fact that he was carrying tools to effect auto break ins when he landed in the hospital.

They also bring to light that Fat Fred had taken a bone breaking beating at the hands of some black thugs less than a month earlier. That was never classified as a hate crime. He was treated at the hospital without ever thinking about pressing charges against anyone.

Enter the neo-conservatives for their fair share of the camera’s trough. Before you know it the Bay Ridge Moms have a media mob of their own, complete with slogans and signs.

The Voice writer attempts to rationalize it all as a cultural conflict. Which is what the Voice does with every demographic. Trouble is none of these cultures are going to give us another Parthenon anytime soon.

But we can get a couple of giggles. We certainly know that we’re not dealing with a civilization in ascendancy when the rallying cry for a gathered crew is "Free Fat Fred." It was also fun to watch Sharpton cut and run when he got wind of the Moose the Mooch name for the war hero.

Too bad the giggles can’t outweigh the sadness of two young men whose stupidity has left them both with wasted lives. One of them irrevocably maimed. Nor can anything touch the pathos of the mothers whose love for them might almost be said to have been squandered. Time to start skimming the rest of the issue.

They’re seeking a cure for asthma among the young. Perhaps a better quality of air??

I riffle a little more through the newspaper roulette. Nobody sits down and puts getting old, ugly and selfish on their social calendar. They should. Especially in view of how many show up for the occasion.

One really neat dodge is the amazing expansion of the use of the word, "kid." I lose a little appetite reading a randomly selected article apply the term with all seriousness to a homosexual man of thirty five. He is being defended on charges of felony murder while driving drunk.

At the age of thirty five, he’s not old yet. But judging by the mug shot, he’s got plenty of compensating ugly and selfish. Our "kid" is a white male from the Long Island Suburbs who likes to buy lower west side man meat on the weekends. The article tries to be sympathetic.

So of course, he is a beloved High School English teacher in his home town. The kids find him simpatico. He understands their music and wears the right sneakers. He made Shakespeare relevant by having the class do a rap version of Hamlet.

He leads the youth group at a local Temple. He does not believe in the destructive impact grades can have, so he has never given a mark below a B. The parents love him.

Nobody has any doubt that this paragon’s incarceration would detract from his valuable contributions to the community. It must be an isolated incident that deserves broad minded compassion. He clearly needs rehab and therapy.

He made a Mercedes mush out of a grandmother one Sunday morning’s golden daybreak. A lonely old Polish lady of eighty six who was on her way to 6:30 mass. She was wearing her only nice flowered dress.

He was doing about eighty when he lost control of the car and jumped the curb onto the sidewalk. With one perfect clip it smacked into her and looped back onto the road. It tore the entire bottom half of the dress from her body. Somehow the leather belt at her waist got entangled in the passenger side rear view mirror.

The fine German engineering dragged her mangling body at least two blocks before he realized the car wasn’t handling up to spec. He got out, took one look at this ancient life naked from the waist down, threw up, and passed out next to her as she lay dying.

Just as I’m getting a visual on this I hear the adenoidal cry of the Pizza dwarf. "Two slices!".

For one nauseating moment the cheese interlaced with tomato looks like macerated flesh putrefying atop the dough. Nevertheless, I who slave still must eat to remain strong enough to slave. Bon appetite.

"Thanks, man.&$34

I lose more appetite looking at the specimen‘s photo. He juts a double chin under thin pursing lips. His porcine arrogant eyes squint at the camera under a receding hairline. The gave this son of a bitch a teaching job. They’ll probably only give him probation too. Some guys have all the luck.

But then. What is luck? Maybe it’s God’s little reminder that being good is not good enough. The reason that you would always win in the Casinos of Hell is that losing always inserts an element of hope. Hope that things might be better with just another shuffle of the cards or throw of the dice.

Here was a golden boy who was on a lifelong winning streak. It concludes with a manslaughter after a night of debauchery and sex rented by the hour. Probably born rich, considering that a teacher’s salary would barely cover the cost, upkeep, and maintenance on that Benz he creamed the grandmother with.

Hey! Speaking of family money or lack of same. Right below the article is an ad for Ancestry.com. It promises to let us relive the joy of our grandparents wedding day. Right down to the brand of shells great grandpa used to load the shotgun?

They can change the words, but they can’t change the tune. We are a nation of synthetic identities. Ancestry.com indeed. Look at how many psychological professionals are making their money from progeny who hate or resent their parents. Perhaps our drunken, grandmother slaughtering teacher has lawyers who are working this angle now. How many of these folks realize how lucky they are to be able to have parents to resent at all?

In the ghetto communities, the only great success is that of going from bad to worse. Fourteen year olds having babies with no sense of responsibility because that’s how Mom had them. These kids have no templates for accomplishment.

Trailer trash or not, I was lucky. My father taught me that there was no job or task, no matter how humble or miserable, that was not worth doing well. In my case, it was learning to hammer a nail into a board at the age of eleven. One sore thumb and a box of nails taught me more in one hot August afternoon, than years of public education at uncounted public expense gives thousands of these kids.

Personal identity derives from a sense of what one has done. And once one feels the accomplishment of one thing well done, one has an intuitive feeling that can carry one through countless challenges that lie ahead in life. The way it felt when that first nail went in straight set a tone for whom I am and know I can be.

I thank God that my old man was not worried in the least about my self image when he assessed my first botched attempt as pitiful. His tone exuded confidence that pitiful was not going to be forever. But pitiful is pitiful nonetheless. It is important to be able to recognize it.

I guess we have all these different parades about Puerto-Rican Pride, Irish Pride, Gay/Lesbian Pride so we can take pride in something. I guess nobody’s proud to be American anymore. Why?

I can only guess it’s that identity thing. To be American was once associated with one’s individuality. Admittedly there was a lot of empty rhetoric behind this myth of the rugged individual, but it’s something a lot more to strive for than defining success as being whoever dies with the most toys.

Flip to another page. A fluff article bitching about Bush’s idiotic war. They’ve got a caricature of him with the usual jug ears, cowboy hat and six guns. Today he’s also portrayed as Rumsfeld’s hand puppet. Not much originality. But still, this objective free war is such a horrific waste of national resource and human suffering that any critical slant, no matter how specious and meretricious is self justifying.

The ease with which we as a nation swallowed a series of transparent lies barely justifies the term propaganda. The game began in Iraq with Operation Shock and Awe, borrowing a phrase from Clausewitz. We hammered the country with an equal amount of ordinance to that employed in World War II. Sweet. It’s supposed to be a cake walk now.

Against Pentagon advice, we send in about 130,000 soldiers, an insufficient number of ground troops, who find that our Iraqis haven’t been shocked and awed enough. The only ones who are, happen to be dead civilians whose number goes uncounted and unpublicized.

No problem. We topple a large statue of Saddam to what looks like a cheering crowd. However, that’s only if one is looking at the later, edited footage. The crowd is only a crowd from certain ground level camera angles. Nor should we be surprised by the observation that this is heap technique that is a stand-by of rock videos. A helicopter shot later expunged from the press footage reveals it to be little more than about two hundred Iraqis. Only a few million more to go, and we should go home heroes.

In another unexpected twist that our Intelligence should have anticipated, it happens that the newly liberated majority Shiite Iraqis never had anything but contempt for us in the first place. They grow AK-47’s by what seems like magic, and start holding towns like Fallujah. We call them terrorists.

When we finally take that town at enormous capital expense, and tragic human cost, the Shiites with the weapons disappear into the woodwork like the mighty cockroaches of a New York City tenement.

We lose a couple of hundred marines, and about thirty billion dollars, but we do gain another uncounted number of dead civilians. Not to worry though. They were probably potential terrorists with whom we have dealt proactively.

If they happen to be pregnant women, well, talk about two for the price of one. Hopefully we killed their husbands and brothers along with them, lest we leave any of this newly liberated group itching for a little revenge.

The minority Sunnis are the ones who were also in the military. They basically walked off with all the weapons they could stash in the family car. They’re mad because they are unemployed, unpopular, and unable to escape. They lay low for a bit, but will be later labeled as insurgents. Nothing like an opposition that has military training, military gear, and dwindling savings to spice up the newly renamed Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Seen through the incident driven eyes of the media, five years of this has become nothing better than a parade of petty obscenity. We have the corpses of Saddam’s sons on front pages. Naked Iraqi men wear dog collars and are forced to masturbate in the name of interrogation.

When finally captured, Saddam is photographed in his underwear while cleaning his cell. Dignified in his humility, he defies our attempts to humiliate him. At least three thousand American dead and about ten thousand seriously wounded. Tens of thousands of Iraqi dead and numberless displaced. For what?

Osama Bin Laden, who triggered this squalid episode, laughs from inside the borders of Pakistan. We can number among our few accomplishments that of making him a Robin Hood figure for the illiterate thugs of radical Islam.

Meanwhile, the American public, supposedly free to express its displeasure with this unpopular bankrupting charade, initially proved as enthusiastic as the Japanese when their government invaded Manchuria in the name of Asian economic cooperation.

The news gives us only the barest sketches of what is happening on a day to day basis other than the most recent casualties of roadside booby traps.

The price of gasoline gets more attention. It keeps going up. Big surprise. Nobody asks how much gasoline we have squandered across this enterprise. The moral abyss is subsumed by ever more titillating and violent entertainment. In other words, do’t be alarmed, we’re engaging in business as usual.

What motivates the leisure time monsters who profit from all this? Who are they? How has killing become fulfilling to them? Stop. More precisely, how do they manage to repress the gut level perception of the horror upon which the fulfillment of their greed must feed itself?

Do they have dreams about elegant dinners with the faces of their victims pleading helplessly from fine china anticipating the descent of their golden knives and forks? Do they see quivering innocence spoon by spoon digested into profits and defecated into bank accounts?

The vast WE, who watch it all on TV, passively collude with this process to a greater extent with every passing decade. Ever since the eighties, in the guise of enhancing ratings, America has made the news a cosmetic entity. We tacitly accept it as good enough. "I don’t want to know any more than what it takes to get through my day" expresses the zeitgeist. Diversion is sexy. Researched history is boring, and potentially editorializing. Trouble is what will we need to know tomorrow?

Of course, in addition to the sheep who watch the tube as a form of anesthesia, we have those who are up in arms about TV and its content. This group is as Balkanized as they come, ranging from the NO TV IN THIS GODFEARING HOUSE Xian right and the WE ALL KNOW IT’S A FRAUD SO LETS MAKE SOME MONEY AND RUN not so Xian left. And all manner of impotently intelligent discontents in between. These folks are in a similar position to atheists who do not believe in a God that they have not defined

Does this indicate a species like differentiation, invisible to us? Is this not the same symptom by which the fraudulent high priests of Babylon caused people to believe in demons for centuries? Now the demons are in the boxes whose screens attract the collective eye, usurp the psyche, and the allotted time of the human life with dreams of greed fulfilled and fear projected somewhere else. The high priests the technocrats and mega-dealers?

Does this kind of opportunist represent a psychic infestation of an eternal template wherein the individual has chosen to participate in the stamping process? Like every devil’s deal from every folk tale, the will must submit in the name of short term satisfaction.

Here the article cites Rumsfeld whining that our adversary has a skillful knack for grabbing headlines This is how we describe an insurgency composed of people who used to be in the ruling classes, therefore better educated, and with better access to weapons as well as training in their use.

He complains that the military don’t understand that we are fighting a different kind of war. I suppose so. It is one where the aggressor is doing everything possible to lose. What is Rumsford? The king of the pointy headed universe?

Like the poison dripped into Hamlet’s father‘s ear, the final motivating utility in propaganda always seems to be lies heard and repeated. The visual media hijacks the popular attention, but it is the primal act of sound itself that directs group behavior.

The axiom of the puppet master, from the times of the Pharos to now, from Grand Rebbe to Ayatollah, from President to tinhorn dictator, and to all their concomitant media minions, is that people are stupid, willfully ignorant, sexually obsessed automata who can’t be saved and are only worth exploiting as resources. I happen to hope we stupid automata can be saved, and will find better exploitation that way. Sure. Maybe next week.

Whoa! Will you look at the butt on this one ordering the calzone! When God made the template for the Japanese woman, did being fruitful and multiplying ever get a sure guarantee.

I linger over the crusts of my two slices and struggle not to gape in awe and wonderment at the perfection of the ripe cherry’s proportions radiating through the blue jeans painted on this young woman’s lower form. I realize with horror that I’ve barely noticed her face. She could be a farm animal from the waist up for all I care. And to think, I like to think I’m somehow superior. Sure.

Oh damn. I forgot to remember I need to run home and get my wallet. Tonight I might hook up with Monica! I’ll need the plastic.

I throw my mind back on interior monologue diversion and my feet on autopilot.

It is a terrible irony that I curse a life that more than half the world can only dream of when it comes to physical comforts.

The burdens of pleasures taken for granted. That’ll be interesting come the afterlife. Just trying to explain that to yourself in the company of the souls whose life were a torture, and who need you to share your pleasant memories with theirs to alleviate the suffering of their memories.

The mortification of horrific truth when you lay your life bare for the souls of the WWI trench dead to bathe in the healing balm of your recollected sensations. They will have to sift through petty mewling of your ego in the moment to catch the vapor of the roses almost overlooked.

The very same things I imagine make me miserable will look to them as blessings. I flash on a dream.

If growing old provided any answers, we’d all be Dalai Lamas by now. But most seem to get worse. More self-absorbed. Greedier. More cowardly. For every Mother Teresa, ten thousand shriveling crones clutch the business pages of the Times and pick at tea and toast with tremulous nickel grubbing fingers.

And what about that Sixties Generation? Didn’t take them any time at all to morph into Reaganite Bruce Springsteen fans. Critical thinking became the mark of malcontents and losers, who had not grown up. Of course, growing up meant to accept the poisonous axiom that if something makes money, it must be good.

The last time I attended a party with that sort, I left feeling as nailed as Jesus Christ in the Home Despot on a Good Friday Promo Sale. It was on lower Fifth Avenue, a doorman high rise deep in the heart of Lower Manhattan’s Fat City. A friend was trying to hook me up with publishing connections. I wore my best jacket and only decent black jeans.

The place was a study in stark, high end Swedish modern interior decoration. Glossy parquet floors, chromium, black leather track light sterility. Muted Mozart twittered in the background. The place was crowded with tight cliques of self congratulation and air kisses.

My host introduced me to tall, pinch featured Amanda Plumgarden, a fifty something woman in the publishing business, auburn hair tightly knotted into a baseball sized bun. She glanced at the double Jameson in my hand. Her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed. I knew what that meant. She’s decided I’m a drunk, and she despises drunks.

Having already decided that she had no interest in me whatsoever, but still had some time to kill, she used her best Harvard condescension to equate Shakespeare with that master American storyteller, Steven King.

Wine glass in blue veined talon, wire hanger shoulders under a white linen Yves St. Laurent suit, she towered over me on vast doughy hips mushroom capping spindly legs oozing from glossy black five hundred dollar spike heels. Her eyes were the sadistic blue of an Antarctic sky. Snow White and the ugly penguin dwarf in the thrift shop jacket. Two characters in search of a social escape hatch.

Blah blah blah. Shakespeare was successful. Blah blah starving artist is a Victorian myth. Blah blah look at all the creativity in advertising. Blah blah you’re very promising, but you need to let go of the past. Blah blah find a way to tell people what they want to hear. Blah blah art is smart. Blah blah excuse me, there’s my good friend blah blah nice meeting blah.

We’re all stars in movies in our minds. But what did people do with their minds before movies?

Funny about the things that finally tip the scales. Small things truly do seem to precipitate cataclysms. The making of Adolph Hitler may have resided not in the grand historical vacuum that the man was a product of forces beyond all human control.

It was probably more like the accumulation of the cavalcade of indignities he suffered as flabby, mustached little Corporal one testicle Schickelgruber. A far cry from the Arian Adonis that was one of the idols of the National Socialist infestation.

How many times do we want think of how, on a daily basis, little Adolph got booted around the boot camp like a medicine ball?

How many times do we want to think that he got all sorts of affectionate nicknames for his undecided testiculation?

I wonder what’s the German for no-dick?

Let me know how much money you would need to spend to make that body you ’re infesting worth living in. Many of the twentieth century technocrats, were textbook pathologies. The Nazi inner circle looked like something straight out of a circus side show.

As we turn the corner into the twenty first century, the new chimera is more evanescent. There are no individuals, just constant self-reinventions. From entertainment idol to fifteen famous minute sicko, the key to career longevity is to keep changing identity.

The spokeswoman on the radio mentioned that the paroled Joel Steinberg would have excellent rehabilitation support and re-entry services available, courtesy of the Fortune Society. This is a man who tortured and ultimately beat to death a cute little girl. A pair of handcuffs, a jar of Vaseline and a desk at Central booking with a stack of pornographic magazines would be a more elegant, economical, and appropriate "re-entry program" indeed

Expecting a medal for doing the right thing perverts and self-disqualifies both act and motivation. It’s common enough and bad enough. But these assholes want medals for virtuosity.

The picture of him on the news has him posed with the chinless pout of a codger unhappy with the temperature of his oatmeal. He destroyed a child bit by horrifying bit. If he were a Nazi, he would have been swinging from war criminal rope.

Almost back at the apartment. Why is it that the closer I get, the more I flash on scenes from work?

Weirdest thing about working there is how many of the customers think I run the place. Which leads to some bizarre misunderstandings and exchanges that inevitably end with.

"Run the place? Hell no. Everybody’s my boss here. I’m just a Sales Associate."

I just happen to still walk like a man with pride. That’s why you thought I ran the place. Sorry about that.

I should have been fired for that remark. No one is "just a sales associate." But if every should that should be should come to be, NYC would not have brick on top of brick.

Like the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, modern retail management creates a culture of internal contradictions to deflect the individual from thinking critically at all. The trick is to balance compliance with an ever expanding series of "empowerments" (read "tasks") with language that judiciously vents the truth.

If it were dripping with more sarcasm it would ooze. But it is delivered with a bland absence of same.

"Well, I suppose the bad news is that you haven’t been making very much money the last two months. Your sales are sub par. But I have some good news. We’ve decided to promote you. To customer."

The moment one steps into the sales arena one realizes that one has never experienced the condition of covetousness as one does now. A plethora of things to want that one does not have.

But like some hideous psychological fractal, it iterates into ever more microscopic self similarities. I have never walked past a sales associate at a terminal who is ringing up a purchase, no matter how pitiful, without coveting the transaction.

It is the sense of entrapment. The exquisitely turned moment that feels like an eternity coupled with the firm knowledge that this is going to go for a while and get worse. A distinct sinking feeling. Like cops, retail has this eerie ambience of an underlying non reality behind this grotesquely urgent and infantile theatre.

Or maybe we need to tweak the Freudian knobs. Could infantile be better described as primal?

Ah, who knows, and who cares. Here we are. Home again. I gallop up the three concrete stairs leading to the door of the row house I call home. Steel barred security door. Key slips. I curse. Get through. Wooden inner door. Key fine. Fly down the stairs to the basement of solitude and defiance.

The apartment’s red steel security door is emblazoned with the pink neon sign, Lair of the White Weasel. Liberated from the promotional display for a B horror movie of the same name by Monica! Five years ago, during one of our halcyon periods, she had appeared in a blood engorged, purple headed topless role as one of the White Zombie’s slaves of the vermicular.

They stiffed her on some of her pay, so she filched the sign, along with a few other trifles, like somebody’s diamond encrusted platinum Rolex.

"They had it coming, That was one of the best acting jobs in my life. I should have gotten an Oscar for the job I did blowing the fucking geezer lush director. Took a half hour of coaxing to get it to half mast. Turned into an hour and a half of playing pool with a rope."

That’s my Monica! Well, not really just my, I suppose. All right, where’s the wallet? The living room is a catastrophe of ten straight work days’ worth of randomly scattered work clothes. Sox, collared shirts everywhere. Only one pair of pants, tomorrow’s, because I’m rotating between only two. Poems of Mallarme on the floor next to Sleazy M.I.L.F.’s Finest: The Kama-Sutra Issue. Django Reinhardt Anthology split open to Nuages.

But no wallet. Why do I do this to myself, dammit? I never seem to have the same place for it twice. A million times I assign a common sense place to always put it. A million times I deviate from common sense when I remove it from my pants and put it down.

I remember the canyons in the wide deer brown eyes of thirty something Flora Silverberg by eight candlelight, lithe muscular legs in a lotus on her King sized bed deep in an Upper East side high rise.

She was naked but for a bra to restrain her naturally mammoth mammarian endowments. Fragrant lush black pubic hairs winked from the flickering shadows under her hint of a belly. The window behind us framed the black velvet carpet of the East River jeweled with the lights of Queens.

"See Weasel, you’re really Jewish. You were probably in a Concentration Camp in a previous life, and couldn’t stand the idea of another reincarnation. Trust me. I’ve got great JUDAR. That’s radar for Jewishness. I’ve never known anybody as Jewish as you."

Shoulder length curls, almond oval face, honest generous lips. Easy kisses. Passion with stamina.

"I’ll bet you’ve never felt really at home, and there’s a part of you that’s always preparing to have to be on the run. That’s why you always keep losing your keys by hiding them somewhere in plain sight. In my meditation seminars we call that Karmic Conflicted. You’re afraid to become attached to what you may lose. So you lose it anyway."

"And to think I thought I was just an absent minded sex addict."

"Well a bit of that too." Twinkle.

"Too bad I’m not a tit man. Yours really are spectacular, and they’re wasted on me. I sometimes feel bad about that."

"Don’t. That’s what I like about you in bed. You let me keep my bra on except when I need you to suck on them. And even then, you usually don’t suck on them too hard. Most men suck on them like they were made of rubber and attached to a bottle."

I never say that I don’t care for big breasts because I find them depressing. Their losing battle of the sag against gravity starts early. Many nineteen year olds already have stretch marks. Remind me of the Dali painting, The Specter of Sex Appeal. Giant sandbags supported by contorted crutches.

I make love in spite of them, because I love the head on top and the heart that beats under them, not because they arouse me. Ah, cut the crap. I’m an ass and pussy man. Helps if the rest of the body is in proportion.

"Speaking of bottles Flora dear, do we have enough beer?"

In the fridge, Weeze. But before you do-"

She drops her head back onto a fluffy lace edged pillow, arches her back, and unwraps her legs in a sinuous fluid motion.

Whoa!! Let the Beer get a little colder. This moment is now.

I rip my jacket and tee shirt off. Curse the fact I wore the lace up combat boots that take forever to get off. But we’ll solve that later. I walk my hands up the mattress to her shoulders and bend to kiss the tiny darkness candle dancing beneath her earlobes. She drapes her willow arms around my neck and hums.

I angle up and hover over the threshold of her lips. Easy down and delicate mouths touch. I wait for her graceful tongue to snake through mine first. Our eyes stay open and lock on each other.

Diving deep in these shimmering eyes makes twins out of me. Weasel one has never felt more rooted in this divine jewel earth here with Flora and now on a soft April night. Weasel two is hurled someplace that better be heaven, because if it isn’t, God’s in trouble now.

Weasel one feels like teasing with his right hand down the course that runs from her collarbone around the base of the underwire super structure encasing her breasts. The oasis of skin that curves beneath her rib cage. Her tongue slips out. She gives a soft gasp on an intake of breath and translates that into a feline purr.

If I were a wallet where would I be?

Where’s Monica! When I need her? Where she always is then. Somewhere else. But now she’d have the wallet in hand already. Genuinely uncanny that way. I usually hid the cash from the body disposal gigs with Norm in one of the more obscure philosophy books jumbled in the milk case bookshelves. No matter where it went, I could set my watch by-

"Boethius. That sounds like an interesting name. Oops! What‘s this?"

Out slid three grand in fresh hundreds to the floor. There was a weekend to remember.

In fact, now that I’m home, I’ll kick on the computer and touch base with the email. Maybe she’s hung her coordinates there.

While that’s doing its thing, I’ll just lie down a minute and rest the old carcass in anticipation of the joyous backbreaking to come in the gulag Cracker.

Ah. Memory, sweet mammary. I feel something coming up. The cobra wants to dance with the right hand mongoose. Thinking about the time I earned the eternal hatred of my room mate, Brad Tomlinson, in his apartment in Manhattan. Poor little rich boy Brad, of the boyish face that used to get him laid, and the premature spare tire that insured the great future he had behind him at the ripe age of ruined thirty five.

She and two of her girlfriends spent the night. All of us tripping. All of us horny. All of us adventurous. For the next twelve hours, a symphony of thrashing, slurping and moaning oozed through the sheetrock walls of my bedroom into what was left of the living room of his sub-divided one bedroom apartment.

Every now and then one of us would rush out to the bathroom in a towel. He was sitting on the couch pretending to read the newspaper while he chain smoked Marlboros. On the way back, the girls kept hitting him up for a cigarette. After enough of those transactions, he took his room with the TV on as loud as it could go.

He never forgave me. I can’t say I could blame him. But let’s face it. A night where everybody comes at least five times, only comes once in a lifetime to the preternaturally lucky. It certainly never happened to me again. But talk about a lifetime’s worth of masturbation memories.

I was thirty one, the old man to the twenty two year old Monica! The rigors of acting/modeling ambitions, along with the high end prostitution she pursued to fuel said ambitions had chiseled the beginnings of hollows under her high exotic cheekbones. Whatever baby fat she may once have had was gone, leaving her a lean mean sex machine. Yoga kept her long legs limber and her ankles easily tucked behind her ears.

Now there was a pretty sight. A perfect ellipse. Two pairs of lips top and bottom. And a little puckering anus winks at me and hints at later curiosities. The delicious dilemma. Which to fuck first and which to kiss. Heads or tails, anyone? Let me kiss the smiling ones first, this time.

Relaxing my mouth open, but not slack jawed. Lips undulating sea anemones. Tongues frisk like oiled weasels. Ah yes. Thus my name.

Fluttering my fingers down her back, around the rib cage, and over the soft quarter inch of flesh over her abdomen, my butterfly right hand finds the hooded pearl of her clitoris. That’s always been a tricky point with her because it’s small and not particularly sensitive.

Still, too hard a touch can set everything back to square one, or even the dreaded negative numbers. Let her moans be the guide, and remember a gasp rarely indicates pleasure.

Oh Jesus, she’s already wet and deliciously loose, but tight on the throb. Simultaneous orgasms would make this a dream fuck.

My lips have followed my hands down her ribs and I swing my hips around into a Piscean 69 posture. I suck the little bead. Her mouth is homing in on mister half staff. What could possibly go wrong now that we’re in heaven?

Youch!! Those Hollywood perfect teeth grind a constellation of agony when my walnut tip pops through the lips of milk and honey. I grit my teeth and gasp.

"Oops." She giggles. "That’s what you get for having a big prick."

Talk about damning with faint praise. Don’t lose the hard on over this. My anus clenches protest when I stifle a shrill of pain. Silence is golden when rhythm is all. She starts humming her little Beethoven of rising waves of arousal.

The things any lover must let pass. Mr. Walnut sends a panicky meat shriveling message to my brain. A cascade of images of his unhappy head bitten in half and hanging on by a bloody thread.

Fortunately my penis override takes command. Mr. Happy ain’t spoiling this magic moment with the complaints desk. Why, hell, I’m not really sure if I’d interrupt this if I had to spit out half of Mr. Tongue, equally hard bitten on my part to suppress my own squeal of agony.

So, Mr. Tongue and Walnut, I need you to take this one for the team. Talk to the chaplain later. And look on the bright side, Buckaroos. Where would we be if this was a blow job in a Ford smashing down a ravine?

Meanwhile back at love’s ground zero, a mushroom cloud of radiant heat expands into a mystic bubble. We meld into a single sweat slick interlace of nomadic caresses. I lose a sense of where my body even ends. Her neck is kissing me. Somehow I’m teleported on bottom and looking up at her tits dancing a hula while her fingers are all over her cunt.

Oh, there are my hands. They’re cupping her muscular, calipiguous ass. She bucks and humps arch backed, face pointed at the ceiling. And Mr. Walnut is knocking on the heaven’s doorknob of her uterus, albeit with the hammering pain of a nine penny nail with every bounce.

A river’s loosening and bats my penis like a canoe on white water rapids..

Ooh. That is the soft copper of blood in my mouth. So what? Hell. You could put a bullet in my left foot right now, and I wouldn’t have a thing to say about it for at least the next hour. That is to say, if I can do, or better to not say, not do anything about it. Never mind.

Copper. Like the coppery triangle when she lets her little bush shrub out between jobs. Otherwise she keeps it oiled and shaved like tonight. She wants to show off for her two naked compadres in the audience. The ones I completely forgot about the minute she threw those flexible perfect legs behind her shoulder length red locks.

Patsy Burton and Amanda Song were a couple of her partners in love crimes over at the Club Lotus Blossom, a high end establishment catering to United Nations representatives. This townhouse remains conveniently located three locks away on Forty Seventh Street between Second and Third Ave.

The only hint that this discrete club is anything other than another residence for the silently wealthy of Manhattan is a small bronze plaque next to the building’s elegant street level oak door: Advanced Society for Confucian Studies. That old prude, Confucius. Now there’s a body twirling in the grave.

The buzzer is a simple old fashioned dime sized white button nested in a square aluminum speaker plate. There is no evidence of the twelve hidden security cameras that cover the entire sidewalk approach from every perspective except worm’s eye view.

I‘d never been inside the place myself, but the ladies provided me with graphic details when the three of them tumbled into my place at six one pink sunrise morning. Monica! had finished her first shift there. I never cared much for her chosen profession, but I couldn’t compete with the money, so I had to settle for keeping my fears to myself.

I’d barely gotten to a fitful sleep. Suddenly the key turned in the lock, the lights blew on, and I awakened in a state of startled, annoyed anxiety coupled by a sense of relief.

The heavy click clack of Designer heels on the bare linoleum floor accompanies an 1812 Overture of drunken laughter. The alcohol fumes are potent enough to sprint across the room. They each hold half consumed bottles of Jack Daniels in one hand, and deli bags with six packs in the other. All is forgiven immediately.

I’m looking at the stuff that so many men dream of. Reality is a little different, of course, but quite enchanting as well.

Patsy Burton belies her Anglo name. She is a tiny twenty something Japanese figurine of flat-chested porcelain androgeny. The black horn rimmed glasses coupled with her plaid wool mini skirt make her look like a sixth grade spelling champion. She specializes in geezer whack off scenarios involving school girls.

"Yeah, my Nippo-Trash parents re-named me after Patsy Cline and Richard Burton when they started renting me out to Yokohama bordellos. I was the best little tea serving blow job artist the Emperor’s family had ever seen. And baby look at me now.".

Look indeed. Not bad at all now that Monica!, she, and the short, plump, square faced Korean, Amanda are parked cross legged on my throw rug in their underwear. A golden triangle of perdition.

High end hookers slumming with a low rent rocker. They’re swilling the Jack and popping open Beck’s. I grab one.

Ah. Life is good. Their glossy little pink panties reveal more than they conceal. These vaginas are probably more intimate with razors than they are with the clientele. Especially if you factor in their minds.

Amanda starts blowing up a little balloon that looks like it has the width of my pinky. Her cheeks are bulging out at the resistance. The three of them are laughing hysterically.

"What the fuck kind of balloons are those?"

"Japanese condoms." Smirks Monica!

Within a half an hour we were all naked and goofy. We were playing anti strip poker, and nobody was winning. No sex that night, but it led to wonderful future adventures. And the image alone is enough to keep my lunchtime mongoose dance with the cobra high stepping to completion.

Oh God look at the time. I pull my pants back up. Look around in a panic and see my wallet under the M.I.L.F. Kama-Sutra. That was easy. Time to run like hell.

My front door slams loudly behind me, and I wonder if I forgot to shut down the computer. Damn I’d forget my dick if it wasn’t firmly attached. Not that I feel like using it once I hit the processed air inside that gaudy shit hole. I wonder if they put something in the central processing. Paranoia time. Just get back in and check.

Come on. Requisite key fumbling since I’m in a real hurry now, running at least fifteen minutes late. Slam back through the two solid locks to the exterior Metal Gated door and secondary solid wood door.

Almost break my neck on a half successful header down the narrow stairs. Now this last metal door key is sticking. I say a quick Our Mother Fucker to the blind drunk lesbian divinity of GSI, and sure as Abracadabra the door swings open.

I step back over the three week growth of newspapers, beer cans, and take out food containers. Outside of work, I’ve been too exhausted to do much more than eat, sleep, and practice. Make appointments for taking dumps and showers. Clutter is one thing, filth another.

For the nth time in my few but longest years of life in GSI, I wonder if it’s worth it to hang on to the job. Rodney’s latest campaign to break me is to hammer me with extra hours. He knows he’ll get the time free because I won’t punch in for more than my sales numbers justify. That would qualify me for promotion to customer, based on under-productivity. Pure gravy for the genius of Human Resource exploitation

To an uneducated eye the rising tide of active garbage is a fire hazard and cockroach attractor. But those bootleg Nan-o-spiders Norman filched from a Malaysian lab of the not too distant future have rendered my squalor sterile and unfit for any wildlife habitation. Bastard did it just to remind me that he could get me a winning ticket from the numbers of the future, should I cooperate with his plans for the past/future.

My skin crawled up about two octaves when I came upon about twenty of them flaying a squeaking mouse alive. Nevertheless, Mickey and Company have been keeping a respectful distance, along with ants, cockroaches, and even the indigenous wolf spiders that used to call my basement apartment home.

I hope they don’t start looking at me once they have the lady bug and Asian Longhorn Beetle licked too. Norman assures me that my pheromones will repel them. Meaning I suppose that I stink as far as they are concerned.

Would that were also true of the freight train worth of loony females over the last fifteen years who seem to like to pick me up on the street and the local saloons. Me think the Weasel doth protest too much. I’ve been so much luckier than I could ever imagined, much less deserved to be.

More than a hundred. Each beautiful in different ways. Never lied to any. Never a disease. Many of them are acquainted. I must be a fictional character who begged God for my life in a careless moment of adolescent misery, or my own dream in my unrecognized afterlife.

Like one stuck drunk in a packet boat, Weasel died and did not know it.

I see that the computer is shut off. I did remember, or is it that I forgot to remember that I didn’t forget to remember to shut the thing down? Never mind. OK all good. It’s time to get onward and upward to the land of the dickless.

Auto-pilot interior monologue sprint back to the place where unmanned men strive to capture good old days they never had.

The land of men who clearly are not getting enough, and to whom no woman in her right mind would give any to. The land where I forage my eking as a stranger in a land where all musical values of a sacred kind have decayed into a cacophonous sarcophagus where volume and velocity are all.

There’s a screenplay for a movie somewhere in all this. The heartwarming story of a man who learns to become a company cog, and stop worrying about silly large moral issues that he couldn’t do anything about anyway. The next generation of pediatric cancer be damned.

If China doesn’t worry, why should he? A billion and a half people named Chin can’t be all Wong, hee hee. And anyway, better a piece of junk, cleverly disguised as a guitar, than a rifle. The same factory can build either easily enough.

Trouble is, how do you deal with a sack of festering lies cleverly disguised as a human being? Our bosses, that is to say. Political and otherwise. The war pigs are experts at dodging the billions of bullets they participate in manufacturing and marketing.

On top of this I really have to consider Norm‘s proposition. I‘m headed for another one of those Significant Temporal Bifurcations. Just a fancy post Temporal Technology phraseology for mid-life crisis.

Do I whack the guy who is going to murder the already dead Norm, steal Norm’s body for him, and get the key to my future and winning lottery ticket? And does that now mean we have two Normans? The original distressed horror, and whatever it is that I will be bringing back? I shudder at the thought of that so manipulated, unknowable future.

I can’t deny I’m starting to feel sorry for the old spook. He’s been looking positively disgusting. The skin he was using last time came off his body after the autopsy. Despite his work with the positron epoxies, you could clearly see the tracks of the bone saw on his skull.

"Temporal manipulation opens up possibilities for the human will that make the industrial revolution look like a set of full body shackles."

I don’t know, Norm. I just don’t know. I’ll settle for this full tilt sprint back to the purgatorial present.

Already back at the brick façade of the musical dream toilet, I realize I haven’t even noticed that that it’s beautiful late April day, balmy and roseate with early blooms that lined the front yards of the houses on my four block rush back to the gates of .

How do we all allow ourselves to deny ourselves the never endingly present experience of beauty? And why do we so willingly replace this with such twisted second rate movies?

The Machine does our visualization for us every time we look at some glowing rectangle whether TV, Cinema, or Computer. By telling us how to imagine, does that act of directing us mean it’s begun to imagine us? Is that question just some specious deconstructionist enigma I should be using to torture impressionable college poetry and philosophy students?

What about factoring in brute force bio-chemistry? Visualization requires a vast pump of messenger RNA in the brain, all of said RNA’s differently coded. The hypothetical mechanism by which these chemicals coordinate into an individually imagined vision atrophies.

Coleridge’s distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Are we becoming all Fancy? Visualized grotesquery with no unifying force of will? Don’t worry, Missy, we got the Media to do that for you. Don’t mind that little side effect that your feet feel like they have a life of their own. Just go with the flow. Relax, and enjoy the show.

It was all so much simpler, albeit more miserable, in the days of the bow and arrow. When high tech entertainment meant a drawing on a cave wall coupled with a campfire and a couple of local hallucinogenic mushrooms cooked into the mix.

Technology began as our object, upon which we imposed our will to accomplish work. The need for skill ensured that the hammer never used the man.

The industrial environment subverted skill and the instinctive joy that accompanies that application. With the destruction of joy, pleasure must be over stimulated to fill the vacuum. A strange titillating pleasure of violence and loveless sensuality.

Everybody has sex in the movies, because nobody is making love at home. But now we seem to be turning into its object, and therefore the minions of its subjugation of humanity.

Better watch it Buddy, you’re starting to sound like Ted Kazinski on too many coffees.

How I yearn for those golden days when I felt contempt, and believed in some special anything beneath it. Bedrock is a breeze, with power tools like these.

The chasm is opening. It’s a long way down after the trip up the escalator. Into the nightmares of whistling pigs I go. Hi ho.

I walk past the Door Pavilion and give a "howdy" flare to Angela, another of the latest in a slew of attractive young women. She’s majoring in Music Business at Baruch College

"And how is the Island of Enchantment today? Has cute little moron island grown into the Assholian Archipelago? With every passing day does the big lie get a little more squalid and shopworn."

Her coconut brown eyes glance at me from above a wasp waist and impressive décolletage with a passive bovine loathing. She’s still trying to figure me out. Probably figures I want to worm my disgusting geezer way into her miserable narcissistic pants. She won’t. I don’t.

Briefing for the walk into hell. Act nonchalant. Fortunately they must have just called the sales meeting, so my tardiness should have made it under the radar. I check my pants for tell tale stains. All clear.

Get in the Sales Office and sit down on the industrial gray carpet floor with as little ado as possible. The highest nail is first to attract the hammer.

From a godlike position behind his metal desk at the far corner of the Sales Office, Rodney Cracker opens the Afternoon Sales Meeting with a massive belch. Its resonant roundness belies the charming Isosceles Triangle that frames his olive face.

The glare of the fluorescents cuts angle into angle. His eyes look almost raccoon-like. They fall short of said rodent by virtue of pupils that are pits sucking light through a filter of shattered ethics. He gazes blankly at the two computer monitors glowing before him. One is the local store network, the other is wired into the internet.

The rest of the sales associates on the shift are settling in. They line the walls of the room alternately sitting on keyboard stools they bring in, or, like me, sit cross legged on the floor. They exchange bawdy and/or insulting badinage like old foxhole buddies

"Hey, Marco, your girlfriend‘s butt is almost as round as yours. Or is she a girl at all, or your twin brother in a dress?"

The odor of Starbucks coffee and partially digested Fettuccini Al Fredo expands to fill the stuffy manager office. As always, no shift begins without this motivational experience.

Chapter in an imaginary book entitled The Theatre of Modern Management: A classroom study in how people who must make other people miserable assuage their bad consciences with a theatre of how they are somehow more miserable. Creating synthetic empathy. Heavy hangs the butt upon the throne.

They compound the misery they afflict by insulting the intelligence of their charges. On the other hand, the charges themselves are in a pretty high end stupefaction themselves. Win/win all the way.

Exhibit A being moi. I suppose Concentration Camp administrators complained of ulcers and the pressures of their calling. Are we having a gas in Belsen yet?

I can’t figure out why so many GSI managers feel it incumbent to belch loudly, but rarely do I fail to experience it from manager to manager. Probably a projection of the whole gastric misery thing. And then there’s simply the gas in gastric.

Like some vast and noble gust passing through a mighty set of buttocks, his breath met my nostrils with the stench of three days’ vintage road killed skunk. Suddenly the Hoover vacuum of his eyes is fixed on me.

"Sweet smell of success, oh scrawny white geezer Weasel. Why don’t you sell more and give yourself a raise? Then this too could be yours."

Me? I’m just praying that he has a long and healthy life punctuated by acts of urination so increasingly excruciating that with each passage that he prays for death. I counter pray that each urination brings him greater health and longevity.

Perched at his left on a keyboard bench and directly below the Gibson pitchfork poster is his petite black haired second in command, the harlequin featured, apple breasted Raven Casaguano. She is five feet four and endowed with the heat seeking vision of a pit viper for disposable income.

Even after a year at the store, nobody is really sure what color those eyes are. None dare look too deep. On the sales floor she is a monster. Top writer. A short razor cut coif frames the acorn of her quarter century alabaster face like a gladiator’s helmet.

She’s a couple of scruples short of a morality play. An ethical vacuum cleaner, sucking up shekels. She’s great at sales.

Unstinting in her lack of generosity, she is a paragon of the salesman’s miserliness. So charming in the act of discounting one item, that one does not realize the stealth with which she has loaded the rest of the transaction with undiscounted high margin frippery.

No four thousand dollar Les Paul that she discounts by one hundred dollars leaves the store without at least three hundred dollars of "cutting edge" gizmos. She convinces the customers that they need these enhancements with the sultry tones of a porno star.

The best part is that she is telling them the truth. Said gizmos have a homogenizing effect that detracts from the unique character of the piece, the very reason why it costs so much in the first place. But let’s face it, they get what they deserve. They’re trying to compensate for a lack of practice and devotion. And they want to get in her contemptuous pants. You can not blame her for delighting the customer. It’s her job, and she does it consistently and brilliantly.

Three to six months later, many of these self defeating seekers after the perfect tone return to make another purchase of another of the newer, high end pieces that Gibson and Fender grind out with every passing year.

The previous piece trades in for about a third of what they paid, and hits the sales floor priced at double that. Since she took the piece back in, she also automatically gets twenty five per cent of its sale, regardless of who transacts it later..

Behind Raven’s brilliant theatre resides a deeper contempt for these customers than any I could dream of giving myself credit for. Somewhere along the line somebody really must have kicked her.

Somehow her personality is either blessed or cursed with an Alchemy so powerful that all that negativity serves as fuel for the dancing fire of her charming persona. One had best hold one’s breath in the presence of this awesome force, lest one roil up the fears and traumas that colluded in its formation.

Today her muscular dancer’s thighs are shrink wrapped in green, stylishly retro bell bottoms that stop short of her mid-shin. She’s topped them off with an impossibly green pair of snakeskin boots which almost match.

From the waist up, Xena, warrior princess. Neck down, a malevolent but athletic leaping Leprechaun. And so it is written many intelligent young men of Eire from ages past took refuge in the monasteries.

I’ve lost track of how many of these specimens, ripe for laboratory glass, have made a purchase of over a thousand dollars in the vague, vain hope that this interaction is the seed from which a romance might bloom.

Many of these hopefuls (how I insult the word hope) have been previous customers of mine, or have spent hours on the sales floor picking my brains and assaulting my ears with tooth rattling blues licks. At highest velocity as well, of course, because if we can find a particularly unpleasant sound, what better way to raise the bar line than to execute it by iteration and chainsaw speed?

"I’m sorry, Darius, you weren’t in, and Raven showed me the Les Paul. Before I knew it, I knew I had finally found the perfect piece. You know what I mean?"

"Sure, Frank. Finding the right instrument is part calculation, and another part pure serendipity. The stars were in alignment that day for you. I wish I had been there for you."

From the confines of his slightly undersized honey tweed jacket and grossly undersized black slacks, Frank Mazumbo squeezes a benevolent smile down at me. It oozes around his shiny gapped rat teeth.

High atop his half century two hundred thirty, five foot ten altitude, a thick black caterpillar mustache writhes beneath white hairs peeking through the caves of his narrow, ruined nostrils. A professionally short skullcap of thick Mediterranean hair matches it, a uniformly dyed black.

He is a guidance Counselor for the Board of Education. He is an ex-cocaine addict and born-again Pentecostal Christian. He is also the remnants of an adolescent impulse towards excellence. An excellence bloated beyond recognition now, but an excellence nonetheless. Any guitar in his hand is guaranteed to agonizingly yowl a carpet bombing of notes.

"How about that Raven, huh? I was surprised how well she could play guitar."

This from a man who never has anything but shrewish words for any male who shows the slightest twitches of a rapid Dorian mode. This from a man who has frightened children from the acoustic matrix with his ever triple fortissimo Classical Guitar bashings.

This in regard to our very own Raven, whose many gifts do not include that of commitment to the pursuit of rigorous musical discipline.

Step one: wait a beat. Take a moment of silence to respect the death of the truth. Give him rope.

"You know, Weasel, she’s pretty cute too."

Step two: wait another beat. See if we can squeeze a cringe out of the subject.

"You wouldn’t happen to know if she’s uh- You know-not that you can really tell me, but-"

His mustache and bushy eyebrows are waving caterpillar distress flags of hope. Somewhere in the vast Oort region of my mind, I grope for a comet sized cow patty to sling at the situation.

"Is she involved? I don’t really know. Never asked her."

Never had to. Shuddered to visualize a couple of jazzed up Wonder Woman episodes. Still looking for the cow patty.

"It never occurred to me to ask. I suspect she is in a long term relationship, but-"

"Thanks, Weasel. Hey, check out this riff."

Oh no! Anything but the new fucking riff! Too late. The moment’s passed.

"Oh. Great! Let me get you a stool.".

Customer’s still the customer. Time to buckle up and grab an air bag. Why should a jackass be a perfect idiot, when being a half wit suffices so well for him? Even the mediocre will pursue excellence and breed forgettable monstrosities from the womb of narcissism.

The path of the buffoon is an ancient and well traveled one. At least we are working with familiar territory. But if player number one is a buffoon with no awareness of being so, what does that say for character number two?

For verily, I am no stranger to half wittery. None are immune. If I’m any good, what am I doing here?

Uh oh. Rodney is staring at me. He’s asked me a question. I have no idea. Tread water.

"Me?"

"No. The two hundred pound ghost on top of your head, you half wit."

"Sorry, Rodney. I was thinking about my sales goal for today."

What was he saying? A distant echo is twittering in. Oh. Radio promo.

"Accessories is offering ten sets of strings for twenty dollars with the purchase of any fifty dollar Hiram Bulbous Bag o’ Pix."

"That was last week." He looks around the office at the other associates."Know thy promo."

A spindly pimple faced new hire with a distinct mincing lisp squeaks corporate truth. Looks like he’s barely out of grade school.

"Lubri-Grip products are fifty per cent off retail with any purchase over twenty dollars."

"There’s our next Accessories matrician. Thanks for saving the old Weezer. Now get out there and sell, boys, girls, and of course, old Barney Fife here."

It’s going to be a long slow miserable ride to close. I can feel it. Thank God for Monica! In any case, I’ve had my complementary humiliation for the nonce. Shouldn’t be due for another for at least a few hours. Time to step out for a cigarette in lieu of a violent felony. Christ, I’ve killed better men than Cracker.

I’ve barely got the pack out of my pocket and set my course for the door when I feel an ugly tickle at my peripheral vision.

Cracker’s striding purposefully towards me, his tubular locks streaming fiery points, and I hear the dreaded words,

"Hey, Weasel!"

The same words from other lips and phrased in other tones have given a world’s worth of the warm and fuzzies, but this ain’t that world, it’s cold, and decidedly unfuzzy. I guess there’s one more humiliation to come.

"What do you need, Rodney?"

The only question appropriate from peon to Sales Captain.

"Did you forget to take your Geritol today?

Ooh. I see we’re not wasting any time.

This sixteen hour day has been brutal on my feet, so far. Only four to go. They’d been killing me for the last few days, but yesterday was worse than today. I am being quick on them. What the hell’s the pointy headed wombat’s problem now?

"I guess not, Rodney. What did I miss?"

"Where’s my display?"

I give him my best George Bush face. Deer eyes wide in the headlights of his righteous wrath. "Yeah. The Lubri-Grip display!"

Oh, Boy. What a world of comic badinage lies here. If only his tone were not so urgent and serious. What is this stuff they’ve been talking about?

"I’m sorry. I’m not sure that I know what you mean."

"The Accessories Matrix needs to have a promotional display of Lubri-Grip product. They sent every GSI outlet a kit. Ours is in the warehouse. Don’t you read your email?"

Only the items I don’t auto-delete. Most if not all. But in retail, as in war, truth is naturally a speedy casualty. Therefore, I look him right in the eye and present my best enigmatic smile. A pose I learned watching Raven. My lips remain closed, but are set in perfect harlequin symmetry, two tight esses that meet at mid-nose.

By and large I have seen this facial expression on retail survivors and highly intelligent career criminals. Also Hollywood females of the thirties through fifties. Lauren Bacall, for one.

It is the mark of those for whom all life is a poker game. An unnatural smile devoid of happiness. The smile of those for whom truth is nothing more than an outcome in abeyance. A mask polished daily in the morning mirror. The perfect facial outfit for the Cracker Halloween Spectacular. A mirror for his vanities.

"Yeah. Faithfully. You know that, Rodney. When was it sent?"

"Yesterday, white boy. That’s why I need a veteran today. We had no coverage yesterday either. The rep is going to be by either today or tomorrow with the Regional Accessories Manager."

Yeah, that’s right. Yesterday you spot terminated Pepe Rodriguez an hour into the morning shift. Bastard. Non-productivity for a two year employee. Same sword you dangle over my head. One less to qualify for vesting into the company long term benefits. Payroll down sends your bonus up. You make the bed. We lie in it.

"Honestly, Rodney. I distinctly do not remember seeing any email. Did corporate send it to the Guitar Matrix group, or was it only sent to the Accessories Matrix group?"

His mouth is making that perfect circle again. He doesn’t know. But he also doesn’t know that I know he doesn’t know, so…

"Just get it done yesterday, man."

Ooh boy. Promotional displays from some new devil’s deal corporate has cut with a vendor. GSI floor space is valuable stuff indeed. The foot traffic we attract allows the pointy head suits in our Florida Corporate Offices to convince new vendors to make all kinds of concessions at a base price level if we in turn give them a Promotional Display.

Marketing people love to talk about impressions and market penetration, that is to say, views of new product on display so people will buy said new product. Logical enough.. Laudably, GSI makes the conservative claim that any product with a floor space display will be seen by at least three hundred people per day.

That’s nine thousand per month. Times one hundred eighty locations, that comes to one million six hundred twenty impressions nationwide per month. That’s nineteen million, four hundred forty thousand impressions per year that are made on a pre-screened population who are already in place to make a purchase.

This is the sort of ersatz arithmetic that marketing wonks and entrepreneurs both adore. There is nothing like a collection of numbers to reassure the chronic insecurity of those who have their jobs only by virtue of the inertial forces of consumer driven culture. But what do these numbers really mean?

A good tenth of our measured traffic is in diapers, accompanied by desperate refugees from the cheese line when it extends down the stairs and around the building on a sweltering July afternoon or a bone chilling January. Whenever the government checks hit the projects.

They need the bathrooms.

Another tenth or more is from the local high schools. With all the affection I may have for the kids, I would never include them as a marketing statistic regarding point of purchase probability. Good God, most of them cost me about five bucks a week in "borrowed" picks. Other than Christmas, their idea of a major purchase is a ninety nine dollar guitar.

They need to masturbate. Hmmm. Maybe Lubri-Grip is just the thing for them. But what is Lubri-Grip?

By now I‘m in the warehouse.

"Hey Dave! I need you to take a deep breath and not to laugh. Are you ready?"

His ebony bear like form comes out from behind a towering pallet in the SSHIT staging area. He gives me a grin so bright I could read in the dark with it.

"I take it something stupid this way comes, Weasel."

"I’m not sure, Dave. This might fall right off the stupid map and into the boundary condition between idiotic and moronic. Do you know anything about the store receiving a display for Lubri-Grip products?"

"Say what?" His fire hydrant sturdy ebony body starts to stutter out high pitched repressed giggles.

Uh Oh. Now I’m getting the giggles.

"Dave, I’m trying to be serious-"

"And failing miserably, Weasel. Let me make sure I’m getting this right. Lubri….Grip? As in lubricate to grip tight. Right?"

"Well, Dave, I’m guessing here. But I believe that’s supposed to be the idea."

"Sounds like something that could be a big item in the prison commissaries upstate."

"Dave, promotions is all over us to have this fucking display out yesterday, and now Rodney’s on my ass about it today-"

"I’m feeling inspired here, Weasel. Get promotions on the phone. How’s this? If your cellmate’s feeling loose today, send some Lubri-Grip his way."

"C’mon Dave. Rodney’s going to be working some of that stuff up my colon if I can’t at least find this god damned thing."

"Not to worry, Weasel. Uncle Dave’s got you covered. I’ve got the boxes right over here by the receiving doors. Whole warehouse crew been laughing about it since yesterday morning, just trying to figure out which was the lucky department to get some Lubri-Grip in the mail. Whatever that may be."

I look over to see five crates. Four three foot cubes and a fifth one that with a one foot square base that is six feet long. These innocent looking cardboard packages spell nightmare to my trained retail eye.

We’re going to have to build this into something. The directions will be unreadable. Something will not work. And this thing is going to be big.

I figure only one of the crates will have the merchandise itself. The rest of this is going to have to become the elusive pipe dream of some marketing wonk. One who takes much better drugs than I do. And s/he will be accordingly more the perfectionist in over perfectionism that I can possibly hope to live up to. Can’t wait for the visit from Wonks Inc.

"All right. Let’s grab the big guy first."

"That’s the light one. Don’t need to worry about your back, Papa Weasel."

"I sure do appreciate your concern for a poor tired ole geezer who never got a break from an unscrupulous industry."

"OOh. So now you going to be talking to me about your time with King Arthur?"

"Well, I go back Dave but not that far."

"Well I meant King Arthur-it-is. You old enough for that."

"Well, and now I know what my next excuse will be when you guys need to find somebody in guitars to get a couple of pallets worth of steaming acoustics dropped fresh from the corporate diaper."

"You can’t fool me. You got too much balls to turn your back on work."

"For which I compensate with insufficient brains to avoid it."

"That’s my Weasel. Say, seriously. Do you want a hand with this shit?"

"No thanks, Mom. I’ll flush it myself. So let’s find out what the fuck this Lubri-Grip is. I’ll pop open the heavy one, and check it out."

I guessed correctly. The heavy one contains the literature, product and instructions for building the display.

"Well, here it is. The wisdom of the ancients, at long last revealed!"

"And what might that be, oh great sage?"

"Lubri-Grip is the first bi-functional, all-natural, chemical product guaranteed to become a revelation to the guitarist of today, and indispensable to the guitarist of tomorrow."

"Aha! Bi-functional. I knew it was a sex thing in there somewhere."

"Dave, my good man. The dirtiest part of your body is indubitably your mind. Bi-functional only means that the product does two different kinds of things. I think. What kind of a word is that anyway?"

"A dirty word, Weasel! Now read on, and enlighten this Bronx High School dropout."

"You’re making me laugh, Dave, and that’s not helping.

"So anyway, you want me to read some more, or shall I open up the cracker jack box inside the box, and see what the prize might be."

"No, daddy. Read me more of the fairy tale from…where is this stuff from again? Hong Kong?"

"Actually, for a change, this is from Goa."

"Goa? You mean as in I’m a-Goa fishin’?"

"No. A weird little place about the size of Staten Island that’s halfway down the snout of the Indian sub-continent. Weird, because it was a tiny Portugese colony nestled in the vast English Empire there. Don’t know much about it except for the fact rich hippies liked to go there in the seventies and eighties. But India didn’t annex it until late in the game. I think the sixties or seventies."

"Maybe they got the idea for it as a denture adhesive. Lubricates the gums and grips the food? So now who’s got the dirty mind? But shouldn’t they be selling this shit at Duane Reade?"

"I don’t know, Dave. Mine is not to reason why, mine is to build this display. I’m sure I’ll have the product figured out by then."

"So what did they write the instructions in, Goaese?"

"Could be. Could be. Here’s the sheet now. Step one. Open crate and inspire for damage in transit product. If damage tubules cause product mixture will bad smell. In case of that evacuate room and well ventilate."

"I don’t like the sound of that, Weasel. I think I bad smell something just about now. Better evacuate for lunch."

"Cork it, Dave. Those are just my armpits. What I can’t figure out is why do they tell me to open something that I already had to open in order to read?"

"Maybe they do things different over there in Goa fishing. Maybe you were never supposed to open the box in the first place. Maybe tubules dangerously tubulate and reproduce."

"Tell that to Cracker and the corporate henchmen he’s toadying for.

"Anyway, step 2. Examine parts bag for flanges and nuts. Must be at least twelve and half.

"What the hell is half a nut?"

"All you’re going to have when Rodney gets through with you."

"Oh fuck this. I’m opening everything up and just improvise."

"How much you want to bet that’s what they were trying to tell you in the instructions in the first place?"

"It’s how I’ve always did it before. Famous last words. The only thing that bothers me is that funny smell business. Something can’t get mixed, and it ain’t half a flange."

I’ve opened all the boxes by now and am trying to get a long shot. The three other crates open to expose solid Styrofoam molding, like that used to shop pro audio stuff. They’re shimmering off the usual plastic high vapor pressure perfume. I lift one out and detach the molded packing. It is a frosted white glass sphere bearing the word Lubri. What a surprise. I hold it up.

"What do you think the other one is going to read, Dave?"

"Cate?"

"Don‘t you go talking about Rodney‘s sister, Katherine, like that, friend."

The other crate reveals a corresponding white sphere festooned with Grip!. I open up the third one and it contains a purple hemisphere. Naturally the lone box contains a six foot plexiglass tube. Dave and I look at the parts and burst into laughter.

"They’ve got to be kidding me. They want me to put a six foot plexiglass dick in the middle of the accessories floor?"

"It’s not a dick, Weasel, it’s a corporate sponsored display that your dirty mind says looks like a dick.

"Just because it’s for something called Lubri-Grip, does not mean you have to build a six foot dick today. It‘s a tubular installation. That‘s all." Tears are rolling down his eyes, and he’s doubling over into an ebony sphere himself.

"Dave, I thought I was taking your side here. Hey, check this out, there’s a long and winding three inch wide purple stripe running up the shaft. Remind you of anything?"

"Look on the bright side, Weasel, at least it’s white and not black."

"Now’s something for the Fear of the Black Dick file folder."

"Hey, yeah. Do I detect a hint of racism here? How can there not be a black dick in this porno-rama?"

"I can‘t find the sense in it Captain. But, I can‘t understand how a lubricant is supposed to grip."

"Sounds like sand in the Vaseline to me, Weeze."

By now I’m rooting through the final box. A ream sized packet of glossy paper literature slithers through my fingers, each sheet oily to the touch.

"Damn it, Dave! Why do they always fail to wrap this garbage in something?"

"Never say always, Weasel. Keep yourself down to one hundred one percent of the time."

Call it whatever, but I’m on my hands and knees scrabbling for the last of the eight by ten product blurbs.

I see we’ll be selling them in a two tubule blister pack. A glossy photo takes up half the blurb. Something tells me Raven will be selling a lot of these to her crew of the wretchedly middle aged male.

Whoa! These bad boys retail for a hundred and we’ll be doing them for sixty five. And this weekend they’re special at fifty. Cost, a dollar. There’s a mark-up one can live with. You can practically make money paying the customer to leave with them.

I’m thanking God that the piece does not require electricity. I can only imagine possible interior lights on this monstrosity. I don’t even bother looking at the directions to put it together. It’s pretty obvious from here.

The rack for the literature hangs on a hole in the shaft about five feet above floor level. The spheres hook into holes at the bottom. The products themselves have racks that hang six inches below the literature to the right and left.

I step back to look at my handiwork, and imagine this structure being erected in GSI outlets across our fair land.

"Dave, what do you think? Should I take it apart and re-assemble it on the sales floor?"

"Would Michelangelo repaint the Sistine Chapel?"

"I take it that you are volunteering to assist me in delivering this national treasure?"

"What better job for an American black man than to assist his white brother in the act of transporting his oversized artificial penis?"

"Ouch, Dave. If I didn’t know you loved me like a brother, I’d say that could be interpreted as a hate remark."

"We’ll be an American icon, Pops. Bad taste in an ebony and ivory sandwich."

"You’ve been working with me too long, Dave. We should do stand-up together."

"Well, one thing about any act involving a black man and a white man together-"

"Okay, what’s that, Dave?"

"We won’t have to worry about the act not being able to get arrested."

"Sad, but true. Anyway, you ready for the six footer’s triumphant entry?"

"You mean through the lips of the warehouse into the walls of the sales floor?"

"Those very ones indeed."

With no further ado, we lift the hideous marketing device and wrestle it through the doors.

Every now and then the gods of timing favor even the misbegotten. We chose the very moment the Lubri-Grip rep walked through the doors to totter in with his company’s precious creation. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Rodney in mid handshake with the pin stripe suited, attache case tormented, bald pudgy guy at the door pavilion. I knew it was him because his case had Lubri-Grip written in bold ugly letters. He was delighted.

"I heard something that sounded like "This is the best I’ve seen from any GSI location I’ve visited. How did you know? You guys are the best. I can‘t wait to tell your promo guys. Truly brilliant."

It really did look like we planned it that way. Rodney even replaced his customary labial O with a perfect straight line of a smile. I could almost swear I heard it creak.

They went out for a long lunch. When Rodney came back two hours later, he was practically cross-eyed hammered. In the meantime I’d been adding Lubri-Grip onto almost every string purchase that hit my counter. I used a chop that wasn’t really a very big whopper of a lie.

"Well,you’ve been asking me about how I get that smooth tone out of every instrument I pick up from the wall. The secret’s out. I used to buy this stuff mail order. Now it‘s everybody‘s. And it‘s at a special introductory price. Only fifty bucks."

I figure there’s no harm in trying to capitalize on the Terminator’s good mood and possible vulnerable hammered state. At five I ask Rodney if I can leave early, hoping to escape the interminable clean and close under the eagle eyes of the perfectionist Raven.

He looks back at me through his raccoon socketed bloodshot eyes.

"You’re kidding, right?"

"Not really, I’ve got something personal I need to attend to."

"Well, you should have been. No way in hell, old man."

Oh well. What can you expect from a drunk lesbian keyboard playing god who learly loathes white male guitar players? And for that matter, I don’t exactly hold the species in very high esteem either. But there’s always Monica!

Crawling to the end of my day, I work the last half hour like a snail wending its terrified way across a salted razor blade. Every step forward a slow pump of a suicidal heart or a brutalized liver teetering on cancer. Thank God for Monica!

TO BE CONTINUED…..