I have been writing something for a while now. Here are the first 9 pages of it:
Mr.
Cruxton’s suit was doing its best to keep him from expanding. It appeared that
for the moment a truce, albeit a tenuous one, had been reached between suit and
skin and so the leather belt and ivory buttons had nothing to
worry about. The suit itself was a nice single-breast, professional charcoal
gray, tailored and obviously expensive, but you could guess that it had looked
better on a mannequin or a fashion magazine or wherever Cruxton had first seen
it and decided that it would look that good on him as well. Fat and skin spilled
out from Cruxton’s starched collar, folding over itself again and again, much
like the way little boys and girls draw curly hair on stick figures.
Once Shred took
his eyes off of Cruxton’s chins they soon went to Cruxton’s stomach, which gave
Cruxton the strange appearance of being pregnant, though Shred highly doubted,
and actually hoped, this wasn’t the case. He really wasn’t a pleasant man to
look at.
Mr. Cruxton
had introduced himself as Mr. Cruxton to Shred, which seemed a bit odd since
Shred had never met anyone named Mister, but Shred had taken it well and shaken
Cruxton’s hand and looked him square in the eyes and not the chins or the baby-belly
and called him Mr. Cruxton and said how much of pleasure it was to be here and
how excited he was about the opportunity and then he sat down in the leather
chair across from Cruxton, whose first name he didn’t know and never would.
It was closing
in on 105 degrees outside. Inside Cruxton’s office, the temperature dropped to
somewhere close to 50 thanks to the ceiling fan, two a/c units on full blast
and one surprisingly quiet miniature desk fan. All the sweat that Shred had
accumulated on his walk from the parking lot to the entrance was now freezing
to his body, making it difficult for him to focus on anything other than trying
to not shiver uncontrollably. As he tried to hide the seizure his body so
desperately wanted to have, Shred wasn’t quite sure why all the leaders of
business hadn’t gotten together somewhere and agreed that suits didn’t fool
anybody anymore and they were no longer needed because then they could hold a
big fundraiser and auction off their thousand-dollar ties and gold cuff-links
and donate all the proceeds to cancer research and maybe that donation would be
the break-through and hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved. It was a
bit of a reach, Shred realized, to imply that by unofficially pressuring its
employees to dress formally the business world was partially responsible for
deaths caused by cancer. But he was cold and more than willing to make that
reach.
-“I bet you hear you look exactly
like your old man all the time, don’t you?” Cruxton asked.
You’re the
first to point that out, actually. Only fuckwits who don’t have much to say but
desperately want to say something would point out that I bear a striking
resemblance to the man whose DNA created me, and you sir, especially given how well
you’re dressed, can’t be a fuckwit. No way. You wouldn’t watch a football game
and say something like “well, there’s still a lot of football left to be
played,” after the first quarter ended, as if everyone else watching had no
idea that the game didn’t end after the first fifteen minutes. I used to sit
next to this girl in lecture, Cassie; her tits were about as big as yours. Anyways,
one time after lecture was over Cassie and I were hanging outside of class and
one of Cassie’s friends came over and asked Cassie if she knew anything about
pregnancy and Cassie said she knew a little bit and then her friend asked, “do
you know if your baby can get pregnant if you like, have sex while you are like
pregnant?” It’s an amazing question, partly because Cassie’s friend seemed so
damn genuine and didn’t even look pregnant herself. Your question made me think
of that. Does that answer your question?
-“Once or twice,” Shred said.
“Better him than my mother, right?”
The
line got the desired laugh from Cruxton, whose neck reverberated with each
chortle. All Shred could think about was a bowl of Jell-O in unsteady hands.
-“I remember when your father
looked like you do now. Us dinosaurs were both your age once, believe it or not.
Long time ago that was, of course. Long time.
It’s funny. Just the other day my oldest grandkid, he comes up to me and he
said “grandpa, how big were iPods when you were young?” What do you say to
that?”
Shred
laughed, then smiled for what he guessed was an appropriate amount of time.
Then there was a silence and Shred wasn’t sure exactly he was supposed to fill
it with, so he didn’t. Maybe Cruxton was forming a solution in his head of how
to stop babies from becoming pregnant.
The silence
lasted long enough that it became audible. Cruxton suddenly looked at Shred’s
résumé much like you would a new dinner menu, his eyes up and down, up and
down, moving too fast to actually be reading anything but moving nonetheless to
give the appearance of close scrutiny and in the hopes of finding something
worth latching on to.
-“Business major, huh? What made
you choose that?”
Call it the
lesser of twenty evils. I didn’t want to be a male nurse for obvious reasons,
and I didn’t want to be involved in anything that required more school after
all the school I’d already taken. I didn’t want to teach because I didn’t want
to become like any of my teachers. And the rest just didn’t sound interesting. Even
business didn’t sound interesting, it just sounded the most impressive, and
when I told everyone that’s what I wanted to study they all seemed impressed,
or at least impressed enough to nod and not ask me why I was majoring in
business. As it turned out, the only thing that made studying business mildly
worthwhile was Cassie, and that’s because she had a phenomenal rack and wore
colorful tank-tops to class.
-“Well, I’ve always had a passion
for business. As you know, that’s the route my Dad chose, and uh, growing up
and watching him in his work and having discussions about it around the dinner
table, it’s just something I’ve known that I wanted to be involved with,
something I’ve had a passion for, something I know I could be great at.”
The
recital had officially begun, though officially, the recital was an interview. Cruxton
nodded at all of this approvingly.
-“And so Shred, tell me a little
bit about what you’re doing now.”
You mean
besides sitting in this fucking icebox, gradually acquiring frostbite? I’m a
bartender, just like it says on my résumé, but you’re asking because you just
want to hear me say it out loud so you can feel like you’re doing me a favor by
sitting here and talking to me and offering me a life-line to the real world;
hearing me say it makes you feel better that you’ve never been a bartender and
will never have to be one and your son who’s my age is a banker and not a
bartender and neither is your wife or your other son, who oddly enough, looks
like you too. Has anyone ever told you that?
-“Well, I’m uh, currently a bartender
and manager at a place down on fifth called The Alamo. It’s uh--”
-“The Alamo? Like the real one down
in San Antone?”
That’s my
favorite thing about you, Mr. Cruxton. You’re always good for an incisive
comment or two. Yes. The bar I work at is exactly like the Alamo in “San
Antone.” In fact, we exhumed a few of the bodies from the “real one down in San
Antone” and have them displayed on the walls in glass cases so people can feast
their eyes on a few corpses as they drink and we even have a sign out front
that says “No Mexicans Allowed” – our funny little way of combining tragic
history with a little bit of humor. And in the back we sell t-shirts that say
“I got so drunk last night I didn’t remember the Alamo” and then after
everyone’s clocked out and the bar’s cleaned and locked, we all go outside to
our cars and drive down the “real one in San Antone” and piss on the graves of
the men we haven’t dug up yet just to finish the job.
-“No, not really. Just the same
name I guess. Owner’s born and raised here. Just a big fan of Texas apparently,
or at least the Texas spirit.”
-“Do you like it? The job, I mean?” Cruxton
asked.
-“It’s not a dream job, by any
means. But it’s a way to pay the bills. The silver lining, you could say, is
that it constantly reminds of what I don’t want to be doing.”
-“Right,” Cruxton said as he gave
Shred’s résumé another once over. “So what exactly do you want to be doing?”
I want to
be anywhere but here, doing anything but this. Maybe start off somewhere in the
south of France, Toulouse sounds nice but then again so does Montpellier, and
then perhaps gradually drift down across the Pyrenees into Barcelona and stay
somewhere quiet along the coast and disappear for a few years and learn Spanish
just to see what may come. Dublin also comes to mind and I’m not exactly sure
why. I’ve always imagined it cold and green, which both sound appealing. But
the truth is I don’t know what I want, no matter how many people ask me. I have
an idea – different sounds and pictures and sensations, really – but it’s still
murky, and so the best answer I can give is that I just want to go somewhere
nice and be still enough to let everything settle.
-“Professionally, I’d like to start
a career. I want to be challenged. I want to have room for growth. I want to
learn. I want to gain experience--”
On
Cruxton’s desk was a black phone that was the same phone you’d find in every
office in the city. It had plenty of LED lights and gray buttons and it was all
plastic and it fit perfectly with the rest of the office because the rest of
the office was full of everything you expected to see in an office and
absolutely nothing you wouldn’t. The wall was a smattering of diplomas and
certificates and newspaper clippings and a few photos of Cruxton with important
looking people but strangely not one photo of his family, unless his family was
comprised of old men in suits who liked to shake hands.
Anyways,
the black phone started to ring and Cruxton answered it, but didn’t say much
other than uh-huh and of-course. You could tell he wanted to say more, but each
time he was about to he’d look up at Shred and remember that he wasn’t alone
and so he’d pause and swallow whatever he had been about to say.
There’s
only so much one can uh-huh and of-course at and soon Cruxton hung up the phone
and squinted at Shred, trying to remember if he’d said anything revealing or
anything he wasn’t supposed to, but evidently felt satisfied because soon his
eyes un-squinted and settled back on the sheet of paper that told the story of
Shred’s life with important words like generated
and customer-service representative.
From the
front pocket on his dress-shirt, Cruxton produced a pen and uncapped it and
scribbled something down. What exactly, Shred couldn’t tell, because Cruxton
guarded it like a student who doesn’t let others cheat off of him. When he was
done writing, Cruxton took the paper and put in one of the drawers of his desk
and then put the pen back in the same pocket.
-“Sorry about that,” Cruxton said.
No you’re
not.
-“I told
Jessica to hold all my calls but that was, uh--.” Cruxton stopped himself.
“Anyways. Where were we, again?”
We were
wading through this thing, one predictable question at a time, though we hadn’t
yet reached the proverbial deep-end where you ask me how I see myself fitting
in and what I think I could bring to the table here.
-“I was telling you about what I
want to do.”
-“Yes, yes. Of course. I remember,
now. Experience, right?”
-“Right.”
-“Experience,” Cruxton said again,
as if the word meant something different this time around, but then he couldn’t
find anything to follow it up with and the office became so quiet you could
hear the air-conditioning unit.
As
Cruxton thought about what to say next, Shred thought about what he actually
wanted to do. The bar had given and taken plenty in the little more than a year
he’d been there. There would always be reasons to leave -- the weird hours, the
shifts where he hadn’t made enough to pay for a tank of gas, the demeaning
feeling somewhere in his core when he cleaned glasses or poured drinks for
certain people -– but then there were the nights where he’d make $700 and the
stress and the repetition and the backwards hours and the stasis and the shame
and the non-tippers were all worth it and he’d almost feel guilty about how
much money he’d made in one night. Almost. Last Friday had been one of those
$700 nights, a little more actually, but Shred was still here, still wearing
the suit he hadn’t put on since graduation, answering fake questions with fake
answers. He looked around the office but more so at Cruxton who was still lost
and wondered if this really was progress or something else.
Perhaps
making way for what he’d just thought of, Cruxton cleared his throat.
-“Shred. I’m not going to waste any
of our time, here. There’s an opening and even though you’re not as uh, qualified as some of the other
applicants, I know the type of man your father raised you to be, and I know the
asset you’d be here. And while I can’t put this on paper, I can almost assure
you that if you do what you’re supposed to around here, if you work hard I’d
guarantee that by the time you’re thirty, thirty-five, you’d be an account
manager, and you’d never have to worry about money again. How does that sound?”
