Processed cheese, p.9
Processed Cheese, page 9
“I’d tap that,” said LimitedEdition.
“She’s already spoken for,” said Graveyard. “Devil’s already got her under his management. Look, here he comes now.”
Some skinny half-naked guy painted candy-apple red and wearing horns and batwings and a rubber tail flew up out of the pit, seized the popster in his long shredded arms, and dragged her, still warbling, down into his infernal throne room, where she was crowned queen of the underworld as all the denizens of hell broke out into a mad, krumpin’ frenzy.
“How ridiculous,” said LimitedEdition.
“It’s supposed to be ridiculous,” said Graveyard. “You remember it better.”
“Who’s gonna forget that body?” said PocketPool.
“I’ve seen better,” said LimitedEdition.
“Yeah, where?”
“At work.”
“Oh, yeah, who?” said Graveyard. He wondered if he’d known anybody LimitedEdition was talking about during his brief stint at StandUpAndCheer.
“Well, LoadedDice for one. Once she even got a personal wardrobe warning from NoWaivers himself.”
“What’d she look like?”
“Stacked, packed, and whacked. She eventually got fired for putting xenofoam into the break-room coffeepot.”
“Never met her.”
“And PrivateIssue, down in Disinformation and Insecurities. She had half the entire Human Capital team. I mean, she literally had them.”
“You actually make the corporate life sound busy and fun.”
“Yeah, well, what do I know?”
“How’s that Resolve of yours?”
“Oh, good. Real good, as a matter of fact. You know her, she’s always good.” He paused. He paused again. “I think we might be coming apart,” he said. The line just popped out. On its own. Big surprise for both him and his friends.
“Oh, shit,” said PocketPool.
“You can’t come apart,” said Graveyard. “You’re a team.”
“How do you know you’re coming apart?” said PocketPool.
“Her girlfriends look at me funny,” said LimitedEdition.
“Uh-oh,” said Graveyard.
“It’s never anything terribly overt. More like I’ve got some terrible disease and they’re sorry, but they can’t do anything about it. Sometimes I feel like I’m being attended to by nurses. Nurses who’re studying me for further symptoms.”
“So how’d you come to be the patient in all this?”
“Beats me. If you ever get a good read on Resolve, let me know, cause you’d be a better detective than I am. I think this was probably a long time coming, but you know how she is. What’s the message? What’s the static? I can’t tell the difference anymore. I’m too this, I’m too that. I talk too much, I’m too quiet. I’m too close, I’m too far away. I make strange birdlike noises when I eat. Hyenalike barks when I come. I don’t make enough money.”
“Sounds pretty much like your normal relationship to me,” said PocketPool.
“And just in the last month, she’s begun developing allergies to things I’ve never even heard of.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Castaway seeds and bitterheart and crisscross grain. And, oh, yeah, yobodia. Apparently that’s something really bad found in all gingum flour.”
“Sunchokes and adzuki beans,” said Graveyard.
“I’d hate to have to give up gingum cookies for life,” said PocketPool.
“She’s making her own meals now. Separate from mine.”
“Maybe she just needs a brief vacay or something,” said PocketPool.
LimitedEdition waited a moment, then he said, “I think she might be seeing someone else.”
“Here we go,” said Graveyard.
“What makes you think that?” said PocketPool.
“She goes out at night. She doesn’t get back till dawn. She’s all ellipsised up. She won’t tell me where she’s been.”
“Okay,” said Graveyard, “but what else? Where’s the smoking gun?”
“It’s not funny.”
“I know it’s not. Sorry.”
“I keep waiting for that ‘we have to talk’ moment.”
“Maybe she took on another job without telling you,” said PocketPool.
“Yeah. The horizontal kind.”
“I think we need more drinks,” said Graveyard. He called over Q. He decided they required an urgent upgrade in alcohol percentage. A round of Brainpoppers. Hold the Tabasco.
“Sorry, guys,” said LimitedEdition. “I didn’t mean to dump all this crap on you two. I don’t know what happened.”
“Who else you gonna dump it on?” said Graveyard.
“You’ve got problems of your own.”
“Not as bad as yours,” said PocketPool.
“Thanks,” said LimitedEdition.
They sat in silence for a while. No one knew what to say. Graveyard was thinking about Ambience. Where she was. What she was doing.
“Sorry,” LimitedEdition said again.
“Forget it,” said Graveyard.
“Make her jealous,” said PocketPool. “Your time to party.”
“Does that work?”
“Who knows? But at least you’ll be getting some fun out of this mess.”
“I don’t know anyone who’s getting any fun out of anything.”
Next thing Graveyard knew he was staring out the front window and gradually realizing it was getting dark outside. What? How’d that happen?
“What time is it?” he said.
“I don’t wear a watch on the weekend,” said LimitedEdition. “This is when I pretend I don’t work for a living.” PocketPool never wore a watch.
Graveyard caught Q on her way by. She wasn’t wearing a watch, either. She didn’t like to be reminded how slowly time was passing on this shitty scumbag job of hers. Thanks, Q.
“Well, no matter what the time is,” said Graveyard, “I think I’ve got to be shoving off.”
“You know what she wanted?” said LimitedEdition. “What she’s always wanted real bad? A pair of those Lance&Fester shoes. I always said they were too expensive. If only I’d gotten her those shoes, maybe none of this would be happening.”
“How much are they?” said Graveyard, reaching into his pocket.
“I don’t know. A lot. Five hundred or so.”
Graveyard counted it off the roll in his hand. He passed the bills over to LimitedEdition. “Pick her up a pair on your way home.”
“I couldn’t.” He tried handing the money back.
“Yes, you can.” Graveyard pushed the bills away.
LimitedEdition looked at the new green notes in his hand. Then he folded them and put them in his pocket. “Thank you,” he said.
Graveyard turned to PocketPool. “That boyfriend of yours need anything?” he said. “Before he leaves?”
PocketPool was an alternating-current kind of dater. He’d take up with a woman for a while and whenever that ended he’d find himself with a man until he left and it was back to a woman. He was obviously looking for something. He didn’t know what it was. At the moment he was on the male half of the cycle.
PocketPool looked at the money in Graveyard’s hand. “We’re good,” he said.
“Have a party favor anyway.” Graveyard crumpled up a few bills, stuffed them into PocketPool’s shirt pocket. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m afraid, gentlemen, that I must now take my leave. Got to get back to the hacienda to prepare for the evening’s repast.”
“And what do rich bastards like you eat, anyway?” said PocketPool.
“What all rich bastards eat: barbecued angel wings and unicorn steaks.”
He gave a mock salute and he was gone.
Out on the street he suddenly remembered. I bought a brand new car today. Amaranth and watermelon, he said to himself. Hard to believe that monstrous contraption parked halfway up the next block was actually his. He coulda bragged about it to the guys. Given them an up-close view of what an exceptional’s ride looks like. But then he realized he hadn’t really wanted to show off before his friends. He hadn’t wanted to feel what they’d be feeling when they salivated over the priceless machinery. He hadn’t wanted to feel what he’d be feeling watching them. He popped the locks with the remote and got in behind the wheel. That heady new-car smell. Leather and money. He drove the dozen blocks home with studied care, worrying the whole time about getting even a single scratch on the car before Ambience could take a look. He wanted her to get the full, unadulterated impact. Then, miracle of miracles, there, before his disbelieving eyes, was an empty space right in front of his brownstone. He didn’t know how much more parking luck he could stand in one day. He carefully maneuvered the massive vehicle into the spot (a smooth, easy fit), raced up the stairs, calling for Ambience as he rushed through the door. She was in the bedroom, trying on jewelry before the mirror.
“Where the hell have you been?” she said.
Graveyard grabbed her hand. “Don’t say another word. Just come with me.” He hurriedly dragged her down the stairs and out the door and posed her in front of the new car.
“What?” she said in blinking disbelief. “You bought that?”
He nodded.
“You bought that.”
He nodded again.
“We own that?”
“Incredible, isn’t it?”
“It’s a HomoDebonaire.”
“The HomoDebonaire3000. Top of the line. Runs on sunshine and fresh breezes. It’s greenly green.”
“No,” she said. “No.” She walked around, examining the bright, shiny thing in an apparent daze. “I never thought I’d own a car this expensive, this nice, in my entire life.”
“Well, now you do.”
“Can we go for a ride?”
“Certainly.” He stepped forward, opened the passenger-side door for her. “After you, miss. Step into the Homo, please.”
They took the LookyLou Drive up along the ReadyToWear River, over the Conundrum Bridge, and in half an hour they were out of the city. The normal, ludicrously heavy traffic seemed to move aside at their approach.
“Didn’t this insane purchase take quite a hefty chunk out of our assets?”
“You’d think.”
“Why I asked.”
“But no matter how much I take out of the bag, the amount left behind in the bag seems to remain pretty much the same.”
“Like in a fairy tale?”
“Exactly.”
“How is that possible?”
“Maybe this is a fairy tale. A real fairy tale.”
“As opposed to a made-up fairy tale?”
“You need to get with the program, Ambience.”
“I am with the program. I just don’t know why.”
“Give me a kiss.”
“You’re driving.”
“A kiss so deep I might even lose control of the car.”
She leaned over and planted a major tongue sucker right on him. The car swerved to the left. The car swerved to the right. It settled back into its proper lane. Everything about the moment was thrillingly otherworldly. After it was over, they pretended as if nothing had happened.
“At least the traffic’s not too bad,” said Ambience.
“They knew we were coming. They cleared out.”
“I can’t even hear the engine.”
“Acoustical baffling. Standard issue on this model.”
“And the ride. So smooth. If you didn’t look out the window, you wouldn’t even know we were moving.”
“Mattress-quality engineering. Standard issue on this model.”
“Well, whatever the standard issue is, the whole experience is making me standardly horny.”
“There’s plenty of motels around here. Look, there’s a Highway Hideaway, and on the right a Bogus Inn. Vacancies at both.”
“I’m not talking about motels, you simp, I’m talking about the car. Fucking in the fucking car.”
He pulled off the interstate at the first opportunity. The Governor RoundAbout Memorial Rest Area. Parked in the shadows, away from the all-illuminating sodium vapor lights. They climbed into the spacious leather back seat and went to work. This time there was more oral than there had ever been before. And Graveyard felt he could do what he was doing for hours, or so he liked to imagine.
“What’s that?” Ambience said, squirming around on the tip of his tongue.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Invented the move just this instant.”
“Me like,” she said. “Keep doing that.”
So he did.
She tasted like something primeval, something you kept tasting and tasting yet still couldn’t quite get.
“You know what’s wrong with the world?” she said. “I just realized.”
“Tell me,” said Graveyard, trying to keep up.
“Pleasure,” she said in a strange voice, half groan, half grunt. She was obviously somewhere far beyond the stupid rational world. “Pleasure deficits…all of us…too damn many.” She got quiet. Then she said, “Could you do that thing you just did?”
“I don’t know what I just did.”
“Let me help you remember.” She shifted her hips.
“It’s coming back to me.” He felt that right now, in this momentary moment, he was making up for years of deficits.
“Could you go a bit lower, please?”
He went lower.
“Little to the right.”
He went right.
“There,” she said. “Now, don’t stop. Please, don’t stop.”
Okay by Graveyard. He wanted to go and go and go until he was spent.
Chapter 9
The Art of the Fuck
On the eleventh floor of the sleekly styled BigPointyBuilding, in midtown, was located the beating heart of the NationalProcedures organization, an officeless open space divided into more than a hundred cubicles, each occupied by a bonded Gatekeeper whose job it was to bring into the company as much asset as possible during every 24-7 work cycle. The floor was known within the company—and throughout the industry, for that matter—as the Comb. Where the worker bees deposited and stored the honey. Score was kept by means of a stadium-size electronic board mounted to the wall at the front end of the floor. Each employee’s position in the hive could be read at a glance by anyone who cared to look.
At the moment Gatekeeper 65, in row K, cubicle 8, was listed at number 47 on the company’s flickering box card—not too horrible, not too great. UnauthorizedReproduction’s personal goal for the day was to close at 40, a level he had come tantalizingly near but never quite attained before. The most important part of the job, he’d learned quickly enough, both professionally and personally, lay in eavesdropping on conversations in nearby cubicles and the treasure trove of the break room and turning the overheard data to lucrative advantage for himself and the company. He’d scored big today, overhearing a convo in cubicle 10 relating to significant updrafts at MurmurLow, one of NationalProcedures’ major competitors. So he punched in a handful of letters and numbers and made the company two million dollars justlikethat.
But the best advantage to pilfering personals on his colleagues, both professionally and personally—though at this point, what was the difference?—lay in discovering who was fucking whom, the company’s most sensitive intel. What he knew so far: MisterMenu was fucking both NeedlePliers and DelicateSear and many more employees than anyone could keep accurate track of, including TearDrop, who was fucking BlisterPac, who of course was also fucking DelicateSear, who was also fucking EmeryBoard, who was fucking TrollFarm, who was fucking CapsaicinPod, who was fucking SlapHappy, and DigitalSignage, who was fucking…and on and on (you get the drift), so the sugar noogies were passed ever and steadily downward, sweetening the firm from top to bottom. Of course, there was always a sourpuss or two who didn’t enjoy the same candy the others did, and these people would try to get their gummies wherever they could. Outcome: not good.
Occasionally MisterMenu himself made an appearance on the floor. He’d stand at the front of the room, engage in a brief face-to-face with SpringLoaded, the Comb’s floor pimp, let his eyes roam unseeingly over the roomful of bad-postured employees, then depart. And sometimes, after one of these cursory check-ins, a female Gatekeeper would casually rise and exit, as discreetly as possible, by the same door. Rumor had it that MisterMenu maintained a capacious boudoir off his executive suite, which got significant play. UnauthorizedReproduction didn’t know whether to believe the rumor or not. MisterMenu had to be smarter than that. Or did he? Nevertheless, UnauthorizedReproduction kept watch. And, based on his careful scrutinies, he couldn’t help but fantasize about fucking his own way to the top. And why not? He’d seen the movies, too. Of course the preferred lead of those pictures was almost always a woman. But why couldn’t a guy successfully crawl over a few willing female execs? Maybe he could if he were as gorgeous, well built, and all-around studly as PumiceStone or CordialLips and had a slick screenwriter draft the script for him. So in his mind that’s what he was. And when that particular scenario had been brought to a satisfying conclusion he’d dissolve into the next long-running feature: Doughnuts to Dollars, in which he, UnauthorizedReproduction, played this time by CocktailRepartee, seduces TearDrop, played, of course, by the irrepressible PageTurner, and, in a memorable scene of hilariously staged pillow talk, learns that the all-time favorite doughnut of MisterMenu, impeccably impersonated by the ever-fluid KingClover, is the GlazedLumbarCluster, available only on Tuesdays until product runs out from the CrustToneBakery in Chyron Heights. Next Tuesday the image of Unauthorized gets up at dawn, makes the hurried trek to the Heights, buys a box of a dozen Clusters, and, back at a reasonable facsimile of the BigPointyBuilding, stations himself in the stage-set lobby until KingClover arrives, then boldly fast-talks his way into a convincing connection with the great man, who, naturally, invites him up into the executive aerie, where, after a bit of comical business with the farcical staff, installs him as prime doughnut procurer for the entire corporation at a thousandfold increase in salary. Maybe he marries the boss’s daughter, NoDeposit; maybe he doesn’t. What does it matter? Curious how much of his on-the-clock was consumed by these absurd brain flicks, which, transformed into the prevailing script format of the day, would simply expire unnoticed because of funding deprivation in the ward for terminal long shots. He had already been briefly cast in a real movie in the real world (he’d fucked the casting director’s assistant in high school) as an underpaid, defeated peon in a national epic of consuming self-love, unglued greed, and emotional slaughter entitled Fat Chance in a Slim Boat.
