Читать книгу Wake Up and Smell The Beer - Jon Longhi - Страница 8

Last Laugh Distribution, an alternative book and magazine distributor, had been in business since the '60s, and I worked there as a phone salesman. This madhouse was owned and run by an old hippie named Thor Tinker who bore more than a passing resemblance to the mythical thunder god. He was kind of an uneven cross between Father Time and Mr. Natural, with moods that could go from gentleness to fury faster than a Trans Am goes from zero to sixty. On the whole, though, he was a pretty nice guy. I liked my job even though it drove me insane. Lots of pressure, and I ate stress like beat cops down donuts. Some days when the phones were really ringing I might as well have been a broker on Wall Street. I started working at Last Laugh when I was twenty-five. After two weeks there, I said to myself, “If I keep this job, I'll be dead of a heart attack by the time I'm thirty.” Well, I was still working there and I had just turned thirty-two.

Sam Silent was this really cool poet/slacker/intellectual guy I hung out with. I met him through the local SF writing scene (we called it Poetryland) and back when he was at a real low point financially I got him a job at Last Laugh. He also worked as a phone salesman. A strange job for someone whose last name was Silent. Sam was a natural conversationalist. Tremendous sense of humor. A mind like an encyclopedia of dirty jokes. He had a story for every occasion. Sam was 24 and enjoying life as one in their early twenties should. It was his constant banter and steady stream of weird jokes emanating from the desk behind me that kept the boredom and stress from driving me to tantrums.

One day I was taking a break. On the job, I was a high pressure hard sell, a compulsive personality who drank massive amounts of coffee and yakked my fool head off to clients all day. Into the receiver I spewed a nonstop stream of consciousness monologue that described some of the most perverse rags the world of publishing had to offer. Last Laugh sold a motley assortment of underground comics, literature, pulp fiction, punk rock magazines, drug manuals, and kinky sex journals. What paid the bills was the porno we moved, or as we liked to refer to it, the smut. In a lot of this smut stuff the only thing people were wearing was the staples. In a perverse way, I was proud of being a smut peddler and thought nothing of wearing the First Amendment like a fig leaf. I figured that was what it was there for.

The company didn't have anything as traditional as a receptionist so it was also my job to answer the phone. I picked up the receiver hundreds of times each shift saying, “Hello, Last Laugh.” I said it so often that when I was home I would answer my own phone, “Hello, Last Laugh.” Sometimes I just said, “Laugh.” Whenever Thor yelled at me though, the greeting became “House of Mud” or “Solvent Tank.” When I was in a really bad mood I would answer the phone by saying, “This is Hell and I'm just the janitor.”

My desk was piled high with dog-eared pulp novels, stacks of comic books, skin mags, rubber fetish catalogs like Latex Priest Quarterly, smut comics with titles like Insect Sex, Buns and Hotdogs and Horny Anus, and body piercing manuals including Holey Hole and Full Metal Genitalia. There were also tomes of great literature from Homer to Burroughs in the mess, classics mixed in with the trash, Pulitzer Prize winners, and true science exposés like Incredibly Strange Genitals and The Man Who Was Born Without A Head. There seemed to be a magazine for almost every subculture and mania, we even had a title called Cannibal Monthly. Fourfoot-high stacks of these and other books surrounded me on the desk like castle walls I could duck down and hide behind. Outside of this printed perimeter the mail order girls swarmed, cute new wave chicks Thor had hired to cop cheap feels from.

And skulking through that chaos of activity was Crate, the man who mailed out dope books. Crate was his legal name. He had it changed from Sidney Francis. Just Crate. No first or last name. Just Crate. When he first told me I didn't believe him, until Crate showed me his driver's license. Sure enough, there it was printed in the holographic plastic of the state, just Crate.

He was an evil little man who mailed out books on how to grow marijuana, necessary information during the Drug War years. It wasn't that he was evil in his soul, Crate just hated everybody. His coworkers got on his nerves and would send him into such a state that he'd freak out screaming and break their coffee cups or hide their radios in a locked drawer. After these outbursts, Crate would suddenly change his hours to strange nocturnal shifts like 2 in the morning to 10 a.m. It's like his senses were hyper-aware, every little thing got on Crate's nerves. Left alone in a white room with a single housefly he'd either kill himself or punch through the walls. The room would darken when he entered, conversations would stop. Crate carried his bad attitude around with him like a perpetual case of B.O.

Thor told people that Crate's problems had started when a car hit him and a six-inch chunk of bone got knocked out of his leg. He still walked with a terrible limp. When he got hit, Crate went into a coma and woke up months later with his mind wiped clean as the noggin of a newborn baby. The doctors put a metal plate in his skull and he had to relearn everything he had ever known, from kindergarten up through twelfth grade. As time went on, bits and pieces came back to him, speeding things up, so the whole process only took about six or seven years. But Thor said he'd been tweaked ever since it happened.

One day Crate came into work with his head shaved, bearing a disturbing resemblance to Charles Manson. He was very sensitive about his new 'do, or the lack thereof, so whenever the new wave girls joked that they were going to carve an X on his forehead when he wasn't looking, Crate would explode into snarling, slobbering, screaming fits, and begin hurling copies of Indoor Bud Master, Growing Dope by the Moon Cycle, and Choosing Your Hallucinogens.

On break one day, one of those innocent young new wave girls with dyed red hair and black eyeshadow named Pagan asked me how to deal with Crate's violent outbursts.

“It's real simple,” I said. “Get an extension chord. Plug it into a wall socket. Cut off the other end with a scissors, and take those flayed wires and touch 'em to that metal plate in Crate's head. Snaps him right back into shape every time.”

Pagan lived in a neighborhood so bad it reminded me of that Dan Rather documentary Forty-Eight Hours on Crack Street. Outside her bedroom window an open air drug market swarmed constantly. Junkies and rockheads melted and exploded on her doorstep. One night Pagan saw a woman on all fours let a dealer piss in her face for a rock of crack. Of course her living environment affected her job performance drastically because she was kept awake until four or five a.m. every night of the week. The boss constantly yelled at Pagan for being late or inattentive at her computer monitor.

In order to help cheer her up, Pagan's mom bought her one of those musical toilet-paper rolls. They're some new gimmicky knickknack, a relative of the mood ring. Every time you pull off a square of toilet paper it bursts into song. Pagan's played a tinny version of “Love Me Tender” by Elvis. The notes were little electronic beeps like those made by a digital watch. For awhile it was nice to hear the sweet melody against the sonic backdrop of the crack dealers threatening to kill each other. But Pagan soon got sick of hearing “Love Me Tender” every time she used the bathroom. After only two weeks she had already heard that computerized ditty dozens of times. It began to drive her crazy. And if that wasn't bad enough, the musical toilet-paper roll began singing on its own. In the middle of the night, when they were all eating dinner, while Pagan was having sex, when she least expected it, the ghostly strains of Elvis would drift from the bathroom. The toilet roll minstrel seemed to have a mind of its own. Then it went even further and just began to play its little computer ballad all the time. “Love Me Tender” beeped over and over constantly until Pagan could stand it no longer and threw the roll out the window. But even out there it kept playing, the battery seemed to never run dry. For days afterward when Pagan heard the sad song, she would look out her window at the plaintive toilet-paper roll lying unwanted in the gutter among the discarded hypodermic needles, old condoms and broken crack pipes.

Night time. Nothing but Cops on every station… Finally I get to a station that has something different. Only I am instantly consumed by horror and paranoia when I see that this station is broadcasting a continuous live satellite feed of me watching television in the hotel room I am hiding out in. I look around. There must be a hidden surveillance camera somewhere in the room, but I have no idea where it is. Finally, based on a close inspection of the perspective being broadcast on the television, I figure out that the camera must be hidden in the front door to the room, somewhere around the keyhole. I search the door thoroughly but can't find any camera. Then on a lark I bend down and look through the keyhole. I see an eye staring through at me from the other side of the door.

The alarm went off. I woke up and it was time to go to work again.