Unemployment Round 2

The Case of the The Vanishing Ennui (narrated with the voice of Humphrey Bogart)

It was a dark and stormy night. Or at least, it should have been. Instead, it was a bright and sunny day as I made my way back to the Unemployment Office for round 2. I'd just got my car back after a week of it being in the shop. Last time I'd gone to the Office, my brakes failed on the way home. I barely made it home alive. This time, I was packing some serious heat.

Mostly because the air conditioning in the car isn't working. Also, I'm fat. And fat people sweat like second-rate drug dealers in a police interrogation room.

I knew there was a problem the minute I walked in. My watch said 1:15. I should have been right on time. But the clock in the Office was 5 minutes fast. I was late. Almost as if... "someone" had set it up that way. After last week's near fatal lack of brakes, I wasn't taking any chances. I took off my clip-on sunglasses so I could see.

There was no one at the reception desk. I waited for what seemed like hours, but it was probably only a few seconds. In that kind of life or death situation, time plays tricks on you. Finally, an old lady waddled up to the desk. Her hair was soft and grey and curly like the fur of a thousand year old poodle. She told me to go into the room behind me. She pointed. I spun around faster than a rattlesnake on a merry-go-round.

Just as I suspected. The orientation had already started.

I sauntered in like I owned the place. Since I'm a taxpayer, that is technically partially correct. All eyes turned to me as I walked in. The instructor's glare might have stopped my heart, if I had stopped to look at her. Instead, I saw... HER.

Our eyes met across the room. The slight smile splitting her maw would have looked more at home on a crocodile in clown face-paint. Her eyes were like the bottomless cesspits of calcutta, brown and murky and full of things you can't get rid of, not even with penicillin. Her lips were the frothy red of a freshly gutted catfish after a spring rain. She was beautiful.

But I dared not tip my hand so early in the game. If anyone had cut my brake lines last week, it might have been her. She had an air about her, an air like the stench a fetid swamp spews forth when you pull a rotting deer carcass from the muck. Or maybe she just had gas.

The mechanic hadn't said one way or another if the brake lines on my car had been cut. I just assumed. In my line of work, you can never be too careful. I took a seat on the other side of the room.

The orientation, if that's what you call what went on there that day, seemed to pass quickly. I spent it staring at her ass as it sat in the chair, dreaming of what could be. I learned very little in my time there, mostly that I should have been keeping a written record of my job search. I say, records are for timid housewives and men in polka-dotted bowties and fancy suits. I was lucky I was wearing pants.

At the end of the orientation, the old woman doing the talking demanded my papers. My papers! This wasn't Nazi Germany, under the control of the Gestapo! This was America, and by God, I wasn't about to submit to any strip search without a good cause. She told me a strip search wouldn't be necessary, but the look in her eyes told me otherwise. I knew if I didn't hand her my papers, they'd single me out as a troublemaker, and I'd never close the case. I folded like an accordion in the hands of a demented 6-year old trying to play "Moon River."

I sat by myself in the waiting area, knowing I'd soon be called before the Big Boss. I was going over my notes, but frankly, I couldn't read them. Was that a Q? Why didn't I invest in those shorthand classes?

Then SHE sat down near me. I knew she wanted me like a lion wants young gazelle for sunday brunch. But I wasn't on the menu. She was like a flaming toxic tornado of lust, and I wasn't getting caught up in her storm. It was time to go in for the kill.

"Shorry shweetheart." i said to her, packing up my things. "You're a nine, and I only sleep with tens." And with that, the Big Boss called me. As I walked away, never looking back, I heard her heart break with a sound like the shattering of a hundred mirrors. Or maybe she'd just thrown a shoe at me and missed. I ran, ducking swiftly into the Big Boss's Office.

The Big Boss turned out to be a frail old lady. She asked me if I had any questions. A million thoughts crowded into my brain at once. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here on this planet? What is to be my destiny? Why do they put DO NOT REMOVE on those tags on pillows if everyone just tears them off anyway? But I couldn't ask her all these things. She looked like someone's grandmother. Not mine. Someone else's.

"No." I said, putting all the desperate losses of her many helpless victims into that one word. "No." I repeated. She got the message. I knew I wouldn't have any more trouble from her.

My brakes didn't fail on the ride home.