Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation Page 8

  Yes, embryonic goals were slowly taking form, but I was still fuzzy on direction. There was only one thing I was sure of (other than the fact that I’d never bang that chick from Italian Delight): I had to quit the insurance business. But how could I leave Bob without having made a single sale? I didn’t want him to think it reflected on his training. From bars to bowling alleys to the racetrack, he put in a lot of time with me. He treated me like an adult.

  It was after eleven on a slow Thursday night. I was a little tired, so I decided to close forty-five minutes early. I had already locked up and turned off the lights and was in the process of filling a bag with Polaroid film and Mr. Goodbars when I heard the rumble. It was low and powerful and the Tic Tacs on the counter began to chatter in their plastic boxes. I looked out, squinting, as two blazing orbs sailed into the parking lot, bleaching the world white. Then, all at once, there was silence and darkness. A jacked-up ’78 Bronco was resting in the handicapped space. The door groaned opened and a large figure emerged. The interior light on the driver’s door swept across a pair of black Frye boots with pilgrim buckles.

  He approached the store. It was obvious we were closed, but he tried the doors anyway, shaking them so hard a couple of wiffle balls from a nearby display box rolled off and bounced down the aisle. I reached for my keys and haltingly made my way toward the entrance. Our eyes met.

  “Hey, man, is that you, Resnick? Lemme grab a pack of Marlboros.”

  Jeff Glogower had graduated several years ahead of me and was a friend of my older brother Jack. He was a big dude—a typical Perry County mountain man—who played on the football team until getting kicked off for squirting oven cleaner in the face of an opposing quarterback. Since then, he’d found success selling pot, steroids, and select reptiles that were not legal to own.

  I comped him a carton of Marlboros and we sat down on the curb next to the ice machine. He smoked and I stared at the river. He asked me what I was up to these days. I explained I was all screwed up, trying to figure shit out. He suggested I sell drugs. I told him I wanted out of sales. The conversation drifted to the erosion of his three-month marriage. The light had long gone out on that relationship, he told me. His liberal use of the term “raging cunt” seemed to confirm this.

  “She went and got her ass pregnant,” he said. “Now she tells me I can’t come near my own goddamn kid.”

  “That sucks,” I responded.

  “It’s gonna suck a whole lot worse when I shoot her in the fucking eye.”

  He was just blowing off steam. Perry County guys always talk about killing their wives and girlfriends, but seldom follow through.

  “I know that bitch. She’ll get herself a lawyer. She’ll take my truck, my money, and shack up with some dude who’s gonna get his dick sucked on my dime.” It was obvious he still loved her.

  Suddenly, a dim spark fired somewhere in the depths of my frontal lobe. A connection was made between Jeff’s plight and something I had recently kind of learned about. Bam! I asked Jeff if he knew anything about life insurance. He wondered if it was anything like car insurance. I told him yes, it was just like car insurance, only for people.

  I was off and running, explaining concepts I barely understood and others I knew nothing about. But the spine of my proposal was solid: I could design a policy for Jeff that ensured the death benefit or any cash value would go exclusively to his son. His ex-wife and whatever dude she might be blowing couldn’t touch it. Jeff fell in love with the idea, especially since he felt certain he’d be dead by thirty. He called it his “final ‘fuck you’ from the grave.”

  Soon he was filling out sticky, dog-eared paperwork on the hood of his Bronco. I had to fish the forms out of my trunk, where a bloated can of Dad’s root beer had exploded. We shook hands on the deal and he thanked me for the smokes.

  I had made my first sale. True, my client would eventually require a doctor’s exam, which might raise a flag or two, but I wasn’t going to fret about that now. I’d accomplished my goal: I could retire from the insurance business with one on the scoreboard.

  The following morning, I strode into Dirschberger & Associates with Jeff Glogower’s application rolled up in my hand like a degree from Oxford. I wanted Bob to see that his wisdom and leadership had borne fruit before I quit.

  I knocked on his door and let myself in. Bob sat alone, gazing quietly at the Pizza Hut across the street. The sun bounced harshly off the red roof, giving his office a Technicolor glow. Had he been wearing a cape, he might have resembled Rhett Butler.

  “It’s a frightening world we live in, Adam,” he finally said. “Things like ‘allegiance’ and ‘loyalty’ . . . those are just words these days. We’ve become small.” He swiveled his chair to face me. “They’re bringing in a new honcho.”

  “They’re transferring you to another agency?” I replied, shocked.

  “They’re transferring me to the cemetery. I’m gone.”

  I told him it didn’t make sense, even though it made complete sense. Everything was changing. You could feel it. Places like this and guys like Bob were on borrowed time. Something different was coming—a world where it would be harder to get away with stuff and every battery would be accounted for.

  “Nine years,” Bob sighed. “This place was a dump when I took it over from Kaplan. Lapsed policies? You could wallpaper your house. The goddamn files were in Chinese. Not one thumbtack. Look anywhere. Thumbtacks were like caviar.”

  I assured him his mark on the agency would live on. Then I slid Jeff Glogower’s application across his desk. “You made a sale?” he said, brightening up. He walked over and crushed me in his arms. I told him it was his sale as much as mine. Then I tendered my resignation. He tried to talk me out of it, but I insisted I couldn’t possibly work there without him. Bob admitted I was probably making the right decision. Rumor had it they were replacing him with Len Speece from Doylestown, “a complete fruit.”

  That night, we returned to the Holiday Inn where we’d once celebrated my passing the insurance exam. This time I drank. I toasted Bob, who had vowed to open his own financial-estate-planning-consulting something or other. “Everything’ll be under one umbrella,” he kept saying over and over. “And you’ll be my top dog. We’ll beat the bastards at their own game.”

  Later, he struck up a conversation with a middle-aged woman who sat alone at the bar, telling her she had a “smashing figure.” It wasn’t true, but she accepted the compliment. Neither seemed particularly attracted to the other. Within moments, though, the flicker was back in his eye. As he took her hand and led her to the dance floor, he nudged my ribs and said, “That’s all you can do, pal—take it where you can get it.”

  The Agitator Slat

  Fast food, as the saying goes, is shit. The jury came in on that a while ago. Nonetheless, I do find myself indulging from time to time, mostly to keep my ego in check. Only a narcissistic asshole would consider his body a temple.

  When the urge hits me for this sort of fare, two things are assured: I’ll walk into the restaurant, salivating like a Bernese mountain dog, and exit, feeling like a drug mule with a ruptured condom in his large intestine. But looking back on all the years of hamburgers, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and double-wrapped tacos, I’d have to say the most unhealthy thing I ever consumed, compliments of a national fast-food chain, was a milk shake with a razor blade in it.

  This is no urban legend, folks. This is not the woman who claimed her salivary glands became infested with maggots after she ingested unpasteurized honey, or the guy who swore he found a human penis in a box of Rice Chex. What happened to me—this razor blade thing—actually happened. It occurred sometime ago at a fast-food restaurant on Ninth Avenue in New York City.

  Before I continue, my publisher’s legal department, in all their Hebrew fanaticism, has required that I abide by the following:

  I cannot use the name of the restaurant chain.

  The words “milk shake” will be substituted for the name of the actual produ
ct, which is indeed a milk shake but employs a minor gimmick in an attempt to stand out from other milk shakes.

  I am prohibited from referencing, no matter how obliquely, a rumored sex-slave scandal involving the chain’s upper management. (“And don’t try to get cute with little jokes, ’cause I’ll burn the whole fucking book”—unnamed lawyer, via telephone.)

  And now, on with the show!

  It was a typical Sunday. I’ve always hated Sundays. Come Monday, the shit starts all over again and it goes on like that until they plant you. I stopped into the pint-sized dump I called an office to go over some paperwork and contemplate suicide. Too lazy for the former and too much of a pansy for the latter, I settled on lunch. I decided to dine on the cheap. I wanted something as lousy as I was feeling.

  I ordered the special, or as it’s known in fast-food parlance, “the combo.” In this case, it was combo number 3: cheeseburger, fries, and a drink. “Would you like dessert with that?” I was asked. Pretending it was the goddamnedest proposition I’d ever heard in my life, I let out a resigned sigh and ordered a small chocolate milk shake, emphasizing the word small like I was in training for a big bout at the Garden.

  A purple neon sign freckled with dead bugs announced DINING ROOM UPSTAIRS. I made the trip and slid into an empty booth. A feeling of shame came over me, similar to those first few moments in a whorehouse parlor when the piano player starts singing “Ol’ White Boy’s Gonna Get Hisself Some Pussy Tonight Rag.”

  If you’ve never been to a fast-food restaurant, envisioning the State Dining Room at Buckingham Palace would be off the mark. To be objective, though, what this place lacked in elegance, it made up for in filth. Before setting my tray down, I used an oven mitt constructed of napkins to clear my table of stray bits of lettuce, orphaned french fries, and a tableau of smeared condiments most likely inspired by Jackson Pollock. All told, the diner before me left enough food behind that with a little ingenuity and a strong stomach, you could create an entirely new meal. Something “off menu.”

  My burger and fries went down without incident, garnering a rating somewhere between “acceptable” and “what the fuck was I thinking.” I’d brought along the New York Post to distract me from the particulars of what was going into my mouth, and by the time I got to the milk shake—which was so wonderfully gelatinous I had to eat it with a spoon—I was engrossed in an article about Donald Trump and some beef he had with Leona Helmsley. Just as I started daydreaming about personally brokering the peace between these two American treasures, I felt my spoon scrape the bottom of the cup. I glanced down. That’s when I noticed something protruding from the last chocolaty blob of pig collagen. Alarm bells went off in my head as I braced myself for the possibility of vomiting on the guy at the next table. I took a deep breath and tentatively scooped up the whole wad and dumped it into a napkin.

  Out of generic convenience, it’s easy to lapse into the term “razor blade.” But what I discovered wasn’t a classic men’s shaving blade—the kind you picture nestling beneath the skin of a Halloween apple. This one was narrower and more industrial looking, approximately an inch long and maybe a quarter of an inch wide. It had a little punch hole on one end where a rivet might go and appeared to have broken off from a larger part of something else. It was the “fun size” of razor blades—perfect for swallowing whole while you’re distracted, reading a story about a prick billionaire.

  I had a hard time wrapping my head around it. What was it doing in a milk shake? Even for a fast-food restaurant, it didn’t make sense. A gob of chewing gum? Sure. A Band-Aid? Why not. A back molar? Classic. But a thin little razor blade that could actually kill someone? That’s Broadway, baby.

  I asked for the manager but was told he was off for the weekend, so I requested to see the highest-ranking employee on duty. A Bunny Wailer–looking dude named Joplin soon appeared on the other side of the counter. Assuming he was about to get the run-of-the-mill bitch about cold french fries or piss on the restroom floor, he was already fingering his pocket for a free medium soda coupon the way a gunslinger reaches for his Colt Rainmaker. Keeping it cool, I wordlessly laid the bunched-up napkin on the counter. Then I dramatically opened it, exposing the blade like a freshwater pearl.

  “I just found that in my milk shake,” I pronounced, trying to sound like a cross between Steven Seagal and Morley Safer. Joplin reached down and picked up the blade. He inspected it for a moment and shook his head.

  “There’s no way this came from my milk shake machine,” he stated definitively in a Caribbean accent. There wasn’t a hint of concern or curiosity in his voice. Instead, his tone seemed to imply that I was up to some kind of monkey business.

  “Well . . . it came from somewhere,” I said. “I certainly didn’t put it there.” My voice quivered a bit. I was born feeling guilty, so it doesn’t take much for me to question myself. In this case, though, I felt pretty sure my hands were clean.

  “Imagine if a kid got that milk shake?” I continued, growing outraged. “I mean, someone could’ve died from this thing.”

  He looked at the blade again, exhaled, and disappeared for a moment. He returned with a stubby pencil and a fresh napkin and told me to write down my name and phone number. Obviously Joplin wasn’t going to expend much energy on this one. It was a departure from the norm, and they don’t pay him for shit like that. He told me he’d show the blade to his manager on Monday, and if the manager felt it warranted further investigation, he’d send it off to “corp.”

  “Do you promise me you’ll do that?” I asked, unintentionally sounding like the boss man on a sugar plantation.

  “What did I say to you?” Joplin snapped. “If I say I’ll do it, I’ll do it.”

  He was getting a little grumpy, so I decided to back off, but I told him I’d be stopping by in a few days to follow up. He gave me a smirky nod, as if to convey the Jamaican equivalent of “Oh, goodie, I can’t wait.”

  I was convinced the entire matter would disappear once my shoe hit the sidewalk. The evidence was no longer in my possession. Cell phone cameras were something new in those days, and I didn’t have one. And even if Joplin, who clearly wasn’t a fan of mine, showed the blade to his manager, there would be no upside for the guy to take it any further. It was found in his location in one of his milk shakes. The jagoffs from corp would be all over him like lime aftershave on Donald Trump (sorry to bring him back into it). No, the razor, the napkin, and the whole incident were headed straight for the garbage with the rest of the stink. I’m not a cynic; I’m a realist. Especially when it comes to human beings in positions of power and the dirty business of fast food.

  I began having dreams about coughing up blood. I saw diners screaming and knocking over tables to get away from me. I saw the floating head of Leona Helmsley licking red spittle from her Joker smile. Then I was harvesting sugarcane in the oppressive Kingston heat as Joplin whipped me with a riding crop. I sassed him and he threw me in “the box,” where I sweated it out with a blind girl I glanced at once in the subway. My hand found its way up her skirt and I was compelled to ask in a flustered voice, “Wait, you are a girl, aren’t you?” She just laughed and told me to look in my hand. When I opened it, I found two eyeballs. So, sort of a happy ending.

  I went back to the restaurant to check on the status of the investigation. Joplin no longer worked there. All I could get out of the young woman behind the counter was that he was “probably in Queens.” The manager I spoke to, a friendly middle-aged man with braces on his teeth and a William Holden hairline, knew nothing of the incident. He’d been out for a couple of months with shingles and told me Joplin most likely dealt with the “temp manager.” When I asked him if he knew where the temp manager was, he responded, “Not really. Those temps, you know, they kinda float around. I’d say your best bet is Queens.”

  It was a sufficiently half-assed answer that left me little room to maneuver. For my own peace of mind, though, I had one final question: Had he, at any time during his employment a
t the restaurant, received complaints from customers who’d encountered razor blades in their milk shakes?

  He crinkled his eyes and appeared to search his memory. “No,” he finally chuckled, “I think I’d remember something like that.” Then he added, “A lady fished a moth out of her coffee once, but that had more to do with the fluorescents.”

  I moved on with my life. The milk shake, the razor blade, Joplin, Bill Holden, and the blind girl—I put it all behind me. The bad dreams had subsided, replaced with new ones that involved more fucking and less blood.

  Approximately six weeks later, my phone rang. A polite-sounding woman with a light Southern accent inquired, “Is this Mr. Resnick? Mr. Adam Resnick?” I assumed it was the cable company confirming yet another appointment to determine why the bedroom TV keeps freezing up on the ReelzChannel. She verified my identity and continued.

  “This is Mitzi Kurstetter [not her real name] calling from Rumblenuts Corporate [not the actual restaurant chain], following up on the piece of metal you chanced upon in your milk shake at one of our midtown Manhattan locations?”

  “Yes?” I answered in astonishment.

  “I’d just like to inform you that our engineers have determined that the object did indeed come from the milk shake machine and they are resolving the problem and we apologize for any inconvenience and would like to send you something if I may get your address, sir, please.”

  It was a rush of information and, I’m fairly certain, a run-on sentence, but I got the gist.

  My immediate thoughts were of Joplin and the temp manager. Despite all of my doubts, they had done their jobs. I felt like a real shithead. Maybe I was a cynic after all. Perhaps I needed to question my long-held belief that, as a rule, human beings are lazy and incompetent. But then I remembered the the guy who okayed the launch of the Challenger chicago I decided to put a pin in it.