All It Takes

Poor Darlene. Late for her job interview, stuck in traffic on the Washington bridge, she had to pee so bad that her toes were curling. She was going to be late, so she picked up her cell phone and scrolled through her recent calls while inching her car forward, trying to gage the distance to the end of the bridge by squinting through the morning fog, wondering if the bridge maintenance office had a ladies room she could use. Hell, even a porta potty if the construction workers were still stationed at the turnoff to Claremont Village. It was while eyeballing her call list that she took her eyes off the road for just the amount of time required for her to miss the car in front slamming on its brakes - CRUNCH! "Oh fuck." Darlene had rear-ended the car in front of her. "Fuck fuck fuck FUCK!" The surprise caused her to lose control of her bladder, warm piss gushed from her vagina, down her stockinged legs, filled her high heels and spilled over to the car floor, soaked the carpet. An amount of fluid so great that it was a puddle that sloshed back and forth with the momentum of her car. The driver in front of her exited his car and cursed at her, arms raised, palms flat to the sky as if begging the Lord for answers. Darlene rolled down her window, trying not to burst into tears. "Sir, I am so sorry-" she started. "What the fuck is wrong with you? Look what you did to my bumper? Were you on your phone??" He glared at the phone gripped in her fist, then observed the flushed-red anguish spreading across her face, zero clue that she'd just wet herself. "Follow me to the next turn off so we can exchange information, ok? Sorry to yell. My car is barely a month old!" "Sure," was all Darlene could muster. Just then, she realized someone had picked up the phone on the other line of her call. She lifted it to her ear, "hello?" She kicked off her heels, tipping them over with her toes to empty the urine from them. Traffic was moving slowly but surely and she could now see the end of the bridge, the Claremont exit coming into sight. "Hello?" a woman said on the other end of the line. "Is everything okay?" "Hi, yes, no, I'm sorry, not really. This is Darlene McGillicutty and I'm afraid I'm running late for my 9am interview?" Her stockinged feet were pressing into the car's piss-saturated carpet, and audible SQUISH making Darlene frown with disgust. "I'm sorry Ms. McGillicutty, maybe there was a miscommunication, but I have you in our calendar for an interview at 9am NEXT WEEK." "Wait, seriously?" Darlene thumbed through her phone apps, pulled up the Calendar. Sure enough, "Interview" wasn't today, but next Tuesday. Just then - CRUNCH - she rear ended the same car, having failed to notice it stopped in front of her again. The driver got out: "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?? I'm calling the police!" and got back into his car. He wasn't moving even though traffic was, stopped dead still in the middle lane on the bridge. Cars honk while pulling around them both, some angrily mouthing obscenities, others flipping the bird. Darlene burst out in tears. The driver of the car was on his phone with the police, furiously dealing with the police dispatch on the other line. Everything seemed to slow down for Darlene then, cars passing by in slow motion, a breeze blowing her hair back from her face. She wiped the tears from her face and back-swipes the mucous pouring out her nose with her arm, leaving a snail trail on her nice interview coat. Everything went quiet - the honks, the engines roaring, the man screaming into his phone - as Darlene turned to the sun rising over the river, the horizon beyond the bridge beckoning. She left her car, engine idling, the driver side door flung wide open, as she sloshed in wet stockings to the edge of the bridge, cars screeching to a halt as she passed in front of them, oblivious how close she was to being hit. "HEY LADY!" The man screamed, assuming she was trying to escape responsibility for the accident. "WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?!" She rather lithely pulled herself up on the protective pedestrian barrier, took one last breath, then flung herself over the edge. The nearly 20 second fall to her death below was a moment so freeing that for the first time that morning Darlene realized she'd forgotten to put on undewear.

Ancillary didactics

Paul frankly had had it with Simone and her theatrics. Stupid Simone. Wirey, wired to the tits on prescription meth and wired literally to the tits - by the FBI, who rigged her with a recording device - she walked awkwardly, stiffly trying to pretend there wasn't $15,000 worth of electronic gear strapped to the sweaty small of her back. Trying desperately to appear like the innocent secretary going about her business. Trying like hell to act like she wasn't in the midst of selling her boss down the river and pretend she had no idea about the insurance fraud, the underage animal sexual abuse or the Colt .45 in her desk drawer, just itching to be used if things go south. Paul knew hiring Simone to pull off the deed was a stretch. He could have gone with Nora, the heavyset black lady in Accounting who he knew held a deep grudge against Amalgamated Dynamic Corp. and its fetid stench of corruption. Thing is, he ilked Nora though and didn't want to put her life in danger, let alone ruin her future with what was sure to be nonstop litigation and potential Congressional subpoenas until she was near death. So, Simone it was. Simone, of little self-confidence yet an overwhelming sense of self-importance. The kind of woman who bosses her underlings around rudely just because she can. The kind who brags to her friends about her work by augmenting her actual duties - that of secretary - with the completely fictitious title of "Administrative Coordinator." The only thing Simone coordinated was the color of her stockings, and that was about it.

I'm guided into a sleek, expensive looking office with thousand dollar ergonomic chairs and edgy desks made of exotic, state-of-the-art materials by a secretary named Elise. Elise's ass sways in her tight designer skirt like a perfect pear suspended in a drawstring bag, swinging like a pendulum. The view is of downtown Manhattan from the 40th floor and on this day the sky is ominously dark, full of swollen clouds and distant lightning flashes.

"Ms. Barnes will be in to see you shortly, and just FYI? She prefers you call her by her first name; Karen," the secretary says with the sharp clip in her voice only years at the top of the corporate assistance heap will teach you. "May I get you anything to drink? Tea, sparkling water?"

"Sparkling water," I say, my voice cracking. She goes to the small executive bar near the entertainment center, leaning down to pop open the small fridge to snag a Calistoga. She twists the lid, pours the contents into a waiting glass of ice. When she hands it to me I'm transfixed by her impeccable French manicure and her ten thousand dollar gleaming white veneers.

"Thanks," I say lamely.

She steps out backwards with a pert nod, shutting the door with a little too much force. For a moment I'm left alone with only the sound of the gurgling aquarium keeping me company. My eyes wander over to Ms. Barne's - Karen's - desk, which is a granite-topped monster devoid of a singer stapler or pen cup. In fact, the only thing on the surface of the desk is a recessed flat screen control panel. I get up to go take a closer look, leaning in to try to read the tiny inscription on the plastic paneling when suddenly the door opens behind me.

"You must be Mr. Lamaar."

I turn, slightly embarassed as if I were caught snooping, to find an early-40's woman in an expensive designer black pants suit striding forward with the confident swagger of a major league pitcher, her arm outstretched and thrusting toward me like she wants to reach through my chest and squeeze my heart into motionlessness. After an akward pause when I realize she wants to shake my hand and I finally shake hers, I say, rather lamely, "and you must be Karen,"

Her eyes twinkle with a tiny hint of sadism when she replies, "Ms. Barnes, if you please." She squeezes my hand so tight we can both hear the bones pop, and though I wince she offers no apology, circling her desk and descending into her chair like an Olympic sprinter between events.

"Please, sit down," she says, indicating the fifteen hundred dollar chair in front of her desk, a reclining slab of green plastic suspended on 36 steel posts. I do my best to make it look comfortable, although it's clearly meant to make her visitors feel physically inferior when faced with the imposing gargantuanism that is her granite desk.

"I understand you're interested in partaking in the program," she says, punching a few buttons on her recessed control panel. All the windows in the office begin to dim as a flat screen monitor flickers to high-definition life on the wall behind her. "Let's take a look at your qualifications."

"Psychic real estate is so now," he said, his face so close to mine I could smell the chicken parmesan and cigarettes on his breath.

"What exactly do you mean by that?"

"Exactly what I said. Real-world real estate is plummeting. Advertising has maxed out their potential in TV, movie product placement and search engine ads. Everyone's scouring the world for the next big money-maker and I'm telling you, right here and now, that the next boom is gonna be in dreams."

His eyes were bulging, a vein as thick as my pinky finger was throbbing near his temple. Small sweat balls were emerging from his enlarged pores. A string of spittle was oozing down from his wide, grinning, veneer-enhanced smile, dangling its way toward his white dress shirt.

"You'd think a smart young man such as yourself might wanna be in on the biggest thing since the fucking wheel. Until they start figuring out a way to charge people to breath the goddamned air this is it. IT!"

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, making an attempt at showing some kind of composure by folding my arms across my chest. "I think I need to hear a little more about how exactly you see me fitting into the picture before I commit."

His Chestshire cat grin only widens at this. He lets out a long slow hiss as he backs away from me, circles his desk and seats himself in his high-backed ergonomic chair with a little whimper of delight.

"Very wise of you, young grasshopper, very wise."

Dave was the kind of guy who liked to let the dust accumulate. He'd rather sit around in his boxers all day and watch the mold grow on that 3-month old bowl of cheerios still sitting in the middle of the livingroom floor. The bowl had been kicked by negligent roommates a couple of times, knocking fetid milk over the edges of the paper bowl, so that the what had once been deep-pile shag carpeting surrounding it was thick and matted into rug dredlocks. There was mold growing on the carpet now, too, and it was spreading.

Dave was a chronic masturbater, and by chronic we're talking on the hour. Sometimes on the half-hour. Dave beat off so much he had callouses on his penis that were shaped like his fingers. You could see Dave's grip on his dick when it was hard; when it was soft, it just looked like his dick had a dog's paw growing out of it - those thick, leathery oval pads like little raised moons of hardened flesh. He didn't pump out much sperm as a result, maybe a drop the size of a pea. Who's testes could keep up with such output? Not Dave's. He didn't care. In fact, he looked at is as a major plus: This way he didn't have to wipe the spooge off on whatever shirt he was wearing at the moment, causing odd stares at the grocery store from other patrons who couldn't help but notice the large, crusted white stains on his clothing.

Dave went through roommates like most people go through the junk mail at the end of a long day at work as a result. It took a while before he could find people who didn't mind the rotting laundry balled up in the back of the stinking refrigerator, the dead mice dangling by their tales over the iguana's cage, the thousand tiny balls of dark green affixed haphazardly to the "booger wall", or his incessant beating off at all hours of the day right there in the Lazy Boy recliner positioned directly in the middle of the living room. Dave surmised that had he been blessed with the genes of say a Brad Pitt or perhaps an Ashton Kucher, they wouldn't have minded so much stumbling into yet another session of self love. No. They might not have minded at all.

Marketing had got wind of a new campaign from the diamond industry trickling down from Corporate. Apparently they wanted to up the public rare gemstone awareness factor well before the holiday shopping season by planting several stories in the media. Editorial hooked into a killer campaign - a woman in South Africa had found a massive diamond, over 600 carats, and everyone in Production agreed that it skewed nicely in all demographics. So they went with it, this story about this massive diamond, and provided links to several related "stories" about diamonds and how the average Joe or Jane might purchase one. Size, price, placement, characteristics. Written with straight-faced seriousness and accompanied by a few full-color pictures bought from a stock photography shop for rights world-wide, in perpetuity, throughout the universe. Ad Sales reported back that clients were thrilled with the resultant uptick in purchasing, with several side quandrants reporting parallel rises that caused champagne glasses in boardrooms from New York to London to toast like it was New Year's Eve.

He had brushed and flossed his teeth, set his alarm, and put an envelope he wanted to mail on the mantle. He turned on the porch light, turned off the reading lamp in the living room, doffing his robe to slip naked beneath the cool sheets and was just drifting off to sleep when he heard it. A noise coming from the kitchen. The sound of a pot shifting on the drying rack? He was about to ignore it and turn his focus back inward, closing his eyes and rolling them back, when the unmistakeable sound of footsteps creaking across the wooden floor of the foyer made him sit up lightning fast. He held his breath, eyes wide, listening intently, but the creaking had stopped, as if whoever it was had heard his reaction and stopped mid-step.

It was then that he saw the head creeping around the doorframe, the eyes on him.

"What the fuck are you doing in here?!"

And the eyes disappeared, the sound of feet running across the foyer into the kitchen. He bolted from bed, naked, running after the intruder, almost slipping and falling on his ass on the polished wood floor. The intruder got to the back door leading out of the kitchen and fumbled with the lock, just enough lag time for him to catch her.

It was a woman. She was crying when he grabbed her, spun her around in a furious rage.

"Who are you?!" He demanded.

She collapsed in his strong grasp, sobbing violently. Her face was dirty, a patch of blood dried at the corner of her mouth. Her sobs only angered him further; he shook her fiercely.

"What the fuck are you doing in my house?!"

This here (points at self) is what 20 plus years of smoking cigarettes looks like. Anywhere between a few cigarettes a day to an entire pack drinking beers at some hole-in-the-wall bar. This here is what one can expect from a shattered family life in ones early years. This life is what happens when expectations exceed ability; a gaping disparity filled with nearly 25 years of pot smoke and fingernails chewed to the quick (and beyond). This is what self-doubt can do to a fertile mind, this graying, shriveled remnant of synaptic function that once, many long years ago, beamed with a light that could blind.

That light was extinguished - or nearly so - when I lost my legs in a car accident 6 months ago. You see, I was a dancer, a member of the Thurgood Dance Troupe based in Philadelphia. We'd traveled the world with our last show, a circus-inspired bawdy burlesque that featured some wire work and elastic trapeze.