Helping Folks Get Back on Their Feet.

 

One or another of us has been asked about our resemblance to a premier individual who also happens to be deceased. We take turns trying, usually without much luck, to make our lines stick. In the end, we are politely asked to vacate the facility. With our blackened hands still wet, we walk to the next exit and have it out with one who's still on duty. It seems there was a problem with his ability to swallow stolen hair and then keep it down. My speciality was to bring numbers forward on a springboard pallet and then attempt to make my voice heard over the lionized commotion. If it weren't for the quick thinking of a woman I'd only gone out with once or twice, I'm afraid we might've been nailed right then and there.

The part where we cut one of them in half always seems to be a crowd pleaser. What they don't know is that if any one of us hadn't gone undercover to take a hike in the other guy's shoes, you'd be looking at a very different, if well turned out, Executive Vice Associate. Not that anyone has anything over which to cry into their spilt milk. Far from it, in fact. I'm looking at YOU, Walter Birshup Jr. Far be it from any of us to donate a very large box in the name of a transitional parking magnate, but, if this seems like just another excuse to slip into a comfortable outfit, climb a tower, hoist a brewski and have it out with a remedial reaction fomenter, then it might do you good to get into a safe space from which to draw up plans for our firm's thirty-fifth anti-diversity shindig. Eventually, I'd be willing to crawl through the skylight and surprise the diners with a triple whammy in the form of a curving swath of unguarded pellet gum.

The terms were all set while our mouths resumed the 'open' position. A woman in a beige caftan appeared from a door in the back of the room and immediately returned to her place in line where, until then, a gentleman claiming to have known her Father before the War, had been amusing some of the infant brides with the sullen way he pronounced a very particular vowel. Once I got through with her, there was no denying that her cord had been pulled. I peered into an opening and, with the scant illlumination still available, began to read aloud from a prepared statement to the effect that I had agreed to take full responsibility for the actions of others who I'd never met and whose identities were an all but foregone conclusion. In reply, I was presented with a very soft, if empty, envelope. Once I regained control of my faculties, it seemed that I was left alone and unaccounted for in a medium sized city in the Northeastern quadrant of the Southern Mid-west. I took to my new home like a fish under a watery dome. I finally came into my own as a dimesmith, got married by default and adopted the ways of a livid market flop. This is all about helping people get back on their feet.

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