My Little Blue Dress (26 page)

Wendy and Russell were both there—Wendy in a pale blue sweater and a miniskirt with her hair in a ponytail, Russell in a fringed jacket and a big red ball of hair.

“I have something to say,” I said, looking first at Wendy, then at Russell, then back at Wendy.

“What is it?” asked Wendy.

“It's that changes are being made,” I replied. “Made to the way we do things around here.”

“What are these changes?” asked Russell.

There was a tap at the door right then and a man came in, bent on . . . .

Okay, stop the presses! Amusing occurrence! My pen seems to be running out of ink! I'll tell you the rest of this anecdote in a day or two.

July 26th—Monday

Sorry about yesterday. I've got one of those ridiculous old-fashioned pens that dry up if you don't keep switching between the Past and the Present . . . I mean, not
actually
. That isn't
actually
why the pen dries up. That's just sometimes how it feels and I do
actually
find that if I switch narrative modes then the pen relubricates itself, sometimes. Look, just humor me, would you?

Bruno's back, by the way. He's back here in Chinatown for the forseeable future. Simon Menges just kicked him out of her apartment for the crime of “desecrating her psychic space” with his “noise.”

“What noise?” you ask, reader?

Well, it's somewhat hard to describe. Place a gun to my head and I would have to say that it's a bit like the sound of a bulky young man standing up and sitting down and standing up and then trying to watch television very quietly and then possibly eating a giant sandwich. In short, a hard noise to put into words, especially with one of those old-fashioned pens that you can't rely on.

July 27th—Tuesday

Tuesday. Fantastic.

I hate you, reader, did I mention this earlier? I hate your fucking guts and I hope that one day you too know what it feels like to have your whole body just
completely itch
. All of it. Every particle. Have you ever felt that way, reader?

I didn't think so.

You've been sheltered haven't you? All your life. Mummy and Daddy resolved to keep tiny little baby Reader all swaddled up and out of harm's way, didn't they? No total-body itchiness for Reader. Nothing bad at all for Reader. Just a comfy upholstered perch from which to judge.

Christ
, you've got problems.

You've got
real
problems, reader.

You should see someone.

But not me.

Please don't try to see me.

Because I hate you.

July 28th—Wednesday

“Okay, here's what's happening,” I said to Russell and Wendy, back in the sixties, back in the conference room, gesturing with my hands as I sought to explain to that pair of quietly sitting employees why it was that you, reader, have never heard of me. “I started this management company because I didn't want to be famous. It seems that's not possible. All the managers these days are celebrities themselves. So I'm changing the very
nature
of our business.”

“Are you firing us?” This was Wendy.

“No.” I laughed and laughed and laughed. “I'm
promoting
you. I'm promoting
all of us
. I'm taking this company
up a level
. Instead of managing quote unquote “famous artists” like Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan we're going to manage the careers of . . .” I managed a really rather excellent drum roll on the table with my hands, “. . .
other managers
!”

Wendy popped her gum.

“How will that work?” asked Russell.

“Yes,
do
you see?” I agreed with him. “We'll be like
meta
-managers . . . managers
squared
 . . . helping our manager clients . . .” I did another drum roll,
“. . . in their roles as managers!”

“How will that work?” asked Russell, who I realized now was trying to . . . trying to get more information about my brave new scheme.

But he had missed his chance. I had already exited the conference room and was already sauntering back to my private office with the lockable door, knocking over the water cooler as I passed it, whistling a tune, suddenly not giving much of a shit about anything anymore and man oh man was that a good feeling!

July 29th—Thursday

Oh, hey, do you know who's fat? Do you, reader? Do you know who's a fat fucking fuck? You do, don't you? You can tell by the way I'm saying it. Yes, that's right.

Bruno Maddox is fat

Just this very morning, in fact, he waddled in very fatly arm in arm with an egg-cheese-meat “breakfast sandwich”
the size of a large throw-cushion. Using his stubby fat fingers as utensils he pressed it deep into his face hole while flipping chubbily back and forth between
Wheelchair Tennis Master Class
and
Trowel Sports International
and then what he did next was fall asleep. Had to have been at least eleven, reader, before he finally got down to work.

Work.

“Work” is a funny word, reader. Not just the way it's spelled relative to how it's pronounced but the way it can mean so many different things to different people.

For a road digger “work” can mean digging a road.

For a doctor it can mean curing a patient's disease.

For Bruno Maddox, most days, it means staring at his legal pad and with a flick of his pen, relocating the novel about the man with the video camera in the back of his head to the Scandinavian nation of
Finland
in order to capture “that austere, echoey feel.” After that he pulls his shoes on in order to scour the city for a reasonably priced Finnish phrase book . . . but what do you know? All of a sudden it's noon, lunchtime around the globe, and so he has to just quickly wolf down three slices of giant pizza from the place around the corner. After a shortish nap the young man tends to be sufficiently rested to field the daily midafternoon 'phone call from Hayley Iskender. “How's it going?” she always asks him. “Good!” he always chirps, expertly expanding his throat so it doesn't sound like he's lying down.

It's been like this for a while, reader, as I suspect you've suspected. Maybe for a
day
or two after that initial session with Theo Bakula and Gordon Gundersson and Theo's successful media friends Bruno did in fact manage to scratch at his pad for the entire length of the morning, feeling good about things, occasionally exploding out into the
streets of Chinatown and stride around composing acceptance speeches for works as yet unwritten, that when they were eventually written would be written in weird mixed-media hybrids as yet unsynthesized.

But then of course it all fell apart, suddenly, one morning a few weeks ago, possibly a Wednesday, when for a change of scene, in an attempt to put the spark back, Bruno began his workday at this simply atrocious little place over in the bohemian district that surrounds Hayley's very unbohemian giant purple apartment building. The Dead Dog it's called, somewhat whimsically, and I suppose, to be fair, that it's a decent place to nurse a mug of flavored coffee just so long as you don't mind being penned in on all sides by Bruno Maddox–type individuals with pens in their mouths scouring the exposed brick walls with their eyes and lightly dusting yellow legal pads with partial and illegible schemes for Global Domination.

And all of a sudden, two sips into his ninth cup of coffee, Bruno
did
mind. One moment he was sitting there marveling at what deluded, inferior scumbags the other patrons seemed to be . . . the next he had noticed that the horrible little shit at the adjoining table was quote unquote “using” the same brand of pen as he was, as well as being identically as stubbly and wild-haired. With torrential foreboding Bruno craned to peek at the guy's yellow pad and predictably, although the fellow's handwriting was every bit as free-spirited and romantic as Bruno's own, our plump and irrelevant hero was able to make out the words

Alison: [nibbling her lip] I don't love you anymore. Well, I
love
you. I just don't . . .
love
you [then explains what she means].

and instantly it was all too much. With twenty-five trainee geniuses compiling adjectival clusters with which to perfectly render the passionate, elephantine manner in which he exited the establishment, Bruno Maddox did in fact exit the establishment and lumbered off through the scorching streets in search of any kind of comfort, winding up, ill fatedly, in an enormous chain bookstore where with the urgency of a man trying to clear his name after being falsely accused of murdering his own girlfriend, Bruno Maddox fell upon a display table by the entrance and started ripping open volumes of New Fiction just to quickly, you know, check that there wasn't, you know, any single sentence in any of the books that he couldn't personally have written.

Saturday afternoon and the fairground was full of patrons.

was the first sentence he checked. Could he have written it? Yes. In his sleep. He knew what a patron was. In fact, he'd just been sitting among patrons in the Dead Dog. As for fairgrounds . . . well, he'd actually
been
to one once. Fortified, the boy pressed on. A new volume, a new victim.

They ate as they had drunk: as if compelled.

which with hindsight was where all the trouble started. The problem was that colon. That horrible, brilliant colon. What kind of wunderkind did you need to be, how much classical music did you need to have been played in the womb to be able to think of using a colon in the middle of that sentence there? Who
was
this guy, this . . . “Greg
McEwan?” Surely he at least had a Nobel Prize to his name, or a world chess championship? Bruno scrabbled for the flap copy. “Greg McEwan's first novel,
Gary's Song,
won the Delia Carter Prize for Fiction. He lives in Fordham, Wisconsin.”

Now I'm not saying the boy would have been
okay
if he'd managed to prize himself out of the bookstore at that point. He'd already sustained significant damage. People were even starting to stare, reader. In fact,
patrons
were starting to stare, if that's a word in your vocabulary. They were starting to stare at a horrifically deformed young man reaching with trembling eellike fingers for a slim, ostensibly manageable volume of Scottish short fiction.

Mind you, it wisney like the cunt given 'im any
smack
for the fish fingers 'ad 'e? Just
ta'en
'
em, adn't 'e? Bird's Eye, then fish fingers 'ad been. Top of the line. Creme de la fuckin creme. “Fresh from the Captain's Fuckin Table.”

Yeah, that was the one that did it. A thin, high cry was briefly audible in the air, and shortly after, for those who cared, there was a large bloated distended young man to be seen shuffling home at high speed through the terrible noontime heat, as close to crying as you can be without actually doing so.

Why?

Because he's one of
them
, reader. One of them, one of them, one of
them
. One of those young
men
, reader. One of those extremely low-quality young men whose entire peace of mind rests on the knowledge that they are a
genius
, not
just that they're a genius but also that nobody else is a genius, and that nobody else even thinks they're a genius in the same way they do, one of those
insanely bad
young men, in fact, who are so utterly addicted to the idea of their own genius that—and here's an irony, given what happened to me in the sixties—they loaf about the place harboring a secret confidence that had they been born in any earlier era they would naturally have been best friends with all the
other
geniuses, the ones you've heard of. In third-century Italy, or whatever, they would have been palling around with Michelangelo on the golf course suggesting, as they followed the flight of their ball, that he do a painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile. In Stone Age times he would have been hunting buddies with the guy who invented the wheel and in the sixties of course a young brunomaddoxy man such as Bruno Maddox would have been rubbing shoulders with Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. Of course he would have been.

Where else would he be but with the geniuses?

Out there, reader?

Out there with the scum? With the masses? With the people who were
impressed
by the idea of a man's enlarging a soup can label? With the
consumer
, reader?

No. Of course not.

The idea of enlarging a soup can label, to a man like Bruno Maddox, is child's play.

Though his tragedy, of course, is that he wasn't born then back in the Past. He was born
now
, in the Future, when all the good ideas have already been
taken
. When all the world's most dominant geniuses can do is sit tight and wait for inspiration, with the TV on—as long as it's meaningless
sport, where there's never any mention of any of those fake athletic geniuses who stalk the globe, stealing all the money, stealing all the girls—maybe a little glass of something, maybe a
sandwich
, and that's why he had a meltdown in the bookstore, reader, and why things have been tough around here lately on the “work” front.