The Uncivil Servant

The Uncivil Servant Part XXXV

Thu, 3 Dec 2009 18:29:28 -0600

Brad staggered onto the couch, dimly aware that Rick had suggested he sit. What the hell else had Rick been talking about? Something about not paying for TV?
“So, it’s expensive, but sometimes it’s worth it,” Brad said. “Cheaper than, say, going out and doing something.”
“Fond of being sedentary there, Brad?” Rick asked, having pulled up some sort of Linux menu and begun fiddling with it. Azimuth, Brad noticed. Maybe it was satellite-related?
“Sometimes, I guess,” Brad said. “Not always. But, with TV, you either have it, or you become some outcast and go without, right? And you can’t get much with an antenna, so you have to pay for it. So I pay for it. But at least I don’t go without?”
“If they charge a reasonable amount for it, I’ll pay for it,” Rick said. “Five or ten bucks a month. Television is paid for with advertising, so the channels shouldn’t charge the cable company anything to carry their signal. The cable company, in turn, shouldn’t charge more than whatever the amortized cost of their infrastructure along with their general overhead comes to, plus a small profit. But since none of them are content with such a reasonable arrangement, I make my own.”
“So, uh, you …” Brad frowned and felt his cheeks grow hot. It was like a dream where you were back in kindergarten, but somehow you couldn’t get the answers right in spite of your being clearly more than a decade past the appropriate age of participation. “Oh. You steal cable.”
The answer, finally found, seemed both self-evident and a bit mundane. Brad quickly followed himself up with, “But I thought that was impossible nowadays? I mean, all the security chips and ID stuff.”
“It’s not impossible,” Rick said. “More difficult, maybe. Less common, certainly. But not impossible. You probably could’ve figured that out by virtue of the fact that I’ve just told you my daughter doesn’t pay for cable, and that I’m sitting here making modifications to software called ‘Open Dishame.’”
He had a point. Now that he pointed it out, Brad could see the software title bar pretty clearly. Sure enough, it was indeed called “Open Dishame.” One would think he would’ve caught that factoid.
“I’m … that’s pretty cool,” Brad said.
“Still a bit tongue-tied, but improving,” Rick said. “What is not improving is this satellite calibration. There’s another tier of channels I want to add to the Queen Anne’s Revenge, but the signal strength isn’t strong enough. The dish must’ve gotten jarred loose.”
“Up, uh, on the roof?” Brad asked.
“Very good,” Rick said. “You got it on the first guess. Liz does, indeed, use one of those satellites where you have to place your dish on a high object, with an unobstructed view of the sky. Probably because the satellite signal we’re trying to pick up is beamed down from a geosynchronous orbit, rather than being provided by, say, a community of highly advanced ground squirrels.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Brad said. Rick sure was a dick.
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t planning on doing any maintenance this trip, so we didn’t bring a ladder. Which means I can’t finish up this job. Which means the Queen Anne’s Revenge gets no more channels. Which means Liz doesn’t, either.”
“I’ll, uh, be right back,” Brad said. There was a glimmer of hope, a possible way to dig his way out of the horrible point deficit he’d incurred with Liz’s family. A victory might still be impossible, but what kind of team doesn’t go for the onside kick when there’s still a mathematical chance to win?
Brad got to his feet, no minor accomplishment given his erection and great girth. Just getting up from a couch or recliner took a careful and multistep process of shifting and moving in order to get his center of gravity into a place where it would allow him to leave the warm embrace of padded furniture. Hiding his turgidity only added to the challenge, like throwing hams at an escape artist trying to get out of a straightjacket.
“I gotta go do something,” Brad added.
Mona smiled at him, showing her teeth, and said, “Need a hand?”
“No, uh, ma’am,” Brad said. “I’m okay.” He was pretty sure that help was the last thing that would do him any good in what he now intended. About all another person could do was tell him that it was a very bad idea – and Brad already knew that.
Shuffling like a crone, Brad made it to the door, at which point he could straighten a bit. Sure, there might be strangers outside, and having them stare at his engorgement would be nonoptimal, but at least they weren’t Liz’s parents.
Plus, now that he was away from the strange mojo of the room, naked Liz seemed to be fading. Maybe he could accomplish his task without her. That’d be nice.
Getting out to the parking lot behind the apartment, Brad found that he couldn’t get to his car like he’d hoped. A car with Texas plates was pared half up on the curb, half in the space next to Brad’s car, with barely an inch of clearance between the interloper’s side-view mirror and the side of Brad’s ride. In fact, the car was pulled a bit ahead of Brad’s up on the sidewalk, and if it were to simply back straight out, one or both cars would end up without any side-view mirrors on those sides whatsoever.
This wasn’t an end-of-the-world situation. Brad just needed to get into his trunk, and apparently, for all their efforts, Liz’s parents had been unable to think of a way to prevent him from doing so when they parked.
Grabbing some pliers and a few screwdrivers from the tool chest in his trunk, Brad turned to survey the apartment building. It was vaguely trapezoidal, with the second story sticking out just a bit more than the first story, and covered by a plain, if slightly steeply angled, roof.
On the back edge, Brad could see Liz’s satellite dish – grey, innocuous, and highly inaccessible for a man who had no ladder. Still, Brad was determined. Nobody said an onside kick was supposed to be easy.
There was one, small glimmer of hope: some sort of ribbing that extended all along the second story up to the roof, boards laid in some arty, overlapping manner that probably served some necessary purpose to the structure and also looked like they might provide some usable handholds for Brad. He headed back inside for the stairs and the second floor.
This was alien territory for Brad. Part of him wondered absently if the neighbor above Liz had been able to hear any of their lovemaking … or amateurish, animalistic rutting, if accuracy were preferred.
Or how about Liz sobbing? Surely they’d heard that. Brad was pretty sure the entire world had listened as his girlfriend cried next to him, sticky, slightly smelly, and emotionally distraught.
The window at the rear of the building on the second floor did not want to open. Brad pushed and pulled, and then managed to put his arm through the pane of glass.
A large gash opened on his right arm, near the wrist. Broken glass was everywhere, some on the floor, most falling to the ground below to shatter further on the concrete there.
Brad’s arm was bleeding a lot. He probably needed medical attention. The pain was sharp, and he was careful not to look too closely, because he had a feeling that, if he did look, he was likely to see some of those meaty bits you never wanted to see – particularly if they belonged to you.
Adrenaline was in full effect. Brad felt infinitely competent and charged with the heady aroma of battle. With giddy ferocity, he grabbed the window frame and hoisted himself up and partway out.
“Jesus hopscotching Christ, it’s kinda high up here,” Brad said, watching as a stream of his blood dripped down onto the smattering of glass below. “Better get going, or someone’s gonna call the cops.”
It was a valid point. When you saw a fat guy bleeding profusely, hanging halfway out of a broken window, you usually called the authorities – if for no other reason than to add a new variable to an already entertaining domestic tableau.
“Oww.” Brad felt like he’d earned the right to that statement. Nor was the fact lost on him that his cut wrist was going to score him a ton of bonus points, provided he pulled this thing off.
He’d been wounded in the line of duty. Hell, he was a hero.
How to proceed? As a hero, he felt confident that he should know the answer to that one. In practice, he found that climbing up onto a roof was way more difficult than it appeared when you saw someone else doing it – someone who, typically, knew what he was doing, had a ladder, and had done it before.
The wood slats were slippery and angled the wrong way to properly grab onto them. The roof itself stuck out a bit, too, so he was going to have to somehow get himself not just to the roofline, but then up and over it.
Brad heaved himself all the way out of the window to see if he could hold himself. After the fingers on his left hand slipped a bit, he adjusted and managed not to plummet to his doom. It seemed a good start.
Feeling like the world’s most obese cat burglar, Brad got his feet onto the window ledge and tried to push himself off. It worked, although his arms were starting to quiver slightly, and he felt entirely unbalanced.
Moving one hand at a time, he got a grip as high up as he could go. It was now men-from-the-boys time. Brad had to shift his lower body higher, and the only way to do that was to abandon his windowsill foothold.
Throwing a leg up to his right, he managed to sort of wedge a shoe into the slats. The grip seemed tenuous, but it was all Brad had available, so he shifted his weight to support himself by that foot and got the other one swung up behind it.
There was a moment of infinite instability. Brad felt himself began to totter, and the toes on his right foot cramped at the same time, apparently pissed at being used for the first time in what had to be years at a minimum.
He was losing his grip. He was going to fall. He was so close. This wasn’t going well.
Desperate, Brad made a Hail Mary grab for the roof’s edge. His hand sort of floundered on the shingle surface, unable to hold in spite of the gritty, textured surface. Then, salvation: molded plastic base, firmly attached to the roof itself.
Brad grabbed it, pulled, and began to heave himself up. His feet slid loose, no longer halfway gripping an inadequate support. As he pulled, his eyes rose above the level of the roof, and he could see what had saved him.
It was the satellite dish. Drilled into the roof material, the plastic dish and its mounting base were holding Brad’s weight. Possibly the thing had even saved his very life. What a superb satellite dish.
Certain realities were sinking in, like the fact that there was no way he was getting down without a ladder, unless he could manage to jump into the branches of the tree that grew next to the apartment building and whose upper branches shaded half the roof. But soon, those realities were crowded out by another.
One of the corners of the satellite dish’s base had popped loose from the roof. The next two corners went a moment later. And almost as quickly as Brad realized what was happening, his salvation had turned on him, sort of like God turned on Job as soon as a betting opportunity presented itself.
The satellite dish was no longer attached to the roof. By extension, neither was Brad.
It slid to the edge. Brad fell.
As he fell, Brad had enough time for only one thought: Was this survivable? He figured the answer probably depended on how and where he landed.
He landed on the pavement. It was that kind of morning.
End.

The Uncivil Servant Part XXXIV

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 07:02:44 -0600

Brad was mortified. He stuck his own hand down there to try to assist, knowing that he’d be less gentle than she was being. By squeezing himself like he was trying to murder a garter snake, he managed to shove a bit in. The rest followed through careful, but hurried, kneading.
And it felt wonderful.
And he was still largely flaccid.
And he orgasmed anyhow.
All in about five seconds.
Liz looked down at him, sort of cocked her head to one side like a terrier looking at a squeaky toy, and said, “Did you, uh … already?”
“Yeah, I, uhm, think so. Yep. Sure did.”
“Huh,” Liz said, sliding off of him and standing up. The air smelled a bit like ass, and Brad felt slimy-sticky. “That was surprising.”
“Man, you’re telling me!” Brad said. “I mean, not only did it only last two seconds, I couldn’t even get it up.”
Sometimes the trick to failure was to lay claim to it before anyone else could. At the moment, Brad figured he had nothing to lose.
Liz pulled up her panties and jeans and began to zip up. Brad rolled off of the couch like a walrus, then waddled toward the bathroom with his slacks around his ankles.
How could she not, like, wipe herself down? That couldn’t be pleasant, or hygienic.
Brad made it to the restroom and did his best to clean himself up before pulling his clothing back up. He knew it’d be an imperfect job – one of the downsides to male anatomy was that, invariably, ten minutes after you got laid, or whacked off, or otherwise ejaculated, a little bit more would show up and ooze out as a sort of sexual afterthought. Which would be fine if you were, say, naked in bed, but when you’d gotten dressed again, it was a very frustrating thing – going to all that trouble to get clean, only to be betrayed by your own body.
At least he wouldn’t be as sticky as she was. Brad washed his hands carefully, with soap and everything. Anal sex-flavored pizza wasn’t particularly appetizing. As a man who took his pizza piously, he had to ensure the vessels of its delivery were cleansed.
In spite of the mild shame, Brad was still pretty pleased with how the evening was going.
He re-emerged into the apartment with his slacks cinched in place around his gut, his hands smelling a bit girly because of the scented soap that had been his only bathroom option. Girly was better than girl’s ass.
“Wonder how long we’ve got ’til that pizza gets here, huh?” Brad asked. “I mean, damn, I’m hungry! Even hungrier than before.
“And maybe after we eat, we can, like, give that another go. I think you’re just too hot. So you get me all excited, so I’m, y’know, twitterpated. Can’t perform properly. But I bet next time’ll be better, way better. Awesome.”
“It’d better be,” Liz said, snuggling up next to him on the couch as he sat down. “I have needs. So you’ll have to improve.”
That sounded somewhat ominous. Brad felt his penis seem to try to shrink down there in the presumed safety of his slacks and boxer shorts.
He wasn’t sure how other men felt, but for him, at least, there was nothing quite so intimidating as a sexually demanding partner. The more she wanted it, seemingly, the less he did.
Maybe he could work on her over dinner, convince her she didn’t want it, so he would. After all, once he wanted it, it should be easy to convince her to want it again – he could just rub it on her ’til she came around to his way of thinking or fell asleep. Either way led to the same thing.
If he had been alone in his own apartment facing impotence, the solution would’ve been simple: some nice rape or bestiality porn would’ve fixed him right up. Somehow, in spite of their explicit relationship, Brad just wasn’t comfortable suggesting that kind of sexual aid to Liz.
What would he say, precisely? “Hey, Liz, how about we watch a nice hardcore video of simulated rape! Or some girl suck off a stallion! Wouldn’t that be AWESOME?”
In spite of how frisky-friendly she seemed to become when they were alone, and away from work, Brad was still in that dangerous “breaking in” period of the relationship – a stage where it was far too easy to break things.
The whole concept of rape porn was risky business all the way around, anyhow. To begin with, what did it imply about your opinion of women, if that got your rocks off?
Brad had spent enough time around militant lesbians to know that he, like all heterosexual males, was basically a pretty lousy guy – and that was if he only engaged in consensual, mutually satisfactory sex. Take out the consent, remove the satisfaction, and you were, well, a pretty lousy guy, right?
Somewhere, at some point, Brad had read that women were supposed to fantasize about rape. That served as his only, narrow grain of hope in what seemed to him an otherwise untenable position. Like a Nazi apologist insisting that the Holocaust was a myth, the notion of female rape fantasy gave Brad the sliver of hope.
Maybe, somehow, someday, he’d end up with a girl who really, really liked that sort of thing. They’d do rape role play. It’d be, Brad was sure, awesome.
There were a few obstacles, though, like the fact that Brad never, ever, ever wanted to talk about rape with anyone, much less a girl. Or the fact that Brad didn’t want to talk during sex, much less interact in the sort of verbal and violent manner you’d have to in order to pull off a convincing rape. “Uh, yeah, slut, you take it. You take it, or I’ll, uh, hit you good. Yeah.” He had a hard time picturing it.
It wasn’t hard to figure out the appeal of rape porn: It was quasi-plausible. As a portly gentleman, there weren’t a lot of realistic scenarios that ended up with Brad having sex with a hot, squirmy, young thing … not unless he paid, and he was far too socially inept to pull off the grand feat of hiring a hooker.
Sure, there was Liz, but she was more in his ballpark. Bony, greasy, totally insane, and weird on top of it all. Even with all those downsides, she was at the top end of what he could reasonably expect to score – right up there with those disfigured by car accidents, and perhaps the elderly but still horny.
Brad’s sexual prospects were poor. This Liz thing was a major feat.
Then, of course, there was the matter of the bestiality. Now, Brad was no sicko – he didn’t go in for the stuff with, say, golden retrievers or goats. But something about equine-on-girl sex was just, well, hot. Hot and very wrong. Maybe hot because of the wrongness.
Again, how would he propose such a thing to Liz? Just leave it running on the computer by “accident” and hope she saw it? Saw it, and didn’t immediately take a knife to his junk?
Or maybe they could honeymoon in Tijuana, and he could take her to a donkey show. He’d never been, but he’d heard plenty.
If it went badly, he could claim he hadn’t known what the show entailed, and if it went well, then he’d have a partner in crime, as it were. Not that he knew precisely what he’d do with such a partner, anyhow. Buy a stable? Rent?
Dirty naked imaginary Liz made a brief reappearance as he ruminated on ruminant sex. She looked pretty good getting it on with a horse. Maybe that could be a long-term goal or something.
Heck, she was crazy enough; maybe she’d let him film it. That’d be good for some cash, he was pretty sure. There couldn’t be an overabundance of “models” willing to do that sort of work, right?
Filled with the warm glow of future hypothetical debauchery, Brad encircled Liz with his arm and distractedly squeezed at her smallish breast. Life was good.
A loud knock came at the door. Life was moving from good to great.
Brad jumped up and ran around the corner, intent on not being visible when Liz talked to the pizza guy. She gave him a puzzled look as he ran, but with the knocking, there was no time for her to ask what the hell he was doing.
He stood eagerly in the tiny kitchen, listening as Liz went through the standard back-and-forth with the pizza dude. Hi there, twenty-three-fifty, there you go, thanks, have a great night.
The door closed, and Brad came darting back around the corner, a dish towel he’d found on the stove in one hand. Pizza, after all, had a tendency to be greasy. Brad hated greasy. Towels were awesome.
“Did you have to pee or something?” Liz asked.
“Nah, I just hate talking to strangers,” Brad said, “so I ducked into the kitchen.”
“I was already going to the door,” Liz said. “You wouldn’t have had to say anything to him.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to explain,” Brad said. “It’s just a thing. I like to avoid people whenever possible. And when there’s a knock at the door, my instinct is to run. It’s not a cop thing. It’s just a recluse thing.”
“Like the spider,” Liz said.
“Uhm, I guess so?” Brad said. “Only, less venom?”
The pizza was still steaming hot. Brad pulled out a piece, and then very daintily bit off the smallest bit of a corner of the slice to prevent scalding his tongue. Nothing worse than scalding your tongue on the first bite and missing out on all the deliciousness for the rest of the meal.
Like most brief opportunities to achieve the sublime, Brad ignored the chance to savor the blend of chewy, greasy, crisp flavors that made up the pizza. Instead, he inhaled it at the highest rate its latent heat would allow.
After the first half-dozen slices, he noticed that Liz was watching him wide-eyed, in apparent horror.
“Uhm, whachmif?” Brad asked. He wasn’t entirely sure what words that had entailed, and sort of suspected that it was possible the part of his mind dedicated to interpersonal communication had bailed out halfway through and left the final word choice to the gibberings of his id.
“Were you really hungry?” Liz asked.
Brad, recognizing that it’d be best not to eat another slice while they were having this particular conversation, took a moment to paw at his face with a napkin, removing some of the slick pizza by-catch away.
“I, well, I mean, I was kinda hungry,” Brad said, trying to be honest. “Maybe even really hungry. But I really like pizza. So it’s hard to say for sure. I’ll, y’know, slow down or something, so you get enough.”
“I’m fine. That was just scary.”
“Sorry,” Brad said. “I’m a pretty enthusiastic eater. Like a piranha. Or maybe a nine-inch dredge.”
“I’ve never seen anyone do that,” Liz said. “It was like you were angry at the pizza. Or like you’d just murdered the pizza, and you had to eat it before the cops got here, to dispose of the evidence. Or like a dog that’s stolen a bag of fried chicken, and it knows its owner is going to try to take the chicken away so the dog doesn’t choke on chicken bones, but the dog has decided that the chicken is so delicious, it’s worth dying for. That’s sort of how you ate.”
“Huh. Never thought of that before. It’s kinda awesome. And y’know, even when I was a skinny little kid, I really put the food away. Sort of wondered if maybe I should try to become a competitive eater, so this one time, I cooked two dozen hot dogs, and sat down to see how quickly I could eat them.
“I haven’t wanted to eat hot dogs much since then. Throwing up that much, that fast, will sorta do it to you. Dunno how competitive eaters keep in the game, what with the vomit. Puke is a real turn-off for me, delicious-wise.”
“I think I’m going to go lie down,” Liz said.
This was wonderful news to Brad, as Liz lying down implied a lot of things: that she’d be in a bed; that she’d be in a position where her various parts would be conveniently located for penile accessibility; that, perhaps, she was even inviting such access by her actions. It was awfully early for sleep, after all.
As soon as she was out of the room, Brad turned back to the pizza. He was fond of cold pizza, but he wouldn’t have cold pizza. Future Brad would. And Brad didn’t really care much about future Brad. Future Brad needed to fend for himself.
There was sex to be had. And before that, pizza to be quickly disposed of. With luck, Brad could soon be basking in the warm glow of two endorphin floods: postcoital and postfeast. It was going to be a beautiful night.

Morning came in like a burglar, masturbating on your high school debate team trophy.
Brad’s recollections of the night before were somewhat hazy, but he did know they involved sloppy, fairly poorly executed sex. That, and Liz sobbing for a while afterward.
That part had been highly lame. He’d had to pretend to fall asleep immediately, so as to avoid being a bastard for not asking what was wrong.
She seemed fairly cheerful now, though. Almost manic.
“Get up, get up! You’ve got to get dressed! We’re going to have a wonderful day,” Liz said. “My parents are coming over!”
This was quite the proverbial Clydesdale kick to the nuts. Brad could already picture it. “Hello, uh, Mr. Liz’s Dad. I spent the night sodomizing your daughter, and then she cried. I felt bad, but at the same time, I was sort of basking in that post-orgasm glow. So I suppose my bad feelings were tempered a little.
“She has very small breasts. I suppose that’s your wife’s fault? Genetics, and all that. She doesn’t give head, does she? Because that’d be swell. Your daughter, I mean. It’d be kind of weird getting it from your wife.”
Brad wondered if Mr. Liz’s Dad would be bringing a shotgun. Judging by how crazy she was, that didn’t seem entirely out of the question.
He also wondered what her last name was. He knew he’d been exposed to it in the past, and he should probably know the answer. But he didn’t.
The sweating began. Or maybe it got worse. Brad usually woke up slick in the morning, unless he had the air conditioning cranked down to ice-cube levels, which resulted in electric bills way past his pay grade.
So, unless it got to the 40s at night, Brad usually slept uncomfortably warm. Every bed he slept in was stained a greasy yellow, and his sheets typically became unbearable in about a week – not that he washed them at that point. That’d be both sensible and sort of pleasant.
He could already see his canary-esque influence on Liz’s white sheets when he glanced back down at the bed. She slept with a lot of blankets, and even her sheet was somehow incredibly warming. So Brad’s sweat glands had been on high alert. Each night he’d slept next to her, he’d had to flip the pillow at least twice because he’d soaked the side he was lying on.
“Parents. Huh.”
“You’ll love them. My mom and dad are the best. They live in Texas, but they visit at least every other weekend. We’re very close. They like to make sure I’m doing well.
“I’ve told them about you, so they’re very excited. Dad said he wanted to talk about plans with you. I’m sure you two will love each other. He’s very smart. But I guess you shouldn’t call him Dad, at least not yet.”
“That’s really something,” Brad said. “This sounds kinda, y’know, planned. Organized, even. In a very scary way.”
“Don’t be a giant moron,” Liz said. “Nobody planned anything. My parents love me. They love to visit me. And today, they get to visit you, too.”
“Isn’t this a little early?” Brad asked. “Shouldn’t we be, like, further along before we throw parents into the mix? I mean, I don’t really like seeing my parents, let alone someone else’s.”
“That’s very sad,” Liz said, “but not very important. You need to take a shower and shave. They’ll be here in an hour.”
“I wonder if this is what it felt like to get swept up in, say, the cultural revolution?” Brad asked. Oddly, or perhaps not, one thing was finding resonance: It was, somehow, peculiarly stimulating to imagine meeting Liz’s father so soon after having molested her in such unspeakable ways. In fact…
“So, an hour is kinda soon, but not that soon,” Brad said, moving closer to Liz so he could cup her ass with his hands and sort of grind into her from the front. Dirty Liz and daughter Liz had a brief battle, Brad was fairly sure, but the fight ended badly for him.
“I have to clean, and you have to shower,” Liz said, borderline angry. “We can’t do things like that while my parents are on their way! In fact, after last night, I’m starting to wonder if we should have sex at all until we’re married!”
Brad’s ardor dissipated faster than French teenagers in teargas. Had daughter Liz just murdered dirty Liz and buried her in a shallow grave?
“You’re joking, uh, aren’t you?” Brad asked, feeling himself being herded toward the bathroom. “I mean, we just got started, y’know? We can’t quit now.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Liz said. “Get clean. I have to vacuum.”
Brad shut the bathroom door and locked it. He stared at himself in the mirror, feeling the loathing he usually did whenever he saw his own reflection.
He glared, willing the image on the other side to drop dead, even baring his clenched teeth, although none of it seemed to make much point. Mirror Brad never died, and mostly looked sort of sad and slightly broken down.
Liz could feel that she’d won this round, but Brad knew otherwise. If she was going to refuse his affections, he’d get her back: He’d masturbate in her shower while she cleaned the apartment. That’d teach her.
Not that Brad had any idea how, precisely, it’d teach her … or even how she would ever find out. But he was determined to teach her. Somehow.
He started the water going, and as he lumbered in, an idea began to coalesce. Rather than your traditional, quick rub-out into the drain, he’d go ahead and try to jerk off onto the tile, preferably in one of the spots that hardly ever got wet when the shower ran, so his spunk would remain there until she discovered it, one way or another.
The notion got him fairly excited. The same bizarre desire to inflict humiliation that drove at least part of the appeal of the facial leapt at this chance. He could just picture her, perhaps relaxing in the tub, when suddenly, she’d notice a strange, dried, white smear there on the shower wall, below the showerhead.
“What’s that?” she’d ask herself. “Dry shampoo?”
Maybe she’d reach out a finger and touch it. “Feels sort of tacky for shampoo,” she’d say.
Maybe she’d even … maybe taste it. Yeah. Maybe she’d put her finger into her mouth and taste the mysterious, tacky stain. There’d be no mistaking that taste. Salty.
Shampoo wasn’t salty. Neither was conditioner.
What would she say then? Would she squeal in disgust and jump out of the tub, all wet and glisteny and nude and startled? That’d be kind of awesome. Or would she, you know, go for another taste?
Brad was getting quite worked up.
The second taste – that was definitely the hotter option. Having gotten a little taste, she’d need more.
Maybe she doubted that first one. Maybe she just, like, loved what she’d gotten. She had to finish it. Finish every drop. Yeah. The dirty little slut. Every drop.
The moment of truth arrived, but Brad’s fantasy had worked too well – he was totally lost in the midst of it. Accordingly, his aim was waaaaaaaay off. None of his ejaculate made it onto the wall where he’d intended to leave it. Instead, he fertilized part of the shower curtain, a bottle of shampoo, his right foot, and his right knee.
“Oh, crap,” Brad said, trying to grab some and hand-spread it onto the wall. The effort didn’t work very well, and he was also suffering from the general sense of “screw it” that usually comes after orgasm. Maybe next time.

Liz’s parents came in like Israeli commandos. Not that they were Jewish, just that their entry happened so fast, you didn’t really know what was happening, and you couldn’t really understand what they were saying.
Brad gathered that Mr. Liz’s Dad was called “Rick” and Mom was “Mona.”
Mona was all giant smiles and sort of dead behind the eyes. She shared Liz’s great love for quarter-inch foundational makeup and had the same sort of powdery-grease sheen.
She spoke softly, like Quaaludes sort of soft. There was an odd rhythm to her, like you’d start to feel seasick if you spent too much time in her company. Every so often she’d sort of erupt into life and behave in that giant Texas way all Texans seem capable of, laughing way too loud, or telling a story in some brash, sudden manner.
Rick was intense, like a Gestapo arc light trained on a huddled group of would-be escapees. He smiled a lot, if you counted pulling the flesh back from your teeth as a smile. He asked a lot of questions, all of them short and fast, like a .22-caliber Gatling gun.
The weird pleasantries flew by and around Brad like an sudden, disorganized storm. He craved pharmaceutical support desperately. Pills, any pills, to make this all seem like a really funny exercise in futility. Snort it, shoot it, smoke it, whatever … He just knew he wasn’t doing a very good job of taking it. Not so far.
Finally, he latched on to a question that seemed to require some sort of thought-out response: “So, Liz says you two might be getting married?” Rick asked, though it seemed fairly rhetorical, at least the way he put it.
Brad squinted back at the blaring light that was Liz’s father. “I’m, uh, … It’s kinda early, y’know? We’ve talked about a lot of things.”
“Well, don’t talk too much,” Rick said. “People talk themselves out of things all the time. You don’t want to miss out on my little girl. And anyway, you clearly are very close, for you to have come over this early on a Saturday to visit.”
Brad frowned. Did they not know he was sodomizing, and then sleeping with, their daughter? How could they not realize? His hair was still wet from the shower, and he even smelled like her, since it was either that or go sans deodorant … It was never a good idea to skip deodorant when you sweated like Brad. But to do so when you were going to meet your girlfriend’s parents, well, that would be insane, which Brad liked to hope he wasn’t. Yet.
“How’s the cable working?” Rick asked, mercifully turning his attention away from Brad. “They sent a piracy pulse last month. It didn’t hit you, did it?”
“It’s fine. I watch it every night,” Liz said. She looked pissed off, but Brad wasn’t sure why. Had he said something? His mind was getting fear-hazy, and he just wasn’t sure.
“Yeah, I’m a big TV guy,” Brad said.
Rick had gotten down on the floor by the television and was fiddling with the computer next to it. Without looking up, he said, “Huh. Well, there’s usually not much worth watching. But that means there’s even less worth paying for, which is why no daughter of mine will.”
Brad felt dense. Was this some challenge to his manhood? Was Rick implying that he, Brad, wasn’t good enough to supply good cable to Liz? That seemed a slightly odd way to evaluate a suitor. Which, by the way, he wasn’t, necessarily.
Still, never back down from a challenge, and all that. “I’ve always paid for very good cable. I believe in having a full selection of channels,” Brad said, feeling a bit defiant. Sure, the cable had been turned off a few times, but he always got it turned back on. He was a winner.
“Really?” Rick said. “You think that’s smart, paying those inflated rates for their diluted content? I’m glad my daughter doesn’t agree with you. I raised her to be smarter than that.”
Yeah, this was great. Rick was a charmer, and he was winning.
Best of all, Brad hadn’t even known it was a contest. Now that he was losing, he still wasn’t sure where the starting line had been. “I’m, you don’t?”
“I’m sorry, Brad, but you don’t seem to have replied to me in any meaningful manner,” Rick said. “Maybe you should sit down a minute. You seem nervous. Clearly, it has you tongue-tied.”
As if Rick had recited some powerful, though localized, incantation, naked Liz showed up in Brad’s imagination, pantomiming the act of being “tongue-tied” in a very inappropriate manner. Brad felt the stirrings of an erection.
Mona was staring at him, smiling in this creepy, vacant manner. Well, staring near him. Her gaze seemed like it was just the tiniest bit off, sort of like Robocop’s targeting before what’s-her-name fiddled with him in the abandoned warehouse scene.
What, precisely, was the penalty for getting a boner in front of your girlfriend’s parents? Did you get extra punishment if it was the first time you met them? Was there some more shameful fate? Like crapping your pants? Or crying for no reason?

The Uncivil Servant Part XXXIII

Fri, 2 Oct 2009 07:22:03 -0500

The afternoon didn’t involve many more calls until it came close to the end of the day. At about four, friends and relatives began to ring, looking for their favorite inmates. Brad figured they were probably calling because they were surprised, with the official end of the day only an hour away, that the civil servants in question weren’t already home.
Were they dead? Brutally raped and decapitated, their bodies dumped in an anonymous patch of the Atchafalaya? Or were they just earning their paycheck for a bizarre switch?
Brad figured he knew the more likely explanation: They needed to photocopy church newsletters, and feeling vaguely guilty about the process, preferred to do it when all of their coworkers could be reasonably expected to be gone. He took the calls resentfully and punched halfheartedly at the phone system’s buttons, managing to track down one or two coworkers.
At some point, somehow, the day ended. The moment Brad’s watch read five, he jumped up from the desk, malevolently pleased that the phone happened to be ringing.
“I’m off-duty, bitch. Keep on ringing.”
Back to his office. A desperate cigarette, inhaled with the enthusiasm of addiction. He launched Civilization and began bombarding neutral countries with his fleet of battleships. Watching the phalanxes and chariots die amused him. Playing on “chieftain” had its benefits.
Brad hadn’t seen Liz in hours. He wasn’t sure what to do next. Normally, he would’ve bolted first chance he got, but he wasn’t even sure where he was going – his crappy apartment or hers. He wasn’t even sure anymore what they’d settled upon for a parting conclusion … were they dating? Engaged? Mortal enemies?
The encroachment of an utter inability to focus, pay attention, remember, or do anything in any way constructive seemed to indicate one thing: Brad’s system was devoid of amphetamines. He fingered his pocket pharmacy and thought about rectifying the situation.
Somehow, the need just wasn’t there. This moment seemed to call for improvisational skills. Objective evidence aside, Brad fully believed he was a more creative, more inventive person when he was off the speed. Less productive, sure, but more interesting.
Soft, fast knock at the door. It opened; Liz entered.
“Are we driving together, or what?” she asked. She pulled out one of her own cigarettes and lit it, looking pinched and nervous, thick makeup gleaming with the sheen of a long day sweating, talking, and natural exfoliation.
“Where’d Ethan run off to?” Brad asked, trying for a more neutral subject.
“He said he needed to contemplate or something,” Liz said. “I think he fell asleep on the folding table by our desks.”
“I guess we should probably both drive, since I left my car here last night and all. But maybe I could meet you at your place?” Brad offered.
“I think that would be best,” Liz said, squinting at him past the cherry of her cigarette.
Brad could see creases in her makeup, like laugh lines on an old woman. It looked greasy. Brad didn’t like greasy. Having that on his face was yet one more iteration of the many and varied forms of hell Brad could imagine. He wanted to take a squeegee and remove the makeup like excess grout from floor tile.
And he wanted, very badly, to bend her over his cluttered desk and take her with inexpert grace and feverish brevity.
Mazzy Star played in the background. More sweat broke out on Brad, although it would’ve been hard to tell, what with the existing sheen. He could probably use the squeegee himself, just to remove some of the oily sweat mixture that coated him like vernix on a newborn.
“You, uhm, …” Brad said. “That’ll be cool. Y’know. At your place. We can watch TV and stuff. Talk? Yeah.”
Brad’s hands started to move toward his pack to get another cigarette, but he hadn’t finished the one he was already smoking. He was painfully aware of his pulse, and he felt queasy. Brad never had understood why poets described the cocktail of adrenaline and endorphins – God’s own speedball – as “love.” It was more a wistful sort of lust, at best.
Liz continued to stare at him. For all the months he’d been around her, he still hadn’t the slightest idea of what she was thinking. She’d make a good poker player, maybe – except for computing the odds, of course. Probably be a bit weak on the math angle, he figured.
Brad’s head got that weird tilting angle again, and he felt the hot metal blood thing from the day before and his “episode.” This seemed a lousy time for it. Brad clenched his jaw and willed the déjà vu to go away.
To his chemically disturbed mind, Liz was no longer a pseudogirlfriend or source of skeletal potential sexual release. She transformed into a gatekeeper of sorts. A jailer, watching over him as he served his sentence.
Brad’s head drifted further to the side, he argued with himself that it was all a chemical illusion, and Liz’s expression grew gradually more alarmed.
“Are you okay?” she asked, sounding more accusatory than concerned.
“Yeah, just a hot flash, like,” Brad said. “I’m cool. Really.” Banter lies were tricky when you were saying them at a 90-degree angle. His head had tilted so far to the side, he wondered if he was in danger of falling out of his rolly chair. Brad took a cigarette for fortitude and managed the sickliest, least sincere smile on record.
Liz rolled her eyes, squinted up her face, and resumed smoking. She seemed to think Brad was making fun of her.
Brittle silence stretched, and finally, they’d both finished their respective smokes. Liz snapped, “I’ll see you later,” and left.
Brad took a moment to gather his pulse. He felt flushed, queasy, and weak – and not the romantic way he’d been feeling a few minutes earlier. His chest felt tight. Was this how a heart attack started? Surely he was too young for that, morbid obesity be damned.
Clicking back onto the computer, more phalanxes fell to his Civilization wrath. Soon he’d research the atom bomb, and once that happened, he planned to nuke the rest of the world into an ecological apocalypse. It eased the tension.

“It’s so romantic having you here,” Liz said as she let Brad into her apartment.
Once again, it was the Good Liz, Bad Liz routine, some strange perversion of the old Jekyll and Hyde mythos. At work, prudish, paranoid, bitter. Here in the privacy of her own apartment, she was a veritable sex kitten, albeit one with slightly crazy eyes.
“I’m, uh, me too,” Brad replied suavely. “Say, you hungry?”
Brad was feeling pretty good. He’d stopped off at his own apartment and loaded his nervous system to forbear. He had more drugs coursing through his system than your average over-medicated centenarian. Neurons giggled to one another like Japanese schoolgirls. He had become Bacchus, archetype of joy and indulgence. Liz’s own peculiar acceptance only served as further proof that all was well with the world.
Brad was also quite pleased that their apartments were so near each other – he’d had a few swervy moments while driving over, and wondered in an abstract sort of way whether he might’ve killed himself or others had he stayed longer behind the wheel.
Somehow, the image of the boner-jet-pack commute had occupied most of his attention for the drive over. He’d grinned out his window at passers-by, imagining they were staring at his junk with dumbfounded fascination. He even did a few quick pelvic thrusts for the audience, delighting in his lack of inhibitions.
It was during one of these thrusts that his car had run off the road into the gravely-grassy shoulder, and Brad had been forced to slew it back to the blacktop. It’d seemed pretty funny at the time, although a brief chill had come upon him when he pondered how unfun it would be to explain himself to a cop were he to get pulled over.
But that was in the distant, nebulous, ancient past. Now he was with Liz, and she seemed in on the joke, which was great.
“Let’s get some pizza already!” Brad said, collapsing onto her couch like a gelatinous wrecking ball. “I’m so totally hungry, man.”
“You sure are happy. I’m happy, too,” Liz said. “I don’t normally order pizza, because I can’t ever finish it, and I don’t like it once it gets cold, so usually I just throw it out after a couple of days, which makes me feel bad, too.”
“Awesome,” Brad said. “I’ll eat it. No sweat. I’ll eat all of it, y’know?” This seemed like a rather witty observation, and he wiggled an eyebrow at her to show that he knew how clever he was.
But then a terrible thought occurred to Brad, and he sat upright on the couch.
“But, look, I can’t call them! I can’t! I’ve been on the phones all day! It’s a terrible, terrible thing to do, to someone delicate like me!” Brad said, suddenly in a near panic. “You’ve totally gotta call them, okay?”
Liz shrugged. “I can call. What do you want?”
“Meat! Meat, and more meat! And olives! Black olives! But never, NEVER any onions.”
Brad collapsed back on the couch, completely and totally pleased with the superb job he’d done in voicing his preference. He was great. This was great. Everything was great.
Liz looked up the number in a tidy phonebook, dialed, and started talking.
Brad could almost taste the pizza already, so he started singing a badly butchered version of “Yellow Submarine,” mostly because he couldn’t remember very many of the words other than the chorus.
“Oh when our hats, are in our hands, and the cheese, it’s very good … Every one of them, is all we need, is all we need, oh, we all live in a yellow submarine … a yellow submarine … a yellow submarine … Oh, we all live in a yellow submarine … a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. And then our shirts, get full of fish, and the other dude, says he’s sick of it … So we call him names, and kick his ass, and then that other thing, we also do that, cuz … We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. We all live in a yellow submarine, in a yellow submarine live we.”
Liz had a finger in one ear to try to hear the voice on the phone. Apparently, he’d been singing a bit loud.
The danger of missing out on pizza was a startling thought, and Brad violently closed his mouth to prevent any more brilliant lyrics from escaping. He also bit his tongue. It hurt. Tasted a bit like blood.
Brad dug into his pocket and pulled out a pill to cheer himself up. It was a Tylenol No. 4 – 60 mg of codeine phosphate with a protestant punishment dose of acetaminophen to ensure that the fun didn’t get out of hand. Or, more likely, to ensure that when the fun did get out of hand, you’d have some liver damage to remember it by.
Brad dry-swallowed it, which brought up an important issue: “Hey, hey, wait a minute! Don’t hang up! Hold on! Do you have any Coke? Because we need some! Make them bring some with the pizza! Otherwise, we’ll have nothing to drink!”
Liz frowned at him, but it sounded like she was including his request in her dinner negotiations over the phone.
Brad was immensely relieved and slumped back into his amoebic, relaxed state. One benefit of being so fat was that you could give the illusion of having been born without an endoskeleton. Whether this was accurately classified a “benefit” might be up for debate, but the results weren’t. Brad looked like a puddle of flesh, and he felt bliss.
Liz got off the phone, and her frown hadn’t gone away. “I saw you take a pill while I was talking to the pizza guy. What was it?”
Brad suppressed the desire to giggle, because he knew exactly how to answer that one. “Tylenol!” he replied, quite pleased that he hadn’t lied. His was, at most, a sin of omission.
Which brought him to his other recurring theme – he really wanted to get back to the sins of emission he’d experienced with Liz the night before. “Hey, why don’t you come sit down while we wait for the pizza?”
Hearing that he’d taken a Tylenol seemed to make Liz feel a bit better. Brad was pretty sure it was going to make him feel better, too, although it did put a bit of a time crunch on his plans for sexual indiscretion.
Opiates tended to interfere dramatically with his ability to get laid. Sometimes they caused impotence. Sometimes they kept him from ever achieving orgasm. Sometimes they just made him go limp midtryst.
Codeine was a fairly mild opiate for him (which was why he had it – he’d run out of anything harder), so he hoped he might be able to grunt and grind his way through this latest impediment. Still, the safest choice would be to take care of the sex thing before the pill started to work, so he held out his arms to her in the universal symbol of “Hey, c’mere, you!” and gathered her into his substantial embrace.
The night before, he’d been far more timid with her. Both afraid of rejection and sober, he’d suffered from the cautious inhibition that normally marked the intimate efforts of the sexually starved. Well, half the time. The other half, they were like he was now – way too eager.
Liz didn’t seem to mind a bit as his hands reached out to grasp her firmly by the ass and his mouth started roving like a piranha with ADD. She still had a sweater on, over some kind of blousy thing, so he had a very hard time coming anywhere close to her small breasts. Brad frowned and took one hand away from her rear to work on her front.
“You’d better be careful,” Liz said. “The pizza guy will be here soon.”
“Exactly!” Brad said. “We’re under the gun here! No time to waste!”
Liz didn’t resist. If anything, she seemed to go right along with it. Brad forced a hand under his belly and toward her crotch, working hard to figure out the zipper and button of her jeans. His own slacks were easier to free, and soon he was in an “open-air environment,” even if it was surrounded by their respective bodies.
Something alarming was happening, though. He felt a bit sticky, which wasn’t too uncommon when sexually excited … but he felt, at best, to be at half-mast, which wasn’t good news.
Liz sort of shifted her body as he began desperately thrusting up toward where he hoped was the right spot and said to him, “Not before I’m married.”
Brad was puzzled and started to wonder if maybe things had just taken a dramatic turn for the horrific, but as she rocked her hips forward, he suddenly understood: She wanted to remain a virgin. The other stuff was fair game.
This was awesome news, although the awesomeness had yet to penetrate his semiflaccid state. Brad put even more force into his upward thrusts, as if that could somehow force more blood into his member.
Liz came down onto him and guided him in toward her ass, frowning when her fingers reported his state of arousal or lack thereof.
It wouldn’t quite work. Like one of those oil-filled toruses you played with as a kid that constantly slipped out of your hands, Little Brad wouldn’t go where she tried to put him. And like a slug under attack from ants, Little Brad was growing more slimy with each passing moment, making the process all the more challenging.

The Uncivil Servant Part XXXII

Fri, 4 Sep 2009 07:19:50 -0500

Brad felt funny and wondered if he’d just wet himself. He was fairly sure, had he been given access to a mirror, his face would’ve been white as a sheet. He staggered a bit and managed to guide his girth to one of the guest chairs positioned on the other side of Faye’s desk from where she sat.
“I really need this job,” Brad said at barely more than a whisper. “I sorta kinda quit college at this point, really. I mean, I don’t know where I’d begin, if I tried to go back from co-op now, y’know? So this is sorta the basket my eggs are in. I really liked it here, which is why I did that. And I thought it was going so well.”
“You did very well here from the start,” Faye said. “That’s why you had such positive performance reviews initially. The problem is that your performance has deteriorated since then, and you are now no longer a reliable person for assigned work.”
“Oh.”
“You are not being fired,” Faye continued. “You are being given what you should take to be a stern warning. You have to improve, or you can no longer work here.”
That sounded a lot like being fired to Brad. He couldn’t imagine going without a job. Or trying to figure out how to go back to college. He’d backed himself into a corner, and if that corner tried to kick him out, he’d end up nowhere at all.
Really, this wasn’t supposed to happen. The joy of being a civil servant was that you had to kill someone to lose your job – and Brad had, as yet, failed to do so. Therefore, logically, it made no sense for his job to be in jeopardy.
This wasn’t exactly a dream gig. How could the world conspire to take away a job he didn’t even want in the first place, merely because the world had realized how lost he’d be without it? Hell, he didn’t even have any friends left without this job.
It was, Brad was quite certain, entirely unfair.
“I’ll figure it out,” Brad said. “Just need some organization. I can get started right away. I’ll get started right now. Go tackle my office, figure out a system. Maybe a system of systems. Like nested subroutines. Only my office won’t look like a nest, because that’s probably not conducive to an efficient work routine. Might even put you off a bit when you stick your head in my office.
“But, still, wheels within wheels … I’ll figure something out. Even though I’m not very organized, once I’ve got a good system going, I can usually keep it going pretty well. Back in high school, my mom used to organize me. She was good at that. So, yeah, I’ll just go get started.”
“No, you have to get back on the phones.” Faye said. “I only got Andy to cover you while we spoke. He needs to get back to work.”
Faye knew what she meant. If he knew Andy, and he’d like to think he knew Andy, Andy would be signing out for the day the moment Brad made it back to the front desk. It was (checking his wristwatch unobtrusively) 3:45.
Brad backed out of Faye’s office, filled with a bizarre mixture of elation and despair that convinced him (along with other things) that he had to be clinically insane. He was going to be fired. He was going to organize his office into a model of efficiency, accomplishing such a remarkable feat of high performance that they’d give him some kind of magical raise. Perhaps a new title. ’Cept he was gonna be fired. Or applauded. Somehow, maybe both.
Schrödinger's Cat had it easy by comparison.
By the time Brad lurched back to the front desk (it was, after all, literally just a few steps across the hall), Liz was gone, and Andy was glowering.
You never failed to guess what Andy was feeling, and as a general rule, it was a perpetual conviction that he was being forced to work harder than it was reasonable to expect. Andy gathered up his things as Brad stepped in and left without a word.
Brad faced the phone, still completely lost. He’d suffered a massive setback, but the nutty optimist inside him kept trying to put a positive spin on the abysmal situation. It was the sort of Pollyanna crap that made you want to try do-it-yourself brain surgery with a power drill.
He wasn’t even sure what was going on with Liz. They’d talked in a circle for what seemed like months. Were they now engaged? Or was she now his bitter enemy and ex-girlfriend? Either way, it was a strange price to pay for one evening of clumsily performed anal sex.
Then again, any price paid for clumsy anal sex might be an odd one. There wasn’t exactly a website you could check for current anal sex market conditions.
Brad wondered: Would prices vary between the gender markets? Was receiving backdoor privileges from a girl more “valuable” due to its scarcity compared to receiving the same from a (presumably) gay male?
Either way, the question was arousing him quite a bit, like most things. His long-grinding companion, naked imaginary Liz, shook her booty at him in a suggestive fashion. She was wearing a thong, or maybe regular cotton panties that had simply ridden so far into her crack as to be indistinguishable from their more risqué underwear brethren.
Clearly, imaginary Liz wanted to pleasure him in a filthy (but fun) manner. She was like that. It was part of her charm.
Brad hunched over at the phones and hoped there’d be no more in-person visits. The nice thing about telephones was that nobody could see your guilty erection.
Brad gave a mental thanks (not for the first time) to whatever whim of technological adoption had kept videophones from ever catching on in the mainstream. According to the 50s, he would’ve been answering a videophone and commuting via jet pack, both of which would leave his covert erections unpleasantly exposed to the gawking of others.
He could just picture it, flying along at 90 mph, 80 feet in the air, clad in some gold lamé-plastic nylon jumpsuit, his bulbous tumescence jutting forward like an aerial weather vane, terrifying and amusing the citizenry as he whizzed by overhead. They’d shade their eyes, mouths agape, and point at the fat man with the erection as he jetted toward his apartment.
Heck, given the contrary and patterned nature of biology, it would probably become an everyday ritual. Having once flown his colors on the way home, anxiety about the process would, invariably, lead to repetition. Every single day he’d spend, what, five or six minutes flying through the air, erection tugging at flight suit, face flaming red, and not just from windburn.
Watching and laughing would become a part of the daily routine for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of strangers along the route. “Hey, it’s 5:15 – time to watch the fat guy with the boner fly overhead!” they’d yell.
Out they’d come, some with cameras, some with binoculars, or high-tech sunglasses with built-in amplification, what with it being a future replete with jet packs – all to enjoy the spectacle that was jet-packed Brad: a man who flew with three joysticks. Even fellow commuters might get in the habit of hovering in place, trying not to burn their ankles while they waited for Brad to fly past.
The only people who could see your erection while you commuted in your car were truckers, and those dingbats with the ludicrous raised suspensions for off-roading. In either case, you figured that, while they may very well stare at your pants tent, they couldn’t admit it to anyone, so it was nearly as good as if they hadn’t looked in the first place.

The Uncivil Servant Part XXXI

Fri, 7 Aug 2009 09:45:27 -0500

The phone rang again, and Brad quickly passed the caller off to voice mail. It had rung a few times since Liz had walked in, but he hadn’t felt like sparing the mental attention. Thankfully, and somewhat predictably, this particular job didn’t take much thought.
“You keep jumping to the defensive,” Liz said. “I’m here to figure out the rest of my life. You’re the one who sees something wrong with that.”
“Well, duh,” Brad said. “Of course I do. An afternoon at the office just isn’t the right time for sorting out one’s entire future course. It’s more a time for stealing pens and Post-it notes, maybe making a tasteful photocopy of one’s butt. Assuming one has a butt that could safely be supported by the glass surface of the photocopier. Which, it is possible, I admit, I do not.”
“Life’s over quickly,” Liz said. “I should know. I remember most of the previous times I was alive. So I know that you don’t put off the big decisions. Maybe you skip the small stuff. Like deciding whether to shave your legs. But you don’t put off the big decisions. Like getting married. Or having kids. Or getting surgery. What if your leg falls off because you waited? You’d be pretty stupid then, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, stupid, and hopping about on one leg, too,” Brad said. “You couldn’t even kick yourself for making such a lousy decision. I mean, not unless you were incredibly athletic on that one leg.
“You could probably get on TV for that, y’know, variety shows. Or maybe make some money on the street corner. Sort of a ‘watch me kick myself in the head even though I only have one leg, and chuck some cash into this hat while you’re at it’ kind of thing.
“But you’d need a partner, because otherwise, some ne’er-do-well could run up and steal the hat with the money, seeing as you can’t hop but so fast. No matter how athletic you are. In a footrace, the dude hopping on one foot is generally going to lose, unless the other guy has no legs at all. In which case, calling it a ‘footrace’ would be a bit misleading. Or maybe it’d actually be more accurate than the term normally was, since it’d be a race and only a single foot would be involved? Huh. Hard one to call.”
“If you only have one leg, you shouldn’t run,” Liz said. “You should do something sensible. Maybe ride a unicycle.”
Brad briefly considered arguing, and then decided she was probably right. Somehow.
“I think we’ve come up with a really groovy life for our one-legged man,” Brad said. “I’m proud of him. He’s turning into a really fascinating, odds-defying person. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing he lost that leg. Which’d sorta weaken your whole argument about big decisions.
“I mean, the guy is downright inspirational at this point. He could probably get a lucrative side business going, doing, like, motivational speaking. Who isn’t gonna be motivated by a one-legged man who can kick himself in the head and ride a unicycle? Sign me up, man. I mean, to be inspired, not one-legged on a unicycle. I’m not a unicycle sorta guy. Or bicycle, for that matter.”
“I used to ride my bike everywhere when I was a kid,” Liz said. “It was freedom. Even better than when I got a car, because I didn’t have to make insurance payments, or lose my title and have some cop feel me up in the back of his cruiser to get out of the ticket, and then he wrote me the ticket anyway. I liked my bike much better. It was pink, and had a bell, and there were flowers all over it.”
“Painted, or real?” Brad asked. He was betting she meant a floral paint scheme, but she was just crazy enough that he wouldn’t have put it past her to have decorated her ride with a bunch of fake or dried flowers hot-glued all over the thing.
“Paint, stupid,” Liz said. Brad was disappointed. “But I did have a little Strawberry Shortcake doll that I attached to the handlebar with a twist-tie from a bread bag. She was either my mascot, or my hood ornament, depending on how you looked at it.”
“Or maybe your fruit voodoo totem,” Brad said. “Did you ever stick pins in her or wish disease upon your enemies?”
“She was a Strawberry Shortcake doll, stupid. Of course I didn’t stick pins in her,” Liz said. “And when I wished bad things would happen to people I hated, it didn’t have anything to do with her. She was all about hugs, and smiles, and maybe baked goods.”
“I used to sorta borrow my sister’s old dolls sometimes,” Brad said. “Usually so I could get some army guys together to play pillaging the village. Guess I watched too many gritty, exploitative war movies or something. I was a sick little puppy.”
“I’m sure you were just demonstrating your true nature,” Liz said. “Childhood is like alcohol. It reduces inhibitions. Shows how people really are. The government should probably follow children around with video cameras, and get rid of the ones that do terrible things like you did. Then we’d only end up with good people as adults.”
“You sure do look on the bright side of things,” Brad said. “Childhood happy-time eugenics program. Weird thing is, you call me sick.”
“I’m just being sensible,” Liz said. “You must be one of those people who romanticizes children.”
“What, you hate kids? Not gonna start a brood of your own?”
“I didn’t say that,” Liz said. “I like children. I’m just realistic about them. Most people put them on pedestals, don’t realize that they’re actually evil, nasty, brutish little creatures.”
“So, you think they suck, but you want some anyhow?” Brad asked.
“Everything is nasty and dark and evil once you twist away the surface,” Liz said. “Kids are no different. So just because I know how nasty they can be, that doesn’t mean I don’t want some of my own.
“Plus, if you have your own, you get them while they’re babies. And babies are pretty much the only things that aren’t twisted and dark and malevolent. They’re just noisy and sweet. And a little messy. Have to be burped.”
“So, now that you’re talking kids, does that mean maybe I’ve turned some kind of corner? Maybe you’re reconsidering our future lives of eternal domestic bliss?”
“I didn’t say you’d turned any corners,” Liz said. “We’re just talking. Like we used to, before I felt sorry for you because you were falling-down drunk at work, and you took advantage of me.”
“I wasn’t drunk, or high, or anything,” Brad said. “Just had some weird déjà vu.”
“Right. I’m not that gullible, whatever you might think,” Liz said. “But it doesn’t matter. I felt sorry for you, and you took advantage of the situation. So we’re not exactly off to the best start, if we were to make something of our lives. Like, together.”
“Well, uhm, here’s the thing. I really like you,” Brad said. “And it’s driving me sorta crazy having this weird roller-coaster rebound deal going on here. I mean, I woke up this morning on top of the world, only I didn’t know the top of the world had this sheer drop, or that you’d push me off it.”
“How very melodramatic,” Liz said. “If anyone’s pushing, it’s you.”
Brad itched, in a very personal way. He wondered if this was some sort of commentary on the part of his nervous system, and he attempted to come up with a way to scratch it. Wishing to be subtle, he settled on slowly rocking his body backward and forward on his chair. He was pretty sure he’d pulled it off with absolute stealth.
“Why are you humping the chair?” Liz asked.
“I’m, uh … was I?” Brad said. He felt his face grow red yet again, and the shame just seemed to intensify the burning itch enveloping his testicles like briefs woven from cat hair.
He was also getting an erection. After all, why not? When God decided to make you the butt of one of His jokes, He seldom held back.
Brad contorted, intent on hiding his turgid state. He continued to itch, and naked, imaginary, tiny Liz was back, doing her whorish best to torture him with her gyrating presence.
“Yes, you were,” Liz said. “And now you sort of look like you’re having a fit, only you’re having it really slowly. Or slow for a fit, anyhow.”
“Great,” Brad said. “It’s just an all-around awesome day, then. Couldn’t be better. Guess the only redeeming feature is that it’s Friday. So tomorrow I can huddle in a corner somewhere and sob for a while, which’d be nice. Maybe I could huddle in the corner at your apartment? If you’re gonna blubber, it’s nice to blubber with someone else around. Otherwise, it’s that whole tree in a forest thing. What’s the point?”
“What makes you think I’d let you back in my apartment? Ever?” Liz asked.
“My youthful good looks?” Brad asked. “Plus, maybe we’re falling in love? In which case we sorta owe it to the cosmos, don’t we?”
“For someone who nearly raped me, and then didn’t want to take responsibility for his actions, you’ve made a big jump to love there,” Liz said. “But I’m tired of arguing, so, whatever. You can come over.
“Also, Faye said she wanted to talk to you. I guess I should have told you earlier. It sounded important.”
“What could be so important?” Brad asked. “It’s a Friday.”

Faye looked like someone who had eaten something awful. Working for the City, this was a look Brad was familiar with. He used it often himself.
“Hey, uh, Faye,” Brad said. “Liz said you wanted to see me. But I’m still on the phones. So mostly, I guess, I hope they don’t ring?”
This was, after all, virgin territory. When abandoning your post due to a higher calling, what was the proper procedure?
“I’ve already taken care of it,” Faye said.
That seemed ominous. Fights over phone duty were legendary for their passive-aggressive intensity. For Faye to have triggered one for him seemed like far more trouble than he should be worth.
In fact, Brad went to a lot of time and trouble simply to ensure that he was never, ever, worth that kind of trouble. The Civil Service was like the lineup at the Bunny Ranch: The only reason to stand out was if you wanted to get nailed.
Brad began to glisten. He’d been sweaty all day, but standing up and coming under scrutiny both contributed to a prolific output of perspiration.
“How do you think your time here at the office has gone?” Faye asked.
It was a good gut shot. Brad couldn’t help it – he recoiled just a bit, as if she’d slapped him, or perhaps thrown a stapler at his belly.
“I’m, uh, I’ve really appreciated the chance to work here,” Brad said. “It’s a great place, and I’ve learned a lot. Plus the people, too. I mean, the people, they’re great. Great people. You know, friendly. Lots of neat people. I’ve really enjoyed myself. It’s great. Really neat. Great, neat people. Place, too. And, uhm … Is that what you mean?”
It was going great.
“I mean that there have been some issues with your work performance,” Faye said. “With assigned work not being turned in on a timely basis. With assigned work going missing. Or some work being done only partially, or not at all.”
“Man, when you put it that way, it all sounds so awful,” Brad said.
Faye didn’t smile.
Brad backtracked. “That is, I guess, I could see where I have some faults, uh, ma’am. Faye. Faye, ma’am. I think I have problems with organization. Maybe I need to organize myself better. Then I could keep better track of my assignments, make sure that I’m giving them all their proper attention, you know, in the proper order, and in the proper time, and stuff. So things don’t end up late. Or go missing. Or get messed up some other way. I’ve never been very organized, but I think I could be more organized than I am now, maybe, if I really tried, you know?”
“Because of these issues, I’ve been forced to write a poor performance review for you,” Faye said. “That means you’ll be getting another performance review in three months. If it isn’t positive, you may face termination.”

The Uncivil Servant Part XXX

Fri, 3 Jul 2009 07:57:33 -0500

Brad gave a yelp of joy, settled the handset onto the desk, and ambled at a more leisurely pace until he was behind it. He then noticed he was not alone.
Liz, for some reason devoid of Ethan, was sitting in one of the stained, cheap, plastic chairs which ostensibly served as a place for visitors to wait. (In reality, most visitors simply stormed to whichever office they wished to visit. If you were lucky, they might duck their head in and inform you of their presence.)
“Uh, hi, Liz,” Brad managed. “What’s, like, up?”
“We need to talk,” Liz said.
It was the conversational equivalent of having a piano drop on your head while strolling on a sidewalk. The air leaked out, and Brad sat slumped in his chair, waiting for the rest to unfold.
“I am concerned.”
“You’re, ah, what?” Brad asked.
“Concerned. About us. And things. We aren’t really dating.”
“Well, I guess not, but I kinda thought maybe we would be, I mean, now,” Brad said.
“If you’d asked me out on a date, I might have said yes,” Liz said. “I thought you were nice, even if you had so many flaws. Like the drugs. And that way you like to be so sarcastic. When you asked to come over, you seemed so desperate, I thought I should say yes. But I didn’t – wait a minute.”
She got up and closed the door to the reception area. Brad had never seen that done before. In fact, he was almost positive it was strictly forbidden. This was a place of openness. Never of secrets. Still, that seemed the least of his worries.
“Anyway, I let you come over because you seemed scared. Or upset. Or something. I never thought you just wanted to come over to take advantage of me. I should have known. You’re a boy. That’s what boys do.”
“But, like, that wasn’t what I did,” Brad said. “I mean, sure, it was what we did did, but it wasn’t why I came over. Or what I meant to do. It’s just what we did. What we ended up doing. And, it, um, seemed mutual. Y’know.”
“I didn’t say you forced yourself on me,” Liz said. “I said you took advantage of me. That’s not the same as rape. If you’d forced yourself on me, I’d call the police. Not sit here all alone with you and talk to you again.”
For whatever perverse reason, naked Liz was back in his mind’s eye. She cavorted even more lewdly than she had earlier in the week, back when he didn’t have firsthand carnal knowledge of her body.
That firsthand experience lent an uncomfortable degree of reality to imagination. Why now? Was his mind really so far gone from his own control?
“Thanks, I guess?” Brad said. “But I really wasn’t trying to take advantage of you. I just like you, you know? I have for a while. You’re hot, and we get along.”
He was stretching things a bit. He’d found her strangely sexually compelling, but that wasn’t really the same as “hot,” and he wasn’t sure if he would’ve described them as “getting along,” either. Not before sleeping together, anyway.
Come to think of it, just how should he play this thing? Maybe it was a gift from God – a sort of “Get Out of Liz Free” card, dealt by the fates.
Numerous warring factions were arguing for his mental attention, and there was nothing close to a consensus on the right way to go. He’d just have to blunder mindlessly along.
“So you think we should ‘be together’ be together? I’m not just some conquest you’ll brag about to your friends? You’ll do the honorable thing now?”
Honorable thing? Just what the heck was she talking about? Marriage? Moving in together? Blood pact? Cutting off his ear and mailing it to her in a box? Whatever she meant by honorable, he was pretty sure it did not mean asking what honor entailed.
It was like the prices at a Rolls Royce dealership: If you had to ask, you probably couldn’t afford it. Though they do come with an umbrella in the door. Which didn’t have much to do with Liz, aside from the fact that she was built a bit like an umbrella.
Task at hand.
“I, um, think I’m a pretty decent guy,” Brad said. It seemed the safest way to suggest that this whole honor thing might be up his alley, without committing to, say, being baptized into the Church of the Armageddon Apostolates. Brad was leery of baptism. And apostles.
“You can think whatever you want,” Liz said. “But I don’t think you’re ready. I think you’re just scrambling to talk your way out of being in trouble. And I don’t think that being with me should be trouble. Or that I want to be with a man who feels that way. About me. Or us.”
“You, like, don’t?” Brad was now lost. Was she dumping him? Had she just proposed marriage? Or maybe forced him to propose marriage? And then rejected the very same marriage proposal she’d just forced him to make? Odd.
“You’re … I think you’re great,” Brad continued. “You’re kinda surprising me here, is all. I don’t always think things through really far. But I like you. I thought you liked me, too. Sorta figured that’s all we had to figure out, for now. Didn’t know there was, like, some kinda pop quiz involved. Or that we should be hiring some kinda wedding broker. Like an arranged marriage, only no parental involvement.”
“Are you making fun of me?” Liz asked. “Is this all funny to you? You’ve had your way with me, and now you can laugh at me?”
“Hey, no, you’re totally discombobulating me here,” Brad said. “I don’t think this is funny. I think it’s absurd. They’re related, but different. Funny is when something happens to someone else. Absurd is when it happens to you. This is definitely not funny.”
Brad began to fidget with the mouse, opening up solitaire as if digital card-playing could somehow provide guidance or insight with his current predicament.
“You’re not even going to pay attention to me?”
“I’m flustered, man, I’m flustered!” Brad said. “This is, I don’t even know where this is coming from, okay?
“I was on cloud nine, right? Everything was groovy. Then you come in here like some sorta avenging angel, and you kick me off my cloud. Like you’re some sort of slumlord in heaven, and I’m late with the rent. So now I go from jamming on a lyre, maybe munching on some grapes, to plummeting in a free fall, screaming something totally inappropriate for my former digs.
“Whole time, you’re standing over me, up on that cloud, hollering down that I’m not taking it all seriously enough. Dude, I’m taking this way seriously. I can’t take it much more seriously. Feels like my head is going to melt.
“I thought you liked me too? How’d I get so far off base? So wrong about where we were?”
“We had sex. That is a very serious thing,” Liz said.
Brad found her choice of words unfortunate: Just hearing her use the word “sex” caused his naked imagination-Liz to begin doing her bump-and-grind routine in his head all over again.
“It doesn’t mean that I’ve just become some doormat you can have a meaningless carnal tryst with.”
“Dude, I never said that! I thought it meant we were, like, boyfriend-girlfriend! That isn’t meaningless. That isn’t some tryst. It’s serious. And it’s fun. And it’s good for us.
“That’s how it should go. You like someone. You fall in love. You date. You have sex. You get to know each other.
“If all goes well, you decide to stick it out for the long haul. You get married. You have kids. A house with a garage. A modest IRA account.
“But you don’t jump straight from the sex to the wedded bliss, man. You can’t do that. You gotta feel things out. Figure out if it’s right. I mean, seriously, we don’t know that yet.”
“All the times we’ve talked here at the office, none of that allowed us to get to know each other in any way?” Liz asked. “That was just a way to kill time and end days for you?”
“Sure, there was, like, some knowledge exchanged,” Brad said. “But there’s a big difference between the chitchat you have with a coworker, and someone who you’ve gotten sweaty-sticky with. You don’t usually need a shower after you’ve shot the breeze at the office. Kind of different animals, those.”
“I’m not going to let you derail our serious conversation with your lewd remarks,” Liz said. “This is too important.”
“Yeah, we’re a regular Potsdam here,” Brad said. “You wanna be Stalin? I’ve got dibs on Truman. Although maybe Churchill’d be more appropriate. He and I sorta share similar body types, even if he was a little older. So, yeah, guess I’m Churchill. Heck, maybe you should be Truman.”
“I’m a girl, stupid,” Liz said. “I’ll be Lady Marmoset.”
“Uhh…?”
“She was a countess in one of my past lives,” Liz explained. “So if we’re going to be famous, powerful people, I’ll be Lady Marmoset.”
Brad blinked, then quietly pulled open a Web browser window so he could double-check with Wikipedia. He’d thought a marmoset was a sort of marsupial, but no – it was a type of monkey. Either way, not very dignified for a dignitary.
“You, like, remembered her name? Or did you just make one up to fit her?”
“I remembered it, obviously,” Liz said. “I think maybe it’s Gallic. Or German, or something.”
“Well, yeah, why not?”
“You’re making fun again.”
“Nuh-uh. I wouldn’t dare,” Brad said, which was true. If he allowed this to get funny, he was liable to double up in laughter, which’d put him into serious trouble, if past experience was any indicator. “So, she, uh … lived in a keep? Or a manor house, or what?”
“She ruled over an entire castle,” Liz said. “Held lots of dances. And made sure the peasants were happy. She was a very generous ruler. And an excellent seamstress. She made all her own dresses.”
“Married to Lord Marmoset, I take it?”
“I don’t remember being married when I remember that life,” Liz said. “So I guess she was divorced. Or maybe she didn’t like him, so she cut off his ears while he was asleep and he bled to death.
“I’m sure she could’ve just said he was possessed by the devil when she did it; people did that kind of thing all the time back then. So she would’ve gotten away with it. She was very clever. You should’ve seen some of the dresses she made. They were beautiful.”
“Probably had calluses on her fingers then,” Brad said.
Liz frowned, wrinkling her whole face. “Of course she didn’t. She was a lady. Her skin was milky and soft. She probably never had a blemish in her whole life.”
Brad couldn’t help wondering if Liz had watched Moulin Rouge, heard the song, and then somehow, in her twisted Liz brain, gotten Lady Marmoset from Lady Marmalade. Probably throw in one of those dull, informative videos from high school, and you had a pretty workable theory. Still, there was the matter at hand.
“Sure she had ’em. She was a seamstress. All those needles, pricking her dainty, aristocratic fingers. She pretty much had to build up calluses on her fingers.”
“You’re just hateful,” Liz said.
“Dude, I wasn’t being hateful. I was just exploring the implications of her life. If I wanted to be hateful, I’d delve into personal hygiene back then. And I don’t just mean bathing.”
“She was NOT dirty!”
“Seriously, relax,” Brad said. “She’s dead. No reason to worry about it. We can, like, just celebrate her good side, if you want. Like all those grand balls and fancy dresses. And how she didn’t douse herself in perfume to cover up the stench of unwashed humanity, nor did she muddle through during her monthly visitor without the advantage of modern tampons or pads. No way.
“She was a delicate, dainty, callus-free flower who probably smelled like Ivory soap with just a hint of lilac or rosewater, I’m sure. I’d totally love to share an elevator or subway ride with her, especially if the thing got stuck for a few hours with the ventilation fan off.”
“You’re just jealous because you don’t remember any of your past lives,” Liz said. “Which means they were probably ugly, boring lives not worth remembering in the first place. Otherwise, why forget?”
“Oh, I can think of lots of reasons,” Brad said. “Maybe I just goofed off too much in infancy, didn’t work hard enough at remembering. Or perhaps I was a stoner in a lot of my past lives, and didn’t even remember them while they were taking place.
“Or I might’ve died badly. A good, slow, agonizing death probably burns clear most of the memories of more pleasant times. Be kinda like holding an electromagnet next to a hard disk, only more fiery sensations of pain, right?
“I’m sure, if I remembered that kinda death now, I’d just mistake it for birth agony, or whatever the heck you call memories of birth. I know there’s some clever term for it, just have no idea what the term is.”
“You’re just making excuses,” Liz said. “Really, you’re afraid you had lame lives. It’s okay if you did. Most lives aren’t worth remembering. It’s not your fault if you’re average. That’s why they call it average. Because it’s what so many people are.”
“I’m not entirely convinced that’s why they use the word ‘average,’ but I guess you’ve got the gist at least. For all I know, maybe I do have past lives. It isn’t like I’ve gone looking for them.
“Whole concept creeps me out just a little. It implies that maybe there’s life after death, but you’ve got to be fortunate enough to remember this one. Otherwise, you may as well be plain old dead, y’know?”
“I think it’s wonderful to have past lives,” Liz said. “There’s no reason to be afraid of them. They can’t hurt you. They’re all dead.
“Plus, they’re you. So if you deliberately don’t remember them, it’s sort of like you’re killing yourselves. Which is very mean.”
“Well, um, dunno that I have a rebuttal for that one,” Brad said. “Guess if you accept your, like, postulates, you’ve got a valid conclusion. Weird postulates, though.
“Not to be confused with weird prostitutes. For those, you’ve got to go out on North, by the cemetery. Not that I know firsthand. I mean, I’ve driven past. That’s all. Hookers sort of scare me.”
“Maybe they’re what you need,” Liz said. “So you could have your sex without having to commit to anything. Without it having to mean anything. And so you could catch some nasty disease to teach you how bad you are for being so shallow. Something to make your penis turn a funny color and fall off, with lots of puss and sores.”
“Dude, seriously! Where does this stuff come from? Way, way overkill. I mean, I haven’t even said I didn’t want a commitment. In fact, you were the one that rejected me when I asked, I think. Whole thing was a bit hazy. But it’s not like I turned you down. It was totally the other way around.”
“I didn’t turn you down, I just decided that you weren’t really going to ask me. You were just humoring me. Because you thought I’d backed you into a corner, when all I’d done is tried to find out if you had honorable intentions when you took advantage of me.”
“Again, look, I didn’t take advantage. Things just happened. And I am an honorable guy. I like you. I don’t know if that means we should run off to Vegas and get hitched, but it sure means I’ve committed myself to you, okay?
“How is that not good enough? How much do you want, anyway? Do I have to go try to find a jewelry store that’ll let me buy on credit, pop the question on bended knee?”
“You’re making fun again. It’s a stupid defense mechanism.”
“I dunno that it’s really a defense mechanism,” Brad said. “It’s kinda how I start figuring things out when it’s crisis time, which isn’t really a defense mechanism. More a survival technique.
“Defense implies I do it to push people away. I don’t. I just find humor a good thinking tool when things get tricky. It’s, like, mentally flexible.”
“So is rubber. But you shouldn’t have a head full of rubber. That’s an insult,” Liz said. “Maybe if your brain is too flexible, good ideas bounce off of it. Just like the nursery rhyme.”
Brad couldn’t really refute her. Some arguments, by their very absurdity, couldn’t be debated. Still, he could object on the basis of a technicality.
“I’m not sure that’s a nursery rhyme,” Brad said.
“Is so,” Liz said. “I’m rubber, and you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you. It rhymes. Glue and you. And it’s for kids. So it’s a nursery rhyme.”
“Doesn’t exactly have the same street cred as your average Ring Around the Rosie,” Brad said. “And I don’t know that you’re gonna find it in a lot of, like, Treasury of Inanity for Children, y’know?”
“It’s part of the oral tradition,” Liz said. “It doesn’t need to be in a book.”
“Some traditions are better than others,” Brad said. “So I won’t argue the point.”
“Arguing is nearly all you do,” Liz said.
“Nah, I don’t argue,” Brad said. “I disagree. To argue, you have to get all, like, pissed off and stuff. Yell, maybe. Make disparaging remarks about the person you’re arguing with. Bring up their hygiene, or breeding, or both.”
“You’re insulting all the time. And you try to be funny. Those traits are combative. Being combative is just like arguing.”
“So, you’re saying I have a sort of argumentative nature?”
“I guess so,” Liz said. “Or maybe you’re just an ass.”
“Maybe,” Brad said. “I’ve got enough other flaws. No reason I couldn’t put that on the list, too. If I’m so bad, why’d you even get mixed up with me in the first place?”
“You’re nice sometimes,” Liz said. “And you’re funny. Even if it’s a mean funny.”
“Now, see, that criticism hurts,” Brad said. “I try to always use my funny for good, not evil.”
“So try harder.”
“Turn away from the Dark Side, eh, Yoda?” Brad said. “I mean, really, I do try. Humor is a tool for, like, improvement. It makes people happier. It criticizes, but in a good way. I really take its, like, societal role seriously. So I kinda disagree with you on the whole mean-funny thing.”
“Fine. Maybe you just seem mean.”
“I think that’s the same as being mean,” Brad said. “What’s the point of being a great guy if everyone thinks you’re a jerk? That’d be sorta like being a really great driver who just happens to get into accidents all the time. If I seem mean, then odds are, I am. I just didn’t think I was, is all. Kinda depressing, actually.”
“You’re weird,” Liz said.
“Yep.”
“Maybe you’re not that mean,” Liz said. “Maybe you’re just negative. I don’t like it when people are so pessimistic. I guess that could seem mean to me.”
“You don’t have to coddle me,” Brad said. “Besides, aren’t you here to castrate me for being dishonorable?”

The Uncivil Servant Part XXIX

Fri, 5 Jun 2009 07:53:14 -0500

Brad couldn’t even pay token attention. He clearly needed an amphetamine infusion to give him that narrow-field focus, but he hadn’t had a chance to run by the apartment and restock on pharmaceuticals. His mind was adrift on an ADD inland sea.
Marion was now discussing how difficult it would be for a hacker to gain illicit access to the phone system. Brad found this puzzling, considering that there couldn’t be anything in the world less interesting than the phone calls that went in and out of the office.
Not only would the payoff be particularly weak sauce, but to acquire it, you would have to sneak into the office, jimmy the closet lock where the phone server was stored, and then figure out a way to upload a custom-written intrusion program to the phone server. No small feat, given that it only had a hard drive – no floppy, CD-ROM, or DVD drive with which to load software. No USB ports, either.
Apparently, the Mission: Impossible team would just barely manage to pull off such a caper. Everyone else would be stymied. The pointlessness of it all truly boggled his mind – like Susan B. Anthony wearing a chastity belt.
Marion had moved on. She was now covering the technical difficulties of the larger city-parish phone system, which their office had to tie into. There were, as might be expected, all sorts of complexities involved in making it so you could transfer a call from your own office to, say, the Department of Public Works.
Of course, these complexities were hidden from the end user. It wasn't like the days of yore, when some poor soul would have to sit there plugging cables into holes to forward calls. No, today, you just hit a button. But Marion seemed intent on describing precisely what was involved at the physical, electrical level behind such convenience.
Like everyone, Marion had a hobby. Brad had just discovered its nature. The ironic thing to him was that, in spite of this passion, she detested actually answering the phone.
You would think, as someone who could quote you the 700-page operator’s manual, she might glean some satisfaction from the process of actually running the front switchboard, but she didn’t. Probably in part because you didn’t really use any of that capacity over the normal course of duties. You just greeted people and sent calls to extensions – dull, repetitive work.
Brad supposed this seeming inconsistency in her interests could be understood. After all, would you expect a numismatist to get giddy over making change at the Nev-R-Close? Or a homeless guy working as a trash collector?
Brad had now both confused and distracted himself. This happened often.
He returned his disheartened attention to Marion. Now she was telling him about the old city-wide system that had been in use up until the late ’90s. Apparently, it was different, yet still terribly complex.
He wondered briefly what other qualifications it would take for Marion to turn her oddly encyclopedic knowledge into a paying gig. Some sort of electrical engineering degree? Or was phone installation a trade-school art? She was a small-framed woman; could she even comfortably hold up the belt with all the phone gizmos you saw such installers sporting?
Brad began to picture her in overalls, with a massive leather belt loaded with electrical probes, test phones, screwdrivers, and every other bit of associated paraphernalia he could conjure up in his mental eye. It was, of all the perplexing possibilities, fairly sexy. Mental Marion blew him a kiss and made one of those poses you used to see painted on the side of World War II bombers: knees tucked under, hand behind the head, jaunty, flirty expression.
Given the context, this wasn’t just puzzling; it was a bit frightening. The last thing in the world he could afford now was a fantasy about Marion. For one thing, she might expect him to be able to respond in some vaguely intelligent manner to the things she’d been saying. For another, an erection would be a dead giveaway that his mind was elsewhere. Badly elsewhere.
She smelled nice.
Now he learned that the company that had installed the older system, way back in 1971, proceeded to go out of business in 1973. This meant the city-parish had to try to develop its own support department for the phone system, no longer being able to rely on its outside vendor. The corresponding culture of technology that ensued meant that the phones had been very well supported, indeed – and also meant that the system became so firmly entrenched that it wasn’t replaced until it was four generations behind.
Vaguely interesting. And she still smelled nice.
Brad mumbled something vaguely affirmative. It seemed a prudent thing to do, to show that he was involved in the conversation.
He learned that the city’s Office of Phones and Telecommunications had eventually grown to sixty-some-odd employees. It had designed its own letterhead. Had a fleet of specialized trucks. Was almost like a Baby Bell. A preemie Baby Bell, suffering from developmental delays. The head of the department even got a title right out of some sci-fi techno cult: Chief of Telephony.
Marion was, of course, quite brilliant for knowing all of this. Brad found that the more he looked at her, listened to her voice, smelled her skin, the more convinced of her genius he became.
He began to search urgently for some witty insight to add to the conversation to demonstrate that the spark of genius dwelled within him, too. Nothing really came. Phones don’t lend themselves to witty banter, and he was vastly outclassed in fundamental knowledge of the subject.
He wished fervently for some proof of his own worth. It seemed incredibly important just now to show Marion what an exceptional young man he was.
“Are you okay?” Marion asked, suddenly looking up from the phones with concern. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
Considering her words, Brad discovered that he’d briefly forgotten to breathe. Perhaps he’d been distracted?
He now had a quandary. He discovered that he badly needed to breathe. However, suddenly resuming the process of respiration was sure to involve some massive gasp, one that would do little to add to his suave and debonair appearance. His eyes began to dart about in their recessed sockets, as if he’d somehow spot some visible means of escape.
This was really quite a quandary. He needed to breathe. Going without was making him look like an idiot, or possibly someone on the verge of death. Breathing, on the other hand, would probably make him look like an even bigger idiot.
He began to attempt to sip air. This did little beyond giving the appearance of his being some sort of simpleton. Tasting the briefest touch of fresh air, his lungs loudly demanded their rights under the Internal Organ Accords, and he found he could do little to refuse.
Standing upright and stepping backwards, tipping over the chair he’d been slouched in in the process, he let loose with a voluminous gulp of air, followed quickly by an equally impressive exhalation. For a period of time, he was a human bellows. His color gradually shifted from a pallid sort of purple to a more natural (for him) blotchy red.
Marion watched. Brad had no idea what she was thinking. Did she find him amusing? Or was she more worried? Some mixture of both?
Eventually, his breathing returned somewhere close to normal. He stared at her blankly. This wasn’t his day. He wished they could get back to the Office of Phones and Telecommunications. Or phone circuit polarity. Anything but this.
“Huh,” Marion said. “Were you holding your breath for any particular reason?”
She was crafty, this coworker of his. Her question showed a devilish ability to pick at his weak spots. He mentally bowed to this master of the verbal gambit.
“I, uh,” Brad began, desperately searching for a plausible explanation. He found one, but it wasn’t very good. “I was trying not to sneeze.”
“Huh,” Marion repeated. She didn’t seem interested in pursuing the matter further and turned back to the phones.
Brad tried to get his shirt to swallow his head and slid back into his seat. Pretty soon, Marion was probably going to turn him loose on the phones entirely solo.
He wished she would’ve mentioned some means of sabotage by which he could render them inoperative. Worse yet, he sort of suspected she might have told him precisely that – if only he had been paying closer attention to the technical minutiae of her lecture. Where were life’s CliffsNotes when you needed them?
Brad stewed while Marion tidied up a bit. “All yours,” she said, failing to include any of the venom that such a statement should be full of. To listen to her, you’d think this was an everyday occurrence, like brushing your teeth, or masturbation.
Brad slouched into position behind the phone, glaring at the vile instrument and angrily willing it not to ring. As soon as Marion was in the hallway, out of view, it rang.
Brad slammed his head down on the desk, once, much harder than he’d intended. He recoiled, hand rushing to his forehead. There was a loud roar in his ears, and it felt like he’d just split his skull open, but his hand reported no telltale blood. Just sweat.
He reached out, grabbed the phone, and croaked, “Hello?”
“Who dat?” Brad thought he heard. He wasn’t sure. The voice was muffled, its accent thick.
“Sorry,” Brad said. “Office of Economic Enhancement. Who do you need?”
That didn’t sound right. Apparently, Marion had failed to coach him on the proper greeting etiquette. The Office of Economic Enhancement he’d been able to figure out for himself – it was on the letterhead, not to mention over the front door and out in the parking lot. But beyond that, he was a smidgeon lost.
“Who call me?” the voice asked. It may have said, “Who called me?” or even “Pooh calls me.” Brad would even suggest, “Boo cough ye,” as a possibility, although a somewhat nonsensical one.
“I’m sorry,” Brad said. “What? Called you?”
The voice got angry. “Who call me!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Brad said. “I don’t know this game.”
As he spoke, the phone began ringing again. Apparently, it didn’t care if you were already on the line with someone.
“Please hold.” He hit the hold button and transferred the Who Call Me woman to a random extension.
The new caller, sadly, was a step down. Brad was pretty sure she said, “Toby Hair.”
There was nobody by that name in the office. Brad even reported as much to the caller. She responded well – by yelling “Toby Hair!” really loudly.
Brad held the handset away from his ear and replied, “I’m sorry, uh, person, but there’s nobody here named Toby Hair.”
“Lemming geek t’Toby!”
Brad was in full panic now. Toby Hair sounded very angry. If Brad sent her to the call-forwarded Neverland, she was liable to get very angry. Call back. Maybe even show up at the office.
Goodness knows, enough of the OOEE’s clients had plenty of time on their hands. Why else would they call during the week after Christmas? Busy people didn’t do that. They worked, or enjoyed their families.
Brad felt a little sick. In desperation, he scanned the extension list. A glimmer of hope came to him as he reached the name “Antoine.” Ms. Antoine was sometimes called Tony – some sort of nickname-type situation. Could this be the mysterious Toby?
Even if so, it might not help. Ms. Antoine was on vacation, like most of the office. Still, at least Brad could send Toby Hair to her voice mail. Maybe her message said something handy, like, “I’m out of the office this week. Call me back next week.” A boy could dream, couldn’t he?
Still, Brad was nothing if not a fatalistic adherent to Finagle’s Law: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. What were the odds that Ms. Antoine would’ve left a message telling callers to call back next week when she might deign to visit her desk?
Practically nil. In fact, Brad could already imagine what her message actually said: “This is Tony. I’m not at my desk, but I’m sure I’ll be back in a minute. Just leave me a message so I can call you back. Or just call me in a few minutes. I’m surprised I’m not here, frankly. Perhaps I’ve gone to the bathroom? Or to grab some photocopies? Don’t you worry, though. I’m never away from my desk for very long. I practically live there. You just set a spell and call me, okay?”
Yeah … that was almost certainly what she said, or very close to it. Brad had no choice. He was going to have to talk to Toby Hair.
“Thank you for holding, ma’am,” Brad said, hoping it was, indeed, a ma’am. He wasn’t really sure. The line was bad, the patois thick, gender fairly indeterminate. Sometimes you just had to roll the dice.
Or maybe flipping a coin would be more apropos. There were, after all, only two possible outcomes for gender, from a traditionalist point of view.
“Miss Antoine is not in this week. She should be back sometime next week. I can send you to her voicemail so you can leave her a message? Or you could call her back next week? She’s on vacation. For Christmas. Would that be okay?”
Somehow, Brad hoped that if he offered enough semi-questioning statements, it might overwhelm Toby Hair and result in some sort of positive outcome, like surrender. That’d be nice. Even a brisk epithet followed by a hang-up would be an improvement.
It came as little surprise to Brad that another line was flashing, and the phone was making some insistent noise to the effect of “Pick this up.”
Toby Hair said something. Brad had no clue what. He couldn’t even accurately judge the length of the statement. It was, perhaps, fifteen words.
A message, maybe? Some polite small talk about the holidays? A profession of undying love? Could’ve been most anything. Mostly Brad just hoped it wasn’t something like, “I’m coming down there, boy, and I’m coming for YOU.”
Brad wasn’t really the combative sort. More the run, hide, piss-on-himself type. And in his weight class, adequate hiding spots were few and far between.
Brad sent Toby Hair to voice mail. He couldn’t face the blow-up that would take place if he tried once more to decipher the words issuing from Toby Hair’s mouth.
Brad punched the incoming line and answered, “Office of Economic Enhancement. Can I help you?”
“You called me,” the voice said.
It wasn’t, Brad noticed in sick fascination, the earlier caller who had said something similar. With a giddy sort of despair, Brad replied, “No, I didn’t.”
“Huh?”
“I didn’t call you,” Brad said. “I didn’t call anyone. In fact, I hate calling people. If I never had to call another person in my whole life, I wouldn’t. And I’d be totally happy about it. I’d just sit quietly in a room somewhere and do my own thing. Maybe listen to music. Even type things every so often. But never, ever, ever touch another phone. So, whatever sins I’ve committed, whatever wrongs I’ve failed to right, calling you does not rank amongst them.”
“Someone called me,” the caller insisted. “Says so on the box.”
“Alright, then, we’ll accept as our initial argument that someone has, indeed, called you. Perhaps even someone from this office. Now we come to the crux of the matter: This is a big office. A lot of people could have called you. Did they call you this morning?”
“No.”
“Alrighty, then. That doesn’t narrow it down. Could you maybe tell me when they called you?”
“Last week,” the voice said. “I wasn’t here.”
“Indubitably,” Brad said. “Which brings us to another problem. Beyond the fact that I’ve no way of knowing who may have called you or why, the chances are pretty good that whoever called you isn’t even here right now. Most of the office is out for the Christmas holidays.”
“What that office do?” the voice queried. Brad chose not to correct the grammar involved.
“We’re the Office of Economic Enhancement. We do some repair work in economically distressed regions, have some loan programs, that sort of thing. Did you perhaps apply for some help with your house?”
“I live in an apartment,” helpful voice said.
“Well, we can cross that theory out. Honestly, ma’am, I have no way of knowing who called you, or why. Maybe you could wait until they call you back? I’m sure they’ll call again if it’s important?”
Voice said something, which Brad couldn’t quite make out. There was a click, and the line went dead. He’d been hung up on.
He slunk into his chair and glared angrily at the phone, willing it not to ring, to, perhaps, break.
Inspiration struck. The office shared four lines. Of those four, at any given moment, at least one was inevitably tied up by some personal call within the office. That left three. Brad knew how to call out – couldn’t he just use one of the outside lines to call himself, and thereby tie up two lines?
He saw no reason why not and quickly put the plan into motion. Picking up a line, he dialed the office, put his own call on hold, and then answered himself.
“Hi, me. Sit and spin.” He put his incoming call on hold. There was now only one line free.
His outgoing line began to flash and beep angrily. Brad frowned and picked it up. “Quit bothering me. You’re on hold on purpose,” he said, putting it back down on hold.
Within a few seconds, the incoming end was beeping for attention. This was turning much less fun than Brad had expected. As he answered it and put it back on hold (also having temporarily run out of witty quips to accompany the process), the remaining incoming line began to ring.
Brad swore lustily and answered it. “Office of Economic Enhancement, may I help you?”
“May I speak with Robert, please?” The voice was very polite and female. Probably Robert's wife. Shame Brad had used such a snippy tone when he answered. That was probably no way to speak to the boss’ spouse.
“Uh, sure, hold on just a moment, please,” Brad said, fumbling with the buttons and briefly jamming his finger on the nine, eliciting a loud beep in his ear. More importantly, in Mrs. Gelsin’s ear, as well.
Brad wondered if he was overreacting. He had no benchmark to give him guidance. This was all virgin territory, even if he’d gotten laid last night.
The call safely transferred, Brad discovered with dismay that his cannibalistic call had self-destructed. Neither the outgoing nor incoming lines were still lit up, which meant that he was vulnerable to as many as two calls coming in at once – a highly intolerable situation.
What he needed was a way to keep a call open indefinitely, but that didn’t seem possible. As soon as you placed a call on hold, some infernal timer began to count down. As soon as it hit zero, it imploded, began to beep, and insisted on your attention.
Brad could take care of half the problem by leaving his own phone off the hook. But that did nothing for the other side of the illicit, non-existent conversation. What he needed was another phone.
Providence smiled on him. He knew just such a phone. He had one at his desk – an implement which he usually thought of as an annoying source of frequent interruption, that same phone was now going to serve as his salvation.
Beside himself with joy, Brad pulled his ponderous bulk to an erect stance and began lumbering toward his office at top speed. This was, roughly, approximately three miles per hour. It brought his pulse up to pounding intensity and turned his damp sheen of sweat into a downpour.
Rounding the corner from the reception area, he trundled toward the right-hand turn that would bring him to the hall upon which his own office lay. Robert’s door was open, but Brad could hear him talking on the phone in there. Hopefully, he wouldn’t notice a careening, sweaty sumo blundering past his open door. With luck, he might even be doing something goofy, like staring out the window. Stranger things had happened.
Brad made the turn without drawing any noticeable attention. Robert hadn’t said anything out loud, at least. Nor had Brad noticed any surprised yelps. Therefore, it seemed a reasonably logical conclusion to deduce that his passage had been unseen by the Big Boss.
The hallway opened into the region where the communal printers lived. Brad’s door was beckoning on the left, and he burst through it with a motion that was only partially voluntary in nature. Somehow he maintained balance and stabbed at the outside line on his phone. Fat fingers jabbed at keys, and he had to start over several times, but finally, he made it: He dialed the number for the office.
Now he had to make an about-face and charge forth for the front desk. He slammed his door behind him and began pumping his arms (although he didn’t realize he was doing so; had he, he probably would’ve stopped – absurdity has its limits).
His legs were like two khaki-wrapped seals strapped to a pair of stilts. Although they were the slenderest part of his anatomy aside from his feet, his legs still encountered weight-related resistance in the region of his thighs. There, his flesh rubbed together furiously with every erratic step, a fact he would painfully note later.
But not now. For now, it was only the mad dash for survival. A wounded bull walrus fleeing a hunger-maddened polar bear had nothing on him.
He collided with the edge of the wall as he rounded to take the left toward the front desk. The phone was still ringing. He prayed it was his own call he heard.
Knowing he had no chance of actually making it behind the reception desk, he grabbed the phone from its base and half-shouted, “Hello?”
Silence. Blessed, sweet, absolving silence.

The Uncivil Servant Part XXVIII

Fri, 1 May 2009 07:50:20 -0500

Finding neither guidance nor resistance, Brad slid his hand beneath her briefs. He proceeded to do his best to attempt to provide her with some pre-coital pleasure, but he was fairly sure his clumsy lack of know-how was both readily apparent and less than entirely enjoyable.
Not wanting to actually injure any of her delicate parts, Brad gave up after the most cursory of finger play. He pushed at her underwear, finding it even more difficult to remove than her jeans had been. The panties eventually halted mid-thigh, as frustration and urgency forced him to abandon the project.
His boxer shorts went down at a diagonal. The left side made it all the way down to join his slacks at his knees, while the right side ended up at his own mid-thigh.
There was now nothing at all between them in this narrow sexual band. Brad began poking at her again, felt himself actually reach somewhere that felt moist and seemed appropriate. In fact, Brad was almost certain he’d actually hit the mark.
Strangely, this brought the first active response from Liz of the entire encounter, as she raised herself up briefly, reached beneath, and pointed him in a new direction – back a bit. Apparently, she had her own contingency, as far as pregnancy avoidance went.
This change, while unexpected, suited Brad fine. Any port in a storm.
After months of masturbation, the sensation of actual intercourse was as overwhelming as a heroin rush to a toddler. Brad grunted, “Ondigo!” and ejaculated.
The process, from insertion to completion, took a little under ten seconds.
Brad fell back, then arched forward again when the leg cramp got serious. While his physical state was ebbing, he remained ensconced within Liz for the moment, and he had to make an attempt at being gentle as he threw her to the side and jumped up, slimily, from the couch.
He really hoped nobody could see through Liz’s blinds. He imagined he struck quite an image at the moment.
“Leg cramp!” Brad said, by way of explanation.
Liz looked odd, a mixture of mild disappointment, extreme arousal, and surprise. She wasn’t terribly expressive, though, even in this moment of duress. Brad figured she’d make an excellent poker player, at least as far as having a poker face went.
“I, uh … Are you okay?” she asked. Brad was leaning forward on the leg, his dangly parts woefully uncovered. He wished he had a towel.
“Yeah, it came sorta sudden,” Brad said. “Kinda ended things suddenly.” Blaming the cramp for his rapid performance seemed better than saying, “Man, do I suck in bed. Or on the couch. Wherever. I’m just laughably bad at sex.”
He then added, “But I’m okay. Do you, like, want me to grab some towels?” Being highly unfond of being sticky, he knew he needed one, and assumed she might like one, as well.
The room smelled a bit ripe, too. It smelled like ass. Brad hoped that was due to what they’d done, rather than being due, say, to the sweat that had trickled down his own back crack.
At the very least, he hoped that Liz thought it was a smell of her own origination. He didn’t want her first postcoital memory of him to be dominated by the realization that he was giving off a powerful outhouse aroma.
“I have some hand towels in the bathroom,” Liz said. She pointed over her right shoulder, and seemed to be regaining her composure. She pulled her shirt shut, but made no move to button it.
Brad scuttled in the indicated direction, knowing that nudity was not his best “look.”
The towels were easy to find, and having wrapped one around his sticky bits, he was able to pull his boxer shorts back up. He also managed a quick swipe at the crack with some toilet paper, dropping it in and flushing it before walking back with a bit more confidence, although he did make a judgment call and pulled his slacks all the way off.
They’d had sex. That meant he now had the right to walk around in his boxers if he found that more comfortable.
He handed her the other towel and then collapsed on the couch next to her. It was wet in patches, something he decided he’d rather not think about.
She shoved the towel into her rear, which was not the sexiest thing he’d ever seen a woman do, then kicked her jeans and panties to the floor before snuggling back up to him. Apparently, this hadn’t been some one-time thing, never to be spoken of. They were now on cuddling terms, at a bare minimum.
Brad settled in, one arm wrapped around her, ready to see if the Mackenzie family could win Fast Money. He guessed he wouldn’t have to sleep on the couch after all. Pleasant news, coming on the heels of the best night in recent memory.
Plus, maybe they’d diddle again after going to bed – and maybe he could break the ten-second mark if they did. He’d be sure and bring some towels to bed, just in case. Better safe than sticky.
–––––
Brad would’ve called in sick, but it was Friday, and anyhow, he needed to get away from Liz so he could jerk off. Sex was great, but it didn’t obviate his need for “Brad time.”
Plus, there was the chance that she was now his girlfriend, in which case he didn’t want her thinking badly of him. He was fairly certain she’d frown upon the practice of calling in sick when your only malady was being sick of going to work.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to hang out in the apartment all by himself, either – his or hers.
Civilization had just locked up, so he’d been forced to restart his machine. A fresh cigarette fed him nicotine, and he felt unhealthfully good … aside from the heart murmur, which hadn’t really gone away yet, oddly enough.
Not only had Liz not sworn him to secrecy with the arrival of morning, but she’d actually been rather on the chipper side. Cooked him breakfast. Smiled. It was an odd change of pace.
The piles of crap that littered his office had taken on a more cheerful glow. When he leaned to the side to release a greasy fart, it was a happy greasy fart – a cheerful bit of pungent joy, thickening the air with glad tidings.
He hadn’t even felt like tapping his pharmacopoeia as normal this morning. (The fact that he hadn’t had a chance to stop by his own apartment and restock surely had nothing to do with that.)
He was high on life. Nancy Reagan would be proud. Aside from the anal sex, anyway.
Brad leaned back in his chair, like a bull walrus visiting the dentist, and blew smoke at the tattered ceiling tiles. He began to wonder what other sexual escapades were in store for him tonight, once they arrived at Liz’s apartment.
This brought a momentary twinge of unease, one that had been growing all morning: Would the fact that she was, basically, fairly unattractive eventually mean he would have a hard time finding sexual release in her bony abyss? Would he, at some point in the near future, find himself flaccid when faced with the prospect of sex with Liz?
Attempting intimacy with a fallen soldier never impressed the ladies. As a man with many, many faults, Brad knew that this one had to be avoided. A shame, really, that his stash of meds didn’t include any for erectile dysfunction.
“Just have to hump that bridge when I get to it,” Brad said, puffing some more on his cigarette and lazily swiveling his chair from side to side as he continued to stare up at the ceiling.
The tiles were the cardboard-like acoustic tiles popular in so many institutional buildings. He wondered whether they backed up against a solid surface or if it was a drop ceiling.
He sort of wanted to take a look – he always felt like every drop ceiling he sat beneath was a potential hiding place … and that, eventually, if he peered into enough of them, he’d find something cool some other poor bastard had hidden and forgotten about. Drugs, maybe. Or porn. Heck, could be booze or a gun, or even cash. You never knew. But it was bound to be fun, whatever it was.
Brad got up and climbed onto his gimp desk, using his feet to kick enough paperwork out of the way to create spots for his shoes so he could stand. He wobbled a bit as he stood there, but the desk gave him enough height to push against one of the ceiling tiles. It resisted him, but after he shoved a bit, and tore off some chunks at the corners on one side, the tile moved up out of his way.
Dust and ceiling tile fell down in a brief rain, coating him and getting in his eyes. Brad came up with a few choice words, rubbing at his eyes with the crook of one arm.
Once partial vision had been restored, he peered into the void between the ceiling tile and the true ceiling of the office. There was plenty of dust, and various conduits of unknown purpose, but nothing remotely resembling treasure of any sort. Brad swore some more, and wedged the ceiling tile back in place badly, breaking off more of it in the process.
He hopped down from the desk, a graceless motion that left him with a sharp twinge of pain in his left ankle. Making a face, he collapsed back into his chair and attempted to reach the ankle so he could rub it down a bit.
He couldn’t reach. The ankle remained tantalizingly beyond his grasp, separated from his questing arms by the enormity of his belly, and by a basic refusal on the part of his body to accommodate him with any sort of flexion throughout his torso or legs. He felt like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, only way, way, way fatter. Maybe like the Tin Man in a whale suit.
He gave up and felt sorry for himself for a while.
A knock came at the door. Brad gave a little hiccup, strangely enough, and glanced guiltily at the portal to his office. He wasn’t sure what he was guilty about, but given time, he was certain he could think of something.
He managed to squawk, “It’s open,” a moment before the knob turned and the door flew open. Faye stood there, looking at him with the vague appearance of bemused disappointment she took on so often when she saw him.
He glared back, unsure of what attitude to take. The day was, on the whole, still a good one. But it was seldom good when your supervisor decided to take a personal interest in your existence. What the hell was wrong with her, anyhow? Didn’t she know it was Friday?
“You’re on the phones today,” she said, like it was the sort of thing you could just say like that, and in so doing, make it so.
Brad felt his jaw begin to drop, although he arrested the process before it could progress far enough to actually pull his mouth open. His eyes grew a bit wider, and he found himself unable to come up with a witty response. “Huh?” was the best he could manage.
“It’ll be a slow day. Marion is going to train you,” Faye said. In so doing, she squelched the first true protest he’d been about to voice: “I haven’t been trained yet!”
She was diabolical. Clearly, she’d thought of everything.
Brad hunched in on himself, determined not to break down crying in front of this woman who toyed with his fate on a whim. He had only one question left at this point. “When?”
“She needs her break at 10, so you need to go up there by 9:30,” Faye said. “You’ll be giving her all her breaks, and spending most of the day up there. At least until Marion says you’re trained, at which point it’ll become your day to be on the phones. Marion has to leave early today, and the pool is short.”
Brad felt like a little piece of his body had just been carved off and tossed into his grave. Perhaps his left foot. Or maybe a testicle.
Sort of like peak oil production, he’d always known this day would come, yet somehow sort of hoped it magically wouldn’t. He’d been sentenced to join the phone rotation, and from this day forward, the phones would always loom over his days as a potential punishment for his sins.
The day had grown sinister in a shocking manner. Brad figured this was what it would feel like to fart blood.
Faye left, her machinations complete. Brad turned to his computer in a sulk and glanced at the time. He had less than ten minutes to join Marion at the phones – just enough time to hot-box two cigarettes and choke back some tears.
Brad adjusted his music, put on Portishead. As a band, they did a good job summing up the melancholy solitude he was feeling. He tried to find solace in memories of Liz, but at the moment those mostly seemed dirty and fleeting, like scrambled porn.
His eyes began to water. He pulled hard at his cigarette, gouging his face into the crook of his arm to get rid of any wetness, and rubbing hard at his eyes while he was at it. If they were going to be red, it’d be best if they appeared bloodshot. Even whales had their pride. He would not be shown to cry in front of his coworkers.
Like summer vacation, the ten minutes ended quickly and in a blur. He gathered up a book so he’d have something to amuse himself with if the opportunity arose and shambled for the door.
Shoulders hunched, he pulled it open. Nobody was in the hall to see his march of shame. He moved at a reluctant pace, headed inescapably toward the front desk.
There weren’t many sights along the way. A bookcase stacked high with planning manuals he had never seen anyone open during his time in the office. Closed doors belonging to offices empty over the holiday week. Industrial carpet with its knack for always looking threadbare and dirty, even when new. Fluorescent lights with their life-giving glare and high-voltage hum.
Marion saw him as he rounded the corner, and their eyes briefly met. Brad couldn’t tell if she was still angry, but she definitely didn’t seem particularly warm and fuzzy. If anything, their shared microsecond glance seemed to indicate cool professionalism, that most boring of detached emotions.
Today was going to be all work and no play. Brad felt the dull boy.
“So, uh, guess I’m learning the phones?” Brad offered, by way of apology.
“Not much to learn,” Marion said. “When it rings, you’ll see the line flashing where the call is incoming. You push the button, which engages the line. Say hello, find out who they need to talk to, then push the hold button. Then you just push the transfer button, and the button for the extension they need, and the call is transferred.
“You can also push the extension button while you’re talking to them, and it’ll instantly transfer. If they’re not in, tell the caller, and offer to let them go to voice mail. For that, you just push the voice mail button, followed by their extension.”
Brad regarded the phone solemnly. There were a lot of buttons.
“How do I know which extension?” Perhaps, if he could find some insoluble obstacle to his ability to answer the phones, he could still bow out, begging stupidity, although he sort of doubted it.
“The extension list is right here, by the phone,” Marion said. “If you want, you can screen calls. Just push the extension button without hitting transfer, after you put the call on hold. Then you can ask whoever is at that extension if they’re available. It’s a hassle, but some people get cranky if you don’t do it.”
“This doesn’t sound like much fun,” Brad said.
“Not even close,” Marion said. She then continued to expound, but Brad found it increasingly difficult to pay attention. There was a spiel about the server that hosted the phone system, locked away in a closet somewhere. Information about the number of wires contained in the physical switch array nestled in the dusty gimp bathroom he’d used for his emergency dump days earlier. Marion even told him about the history of this particular system, how this model had been cutting-edge when the office had adopted it in the late ’90s and was still considered totally adequate by most industry pundits.

The Uncivil Servant Part XXVII

Fri, 3 Apr 2009 07:48:21 -0500

Brad had already pawed Liz’s breasts through her blouse, yet somehow the loss of a layer of clothing made the fondling an order of magnitude more enjoyable. He wrapped his swollen sausage fingers around each breast and played a bit with her nipples through the rough-textured, lacy material of the bra exterior.
He kissed her neck, but held off on giving her that time-honored, and highly trailer-trash, badge of distinction: the hickey. Sucking flesh was an instinctive drive at a time like this, but this was still Liz. She might put up with a lot, but visible evidence … that just sounded like a horrible idea.
Her skin was a little salty, although that might’ve been transfer from his own sweaty torso. Somehow, the notion of licking his own sweat off her body wasn’t nearly as erogenous as it would’ve been had the sweat been hers to begin with. He’d been about to lick her, but this latest revelation sent his tongue back into its den. This was merely temporary.
Having abandoned the licking approach, it was only natural that they now begin to kiss. Mouths met, lips parted, teeth clashed together painfully. Tongues began to probe sort of like boxing kangaroos, neither seeming to quite know when the road was clear, or which direction it should take. Neither willing to give, or ask for, quarter.
Clearly, they were both rank amateurs. This was something of a relief to Brad: There is nothing worse than being the only amateur in such an endeavor. Her shared inexperience meant neither had to feel particularly ashamed for a substandard performance.
She tasted like smoke and lip gloss. Watermelon lip gloss. Even as a smoker, he found the tobacco flavor Liz harbored to be a bit overpowering. He wondered, briefly, why that would be. Why did some smokers hold the smell (and, in this case, taste) of smoke more than others?
Clearly, she must have a smokier mouth than he had – otherwise, she would’ve tasted neutral to him, seeing as he was already accustomed to the smoke taste of his own mouth. Or was it simply a matter of their smoking different brands?
He’d never know. This wasn’t something you could ask someone. How could she be expected to react if he were to say something like, “Hey, does my mouth taste like an ashtray, too?”
Poorly, that’s how. Poorly, and that probably meant some sort of uncomfortable, non-naked, non-kinky interaction. At this point in the festivities, Brad wouldn’t say a peep if he discovered a severed bat’s head in her mouth. He’d just gracefully disengage, turn his head, and attempt not to retch on her. Or better yet, not retch at all. Stiff upper lip, and all that.
They continued their lip-bruisingily clumsy attempts at making out. Brad felt a fairly hefty trickle of spittle on his chin, actually reaching all the way down to his neck. It was a mixture of his and hers, and given it wasn’t near any of his erogenous zones, it wasn’t particularly sexy.
Obviously, there was some sort of lip-related airlock procedure that the two of them had yet to master. You never saw drool all over the chins and necks of actors and actresses after they broke from a passionate embrace. Even kinky porn didn’t seem to involve leaky kisses … well, aside from “snowball” scenes involving other bodily excretions, but that was a different ball of wax altogether, so to speak.
Brad’s neck was hurting, and he figured, if they kept it up, Liz would pass out from dehydration before too long. With as little meat as her frame carried, her blood volume had to be less than that of most people. Fluid loss was surely a real danger for her. No wonder she normally had that greasy shine – it was probably some sort of survival mechanism to reduce moisture loss due to respiration. Sort of like those glossy leaves you found on desert-dwelling plants.
Needing someplace to put his own mouth, he settled it into the hollow of her neck, carefully avoiding the spit-slick that graced her own lower face and neck. He shifted hands, leaving the right one to fondle her breasts while the left moved towards her jeans.
This was another of those potential failure points, and it was with a good measure of relief that he found himself able to unbutton the button above her zipper without incident. He had to sort of yank at it, lifting her an inch into the air in the process, but she didn’t say anything, so maybe she didn’t mind, or somehow hadn’t noticed.
The zipper, in comparison, was a breeze to slide. The jeans slid down to her knees, although that took a bit of yanking and shoving, not to mention a few involuntary grunts on his own part. Recorded on audio and played back without context, he figured it probably sounded like he was sitting on the toilet, attempting to pass something.
No Liz complaints, though. He was starting to wonder if he’d somehow slipped her some bizarrely effective date-rape drug without even remembering it.
If so, he wished he’d stumbled across this particular pharmacological formula sooner. It would’ve made high school, and more importantly, college, much more entertaining from a relationship standpoint. Well, once he licked the problem of convincing girls to be alone with him at all, anyhow. Even achieving that feat had typically eluded him in the past.
With her pants hung up on her knees, a new plateau was reached: panties, bare before the world. This moment was, to an objective observer, the high point of the night. There would be peaks, but this one maintained a level of euphoria that would only be briefly exceeded, and not long-sustained, at any other point.
Only the baggiest, frumpiest of granny panties could manage not to be incredibly sexy when seen in their native habitat. Nudity might be more explicit, but underwear managed to be more arousing. Brad didn’t even touch them, at least not yet. Just seeing the white cotton, triangular real estate was enough to send his pulse up another dangerous notch.
It also meant he needed his own pants free, both due to restriction, and also because removing them served as a body-language question mark – a way of saying, “Hey, notice anything? I think I might have an erection. As enjoyable as it is having it pulsate next to your spine, I was sort of thinking maybe we could do something else with it. As to what, I’m fairly open to suggestions.”
His boxer shorts caught in his slacks and attempted to join them for the ride as he yanked down. Liz, for her part, had been bucked partway into the air to give himself less tug-resistance.
The tricky part was keeping his butt cheeks clenched firmly together, on the chance that he might have a skid mark to hide. It would’ve been better if he’d been able to take a pit stop before this all began, but sex sometimes had a way of jumping out at you when you were ill-prepared. When it did, you took it. It was sex, after all.
Like hers, his pants ended up hung up on his knees. They now served as a sort of communal berm, the demarcation line for nudity. As soon as they were partially out of the way, Brad pulled Liz back down into the sweaty confines of his lap.
He bent back a little, to try to clear his pendulous stomach out of the way. For this stage of things, it was important that his own anatomy and its anatomical state be unmistakable.
He was, at this moment, only two layers of cotton away from actual, honest-to-God penetration. His left leg was giving small spasms, premonitions of a cramp that now appeared imminent. He grimly ignored it. Throwing half-naked Liz to the side and jumping up so he could stomp the cramp out would be lousy sexual manners, Brad was certain.
Brad ground a little against Liz. It wasn’t the wittiest thing he’d ever said, vocal or otherwise, but it was expressive.
If anything, Liz was being a bit recalcitrant at this point. In Brad’s limited experience, the girl had always begun to take an active interest in him at some stage. Liz was reactive, not proactive.
This meant trouble was looming, as Brad was actually a bit hazy on just how to locate the necessary bits of her anatomy when the time came. Sure, he’d seen pictures. Films. Diagrams. But it wasn’t like he had a docking camera on the tip of his phallus. Nor was the region very well lit, even if he did.
Knowing where to point on a diagram was a lot different than getting there in the field, as it were. He’d just have to hope for the best, and assume that she’d take corrective steps if he missed.
The condom lack was also bothering him, at least on an intellectual level. He wasn’t positive that he was prepared to sire a child with Liz. Still, he was absolutely dead-certain that there was no turning back at this point. If she wasn’t worried, he wasn’t going to bring it up.
The one consolation he took was that, judging by what he’d known of her, she wasn’t exactly lining them up and knocking them down. In theory, she should be less likely to carry an STD than your average, say, tramp.

The Uncivil Servant Part XXVI

Fri, 6 Mar 2009 07:44:02 -0600

Brad felt wet, mostly sweaty. Liz kept her apartment warmer than he liked it, although that came as little surprise. Most people preferred something in the lower 70s for interior temperatures. Brad was more a 63 degrees kind of guy. Blubber did that to you.
With the anxiety of the day and the potential for coitus looming, Brad found his pulse and metabolism kicking up higher. Several times while on the couch, he’d had to suavely swipe at his eyebrows to eliminate sweat slicks. His left eye was watering a bit from where some salt-laden moisture had gotten past his eyebrow and trickled its way in.
Still, for all the discomfort, and the way his clothes were now plastered to his body as if he’d taken a shower without removing them, there was Liz, nestled against his trunk like an Ethiopian leaning against a barrel of chilled relief mayonnaise, sweating in the sun (the mayo, not the Ethiopian).
“I haven’t watched Family Feud in, like, forever,” Brad said, as a way of witty sexual innuendo. “Good thing there’s TV Land.”
“Yeah,” Liz said. She sounded a little breathy.
Brad pulled in a deep breath, and without realizing it, held it. As he did, he slid his right hand down and slightly around Liz’s back. It now cradled the diminutive swell of her right breast. She tensed up just a bit, but then relaxed, saying nothing.
He had just been given the universal green light. Liz was open for business.
Liz’s breast was small, small and protected by both bra and blouse. Still, that rounded softness was unmistakable. Even her nipple made itself known against his palm, although he was not yet so bold as to go for a tweak, or any of the other generally accepted forms of nipple play. For now, just pawing the entire breast was plenty.
Brad’s clothes felt confining. He wanted to squirm but didn’t dare. Even with Sexual Planning Commission approval, one must be cautious. An erogenous zone permit could be yanked, given provocation. A squirm, at this point, might be construed as a premature attempt at nudity. He needed to wait some reasonable stretch of time, and then move up to the next level of intimacy. The next commercial break, perhaps.
It had been a while since Brad had touched a breast other than his own. And while the teats he carried on his own great frame might actually outmass those Liz wore, hers were infinitely more interesting and desirable. Even through clothes, he could sense that unparalleled softness. Already his hands seemed to be imagining what it’d feel like to go clumsily questing around under her shirt, searching for nipple and areola, and awkwardly squeezing at side-boob instead. Like a full syringe held in front of a junkie, the anticipation was of a giddy intensity.
He tightened his hand, ever so slightly, like a curious parent feeling the soft spot on a newborn’s skull. She did that breathing thing women did: the quick, strong in-breath followed by the slightly sigh-like exhalation.
Brad’s butt itched. He made a mental note to make sure and sneak off to the bathroom somehow before taking off his boxer shorts to give his ass a quick just-in-case wipe. The smell of poop was a potent anti-aphrodisiac.
Liz seemed to be leaning slightly into his hand, a rather encouraging state of affairs. Onscreen, Richard Dawson was getting pissy because a contestant was taking too long to guess at a survey result. The show was closing in on a commercial break.
Brad turned slightly and tugged gently at Liz. She allowed herself to lean back against his chest, so that she was now partially nestled in his lap. His back was supported by the left arm of the couch, as well as the back of the couch, and Liz leaned most of her slight weight against him, with her head on his upper chest. In this new position, his entire arm now wrapped around her, and he switched from right to left breast.
His right leg was bent painfully at an angle, as he hadn’t risked fully committing to the lap maneuver, so he had neither wrapped it around her nor split it off to the side. Instead, it lay partially under her butt and under her legs. Not that he noticed. As was always the case when you had a girl in your lap, Brad had bigger things on his mind, like how close his penis and her lower back presently were. Sure, he and his phallus both realized that wasn’t how sex worked, but it was nonetheless contact – and there were times during his long sexual drought when even dry-humping a lower back would’ve been a heady opportunity.
Present company seemed to be leading toward far more than a dry-humped spine, and excitement was growing. Partially engorged, Liz was almost certainly aware of his state of affairs. She made no protest and didn’t attempt to move away – yet another in a long list of permissive and encouraging displays he was receiving. She apparently didn’t mind lying (or leaning) on his hard-on. It was such romantic news.
Commercials blared. Brad wasn’t sure if Liz had TiVo, but they were watching the Feud live – although that probably wasn’t the best way to describe a 30-year-old rerun. Whatever the case, no pausing, no fast-forwarding. For once, Brad didn’t mind.
He wrapped his left arm around Liz, slipping it under her shirt at midriff. Her skin was dry and smooth, in sharp contrast to his own sweaty, scaled epidermis. Beneath her clothes she was insubstantial – skinny to the point where you might suspect anorexia. But at the moment, she seemed perfect in every way.
Breath now came in giant, labored gasps, like a bellows working at emergency pace. Or maybe like a vacant house wrapped in flames, sucking in air through a broken window. It wasn’t the sexy panting of traditional lovemaking (heck, nobody had even removed any articles of clothing yet) – simply the out-of-shape laborings of a man in an extreme state of excitement. This was probably how he’d sound if someone dropped a cobra in his lap, or threw him out of a window.
But, being infinitely suave, Brad was trying his best to stifle his own respiration. Brief attempts at channeling airflow through the nostrils were met with immediate failure, like trying to suck a strawberry through a straw. Now that he was focusing on his own breath, things only got worse. Like most autonomic functions, breathing took interference from the voluntary nervous system as a great affront, one that deserved the immediate cessation of all successful activities.
Suddenly, the “secret” to breathing both in and out seemed highly elusive. Brad pawed at Liz’s breast in puzzlement, trying to keep his mind on the prize. Still, this new question seemed to take center stage: Just how, precisely, did one breathe? And not grow tired in the process? If your lungs got tired (or, more accurately, your diaphragm), would you quit breathing?
Diaphragm. There was a good point to raise. Did Liz have some form of birth control? She was, clearly, a ravishing vixen of skeletal beauty. Still, if they were going to make violent, amateur love here on the couch, some form of protection would be best. Brad had nothing. Perhaps he could fashion a crude condom out of cling-wrap, if she had some in the kitchen?
There. That had done it. He’d gotten his mind off of breathing and back where it belonged: in the gutter. Except for when he congratulated himself – that just brought it right back to the forefront of what had started it all: the inherent unlikeliness of the entire breathing thing. Brad listened to himself gasp in his very unsexy, “I’m having a coronary” fashion and found it somewhat alarming, mostly for appearance’s sake.
Then again, he was the same, lard-filled, human sausage he’d been all day. Liz didn’t seem to mind. So why should she care about a little labored breathing?
Brad relaxed and returned to the groping. Fondling Liz’s various curves (and sharp angles) made for a more pleasant passage of time. If nothing else, he’d just have to assume that if he managed to entirely screw up his own attempts at breathing, the worst that could happen would be that he’d pass out, at which point he was pretty sure his autonomic system would kick back in.
There was a certain anti-Zen simplicity to exploring a woman’s body for the first time. You lost yourself entirely in the moment, yet never lost the urgent anticipation of what was coming, that drive to undress, escalate, insert, complete. Having free-roam privileges over Liz’s body was heavenly, yet all he could think of was tearing her pants off and defiling her as quickly as he was physically able. It was glorious.
His blood pounded, a bass thump in tune with his heart. It seemed to have a slight hiccup to it, actually. Sort of a ba-dump-bump … clack – which was probably a bad thing. Not bad enough to divert his attention just now, though.
Brad’s right hand relinquished its breast-grip and began undoing buttons. This was a delicate stage of unspoken negotiations, and Brad steeled himself for the hand of arrest. It didn’t arrive.
The buttons were released without incident – well, aside from the third one down, which he accidentally popped off, much to his chagrin. But even wanton garment destruction didn’t seem enough to arouse Liz’s inhibitory response.
Her blouse was now undone. Her skin was pale, much paler than his own. It stretched tight over her ribs, like taut leather over a xylophone. She’d be an excellent candidate for background actress work in any of the Hollywood holocaust epics.
Her breasts were now on prominent display, snug in their somewhat lacy bra. It was off-white, and sadly did not appear to be one of those convenient front-closing types. He’d have to fish the hooks out in the back.
Still, that could wait. For now, things had ramped up a notch, and Brad was content to enjoy things. Endorphins surged, dopamine cascaded. Brad loved drugs, and sex was a superb (if messy) one. Neurons sang in the biochemical equivalent of an unsupervised fifth-grade field trip to an amusement park.
“Yams,” Brad muttered, some part of his mind refusing to stop paying attention to the Family Feud. At the moment, the survey was looking for things you might eat at Thanksgiving. Most of the obvious answers were already taken.