MONICA!

I’m on the blower reviewing my Wednesday slew of meaningless phone messages. I particularly love the ones that congratulate me on winning my vacation in Scotch Plains, New Jersey if I sign on board with them for Cockroach Collision Insurance.

I rarely collide with cockroaches because even they do not consider my basement apartment to be fit for their habitation.

I’m sure the incoming beep on my call waiting is just another request for some of my non-existent finances to further a meaningless enterprise..

Norman is on a much needed vacation on Alpha Centauri, catching some once in a millennium gravitational collapses. I told him to send me a post card, and make a note to pick up some Tullamore Dew.

Tempted as I am to ignore it, the giddy optimist that still squats in the cellar of my soul insists that I pick it up.

"Hello?"

"Weasel! You know who this is."

"Oh Jesus, Monica!"

Break out the party hats. It’s Monica! The only person in human history, to my knowledge, who had her name legally changed to include an exclamation point.

Any man who has not had a Monica! In his life, will never be fully capable of appreciating what a jewel he has in a wife. The Monica!s of the world have always been with us and already charmed the men of the world out of their pants and a greater portion of their money.

Monica!s usually are already on the boat waving Bon Voyage to the guy in the pier before the poor sap realizes he forgot to get his penis back. They have already hocked said organ to pay off a credit card bill.

And it’s not that they steal it, although some of the world’s Monica!s do. Nor is it because they flatter and manipulate it out of us, although many of the world’s Monica!s do.

And despite the fact that sex is not necessarily a final reward for the guy, if it were not for sex, the Monica!s of the world would not have a leg to stand on. So to speak.

"My" (and wow do I ever use that one "my" circumspectly) Monica! is a walking cross between a train wreck and the finest porno flick I’ve ever had the pleasure to have lived in for some years or two.

Add to that a precocious and genuine interest in the fine arts and poetry, including even the brilliant Andrew Marvell (She loved to read The Nymph Complaining on the Death of Her Fawn), and any misgivings I may have are goners.

We met when she was eighteen and I was twenty eight, making me feel like a bit of a child molester at the time. When a man is twenty eight he starts seeing himself as thirty, and at thirty, "loser" is the only word conveniently a propos for somebody hacking an eighteen year old..

However, under the circumstances I was about as blameless a piece of virtue as Sir Galahad had ever been. Monica! already possessed a full three years’ resume worth of epic adventures with men far older, sadder, and wiser than I was.

At five feet eight inches she was a little short to make a big niche in the model scene. And her chiseled features were a little too exotic for the cookie cutter. There was nothing bland there for the machine to work with.

To make matters worse, her generous tits were not quite generous enough because she also was a natural track athlete from eleven onwards. Her eyes seemed to oscillate between green and hazel in bright sunlight.

Red hair and milk skin with a feather dusting of freckles. Really not quite right for the star machine, but physically irresistible.

I met her at two a.m. with about a case worth of beer goggles I’d been donning across the day and into the evening. My band, The Positronix, were pulling $75 a man at STAINZ, a seedy Babylon, Long Island shotgun bar where the management was trying to pack three hundred under age drinkers into a 150 capacity shithole.

It was a roaring delight by then, as long as you didn’t mind ducking random flying Budwieser bottles on the way in.

The Positronix were a post punk heavy metal "progressive" band a la early Metallica meets The Stranglers. We worked clubs where most of the patrons were between seventeen and twenty five, and were either into the Goth look or the Black leather look.

Either way there were a lot of black leather jackets and tight black jeans. All pretending to be "living on the edge" behind a back stop of suburban Long Island money

When I jumped off the shabby wooden stage in search of a beer, I almost walked right through her. The only anxiety I have known worse than stage fright is dealing with people after I no longer have the crutch of music to rely on.

Unlike my sales trained retail professional self today, at that point, I was virtually a social cripple without a guitar in my hand.

Surrounded by her female compadres in the de rigueur black leather, Monica! looked like a Boccacio goddess in some kind of flower silk screened summery dress thing.. She stuck out like a side of ham in a synagogue. How could I do other than to overlook as petty a canyon’s worth of distance like age and background?

At first, easily. Due to my background in the sex industry in my early teens and then later twenties, I despised the vanity of middle aged men who would rather shark teen agers than take on the challenges of a woman in the full bloom of her sexuality. Why not leave youth to the young?

The twenty three year old woman who used to pimp me to discreet Upper East Side matrons, used to joke about how pathetic such men were in their toupees and combovers trying to "charm" a freebie out of one of the working girls.

In between social butterflights she dropped her number with me on a postage stamp sized scrap of beer napkin. Her laughter bubbled in my ears, and I wondered if she was doing it as some kind of elaborate joke with her friends. Call it a round of "play the thirty year old geezer and see if he acts the chump."

As I watched her willowy red ponytail do a little horsy dance into the dim and smoky bar horizon, I stuffed the napkin scrap in my pocket and figured it was a fake.

It wasn’t.

When I woke the next morning in Danny Baldwin’s van, I felt like a case of #4 ball peen hammers had been dancing Giselle on my head all night. My hands were shaking and I promised myself for the 10,000th (or was it 10,001?) time that I would not drink to conquer my stage fright.

After a breakfast beer to settle my nerves and shakes, I remembered her dryad like presence. Hopeless as it seemed, I gave her a call.

"Hello?"

The voice of a mature woman blew back at me."

"Is Monica (without the exclamation point and before her legal name change) there?"

"No she’s not. This is her mother. Can I take a message?"

Despite my delicate hungover condition, I certainly know better than to say that it is Weasel from the Positronix calling. Probably better to leave STAINZ out of this too.

Little did I know how well mother knew daughter. Or how well Mother had trained daughter.

"This is Darius Wheeler the third calling, and could you please let her know I will try her later?"

That got her interest. That the third bit has gotten me past many a phone screen.

"Is there a number she can reach you, Darius?"

"Yes, 718-696-0666. However, I won’t be available at that number until tomorrow."

"Okay. I’ll let her know."

"Thanks."

"Goodbye, Darius."

"Thanks again, and goodbye."

Unlike most rock and roll geezers, I had no shortage of female company as it was. Most of them either my age or older, which was exactly as I preferred it. Again, not so much due to my Godlike form or brilliant political insights, and more due to a simple combination of desires to be giving in the sack and dignified in company. Dignified by CBGB cultural standards.

After two days went by, I figured she would never get back to me. I gave her one last courtesy call, and left another message with her mom.

Another day went by, and I had just about written her off, when my answering service informed me that Monica had called back and wanted to know what I was doing a week from Saturday.

My brain was screaming "NIP THIS IN THE BUD, BROTHER! Think of all the reasons why someone this tall, young, and beautiful will get no good from you, and you will get no good from her."

But my dumb foolish heart was singing like the lark at daybreak. Not two days before the gig I’d had a dream about a beautifully willow of a lady for a companion in Venice under the Doge’s Palace. An evasive dream of a love with an unremembered face. Faceless because love has a thousand faces.

Within twenty four hours I had written three pitiful love songs. A bit of a stretch for a band whose most requested tunes included Surfin’ in the Sewer, Television Drilled a Hole in My Head, and French Kisses for the Mushroom Cloud.

My two fellow Positronix, bass and drums, saw right through me, and dropped Monica’s name with arch, knowing tones. Before taking up with me, they had worked the same circuit with another power trio, Toxic By Nature. Monica and her extended circle of female cronies were already a well known set of variables.

The drummer, Tony, the Tank, Tancanello signaled for a break after we had practiced a particularly grueling two hour set. Sweat was pouring off of all our bodies, soaking through our cheap black tee shirts.

The sound proofed room was suffocating. The air conditioning had once again fulfilled its reputation for existential non-existence in the mid day August swelter.

He eased his furry, ape-like five eight two hundred pounds of Sicilian football muscle and beer fed belly from a drum throne that his butt cheeks could have swallowed whole. A permanent five o’clock shadow and bushy beetle brows further darkened his brown oval of a face. Without a word of preliminary he spoke his mind.

"Those bitches are poison, man. The whole gang of them. But especially Monica and her hell dyke partner, Zolfanello. Ron, fill him in. I need to take a dump. See you in ten."

The bassist, twenty year old Ron Adonis, sucked on a Marlboro red through razor sharp serpentine lips. His cheeks hollowed his chiseled features into beveled facets. His head was bald except for a two inch tall Mohawk running the crown of his rhomboid head.

His permanently coke dilated eyes shone glossy black in the shadows cast by the minimal lighting of our squalid space in Plastic Armageddon Studios. He dropped his six foot gymnastically trained body onto a tattered couch facing the ratty wooden stage on three foot risers.

Three microphones, a guitar stack, and a bass rig hummed in front of a stain dappled black back drop. Beer cans and cardboard quart orange juice containers litter the stage. I pop open a warm Budweiser and brace for the onslaught.

"Tank on the porcelain. Not a pretty sight. But he’s right, man. Those chicks are havoc. You’re the oldest guy in the band, you should know better. You know the type. Cut your balls off."

My mouth waxes cynical while my mind takes a job at Hallmark.

"What’s the big deal? I talked to the bitch a couple of times. She gives me her number. It’s not like I’m slamming her yet."

"And if you’re lucky, you never will. Watch out for Zolfanello. She gave five guys a case of the crabs in one weekend."

"Ron, I don’t know what you guys are worried about. Her friend’s a pig, and she’s just some flaky eighteen year old who happened to corner me in the bar."

The smile that seemed to bathe the sleazy bar in silver moonlight. The floral dress whose violet petals shimmered visions of the innocence of Eden’s Garden in the ripe radiance of a pink spring background. Uggh! How can I be thinking stuff like this? It’s like my brain is dumpster diving in the Barry Manilow songbook. Ripe radiance?

"Well, don’t come crying to me or Tony when you start pissing green slime and your dick falls down the bowl. You were warned. The only reason we’re worried is that this project is starting to sound signable, and the suits won’t buy a band with a guitarist who’s getting led around by a dick he lost in a Long Island sewer."

"You got nothing to worry about, Adonis. She’s too damn tall for me anyway."

Gold even in an imaginary after glow. If we were to be lovers, that is to say, If I were lucky enough that she were to consider the possibility that she might want to be an older man’s lover, and IF this whole thing is not some hideous and colossal prank which my band members are pulling on me-

"Damn right about that, Skippy. You’d need a ladder to get a dose of the clap off her."

-and if there is to be anything to this wwhole phantasmagoria of new emotions exfoliating before me, we need to be wonderful friends before any real physical contact.

"You know what else? She used to fuck Jimmy Panatella, and he beat the shit out of the last guy that touched her, even though they broke up six months ago.

"That guy’s fucking nuts. If it weren’t for his old man in the mob, he’d be doing twenty upstate already. I bet she gets off on that kind of shit. You want to be next victim? Take a number."

If there is one thing that horrifies me in this infatuation’s possibilities, it is that I might act as a corrupting influence on her.

But Panatella? Now there’s something to throw ice on your dick. He started a two hundred odd participant bar clearing brawl that resulted in thirty five arrests. Even after breaking a cop’s wrist, he was not one them. A one seventy coiled spring of five foot ten catastrophe.

As we used to say in my previous band, the porno driven Erotics, "Women rape men for their wallets, but men rape women of their innocence."

I could imagine her as nothing less than a demigoddess of pastoral nature, unselfconscious in its radiating beauty, bestowing the divine more by its presence than any skill. Brilliant with the possibilities of fulfillments yet to come. Hope making bail does not turn into one of them.

However, as it turned out she felt like a has been that never was in the lunatic world of modeling. And in fact, she was more jaded than half the matrons who used to hire me as a lap licking dog du jour.

I found this out after we finally had a real conversation. Three wild sweaty Kama Sutra weekends into our relationship.

This girl’s idea of foreplay was fellatio while I was driving her car down Sundown Highway at about fifty miles an hour. I could swear her neck must have been double jointed.

"Everyone else has contracts and I’m still doing go sees."

"What do you mean "everyone?"

"In the magazines you moron! Anyone I really talk to."

"Oh, that bullshit."

At the age of twenty eight, I knew better than to express contempt for the local idols of the Bitch Marketplace. Especially given my Bitch Goddess needs. But somehow the idiot truth had wriggled out from between my teeth, and slimed its way straight into her ears.

"Bullshit, huh? That’s just sour grapes because they wouldn’t have any of the likes of you. Some of these girls make more in an hour than you’ll see in six months.

"I’ll show you bullshit, look in your wallet. And while you’re at it why don’t step out with me into my car? You gotta joint?"

"As a matter of fact I do…."

And the night ended happily ever after. Monica exhibited a peculiar variant on Attention Deficit Disorder. There was no topic, no matter how deeply she may have felt about it, which she could pay any attention to for more than the time that it took for her to notice that she had an itch that needed scratching.

She’d be checking her vibrator for batteries in the shadow of the mushroom from a Hydrogen weapon burst.

Nevertheless, despite these failings, and no doubt due to my own, I fell for her like the Roman Empire before Osiric the Visigoth..

Meanwhile, back in the present - where the future’s something that’s already happened - here we are six years separated, and she’s got me on the blower, sure as a fireman that she’s going to hose me. She’s right.

The fact that I know better is not going to stop me. I don’t need Norman’s neckless disembodied nose to smell my future.

The memories of her enduring charms rise to the nostrils of memory like August dog shit smoldering in Frankincense and myrrh.

Let the shit fleck the fan, baby.

"So what’s Monica! Been doing lately?"

"Selling beauty products and making a killing at it, Weasel. How about you? Same ol’ same ol’? Slinging guitar licks for the bar chumps and feeling old?"

Starting right up where we last left off: condescension to the nth power.

"It’s been a while, Monica! I’ve had a regular job the last few years."

"Finally knuckled under, huh?"

"Yeah, you bet. Now I weigh 300 pounds and everybody knows me as "Turtle." Did I mention I was bald from the chemotherapy treatments, too?"

"Ah, Weasel, always the kidder. You’re probably healthy as a horse and hate the world more than you ever did."

"Well, I never was quite the same after I busted up with you, but I’m about eighty per cent."

"Well, talk about a surgical approach. You split for a weekend and came back married. What’s a girl to think?"

"That was just a pretty fine example of the axiom that marriage and an eight day bender don’t quite mix."

"My father wanted to have you killed, you know. The only thing that saved you was he had a heart attack on a week long blow spree trying to come up with the cheapest way to wax your butt."

"You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve thought about how wrong that was, but still, our relationship at that point was a sewer line."

"I’ve got to give you credit. It really was the best thing over the long haul, but…."

"But I was a first class asshole-"

"Don’t flatter yourself. Second class asshole. First class would have left me with a Porsche."

Ouch, ouch ouch. It’s the Monica! Masochism test. The things a man will endure just for the memories of some good loving. . And it’s not so much that she’s a bit of whore, it’s more like a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement.

"I guess you’re right about that. And I’m happy to talk to you too. So, what’s up?"

"I’m coming into New York. What are you up to?"

Warning! Warning! Hosing Radar klaxons! But, I’m already mentally canceling every plan I have for the next two weeks. What can I say? It’s Monica! You only live once.

"Nothing exciting really. I’m on a five day schedule. When are you blowing into town?"

And I do mean blowing.

Of course that’s if "nothing exciting" includes two band rehearsals and several dates with women who like to sleep with me. But, of course, they are not Monica!

"Next week. The company’s putting me up in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Want to hook up?"

"Enough about bears, woods, popes, and Catholicism. Done deal. Let me know when your schedule tweaks up."

A little on the too easy side, but why bother pretending?

"Will do, Weasel. I’ll keep you posted."

With a song in my heart and a lilt on my tongue, I prepare for another day of rainforest pimpery at the greatest company in the world to work for.

As I scramble up the escalator for the God knows how manyth time, I consider what a challenge lies ahead for my manager at the afternoon shift’s sales meeting. He has to find a way to ruin my day. On the other hand, of course, so any options there reside.

This manager, the tenth in my time at GSI, is "new," and he is a professional terminator. He has just been brought in from the Macon store, with the express purpose of "turning the store around."

As a grizzled veteran of over three and a half years, I know that my elimination is high priority. This is not the first time I’ve danced in the crosshairs, ducking the termination bullet.

The company’s model is based on "growth." If an employee does not "grow" into management and the six day, sixty hour weeks which that entails, this indicates a failure to assimilate the values of the corporate culture.

Of course I don’t really give much of a mind to all this, I’m going to be seeing Monica!

Experience and product knowledge be damned. Product keeps changing, and experience breeds skepticism. With a pivotal component of the corporate sub-text being military, skepticism ill becomes a retail soldier.

One of the most frequent reasons cited for termination of the longer lived non-management employees is "insubordination." The actual cause of this is generally said employee losing their temper with an "order" to perform a patently absurd act.

There is the famous story of two year "veteran" Bob, "Sarge" Sargonoswki from the Baltimore Galaxy, who melted down after a fourteen hour Memorial Day stretch. At ten p.m. the Guitar Matrix Manager told him he couldn’t leave until he had applied 100 price tags (AKA "POP’s") marked "June Clearance."

When "Sarge" pointed out that the "Clearance" prices were considerably more than the original ones, Matrician Mark Malefactucci told him to "get it done anyway, before you go."

Although none but the brave would suggest it was anything other than an overdose of caffeine speaking, Sargonoswki was terminated the next day for having shouted at the manager, "Mark, this is all bullshit, Goddamit. Let me go home to the wife."

And none but the stupid would assume that this kind of trap is not embedded in the game by which the company eliminates long term employees who otherwise would be eligible for long term benefits.

Blowing "good mornings" like howitzers to keep the Hun at bay, I hurtle past the stirring but still dazzling Disney world of Deafening, stupefying inchoate noise with practiced aplomb. The first person I will stop for is just behind the warehouse door next to the guitar counter.

Of course I don’t really give much of a mind to all this, I’m going to be seeing Monica!

"Diamond" Dave, warehouse worker par excellence will be typically found in the morning at the "Store Ship House Intake Template." Many have noticed an acronym here, but only the terminated have dared to utter it. One is supposed to pronounce it with a serpent’s hiss followed by the word HIT.

The store is brilliantly designed with economy and efficiency in mind. And with retail rents what they are, this is a good thing.

The SS-HIT space cleverly gerrymanders easy access to the metal warehouse shelves themselves. There are ten aisles of metal shelving that tower thirty five feet high and extend for two hundred feet..

It is worth noting about the Greatest Company in the Universe, that they have exo-structurally solved an enormous number of time hardened retail problems, and only require common sense human activity to maintain it. The business model is strong on paper. It is also quite profitable, despite and/or because of its carnivorous relationship with its employees.

Enter the human animal.

We are in an area that should be "open" since it is just past the receiving doors, and is designed to act as the staging area for the shrink wrapped ten foot pallets of merchandise that arrive from the Central Distribution Mother Ship.

Right now, this fine Monday morning, it looks like the aftermath of a tornado. The store did great business, but nobody cleaned up after themselves.

Diamond is a beautiful ebony bear of a man with a box cutter in his hand, who at 5’6" is as broad as he is tall." He’s looking at a disconsolate coffee spattered hill of uncrushed empty boxes strewn over with plastic packing material, soda cans, and fast food containers ripe with half eaten lunches. A mouse rockets between his feet to safety under a bank of steel shelves.

You don ‘t have to look under the modest short sleeves of his red tee shirt to know that he knows that a God he believed in made him strong. And so he is.

I can see him up against prison muscles twice his size. Get a tape measure for the dimensions of Mr. Prison Muscles coffin.

His coal hairless broadly elliptical head wears a Central African face with a flat hunter’s nose that makes a frown look like an unnatural act. He is a high school drop out who believes in work and dignity.

He has no sense of entitlement at all. How he’s managed to survive into his second year is a mystery to all but those who realize that we would have to hire two people to replace him.

He looks down at his dirty sneakers snaked with gray laces. I see a bewildered child. The same one I sometimes catch a glimpse of in my own morning mirror, hiding underneath the pocked and pasty dough mask that answers to "Pops" Weasel.

He speaks with lips as flat as an ox blood slug oozing along a mahogany desk. and looks at me with luminous pearls for eyes.

"I hate this place, Weasel."

We’ve had more than a few conversations like the one I can feel coming already. Dave has a temper due to on overly developed sense of moral expectations. A man who believes in his work ethic relies on a work place to be fair. He feels like he’s on the edge of a meltdown I give him some leeway.

"I hear too many people say that, Dave. I don’t usually hear it from you. Why?"

"Pops," reaching for a five and a half foot keyboard box, one of five hurled willy-nilly among the ten garbage cans and six stacked empty pallets that define the warehouse input theatre.

"Look at this shit."

The perfect place on paper to put today’s incoming pallets.

We stand up to our shins in paper, six foot styrofoam moldings to hold the keyboards, and countless shipping boxes for guitars, keyboards, drums. These are interlaced with about twice as many smaller boxes, more miserable in the breaking, which once contained the ever multiplying accessories and accoutrements. Somewhere underneath this reeking mess are the pallets the store needs to receive the incoming deliveries.

I whip out my own trusty Stanley cutter, donated to me by the warehouse crew themselves.

"Yup. Up to our ears on a Monday, pal. Throw me that box will ya? Let me cut that one down. Another day in service of the needs of the mediocre and the damned. Or is that the damnably mediocre?"

"See that’s what I mean, Pops."

"What do you mean?"

"It’s not your job.

"Sure it is. Right in the handbook it says that the warehouse is the responsibility of sales staff as well. So, I am doing my job."

"You know what I mean, Pops. They were supposed to take care of it when they made the sale and the money, not you."

"I know. But hey, I’m not perfect either. I’ll bet there are a couple of my droppings in there, too.

I toss a box and slash its tape with a practiced sweep, thinking, "well it beats twenty five to life in a Bolivian prison." It comes apart with a quick rabbit punch.

I stack it in an orange warehouse wagon that still has Home Despot stenciled in black. It had been borrowed for the store’s Grand Opening eons ago in retail time. Five years human time. It’s ours now.

"But when a man’s not treated like a man, when you have people that get off on giving orders to people and don’t even treat them like people. I mean, like, what do you think of Steve? "

Ah, the real issue. Stephen "Roy" Lopez, the new warehouse manager, brought in from the west coast to "turn the store around," and damn pissed off about it. He and the Terminator, Rodney ("Balls") Cracker are here to bring the store back to Galactic Handbook standards. An express train to employee Hell without benefit of scenic local stops.

When the company wants to clean house the business model usually retools both the store manager and the Operations/Warehouse Manager. Although rarely seen acting together, they are a hand in glove coupling.

"Dave, Steve is a company man. You know everything has to be done by the book with him. You’ve been here long enough to know that."

Mike, the previous warehouse manager was a hands on, easy going guy, who had a knack for solving problems and running a tight ship intuitively and elegantly. When the store was receiving pallet loads of merchandise, one would usually see him in his undershirt, exuberantly engaged in the process of taking in the goods.

He had a habit of saying things like "a good deal on toilet paper and garbage bags is more important than a great deal on clipboards."

He was eighty sixed along with the previous store manager, because same previous manager had turned a blind eye to inferior used instrument purchases and incompetence since the store’s basic profitability numbers were looking so good.

This was exposed by the end of Mike’s "hard count" of February which showed that the profits indicated for the previous November and December were offset by the store’s possession of about one hundred thousand dollars worth of obsolete Pro-Audio merchandise acquired as a result of trade-ins.

Mike wanted the store to put on paper the losses represented by merchandise that could only be unloaded for dimes on the dollar, if at all. Mark "Captain Ahab" Josephson wanted to "insinuate it in across the next quarter."

I was in the office at the time, still invisible in my role as garbage emptier, bathroom cleaner, and door geek.

Mike was sitting across the desk from Mark, whose lanky six foot frame was slouched in a swivel chair. There were raccoon like circles under his steel grey eyes. Cave like shadows lurked in the hollows below his chiseled cheek bones. His normally "charm the ladies with my still boyish good looks" face looked coffin bound.

His every gesture seemed disconnected from the previous one, lending his normally graceful body language the impression of a bundle of tics.

A mute commentary festooned on the wall behind Mark blazed in the form of a three by four foot promotional poster from Gibson Guitars. It featured a cherry red bat wing SG electric guitar mated with a red "devil’s" pitchfork. Obligatory flames and orange streaked smoke undulated behind. Tres chic. Tres bleak.

A hell whose infernal character is defined by its ersatz substrate. A hell built from the bricks of a grade B central casting agency. A hell which makes its misery more miserable by its self-disqualification. A misery demanding gratitude that things are not any worse. The oldest behavioral modification tactic in the book.

Seated on a folding chair, Mike’s fire hydrant shaped five feet eight inches worth of coiled spring worker muscle sat stolid and immobile. His square twenty five year old face seemed driven by the canyon like topography of a man twice his age. His skin was ash gray under the harsh fluorescent lights in the office.

About forty pages of item by item matrix inventory reports fresh out of the office computer hung limp and heavy in the left of his blocky hands. Hands of the kind worn by centuries of peasants from eastern Europe. Hands whose primary instinct is to count that which they know is there.

Mike’s right hand went up and down as if it held a hammer to emphasize his points.

"Mark, if we bite the whole bullet now, we get the rest of the year to make it up. All we have to do is tank January and February. Attrition will drive payroll down. We can use the real soldiers on the staff to pull the extra hours. With any luck at all, by March the store should already be converging on the black if we keep it tight."

"Mike, don’t cross the thin red line from Boy Scout to moron. Do you realize what that does to our bonuses? Chrissake, we’ll be working at minimum wage for those two months."

"But, Mark, we’ll have the rest of the year free and clear, and you know this is going to catch up with us anyway. What’s really the difference in the long run?"

"I’ll tell you the difference. After my mortgage, car, and insurance, I’ll have nothing after the draw. You’re operations. You make less per annum and work a little more, but you make a steady salary regardless. I don’t.

"My position is solely based on my performance commission. No growth for the store, no money in my pocket."

"Mark, we still had a brilliant Xmas. Better than any the store ever had before. If we come clean now, maybe the company will even help the store out-"

"Mike, I practically love you like a brother, but sometimes you talk like you only visit our fair planet in your spare time. Just what kind of "help" do you think the company will provide when we tell them that our Million dollar December is followed by a two month flat liner?"

"But, Mark. Look at the big picture. Chris Belkowitz played the whole chain for a fool. For ten months he was the big swinging dick of pro audio. The guru at the top of the mountain that everybody turned to. Everybody trusted him."

"We had to trust the bastard. His buys were accepted because he was basically the only one on top of the curve in the ten headed snake monster that’s the pro audio product. Some of that stuff is obsolete in six weeks. We had to either take his call or walk the deal to a competitor."

"Mark, that’s my point. Corporate knows that a lot of profit margins will stay in the tank on some pro audio items until we break the back of the internet guys, and dominate market share.

"These losses can be assimilated as part of the market penetration process. We’re branding ourselves. Maybe Promotions can come up with-"

"East Coast Promotions has its budget already committed to opening another store in Manhattan. A bigger store. They have neither time nor interest in sending some sugar our way."

"When we found out he was taking kickbacks on bad buys to sell the good stuff practically at cost, we got rid of him. But hell, in the music community they see him as a Robin Hood.

"Stole from the big bad GSI monster to make the digital revolution affordable to the poor indie companies. But that part has been played. If we play the wounded gentle giant, we could scrape some copy out of the whole thing too. Hey, we empower our employees to a fault, and he’s living proof of it.

"Did you see the article in this month’s New American Eco-Warrior devoted to his "guerilla marketing" designed to "bring hi tech into the reach of the masses of American discontents quivering at the brink of a new vision of blah blah blah reuniting the American spirit with her polluted body and ending war and hunger with electronic empowerment?"

"It says he wants to cross-pollinate software with health foods, creative visualizations, and Wiccan products.

"Yeah, and he took his clients with him. Now he’s pulling the bucks calling himself a consultant by capitalizing on losses he left in our back yard.

"Everybody from Sidney on down was glad enough to at least have the goods moving so that we were grabbing the market share. It‘s not that this is a total loss from the corporate point of view at all. We have more leads and more clients than ever. It’s not like we have nothing to build on."

"The bottom line is that one hundred and twenty two thousand dollars is one hell of a lot of eating, and that’s on the StoreShip’s table.

"These numbers practically take money out of my pocket."

By doing his job honestly and well, Mike wrote his own death warrant.

By mid-March both Mike and the store manager went on vacation followed by a "family leave of absence."

Both were transferred within weeks. Mike slipped and broke his arm and left the company not long after.

(All it takes is two top sales performers of dubious integrity to cast a shadow on the entire store. Thus, there is also a need to shotgun the entire staff before the make or break months of November and December, should any irregularities emerge across the summer months.)

This new Operations Matrican, Steve "Cannon" Ball, was Mike’s diametric opposite. A classic "Company Man." He installed clipboards in every Matrix, and walked around with his own, leather bound "Master Matrix Compiled Clipboard."

His pants were-shave-you-in-the-morning creased whites that defied you to even suggest he touch a thing. That failing he never failed to provide one with intimate details of his relationship with his chiropracter.

Leadership by delegation, and the best leader delegates everything and does nothing. The zen of eighties style management still haunting the house of twenty first century retail.

The Store Matrician is the head and face of the store, but the Operations Matrician is the digestive tract. And more often than not, the tail end of same. Terminations usually bring the two of them together in the office with any doomed employee. Each one is a witness for the other, if anything is contested in court.

"Dave, you have to remember that life is ultimately a performance, and we all play our parts."

"Pops, I get all that. But still, how are you supposed to take it day in and day out? Why can’t they just talk to you like a man?

"Dave, the system is not about accommodating our humanity. We have to accommodate it. Remember what the Carpenter from Nazareth said? Render unto Caesar. Our employer is like unto Caesar."

"Listen, Pops, St. Paul said a slave should be obedient to his master, but that still don’t justify slavery do it?"

"Dave, for a man who didn’t take much education, you sure know how to ask the hard questions. No it doesn’t. But it still doesn’t change the mess in front of us."

"No it don’t, Pops. And it don’t change the kind of attitudes and behavior that bring it every god damn Monday."

"But you know together we’ll kick this garbage in the ass twice as fast as any four of the rest of these assholes, and that’s why we’re the better men. Throw me another box. I want to pretend I’m punching a different face.

"Or clock, Pops. Or clock."

"Which reminds me. Unless you really want to terminate your relationship with this giddy isle of delightful enchantments, remember to be careful how you talk to Steve.

"You’re coming up on two years here, and that qualifies you for more benefits. Last another year you get vested. Don’t give them any reason to toss you."

"I know they want to get rid of me. They want to be rid of you too."

"You should have seen what they put me through on my second anniversary. It was almost like they planned to set you up for humiliation and angry outbursts. The manager then, Dean-no, wrote me up for being two minutes late for a meeting that was called half an hour early at the last minute."

"What keeps you here, Pops? You should be a professor or something."

"Academic world wouldn’t have me. I have an addictive personality, and I’m addicted to a paycheck and doing good things by the people I work with. So I’m here. I work. Nothing special."

"Well maybe yeah maybe no. Seems like I hear your playing’s kind of special."

"Nothing more than strings, fingers and a lot of time."

"You can’t be standing there with a cutter in your two fingered right hand, already through six boxes, and not be telling me you got some kind of talent with your hands."

"Lotsa people got talent. The creative intelligence of nature had to make sure there was more than enough talent to spare. I figure in a nation of millions there has to be no shortage of people with potential. I just happened to devote an inordinate amount of my time on guitar."

"But Weasel, that inordinate amount of time might very well be what makes you special.

"I’ve seen how they look at you . What do you think, nobody’s got eyes around here? Sometimes it’s envy, sometimes hatred, and sometimes I think they just figure you to be crazy. But I’ve seen how they pass you over and write you off."

"Dave, just because I’m not management material-"

"It ain’t about that, and you know it. You got plenty of leadership. But you don’t ever treat people like things. They’re treating us like things. They talk to you like their voice is a string and you’re nothing but the puppet."

"Dave, these are only people too, and they’re just passing a message along. It’s all about fear of losing the job. They’re puppets too."

"So what’s that supposed to justify? Puppet people making puppets out of men?

"Oh, Jesus look at this!"

In the course of extracting a full liner’s worth of garbage from the 400 gallon garbage can, the liner gave up the ghost. Twenty five square feet of slimed over fast food leftovers smattered before us.

The cause of this Valdez garbage spill was about twenty pounds of tightly wrapped obsolete promotional product literature.

Illustrating the kind of thinking that makes retail America the greatest menace to a world fit for human habitation that human history has ever known, some thoughtless Pro Audio Matrician had begun the prior Saturday by chucking this densely compressed garbage bullet straight to the bottom of the barrel. The whole mess had had an entire weekend to percolate.

The bundle’s sharp corners had sabotaged the thick industrial grade polypropylene. I see no point in reminding Dave that that was the reason why an astute garbage handler always puts the can on its side and tilts the bottom up a little - a precaution that should be practiced unwaveringly.

No. At this point I am seeing a more red with rage than black man busily saying "motherfuck" enough to manage the fornicative needs of a major Chinese City/Industrial Complex. Silence is now far beyond golden. It has gone multi-platinum.

I reflect that on more than one occasion I had "saved the garbage" by this very means. If the liner has torn from the bottom, an adept garbage handler can slip a fresh liner on the lip of the can and empty the enter slop contents, liner and all into the fresh one. If God is a senile lesbian drunken keyboardist, this would be a drop of Her Sacred Drool.

"Back in the day," The Grade 1 Planetary Manual congratulated me on my "golden opportunity to gather performance based points on your centripetal wood product conversion rates.

I never could figure out the the "centripetal" part, but I definitely figured out how to pull an extra ten bucks by hurling box cut cardboard crates at a lethal rate, when I took the closing shift at the StoreShip..

In the Time of the Ancients (Two years retail time.), my responsibilities as door geek, (Master of the Door Pavilion in the language of empowerment), included the evening’s garbage. That practice had fallen into disuse with the hiring of young women for the job as well.

In the interest of Door Empowerment, and no doubt also due to a high Promotion to Customer rate at the Door Pavilion, the garbage and bathroom cleaning Eco-Modules had devolved upon the Sales Troopers.

This latter change was the one that made enormous sense, since no testicle carrying man with even one final putrefying gobbet of self-respecting gentlemanly pride would allow a woman to clean the Ladies Module after a busy Saturday.

The StoreShip’s first female Pavilioneer sprinted her way back to customer status at Saturday’s end babbling incoherently about a mouse, a tampon, and a recently employed condom.

Despite countless snickered ignoble speculations nobody ever quite pieced the whole scenario together. Nevertheless, the second of "Angie the Two Day Door Girl‘s" days had unambiguously come to a close.

The sales model has become a malignant mutation wedding the conniving facets of thievery with the basest forms of beggary, to arrive at a new improved garbage factory. Perhaps we are fated to mutate down just a little bit. The happy gibbering consumer anthropoid blob.

It takes somebody even more disconnected from reality than you are to question yours.

"You know, Pops, sometimes I wonder if we’ve all died and already gone to some kind of weird hell, that’s somehow not so bad, but still is Hell.

"Not fire and all that childishness, but more like an eternal maze where we’re some kind of tortured lab rat."

"It can’t be hell."

"Why, Pops?"

"Well, one could say it’s Hell on your feet.

"Yes."

"And for some, it’s hell on your back."

"Indeed, any ten pallet day can do that."

"For many, it’s hell on their family relationships."

"Yes, but what family? For most of these managers, it’s either divorce or company leave within three years. That‘s why they have no heart and start treating people like things."

"Dave why are you diverting the conversation? You want to equate our situation with Hell."

"Which means we got all the time in the world to prove it. And garbage to keep us company."

We’re stacking the cut cardboard into the twenty foot orange Home Despot hand truck. Except for a couple of rancid grease spots from the weekend’s uneaten fast food containers, the front half of the floor looks almost ready to receive the next load of merchandise.

I gather up the last of the area’s cardboard into one arm and am slightly overloaded. I’ve cut a corner too. I’ve just smushed some of the boxes together, and failed to cut them down properly.

My foot finds one of the grease spots, and I burst into a Bolshoi Ballerina quality pirouette. Unlike the ballerina, I am completely out of control. With the detachment only the truly helpless know, I watch the orange steel bars hurtle into my eyes.

A deft tug on my belt, and the next moment finds me on my ass, covered in cardboard. I am looking straight into the full set of Dave’s grinning pearly whites.

"Your skinny ass okay, oh great white weasel?"

"How could it be anything but, since my butt was in your loving black hands. All good, except I hope I don’t stink too bad."

"And you were saying about here and hell, oh Guru of cardboard and garbage?"

"Logic dictates that it’s not."

Dave gives me a wan and wry glance. "And why might that be, good sir and wise elder, Pops?"

"Because it’s not fucking perfect."

Box cutter slash, bottom punch.

A resigned chuckle combined with a soft shoulder shrug.

I put my hand flat across my forehead like an Indian scout, scope the diminished but still formidable trash panorama, and break into a mock stentorian mode.

"Still there’ll be more."

"You‘re one of a kind, Pops."

The phone is ringing in the background, but neither of us notices until there is a page for "Dave in the warehouse."

"Hello?"

I focus on the box at hand. This one is a monster sized Keyboard box. Must be expensive. There is another box inside this one with heavy duty, finger lacerating " brass staples" reinforcing every seam.

With a practiced short punch I loosen them just enough so I can break the industrially tough bottom of the double cardboard.

"What do you mean you didn’t pay the Con Ed bill, Naomi?"

"I gave you the fucking money! How could you be that irresponsible?"

"And where were you this morning? Sheena said she had to make herself breakfast. Didn’t you make it home last night?

"What do you mean you forgot about the interview? How long has it been since you had a job, now?

"What do you mean overqualified? You didn’t bother to go because you’re overqualified? How overqualified can you be to put some food on the table?"

I take some extra interest in a five foot speaker crate and apply my hostilities and appetite for destruction to same task.. I wish Dave well. I don’t know how the hell he does it.

You hear from all the black demagogues and then look at the fellow in front of me. He‘s breaking a sweat and going back at the boxes with a renewed intensity that belies the man I heard kicked in the stomach by the other end of the phone..

"This fucking place. These fucking fucking assholes."

But then I don’t know how the hell I do it. To walk everyday through this environment we call "work" to maintain for ourselves is to witness a laundry list of that which is wrong with our exosociety.

With the aid of Television, Computers, Cell phones, movies we also have an endo-society (end o’ society?) constructed from psychic icons derived from a machinery that performs our visualization for us. The monstrous cartoons of a KISS or a Michael Jackson: one step away from and below Mickey Mouse.

And you’ll never call it an improvement on any divine template for the original human mind, if you try telling it to a a Veteran of The Sales Floor of Moron Island: port of call- Guano Bay.

Meanwhile, Dave’s sweating so hard, his trusty Stanley Boxcutter goes flying out of his slippery hands and misses my nose by inches.

"Shit! I’m sorry, Pops. I hate this place so fucking much sometimes, I lose all control."

Work is intrinsically alienating, but hatred is nothing but a dangerous energy draining diversion. By this time, I figure there’s space to and need to break back in. I don’t think I can get Norman to go back in time to get me my old nose back.

"I wish I could find anything wrong or illogical about what we’re driving at there, Dave, but don’t forget that anger’s one of the seven Moby Dicks riding the oceans of sin. "

Two beats,.

"The heart’s too small a place to make any room for hatred, Dave.

Another two beats.

"What’s it going to mean in a week?"

Finally.

"I know, Pops, I don’t know how you do it sometimes. I see the way they treat you. The way they hate you for the fact you play a better guitar with two fingers than most of them can play with ten.

"Dave, they don’t hate me. They don’t care enough for that.

"Let’s face it they would rather have intimate knowledge of a dead squirrel than see me get a break. So you know a man still has to find comfort-"

Slash and punch box.

"-with the object at hand, despite whomever’s face you see-

Seam slash.

"-with box cutter in hand. "

I hold the shredded box flats aloft and prepare to pitch it in the Home Despot wagon.

"Now who do you think I’m thinking about now?"

We’re getting a snicker out of Dave now.

"Perhaps some anonymous creature for whom the phrase ‘lying sack of shit’ would be an insufficient exaltation."

I deliver a gratuitous kick to fold the flat cardboard one more time.

"We, the people of the empty wallets and bad credit, who cannot afford contempt, will serve that which festers beneath contempt."

The warehouse door opens, as if on cue, and the tall, olive, triangularly featured specter of the Terminator, Rodney Cracker, drops the humor temperature by twenty degrees-despite a hot cup of steaming Starbucks coffee in hand.

Vengeance is a dish best served cold. Even if the setting is a bakery in August. Despite my mystical background and Catholic upbringing, I wanted nothing more that morning than to hear that ol’ Rod Cracker had bitten the big one on his recently implemented three hour each way monster commute from the Pocono’s mountains. Of course, such had not been the case today. But one could still dream.

Nothing mangling, mind you, nor slow and obscene, a mere headless torso creaming on Rte 22 will suffice. No shortage of opportunities for the Angel of Death there.

The company seemed to do this with every manager. But it was never the company’s direct doing. Sooner of later an individual put into the store manager position underwent a supra human commute lasting anywhere from three to ten months.

We’re talking Zombie manufacturing experiences here. Out of the house at five thirty at the store by eight thirty. Out of the store around six thirty, back home by ten. Six days out of the week.

Crackpot types argued that GSI was another example of corporation as cult. The job subsumes the personality and becomes the individual’s sense of identity. Exhausting experiences of this kind eradicate personality in a task driven work environment. It is like a very diluted brainwashing. All the more insidious because it is nothing more or less than performing the job description.

At any given time, the sheer number of task directives is humanly impossible. Every manager is reduced to a psychological triage condition. There is no energy for personality.

The manager is reduced to corporate mouthpiece and motivates the employees to achieve sales goals by whatever means are possible. Since the environment itself is so amoral the only appeals management has are fear and greed. In other words, what else isn’t new?

Good King Clusterfuck and his ravaging hordes. It’s, Sheriff Cracker, here to stick his nose wherever he can find a good butt uncracked.

He has a natural athlete’s body whose coiled spring has only slightly gone to softness and rust. An untrained and superficial eye might assume he had once been a basketball player. Especially with his meticulously razored goatee and lanky frame.

He could be anything from a seedy twenty eight to a well preserved forty. I would lay money on the former. I’ve caught him plucking white hairs out of his pointy curls when he catches sight of them in one of the sales floor’s many mirrors. Oh sweet optimism of youth.

I suspect from his walk and stances that he’s better at golf, but probably took obligatory martial arts courses after being bullied as a kid. I would suspect him of a mean game of pool as well, albeit with a little cheating to level any threatening competition.

His hair has a loose Latino curl to it, and has a tendency to form horn-like spikes when he’s under particular stress. I can’t help but think Pointy Headed Boss, and he can’t seem to help but reinforce that impression.

In the great American Buppy tradition, Rodney plays the race card like Itzahk Perlman plays the violin. At this point his most memorable remark to me has been,

"This store needs another white boy like Clinton needs another blow job."

For the moment, all I get is-

"Hey, Barney Fife, what are you doing goofing around back here? Get out on the sales floor."

Accursed by God, man, beast, and come to think about it, probably vegetation as well, the employee will arise and go. With an ache in my body, disgust in my heart, and loathing in my soul, I leave Dave to his ministry, and go to pimp my piece of the rainforest on the American retail public.

There’s something deeply primal about when a man goes out and pays upwards of thousands of dollars, to buy a stick with metal attached to it. And more times than not, there’s a wad of cash involved. Emotions and the Limbic system are in full force.

When I worked the door at the Queens Store-Ship, The Saturday Afternoon Male Swagger reminded me of the kind of body language I see in gun shops and the power tool section of Home Despot on weekend afternoons across our fair nation.

Yup. It’s Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton here to prove how stupid anyone can look when they’re trying to look like they know what they’re doing. I had opportunity as ample as the waistlines under examination to witness its unvarying manifestation in the middle aged Peter Pans of the massed Marshall stacks.

First and foremost ,the body language must be that of a practiced master taking that guitar in hand, just as one has done millions of times before. A familiarity as deep as an officer holstering the sidearm, coupled with the flair of a rodeo cowboy swinging a lariot.

Of course, one unfortunate who was not quite so familiar went running past the door "pavilion" with tooth in hand and blood running down his chin. I never quite figured out how he managed to holster the headstock in his mouth.

Nevertheless, the proof of the idiot is his capacity to discover stupidity in new and innovative ways. All we can do is hope his genius dies with him.

Secondly, there is a simpering of the lip which must be mastered and maintained in all its nuances. Half pout and half sneer, it represents a Tao-like balance between the vainglorious and the snob.

At all costs this must be executed with a delicate jut forward of the chin, disguising conditions of chinlessness in all its thirty plus year glory.

Let us not be so distracted by these delights, that we forget the cherry on this cupcake of interactions: One must know ridiculously intimate details of the piece in hand. The first unspoken step in the grinding process.

"Hey, listen to this one, man. They want two and a half grand for it. Whaddaya think?"

"Oh, that’s probably a ‘57 semi-swamp cedar. If it had an alder body, and the third furred tuning screws were brass, then it’d be worth something. Those things have an amazing tone.

"They got the wood for the necks on them from some trees that died next to a North Carolina nuclear power plant. The reason the third screws were brass was that the wood was so hot out of the sawmill, that the finishing guy got radiation sickness. "

Rare is the creature who can fail to take pride in a knife well turned to serve a righteous vengeance. Let no man go un-one-upped.

"But that one? I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of hundred for it. Better off with the Chinese knock-off."

Let the onus of garbage sacking fall to the trader. How did we get here? How did China, in a matter of a few short centuries, go from the priceless land of the Ming Vase to the purveyor of the once and future mountain slopes of trash?

Has anybody ever even tried to count the sheer tonnage of all this shit flown from the Pacific Rim? If the archeology of war involves any kind of calculation of projectile motion, historians may interpret that we’ve been giving away perfectly good currency to receive catapult loads of trash that almost immediately become a recycling challenge.

The Third World war is being won. The excrement of the Third World and the Pacific Rim heaps itself at the retail doorstep. As urgent as a baby’s mega-diaper load in its screaming need to be emptied into the consumers‘ brainless hands.

Back in the old days it was old fashioned horseshit vaulted in with festering body parts of fallen siege warriors.

I can see the shade of Genghis Khan hoisting a fermented goblet load of goat product, surveying the whole thing, and nodding with approval.

If our baby boomer guitar experts devoted even half the time they spend chasing the mystic components of the heavy metal butterfly of tone to practicing, we’d have a nation of Hendrixes.

Of course, considering how little knowledge they have managed to cram into over twenty years of studious application therein, we are well advised to steer them away from any discussion of post-9/11 current events.

" I think we should drop a bomb on those Arab fuckers."

Always nice to see how the love and peace generation learned from Reagan to stop worrying and tongue kiss the bomb. As long as they are not the ones who have to shoulder the rifles.

"The biggest mistake we made in Iraq was not going after the whole country in the first place."

And it’s always a pleasure to listen to those who will never have to see any combat, discuss the possibility of younger men going off to get their body parts shot off.

"That’s the trouble with kids nowadays. They watch too much TV. The army would get that flab right off them."

This from the mouth of a moron who once couldn’t start his day without his morning dose of Captain Kangaroo and a spliff of Panama Red. And hey, I think you could use a couple of sit-ups yourself, pal.

All the "how ya doin’?" howitzers in the world cannot protect me from my first incoming casualty of the day.

It is the blocky, six foot muscular Korean Adonis, the Right Reverend Poon Le Hong from the Church of the Righteous and Prosperous Ambitions Presbyterian Pentecostal Korean Ministry. The entire congregation uses its tax-free status to avoid New York’s ludicrously high sales tax.

"You cheated a poor old man and sold him bad guitar. Bad Guitar. Very bad guitar."

"Hey, no problem. Maybe I made a mistake. Let me see the piece."

I open the case and look into the bowels of horror. The headstock is broken, and there is an almost perfect circular hole with four little nodular humps, gracing the soundboard just below the bridge. But the back of the guitar and all of its joining seams are brand new. The bridge itself is still perfectly seated.

This makes no forensic sense. For a $400 piece of plywood glued to other pieces of plywood using industrial strength epoxies to take a hit with that kind of force, there would be other stress cracks and separations elsewhere on the musical corpus delectum.

"I need return guitar. Want money back. Or give me new one in box. This floor model."

Boy am I ever happy that this is not my sale. Customers always say "you" sold me the piece even if you were off that day. All the more so if the transaction were snaked by Robert "The Cobra" Cabalovich. Swallowed whole again.

He has not even put me on for the courtesy 25 per cent. In any case, the good news is that I get to wash my hands of this garbage. With the greatest of blandness I can maverick, I start laying it on.

"I see you closed this one with Bob, Poon."

"Yes, he give me special "Righteous Ambition" price. Said you not tell me about it. Where.Bob? I not want to talk to you. Get, Bob. My thin is growing very patience."

Every time Poon stops by with one of his congregants he shows off his increasing mastery of "Idiomatic English American." He’s wobbling at his average deviation from comprehensible kilter.

It was a Saturday Afternoon sale that I had lost control over to Bob, and I barely remembered whom the Right Rev Poon had bought this one with. I peered over the counter and remembered with a spasm of disgust.

I had lost interest in the sale for the perfectly good reason that the only way the recipient would ever play the guitar would be in the righteous afterlife. He was a wizened toothless drooling creature who looked like he’d been wearing skins and fighting the Korean Saber tooth tiger back in his day.

He looked like a three foot grain of brown rice and never said a word. I’ve always suspected that the community treats both the very young and very old with equal kindness. They beat them when they speak.

"Today’s Bob’s day off, I think."

"I not believe. You get check up on him."

I dutifully go to the schedule screen, and sure enough Bob is off.

"Sorry, Reverend Poon, but Bob isn’t here today." He’s due for a molting.

"You lie. Now I know why you called Weasel. But I am tiger and I in you my jaw take."

He gives me a mincing self satisfied close lipped smile. The Reverend also gives English of Righteous Ambition classes for a mere $1000 per quarter. He spends an ambitious tithe thereof on gym and Tae Kwan Do classes. He has the chiseled triangular physique to prove it.

No doubt the God of Righteous Ambition alone can comprehend his students‘ discombobulating utterances. I suspect he practices his own righteous creative expressions in front of a mirror for hours on end.

"Poon, why would I lie? Here. Look on the screen. There it is. He’s off today.

"Truth in mouth of liar wriggles like worm in lips. I see you right. No problem. Return very bad guitar and give new one. Hop chop!"

"Oh listen, Reverend Poon, there’s nothing I want to do more. So what happened here?"

"This no time for questions, Weasel in mouth of tiger. This time for actions! You bring better guitar, so poor old man feel happy and proud in Church of Righteous Ambition."

I look down at old Brown Rice and see he’s drooling a righteous river that’s spattering the rug. I see we like our chewing tobacco, which we clearly gum.

"Don’t worry Poon. I’m already building our return ticket. So, just for the notes on the return, what would you say was wrong with the guitar?"

Other than the fact that it looks like it may have been used as a Cricket bat.

"It fall in Church. Headstock must be bad. It just break. You gave me righteous discount on unrighteous garbage. We want better guitar for our six hundred dollar, and we in hurry for church service. Hop chop, Weasel. My thin is growing patience!"

He crosses his arms and pouts. Too bad I keep my guns in Jersey. I can already see a 30-06 flying up his buns of steel.

"We’re moving right along here. So I’ll make the notation that the guitar fell and broke during church services. Say, what’s that other hole."

"What hole?"

The greedy black hole in your head you soul sucking, narcissistic scumbag.

"This one here on the soundboard. "

We’re both looking at the hole now, and I realize that it matches his meaty manicured fist to a tee. Oh goody. So now we are dealing with the Reverend greedy lying sack of shit Poon Lee Hung. What the hell was he doing? Using it in a Martial Arts program?

"Oh, that." Here’s that mincing smile of smugness. "This my mark of righteous indignation. See. It matches my highly trained ambitious knuckles."

"Okay, Poon. Mark of righteous indignation duly noted. How did the guitar fall?"

"Why all these questions? You question me like I black man and you police. You sell bad guitar give us better guitar for our inconvenience. You make poor old man have to skip his Timely Death Prayer and Meditation Services."

He looks down at the drooling three foot raisin with a benevolent simper. I flash back to a conversation I had with one of my Korean English as a Second Language students who told me about one of the more interesting aspects of the community.

"The old people have too much cash. All they have done their entire lives is work sixteen hour days six and seven days a week. They have no idea of retirement. They’ve been saving since their twenties. The average cash bank account for them is well over a million dollars."

I wonder if they serve arsenic in the Complimentary Ambitious Tea and cookies for them at those Timely Death Meditations.

Time to pretend I didn’t hear his last remark.

"Say, I think I have another of these brand new in the box."

"I say better guitar."

"We’ll do whatever we can to accommodate you." Oh God, and how I wish it was your timely and ambitious death,. "Is there one you have in mind, Poon?"

"Not yet, we go make our discriminating now."

This guy is to English what the Enola Gay was to Hiroshima.

At this, he turns on his heel and waltzes back to the Acoustic Matrix, trailed by his shuffling protégé and occasional tobacco juice spoor.

I shudder, realizing there is no way this is going to get better. Time to page a manager, and Cracker struts condescendingly over. Looking for another opportunity to either humiliate me or terminate me.

"What’s up?"

"Well, the Reverend Poon, that fellow walking into the Acoustic Matrix, wants to return this guitar and exchange it for a better one. I display the wreckage of the $600 righteous disaster.

"What the hell happened to it?"

"The reverend feels that the guitar was defective. He says it shouldn’t have broken when it fell."

"What kind of bullshit is that?"

"Rodney, to the best that I can tell, it’s more properly the purest corn fed horseshit I can imagine possible. By the way, that hole you see, is his "mark of righteous indignation." Just in case you were wondering."

Guitars are Rodney’s weakest point of experience and understanding, but he’s enough of a natural born con man to have worked this kind of angle himself. He once gleefully described one of his clever teenaged tricks.

After damaging the front bumper of his dad’s Cadillac in the course of settling a high school grudge, he covered for himself by rear ending a Mercedes Benz, claiming that the driver had stopped short.

When it comes to the noble art of hurling feces at the barn wall and seeing which one sticks, Rodney is a World Series class pitcher.

Nevertheless, his thick Latino ruby lips curl into a sphincter like circle of bewilderment. This is retail body language for being slack jawed stumped.

"Well, is it possible that the guitar broke because it was defective? Can it be repaired? Is there any way we can accommodate the customer without losing money?"

The reverend Poon brought in lots of business. PA’s, power amps, Drum kits, ad nauseum. If one ran a history of The Righteous Presbyterian storefront operation, one would have thought they were pulling off weekly Woodstocks out of the place.

The yearly sales tax alone they’re dodging as a consequence of these righteous purchases comes to over 50K. And let’s not forget a hell of a lot of gifts getting UPSed overseas avoiding our unjust and ungodly export duties. Very righteous indeed.

"C’mon, Rod. We both know what happened here. The goddamn guitar was dropped and landed on the headstock. Everybody knows that’s the weakest part of the instrument, and the repair would cost more than the base price of the instrument. All we’re looking at here is bright shiny brand new kindling wood."

That "O" lip posture purses to the kind of tightness I only see on TV, when the president is about to hurl some mighty cow pie lie at the ovine American public. His eyes tighten. His chin juts forward. With a soft sidelong whisper he cries from the depths of his retail management florescent darkness:

"Get Cannonball."

Cutting to the chase. It happens that the Operations manager is in today. The Antichrist of Sales will see you now. Abandon hope 99% of you who step up his blood streaked pyramid.

Steve "Cannon" Ball has convinced customers that after being ripped off by the Storeship, they really should be making a charitable donation on its behalf. The Anti-grind.

His template hails back to the caves, when some guy name Gog sold some guy named Magog, used clubs. Gog’s older brother, Blingog, was the prototypical Gogian Customer service Specialist. He hid in a tree with a large rock.. A win-win situation.

Cannonball’s razor creased slacks slice into the situation with preternatural velocity. I could swear I never even heard the intercom page. Diamond Dave, the ebony nose tackle, already has Poon and old three foot raisin back at the guitar counter.

Ball looks up at Poon Lee Hung from his unimposing, but wiry, five foot seven. He smiles blandly. I almost feel like I’m looking at an oiled hangman’s noose standing in spotless white high end sneakers. His onion bald head glows like a bunker light bulb.

"What seems to the problem Reverend Poon?"

Was that a momentary wince I saw streak through those high, wide, and imposing cheekbones? A torch for the Korean Frankenstein’s monster?

He stiffens back into the sticking point of his role playing. The wounded customer seeking honest redress.

"You sell poor old man dishonest guitar. Take advantage of poor Kim Chi here."

With a benign paternal flourish, he presents ou our drooling cross-eyed specimen of the preservative powers of a life counted out in sixteen hour days of washed vegetables and neatly sorted fruit. His eyes are focused on some imaginary cantaloupe no doubt. The stench of rotten cabbage seems to linger like an aura around him.

And now just why do they call him "Cannonball?"

"Let’s have a look at the defective guitar."

He turns the pieces over in both hands, turns around and holds them up towards the ceiling and it’s bank of flourescent lights, as if scrutinize them very closely.

"Reverend, I certainly do see a problem with this piece. I want to take it in the back to verify the serial number and we will formally accept the return immediately. I’ll be back with you in a moment."

Old Poon is rocking back and forth between toe and heel. He barely acknowledges me, except to say, "I glad they finally catch up with you, dishonest little man.

"Not even give me righteous discount for dishonest piece. No wonder my thin grew so patient. If grew more patient would have vanish away."

Cannonball comes hurtling through the door, with a return receipt.

"Reverend, we’ve accepted the return and now Guitar Systems International has taken possession of the piece in question. By law I am required to inform you that we will be surrendering it to the 103 precinct as being a weapon that may have been used in the commission of a crime.

"I found what looked like small bloodstains on the headstock. I noticed that it had been cleaned because they left residues around the tuning gears.

"I’ve seen this before. I think one of your parishioners may not be the finest sheep in the shepherd’s flock.

"I think it was pretty darn decent of you to punch that hole to cover up for one of your congregants, but the blood and the fracture pattern on the wood gives it away even to a regular guy like me. If it’s in our possession, though, we have to pass it on."

The noose tightens. Poon’s bulk looks like a Zeppelin that’s just been hit by a TOE missile. The chin comes right back up, though. Gotta respect a fighter.

"Mister Ball. I humbly apologize, but not real deception. Guitar not good. Not sufficient capacity for grip of champion martial artists. But no crime. I tell you what. Just give me guitar and we forget all about petty crime.

"Bad for church business. By the way, did I mention we want buy another more Bank of keyboards and lights for new Church of Righteous Reconciliation?"

"I tell you what Reverend. Even though I’m not supposed to, I’ll just re-transact the piece into the ownership of the Church. I’m sure your people will work the right thing out among themselves. By the way, don’t tell the cops. Cause now I’m the one breaking the law."

They both chuckle at that. So with a final grinding whir from the receipt printer, ol’ Rev Poon strolls off into the sunset of the exit door.

He carries the carcass of the guitar re-coffined in its case, trailed by his prehistoric cash cow, who is in turn trailed by a sticky rivulet of chewing tobacco and drool.

I turn to Cannonball.

"That was ungodly quick."

"Yeah."

"What was up with that "commission of a crime" riff?"

"Pure bullshit. I was just giving him an opportunity to save face."

"What do you mean?"

"Simple. You know that 24 hour Sushi joint over on Abilene and 155th st?"

"Yeah."

"It’s really a front for a whorehouse. I happened to see him there a couple of weeks ago, pleasantly engaged in entering the Temple of Unrighteous Gynecology. When I passed him the guitar with the return receipt, I had written his wife’s cell phone number on it."

"You’re evil, Cannonball."

"Just doing my job. And let’s not forget that evil is nothing more than live spelled backwards."

"Darius Wheeler, line twelve. Darius Wheeler, you have a call on line twelve."

I’ve never been able to figure out what frequencies GIS coded into the address system to make it so effective at cutting even through a sales floor worth of Marshall wanking Metal-kateers.

My God, I’ve been here less than an hour and I already have a headache that’s like a railroad spike straight to my soul.

"Darius Wheeler, you have a call on line twelve. Darius Wheeler, please pick up your call on line twelve."

I grab the phone and pray for painful twitching deaths to befall any and all of dotted across the sales floor in a maze of amplifiers on risers, all cranked beyond musical recognition. Truly a cacophonic symphony from the local mass of self absorbed sub demons in training.

I’m still chuckling about how good old Poon has been righteously tanged.

"This is Darius in Guitars, how can I help you?"

"You can start by slipping that nice fat dick of yours inside me, Babe."

"Monica! Hey, any way you want me to add value to that transaction?"

Nothing like settling in for some good news about the future for that nice penis o’ mine. So many fingers so little music. If they only knew what they’re missing.

I’d suggest that anyone contemplating the monkey-typewriter-Shakespeare experiment gaze upon this anti-Sylvan scene for even a bare half hour. And perhaps if there is just the right combination of guitarists and amplifiers, we’ll get Beethoven. And perhaps President Bush will be remembered for his integrity and leadership.

Again I am reminded how our corporate culture operates by exhausting a perfectly decent set of musical gifts and ideals into an empty shell of an 80K/annum personality, devoid of any love of music whatsoever. Most of the managers I have worked for had more basic talent for music than I might have dreamed of. But, as per Shakespeare, lilies that fester…

Mark "Loophole" Lupenberg did Hoboken to Queens for six months. That’s a mighty daunting commitment. A train from Hoboken could involve as few as two connections and as many as six, depending on the vagaries of mass transportation.

There are two bodies of water that have to be crossed: the Hudson to get from New Jersey to New York; and then the East River to get to Western Queens. If everything occurs optimally, it could be as little as an hour and fifteen minutes. A bad case scenario with about a one in thirty probability could turn that into twice the time. Something really bad could easily turn it into three hours.

For a manager with the keys to the store, every commute in must assume an above average quality of transportation cluster bollixes. Therefore Mark left his home at five to ensure that he would be at the store at 8:30 am, Monday through Saturday.

Mark was a talented and determined young man with no small degree of energy, musical talent, and persuasive talents. When he started working with GSI he had real credibility as a bassist in the LA metal genre. No small accomplishment.

He finalized his commitment to the company during the period of his long commute. On a fine spring morning he picked up a used twelve string bass to demonstrate the product. He had had no prior warm up or practice in days. He overplayed the instrument, and severely damaged his wrist. The company man self baptized with the destruction of the musician.

Power is the pay off. The StoreShip managers often describe certain moments as being godlike, and that’s what makes it all worthwhile.

The store manager is like the captain of a ship. He is there at virtually all times. If his cell phone rings and the store is on the other end, he will pick it up immediately.

He is the final recourse regarding any and all transactions. A manager can and has terminated employees on the spot. A manager can set any price on any piece of merchandise. A manager can give away the store if he so chooses.

But rare, if not never, is that kind of idiot. The more likely scenario of a manager thieving on a grand scale for almost a year has happened once or twice however. They usually leave the company a few weeks before the hard count Operations performs every February.

These managers throw about a quarter of a million dollars of store merchandise down a mystery rabbit hole before their house of cards comes down on them..

Like the American Government, but far more effectively, GSI has a system of checks and balances that keep such disasters to a bare and legendary minimum. No StoreShip Matrician has ever been prosecuted for theft, on rare occasions one wonders what went on behind closed doors.

Joe Vargas was an operations manager who had been working on the inside with a ring of high end guitar thieves in the Las Vegas StoreShip environs. In a case of being hoist on his own department’s petard, the company’s Operations Matrix caught him by setting up a buy for one of the stolen pieces.

Vargas’s guy ratted him out minutes after the cops arrived. Joe abruptly left the Company, but he was never arrested. Despite the fact that he had masterminded a three month spree where ten stores had been hit for a total of forty five guitars representing a retail value of three hundred sixty thousand dollars.

The GSI Guaranteed Universal Micro Price had been a total of two hundred fifty two thousand dollars. . Actual likely negotiated sale price would be more like two hundred ten, and cost would be one sixty.

Since GSI does almost half a billion dollars in business per year, this number does not sound as catastrophic to the uneducated as it really is to a retail enterprise. The leaner the operation, the greater the impact of a loss of sellable assets.

Almost any retail operation has to maintain a significant paper profit margin because on a transactional level it will take a lot of hits at the point of purchase. And there’s always the monster of overhead and merchandise devaluation waiting in the wings.

Guaranteeing a lowest price is only the beginning of getting and keeping customers. Each person wants a "little more" to personalize their experience. They expect the sales associate to "throw in" a couple of small items, even on the purchase of a two hundred odd dollar guitar.

Why and how this was done had me completely baffled at first. When I worked the door of the Queens StoreShip, checking each receipt to verify that the customer left with what he/she had purchased, I figured I must be working with a collection of either idiots or thieves.

I would routinely see a two hundred dollar guitar, twenty dollar gig bag, and a set of six dollar strings for two hundred dollars and the tax. How does it make money?

As it turns out, the guitar at one ninety nine makes about ninety six dollars. The gig bag at twenty dollars makes about ten and the strings at six make about four. Therefore pulling the guitar down to one seventy three and adding on the other two items for a total of one ninety nine means that the entire transaction still makes the store eighty four dollars.

The sales associate gets ten percent of that, eight dollars and forty cents, plus two percent of the entire sale which is four more dollars. This leaves the store with seventy two dollars out of a simple two hundred dollar transaction in gross profit.

A thirty six percent profit margin sounds like a very hefty one indeed, and it applies to a great many of the transactions that any StoreShip does across a routine day. However, the cost of running a store remains a quarter million a month.

This means the store needs to do six hundred ninety four thousand four hundred forty four dollars per month to break even or twenty three thousand one hundred forty eight dollars per day at that rate of profit.

Each major piece of stolen merchandise represents a projected profit that has evaporated. Each piece potentially represents a customer that may have to go somewhere else to get what they desire. It represents a concatenated loss of add on transactions and profits.

This is a loss that the rest of the store’s merchandise, taken as a whole, needs to compensate for. This kind of loss translates its way up the spread sheet columns to imply that for every dollar lost that way, a store needs to make thirty more to maintain its goals for growth projected from the prior year.

Again, considering that the average cost of keeping a store open is approximately a quarter of a million dollars a month, the chain took on almost three weeks worth of an entire store’s overhead with no transactions to support it at all

No matter how you look at it it’s a major felony.

Vargas was never even sued. Three months later Costco hired him. There is an unspoken law of retail. A thief in management is never punished. They just go to work somewhere that it’s harder to steal from.

I interrupt these reflections to wonder where ol’ Pee Jizzle, as he currently likes to call himself might be. Oh God, you heavenly keyboard playing dyke, could he please be luxuriating in pine?

Once again I am amazed at the power of my inner automaton to completely dissociate my inner workings from my external activity. I have walked my way through the warehouse, checked for new stock, greeted the noble and contemptible alike with humor and courtesy, and am already on the sales floor of the Acoustic Mini Matrix.

This is by far my favorite place. There is no music piped in here, and although not sound proofed, the chamber is walled with actual lumber and is a formidable buffer to the never ending cacophony of high end shrieks and low end flatulence of the main floor.

The Mini Matrix itself is divided into three separate chambers: a tiny six by ten classical room, a twenty five by twenty five luxury show room and the fifty by fifty main room.

Here I log into the computer terminal and scope the ten odd customers thrashing away on some of the eighty acoustics under five hundred dollars which line the walls from floor to ceiling.

There is a central pillar with a five foot diameter engirdled by lumber benching sufficient to hold between eight and ten customers. Drum stools in search of the wandering buttocks of the talent challenged also dot the gray carpet .

I see my usual complement of six refugees from the local high school earnestly trying to decode a lugubrious Metallica ballad that has to be at least ten years older than they are.

Tough as my childhood may have or have not been, I am sure these kids have it far worse than I ever could have imagined..

My fellow sales associates say they detest them as disruptive. I think they really hate them because they envy them their youth. How quickly do we forget the misery and anguish of being young. I’m lucky ot be at an age where you could not pay me to be their age. Especially in these times. Mine were quite bad enough thank you.

But hark? Is that yon customer I see as yet unclaimed by any of my greedy colleagues?

The ebony middle aged man of indeterminate age, middle height, thinning black hair, and belly tortured faux gold satin shirt pulls down a $150 Yamaha guitar from its hook on the wall. The cheapest one we have. Pock marked oily dark features betray an origin somewhere on the great Indian subcontinent. It is a face all circles and ovals.

Thick resentful lips form a perfect O and belch over the soundboard. Curry and cheap meat ooze from his every pore. There’s a silent sphere of pudgy shadow behind him. A short me-sized kid about twelve with a shaven head is dressed in baggy jeans and a black sweat shirt emblazoned with a conga line of cigar smoking skeletons in top hats. The backdrop is a beach littered with fifty five gallon drums bearing bio-hazard and nuclear warning logos.

The red and white detailing is sufficiently crude that it takes me a couple of glances before I realize the skeletons are dancing on top of blood spattered bikini clad caricatures of breast heavy women. The caption reads "Cannibal Corporate-Revenge is Tasty. "

The spherical dark face with incipient double chin holds intelligent brown eyes. Anger is in a knife dance balance with awkward embarrassment and desperate unfocused yearning.

We can both smell that dad’s been saving his landlord a fortune in water bills. The man’s armpits haven’t tasted soap in week. He stares again at the instrument as if it is the signifier of one of the great enigmas of the universe.

This is a cross-eyed look I know well. It is that of a man who will try to pretend he has any idea of what he is talking about for the benefit of a son he will treat like a helpless idiot. I can expect him to grind me for every penny he can.

With each advancing step, I stifle another gag reflex. This man truly packs a mighty stench. This is unusual for the local Hindi types, who usually reek of some kind of botanical oil or in the case of the more westernized, the latest dreadful designer cologne.

Thus I have learned that in the case of Calvin Klein’s Eternity, there is truth in advertising. Try standing next to someone who has practically bathed in the stuff. The thick cloying funeral quality floral scent enters your nostrils like a gooey paste and hangs in the air like a pirate on a gibbet.

But what the hell, Weasel. A sale is a sale. Greet. Qualify. Pitch. Close. He saves me the greeting with a jabbing finger and a fixed malevolent stare.

"What kind of wood is this?"

Whatever he does for a living I can feel his hatred for it. If he works for a car service he probably loathes all of humanity. This is his day off. It’s payback time, and it’s my ass in the shower. Dance Weasel, dance.

I relax my shoulders into a servile slouch. I feed his ego by wrinkling my brow and opening my eyes to a pitch whose body language expresses my recognition that I am in the presence of a man of discrimination, and duly impressed.

For a wild rebellious moment, my intellect teems with the truth I would like to say…..

Well sir, god only knows. Everything at this price point comes out of the Pacific rim and is manufactured plywood. For all I know it’s recycled Hong Kong newspapers with just a slight tinge of Dog turd, lending it this lovely autumn brown hue.

The poor bastard who cut the wood in some Indonesian back woods area probably gets a dollar per chainsawed acre. No doubt he hates us and hopes his oldest son will provide for the family by becoming a suicide bomber.

Then they run the lumber from all these chainsaw toting poor bastards through a massive robotic manufacturing plant that spits out guitars faster than an AK-47 blasts out .223 shells on full auto.

At certain points along the finish line, some underpaid bored creatures have to do the final hand work. No doubt said creatures sign off on each piece with hatred in his/her heart and fear of injury in his/her souls.

Most of the imported non-Chinese guitars, regardless of brand, have the same point of manufacture. There is a city sized factory complex in Korea that is home to Min Dik guitars. Raw wood and metal come in, shiny guitars and toxic waste come out.

It is a facility so huge that it is divided into "neighborhoods," where teams specialize in manufacturing pieces to the specifications of each "brand" that they cover. Twenty years ago it barely existed.

The prodigious development of Korea’s manufacturing system has been much trumpeted in a slew of puff pieces in trade and business publications. But the Korean industrial "miracle" was at an unspeakable human cost.

During the course of its early development in the mid-eighties, Korean industry was nothing short of a human rights nightmare. The Korean worker was in about the same position as a coal miner in nineteenth century France.

Lost your hand due to sub-standard safety? Thanks for doing your patriotic duty. You are now retired. Collect your clothes and go home to your family. No compensation in any form. The wise Korean saw the advantages of sixteen hour days and seven day weeks in America. Thus, the equally prodigious success of Korean delis in urban America.

However, among the industrial monstrosities that litter east Asia, Yamaha has such a strong system that the quality of the product is remarkably consistent and high in value for the buck. As I understand it, their employees are better off than the average. If so, God bless them.

In fact, their product will last for at least forty years with little or no maintenance at all. It would not surprise me if they are one of the better examples of the globalized leviathans that we call manufacturers and/or vendors. They’ve made a lot of mistakes already, and since business is ultimately trail and error, they are on top of the curve.

Meanwhile, back to reality land:

"That’s an excellent and important question. In this case, sir, what you are looking at is a plywood guitar. This is a very durable piece, but it is true that whatever tone it has will not change over the course of time. Solid top guitars, however, develop over time into instruments with richer and more complex tones."

The man digs into his nose with a right pinky endowed with a half inch worth of extended nail. I hope this means he feels comfortable with the rapport building process. Junior is watching him sideways, pretending not to notice. Turtle-like, his head retracts a little deeper into the sweat shirt of cigar smoking skeletons. We avoid eye contact.

"Naturally they cost a little more, although we still always guarantee the lowest price in the universe. If you are interested in one with a solid spruce top, I have them starting at two hundred dollars."

He studies his booger free pinky with a quizzical, disappointed look. Maybe his Gods ate it for him. Or maybe my dyke keyboard god cheated him of his nasal salt lick, just to stay in practice.

"Oh no. This one is already too expensive.. Don’t you have anything used that’s cheaper?"

"Actually, sir, most of our pre-owned merchandise is considerably more costly, due to its vintage nature. In fact the store just took in a used HD28. It’s a work of art dating to the seventies. That one’s only eighteen hundred. Would you like to see it, just for fun?"

That was a gratuitous shot. Dad probably hasn’t had fun since that fatal fornication that brought junior into the world. And I’m insinuating that he is the miserable small time grinder that he is.

Speaking of the consequence of his wife’s failure to choose, said poor fornication product is squirming with misery. He knows what I’m in for, but he doesn’t know that I know what I’m in for too. He still thinks his old man is unique.

"No. Forget about that. What about this one I have here? Is there a warranty?"

To myself-

In the Pacific Rim, where most assembly work is done, Warranty apparently means the same as retirement program. Tough shit, pal.

And, should you happen to be the lucky customer who gets the one guitar in one hundred thousand bazillion that implodes with such harmonic dissonance that the cascade effect brings down the entire northeast power grid, we‘ll sue you too.

But not to worry, Homeland Security has a secret plan for that very contingency. It will involve your skull, two metal coat hangers, and a lot of aluminum foil. A whole lot of aluminum foil. Better stock up now.

To him-

"Everything has a warranty, but did you ever try getting a major corporation to honor one on a small purchase?"

"Why are they so expensive? Don’t you have anything cheaper than this?"

Oh how the truth hangs by the neck until dead on the noose of my tongue.

So fucking expensive huh? Two years ago the same model was going for 199.99. It’s called deflation in the prices of consumer goods. Read any newspapers lately? They’ve been writing about it for only the last five years or so. The profit margin is eaten at the point of purchase. Meaning I have to sell more guitars to make the same money I did two years ago.

But again, not to worry. The idiot in the White House is going to make sure that problem goes away. Imports will start costing more as the cost of transporting them goes up. And of course, maybe, just maybe, the folks involved in their production may want something closer to a living wage.

Act nonchalant. Go back to what he thinks you forgot about.

"And come to think of it, actually, Yamaha has a generous two year limited lifetime warranty policy which they support better than most manufacturers. However, to accommodate our customers, GSI offers our world famous Quantum Leap Guaranteed Assurance program."

"Sounds great. I not interested in extended warranties."

"This is anything but an extended warranty. Our Quantum Leap program is a full scale insurance policy on the piece. It provides a check for the full price of the product, written out to you and GSI, should anything go wrong over the next two years.

"You can spend that money any way you want it. Sometimes people have used the check for an upgrade on the instrument if they file their claim towards the end of the two year period. Wouldn‘t you like to have coverage that‘s as good as money in the bank?"

"What do you have to do? Mail them the guitar and wait?"

"Not at all. You just bring the guitar to any GSI, and file the claim. They send the check within fourteen business days."

"So how do they verify that the claim is valid?"

"We take care of that, mister…, uh. .Say. Excuse me, I must have left my manners back at the hot dog stand. I completely forgot to introduce myself."

Oh good. That got us a decent condescending chuckle. I look up at big daddy directly in the eye and notice a pearl sized weeping carbuncle under his left cheekbone. His pug nose is bulbous and liver colored.

I give him my best retail harlequin simper. "My name is Darius Wheeler. And what are you folks names?"

Given the nose picking business, I’m holding off on the handshake. In lieu I provide a manual flourish-a wave of the hand for both their benefits.

"Bhubaneswar Tandoli, sir. Nice to meet you. This is my son, Rawalpindi."

Cannibal Corporate takes an awkward step forward. Those eyes are very intelligent, but feminine. Probably a mama’s boy. I wonder how much shit this kid has to take every day in the public schools.

Simultaneously I wonder if the old man is a wife beater. He has all the earmarks of a control freak. It’s common in that sub-culture’s "life style." Like homosexuality in America, it might be viewed as normal. Unlike homosexuality in America, I find it a sickening loveless thought.

"The pleasure is all mine. Is this a first guitar for Rawal-"

"Just call me Ralph, sir."

Nicely done. Kid’s got some starch in his collar after all. And saved by the bell to boot. I was about half way into butchering the pronunciation.

"Sure, Ralph. So is this a first guitar for you?"

Dad butts right in.

"We’re not sure whether this is not some passing thing. I don’t want to spend a lot of money for something that is just going to be forgotten in a month and gather dust in the closet."

He gives the kid a pointed look.

"Like the oil paints your mother bought you against my advice that you let dry up in the bottom of your underwear drawer."

"Dad, I was five years old-"

"It doesn’t matter. You did not stick with the gift. That is lack of character regardless of age. In fact, it is a very American notion not to have prejudice regarding age."

He shoots me a triumphant glance, and an arrogant, less than winning grin. Like myself, he is missing a few teeth on the back right upper quadrant.

"So I will show none. Five or fifty, you showed lack of character by losing interest. I wonder if you will lose interest in this too, and this all just money down the drain for weak willed boy again."

Now it’s my turn to want to shrink into the background. This is going to turn into one of the all too many sales where I’m getting far more information than I need to perform my job effectively. One again a ten minute conversation about music reveals more family issues than ten therapy hours.

But a sale is a sale. So rather than kick dad in the nuts and take the kid out to the rifle range, I enter the road most frequently taken-blandness.

"Let’s have a look at the guitar your dad picked out. I don’t know how much you know about guitars, Bhubaneswar" (skillfully remembered as Bub and his war, by thinking about our idiocy in Iraq and Afghanistan), "but I have to assume you either know people who do, or you have excellent instincts. Were you ever in a band yourself?"

To ice the cake I play some of my better blues phrases on the Yamaha. True to form, the instrument, although bottom of Yamaha’s price point, still sings.

The fact that I am notorious for being able to do this with almost any instrument in the store is more than these folks need to know to get through our episode. Nor does it change the fact that the kid is going to get a solid, economical first guitar, barring any of a thousand unforeseeable idiocies.

"Just call me Bub, for short. I was never in a band, but I always loved music."

The old man is beaming. I don’t know what button I’ve pushed, but I can almost feel ten pounds of hostility melt away. His pock marked complexion seems to glow.

If there is one aspect of music retail that is utterly predictable, it is that it is impossible to predict. Suddenly the kid seems more relaxed too. His old man is cool. Time to keep the questions coming.

"Did you ever play anything yourself?"

"Back in my country my father bought me a guitar when I was ten. He gave me some lessons-"

His voice softens and trails off. He seems to be looking at something a thousand yards away. I think about what an emotional minefield any conversation about music can be. The skeleton key to the yearnings and unfulfilled dreams of even the most heartless.

But blah blah blah. I’m a salesman, and I need a good sale. The fact that I have standards does not change the fact that I have needs.

The important thing is to keep the old man away from any of the even cheaper merchandise on the guitar wall. Much of that is sufficiently close to unplayability as to make any intelligent kid give up in less than a month.

Even though some of those pieces can make me more money by virtue of wider profit margins, I can’t live with guaranteeing someone a ticket to a self fulfilling prophecy of musical despair. Even at a guaranteed lowest price. I can’t even do that with people whom I detest, and I’m starting to like these folks.

Enter the chubby bronze balloon from the shadows.

"Why don’t you tell him about the famine and the war, dad? The pictures of you with the guitar next to the medals on the wall?"

To me-

"He was a real hero, but now he never talks about it-"

Interrupted by a voice one part stern to two parts soft-

"Son, how many times I have to tell you there are no heroes in war? Just lucky brave idiots and lucky cowardly idiots."

The kid deflates. His old man just called himself an idiot in public. The unpredictable kicks in hard.

Call me a whore. Call me a pragmatist. Call me a GSI guy. But whatever you call me, make sure you all me the guy who’s not going to let this sale grow feet and walk out the door. It’s Whatever It Takes time.

"Ralph. Did you know that a true hero never brags, and knows he got lucky?

"And did you know that we both heard your father express a truth that they never teach in school or show in the movies about the truth of war?"

To the father-

"Bub, I want to start all over again here, and tell you for reasons I don’t want to go into, that I feel doubly honored to be talking to you right now. I want to remind us that there is no hurry or urgency to make a sale today."

Oh for the love of God buy everything at full pop, that is to say our guaranteed lowest price. Right now.

"Make yourself at home. Unless you’re in a hurry to leave, why don’t you feel free to sit down, and enjoy any and every guitar we have?"

Oh. Thank you God. They’re sitting down with the guitar on the bench that wraps around the central column.

"And, hey, whatever you do, don’t let the fact that you’re working within a certain budget make you deny yourself the experience of anything here. Can you think of any reason why you shouldn’t go into the high end room, pretend you just won the LOTTO, and find out for yourself why Gibson has the reputation it has?"

And, Oh God, please keep Rodney Cracker, the Manager who manages by needling and termination, away from managing me. Give him every opportunity to engage himself in the righteous pursuits he so dearly loves: sixteen year old chicks he finds on the internet. In other words, give me this sale, and get him off my tired back.

"The store doesn’t close till nine o’clock tonight. Believe me, you’ll be in a hurry to either buy or leave sooner than I’m going to be in a hurry to make a sale."

Yeah, sure. And I’m from a nation of war heroes too.

And speaking of wars, I’m experiencing a distinct failure to grasp this latest one.

At this point, how can the United States possibly claim "victory" in the war on terrorism? We’re playing Darth Vader buffoons to Osama Bin Laden’s Luke Skywalker.

The upcoming show trials for Saddam Hussein will convince no one of anything other than the fact that the man was a thug. No better or worse than any of the of the other ogres who dominate mid-east and African politics.

God help us all, if he turns out to be a second rate Marshall Tito type, who’s been keeping the hands of a synthetic nation off its own throat with an iron fist.

The destruction of his thugocracy has inflated the spot prices of oil and acted as a global call to arms for disenfranchised oil poor Arabs everywhere. Of course, the easiest targets are symbolic.

These include all the big multinationals, who have done nothing but impoverish our way of life and erode cultural values like education here. Hey, why support American literacy when we can outsource it to India? Nevertheless, to the mob thinking on the Arab side, they are the fruits of our tree.

Now we ice the cyanide cupcake with moderate Islam kicked back into marginality, just when it was getting a foothold in Iran. The new guy is the only real threat in the area, and Bush acts like he doesn‘t exist.

And this after naming Iran as one of the three countries in the Axis of Evil so many moons ago. Want to talk about weapons of mass destruction? If they don’t have a nuclear weapon already, it’s in the pipeline. Ha, ha.

Meanwhile, back in America, intelligent people are asking how we can move a quarter million troops across the ocean faster than the few thousand people who need to be evacuated from New Orleans?

Intelligent people are asking why there is no one in the government who is taking direct responsibility for the victims to have water?

And those same intelligent folks are failing to see most of the problem as a failure of the young men of the community to seize an opportunity to be heroes.

Instead they saw fit to loot stores rather than help save the live of the vulnerable in the community. Maybe they should be glad my kind of government would not get involved in that aspect. Then, shooting to kill would be an imperative measurement of a unit’s performance.

The National Guard had to be sent into impose order at gunpoint. Most of them felt very uncomfortable, and genuinely conflicted. On one hand the idea of firing on Americans they were trained to defend was repugnant. On the other hand, the behavior of the thug community was revolting and cowardly.

At what point would "shoot to kill" become tantamount to war on a desperate and under serviced set of American citizens in need of a five year prison sentence?

At the same time approximately 15,000 people are basically trapped in a football stadium. A place completely inadequate to serve any long term sanitary needs. In many regards they are in a state of greater danger and disorder than they would be if we had simply carted them all off to prison.

As Bush’s theatre becomes increasingly ineffectual both internationally and domestically, Hillary and the left wing cormorants, are licking their chaps at the gobbets of our constitutional rights and liberties.

Frank Zappa’s Totalitarianism: The government that will save you from yourself, now that you‘ve voluntarily paralyzed yourself with ignorance and media driven illusion by turning your back on intellectual values..

Although you have a right to cut corners in such a manner, I don’t think you should want to.

I try not to stay too much in touch with my Inner Jew right now. He’d empty a couple of Uzi magazine loads on Congress and dial up Morty’s for Glatt pizza.

When Joyce wrote the leitmotif of HCE (Here Comes Everybody) into Finnegans Wake, oh, how right he was. Prophecy is forever doomed to be understated, nonetheless. The relentless, yammering, picayune, over stimulated buying public rings the phones of the StoreShip from open to long after the final customer has been sent home "delighted" an hour and a half after "closing."

Central casting could not dream of the some of the names that people really wear throughout their lives.

Whoa whoa whoa. Stop staring at the computer screen pretending to read email. Get back to-

"Guitars, pick up line eleven."

"This is Darius in guitars, how can help you?"

"Hi. How are you doing?"

Just fine. I’m laughing my balls off thinking about that bastard preacher Poon. And I’m wondering what kind idiot you are.

"I’m fine, buddy. What do you need today?"

"I need the Gibson Death Guitar."

Say what? I know about 200 different kinds of Gibsons, and not one of them is called death, although one sometimes wonders. I consider the poster of the Gibson SG crossed with a red pitchfork that dominates an entire wall of the Front Office, AKA Storeship Control Module.

"I’m not sure I know what you mean."

"Hey man. Don’t you know anything? It’s the one Sphincter plays in the Napalm Babies in Afghanistan video.

Time to fake it.

"Oh that one. Is that the one shaped like a pitchfork with the skulls on it?"

Just guessing.

"No. That’s the one on last year’s album. And it’s not a pitchfork, it’s an M-16 with the bayonet headstock."

"Sorry man. I’ll check it out for you. By the way, in case we get cut off, could I get your name and number while I check it for availability?"

"Sure. You’re a Dick."

"Huh?"

Oh, God, what did I say to offend, this time?

"You’re a dick. 917-098-9867."

Oh my God, could it possibly be?

"I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing you over the floor. Could you spell your name for me?"

"It’s in the system. You’re a dick. I buy a lot of stuff there. Check my name."

"No problem, could you spell it for me?"

"No problem geezer. I-m-a U-r-a-d-i-c-h. Check it out and get back to me, burnout."

A quick check of his spending habits confirms that I’ve got a major buyer. Thank God I didn’t hang up on his arrogant high spending eminence. He’s run this drill before and probably laughing about it right about now.

Once upon a time when I was idealistic and laughed at poverty (not laughing anymore), I would have sneered at the self satiric proliferation of different "types" of guitars.

In my naiveté, I felt that great artists like Andres Segovia and Robert Johnson needed nothing more than a well crafted construction of wood and metal as a platform for their unique combination of sensitivity and skill to accomplish work that would cut across time beyond their death.

I neglected to factor in the great Here Comes Everybody coefficient. In order to create a demand for purchasers of ever increasing amounts of guitars and gear, one has to convince the customer that their dissatisfaction with their musical output derives not from a lack of talent or practice opportunity, but that they need the "perfect guitar" for them as an "Artist."

I wonder if Vincent Van Gogh ever had the perfect brush, or Michelangelo the perfect chisel. But somewhere in the twisted folds of ever changing boxes behind the steel file drawers in the Accessories Matrix, is the perfect box to fit the needs of every one of the fifteen million odd guitarists of the GSI universe. Trouble is that there are about a million different gadgets.

The accessories matrix is a terrifying labyrinth of ever increasing numbers of gizmos and signal processors. The purpose utterly bewilders me. How many different ways does one need to make a note seem to echo?

And this effect alone is only the beginning. By my last count the Matrix contains over two thousand different products: finger strengtheners, polishes, cables of ever skyrocketing costs, picks of unspeakably multitudinous thickness and shape, tuners, (how many different ways could there possibly be to tune six strings? And why is it impossible to find a pitch pipe?), mike stands, mike clips, and finally the two things most dreaded of all: effect pedals and strings.

As if that’s not plethora enough, there is probably thirty times that number in the form of virtual inventory: everything in every catalogue, and all the vendors’ stock. Discontinued items. Items on the verge of discontinuance. Used pieces that the store may have had for all of three days before unloading.

With every passing year every major manufacturer comes out with a new line of foot pedals to put filters and enhancements on the original note.

Perhaps people are subconsciously compensating for the deterioration of the lumber that goes into the making of instruments. Or perhaps it is nothing more than blind expediency in search of an illusory individuality through novelty.

The amount of creative energy invested in finding different ways to make a "new" distortion pedal sound like an improvement would be sufficient to land a city on Jupiter.

All distortion pedals under the feet of the vast majority of practitioners end up homogenizing the sound of whatever guitar is plugged into it. The end result is disconsolately uniform.

It makes the thing sound like a very loud kazoo with indefinite sustain. I find it no coincidence that when I am occasionally asked whether we have kazoos, I have to direct them to Toys ‘r Us.

I remember back as a Trashtown adolescent, laughing along with my buddies at some middle aged mandolin player who was trying to convince us that he was an improvement on Hendrix with his own bank of jury rigged pedals.

Despite his undeniable skill on the instrument, scales and arpeggios ripping off his fingers like sheets of torrential rain, the effect was that of tepid oatmeal being poured into our ears. Very loud tepid oatmeal. Unlike Oliver Twist, one did not want more, sir.

After ten minutes of his impassioned tedium we were concentrating our attention on his pitiful toupee, badly dyed goatee, and inevitable "geezer gut" hanging over jeans at least four inches shy of his actual waistline.

Had to make you wonder how he made his way through the day in these horrors without suffocating. Good news for the gene pool! Those testicles are starving for blood cells.

And now that "loser" is my customer. Who’s the loser now?

The market is so diverse that no matter what one’s degree of legitimate knowledge, one is guaranteed to to be overwhelmed by one’s ignorance of the vast minutiae, which are amplified into urgent significance because that piece of trivia is what the customer wants to pay for.

And the Lord said unto his angels, descend now from this celestial jewel shop to my terrestrial toy box and gather from the infinite corners that the round globe encloses every wind that exists and blow them through your vast and ineluctable silent trumpets the notes that will cause the feet of every moron born to find their way to GSI this very day.

And the angels choired in cacophony, "as thou wilt Lord, so have thy faithful servants done."

The secret obscenity of the prison experience resides in how long people thrive there. There may be a type of human born to the cage. The secret obscenity of consumer culture parallels this. There may be a certain sub species of human born to over stimulated idiocy.

Prison, retail, military: Amplified Pavlov all the way home, wagging its tail behind it.

This accounts for some degree of the horror and despair that immediately knots the pit of my stomach when Rodney comes up from behind me and pulls me aside.

Keeping close touch with his inner asshole, he opens his mouth in a perfect circle and intones, :

"Hey man, I need you to cover accessories and burn to close. We have nobody in accessories."

I think of Monica! Thank God for that. I compose my face like a Bach Chorale and reply:

"I’d be delighted, Rodney."

"Make sure you make the one o’clock meeting too, man. Corporate has some special promotions in Accessories."

"I’m looking forward to it, Captain."

"Take lunch early and make sure you’re on time for that meeting."

I am a fluent speaker of Crackerese by now. I leave immediately before any of his Assistant Matrix Officers can grab me for any of a number of tasks which need to be done no later than yesterday. And there goes that sale to another of my ever changing cast of colleagues.

Being a "Veteran," I can usually accomplish about three times as much effective work in an hour as most of the new hires, and they are a constant steady stream. The price I often pay is that I lose sales to the FNG’s (Fabulous New Guys/Gals) I should be training how to do tasks.

Since I am not a manager however, I have no authority to do this. Once in a rare while, one of the ever changing assistant managers decides I need some assistance from one of the drones, and tells me to show them how to prepare one of the pieces fresh from the pallets for the sales floor.

To the untrained it might seem a pretty straightforward thing to get a piece of wood out of a box and slap a price on it, but the more sophisticated an operation, the more formalities need to be adhered to.

Add to this the miserable fact that most of these folks have all the work ethic of a senile southern dog on a hot August afternoon, and one can see why I’m often better left to do the job alone.

Sales Assistants have a distorted notion of work that still defies my imagination, even after several years of witnessing.

The better someone is at selling, the worse they are at executing any sequence of tasks all the way to their conclusion. Perhaps this is based on logic that calls greeting to a customer and talking to them for more than a minute or two as "working."

I have yet to meet top writers who do not refer to their learning disabilities. Attention Deficit Disorder is the favorite. This almost always comes into play when I find myself finishing their tasks at the end of the day.

At 10:00pm on any given weekday the store is one hour past closing. We are locked in until the closing manager decides otherwise. Ten of the hooks on walls of the Acoustic Chamber are empty of merchandise. These were the responsibility of the Sales Associate who sold the piece that occupied them.

The choice is simple. Do things by the book and hunt down the perpetrators, more often than not superiors, point this out to them and wait for them to break out a guitar, dispose of the packaging, thread a security loop through the strings at the neck, the eyelet of the cardboard tag for the SKU tag from the box, and the hole at the top of the plastic envelope which will hold that tag as well as the three by four inch paper with the piece’s retail price and the GSI Absolutely Lowest Price in the Universe.

That course of action would ensure two things for me. The undying hatred of said mid-level superiors, while they are trying to do the routines of closing down the StoreShip. I would get the added value in the undying resentment of my fellow Associates because this would mean we will not escape for at least another forty five minutes.

Plan B is to blast five to ten instruments in one clip. Properly prepared, I can do this in little more than three times the time it takes to do one. This insures me at least two minutes of gratitude from those superiors, as well as all of us getting out of the store earlier.

Plan B is nothing more than Plan A in disguise because Plan A has never happened.

This is really nobody’s fault except possibly the drunken lesbian goddess of retail. Should I start to educate one of the FNG’s in my mysterious warehouse related art, I can be sure that my client will misread this.

The customer sees me explaining procedures and assumes that I am a manager, or some kind of boss. They don’t want to "bother" me with ringing up the very item I have demonstrated to be the best for them.

"Should I take this to the front to ring up?"

With the best nonchalance I can muster, I answer negatively.

"Oh no let’s do that right here at this computer."

Anyway, might as well hit the lunch thing now. I opt to shoot the financial moon and scarf roach and rodent part pizza in the mini-mall across the street. I’ve got at least ten hours to go.

Give my body a little treat for the punishment ahead. As for my mind, I’ll let it feed itself on its own meanderings. But right now, let me grab my jacket from the warehouse and get out of here.

I exit under the blank bovine eyes of tall, tattooed, and spindly Felicia, one of the longer lasting of the "Revolving Door Girls" under the Cracker regime. She’s wearing a clingy black something on top that clearly delineates the contours of her jutting grapefruit breasts and peanut sized nipples.

Black jeans are painted on. The seam goes an inch deep into her baseball sized butt cheeks. God damn that’s got to hurt.

Her bare toothpick arms are festooned with brightly colored tattoos depicting spiders playing poker, a leering skull in a top hat, razor blades and a dog with the head of a goat biting the ankle of the old Grim Reaper himself..

She looks down from the pavilion at me with a benevolent, round, avian face. A tiny silver skull grins at me from a stud on the right nostril of her conical nose. Meeting her, I joked to myself that I almost expected her to twitter.

Sure enough she did, and clapped her hands together like a black clad seal. "Happy to meet you," she squeaked. When she extended her hand, I was delighted to find it wasn’t a fin.

Luxurious black hair cascades perfectly down her unblemished pale olive skin. I never dare ask what possesses people to take such a complexion and pierce its eyebrows, ears, nose, and tongue with so many cheap silver rings and studs. She has eight little circlets going around the rim at the top of her ear alone. No point in trying to count them all.

After decades of lurking in the shadowy world of circuses and carnivals, Tribal Culture seemed to ignite in the early nineties and was in full fire by 1999. Body Art claimed itself to be a genr