Corrections to my Memoirs
Page 9
I retape the box, then take it up to the garage and slide it into the back of the station wagon. I cover the box with old towels and then sit in the driver’s seat, with the radio on, until the sun sets. I sit there so long that I hear the news twice. When it’s dark, I drive to the garbage dump, and I kick garbage on top of the box so you couldn’t see it if you passed by. You’d have to dig to find it.
When I return home, the first rock I throw breaks Mrs. Hannah’s living room window. The second, Mrs. Minniefield’s. Then, my own. It’s fifteen minutes before the police show. I wish Ellie could see their faces. She’d laugh. They look so young and fresh, like they’ve just bathed.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
We have confirmed that there was no World Literature Forum ever held in Budapest, Germany. Or wherever Budapest may be located.
And the references to Budapest’s gin blossoms being in bloom? Gin blossoms apparently aren’t flowers at all. Apparently, it’s the name given to the burst blood vessels that appear on the nose of a heavy drinker.
Those are the sorts of things our proofreader, George, should have caught.
Or, should I say, our former proofreader.
Nevertheless, are you still enjoying the book?
Can we get you something to drink?
How about a blanket? Or a foot rub?
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Okay, we need to confess something.
Remember how we said “The Handwriting Patient” won awards from the Berlin Literary Society and the Indianapolis Shakespeare Commission? Well, there are no such groups.
But if they did exist, we have every confidence that they would have bestowed awards upon “The Handwriting Patient.” So, if blame must be assigned, we believe it should fall on the people of Berlin and Indianapolis, respectively, whose lethargy is the real culprit here.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The same goes for the Breadland Moore Prize and the Circle Around the King Award.
The Circle Around the King Award?
Come on, what could that possibly mean?
YOU HAVE MADE QUITE A PURCHASE
Congratulations on your purchase of the Business Pro Whisper Shred 1600, the finest paper shredder currently offered in the United States manufactured by Business Pro, Inc.1 You have made quite a purchase, one that reveals you to be among the most astute businesspeople and/or homeowners. While others may tear their confidential paperwork using their bare hands or old-fashioned “scissors,” you will now be able to sit back and listen to the gentle purr of the Whisper Shred 1600 as it performs this tedious task for you.2
The Whisper Shred 1600 is the most technologically advanced paper shredder currently manufactured by Business Pro, Inc., for home or business use. With 2,800 razor-sharp blades, each of which could tear the hide off a cow, it is the shredder of choice in some of the most prominent businesses in the country. For instance, when a major beverage company wishes to shred documentation containing the secret formula for its cola, a formula which could destroy the company’s net worth in a matter of seconds were it to fall into the wrong hands, it uses the Whisper Shred 1600.3
Remember, the Whisper Shred 1600 is not a toy; it just looks like one, what with all of the cute little buttons and knobs we put on it, and the “Fun for Kids of All Ages” sticker featured prominently on the box.4 Instead, it is a quality home or business product with 2,800 razor-sharp blades. In order to enjoy the magic of the Whisper Shred 1600, you should follow several simple rules for safe use:
Do not place your fingers in the Whisper Shred 1600.5
Do not place orange rinds in the Whisper Shred 1600. And don’t pretend they just fell into the machine, like Walter Archer of Oakland, California.6
Do not place staples in the Whisper Shred 1600. Staples aren’t paper. The Whisper Shred 1600 will cut staples into dozens of tiny metal missiles, which it will send rocketing toward your eyes or your mouth or your neck. Usually, your eyes.7
Do not place watermelon rinds in the Whisper Shred 1600.8
No magazines. How do you think they keep magazines from falling apart? Staples, that’s how.9
No paper clips. More metal missiles. Eyes, mouth, neck. Mostly eyes.
Don’t put a piece of paper through the Whisper Shred 1600, then try to put the shredded pieces through again to make “super-shredded” pieces. It’ll just clog the machine, okay? Then when you put your fingers in to unclog it, well, look at Rule No. 1 again.10
If your tie or scarf gets caught in the Whisper Shred 1600, and you find yourself being pulled closer and closer to your doom, shut off the machine using the On/Off switch located directly beside the 2,800 razor-sharp blades. It’s right beneath the picture of Whisper the Clown.
If the Whisper Shred 1600 will not shut off while your tie or scarf is caught in it, and while you are being pulled closer and closer to your doom, unplug the machine.11
If the plug should become jammed in the socket, try to reach the circuit breaker. It’s probably located in your basement by the brooms. It might be by the water heater.
If you can’t reach the basement to get to the circuit breaker, get someone else to do it. Try shouting, “Hey! Someone! Please, someone shut off the circuit breaker before 2,800 razor-sharp blades tear through me! Please! Oh, sweet Jesus, please!”
If no one is around to shut off the circuit breaker, use your last bit of strength to peel off the Whisper Shred 1600 label. If there is a Whisper Shred 1500 label directly beneath it, please contact our customer service department.
1. The Whisper Shred 1600 is not to be confused with the Whisper Shred 1500, which is banned in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, North Dakota, and Illinois. If you are currently in possession of a Whisper Shred 1500, please return it to the store where it was purchased. Immediately. And please wear heavy-duty gloves and work boots while transporting it.
2. This is just a figure of speech. Business Pro, Inc. does not guarantee, promise, or otherwise contract that the Whisper Shred 1600 will make a purring noise while in operation. In fact, it makes a noise that sounds something like clink-a-clink-a-clink, like plates banging against each other. If your Whisper Shred 1600 should make a purring noise, turn it off immediately, especially if you own a cat.
3. We are prohibited from divulging the name of the beverage company in any of our promotional materials. However, our attorneys inform us that we are not prohibited from saying that the company’s name rhymes with “Moca Mola.” We are also prohibited from revealing that if someone wanted to spend hundreds of hours piecing together tiny strips of confetti, he could learn exactly what Moca Mola’s secret formula is. And he could use that information to convince Moca Mola’s executives that they just might need to purchase several thousand Whisper Shred 1600s to replace their old, recalled Whisper Shred 1500s. Congratulations to Kenny Riley, Salesman of the Year!
4. Contrary to rumor, those are not unsupervised children featured on the box, smiling as they feed stacks of paper into the teeth of the Whisper Shred 1600. The children on the box were closely monitored by adults while they were being photographed, and they were treated by some of the finest doctors available at the time.
5. This means you, Gina Vargas of Sewickly, Pennsylvania. While the terms of our settlement with you remain confidential, there is nothing prohibiting us from divulging your name or from disclosing that you, a 38-year-old woman who probably hasn’t had a date since the Reagan administration and smells like feet, placed your hand inside the Whisper Shred 1500 while it was in operation in order to retrieve a fifty-cent coupon for Frosted Flakes. You are an idiot, Gina Vargas!
6. While the terms of our settlement with you remain confidential, Mr. Archer, it is a matter of public record that you were feeding orange rinds into the Whisper Shred 1500 while dressed in nothing but blue bikini underwear. It is also a matter of public record that the paramedics found a foot-high stack of old Playboy magazines next to your recliner. We hope you have not spent all of your settlement proceeds on pornography, M
r. Archer.
7. Hello, Tom Scandennelli, Kathy Wallace, Sue Prince, Jeff Terran, Robert Poller, Debbie Poller, Robert Poller Jr., Henry Kallarin, Wendy O’Leary, Stan Austell, Kathy Kuhl, William Rubin, David Zimmer, Cindy Birnberg, and Mark Herzog.
8. Please understand, Mr. Archer, that we have no intention of paying you to settle your latest lawsuit. There’s no difference between orange rinds and watermelon rinds in the eyes of the law.
9. Hello, Cecily Wahl, Brent Johnson, Peter Houk, John Farley, Cathy Fried, Marcus Malley, Lisa Schwarzman, and Thomas Damico.
10. Hello, Debra Jenson, Francis K. Weller, and Curtis Wong.
11. Unlike the Whisper Shred 1500, the Whisper Shred 1600 can be unplugged safely. Or, at least, relatively safely when compared to the Whisper Shred 1500.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The last story, “You Have Made Quite a Purchase,” is one of several stories in which the author relies upon footnotes for comedic effect. The story was originally rejected by many publications on the grounds that “no one reads footnotes.”1 Subsequently, the story was awarded the Presidential Award for Superiority and the Vice Presidential Award for Something-or-Other. The author dedicated both awards to his mother, Beatrice Kun.2 We should also mention that the story was nominated for the Blah-Blah-Blabbedy-Blah Award.
At this stage, we don’t even have the energy to come up with names for these fictitious awards.
1. To which the author says, “Oh, really? Well, you’re reading this, aren’t you? Deny it, I dare you!”
2. The author’s mother is one of those people who doesn’t read footnotes, freeing the author to make the following statement: “My mother was a terrible cook. I mean it. Everything was very oily.”
ADAIR’S
There’s a bar in Danbury, Connecticut, where, for the most part, there’s always an open seat, even when the place is crowded. It’s always the same seat, and this isn’t just some coincidence. No, it’s no coincidence at all.
The name of the bar is Adair’s Pub, and it’s right next door to what used to be Rick’s Super-Fast Luncheonette, and the reason hardly anyone ever sits in this one particular chair is that whoever does dies. No kidding. They just die.
I know this already sounds pretty spooky, and I know that some of you are already too frightened to go on and some of you are just shaking your heads in disbelief because you think I’m making this up, but I swear to God that this is true. I’m not the sort of person who goes around making things up.
So, you see, there was this guy, Adair, who was the original owner of the bar, and he had this favorite chair of his that no one else was allowed to sit in. Well, one day he was run down by the Number 6 bus and died, and since he was the only person who ever used the chair, everyone in Danbury started saying that whoever sat in Adair’s chair would die just like Adair had. I don’t mean that they would get run down by the Number 6 bus and die, just that they would die.
I know this sounds like nothing but silly superstition, and I have to admit that that’s exactly what I thought at first, but then all these people told me about what happened to the people who had sat in the chair. Mrs. Quillen is one of them who told me, and she’s as honest as the day is long. She’s had her gallbladder out.
The first one to die was a lady named Louise Harrelson (no relation to Sam Harrelson, who works over at the Shell station). She ducked into the bar one day because it was pouring out, and she wanted to rest her legs because she’d been shopping all morning. So she sat in Adair’s chair. Seven years later, she was dead. She got her hair caught in a train door and was dragged for six miles and died. Just like that.
Then there’s Floyd Hutton. He was drinking a lot and got kind of groggy. His friends told him that maybe he should go sit down somewhere. So he did. Only, being as he was drunk, he sat in the chair that’s supposed to stay empty. Not even five years later he was killed when he forgot to turn off his power lawn mower. The Danbury Bugle said it was an accident.
Susan Linovich sat in the chair too, and she died thirteen years later. She slipped on a slab of butter in the kitchen of her fourth-floor apartment in Boston and went flying out the window. It’s not like she landed on the pavement and died, or anything like that, because she didn’t. She landed in a big tree outside and was only hurt a little, but when a fireman came to get her out, she thought he looked just like her favorite movie actor, so she had a heart attack.
Earl Timmell was a strange one. He didn’t even sit in the chair and he died. He just sort of looked at it really hard once, and eight months later his own cat attacked him. Dead. Just like that.
Mark Millewski got killed on a roller coaster four years after he sat in the chair, and Donna Vinnetto choked on her scarf two and a half years after she sat in the chair. There are a bunch more too.
Anyhow, about three months ago Jerry Kettles got into an argument with his wife, Marie, at Adair’s, and he got so mad that he picked her up and purposely put her in the chair. No kidding, he did it on purpose. Ever since then, these policemen have been living in their dining room and sleeping on their couches. They’ve already got a warrant for Jerry’s arrest for the murder of his wife. They’re just waiting for Marie to die now.
I don’t know about you, but I personally find all of this pretty scary.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Well, that was a short one. If you do the math, assuming that Michael’s $500,000 advance for this collection was divided equally among each of these stories, we just paid him approximately $25,000 for that story. For a couple of pages he probably wrote while he was eating breakfast.
But that’s the way it is with great writers. You can’t question their art. You can only stand back and appreciate it!
We haven’t even read the next story ourselves yet.
Hope it’s a good one!
COAT CHECK
You can’t fire someone just because you think she’s doing something wrong. You need proof, and that’s why Susan is still working in our restaurant.
Since she started working in our coat-check room last August, we’ve been losing customers steadily, at a rate of four or so a week, I’d say. But my wife insists that we can’t fire her unless we’re absolutely certain that she’s the one who’s been trying on the customers’ coats, and she’s probably right about that. I’d feel horrible if I were to fire her only to learn sometime later that she was blameless, as she claims to be and as all evidence suggests.
Things were never like this before we hired Susan. But they are now. For thirteen years—a few months short of thirteen, to be precise—we never had any problems with soiled, stretched, or misshapen coats. Since she began working with us though, customers have been complaining. Mr. Timmell found perspiration stains on his navy overcoat, and there was a rip in the lining about the length of my index finger. The collar on Mrs. Bonnie’s red wool coat was all marked up. Mrs. Theiss’s jacket was wrinkled when she went to pick it up, and her husband’s had a loose button, the one at the collar. And these aren’t the only ones. If they were, I wouldn’t be in such a panic.
At first I believed that they were just separate incidents and that my customers were confused or mistaken. But when the occurrences began to multiply, when the number of complaints reached the mid-thirties or thereabouts, I realized that it was something more than a coincidence. Somebody was trying on the coats.
My wife was just as upset about the situation as I was, perhaps more. She couldn’t sleep at all, thinking about the empty tables and the meat spoiling in the refrigerators, and when she did sleep, she tossed back and forth and flung her arms about. Pretty soon we’d have no customers, she said, and then we’d lose the restaurant, and then the bank would take our house and our car and our riding lawn mower. She suggested that I ask Susan about the coats, which made sense. I went straight to the coat-check room.
“Susan,” I said, “have you been trying on the customers’ coats?”
“No, sir, I haven’t,” she answered.
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p; I didn’t want to press the issue any further, so I left. When I told my wife of the conversation, she said that I hadn’t interrogated the girl sufficiently and that I should return. She told me how they did it on Dragnet.
“Susan,” I said this time, “are you sure that you haven’t been trying on the customers’ coats?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure.”
“Isn’t it possible that you could’ve tried them on and forgotten about it?”
“No, sir. I would’ve remembered something like that.”
That was true; Susan has always had a good memory. I was satisfied. Susan went back to her work, standing there, waiting for someone to hand her a coat, and I went back to my wife. I told her what Susan had said, and she was satisfied too. We then sat at one of the tables and began to go through the names of our employees, speculating about who would be likely to try on the coats. We agreed that, if it was anyone, it was Vincent, the chef. He was a mischievous sort to begin with.
“Have you been trying on the customers’ coats?” I asked him.
“No, sir, I haven’t done anything like that.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me about something like this, would you, Vincent?”