Just as in some Carl Barks cartoon, the bag Blacklaw carried had been stenciled with the symbol of its contents:
f
This mark signified spondulix. Erlkonig had invented it himself. Harking back to his early childhood love of science and math, he had taken the standard integral sign and slapped a short bar across it, “like the English pound thingie, ’cuz the Queens got class and stayed independent of the lousy Euro,”
Blacklaw elbowed his way through the customers around the counter, offering rude excuses. “Hang loose, folks. Open a path for the King’s Treasury Guy. Chill out and clear the decks. The jake must get through. Money talks and nobody walks. The eagle shits today.”
Rory winced. He had to face this abrasive crudeness every day. Bad enough that he was totally in thrall to Erlkonig and Sterling, without having to endure this repeated public humiliation in his own premises.
Blacklaw plopped the bag down with a heavy thud on the counter next to the register. Then he thrust his clipboard and pen under Rory’s nose. “Let’s have the old J. Hancock, moll.”
Rory signed, registering his displeasure only with a breathy whoosh through his lips, universal symbol of put-upon petulance. Blacklaw pulled his clipboard back.
“You gonna make me wait here while you count the dough?”
“No,” said Rory, eager for Blacklaw’s departure, “you can go.”
“Good, cuz I got a lot more deliveries to make.” Blacklaw pivoted to leave, then stopped and looked back at Rory. “You know what, shell? You look more uptight every day. You wouldn’t’ve lasted five minutes in the yard with that hangdog puss crying out, ‘Poor little old me.’ You got to try to loosen up, enjoy the ride.”
“I’ll consider your advice.”
“Hell, consider your blood pressure, man! Life’s too short to bust a gasket. Anyway, I’ll catch you mañana.”
When Blacklaw had taken his disruptive and intimidating presence away, the storm of orders resurged from the customers and Rory’s staff fell to work to satisfy the hungry horde.
No longer did Nerfball toil alone. Even his superb skills could not match the increased demand for sandwiches. Rory had promoted him to Head Sandwichmaker. Under his direction now labored three additional Beer Nuts: Beatbox, and Leather n’ Studs. The trio of draftees had quickly mastered the rudiments of the art of sandwich construction, although none so far exhibited Nerfball’s flair for hoagie assembly. And now, with their supervisor busy in the bathroom, the underlings seemed to have reverted to scatterbrained incompetence. Busy himself at the register, Rory could only hope that Nerfball would finish his ablutions soon and return.
Meanwhile, though, he had better get this new cash into the till.
Rory undid a bipartite metal clasp and loosed the unpinched drawstrings that bound the neck of the sack. He reached in and hauled out banded stacks of bills. At the bottom of the bag lay rolls of coins. He removed these, too.
Just as when he had operated with dollars, Rory methodically arranged the bills in numerical ranks, from lowest to highest. He did the same with the coin rolls. Then he began to distribute the money into the appropriate drawers of the fancy new electronic cash register Erlkonig had insisted he purchase.
First Rory unpeeled the paper coin wrappers. The coins shared an identical configuration and size, about as big as a quarter, but not as heavy. However, one could easily distinguish different denominations because each was colored uniquely. (In retrospect, Rory had soon realized, he had first seen a prototype of one of these coins in the hands of Umpire Prignano when that bribe-prone official had flipped for first up at bat, indicating that even prior to obtaining Rory’s signature, grandiose schemes had been underway.) These coins were manufactured with the same machinery that had once produced peepshow tokens for porno theaters. Now that Times Square had been cleaned up and the few remaining peepshows had switched over to accept dollar-bills, Erlkonig had easily acquired the perfectly functional token-stamping equipment at scrap-metal prices.
There was no “penny” to account for. Erlkonig had by fiat eliminated that vermiform appendix of coinage.
The lowest coin, an “s-nickel,” was mayo-colored.
The next highest, an “s-dime,” was ketchup-colored.
The “s-quarter” was relish-colored.
The half-spondulix was mustard-colored.
Each coin bore a bas-relief of Rory’s own face in profile—complete to beard and Mets cap—on the “heads” side, and a rendering of the exterior of the sandwich shop as “tails,” along with a numerical value.
When Rory had put all the coins away he began to unsnap the bands on the bills. Printed in black ink, they were colored analogously to the coins: the one-spondulix note was white, the five red, the ten green, the twenty yellow. The central motifs replicated those on the coins: Rory’s face and an image of the store. Various serial numbers, signatures, embellishments and decorative motifs completed the small canvases. The ornate crest of Hoboken Savings and Loan (invented by Suki Netsuke) floated above the legend never work. Across the back of each bill ran the phrase in pumpernickel we trust.
The bills shared the dimensions of US currency, for ease in handling. The same high-quality stock—seventy-five percent cotton, twenty-five percent linen, obtainable only from Crane & Company of Dalton, Massachusetts, suppliers to the US Mint—offered good handfeel and durability. No cheapie computer printing shortcuts had been employed: instead, hand-engraved plates and intaglio printing in uncut sheets of thirty-two bills mimicked the federal methods. The second-hand presses came from a Caribbean nation known colloquially as the Spice Islands, auctioned off on the internet once the Spice Islands had switched to US currency. These hulking clamorous machines now occupied the expansive basement of the Old Vault Brewery, under the supervision of an ex-employee of the San Francisco Mint, one Ernie Trapezitai. Although not quite as fast as the Federal presses—9,000 sheets per hour—they easily produced enough currency to meet the daily demand.
For now.
Counting efficiently, Rory soon had f 5,000 stowed away in his till.
He received an identical shipment each day. Funds out of nowhere, above and beyond any receipts, with which to run his business or even to spend on himself. Rory wryly noted that, with the advent of Addie and spondulix, his life now resembled that old Dire Straits lyric: “Money for nothing, and his chicks for free.”
Rory sustained numerous interruptions during this double-checking procedure. People kept coming to the register to pay for their sandwiches. About two-thirds of the people tendered dollars, a natural consequence of the fact that dollars still vastly outnumbered spondulix. The dollar bills did not, however, enter the register. Instead, Rory stuffed them into a narrow chute that led into a locked safe, the familiar convenience-store arrangement. All change was rendered in spondulix.
The first thing the MBA-trained Sterling had done, upon assuming control of spondulix, was to standardize the currency’s value. Rory’s original spondulix had claimed a value of ten sandwiches. After that first one, Rory had arbitrarily written many spondulix, some with crazy denominations. (“Twelve-and-a-half-sandwiches and a muffin.” “Three sandwiches minus one bag of chips.” “Eight sandwiches and some cookie crumbs.” Whenever any of these antiques surfaced, they were removed from circulation and destroyed.) Obviously, this wild practice could not continue under the new regime.
Sterling established the value of a baseline sandwich, the Platonic ideal, at five dollars. He next defined a single spondulix as one-fifth of a sandwich, in effect making it equivalent to a dollar. This intentional parity contributed to easy convertibility between the two media of exchange.
The prices on the old hand-lettered menu-board in the store now sported the spondulix-sign rather than the dollar-sign. Transactions flowed smoothly out of this revaluation. Say someone handed Rory a ten-dollar bill for a f 3.50 sandwich. Rory simply counted back six spondulix and a half-spondulix coin. Regular customers accepted their change without a
qualm or quibble, knowing they could use the bills in turn throughout Hoboken. New customers fell into two camps: those who arrived having heard something about spondulix took their colorful bills with chuckles or excited exclamations; accidental, spondulixically challenged customers at first reacted indignantly or with confusion, but after receiving a printed pamphlet explaining the system, generally agreed to participate.
In effect, Rory’s store and all others which used spondulix functioned as giant dollar-sucking vacuum-cleaners, hoovering traditional currency out of circulation, while substituting spondulix in place of the greenbacks. Blacklaw, each night repeating his morning route, picked up the accumulated US currency for automated counting. The received amounts were posted (in the medium of spondulix) to the proper business accounts, and the physical dollars went for safe storage into the vaults of Hoboken Savings and Loan. From there the dollars flowed—
Well, Rory could not say with total certainty where every dollar went. Some of the cash was indeed actually pumped back into the community, as loans to businesses still leery of spondulix. The rest went to purchase goods and services not yet obtainable with spondulix. What goods and services, Rory did not know, nor did he want to know. Let sleeping dogs lie. Anyway, Rory doubted his pallid imagination could even begin to supply any uses half so frightening as what Sterling and Erlkonig were really doing.
Rory could not say where this monumentally crazy “invasion of the money snatchers” would all end. When he dared to envision the future, he saw only two possibilities. Either spondulix would totally replace dollars—the triumph of the pod money—or the government would rise up in righteous wrath and squash everyone involved like annoying yet trivial bedbugs. Rory wholly welcomed neither future. In certain moods he rooted for one outcome; other times, the opposite. Luckily, neither seemed imminent.
Rory did not consider himself wise. However, he had drawn several practical maxims from his life so far, and these adages seemed borne out so far by l’affair spondulix:
• Every baby fuckup took longer than you expected to grow up to an adult crisis.
• No crisis was ever permanently and totally resolved.
• Any plans you made to meet the crisis would be outflanked by events over which you had no control.
Some kind of shrill altercation interrupted Rory’s reverie. He slammed the deep money-drawer shut and went to investigate.
Beatbox was arguing with a customer. Sandwich production had screeched to a halt while Leather ’n’ Studs stood with hands on aproned hips, acting as referees.
“Listen,” said the customer, a short stocky fellow. “I saw what you did. You used the horseradish bottle instead of the orange marmalade I specifically asked for.”
Beatbox radiated the pugnacity of an insulted creator. “Okay, okay, so I made like a little substitution. So what? So freaking what? You want to go through your whole life eating the same boring old sandwich, man?”
The customer became defensive, even a little guilty. “I like to try something different now and then as much as the next guy. But this particular combination? Peanut butter and horseradish?”
“The man has a point, Beebee,” said Leather. “Not the tastiest mix.”
“Taste!” erupted Beatbox. “What’s taste anyway? Who ever said that tastes have to harmonize right off the bat? Your taste buds mature and learn to like new combinations. How do you think any recipe ever got invented in the first place? Random substitutions! You got to put foreign substances together, or you’ll never develop anything new and insanely great!”
“Beatbox has a valid argument there,” said Studs. “History supports him. I mean, it took some kind of daring moron to come up with tuna casserole, right? Are you sure you wouldn’t like to take this sandwich as it stands, Mister? You might go down in culinary history.”
“I’m not interested in being a guinea pig in this madman’s experiments! I just want a decent PB&J! Isn’t the customer always right? Are my spondulix good here or not?”
This last comment unnerved Rory. The frail ship of spondulix floated only atop the ocean of consumer sufferance. Any doubts that arose regarding the full and free redemption of spondulix for sandwiches would dry up that ocean faster than Superman’s heat-vision boiling away the sea to search for a missing submarine (an image that had remained with Rory from youth).
Rory moved to intervene in the argument. But before he could act, Nerfball emerged from the employees bathroom and, instantly sizing up the situation, stepped forward and took charge.
“Hey, gang, what’s going down here? Is this the way Sandwichmakers First Class are supposed to behave? Look at you all. Disgraceful! Standing around arguing with the patrons, for goodness’s sake! What’s the matter with you? Have you all forgotten the Sandwichmakers Code? Stand up straight! Tighten your apron strings, adjust your sanitary hairnets, and repeat after me! 1 shall trim all fat.’”
Three chastened voices joined together. “‘I shall trim all fat.’”
“”I shall give true weight.’”
“”I shall give true weight.’”
“‘I shall slice clean.’”
“‘I shall slice clean.’”
“‘My bread will never be even a day old.’”
“‘My bread will never be even a day old.’”
“‘My lettuce will have no brown edges.’”
“‘My lettuce will have no brown edges.’”
“‘My sandwiches will all be stacked like Pamela Lee Anderson.’”
“‘My sandwiches will all be stacked like Pamela Lee Anderson.’” (Leather ’n’ Studs added salacious overtones to this rule.)
“‘The customer’s choices are law.’”
“‘The customer’s choices are law.’” (Beatbox grudgingly affirmed this one.)
“‘McDonald’s is the Great Satan.’”
“‘McDonald’s is the Great Satan.’”
“‘Dagwood is my savior.’”
“‘Dagwood is my savior.’”
“If I violate any of these tenets, may the Holy Boar’s Head gore the life from me.’”
“If I violate any of these tenets, may the Holy Boar’s Head gore the life from me.’”
The rousing ritual ended in a military clap of four pairs of hands, causing the crowd to roar its appreciation. Rededicated, the crew fell quickly to work to satisfy the hungry masses. Beatbox’s experimental sandwich went into the trash, and he eagerly composed a new, more conventional one, troweling on the peanut butter and jelly with elaborate flourishes.
Rory remained deeply impressed by the change that had come over Nerfball upon his promotion. The extra responsibility seemed to have made a new person out of the rotund recluse, rendering him more mature, confident and decisive. No longer did Nerfball’s dream of operating a first-class restaurant seem such an unlikelihood.
The bell affixed to the outer door rang and Rory looked eagerly up for the hundredth time, hoping to spot Addie. Instead he received only the unwelcome vision of Earl Erlkonig escorting Suki Netsuke.
Erlkonig wore a three-piece Italian suit and imported shoes. The scissors of the most exclusive stylist in town had trimmed his frizzy pale curls into a demure nap. A gold tooth now glimmered in place of his missing one.
Netsuke, never quite as grungy as Erlkonig, had been similarly transformed, but with more subtle results. She wore a clinging sculptured dress complemented by a pair of Manolo Blahnik high-heels, and a pair of five-hundred-dollar sunglasses.
Rory felt he was facing a visit from some postmodern Bonnie and Clyde. Or perhaps Scarface and squeeze.
Erlkonig sliced through the crowd like a knife through whipped creamcheese, hauling Netsuke with him. “Hey, shell, how’s it swaying?” He pumped Rory’s hand enthusiastically. “Great to see such a crowd in the store. Did you hear that the daily take down at the Washington Street McDonald’s has dropped by twenty percent? Listen, moll, let Nerf handle the register and you come with me for a minute. We’re gonna check out t
he construction next door, okay?”
Rory obeyed warily. Once Rory had crossed over to Erlkonig’s side of the counter, the dapper impresario gripped Rory by the elbow and steered him toward the tarp-draped hole in the shop’s northern wall, all the while keeping up a stream of chatter.
“How do you like Suki’s outfit, moll? Designer chic! Some guy named Azimuth I’ll-lay-ya.”
“That’s Azzedine Alaia, Earl.”
“Whatever, that rag still cost mucho dinero! And don’t it show off her gorgeous curves six ways from Sunday?”
Rory allowed his gaze to admire Netsuke’s charms from expensively shod feet upward. When his eyes had finished traveling her glamorous length to end on her face, they registered a haughty, prideful expression that plainly admonished him: Don’t you wish now that I were still your girlfriend, instead of that dumpy old Southern belle, Addie Swinburne?
Rory started to get angry, but successfully repressed that emotion. He did not need any avoidable conflicts now. Let Netsuke think herself superior; Rory’s current lover satisfied him no end.
Erlkonig lifted up a corner of the dusty tarp and gestured Rory and Netsuke through. After Rory and Netsuke had passed under the veil, Erlkonig ducked through acrobatically, so as not to begrime his suit.
Next to Rory’s shop for the past year or three had struggled a small clothing store run by an outpost of the Brooklyn-headquartered Jehovah’s Witnesses and named WatchTower Wearables. Finally succumbing to massive consumer distaste for its church-approved clothing, the store had folded six months ago and remained vacant since. Mark Coyne, Rory’s landlord and owner of the whole block, eagerly jumped at Rory’s offer of two thousand spondulix a month for rental of the space, with all renovations to come out of Rory’s pocket. (Actually, out of a general account at Hoboken S&L.) Now workmen were turning the empty square-footage into additional dining and food-prep areas for Honeyman’s Heroes.
Inhaling the scents of fresh-cut lumber, paint and adhesives, Rory sized up the progress with real appreciation. He had never imagined his humble enterprise would grow like this. Despite owing this success to the machinations of Erlkonig and Sterling, he retained some pride of proprietorship.
Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken Page 24
