by C. J.
Laddie boy barely left the room before Danny threw up in the nearest garbage can and Kevin sank to the floor. Kevin then realized he would muss up his clothes and scrambled to the nearest chair, hyperventilating “Emails? What fucking emails?" screamed Danny. At this outburst, the lab became deathly silent. Kevin elbowed Danny in the stomach grabbed his lab chair and wheeled him into a small conference room inside the lab.
"Emails, Danny,” whispered Kevin “the emails you always deleted because Laddie’s such an ass. You never bother to read anything that prick has to say. Apparently, we should have skimmed one or two of them, or at least listened to him when he came by for one his pointless chats,” Kevin wheezed, still hyperventilating.
Actually, Kevin had sporadically read the emails that Brian sent. He’d also dutifully answered them, detailing his and Danny’s progress on the project, figuring they had years ahead of them to actually produce something tangible. Well, not so much tangible as marketable, or at least something with a unique scent and looked different than the other twenty million facial products out there. (Danny had suggested something that smelled like lavender with a faint aroma of bacon.) In fact, Kevin’s emails were like those generated by a crooked CPA. There were the actual figures and figures for the company’s viewing only. If Kevin had been a CPA he would have been indicted twelve times over and sentenced to hard labor on a work gang, if they still had work gangs that is.
For the past year, Danny and Kevin had spent the time in goof-off mode. They’d succeeded in diverting Conner from their lab via a lengthy training program he thought was mandatory for management personnel who wished to advance within the company. Kevin was especially proud of himself for finding NIMS (National Incident Management System). Kevin laughed so hard he could hardly breathe when he told Danny, “NIMS has 70 courses all of which are mandatory for Conner’s management level, including Tsunami Preparedness, and, Animals in Disasters: Awareness and Preparedness.” The latter was Kevin’s personal favorite.
Then after a year of a mostly management free work environment with several non-approved vacations, including one trip they vowed never to speak of again, Brian Conner dropped his Atom Bomb on Danny and Kevin.
CHAPTER THREE
DANNY JUST REALIZED that he was going to lose his job, and the last time he looked he had $212 in his checking account and nothing in savings because, well, he never saved anything. Oh, my God, I’ll have to move in with my parents, he thought, and stared off into space.
Danny's parents, Norman and Lynn Kensington, felt parenting ended at 18, and when he went off to college, they packed up and moved to California to find themselves. They told him they raised him in the Midwest feeling it was the best place to raise a family, but their job was done and now it was their turn to enjoy life. They were going to travel the world and have a small place in Arcata, California. Danny was shocked to hear of their plans since the furthest they ever went on vacation was Branson, Missouri 226 miles from home, for God's sake. That vacation, which was forever burned into his mind and had been described in the travel brochures “an exciting family outing,” involved seeing dark, dank, petrified things hundreds of years old. Oh, and they also saw Marvel Cave which was kind of cool. As Danny remembered, he tried to get lost so he wouldn't have to return at day’s end to the Ye Old Redneck Road Kill Motel and Banjo Repair Shop. Night after night he and his parents slept on a slab of concrete wrapped up in cardboard and sandpaper sheets. In the morning they viewed an interminable parade of cowboy hats, glitter and pasted on smiles. Luckily he brought his own music along and had been soothed by Metallica's Enter Sandman, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Pearl Jam’s Jeremy. "Thank you, God, for bringing Nirvana into my life" Danny would pray as another day in Honkytonkville began.
Thank God for Maggie and her parents Arthur and Joyce. They were the parents he wished he had and Danny had unofficially adopted them. He not only spent the holidays with Maggie and her parents, but he also showed up at Arthur and Joyce’s house without Maggie if she was running late at the university or just out with friends. He would play board games or cards with Joyce and Arthur, or they would just sit and watch TV with or without Maggie. Danny often joked that Maggie was obviously adopted as Joyce and Arthur were the essence of calm and patience while Maggie was a whirlwind with an extremely short fuse. Danny thought Maggie’s mother, was perfect. Since he still liked to be mothered, and Maggie did not have the personality to fill that role, Joyce was the next best thing. All Joyce needed was a set of pearls and she could’ve been June Cleaver. She always looked like she was dressed for a special occasion. To Danny, she was picture-perfect in every way. She was a fit, youthful looking 55-year-old with a cute black pixie haircut, boundless energy and a need to smother. This was a weakness Danny exploited to the max. Joyce made homemade cookies and cakes for Danny, which he loved. They would make bets on Dancing with the stars as to who would be eliminated this week? “Who gave a rat’s ass” Maggie and her father would shout, but then they too would get sucked into the weird drama of over the hill “stars” clomping around the stage with glued on smiles and sparkles.
Arthur was more a down to earth guy’s guy who could fix anything and everything and usually had a cloud of sawdust swirling around him like a handyman’s version of Pigpen. Maggie had once told Danny that whenever she smelled freshly cut wood she was immediately transported back into her father’s workshop. Some of her fondest memories growing up were being with her dad while he was tinkering with one of Mom’s appliances that he had snuck out of the house, or putting something together for a friend or neighbor while Maggie was trying to quietly blow things up with her multitude of chemistry sets.
Kevin saw Danny staring off into space and smacked him in the head. “Hey, don’t check out on me. We are in this mess together.”
“Sorry, Kev,” Danny said rubbing his head. “I had a horrible realization that I will have to move in with my parents if we get fired. Then I realized I don’t know where they are. They could be way out in California or maybe on safari somewhere. I can never keep track. Hey, maybe we can crash at your folks’ place for a while.”
“Right,” Kevin snorted. “You wouldn’t even go on vacation with us during high school, and now you want to live with them? Don’t make me smack you again,” he threatened as he raised his hand toward Danny.
Kevin's parents, Hunter and Yvonne Montgomery, were college history professors. All Kevin’s vacations were spent at historical sites, and a lot of them seemed to include obscure museums. Kevin traveled to beautiful places like France, Scotland and who could forget lovely Paducah, Kentucky. In France they’d visited the excruciating, Musee Du Pipier Peint (Wallpaper Museum). Kevin had a migraine that lasted three days after leaving it. Kevin's mother, however, wrote a thesis on her visit to this museum that set her whole department in a twitter. (Yvonne’s staff consisted of three other like-minded wallpaper enthusiasts.) In Edinburgh, Scotland, Kevin barely survived an engrossing tour of a tartan mill. The entire family purchased matching scarves and sweaters. Kevin nearly had a nervous breakdown and broke out in a rash, which upset his mother because it clashed with the tartan. Closer to home, he’d been dragged to the spine-tingling Quilt Museum in Paducah, KY. To this day Kevin refuses to allow a quilt in the apartment and will not set foot in any museum.
Danny turned to Kevin. “That leaves us with only one option.” He gripped his friend by the shoulders and in an eerily calm, almost sane voice, said, “We are men. We will go about this the manly way and kill ourselves before the board of directors tears us apart like deranged hyenas.”
The members of Lexi Corp.’s board of directors had been young when Kennedy was president and got older, obviously, and meaner as time went on. The company’s principal stockholder and figurehead was a retired model, Lexi, who weighed less than the life-size cardboard cutout of herself that she carted around from residence to residence. She kept this souvenir from an advertisement campaign at the height of her career which an
other board member swore had been during the Second World War. Lexi was consumed with looking young to the point of near insanity. One of her personal assistants once described her as a less stable and much less forgiving Cruella De Ville.
Those that shared the lab with Kevin and Danny began wandering over to congratulate them on their success. Frank Burton advised them, “Lock Laddie in the broom closet or give him a laxative in his coffee. That will teach him to take the credit for all the hard work you two have been doing all year.”
"Thanks, Frank we'll take that into consideration and will give you credit for the idea,” said Danny slapping Frank on the back as he and the mob of lab workers forced them back to their workstation.
"Well nose to the grindstone and all that, Kevin and I have a lot of prep work to do." As Danny said this, he started randomly pouring ingredients into a bowl and mixing them. Kevin picked up the cue and grabbed another bowl and began dumping ingredients on his side of the table into his bowl. Danny saw the substance in his bowl was getting slightly thick and decided to loosen it up a bit. He grabbed a vial with colorful orange and black markings on the side and top that Maggie had given him and dumped the entire contents into the bowl. He couldn’t remember exactly what the vial contained, but what the hell, in it went.
Maggie, who Danny joked was both college chemistry professor and mad scientist was always experimenting with hair color, and hair strengthening products. She used Danny and Kevin as test subjects and gave them samples to take home. Her primary goal was to develop a product that would strengthen hair for chemo and radiation patients so as to prevent hair loss. She’d given Danny a vial of something a few days ago, which he had forgotten about until now.
Both Danny and Kevin were thinking the best possible outcome for them would be to end up on the unemployment line, while the worst..., they didn't want to consider the worst. Danny imagined that being torn apart, and then ground into a batch of Lexi Corp’s newest powder foundation. Kevin meanwhile, imagined a different worst-case scenario. He had met Lexi, the namesake of the corporation, when he’d made the fatal mistake of getting into the same elevator. He had been verbally eviscerated by the ex-model and chief shareholder for thus polluting her personal space. Kevin now imagined Lexi’s jaws un-hinging during their board meeting on Monday and consuming him alive like a boa constrictor with artificially white teeth and perfectly styled hair.
As Danny and Kevin shuddered over their worst-case imaginings, they mixed their mystery ingredients, both realizing what they had in their bowls resembled something that had come out of the wrong end of a sickly dog.
Danny pinched his nose and told Kevin, “Hey, your glop smells just about as attractive as my slime looks.”
“Roadkill left out in the sun for a week?” offered Kevin. They both watched as the substances oozed around in their bowls, possibly of their own volition.
“Maybe I should call Maggie, and she can help us,” said Danny reaching for his cell phone.”
“Why, is she going to change our hair color and forge new passports so we can fly off to South America?”
"No, you idiot. Maybe she can help us with a quick fix formula or a way to double-talk ourselves out of the meeting. Besides South America is no good. Lexi has a lab pretty much everywhere down there. That's where they get a majority of their ingredients."
“Maggie, you want Maggie to get us out of this mess?” asked Kevin. Over the years Maggie had converted her carriage house into a lab, and with the help of Danny and Kevin, made it into a working lab most small companies would envy. Luckily Maggie lived in an unincorporated area and had elderly neighbors who are mostly deaf. The occasional explosions made by one mad scientist, or on one spectacular occasion, by all three, went largely unheard. Most people would think that a feminine influence on Danny and Kevin would be a good thing, a calming thing. In most cases, this would be true. However, in Maggie's case, her personality mixed with the guys’ only made them a triple threat. In fact what Danny and Kevin liked best about Maggie was that she never shot down any of their ideas or said, "Let's slow down and think this through." In fact, Maggie's inevitable response was, "Let's do it," or "Quit your yappin’ let's get crackin’."
Danny's favorite Maggie response to solving problems was, "Let's Willie Wonka it." Willie Wonkaing it was thinking so far out of the box they usually lost sight of the box entirely and went on a wild tangent that generally led to explosions and loss of body hair.
Maggie and Danny had met two years ago when Danny audited one of her biochemistry classes. Lexi wanted its employees to stay current in their field and would compensate employees for a few university courses a year. Danny had heard about Maggie’s courses, after seeing her, and thought he might be able to score a date and possibly steal some equipment for his lab at home. As it turned out, he was able to do both.
They made a striking pair, she slightly shorter than Danny, and while he was a pale blonde, her hair was so dark it almost looked blue. After they’d gone out for awhile, Kevin told them that they looked like a couple from one of those weird Obsession ads.
Danny put up with Maggie’s hobby of trying to create the perfect permanent hair color and re-growth formula, and she put up with Danny and Kevin’s variety of explosive experiments.
“Yes. Maggie Penny, the love of my life. Can you think of a better plan?
“Maggie, the Maggie that allegedly exposed a certain Dean to the Board of Directors as the money stealing psychopath he was and glued that Dean’s office door shut while he was still inside on a Friday evening until certain evidence could be produced on Monday, that Maggie? Or are you talking about the Maggie who filled a certain nasty and allegedly perverted professor’s desk with garter snakes and poison ivy?”
“Ha, that was brilliant, not that I had anything to do with any of those incidents, so help me God. OK, yes, I guess you made your point.” Danny, returning to the crisis at hand, turned to Kevin and moaned, “God, I wish we would get hit by an asteroid right about now.”
“Most unlikely,” said Kevin. “Probability wise, we’d more likely be involved in an earthquake.”
"Yes, but an asteroid would be so much cooler; wouldn't you rather die by an asteroid than by an earthquake?”
"I always thought I would die in a fiery explosion that would take out a city block but still leave my greatest invention intact, thus putting me down in the history books as the man who changed the world forever."
“What invention?”
“I don't know, but all recent inventions would pale in comparison, and appear like nothing more than Silly Putty."
"Hey, what's wrong with Silly Putty? That little round turd has many uses other than those described on the container, Danny said.”
"Besides, the best way to die is by a volcano, and preserved for all time like those from Pompeii. How cool would that be?" mused Kevin.
“As long as we had a few seconds to prepare our cool poses beforehand.”
Danny now regarded the congealing mass in his bowl. “I think this is how The Blob started.” He leaned forward over the lab table and held his bowl upside down over Kevin’s bowl.
Kevin watched Danny’s blob as it defied gravity; it resembled a giant teardrop as it hung from the bowl. "Man, look at that thing just hang there," he said in amazement.
Suddenly, without warning, the gelatinous teardrop broke free and plopped into Kevin’s bowl with a gurgling splash. The contents of the container shot upwards and outwards, and right onto both Kevin’s and Danny’s faces, which were within inches of the bowls. For a millisecond there was silence, followed by a combination of shrieking and swearing. For a brief moment, all heads turned in their direction, but their lab mates saw nothing really out of the ordinary for these two, and everyone returned to work.
Kevin and Danny realized that screaming and swearing was getting the gunk in their mouths, so they briefly shut up and tried wiping the stuff off their faces, or move it to a different area. Once they cleared a path around t
heir mouths, they looked at each other and started snorting and guffawing.
“Boy, do you look freaky,” laughed Danny as he tried to wipe the molasses-like substance from his eyes.
“I look freaky? You look like something that just crawled out from the sewer after hot and spicy tamale night. Now we’ve lost our looks, and we are totally fucked. What a combination,” sighed Kevin.
Usually immaculate Kevin was a complete smeary mess. Realizing how much of the substance covered him, he tried to wipe it off, but it just moved around and dripped down his collar. He felt it oozing around his face, neck, and shoulders. He decided to have a major freak out and froze in his chair.
“You know, you sort of resemble one of those old California raisins or a Dove bar that’s been left out in the sun too long,” giggled Danny. He then started singing that ancient MacArthur Park song about the cake being left out in the rain and consequently was subjected to loud shouts and boos from the lab along with various missiles flung toward him, some of which were not so gently thrown. “I think we have sort of wandered off point a bit.” Danny began trying to the wipe formula off himself, only to succeed in spreading it around more, just as Kevin had. “Ugh. We’d better get cleaned up, so we look good for our obituary photos.”
Kevin didn’t respond and Danny finally realized he’d been playing a living statue for the last few minutes. Danny pulled Kevin's chair away from their workstation and wheeled him out of the lab, down the hall, and into the shower area. "OK, Kevin, are you, 1) frozen due to our formula, or 2) frozen due to the gunk being splattered all over you and now you are in complete freak out mode? Nod once for one and twice for two.” Two nods later, Danny shoved Kevin under a high-powered shower until he began to move on his own.
