by Thom Jones
By now I had been to every fucking engineering firm in the city. Nobody was hiring. If you’re a senior engineer, forget it. They hire a guy out of college, pay him a substandard salary, and get him to do the work of ten people. I reformulated my résumé and started looking for a job as a technician.
Angela was still eating peanut butter by the tablespoon. One day I came home and she was lying on her back with four feet in the air, stiff. Heart attack. In just six weeks’ time. I enjoy peanut butter myself. I had been carrying peanut-butter sandwiches in my briefcase as I canvassed the city looking for work. I switched to low-fat turkey. It costs a fortune and, hungerwise, it doesn’t satisfy, but I got to thinking of all the stuff I had eaten in my life, the whole pile of it. In peanut butter alone, there would be a warehouse. Cigarettes? Truck trailers full. After what I’d seen happen to Angela in six weeks, I felt lucky to be alive. I squared my diet away.
I got some Just for Men and colored my hair jet-black. I began to figure that my age was another handicap. But then one of the no-jobs at unemployment asked me if I’d lost my mind. “Anson, you look like Bela Lugosi!” Another said, “Man, that’s a dye job you can spot a mile away.” Some skaters on the street asked me if I was the singer Roy Orbison. Maybe they said this because I was wearing a pair of shades, or maybe they were just dicking with me. I said, “No, man, I’m Junior fuckin’ Walker.”
When I got home and checked myself out in the mirror, I saw that the no-jobs were right about my hair. It was too dark and it made my skin look pale. It was almost green. I looked like an undertaker. Plus, I’d lost weight, and my clothes were too big. Overnight, I had metamorphosed from a Stage One no-job to a Stage Three. Up all night with pain, I finally dropped off and didn’t get up till four in the afternoon. Too late to go out. I didn’t shave. I was thinking, What’s the point of looking? They don’t want to hire you. Capitalism sucks. The big companies just want to get rich. I got to hating everybody.
I drove over to the pet store and bought two dozen mice and a separate wire cage for each. You read stuff in medical reports about how a certain drug or vitamin did something in some study but it will be five years before the general public can get it. Or you read that something has produced miraculous results in chickens but they haven’t tried it on humans yet. I’m the kind that figures, hell, if it works on a chicken it’s going to work on everybody. I mean, if some guy spots mold on bread and turns it into penicillin, why not me? If I can’t get a job, maybe I’ll just go out and win the Nobel Prize.
I put the mice on a variety of diets and subjected them to various stresses. I kept a control group and fed its members the same mouse chow I fed Al. Other mice—eating a diet similar to my own, drinking a proportionate amount of coffee, and keeping the same hours—were dead in five weeks. Challenge, a momentary adaptation to stress, then exhaustion and death. I accepted the results with equanimity. I knew what was in the cards for me; once again I had evidence. Maybe I was lucky to have been canned. What I needed now was a plan: I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore.
At 3 A.M. I took off my white lab coat, washed my hands, and called up my ex-boss. Brrringgg! Ding-a-ling! Brrringgg! When he answered, I hung up! Ah, ha, ha, shit! I then had a snack and about twenty minutes later—just when he’d fallen back to sleep—I called again. Ha, ha, ha, fuck! I pictured him lying there seething.
I put another batch of mice on a regime mimicking my old schedule, but I fortified their diets with vitamins. They died in just under five weeks, confirming something I always suspected: vitamins, especially the kind that have a strong smell, not only make you feel bad but can hasten your demise! The result held even for the mice that had the antioxidant cocktail: flavonoids, soy, red-wine extract, beta carotene, etc.
To some mice I gave huge amounts of coffee. Coffee mice became very aggressive and would often bite me. For each attempted bite, it was no coffee and three days in a punishment can. It skewed the validity of the experiments, but I already suspected the ultimate outcome. They say coffee is pretty much harmless, but after studying a coffee mouse’s brain at autopsy I calculated otherwise. Shrunken thymus glands, a swelling in the cranial cavity, and a shriveling of the adrenal glands. They could run the most complicated labyrinths I constructed, but they were burning it at both ends.
One night I called my ex-boss and he fucking made me. He said he got caller I.D. and knew it was me on the line. He threatened to turn me in to the police. I didn’t say boo, man. I just hung up. I worried until dawn. I could hear my heart thumping in my chest. Was what I’d done a jailable offense? So much for the job recommendation.
And then, lo, one of my hundreds of résumés bore fruit! I got a call from a large electronics firm, went in, and took some grueling tests involving math, calculus, even physics. I was interrogated by a panel of hard-ass guys with starched white shirts and stern faces. At the conclusion, they said I was one of fifteen people being considered. Two hundred applicants had already been rejected. They told me that employees were subject to random drug tests. They said they would do a background check. Then they’d call me.
The hardiest of my mice turned out to be the swimmers and walkers. The walkers were put on exercise wheels equipped with speed governors and forced to march at a nine-mph pace eight hours a day. Along the bottoms of their cages were metal grids wired to give them an electric shock if they decided to hop off the wheel and shirk their duty. A few rebelled, but the rebellion was dealt with easily: I merely dialed up the electricity. This made me realize the folly of my so-called punishment cans. A nice dark spot in a quiet room was not “punishment.” True punishment, such as that reserved for recidivist biters, now took place in a proper punishment room with hot bright lights and severe jolts of electricity. A yoga mouse that I happened to take a dislike to, a little Hare Krishna crybaby who couldn’t handle the nine-mph pace, died after thirty-four hours of continuous exercise. The shock burns on its feet, tail, and stomach were secondary to cardiac arrest. Hey! I’m sorry, but it’s survival of the fittest. My tests demonstrated that a reasonable amount of hard physical labor each day produced health and contentment. Bodies are made for work, not idleness.
Man, what else could go wrong? I was standing on a corner, minding my own business, and this no-job I knew, a Stage Three, came along and offered to buy me dinner at a Greek restaurant. I said sure, thinking some windfall had come his way. We did a fair amount of drinking and then had this big meal, several courses, with rounds of ouzo for the house. Then he got nervous for some reason. When he reached the register, some drastic thought passed through his brain like a dark cloud. He said to me, “Have you got any money?” I told him I had about sixty cents, and he stood there for a moment. He looked up, down, over his shoulder. Suddenly he yelled “Run!” and bolted. I was standing flat-footed. A couple of waiters took off after him. So did the cook, with a fifteen-inch blade. What a shocker! Too late, I ran the other way, and the older waiters started after me. Six long blocks they chased me. The no-job got away. Me, I was arrested. The police handcuffed me, shoved me into a patrol car, and whipped me off to the precinct station with their lights flashing. I spent the weekend in jail and finally arranged bond on Monday morning. To cap things off, when I got home I found Al in his aquarium with his three feet in the air, stone dead. I won’t lie to you. It was very upsetting. I burst into tears. The lady living above me heard my raking sobs and knocked on the door to see if I was okay.
Hannibal was a well-exercised gladiator mouse. He had a piebald coat, white and tan. I fed him a diet of meat, vegetables, and grain. I gave him testosterone injections from ground-up mouse testicles. He got little boils at the injection sites, but he also became supermuscular. Hannibal won the first annual Gladiator Mouse Championship, killing in succession two swimmers, two walkers, a coffee mouse, and the remaining population of yoga mice—seventeen victims in all. I just kept throwing them in, one after another, getting more and more excited by the ferociousness of the battle. I felt like Caligula. Oh, m
an! It was too much.
Hannibal’s capacity for work and his resistance to the usual stressors, including the punishment sessions, exceeded that of any of my previous specimens. His entire torso was pure muscle. The discipline he showed on the wheel, in the maze, in the pool, or defending his life in the gladiator pit, his appetite for work, and his willingness to meet any challenge made him my most interesting success. I knew I was on to something huge if only there was some way to dampen his murderous impulses, his relentless aggression, and his compulsive sexuality. To be able to harness all that drive and latent productivity. What a challenge!
I was able to farm more testosterone, and I injected it into female mice. The results were dramatic—similar to those which had occurred with Hannibal. But the female supermice, with a natural supply of estrogen, were more tractable. I was at a crossroads in my research. Was this the answer? A female named Cynthia defeated Hannibal in a tooth-and-nail gladiator bout. Yet she stopped short of killing the former champion. I removed his battered body from the little arena and administered adrenaline to his wounds, and then Hannibal bit me on the quick of my fingernail. Yeowza! What happened next was a blur. I slammed Hannibal against the wall like Randy Johnson hurling a ninety-eight-mph fastball. He bounced off and started scrambling around on the floor. I gave chase and stomped him to death in my stocking feet. What an ingrate! And after all I’d done for him.
A few weeks later I was at the university veterinary school, checking out some books on mouse anatomy, when it seemed to me that people were purposefully avoiding me. It went beyond the normal thing you get from being little. Was my fly open? Did I have something in my nose? As I walked up to the checkout desk, I smelled B.O. I put two and two together and realized that the B.O. was coming from me. I tested my breath by licking the back of my wrist and smelling it. It was awful. How far had I sunk? I had a brief panic attack outside and quickly made for home. After I’d had a long bath, the episode passed off.
With the help of the textbooks, I started harvesting other mouse hormones, even though the organ systems were often so tiny I felt I was performing microsurgery. It was also frustrating. The boils Cynthia developed from growth-hormone injections turned into large hard lumps that eventually proved fatal: upon autopsy, I discovered that these were tumors. Cynthia’s liver nourished tumors as well. One by one, all my female supermice developed the same symptoms. Another dead end.
I never got the call from the firm that interviewed me. A month had passed, so, taking the bull by the horns, I called the firm and said that I had enjoyed our meeting and would be grateful for a job. I knew it was too late, and it made me angry. Just because I’m five feet tall! I hinted at the possibility of a discrimination suit. A vice-president got on the line and told me that my size had nothing to do with it. They were impressed by my qualifications. I had the job in the bag, but my former boss had given me a poor recommendation: he said I made harassing phone calls at three in the morning. The man said I could have even skated on that charge, but he’d noticed an item in the police blotter involving an incident at a Greek restaurant. I was so shaken by this disclosure that I said it must have been someone else with the same name as mine. A transparent lie. Despondent. I went out and bought two six-packs of beer. The next day I couldn’t get out of bed. Nor on the following. I got a violent, three-day hangover and vowed never to drink again.
Court. Oh, God! The very thought of it. I went over to the restaurant and offered full restitution. Nothing doing, they said. I tried to explain what had happened but they made furious Greek gestures at me—God knows what they meant. They said, “See you in court, haffa pint! Broke-a-back. Shorty pants!”
Well, wait a minute, I said. It was the other guy’s fault. I gave them the whole story. They said, “Tell us who the other guy is and we’ll drop the charge.” Actually, I don’t know the guy. I mean I “know” him, but he told so many lies I don’t know if up is down with him. At one point he told me he was an actor and had been engaged to Catherine Deneuve. He was a smoothie, and handsome—I half believed him.
I threw myself on the mercy of the court and got reamed with a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine, court costs, six months’ probation, and a hundred hours of community service. Plus, now I’ve got a record. Also, I got hit for a hundred and fourteen in unpaid traffic tickets.
After court I lost interest in the mice and fell into a deep, Stage Five no-job depression. The Nobel Prize? Screw it. I went to a clinic and got prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. On them, all I wanted to do was sleep. Twenty hours? No problem. It was a pleasant escape. After years of insomnia, I was in heaven.
But the medicine made me fat. Bloat weight. I gained back all that I’d lost. Pretty soon I couldn’t get into the clothes that had once been hanging on me. I got a huge gut, a pair of thighs like twin water heaters, and a fat ass that stuck out like a clown’s. I’d never thought that I could sink this low. I resorted to wearing sweatpants.
I started setting my alarm clock for late-afternoon appointments and even then I missed about half of them. I wondered how I would ever reassimilate myself into the mainstream of American life. I felt so low and so bad I didn’t want to talk to anybody. The landlord came by: people were complaining about a smell. I didn’t want him to see my mouse lab. The way things were going it would have been a federal bust—Dr. Mengele Nabbed At Last! I told the landlord I was taking care of a pair of hamsters for a friend, don’t worry, I’ll deal with the smell. He said, “Man, Anson, you gained weight.” Well, no shit, Sherlock!
I cleaned out the mouse cages, replacing the soiled sawdust with fresh cedar shavings. Then it occurred to me to put the mice on this antidepressant that was kicking my ass so bad. Whenever I tried to get off it, I got this full-body pulsar buzz, and everything began to vibrate until I took another pill. I calibrated doses and started medicating the mice. Within three hours all of them were out. Dead? I couldn’t tell. But it turned out no, they weren’t dead—they were in comas. I wondered if that’s what I looked like at night. One slept for two days and didn’t change positions: frozen in one posture. I put another on the punishment wheel, and it was oblivious to the shocks. Blue sparks were popping off its paws and it ignored them.
I mentioned earlier that most of the bad stuff you worry about never comes to pass. But sometimes, I was now discovering, it does. You fall into a kind of Bermuda Triangle of hard-ass reality. How long was this going to go on? I asked myself. I finally managed to get off the drugs by taking smaller and smaller doses. And slowly the bloat weight came off. I phoned for an interview for a technician’s job at a factory less than a mile from my building, and I was hired that very day. I couldn’t believe it. The job was a piece of cake, too. I went in and read the paper and drank coffee for an hour before anyone got ambitious. There were numerous breaks and good camaraderie all the way around. Even so, it was hard to get through a day. I didn’t have the stamina. Coming back from Stage Five was tough business. In the annals of no-jobdom, it’s rare. Almost unheard of. I had pulled off a big one.
Pretty soon some of the design engineers were hanging out with me, asking my advice on projects and so on. One thing led to another, and I was promoted to senior engineer and making a third more than I got at the last place. It was easy duty, this job. I got into the work and—zing!—the time just flew. I never had a job I liked before. I didn’t think such a thing existed.
The mice, as they died off, I buried in little toilet-paper tubes. They have a life expectancy of three years. I didn’t replace them. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What I did was pretty unconscionable. Absolute power, as they say. I’m not proud of my behavior. I had been living without checks and balances. The crap I pulled makes me think of what the space invaders will do to us if they conquer the world. Make slaves of us, eat us, flay us alive and torture us, do every kind of sinister thing in the book. There’s a dark side to intelligent beings, an irrational craving for war, personal defilement, and reckless destruction, eve
n if we know better. So if aliens are out there and they do come down I don’t expect good things. Aliens aren’t out there flying around on errands of mercy or benevolence. To them, we’re just so much protein. We’re calories. When the space invaders take over, it’s the end of the human era. Before that happens, I want to get in a few good times—travel to Ireland, learn how to dance, take tuba lessons, who knows. Happiness is like the gold in the Yukon mines, found only now and then, as it were, by the caprices of chance. It comes rarely in chunks or boulders but most often in the tiniest of grains. I’m a free-floater now, happy to take what little comes my way. A grain here, a grain there. What more can you ask for?
Daddy’s Girl
PA LIKED TOOTIE the best. We were three girls, and then Hubert died at six weeks of whooping cough. Pa always wanted a boy, and when Tootie came along, number four, she was as close as you could get. Tomboy. Followed Pa everywhere. Out in the garage all the time with the mechanics was Tootie. Tootie could fix cars. She knew how they worked, and when something went wrong with one she could diagnose its troubles. All I knew of cars was to get in and go. When I was fifteen, I said to Pa, “Pa, when you going to give me a car?” There was an old Ford in the lot and he said, “You can have that Ford, Junk,” and he tossed me the keys. He always called me Junk, which is not to say he didn’t love his kids, but he didn’t like women, and this is one way it slipped through, by calling me that name. Pa was good to me and although he was what you would call a ladies’ man, he really hated women. He treated Ma awful. He would go with floozies and buy them diamond pendants and then tell Ma about it and make her nuts to the point where she would almost faint. He would get her so riled me and my sisters would have to put a cold rag on Ma’s head at the back of the store in the kitchen where no customers could see. She would go back in the kitchen and nearly faint because of the way he would throw it in her face.