by Bruce Bethke
TELECOMMUTING
Like Laetrile, the death of Elvis Presley, and New Democrats, telecommuting was one of the great popular hoaxes of the late twentieth century. The idea the middle managers would actually allow their employees to use a technology that, by definition, makes middle management obsolete, is too ludicrous to bother refuting here.
There’s one more status thing at MDE. You can tell how someone’s career is going by whether they’re in the left- or right-turn lane at that intersection. A left turn puts you onto Highway 5 East, which leads to some really nice exburban areas, like Afton, Stillwater, and Marina Del Croix.
I turned right, onto Highway 5 West.
The geography of East St. Paul is impossible to explain without topographical maps. Suffice to say, they don’t call it the land of 10,000 mosquito breeding pits for nothing. Highway 5 snakes across Eastern Heights, and turns into Stillwater Boulevard just west of County Line Road. Stillwater Boulevard in turn becomes a cattail swamp just west of Ferndale, as it was washed out in the ‘03 flood and never rebuilt, so I turned north on County Line Road with the intent of catching Holloway and taking it across. But the state patrol had set up roadblocks at Granada Lane—the MPOA was planting landmines again and no one was getting through until Channel 5 showed up—so I gritted my teeth, pulled a U-turn, and headed south.
To Third Street.
MPOA
Maplewood Property Owners Association: yet another bowling-league-turned-urban-terrorist organization. President Gore has promised that the midnight bowling provisions in his new crime bill will solve this problem, but the legislation remains bottled up in Congress.
You don’t need to know about Third Street. Every major city has a Third Street, or something like it. Steel bars on all the windows. Concertina wire around the roofs of the few surviving businesses. Burned-out automobile frames like rusting steel skeletons in the glass-strewn vacant lots, desperate unemployed lawyers holding signs saying “Will Litigate For Food” on every street corner, illegal cash-only medical clinics masquerading as legitimate brothels, and mile after mile of gaily colored real estate signs, their strings of addenda flapping like kite tails in the breeze: $0 down. assumable. seller motivated. make offer. please. for god’s sake, we’re begging.
The reality, of course, is that Third Street looks worse than it is, excluding the time period of 11 P.M. to 3 A.M. Friday and Saturday, when it is worse than it looks. Which is to say, I survived the trip again, made it to White Bear Avenue, and turned north, smug in the belief I was only twenty blocks from home.
And then, like an idiot, I stopped for the Margaret Street light.
There were some nasty-looking kids hanging out in the bus kiosk to my right. What they were, I couldn’t tell at first. Splatterpunks maybe, or shatterpunks, or vegomaticpunks; hell, the punk styles change so fast even Wired can’t keep up with them. What I do know is they were passing around a large bag of Chocolate Frosted Anabolic Steroids™ and giving me the hairy eyeball, so I kept a close watch on them. Their gang colors seemed oddly familiar, though I couldn’t place them at the moment. The traffic light wasn’t showing any evidence of planning to change anytime soon.
The next sound I heard was the unmistakable rap of a beryllium-plated carbon-fiber hockey stick on my driver’s side window. I turned around.
Omigod. He was standing there. Six foot four, at least; two hundred and sixty pounds of surgically-enhanced muscle and unusual body piercings. How does he ever get through airports? was the first thought that sprang to mind, but that question instantly gave way to the sharp chill of pure terror that scraped through my frozen veins like a nanomolecular Roto-rooter.
I recognize the gang colors! My heart pounded as I realized I was surrounded by the worst of the worst, the nastiest of the nasty. Through one stupid detour, I’d fallen afoul of the awful terror that had chased me all the days of my about-to-be-prematurely shortened twenty-three-year life! As the rest of the gang stepped off the curb and surrounded my car, one of them casually turned around, and with a gloating smile over his shoulder, showed me the words written on the back of his gang jacket.
Mounds Park High School Athletic Department.
Please, God, anyone but them. But no, there was no escaping the awful truth. I knew exactly who I was surrounded by.
Letterjocks.
The marginally humanoid monster on my left knocked on my window again and indicated I should roll it down. I did. “Yes?” I said, my voice trembling.
“Good evening, kind sir,” he said, his lips barely able to form coherent speech around his mouthguard implant. “We are here on behalf of da Adopt-A-Highway program. We are da disadvantaged youts what have adopted dis highway.”
His words took a moment to sink in. “You—you’re not car-jackers?”
One of the other letterjocks snarled an evil laugh. “That piece of junk? You got to be kidding.”
“Shit,” another elucidated, “Coach gave me a better car’n that when I made junior varsity.” This brought forth a round of vicious laughter from all of them.
The ogre to my left gently but firmly grabbed my lower jaw and steered my attention back to him.
“If you appreciate da effort we are puttin’ inta making dis highway clean, safe, and bootyfull, we would appreciate it if you would make a voluntary contribution to da Mounds Park Al’letic Assho—Associa—To da team.”
Another of the letterjocks leaned in close, and opened his jacket just far enough for me to see the monofilament-laced locker room towel concealed there. “Remember,” he said, “da contribution you make today will help keep a disadvantaged yout’ from turning to a life of senseless brootality an’ crime.”
I fumbled for my wallet. “Will six bucks be enough?”
They laughed. It was not a nice laugh.
“That’s all the cash I’ve got,” I pleaded, opening my wallet to show them.
“Look like we’re gonna hafta teach dis guy a lesson in da meaning of shared sacrifice,” one of them said. The guy with the towel drew it and began twirling it up for a lethal snap. My God, I’d seen those snaps, you could take a man’s head off with one of those things! The rest of the gang closed in…
“WAIT!” the big ogre with the mouthguard and the hockey stick shouted. He reached across me and pointed at the pile of junk on the passenger seat. “Is dat—is dat a CD-ROM?”
ROLLING STONES
“Mick and the boys are back in top form with their new disc, Cybergeezers. By now you’re no doubt sick of the hit single, “Keith Richards Unplugged” (reportedly inspired by that incident last year when Mick tripped over Keith’s life-support cables and put him in full cardiac arrest onstage), but get the disc anyway. You’ll enjoy the masterful new work by anonymous young black session players, the fascinating new algorithms that have been programmed into the CDS-2000 Hendrix Emulator, and above all, producer Tom Scholz’ brilliant use of audio sampling and larynx implants to make it sound as if Mick still has a functional voice.”
—Skag Pustule, music critic America OnDrugs
I seized the opportunity. “Why, yes it is.” I pulled the copy of Dress For Conformity I’d gotten from human resources out of my raincoat pocket and let him have a quick flash of it. “I work for MDE. This is a classified document my boss has asked me to take home and study tonight—”
“Damn,” the ogre said, “I was hoping it was da new Rolling Stones CD. Okay boys. Kill ‘im.” They all took a step forward.
“WAIT!” I screamed. “Isn’t there any way we can bargain?”
The ogre stopped walking, and turned around. “Well, if it’s really classified.” He snatched the CD from my hands before I could react and read the label. I braced myself to die.
His eyes went wide.
“You—your boss, he’s really makin’ you read dis?”
“She,” I corrected.
Ogre handed the disc back to me, took a step back, and turned to the rest of his gang. “Let ‘im go, boys. We’d be doin’ hi
m a favor if we killed ‘im.” He pointed to one of them. “Maurice, hit da lights, wouldja?” The one he called Maurice whipped out a remote control and changed the traffic light to green. Ogre turned back to me. “Go on, beat it, get outa here. And don’t ever let me catch your stoopid face in dis neighborhood again. We can’t afford to waste our time robbin’ two-bit dipshits like you.”
Well, that wasn’t exactly the sort of savoir faire I’d been hoping to exhibit, but I took it as a win and went on, beat it, got out of there.
Two stoplights up the road, I got bushwhacked by a gang of Wilderness Girls and relieved of my last six bucks. I did, however, get two really swell candy bars out of the deal.
HOME
1783 Ivy Street, St. Paul. Blt in 1923, ths chrmng stcco bnglw feat. 3 bdrms, 1½ ba., blt-in sntd-gls bufft in dng rm, orig. wdwrk, orig. paint insd & out, rtty shag cpt, lg. spdrs in bsmt, needs TLC, but jst a convnt stggr frm Throbbing Temple Liquors and w/a lit. elbw grs this could be a showcase! If you’re the sort of nut who still wants to live in the city.
“Hi, Mom, I’m home!” The aluminum screen door clanged shut behind me. I hung my raincoat on the hook by the door, dropped my galoshes on the empty case of Bud returnables, and picked my way up the back steps, stepping carefully around the bags of flattened beer cans and recyclable bottle glass. Psycho Kitty’s litter box was in desperate need of changing again.
“Mom?” She wasn’t in the kitchen either, not that I’ve seen her there often. I shut Mr. Coffee off, dumped the leftover breakfast sludge in the sink, and ran some hot water in the pot in hopes the remaining molten tar would go into solution.
I stuck my nose into the dining room. “Mom?”
“I heard you the first two times,” her dulcet voice came wafting from the living room, beyond the archway. “Now if you don’t mind, they’ve just turned over the Daily Double and I would like for once to hear the question.”
“Yes, Mother.” Crossing the dining room, I went over to the built-in buffet and started sorting through the piles of random paper on top of it. Junk, bills, junk…
LATE PAYMENT NOTICE
From: J. Gotti Student Loan Servicing Center
To: John F. Burroughs 1783 Ivy Street St. Paul, MN 55103
Dear Mr. Burroughs,
Your student loan payment is late again. Perhaps you have simply forgotten or mislaid your reminder, but since you do have an outstanding balance of $32,188.56 and a history of late payments, unless we hear from you soon, we will be forced to send Guido and Luigi over to help “refresh” your memory.
Capice, paisano?
STUDENT LOANS, ELECTRONIC PAYMENT OF
The federal government has not allowed repayment of student loans by EFT transaction since June 2002, when members of the Caltech graduating class, as part of their senior prank, penetrated the Student Loan Guarantee Agency’s computer system and marked every outstanding student loan in the country as paid in full.
MAIL, THE CHECK IS IN THE
The Official National Lie since 1999, when the U.S. Post Office was pronounced dead and replaced by PostLotto, a fun game in which players buy a $2 ticket that guarantees their mail will be delivered somewhere, sometime, maybe.
FUNDS, SOURCE OF
Netlore has it the reason the feds were so pissed off by the Class of ’02’s prank was that the funds involved were diverted from a dummy corporation operating in the CIA’s black budget, and the theft caused the immediate cessation of a very promising covert war in Bolivia.
I opened my mouth to ask Mom if there was anything else, then thought better of it, and went back to my informational dig. Bills, junk—
Oh goody, the June issue of Model Railroader, which I carefully rolled up and tucked in my back pocket. (Okay, so call me a throwback. I will give up my last hardcopy magazine on the day they come out with a photographic-quality CD-ROM reader that I won’t be afraid to take into the bathroom. My first ReadMan™ died from slipping off my knee and hitting a tile floor, and I’m not eager to repeat that expensive learning experience.)
Something happened in the other room, or rather, on TV. A disappointed sort of crowd noise; Mom swore and yelled, “It was Nixon, dummy!” I started for the back steps.
“Jack?” Mom shrieked. “Your computer is screwing up my TV picture again!”
I stopped and directed my rolling eyes to the ceiling. “That’s not possible, Mom. It’s not even turned on.”
“Oh? Well, you just come in here and look at this mess.”
“Okay, Mom.” I took a short count of five, sighed, and turned around and headed for the living room.
Was Your Last Domestic Partner Inflatable?
Let’s face it. If the database in which we found your name is an indicator, there are houseplants with more active sex lives than you. Sure, you’ve got an I.Q. of at least 150, a squeaky-clean medical history, and a decent job in the high-tech industry—but what does that get you on Saturday night? Carpal tunnel syndrome from flogging the dolphin?
If the last entry in your date book was a dentist’s appointment four months ago—if you think your telephone might be broken because it hasn’t rung in weeks—if you’re tired of living alone in your mother’s basement, you should know, there is hope for the socially challenged.
Diminished Expectations
Dates for the Truly Desperate™
Our clients aren’t much to look at. You’d never give them a second glance if you met them in a bar, which you wouldn’t, because you never go to bars anyway. Frankly, if these people were clothes, they’d be marked Slightly Irregular.
But then, so would you. So why not call 1-900-867-5309 and join our ever-growing stable of pathetic losers today? Because remember, if you don’t stop it soon, you will go blind.
Gosh. Mom, in all her splendor. Her fading hair still dyed a bright, brassy, blond; her ever-larger butt sunk deep into the cat-clawed sofa, which was permanently deformed to fit her shape. A pile of little dead cigarette corpses clustered in and around the Turtle Lake Casino souvenir ashtray on the left arm of the sofa; a matching collection of empty Tab cans scattered on the floor near her feet. (Good. She hadn’t switched to beer. Yet.) Left arm in full extension, like a fencer with a remote control instead of a foil, glaring at that 54-inch rear projection screen and thumbing buttons with a speed and dexterity otherwise seen only in twelve-year-olds blessed with Super Mega Nintendo decks.
“See?” she was accusing. “See? That picture is horrible! Your Uncle Dave, he got me such a good deal on this set, and he had the cable working so nice before you started messing with—”
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Oh, Mom. I just shook my head. The TV wasn’t hooked to cable, it was hooked to a pirate satellite dish in the attic. And that it worked at all was amazing, because I’d been fighting a five-year war with Hubbard Broadcasting’s channel encryption routines.
VISION, JACK’S
20-15 when tested on a Monday morning, sloping off to 20-40 by Friday afternoon. I hope direct brain feeds get here soon because video monitors really bug the shit out of my eyes.
“Okay, Mom, I’ll take a look at it. Could you turn it off?”
No, but at least she was kind enough to mute the sound. I rolled the set away from the wall, got down behind it, and checked the connections.
Ah, just as I suspected, Psycho Kitty had been gnawing on the 300-ohm antenna wire again. I broke a thumbnail trying to twist the connector screw, floundered around for a moment wishing I had something metal to pry with, then remembered the alarm jammer I’d had in my pocket since page twenty-one and fished it out. Thirty seconds later, I had the antenna back together.
“How’s it working now, Mom?”
FAITH HEALING
While it is an established point of law that Native American Healing Centers™ are exe
mpt from the National Health Act, each clinic site being a de juris Indian Reservation, the question of whether Christian faith healing is a religious expression protected by the First Amendment or a dodge to get around the National Health Board is still being hotly contested, and promises to keep expensive lawyers in nice cars for many decades to come.
“Mmmm,” she mmmed. “Still not as good as before.”
“Well, that’s as good as it’s going to get until you let me upgrade it to seventy-five-ohm wiring.”
“Oh no!” She would have gotten her back up in an arch, if she could have gotten it out of the sofa cushions. “Your Uncle Dave knew all about TVs! This is the way he set it up, so this is the way it stays!”
MOM
Whenever I look at Mom, I’m reminded of that line from that old song:
Where have you gone, Doc Kevorkian?
A nation turns its aging eyes to you.
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
You’ve changed your mind, the doc should go away.
Hee hee hee. It’s too late.
Simon & Stipe, “Mrs. Robinson”
from the soundtrack of the Warner Bros. film, 21st Century Limited
“Okay, Mom.” No use arguing, really. I finished putting everything back together, stood up, mill rolled the set back against the wall. “Then this is as much as I can do.” She punched the volume back up to twenty.
Psycho Kitty erupted from her hiding place behind the potted philodendron and sank her fangs into my ankle. I staunched the blood flow with a Kleenex and hobbled downstairs to my room in the basement.
Basement, sweet basement: I had it pretty good down there. My own fridge and microwave (brought back from my dorm room at college), my own phone line, my own futon, my own dresser; with drawers for my socks and underwear, and a secret compartment for my Best of Penthouse CD-ROM collection. Room enough to set up all my computer gear: it’s not like it was a real apartment, but after I got kicked out of grad school—