Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! (2 page)

If you were real, perhaps you’d be feeling some pity for me at this point. Well, save it. Of course it sucks, this being-eaten-by-a-bear experience, this mechanical failure, this whole vacation. But I’m a bright-side looker, a positive thinker. A winner. I’m trapped in a world of suck, yes, but one thing that doesn’t suck is OxySufnix. And I’m going to take another one … in fact, I’ll take two, because I’ve got lots. I’m sure you’d like to hear the lurid details of my agonizing, soul-searing pain, but honestly I couldn’t tell you much about pain. I never feel it. All things considered, I feel great. I’m prepared, and double prepared, and over-prepared. My car let me down, my wife and my so-called team let me down, www.GoAlaska.com let me
way
the fuck down, but OxySufnix will not let me down. And if it does I’ve also got Percoset, Vicadin and Prolexia right here in my breast-pocket pillbox, plus Antix, Ritalin, Mercantin, and a host of other unofficially prescribed favorites stowed away in the hollow end of my stash box, which resembles a small cartridge of wintermint Binaca. So fuck you, bear. Eat my foot, see if I care. I’ll just settle in over here on the bright side, with my drugs, and wait you out.

Drugs are just one reason why I could never cast myself as one of those outdoor/nature/environment types. Technology treats me too well. Technology is so much better than nature at everything that nature’s supposedly good at, I just don’t see the point. Who needs scenery when you’ve got special effects? Who needs flora and fauna when you’ve got the Flora Channel and the Fauna Channel, not to mention the Woodland Park Zoo and a talented team of Latin-American landscapers delicately sculpting the front yard of your estate into a shapely oasis, year-round, pest-free? Who needs bracing wind and sea spray when you’ve got four independent climate control zones? Who needs a campfire when you’ve got a George Foreman Grill?

But the one thing I most adore about society, cities, the unnatural lifestyle in-toto, is this invention we’ve got called Justice. Have you heard of Justice, Mister Bear? Justice is awesome. Justice means that if you lived in Seattle and you walked up to me on the street and started rudely eating me in this way, without my explicit consent, my screams of pain and alarm would not go unheeded. In moments, a squad car would arrive on the scene and police officers would draw their weapons and order you to lay face down on the sidewalk. And if you refused to comply, then those officers — to protect their own lives! — would empty several rounds from their powerful human handguns into your ugly bear face, killing you into submission. Then a luxuriously appointed ambulance would arrive, and friendly paramedics would rush me to a nearby excellent hospital where on-call neurosurgeons would first extract my foot from the stomach of your still-warm carcass — your flesh twitching reflexively as they dig with their scalpels and saws — and then they would spend hours, if not days, fastidiously reattaching each severed nerve and tendon, stitching my foot back on my leg as if I were a torn teddy bear, only ever so much more important. Perhaps to reconstruct the gnarled bits of my ankle they would take a skin graft from my other leg, or from a donor leg, or maybe I’d even receive the first successful human foot transplant, a miracle of medical technology and anti-foot-rejection drugs. My miracle foot and I would be written up in medical journals and made briefly famous on local television, perhaps even asked to endorse products. Then later, when I could walk again, as well as before if not better, I’d buy a round of drinks for the nice policemen who introduced you to the exquisite human concept of Justice, and then I’d drive home resting upon soft new seat covers sewn from your stupid hide.

Certain people — hippies, I guess you’d call them — often insist to me that human beings
need
nature for some reason. Not just the nature we already have in our zoos and farms and parks, mind you, but also this wild, untended mess of Ur-Nature here in Alaska. We need this nature up here, they say, in order to survive down there, they say, and then they invoke all sorts of explanation about the interconnectedness of the spotted owls to the salmon to the cows to the lumber products, and sure, I’m not some trained environmentologist so I can’t say they’re totally wrong. Maybe they’re right.

But this I do know: if human beings down in Seattle need for huge dangerous bears to be running around unchained in Alaska, then Alaska’s going to have to address its Justice problem, posta la hasta. I mean, aren’t there supposed to be Forest Rangers from Fish & Wildlife on patrol around here, making sure that people and animals obey the law and don’t litter or double-park or eat each other without a permit? I haven’t seen one ranger and I’ve been here for hours. Maybe, when they finally kick out those indigent Eskimos and start drilling some oil in this state, they’ll get the income to import some tough inner city street cops to keep these bears in line. For that matter, if there was even one cell phone tower within five miles of here I could just dial 911! But there’s not an ounce of reception on my Nokia picture-phone. No bars. This place is backwards and primitive and wrong.

It’s dark, and the bear is quieting down. He’s snuggled up against the side of the car, just a few feet from me. I think he’s falling asleep. Maybe in a little while here I’ll wriggle quietly free, and get the shotgun out of the Rover and offer Mister Bear some Remington 870 hollow-point after-dinner mints.

You think you’re tough, Mister Bear? I’ve kicked bigger asses than yours. Eat, sleep and be hairy, for tomorrow you shall die.

2

I wasn’t always being eaten by a bear. 24 hours ago I was stretched out on the self-inflating couch of Camp Image Team with a cold Bud in my hand, smelling the outdoor smells of our dainty forest clearing — some pleasant, others repulsive — and supervising the erection of a large six-man tent by the six small, erectionless men of my department. By supervising I mean offering them encouragement and gentle criticism as they wrestled incompetently with a complex umbrella-like nylon pod full of sticks and stakes and strings. That was me doing what I’m best at: delegating. I’m not the kind of manager who gets in his subordinates’ way when they’re busy, unless they’re doing something wrong — and yeah, they usually are — but the thing is, the management wisdom is, you have to let them make those mistakes, and then gently rub their noses in it, for them to learn. And it’s easier to delegate like that with a cold Bud in your hand.

And I would know all about that, because I’m sipping one right now! That’s right! One cold, foamy cylinder of civilization’s finest beer. I waited for my opening, I concentrated my will, made a superhuman effort and with one heroic lunge I grasped the cardboard box from Wally’s Super Supply, dragged it over here and ripped it open to find: a hero’s snacktime! There’s Slim Jims, Bud, Bud Light (Edna’s), Cliff Bars, Diet Pepsi (also Edna’s), and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Man, there’s something perfect about a Slim Jim and a cold Bud … even when it’s cold outside, and you’re cold, and something warm would be really nice. But a cold Bud has such powerful iconic cachet; it’s telling every cell in my body that things are going to be just fine. It’s telling my body The King Is Here, and This One’s For Me. Now is the moment in my life when I must draw on my culture for strength.

I guess I’ve bled some. I haven’t passed out or anything, at least not since the jack slipped and the car fell. All in all, I’m surviving. I’ve got my fluids, my meds, my snacks and my positive mental outlook. My prognosis is excellent. I could use some bug repellent, but whatever. A local crew of ants seems to want to lay claim to my hair, but whatever.

Image Team is going to find me. Or rather, Image Team is going to find some competent Search & Rescue professionals, who will then find me. Image Team couldn’t find their own asses with a digital ass detector and a trail of breadcrumbs. But they ought to know how to delegate by now, isn’t that what I’ve been trying to teach them? They’ve got Baumer’s Toyota and their phones and a big-ass radio and it’s only thirty miles of unpaved road to a paved road, and from there to a ranger station should be quick enough. They had better go get rangers. They had damn well better not wander out here looking for me on their own.

Of course, since this is supposed to be Team Building Weekend, they’ll probably do exactly that, search for me on their own. Shit. I can totally see it: Frank Baumer will act all tough and give one of his gay motivational speeches from that book in the men’s bathroom, like he always does when he’s late on a project and has no ideas — which is usually — and then Halsey, always driven to kiss the largest ass he can smell, will suggest the group elect Baumer as an temporary leader, a sort of ersatz Me until the official Me can be found! And Wollencott and Frink, the Seattle Yes-Men’s Chorus, will think that idea’s a
peach
, an idea with
legs
, one they can
get behind
. And once they’re done humping the legs of Halsey’s gay peach, Baumer will give
another
fucking speech about big shoes to fill, footsteps of giants, not worthy, but okay, call me Boss if it makes you feel better.
(Note to self: fire Baumer.)
And then they’ll unpack the little Motorola two-way radios I bought them, totally useless beyond one mile, and they’ll fan out in all directions, calling my name and making noise and generally screaming HEY BEARS, COME AND EAT US. And then the bears will come and eat them. It’ll serve them right for trying to be a team without me. Those guys are
nothing
without me.

If you existed and were here listening, you might ask just what sort of team-building exercise we had in mind, me and my department of trend-reversal morons, to travel so very far from our natural element, specifically our air-conditioned offices in the sleek twenty-second floor of Seattle’s famous Merch building. What life-bending experience did we think this place could offer, to weld us together into a mighty unstoppable five-headed Godzilla of trend-reversal? Shit, I don’t know, I don’t believe in any of that teamwork bullshit. A team, really, is a group of people who do what I tell them to do, or else I fire them.

But basically we came to kill bears. Frink and Baumer apparently come up here every year to shoot ducks and fish and whatever else is small and defenseless and moves slowly and is halfway edible. And all those guys have been whining to me for some kind of off-site for months now, ever since I made the management error of letting one of our recalled hair product clients personally congratulate them for the supposedly excellent job they did following
my
orders and implementing
my
plan. Like that’s not their job. The hair clients even gave us all little gift boxes full of — no kidding! — the self-same recalled hair product that we had just so deftly convinced the hair-washing public was safe and sexy and wouldn’t cause excessive scabbing or patchy baldness. Right … like I’m going to put that on my head. But the boys in Image Team did, and it did something to their brains — it made them think they deserved things.

So here’s my whole doe-eyed, scabby-scalped department whining for an off-site, and then Frink and Baumer pitch this fishing, sniping, blowing duck calls and wearing orange underwear outside our pants in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness package. I immediately called them on their total lack of balls. I told them: boys, you are a pathetic pack of pussies if you need high-powered ammo to kill a
duck
. Ted Nugent uses a bow and arrow, for Christ’s sake, and he kills moose and bears. Eats them, too. Raw! Drinks their blood! Subsists on nothing but moose burgers and bear sandwiches for months at a time, and then comes back home to NugeLand and writes deep, plaintive songs about the human condition. You little girls couldn’t kill a moose if I sedated it, strapped it into an electric chair for you, showed you an instructional video and held your soft, trembling hands.

And of course they knew I was right. Being right is my job. The thing is, some managers hire people they’re excited to work with. I prefer to hire people I’m excited to dominate. I don’t want to work with my subordinates, I want them to work
for
me,
instead of
me. I’m the idea man, and in marketing that’s the only man who counts. Delegation means never getting caught up in lame, tedious, time-wasting “work.” I create, and I delegate. That’s all I do.

And while the delegating side of my brain berated my weak staff, the creative side of my brain got to thinking how very client-impressing a large bearskin rug and a stylishly taxidermied bear’s head might look in the client-impressing outer lounge, or perhaps even more so in the deal-clinching inner lounge, behind the wet bar. I hear that a creative over at Vermion has a bear’s paw humidor on his desk. Probably bought it at Crate & Barrel, or bearparts.com. But the point is, I heard about it. It made an
impression
, on a whole chain of jaded industry people linking that Vermion creative to me, and if Vermion’s making an impression, then we’d damn well better be making a bigger one.

To make a long story short, I sweet-talked the Ups and the Veeps into bankrolling a little bear-bagging expedition for Image Team, under the excuse of “departmental bonding.” They love teamwork, those Ups and Veeps. Teamwork is their mantra. In fact the senior partners fly to Thailand together each January for three weeks, to do coke and fuck hookers, as a team, and to strategize the future of the firm. That’s how they bond. It’s said that when a group of really rich men fuck the same hooker, it breaks down the masculine neuroses that prevent communication between them, and allows them to think and act as one, or some such faggitude. All I know is, this time next year I’m going to be on
that
team-building expedition and not this one. Because the Ups love me, and the Veeps are starting to hear good things about me, and when I plant a big black bearskin in the inner lounge — or maybe in the executive john, if it wouldn’t get peed on — and when they see me sporting my new bionic foot, and I tell them the story of how I bagged that big one for the firm, well, that’s going to make an impression that’s just
huge
.