Super Born: Seduction of Being (20 page)

He simply ignored me, and pointed to the chubby
guy with glasses beside me, as if I had not been his choice in the
first place.

“
Have you made any attempts to
communicate with the B.I.B. over her possible involvement in the
beer truck incidents?” the guy beside me drawled out
slowly.

“
There has been no attempt to
contact her at this point,” he answered, as if a sensitive nerve
had been hit.

There was uproar from all over the room. “Why
don’t you just ask her? Couldn’t this be resolved easily by
talking?” I have to admit I was one of them.

“
How do you contact someone who does
not want to communicate?” said the mayor. Beads of sweat had formed
on his forehead, and he held up his arms—it was becoming obvious
that the reporter revolt had caused the mayor to lose his
control.

“
You all know the lengths I have
gone through to communicate with that woman, the B.I.B.,” he said,
looking squarely at the audience but pointing his finger to the
side. “I don’t have to remind you of the newspaper ads and the
plans we made for the Searchlight Event. Heaven knows how I have
tried to bring that woman to the table, and every time, she’s just
screwed me over.

“
Whenever I’ve tried, did I get to
speak with her? No. I’ll tell you what I get—crashing cars and
train wrecks, and let’s not forget the planes…the goddamned planes.
They’re crashing and crashing. And I’m just waiting like an asshole
for someone who never shows…they just kept crashing….then the FAA’s
got my ass!” At that point, Edwards, the mayor’s assistant,
gestured to two large men in the wings, who came out and escorted
the mayor off the stage, still babbling.

Edwards stepped to the podium and introduced
Dr. Jones. “Perhaps questions about the B.I.B. could be better
answered by the mayor’s expert on the subject.”

Jones rose and took over the podium. He pointed
to a female reporter in the back of the hall.

“
Dr. Jones, can you answer the
question about communications with the B.I.B.?”

“
Certainly, I can try. We have, for
some time now, been attempting to locate and communicate with the
B.I.B. I began this process even before I joined the mayor’s staff.
We feel that, with time, we can accomplish this.”

“
Do you have any idea who she is?”
yelled out a reporter tired of waiting to be called
upon.

“
We have little to go on beside the
Skelly’s photo, which we believe is genuine. From this she appears
to be a female, early thirties in age, about five-foot-five to
five-foot-seven inches in height, blond hair, and very piercing
hazel eyes that seem to glow when she smiles.” You could tell he
was drifting away, describing his love and not just the B.I.B. “But
with the extensive costume, it has been impossible to determine
precisely who she is.”

“
You have no leads, then?” shouted a
man in the front.

“
Oh, no, I did not say that. We have
been working on a very scientific formula to determine her
identity. We expect to find her…I certainly expect to find her,” he
said, becoming more animated. “And when I do, I am confident that
all will be just fine and that she will help our city.”

A sarcastic middle-aged reporter held up a
blown-up picture of the day care center with the beer truck that
had flattened the swing set. “Is this what you mean by ‘just fine,’
letting this animal run above the law, endangering our
children?”

Jones stammered something no one could
hear.

“
We don’t need to ‘communicate’; we
need to arrest her, and now, before someone gets hurt! Do you want
your child under that truck, Dr. Jones?” the middle-aged reporter
continued. “Do you?”

Dr. Jones started mumbling in an Indian
dialect, seemly enraged by the idea of the B.I.B. being anything
but his perfect discovery.

“
Believe me!” he said, finally.
“Believe me, my friends, we have nothing to fear from the
B.I.B.!…settle yourselves! Once under my control, she will be the
perfect public servant!” Then he began mumbling again and sweating
profusely. He loosened his tie and then waved his arms from over
his head down toward his feet. “Calm yourselves, she is perfect; a
perfect being! Not like you assholes!” Clearly overheated, he
loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top couple buttons of his
shirt, revealing a B.I.B. Miner’s Lite T-shirt.

Reporters in the first couple rows began to
laugh and point.

“
What are you looking at?
You…you…idiots!” was Jones’s response. “We have new methods at our
disposal, and soon we will communicate with the B.I.B. directly.”
No one was listening anymore.

Finally, to get everyone’s attention, he ripped
open his jacket and shirt to reveal his Miner’s Lite/B.I.B.
T-shirt, now proud of it, and began shouting in the same dialect.
Again, Edwards gestured to the two men who escorted Dr. Jones off
the stage. I felt sorry for the sap. At the same time, though, I
couldn't help but wonder what he'd been going on about concerning
these new methods. Clearly, Jones thought he could control the
B.I.B. How?

From the other side of the stage came a very
large man wearing an expensive suit. He introduced himself as Vito
and declared that the news conference was now over. I noticed that
one of the men who had escorted Jones offstage had two Miner’s Lite
bottles in the side pocket of his jacket.

“
With the embargo on, where’d you
get the Miner’s Lite?” I shouted, as the crowd around me buzzed
with the chaos surrounding the end of the meeting.

“
Hey, where’d you get the Miner’s
Lite?” I screamed again.

The man dropped his hand to cover the pocket
where I’d seen the beer.

“
That guy’s got Miner’s Lite in his
pocket! With an embargo on! Or is the embargo just for common
a-holes like us?”

From the stage Vito pointed his sapling-sized
finger at me. “Hey, buddy, you just made the list.”

Another voice yelled, “Where’d you get the
Miner’s?” And then another and another joined the
outcry.

Vito just turned and walked off the stage
toward a set of doors, ignoring us all, but there was a Miner’s
Lite in his back pocket as well.

I raised my fist, shook it defiantly, and
yelled at the top of my lungs, “Hazel eyes, my ass!”

* * *

The old prune sat looking at me like a cat with
a mouse trapped in a corner, or an old woman who’d just had a good
BM. I couldn’t tell which. She rose up and began to creak her way
around me as I sat in the hot seat in front of her desk.

My day just kept getting better. After my
return flight from Vegas the night before, I had arrived to see all
the news about beer trucks falling from the sky, a Miner’s Lite
embargo, and the general public outcry to ‘burn the B.I.B.’. Yeah,
right, like I would waste a beer truck—one of my favorite public
servants—just for shits and giggles. I decided they wanted me to
come out and defend myself, so I didn’t.

After getting all that cheery B.I.B.
news and engaging in a little mother/daughter tiff with Paige, I’d
hurried into work with an armful of files I had taken home to
finish. (Took me five minutes, but don’t tell them that. I would
spoil my illusion of diligence.) I had parked in the closest spot
to the building’s entrance to save time, dropped off the files,
then returned to move my car to the “Associates Parking Area.”
Unfortunately for me, when I returned I found my path blocked by
the old prune’s equally old car, built for her by Henry Ford
personally, no doubt. Apparently it was her parking spot I had used
for what…two minutes? So
voilà! Here I was
again in the hot seat in the old prune’s office, once again, for
parking in an unauthorized area…blasphemer!

She looked down at me with those squinty
eyes—and was that moth balls I smelled? “Sooo, here we are again.
You just can’t seem to learn, can you?”

I began to stammer a defense and she waved it
off with the arc of a bony finger.

“
There is no defense for you now! I
caught you red handed. I know,” she said moving away from me, “that
you’re sorry…You’re sorry you got caught!”

“
It was just a second and it was
because I had taken so much work home!”

“
Tut, tut, tut! I have had that
parking space for ten point seven years, and in that time, no one
has dared park there. But you…you’re special! Aren’t you? You think
you can fly through the air and walk on water!”
(
Yes I can,
I
thought.
With heels on.)
“Who do you think you are, that ‘bib’ woman who
runs, gallivanting all over town?”

There it was, again, ‘bib.’ It made my skin
crawl to be referred to that way. I felt my hands involuntarily
reaching out for her neck as she turned away—a quick snap and it
would be over in a second. “It’s B.I.B. Her name is the B.I.B., not
‘bib’,” I told her through tightly strained lips, attempting to
regain control of my arms.

“
What?” The old prune seemed shocked
that I had spoken. “Fiddlesticks! I don’t give a flaming rat’s ass
what you call that loser showoff criminal! It’s b-i-b and that
spells ‘bib’ in every dictionary I’ve ever seen.” (She probably saw
the first one—you know, the one they carved in stone.)

It took a heroic effort to keep my hands off of
her neck and get them back to my sides, still quaking with violent
desire.

She reached over her desk with a grunt of
effort and picked up a piece of paper, which she handed to me.
“This is to give you notice that I am formally writing you up for
unauthorized parking. This is your second write up. One more, and
that’s where you’re going,” she said pointing at the door. “You
understand?”

“
Yes.”

“
Good! Then we understand each
other.” She looked me over. Apparently there was something else she
didn’t like. “What is it with you? You are always wearing something
black. I will have to check our dress code on that. There must be
something. Now get back to work and prove me wrong about
you.”

I stood up and left. Part of me was
relieved to almost have been fired and the other half began to
think about how bad the job market in Scranton was these days. I
glanced back at the old prune as she hunched over a small trash
basket and dug around with a pencil for something. Then I imagined
her squashed down into the trash basket with just her pruney face
showing as she continued to speak, “I’ve been in the trash basket
for three point six minutes now…” She sensed my gaze, or maybe it
was my hands about to crush her, and turned to give me a sour look.
Of course, I gave her a big warm smile and again scooted through
the door. In my head, I repeated the word
paycheck
over and over.

Chapter 16

We Consider New
Possibilities

For me, the news conference was a frustration
and a disappointment. It caused me to reconsider and take inventory
of the things going on in my life. I realized I’d been spoiled by
the rapid changes in the last few months. I thought everything had
to just keep going up and up from here. Listening to myself say
that now, I can see how deluded I’d been by a little taste of
success. Being saved by the B.I.B. on B.I.B. rescue wasn’t the same
as in reality.

I found myself drifting off into thoughts of
her several times a day. At night while I waited to fall asleep, I
would replay the time I had been so close to her at O’Malley’s and
imagine it turning out differently, the two of us chatting and
laughing together…Crap, was I pining again?

When I got home, I started to take inventory
just by noticing what was there. The apartment once strewn with
dirty T-shirts and jeans was now strewn with silk shirts, expensive
shoes, and underwear that had been worn only once. A new
large-screen TV stood where old reliable had once been. When I
checked the website, I now had a new site; and I was in for another
surprise. When I took the time to check the online store sales, the
advertising revenue, and the hit counts, the numbers were through
the roof—I had no idea how successful the site had become. So there
was a reason I was writing all those big checks to
Rebecca!

I had allowed myself to become
separated from the site, trusting in Rebecca, and being lazy. It
was like seeing it for the first time. It was a great-looking and
popular site. Some of the same idiots were still posting trash, but
ordinary people were adding their supportive comments. Everyone
wanted to believe, so today, most of the comments were those
refusing to believe the B.I.B. could have dropped beer trucks on us
or, if she had, it was her idea of a practical joke.
No one had been hurt
was
the catch phrase.

I took off my silk shirt and dress
pants, put on a B.I.B. T-shirt and jeans, popped the cap off of a
Miner’s Lite, the last one in the fridge, and began to write a blog
I had not updated for days. The theme was that the B.I.B. was
innocent of the truck drops and someone wanted her discredited. The
mob and the mayor seemed prime suspects—or could they be one in the
same? It started out mostly as an intuition based on what I had
seen at the news conference and the presence of Vito there,
who seemed to have become a permanent fixture in
the mayor’s office. but then inspiration hit and the blog became
quite convincing. Hell, even I believed myself.