Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (16 page)

A
FTER JIM DAVENPORT WAS FIRED
, he encountered difficulty finding consulting work. Most of the big consulting companies had hired each other and recommended downsizing. Martha took a hard look at the family’s financial situation and asked if she could give it a try.

Martha began interviewing and immediately landed a high-paying job at Consolidated Bank, which was aggressively hiring because they were critically understaffed due to recent layoffs.

But Jim never gave up. He kept lowering his salary expectations until he found a job on the night shift. Jim and Martha saw each other ten minutes each evening as they made the handoff.

Jim drove into work at sunset, went to his locker and put on his red apron. He pinned a plastic name tag to his pocket:
ROBERT
. They were still making his
JIM
tag, but regulations required him to wear something, so he used the tag left behind by an employee picked up on warrants from Tennessee. Jim’s favorite part of the new job was the cheerful co-workers who befriended him at Sam’s Club.

They began arriving shortly after Jim clocked in. There was Orville, a surviving member of Doolittle’s Raiders, and
Wilma, a former waitress from Tupelo who had pulled through three bad marriages with a gum-smacking, country-music outlook on life, and finally Satchel, who said he had pitched in the Negro Leagues, but nobody believed him.

“Hi, Robert,” said Orville.

“Hi, Orville. It’s Jim.”

Orville and Satchel reloaded price guns and pushed open the swinging “employees only” doors that led to the sales floor. Wilma arrived and slipped into an apron covered with enamel pins representing years of service at Sam’s Club, stock-car drivers and breeds of show dogs.

“Hi, Wilma.”

“Hi, Robert.”

“I’m Jim.”

Wilma climbed into the driver’s seat of a beeping forklift and burst through the swinging doors with a pallet of mustard jars the size of propane tanks.

Jim bent over and tied his shoes. The intercom came on: “Code Orange. Aisle one-twenty-three.”

Jim grabbed a mop and headed through the swinging doors.

“Jim!”

Jim turned. “Serge! Coleman!”

“What are you doing here?”

“New job,” said Jim. “And you?”

Serge pointed in his shopping cart at bottles of vitamins and herbal supplements.

“I’m on a diet, so I need essential minerals.”

“You look great,” said Jim. “You don’t need to diet.”

“I’m just doing it to prove I can. It’s easy to criticize others when you haven’t walked in their shoes…Check it out.” Serge opened a crumpled paper bag for Jim to see inside.

“Old clothes?”

“The most precise scales in town are at the Publix supermarkets. I wear the same outfit every day when I weigh myself so I can get a consistent reading.”

“Why is it all in the bag?”

“I just weighed the clothes on a digital scale at the post office so I can subtract it to get my naked weight. I can’t exactly go in the supermarket naked. Actually I can, but, well, you know…”

Jim looked concerned.

“I have to lose fifteen pounds,” said Serge. “Four days should about do it. Then it’s roast pork and plantains for a week! Can’t wait!”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” said Jim.

“You know my motto: Moderation in moderation. That’s what the vitamins are for. If you’re going to diet, then
diet.
No halfway stuff. It should be a Manhattan Project. If you’re doing it right, you should always feel like you’re about to pass out.” Serge began grabbing bottles out of the shopping cart. “This is ginseng and this is your chromium picolinate, and you’ve got your ginkgo biloba for memory, so I don’t forget to take all this stuff, and your St. John’s wort, which combats obsessive-compulsive behavior—”

“So you don’t go on extreme diets and vitamin binges?”

“Exactly.”

Coleman pointed at the rack under the shopping cart. “I got a fifty-pound sack of beer nuts.”

There was a crash.

Serge had passed out.

JIM AND MARTHA
discussed it at length. She loved the Suburban, but the payments were a budget-buster. Before work the next day, Jim headed back to Tampa Bay Motors.

Rocco Silvertone was waiting in a golf cart when Jim got out of the Suburban.

“What can I do you for?”

“I bought this here a couple weeks back,” said Jim. “There’s been a change in our financial picture. I need to trade it in to lower my payments.”

“I remember you,” said Rocco. “You’re the guy who wanted the total price—you didn’t want to tell me how much you could pay a month.”

Jim picked out another Aerostar with fifty thousand more miles than the one he had traded in. Rocco brought him into the finance office.

He typed up the contract. Jim inspected it and tapped a finger on the sheet. “What’s this number? This four hundred dollars?”

“Oh, that’s dealer prep. It’s standard.”

“That’s four hundred dollars more than the price you gave me.”

“So?”

“So it’s not the price you gave me.”

“That’s okay,” said Rocco. “It’s standard.”

Jim stared. Rocco forced a smile. He hated customers like Jim—the ones who could do math. Rocco motioned for Jim to take another look at the figure. “See? It’s preprinted on the form. There’s no problem.”

Jim continued staring.

“Look, if it will ease your mind…” said Rocco, getting up and walking to a file cabinet. He brought back a bunch of blank forms. “See? They all have four hundred dollars preprinted on them.”

“But they’re your forms.”

“Yeah?”

“You printed them.”

“Now you understand,” said Rocco, handing Jim a pen.

The head of the trade-in department walked in the office. He whispered in Rocco’s ear.

Rocco looked up at Jim. “Did you know the horn on your Suburban doesn’t work right?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” said Rocco. He began scratching out some numbers on the contract. “I can’t give you what we offered if the horn doesn’t work right. We’ll have to take off a couple hundred…Hey, where are you going?”

JIM WAS LATE
for work. He headed south on Dale Mabry Highway, stopping at a red light just before sunset. It was a Friday evening, and sexual expectations began to thicken across the city like a fog rolling in from the bay. Jim’s body shook from the car stereos. Tampa’s young adults in Galants, Mustangs, Corollas, Sentras, Supras and Wranglers. Most had something hanging from the rearview mirrors—compact discs, foreign flags, garter belts, big dice, Mardi Gras beads—to increase the likelihood of sex. Some had handcuffs hanging from the rearview to indicate the exotic brand of sex they were not getting.

Jim arrived at Sam’s Club and clocked in.

“Man, Jim. You look awful,” said Orville.

“Something bothering you?” asked Wilma.

“Don’t look back,” said Satchel. “Something may be gaining on ya.”

“Thanks, guys,” said Jim. “Just an off day.”

Wilma removed one of her enamel pins and stuck it on Jim’s pinless apron. “There. Feel better?”

Jim managed a sincere smile.

“Why don’t you join us tonight?” said Orville.

“Join you where?”

“The crime watch,” said Wilma. “This is our night. Every other Friday.”

“You don’t use guns, do you?”

“Oh no,” said Satchel. “Just walkie-talkies. We’re the eyes and ears of the police. It’s loads of fun.”

M
EANWHILE
,
BACK AT THE RANCH
, Coleman sat on the plaid couch with a beer in his hand.

Serge paced the living room. “This idleness is killing me! I’ve got to get out of here!” He went in the kitchen and checked the refrigerator—nothing he liked. He came back in the living room and resumed pacing. Coleman was still on the couch, facing the TV. Serge disappeared into his bedroom and changed his pants a few times, but nothing felt right. He marched into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator again. Still nothing.

Serge ran back in the living room. “Coleman! I can’t take it!”

Coleman wasn’t responsive, even for Coleman. He slouched into the loose couch cushions like gelatin.

“Coleman! What’s wrong with you!” Serge then noticed the open prescription bottle on the coffee table.

“You got into my schizo medicine!”

No answer.

Serge buzzed around the house for an hour, trying on more pants, looking at his matchbook collection with a magnifying glass, sprinting the length of the hallway making dunk shots with a nerf basketball: “And here comes Jordan
with the three-sixty, triple pump, over-the-shoulder, in-your-face, supergalactic mind-fucker! Eeeeee-yaaaaaaa!!!!!!”

Crash.

Coleman finally began to move as Serge climbed out of the Serge-shaped hole in the drywall.

“You okay?” said Coleman.

“Did I score?” asked Serge, shaking dust from his hair.

“I think so. I’m not sure. Those pills…”

“I know what you mean,” said Serge. “I hate taking that shit.”

“I thought they’d never wear off. That was fucked up!”

“Why would you do something so brainless?” said Serge.

“I got curious.”

“Learn a lesson?”

“And how! It was like I spent six hours staring at the

world through twelve inches of glass—a scary, unfamiliar land where my brain felt like molten plastic and my body refused to respond to the simplest command.”

“That’s why I stopped taking it.”

“Oh, I’m not complaining,” said Coleman. “I
liked
it.”

Serge joined Coleman on the couch. Coleman grabbed the remote control and clicked on
The New Dating Game.

“Weren’t we supposed to rob someone tonight?” asked Coleman.

“Supposed to, but we needed Sharon for a decoy,” said Serge. “She’s nowhere to be found, as usual!”

“Bachelor number three, if you could be any kind of cheese…”

“Cool,” said Coleman. “A night off.”

“I can’t stand the inactivity!”

“It’s not so bad,” said Coleman, balancing the beer on his stomach.

“I’m gonna explode if we don’t get out of here!” Serge leaped off the couch. “I have no choice but to call it!”

“Night Tour?” asked Coleman.

“Night Tour!” said Serge.

“Righteous.” Coleman climbed off the couch and rummaged through the fridge for a cold one for the road. “Will we be going by any place to eat?”

“I was thinking of Fat Guys.”

“That’s a buffet,” said Coleman. “I better smoke a joint in the car so I can get my money’s worth.”

“If you eat enough, theoretically you can actually start
making
money.”

“I’ll bring two joints.”

They jumped in the Barracuda, and Serge stuck a CD in the stereo and cranked it,
Spirit in the Sky.

“Where first?” asked Coleman.

“Dale Mabry Highway. Tampa’s spinal cord. We need to check the pulse of the night.” They passed steak houses, lube shops, fern bars.

“I love main drags,” said Serge. “They’re so egalitarian. Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, U.S. 41 in Naples, A1A in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Who’s Dale Mabry, anyway?” asked Coleman.

“The most uttered name in Tampa, and maybe five people know who he was—local real estate man before he left to fight in World War One and later died in a 1922 blimp crash in Norfolk, Virginia.”

Coleman pointed out the window. “Sure has a lot of strip clubs.”

“We’re known far and wide. You mention to any guy in America that you’re from Tampa and he’ll go, ‘Oh, the Mons Venus.’ It’s our cash crop.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons: quality and quantity. End of story. The clubs popped up like toadstools over the last couple decades because of city-council neglect. Now the mayor’s trying to undo the damage through ruthless fiat. He just declared The War on Titty Bars.”

“Sounds like another Vietnam,” said Coleman. “Why now?”

“It’s sweeps week. The man’s no media fool. Every TV station in town has a giant video library of stock footage taken at discreet angles of strippers swinging around those poles. They’re just drooling for an excuse to put that footage on the air under the pretext of being shocked and offended by the footage.”

“This could hit us in the wallet,” said Coleman. “Sharon buys a lot of our groceries with those lap dances.”

“I know,” said Serge. “That was the part of our portfolio I was counting on to keep us recession-proof. If the mayor succeeds, we may be forced to lower our moral code and start pimping Sharon as a Hooters waitress.”

“What are his chances?”

“Damn good. He laid the groundwork last week by gathering a hundred of the city’s most prominent clergy to view police videos that revealed exactly what kind of Sodom and Gomorrah we’ve become.”

“Sharon told me she was in one of the videos.”

“She was. It showed her sitting on stage with her legs apart, and some lucky gentleman who had paid ten dollars was working a remote control box, driving a Tonka truck with a dildo taped to the roof. The clergy was so horrified that they had to move the next day’s viewing to a larger auditorium.”

“Fat Guys is coming up,” said Coleman. “Left lane.”

Serge turned into the restaurant parking lot. They went inside and grabbed trays. Coleman was about to pick up an all-you-can-eat plate when Serge grabbed his arm. “The one-trip bowl is a better value.”

“But the bowl is too small,” said Coleman.

“And that’s where they think they’ve got you, but don’t fall into the trap.” Serge reached for a bunch of celery sticks. “What you have to do is make yourself a bigger bowl. Watch carefully. First, you make a wrap-around cantilevered balcony with the celery. Then you mortar it in place with potato salad and anchor it all with the heavy stuff, pickles and hardboiled eggs.”

“Wow, now the bowl’s huge.”

“And perfectly legal.”

“Where’d you learn that?”

“Watching the college kids. They’re way out ahead in these areas.”

Serge and Coleman slid their trays down the line until they got to the cashier. She stared at Coleman’s tray an unusually long time, then at Coleman, then made change.

They picked up their trays and headed for a table.

“Why was she looking at me like that?” asked Coleman.

“Respect.”

“Should I ask her out?”

“Absolutely. But be patient. You want to give a great first impression like that time to build in her mind.”

They sat down at a table surrounded by families. Coleman looked at Serge’s plate. Baked potato, french fries, potato soup, potato pancakes, ravioli and rigatoni.

“How’s the diet coming?”

“Can’t tell yet,” said Serge.

“What are you on, the no-starch diet?”

“I was,” said Serge. “But it wasn’t working. Now I’m on the
all
-starch diet.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That’s because nobody’s done it before. Nobody’s ever
dared.
”

“You’re sort of like a pioneer?”

“I just want to participate in my times,” said Serge, hammering the bottom of a ketchup bottle for the fries. “I’m riding the mood of my country.”

“I thought it was about losing weight.”

“The masses out there are lost,” said Serge. “They’re looking for something, anything. Right now they’re following people who eat a bunch of crazy stuff. Like that doctor who came up with the all-protein diet. What kind of bullshit is that? Bacon and eggs and pork and hamburgers. The guy puts out a book that says eat all the wrong stuff, and now he’s so rich he can go back to eating healthy.”

“I think I’ve heard of that diet,” said Coleman.

“I think you’re
on
it.”

Coleman picked up a buffalo wing. “Wow, I never thought of myself as a health nut.”

“That’s why you have to watch the news, to know where you stand at all times.”

Coleman reached for one of Serge’s french fries. Serge slapped his hand.

“Ouch!”

Serge pointed at the fries. “These have been counted. I’m taking notes.”

“Notes?”

“If the diet works, they’ll give me a book deal.”

“They give you a book for eating fries?”

Serge speared a ravioli. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”

“That sounds crazy,” said Coleman.

“I don’t make the rules. I just follow ’em…Finish up. We’ll hit the bookstore across the street. It’ll help explain a lot of this.”

They left their car at the restaurant and darted through traffic and into the giant new bookstore in town, Barnes & Borders.

“What do you think?”

Coleman looked concerned. “Everyone’s sitting around reading. Why don’t the store people get mad?”

“Something else that’s changed,” said Serge. “Nobody yells, ‘What do you think this is, a library?’ Now, you’re
supposed
to sit and read. This is what I’ve been talking about. Everything’s now the opposite. You weren’t supposed to eat meat. Now, you are. You’re supposed to read the magazines. Rob Lowe’s working again…”

“Who can keep it all straight?” asked Coleman.

“It’s nerve-racking, I tell you. No wonder people are going back to religion.”

Serge led Coleman over to the health section and the display of books at the end of an aisle.
The Sugar-Busters Diet, The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet, Ten Days to a New You, Rediscover the Old You, Yoga a Go-Go, Natural Remedies That Can Kill You, Burn Fat Through Exercise, Prescription for Peak Performance, The Peak Performance Myth, Declare War on Love Handles, Surrender to Success, The Low-Expectations Revolution, Calcium Crackdown, Strong Colon for Public Speakers, Take a Pass on Bypass, Cooking Right 4 Unwanted Guests, The Complete Menopause Vacation Planner, Eat All You Want and Ignore Everyone, Time
Out for a Breakdown, 101 Desserts for Multiple Personalities
and
Eliminate Stress Through Hysterical Screaming.

“Look at how these are shelved. What a mess!” Serge began aligning books.

A customer mistook him for an employee.

“Can you help me find the self-help books?”

“No.”

Serge and Coleman went over to the coffee shop. They grabbed magazines and a table by the window.

“This is a pretty nice setup,” said Coleman.

“It’s the new café society,” said Serge. “Just like Paris.”

Serge read
The New Republic
, and Coleman flipped a
High Times
open to a hotel-rating guide for a psilocybin tour of the Yucatán.

Serge stood up. “I need some coffee.”

He went to the counter. A waif with a pierced tongue greeted him. “Mmgtgh skjhje?”

“What?”

“Mmgtgh skjhje?”

“What? I can’t understand you…Holy God! You’ve got a piece of metal rammed through your tongue! Don’t move—I’ll get help!…”

The café manager stepped up. “Everything’s fine. Can I get you something?”

Serge stared at the first woman a moment, then turned to the manager: “Coffee.”

“Latte? Mocha? Café con leche?”

“Coffee.”

“Chicory? Raspberry espresso? Frappuccino?”

“Coffee.”

“Decaf almondine? Cinnamon Explosion?…”

“Never mind.”

He walked back to the table.

“What the matter?” asked Coleman.

“They don’t have any coffee. Let’s get out of here.”

They headed south through the Tampa night again, grooving on the moment. Traffic raced by on both sides. Sports cars, motorcycles, pizza-delivery trucks. Serge and Coleman smiled. This was their town. Serge began tapping the steering wheel and singing:
“Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?…”

Coleman:
“Hookin’ up words and phrases and clauses…”

Serge made a left into a grid-street neighborhood. It was a dark road, and he slowed the Barracuda to a crawl. The street was empty. He rolled down his window.

“You know what job I want?” said Coleman, pulling a joint from behind his ear and lighting it.

“I don’t know. Guidance counselor?” Serge leaned across Coleman’s lap and opened the glove compartment. He dug out a garage-door opener.

“You know how all those soul bands back in the seventies had some guy who would scream,
‘Say what?’
”

Serge rolled by a house and pointed the remote control out his window and pressed the button. Nothing happened.

“That’s the job I want,” said Coleman. He took a double-toke and held it.

“What job is that?” asked Serge. He rolled by the next house and pressed the button again. Still nothing.

“I want the job of the guy who goes,
‘Say what?’
”

“You’re uniquely qualified,” said Serge. He pointed the remote control and pressed again. Nothing.

Coleman exhaled a hit. “Check it out:
Say what?
”

Serge kept clicking the remote control without result.

“Say what?”

Serge looked both ways as he crossed a well-lit intersection.

“Say what?”

They continued into the darkness of the grid street on the other side.

“Say what?”

“Now it’s annoying.” Serge clicked the remote again.

“Sorry,” said Coleman. He thought a second, took a hit. “If I can’t get that job, I want the job of that tiny little fucker who screams on Sly and the Family Stone.”

“I know his work,” said Serge, clicking the remote again.

“I think there are several of ’em,” said Coleman. “I’ve heard the same vocals on Kool and the Gang and the Edgar Winter Group, to name but a few.”

“A cottage industry of James Brown midgets.”

“Check this out:
‘Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’
”

“Again, impressive.”

Coleman grinned and nodded and took another hit. “That’s why I really never worry about being unemployed. If push comes to shove, I always have that.”