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Hall & Oates in the Bed of My Pickup
by Michael Smith
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 illustration by Jose Angel
I didn't want this job.
Hell, it's contracting and you sit around hoping you'll get paid the first paycheck in 3 weeks, if you're lucky.
But I took it anyways. I was out of a job for popping positive for alcohol one day that I spent playing pool in the break-room for seven straight hours at my old job. But I had a house, credit cards, debt up the ass, I needed work, I was so broke.
There's worse you can end up doing.
But contracting is fun. You meet the most interesting people. People who can't hold down real jobs. People jaded on all the talent they have and waste it on purpose in companies that have bosses or managers that feel they own it all. They fuck off all day and laugh. No one calls security and walks you out if you flaunt it in the machine's face.
So now I work downtown in a non-descript building for a major corporation that wants to transfer all their servers from California to downtown Phoenix. I have a parking pass for the bank one parking lot. I watch the building on 1st and Monroe that stretches up higher than all the heat and dirt and homeless and bullshit, with one window open in the penthouse that faces east. I go to lunch with Shawn and we sing, ?there goes batman in his house letting out all the A/C!And we spend our measly miserable 30-minute break looking into that window thinking, I want that place.
Shawn.
He's gay.
But he's over the top gay at work because it's IBM. Christ I don't go to work and say how good of a blowjob she gave me last night! But it's his rebellion. When people say to him, did you configure the p2p? He goes, pee-to-pee, hell, I peed all over that server, close the ticket! And god my back hurts from my ex last night, he raped the hell out of it!
We take these smoke breaks and walk to the bank one and past all the deli?s, and copper buses, and the screaming preachers on all the corners battling, and I tell him all the time to tone it down, that he's making all the Phobe's weirded out.
And I ask him how he can eat all these jalapeños and cheese poppers by the ton, with a wide-open ass at night, and then without shitting his pants for IBM during the day.
It's magic, he says.
Then I kiss him.
Last night I had a dream that Hall and Oates were sleeping naked in the bed of my truck when I walked outside at 5am to go to work. I had to kick them out. And the whole time they sang, you're a player hater, you are a part of the machine.
I just gripped tighter on my company issued laptop bag and asked them politely to get out of the truck so I could get to work on time. Time is time and time is money and money is tight.
They scream, that's hot, your private eye! and then they ran through the townhouse greenbelt naked and laughing, holding hands skipping.
I got in my beat up truck and ran down the US60, past the I-10, to the I-17, and I spent the rest of my life staring at a monitor, developing carpel tunnel in my right hand. There is the metaphor, my friends. Because there goes my sex life if my jalapeño-smelling right hand seizes up.
:: contact Michael Smith :: incognitolounge@hotmail.com
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