Republican Party Reptile(26)

I was late for work for sure by now. The subway was running way behind schedule, and I had to help the engineer for a while when we ran across an armored train. It must have been from over on the IND line. Anyway, it was shooting up the 34th Street station. Fortunately I’d planted some radio-detonated Claymore mines under the litter baskets in that station just a week back. And I had the transmitter in my briefcase. It’s great; it doubles as a digital travel clock. The mines killed all the people on the platform and brought a big section of the tunnel roof down on those guys from the IND too.

Well, by the time I blasted my way through the reception area and raped my secretary and piled up the desk and some chairs to barricade myself in my office, the “old man” was really fuming. He was over on the roof of the building across the street with about twenty guys from accounting, and all of them had M-16s and tear-gas-grenade launchers. He was giving me a real talking-to over the bullhorn, telling me to come out with my hands up or forget about that raise. I got my gas mask on and pulled the Browning automatic rifle out from behind the file cabinet and gave him a little argument. But I couldn’t keep that up for long. I had to take some calls and dictate a bunch of letters and it was a real pain in the ass giving dictation to a secretary who was coughing and gagging from the CS gas and threatening a sexual-harassment suit.

Then I had the Peterson contract to straighten out. They manufacture designer jeans, and what a bunch of hard-nosed sons of bitches they are. Their CEO had been on the horn to me all week threatening to nuke our Tarrytown office if he didn’t see some action soon. Here was a client who was definitely hanging by a thread. And I knew if that Peterson thing fell through my ass would be in deep shit.

I didn’t have time to go out for lunch, so I just had a deli owner and his family killed and some sandwiches sent up. I was working like a bear and by 3:00 I was pretty sure I had all my ducks in a row, and then wouldn’t you know it—fifteen megatons right in the parking lot of our suburban branch office. You probably read about it in the papers. It broke half the windows in Manhattan, and I’ll bet it takes weeks to decontaminate all the radioactive fallout shit all over the place. And that wasn’t the worst of it by any means. Right after Tarrytown goes up in a mushroom cloud and the Peterson account goes with it, the boss finally breaks through my office wall with a Bangalor torpedo and tells me he’s promoted young Donovan over my head to group vice-president. That means I’ll have to go all the way out to Donovan’s house in Darien and poison his kids. Well, that did it. I decided to toss a Molotov cocktail into the mailroom and knock off early.

A couple of the guys and I took our secretaries down to Clark’s for a few drinks, raped the girls again, and then gut-shot one of the waiters and bet on how long it would take him to die. I guess I had a few more than I meant to because I was really bushed. So I thought I’d just have a burger in the back room. I wanted to carve it right out of the cow myself but the fucker wouldn’t hold still. Finally I had to hit it with a tranq gun. Then the guys and I tried to take some det cord and wrap it around the cow’s ass and make chopped steak like that. But the det cord gave the whole thing a really rotten taste. After that I just said fuck dinner and had a couple more drinks and decided to go back to my place and spend a peaceful night at home for a change.

It was still raining outside and I had to call in an air strike to get a taxi. One of the A-IE Sky raiders finally spotted a Checker on Park Avenue and strafed the hack until he chased it over to me. I held the MPK on the driver all the way back to my place and shot up his gas tank for a tip. Then the doorman tried to kill me again and I had to toss a fragmentation grenade at this lady in the lobby to keep her dog from jumping up on me. So I ended up outside waiting around in the rain while one of the building porters cleaned her guts off the elevator door, and then what the fuck do you think I saw? A goddam parking ticket on my car! Jesus, I was pissed. I mean I’m sure it was one of those Jewish holidays when the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations are supposed to be suspended. I mean I’m pretty sure all the Jews aren’t killed yet. I would have complained to a cop if he hadn’t shot first. And then when I finally did get inside, fucking Carson was on vacation again and that asshole Letterman was hosting The Tonight Show. Man, it was just one of those days.





Man and

Transportation





Ferrari Refutes the

Decline of the

West





We made it from Atlanta to Dallas in twelve and a half hours. But that was because we were just cruising, you know, taking in the scenery and enjoying the local color. Besides, we got stuck in bumper-to-bumper camper traffic all the way to Birmingham. Some big collegiate sports event was under way—the University of South Carolina versus Alabama’s Crimson Tide in a varsity dogfight, to judge by the fans. No, no, I won’t make fun of those good old boys in their Winnebagos driving since dawn with their good old families all the way from Columbia and Charleston and Beaufort just to root for the team of their choice. No, I won’t crack wise about the denizens of that fair corner of the free world, because I feel too good about western civilization. And the reason I feel too good about western civilization is that there I was a living, breathing part of it, in the best damn car I’ve ever driven, smack in the middle of the best damn country there’s ever been on earth. And, also, because cutting in and out of those giant travel homes at a hundred miles an hour is more fun than a Marseilles shore leave, and hardly anybody riding in them threw beer cans at us either. Zoom, zoom, zip, zip, I couldn’t have been happier if I’d had a sack full of Iranian radicals to drag behind me.