Odd with a T - Story Section

Immediate Gratification Boy

Our excitable engineer bangs on the steering wheel as a car slowly passes in front of him. Look at this! Not even out of the driveway yet and some jackass has delayed the day. Sure he'll have to wait for less than three seconds, but he goes for the mobile phone – better check the messages, Detroit's been at work for two hours already. He stuffs the earpiece in place while turning right.

The side street takes him away from his apartment where his hot wife buzzes around upstairs. She's smiling and very satisfied with herself after their "zeeb" (a nickname they've created for morning sex). He turns right on Colorado. It's January 2nd and the sidewalks are clean and wet. Yesterday, garbage from the Rose Bowl Parade had covered half the street. Two full lanes of garbage. Yet, as he took his morning walk around five-thirty this morning, it was all gone. The freshly cleaned streets helped him clear his head even more than normal. Plus, there were all the glorious thoughts of the New Year. The opportunities of starting fresh excited him, regardless of whether he still has his old life to deal with.

There's a bastard parked in the intersection of Allen unwilling to turn left. No signal or anything, just a beat-up conversion van with a brake light out watching huge gaps in traffic go by. The light turns red and the piece of shit finally drives off, unaware of the discomfort caused by delay that he has inflicted on humanity.

Our main character waits for the next green. The automated phone voice in the earpiece begins. And so does the aching. His frustration is instantaneous. The thought that he has called work and spent even more of his day thinking about that shit. It's too much. He wonders what's wrong with him. He got laid twenty minutes ago and he's already bitchy.

"You have … six new messages."

He hates his job so badly he physically aches. Most of the pain is in the center of his spine, behind his heart, the rest settles in his forearms and calves.

"You have … seventeen saved messages."

His stomach churns and he begins to hope off a migraine. Not on the first day back.

"Seventeen saved messages." He says to no one. Usually the voicemail voice doesn't get that far. He has the buttons memorized and pushes them before the statistics and options are given. He had been distracted by the homeless guy with the dog and bicycle on top of his loaded shopping cart crossing the street in front of him. He's the largest of the street people in the neighborhood. Barrel-shaped, with a healthy head of gray hair, unkempt, of course. The dog is in pretty good shape, too, even if it spends most of its time on top of a shopping cart full of an old crazy dude's life possessions.

Wow. Six messages. And the day hasn't even started yet. Technically, the year hasn't started yet in California. He's still twelve miles from the building. The automotive industry has been shut down since before Christmas. The first day back is going to be a fun one. His thoughts turn to his cubicle. He hasn't forgotten any of it. The gray walls, the stained red chair, the plant across the hall. He can picture the files on his computer, the piles of paper on his desk, the test specs and quality documents, the presentations printed in color for the Sales V.P. All the drinking, all the late-night parties over the break, and he still knows what his messages are going to be. It's a fucking nightmare.

The shopping cart bangs up onto the curb. The dog doesn't make a sound, barely lifts its head. The light turns green and our unhappy engineer sneaks left through the first spot wide enough for his car, a white four-door sedan. It's a sleeper - one of the quickest cars of its size in his price range, though nobody would guess it from the generic looks. This discrete vehicle is how he's able to drive at the speed of light at all times of day without fear of detection. He is wearing a French blue shirt, with a handsome tie. He understands what's required of him to look the part of upstanding citizen and upwardly mobile white-collar worker. He tears up the street past more apartments, around a bus, to another red light.

'Great start to the new millennium,' he thinks, 'I'm racing to red lights.'

The first message is unimportant. One of the sales guys in the Dearborn office needs something. He smirks. The second message is from the same guy, funnier this time. "Jesus, Man! I'm busier than a one-legged man in a shit-kicking contest. Welcome back. Okay, here's where we're at..." The light turns and he takes off toward the freeway. "It looks like we really got the green weinie on this new Ford spec. Give me a call."

The next light is red but he barely notices as he drifts right, around a corner, across a couple lanes and up the two-ten ramp into the sun. Second gear takes him to forty-five, third to sixty, he shifts from fourth to fifth rapidly and enters the freeway at eight-five between a pair of Corollas, around a semi, and into the third lane. He flips the visor down and frowns at the traffic slowing at Rosemead. The clouds are breaking over the mountains. The green winter vegetation shines in the spotlights of sun. It's one of his favorite sights, not just in California, but ever. Despite telling himself repeatedly when he first moved that he would never be one of the jaded residents who doesn't look at the mountains, he doesn't see the mountains. He only sees the cars all around him.

Next message. Shit, the Lear guy is looking for him. Fucking Canadian even says 'eh' in his messages. How many days will he have to buy for the Test Engineer this time? How many more excuses will the guy have this year? Engineering, as it turns out, means spending most of your time telling one person why another person doesn't have their job done and the rest of it waiting for someone else to finish their job so you can continue with yours. It didn't use to be this way for him. He used to be the low-level grunt, the peon engineer. He longs for those days when he was responsible for doing actual work, but he's had too many promotions and now his responsibility is to create presentations, go to meetings, send emails, and make phones calls to discuss the scope of the projects and their estimated completion dates.

His car squirts between lanes and through the clog. The freeway will now be clear until Santa Anita where the freeway climbs a small hill near the horse track – clear for Los Angeles standards, that is. He blazes along at ninety-five. Everything is smooth. He flows across lanes and around trains of "follower" cars. He has developed a driving philosophy for freeway traffic . He chooses specific lanes for each section of freeway he travels regularly depending on the entrance and exit ramps and the traffic ripples caused by them, as well as the natural obstructions like hills and corners. Follower cars are the ones driven by people not smart enough to find their own way, people who don't mind driving behind some asshole on a cell phone who hits their brakes every once in a while for no reason. He slides between a utility truck and a station wagon, interfering with no one, just finding room.

Since he's in his element here, traveling at high speed on an interstate, let's describe him: Well dressed, as I said, down to some really sharp shoes. He's five-ten and around a hundred and eighty pounds, maybe one eighty-five after the holidays. Some say he's a good-looking kid. He's in his late twenties, married. It's his second; believes in the institution so much he's checked himself in twice. He has curly brown hair. To describe it more wouldn't be worth one's time. His head is like an etch-a-sketch. His hair grows out in waves, then it curls in different directions until his girlfriend, fiancé, or wife (the female he's living with) shaves it off and the whole process starts again. It's been this way for years. It's rarely the same from month to month, and I personally think it's a sign of a deep unhappiness that even he isn't fully aware of as he smiles to convince everyone he's a happy guy. His eyes are deep-sunken, deep green, and deep. You're looking at his soul when you're in conversation with him. For that, he's well respected. He's also well liked; refuses to take life too seriously, even though he hates his career and the lifestyle he's buried in because of it. He's no different than any other new-breed zero, every day is a payment to someone. He and his wife are getting out of debt, but not soon enough. Nothing is ever soon enough for him. He practices patience, though he doesn't believe in it. He prefers forethought and blames his parents' generation, "the fucking whiney boomers", for killing it off in their desire to do better than the generation before them. It never occurred to them that doing better might mean destroying the family structure of America and leave the generations after them successful and painfully lonely.

He's passed Santa Anita and Huntington, still pondering the Canadian's thorough questions. The guy is a good engineer. Unfortunately, our engineer can not find the time to do all the things the asked of him, regardless of whether they're necessary or not. So, he pushes the button and listens to the next message. His eyebrows indicate he's perplexed – they're good for reading his thoughts. The fourth message is from the president and acting CEO of the company. Why would Ralph want to meet with him? The bastards want to force him deeper into middle management, trick him into more responsibility to earn the salary he currently deserves. He'd heard about this at a happy hour in October. What is the point of moving up the corporate ladder if you're still every rung? He knows The Board has decreed no new hires. The high-tech company that brought our Iowa-born, Minnesota-educated engineer from Detroit to California was, once again, out of money. The needle on the dash hits one hundred. Soul Coughing's stand-up bass rattles the door panels; all six German cylinders beat in perfect rhythm.

The last two messages are both hang-ups. And he knew it before he listened to them. Probably a couple repeats that didn't want to admit how frantic they were to talk to him. He's turned into the go-to guy. He'll either get it done or calm them down enough to deal with it on their own. A good work ethic is in his blood, though the little things have a tendency to irritate him. He can deal with his industry's "catastrophic" failures, they have solutions, but a pair of useless messages like that … fuck those people. His grandfathers, both farmers, never wasted time on messages with no message, meetings to discuss meetings, design reviews on a frozen (i.e. you can't change it, anyway, even if it's a mess) design. He chuckles. 'Welcome to the New Millenium where a third of your messages are about nothing.'

The messages are forgotten and the phone is flipped into the passenger seat. It bounces around and lands between the seat back and his black leather bag. Our boy is singing now. He finds it a healthy way to shift his brain away from shitty thoughts, even if he has no sense of melody whatsoever. The music helps him cling to the moment at hand. It's been his one true friend throughout his life. [insert appropriate Soul Coughing, or M Doughty lyrics]

Near the six-oh-five everyone on the freeway jams their head up their collective ass. Traffic grinds to below sixty as he passes Mountain Ave. He slams the car into fourth and rockets into an open lane, past a clusterfuck of people. The phone rings as he chastises himself for swearing so much. God-damned job. There goes the first half-assed resolution. They will all have fallen by the end of the week; that's part prediction and part certainty. It's his wife on the phone. He doesn't need caller ID or a special ringtone. She wants to say something encouraging, tell him she loves him, but hearing her voice with ten hours of work in front of him, ten more hours of his life sold off to finance companies who feast on kids fresh out of college with nothing – no, her sweet voice would tear his heart out this morning. She'll be mad, but he decides it's better to get yelled at for not picking up the phone than to try to fake being nice right now. Besides, he'll think of an excuse later. He relaxes his accelerator foot. It's part of the pre-work routine. He always drives slow, only five or ten over the limit, for the last couple miles. Delaying the inevitable.

After three rings the phone switches to voicemail and rests peacefully beside his bag. There isn't a work-related item in the bag, hasn't been for months. Inside the bag is his passion, what he really wants to do for a living. The bag holds his story, his evidence of existence. He's shackled to a job and a career he chose at eighteen during his senior year of high school, because he was good at math. It's an embarrassment. He has NEVER used math for his job, only common sense and computer-aided design. He could've been a carpenter and used math more regularly. But, you should have seen the list of mechanical engineer jobs they handed out during his visit to the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology, over 10,000 different jobs. He's done a bunch of them: Industrial Technician, Student Engineer, Process Engineer, Production Engineer, Liaison Engineer, Design Engineer, Test Engineer, Release Engineer, Product Engineer, Product Release Engineer, Applications Engineer, Senior Applications Engineer, Senior Design Engineer, Design Enginer - Senior, and Engineering Manager of Systems Integration – quite an accomplishment for someone his age, not that he cares. He's pissed about the whole thing. He's discovered he is a writer.

He was also English Student of the Year his senior year of high school. He didn't even know. He was too focused. He was told about the award at his ten-year reunion, after he'd already completed over half of his first book. The girl that told him was working on her Doctorate in English and had been very jealous. He never thought about a degree in English. There was no list for jobs in English.

Yep, he's a writer, just hasn't sold anything yet. He loves it. There's only one problem: He's a noble guy. He's determined to pay off the bills accumulated during his capitalistic twenties before he leaves his Whatever Engineer job forever. He will never again work on components for cars he can't even afford. He's thinking all this for the thousandth time when a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, his company's success story, swerves into his lane, clips his front end, and spins him toward a bridge embankment.

The car hits a curb at an angle and cartwheels into the air. The right front smashes into a cement stanchion holding the four-lane freeway above. After years in the airbag and automotive safety systems industry and hundreds of hours of watching crash footage one millisecond at a time, our engineer's safety system, in a fit of irony, completely fails and he's thrown through the windshield. His broken neck allows him to look back at the car from the air. The bag tries to follow him through the hole he's made, but the shoulder strap snags on the steering wheel and it's jerked back into the car. He smiles, happy he's left something behind.

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Immediate Gratification Boy