Within minutes of his departure surely a fresh assistant secretary replaced him. He would have to get another job. Fast. He only had enough savings to last him six, seven hours at most…
The next morning he secured a position as a lawn jockey. Had he kept track, he would have discovered that this was the 183rd position he had secured in his young adult life.
The two and a half square footage of yard he had to pose on was rather large considering its location in a densely populated neighborhood and rooftop. He had plenty of room to stretch on the occasion that nobody looked in his direction and caught him not being perfectly frozen and sculpturelike.
His outfit consisted of a glazed white terracotta helmet, a skintight red riding coat, beige polyester pants that flared out at the thighs, and shiny black kneehigh boots. Now and then the owner of the lawn, Mr. Archibald Grapesmuggler, asked him to dress up in blackface.
Things went smoothly for a few days. He came to work on time every morning, posed, took a break for lunch, posed, and left at dusk. Then he let his guard down. He came to work with a hangover. A bad one. He could barely keep his eyes open. And his arm hurt: the strain of holding up a kerosene lamp seemed insufferable. Thinking nobody was watching, he lowered the lamp and sat down on the grass for a minute to rest. Seconds later he was curled up in a fetal position, snoring and drooling.
He didn’t know that his employer had been spying on him from a gopher hole in the lawn.
Mr. Grapesmuggler pushed his head through the hole and crawled out like a zombie from the grave. Achtung 66.799 woke up, tendered his resignation, and ran away…
He came back a few minutes later and said he was sorry. Mr. Grapesmuggler accepted the apology and handed him a handkerchief. “You’re drooling.”
An idea came to him. It wasn’t like the others. This one was sound, realizable—an anti-drool serum. One specifically designed to turn off (or at least tone down) salivary ducts during sleep. His friend Dale Begonia dabbled in street chemistry. The two of them could invent such a commodity extraordinaire if they put their minds together. And once it appeared on the market, the split would be 70/30 in favor of Achtung 66.799. He would market the product, after all, and marketing was more valuable than scientific innovation and practice. The value of science was in fact only as good as the marketability of the merchandise produced by science. He rethought the split and decided on 80/20. He rethought three more times and finally settled on 86/14. Then he kneed Mr. Grapesmuggler in the nuts and tendered his resignation a second time…
The plan failed. Dale Begonia turned out to be more of a hack than he thought; apparently his skills as a chemist didn’t go much further than a rudimentary knowledge of the periodic table, an ability to define the term isotope , and holding test tubes full of Sea Monkeys over Bunsen burners until they boiled and exploded. Achtung 66.799 had also forgotten about the patent again. The blow to his optimism was devastating. He went on a drinking binge that lasted a half hour before the time came to sober up and find (and lose) another job.
Over the next year, he found (and lost) work as a stapler slammer, an underapprentice to a magician, an assistant palm reader, an assistant moth wrangler, an assistant to an assistant eyebrow plucker, a window shade, a pied piper, and a turtleneck dickey model, among others. For a while he was even subcontracted by a ’gänger to surrogate the human high school teacher that the ’gänger was supposed to be surrogating.
All the jobs ended the same way: Achtung 66.799’s imagination took advantage of his better judgment.
“I have so many ideas,” he told Dale one night as they sat in his 1/3-bedroom cubapt on either side of a Bunsen burner drinking glasses of Rippentrop’s Foggy Foggy Dew. “I don’t know what to do with myself. The world can’t keep
The next morning he secured a position as a lawn jockey. Had he kept track, he would have discovered that this was the 183rd position he had secured in his young adult life.
The two and a half square footage of yard he had to pose on was rather large considering its location in a densely populated neighborhood and rooftop. He had plenty of room to stretch on the occasion that nobody looked in his direction and caught him not being perfectly frozen and sculpturelike.
His outfit consisted of a glazed white terracotta helmet, a skintight red riding coat, beige polyester pants that flared out at the thighs, and shiny black kneehigh boots. Now and then the owner of the lawn, Mr. Archibald Grapesmuggler, asked him to dress up in blackface.
Things went smoothly for a few days. He came to work on time every morning, posed, took a break for lunch, posed, and left at dusk. Then he let his guard down. He came to work with a hangover. A bad one. He could barely keep his eyes open. And his arm hurt: the strain of holding up a kerosene lamp seemed insufferable. Thinking nobody was watching, he lowered the lamp and sat down on the grass for a minute to rest. Seconds later he was curled up in a fetal position, snoring and drooling.
He didn’t know that his employer had been spying on him from a gopher hole in the lawn.
Mr. Grapesmuggler pushed his head through the hole and crawled out like a zombie from the grave. Achtung 66.799 woke up, tendered his resignation, and ran away…
He came back a few minutes later and said he was sorry. Mr. Grapesmuggler accepted the apology and handed him a handkerchief. “You’re drooling.”
An idea came to him. It wasn’t like the others. This one was sound, realizable—an anti-drool serum. One specifically designed to turn off (or at least tone down) salivary ducts during sleep. His friend Dale Begonia dabbled in street chemistry. The two of them could invent such a commodity extraordinaire if they put their minds together. And once it appeared on the market, the split would be 70/30 in favor of Achtung 66.799. He would market the product, after all, and marketing was more valuable than scientific innovation and practice. The value of science was in fact only as good as the marketability of the merchandise produced by science. He rethought the split and decided on 80/20. He rethought three more times and finally settled on 86/14. Then he kneed Mr. Grapesmuggler in the nuts and tendered his resignation a second time…
The plan failed. Dale Begonia turned out to be more of a hack than he thought; apparently his skills as a chemist didn’t go much further than a rudimentary knowledge of the periodic table, an ability to define the term isotope , and holding test tubes full of Sea Monkeys over Bunsen burners until they boiled and exploded. Achtung 66.799 had also forgotten about the patent again. The blow to his optimism was devastating. He went on a drinking binge that lasted a half hour before the time came to sober up and find (and lose) another job.
Over the next year, he found (and lost) work as a stapler slammer, an underapprentice to a magician, an assistant palm reader, an assistant moth wrangler, an assistant to an assistant eyebrow plucker, a window shade, a pied piper, and a turtleneck dickey model, among others. For a while he was even subcontracted by a ’gänger to surrogate the human high school teacher that the ’gänger was supposed to be surrogating.
All the jobs ended the same way: Achtung 66.799’s imagination took advantage of his better judgment.
“I have so many ideas,” he told Dale one night as they sat in his 1/3-bedroom cubapt on either side of a Bunsen burner drinking glasses of Rippentrop’s Foggy Foggy Dew. “I don’t know what to do with myself. The world can’t keep
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