Her Conference/Fiesta name tag announced her as Pam McWainscoting, Senior Transportation Coordinator for Pharma-Go-Go Field Agents, and she looked varnished. She had the biggest shoulderpads that I’d seen since 1985 and a frosted motorcycle helmet of hair. Her eyes were the same color as the one I had just flushed, which rattled me.

     Pharma-Go-Go was expanding their operations from their traditional storefront superpharmacies to hot dog-style vending carts, with popular pharmaceuticals available in tiny waffle cones, and they wanted a taxi service in Michigan to drive their representatives from cart to cart around Detroit and its suburbs restocking the supplies, as most of the representatives were too heavily sedated to drive themselves. I lied and lied and lied to that poor woman about the quality of our vehicles and the trustworthiness of our drivers and most of all about my own participation in customer satisfaction. After three minutes of lying my time was up, and I had to go to a different and much longer interview, with a representative from a national chain of funeral homes that were quietly eliminating their hearse budget by sending the corpses to cemetaries and wherever else they had to go in taxis. It would be very important for the cabdrivers to pretend to be talking animatedly to the corpses, and quickly prop them back up if they started to slump over, so that no-one would notice and think it was weird. 

     Then there were several other scheduled interviews, so I kept lying and trying not to fall asleep, then a massive lunch was served. An insurance agencies’ vendor booth was handing out free tote bags, emblazoned with their logo. I surreptitiously filled one of the bags with food and drinks and scampered out through the service entrance to blow off the rest of the days’ interviews and two crucial seminars. I walked back to Alligator Al’s Central Florida Jungle Fun Compound.

     Back in the room, I unloaded my bag. I had almost enough food and bottled beverages to last me the rest of the three and a half days remaining. I had 4 bottles of lemonade and one of champagne and a baguette and nineteen individually wrapped mini-cheese wheels and five grapefruits, three kiwi, four  bags of  pretzels, fifteen assorted teabags, a salami and a lot of miniature chocolate bars, a couple apples and bananas, some dates and figs and four blueberry muffins. I considered just holing up in the room for the remainder of the trip. I missed my kids so much it was driving me crazy. I called home, and Natasha answered.

     “Hlo?”
     “Natasha, it’s Daddy! How are you?”

     “Tibor says his eyes can shoot paralyzing rays.”

     “Well, I’m sure that’s useful. What are you doing this afternoon?”

     “Grandma and Grandpa are bringing us home ‘cause we spent the night and this morning.”

     “At your Grandparents?”

     “Yep…watched a lot, LOT, LOT of TV. We saw this one dead guy in a tank, but it wasn’t a cartoon, it was just on the news after a cartoon when Grandpa was asleep. Tibor said it looked like a dragon attack victim, but Grandma came in and turned on the Buyables cartoon show, and Wonky had the croup.”

     “Fun. I love you, Natasha: is Tibor there?”

     I talked to Tibor for a couple of minutes and managed to glean that Vampirella had been called in to work the previous night, and that Wonky needed to eat his Pocket Strudel when he felt blue.

     “Then I poured my milk into the TV to slake Wonky’s ferocious thirst, dad, which was sposed to only be slaked with Exxxtreme Kwench Kiwi-Kornsyrup Phizz, so it broke the TV.”

Then Vampirella’s Dad Tiberiu got on the phone.

     “Ve are vaiting for your vife. Cheeldren are vonderful.”

     “Yeah, I like them. I’m sorry about your TV. I’ll pay for it, of course. Is Vampirella back at work again today? Couldn’t she get whatever it was done last night?”

     “Forget zee TV, eet vas old and I vant to go visout von for a vile, eef only to avoid haffing to see zose deesgosting Buyables again. Your Vife, I sink maybe zshe ees steel vorking ztrait zhrough from las night. Bot zshe says zshe veal be here vischin zhe hour. Ees a spacial eedition of zat coupon book for your American Szanksgeefing.”

     I thanked Tiberiu for watching the kids and told him to tell Vampirella that I missed her. Then I rang off, put on a Tiki-style bathing suit and went outside to sip some lemonade by the murky pool. It was bothering me that Vampirella had to be at work so much recently. She’d taken the job as a part-time thing just to make a little extra cash and Mrs. PriceThrottler’s kept making her do more and more work for that same amount of money. Vampirella wasn’t anywhere near my class of slacker. In fact, she actually applied herself to her work with a remarkable amount of dedication and care. Inevitably, eventually, an employer would piss her off and she’d quit, and usually defenestrate someone or something in the process, but up until then she’d keep completing the projects as given.

     I’d had hopes that the part-time nature of her work would keep her job low stress, so she could stay with one employer for awhile; Vampirella had had about forty-two jobs in the seven years we were together before the kids were born. She had little patience for jerks and imbeciles, which cripples you in the business world.

     Her resignations were usually impressive. When she quit working for the bank, it took them two days to convince her immediate supervisor that he was safe to emerge from the vault. When she resigned from the Haus of Yarn, she spent a week of eight-hour shifts tying knots first. When she quit working as a realtor for Kuntry Kondos, she filled the carpets of the showpiece model condo with grass seed and water and turned the heat up before the long labor day weekend, and by Tuesday the grass was ankle deep all over the condo. She had a job painting murals for awhile, and the mural of her supervisor being buggered by a pack of orangutans was one of her finest works, appearing as it did on the side of his house the day she quit working there. She had a very short stint as a waitress at an upscale restaurant, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t really urinate in the zinfandel, she just told all her tables that she did. She worked for the Ann Arbor News at one point and people still talk about the day the paper came out with the headline: “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK.”  I will never forget coming to pick her up from the interior decorating job. Both of her coworkers were wallpapered to the wall, and their worried faces appealed to me silently, sticking out of a garish sunflower print. Her coworkers at the ice cream shop were fortunate that their frostbite was not acute enough to warrant any amputations. Her former boss at the Laff-a-Minnit novelty shop still can’t get the joy buzzer out of his nose, and it goes off when he sneezes. She worked for the local phone book company, and the Yellow Pages came out black when she quit. She worked for a pet supply place until she filled it waist-deep with water and ordered a thousand piranhas.

     Vampirella’s coworkers, blissfully unaware of the risks they were taking, did little to take the pressure off her. Unlike me, she had no-one to delegate tasks to. The franchise owner was a revolting salesman suitboy named Brick Marrow, responsible primarily for obtaining the contracts from local businesses to run their ads and coupons. Oily, arrogant and obsequious, with his expensive pink shirt unbuttoned so that you could tell he waxed his chest, he tooled around in his bloated SUV, a babyduck yellow Dodge Penetrator, was rarely at the office, and was the primary contact for the mysterious corporate owners in Salt Lake City, who rarely spoke to any of the other workers. There was a blank little round lady named Sylvia Cowmeadow who did the billing and accounting for the office, and Frank Grizell, a 60ish barrel of unfiltered cigarettes and five o’clock shadows who wrote the local ad copy and Mrs. PriceThrottler’s signature feature column, Mrs. PriceThrottler’s Restaurant & Digestive Reviews.

     Written from the point of view of the completely fictitious Mrs. PriceThrottler, a

feisty septuagenarian who rejoiced excessively at the prospect of modest discounts on items of dubious value, the first half of the two-part food review column was a standard local restaurant food and service review, but the second part, the part that set it apart from ordinary restaurant reviews,  went on to evaluate the eventual intestinal repercussions of the meal, with exquisite descriptions of any resulting eructation and/or flatulence, and a lengthy forensic dissection of the ultimate stool sample. Many restaurants sailed through the first half of the review with high ratings only to lose points for loose stool texture or, worse, constipation. The restaurants that chose to advertise in Mrs. PriceThrottlers Val-U Bonanza, coincidentally, always got great reviews. If Brick Marrow couldn’t land an account, he’d let Frank know, and if Frank couldn’t insult their food enough, he’d also have Mrs. PriceThrottler complain about being unable to control her multitudinous farts at the Church Social. The Restaurant & Digestive Review column was very popular, though more commonly known as the Chew ‘n’ Poo Review.

     Vampirella was the only one who could actually design the ads and format the copy, put the coupon book together and send it to the printer, so she was stuck with actual work. It was very different from my job at Retro Cab.