Darth Vader Takes a Call

John Williams’ “Star Wars” score announces the ringing of Darth Vader’s cell phone. The Sith Lord had been in the middle of toasting Brenda from Accounting when it turned into his dressing down of everyone gathered in the Death Star’s third-floor kitchenette and eventually his killing of a man.

He’d come to congratulate the woman on the birth of her first child but, angry that he’d been handed sparkling cider and not champagne, he’d ended up strangling the host by the power of his mind.

The phone’s ringing sends him padding madly at his pockets. There must be a million of them in that outfit of his. He makes a mental note to kill his tailor.

At last Vader finds the phone. He doesn’t recognize the number but, after all that work, takes the call.

“Hello?” he says, breathing heavily.

“Father? It’s Luke.”

            Vader is struck dumb.
            “Your son?”
            Vader curses himself silently for answering.
            “I’m most sorry but you have reached the incorrect person,” he says.
            “Father, look, I know it’s you. Who else sounds like that?”
            Vader looks up from the phone, confounded. What can that mean? he thinks. He scans the kitchenette for support but finds everyone staring at their boots in terror.
            “Look … Dad … I don’t want anything, OK?”
            “You know I detest your using that colloquialism, Luke. It is your mother’s word.”
            “Jeez, can’t a guy just call his dad for no reason? I just kind of wanted to talk.”
            Vader stiffens. “Well, why, yes. Let us talk. That would be nice.”
            Neither speaks for close to a minute.
            “It’s my birthday,” says Luke.
            “That’s right!” says Vader a little too brightly. “I meant to call.”
            “We went to the Olive Garden.”
            Vader almost smiles inside his great helmet, remembering days past when the three would celebrate occasions by devouring baskets of buttery breadsticks and wolfing down pasta. He recalls how funny Padme could be, telling silly old jokes as she sipped a glass of red wine.
            “I met a girl,” says Luke.
            Vader does smile. He’s relieved to hear the boy has romantic interest in someone other than his own sister.
            “And the Force? You’re still …?”
            Luke sighs. “Yes, Dad. And I’m doing really well.”
            Vader surprises himself. “Well, good, Son. Good for you,” he says.

Silence once more floods in, washing over the two stranded on shores so very far apart.

            “Dad.”
            “Yes.”
            “I forgive you.”

Milton the Mob Clown (in Pieces)

With her eyes on the clown, Jill eased Brendan to the ground. “Honey, the car’s up ahead, OK?” she said, hitting the unlock button on her key ring and pushing him toward the Taurus. The car alarm chirped twice, calling the boy. Still he stood his ground. His eyes, like his mother’s, were transfixed on the giant in the polka-dotted sports jacket before him.

            “Everybody loves a fucking clown. What’re you gonna do?” said the man. He pulled a package of cigarettes and a rubber chicken from his pocket. “Want one? Cancer stick, I mean?”

            “Just say no!” Brendan announced.

            “That’s right, honey,” said Jill. “Wait for mommy in the car, now. I mean it.”

            Brendan only shifted his weight.

The clown lit a cigarette with his boutonniere. He exhaled and the smoke formed a tyrannosaurus in the air above his head. Finally, he tossed a nod toward Jill’s car and with an, “Away, then!” the boy took off running, make-believe sword held high.

            “Nice to see you again, Milton,” said Jill. “I see you haven’t lost your touch with children.”

The clown shrugged. “It’s a gift,” he said. “You like the parachute pants?”

“If you touch him, I’ll kill you. You know that, right?”

            The clown laughed, his red-lined mouth emitting a single, white feather.

           “If you come near my home, I’ll – “

            He stepped forward, his big, red shoe covering Jill’s foot. “There was a time when you liked me to come near your house, lady. I’d do a few balloon animals, you’d suck my dick. Remember?”

             She remembered. “Give me one of those smokes,” she said.

The clown had to have a happy meal. “There’s a Circus Burger. Slow down,” he announced, pointing with a yellow-gloved hand. “Jesus, I could eat a horse. How ‘bout you, kid?”

            “French fries!” Brendan squealed.

Jill hit the gas.

“What the fuck!” yelled the clown, the cigarette almost dropping from his lips.

“Fuck!” said the boy.

“Not a chance, Milton,” Jill said. “You know how much fat there is in one Circus burger? There’s a Soup Plantation up the street.” Then she directed her voice toward the back seat. “And, young man, I don’t ever want to hear you use that word again. I’ll stop this car and give you a good paddling if I hear you use language like that. You hear me?”

The boy slouched in his seat.

“Brendan?”

“French fries,” the boy mumbled.

Like a pointer in the field tracking a downed pheasant, the clown went rigid. “Look! There’s another one.”

“There’s a Circus Burger on every corner, Milton.”

           “Holy Toledo, you wanna get rough?” The clown grabbed at his pants leg, revealing a pistol. He looked at Jill and cocked a purple-painted eyebrow.

“That’s a squirt gun,” she said.

“Hell it is.”

“Look, Milton, I can see quite plainly that that’s a pink, plastic squirt gun.”

The clown dropped the pants leg. “Hey, kid, what’s it take to get Jaqueline La Lanne here to pull over for a goddam hamburger?”

            “Goddam!” said Brendan.

            Jill stopped the car.

The clown, in his big top-sized trousers, took up the entire park bench. An irritated Jill stood staring in disbelief.

After a moment, he stopped chewing. “What?” he said.

            Jill crossed her arms. “What are you doing here, Milton? I thought you’d given up all the clowning around.”

            He dropped the burger, lowered his head and scanned the park. “Christ, lady, you don’t just give up the Chinese mafia. You don’t just drop the bozo whose fingers you’re sawing off and say, ‘That’s it, man, I’m going home.’”

How he’d changed. She’d met Milton at a backyard birthday party three summers ago, where he was riding a miniature bicycle from one end of the lawn to the other and, though she’d not known it, stalking the host. He’d fascinated her with his stories of travel throughout China where, in his younger, idealistic days, he’d served as a Baptist missionary.

She recalled Milton’s pulling a daisy-shaped cell phone from beneath his top hat and punching in a number. When the host had gone inside to pick up the ringing landline in his study, Milton had said, “Listen, there’s something I’ve got to do right now. But after I get back, and I do a few more laps, you want to grab a burger or something? I could eat a horse.”

She knew better than to get involved with a man in the children’s entertainment industry but those tales! What a life he’d led!

That Milton and the profane, menacing man in the fright wig before her now were two very different clowns. “You’ve become cynical,” she said. “And you’re still involved in organized crime.”

He raised an arm, issuing bubbles into the air. “Guilty as charged. On the getting cynical part, that is. But I’m retiring from the killing business. I’ve got this one more thing to do.” He dropped his gaze to the ground. “Then I’m out.”

“Finished?”

“Done.”

A bird in the bough above broke into song. It was the happiest tune Jill had heard in a long, long time.

“What’s the one more thing?” she said, finally.

More bubbles. “Oh, Jilly,” replied the clown. “You don’t want to know.”

Damon Won't Stop Believin' (Cont.)

Part One of this story appeared on Jan. 13, 2011.

Separate Ways

Ann Tilden Smith had carved a moment out of her breakfast schedule to give her husband his quarterly performance review. Now the polite clapping of the Golf Channel was the only sound breaking the mausoleum-like silence of the kitchen. Jim stared into his bowl of cereal. Ann nibbled her Power Bar and put straight edges on the stack of pages between them.

            “I know you’re disappointed,” she began.

            “You gave me a ‘Room for Growth,’ Ann,” he snapped. “So, yes, I’m a little disappointed.”
            An anguished moan came from the TV.
            “I’m your husband, for Christ’s sake, not one of those drones you order around at work.”

He looked at the dingy carpet beneath his feet and felt the chill their walls were too thin to keep from slipping in. They’d begun renting the crumbling bungalow from Ann’s learning group leader when Ann had started graduate studies in business administration at USC. It was five long years ago that she’d finished at the top of her class.

“This isn’t your office, Ann. This is our home,” he said. “Such as it is.”

Ann sought to assuage Jim’s fears. “You know you’re my top direct report,” she said.

Jim reddened and kicked at the rug. “I love you, too. But, see, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Take off the suit for a second. Put down the executive coaching manual. Jesus, can’t you just be you?”

“This is me being me. Myself, rather.”

“No, this is you being them.”

A cheer erupted as a putt found the cup.

“Besides,” Jim said after a moment, “my cleaning of the car port on Saturday gave me reason to expect an ‘Ahead of the Pack.’”

This managing was going to take more than one minute. “You crushed that initiative, honey,” Ann said. “But there’s a gigantic golf-swing analyzer taking up our living room. Last night we had microwaved noodles again for supper. On my night to cook, we had a nice salad.”

            “You bought that salad.”

            Ann shook her head. Jim knew better than this. When receiving challenging news, the winning executive never wanted to appear antagonistic. He or she nodded, thanked those speaking for their input, and announced that a correcting “solve” would be quickly rolled out. With a sigh, Ann affixed her signature to the last page of the deck.

            “Don’t think I won’t file an appeal,” Jim said, scooting his chair away from her and closer to the television.

            Ann had three briefcases stacked in descending order of size at the door. She strapped them across her shoulders, saddling up.

“Where are you going?” asked Jim.

            “To work, Jim. Someone’s got to make a decent living around here.”

            “It’s Saturday, Ann.”

            She checked her BlackBerry. “Shit,” she said. “What am I going to do now?”

           

Ann’s announcement that she’d ordered a bagel tray from the cafeteria was a big win at work on Monday. Everyone to whom she hard-lined had shown up. It was the perfect event for the showcasing of her robust team-building skills.

            “Beat it, Opie,” she said, eyeing a man she didn’t recognize. The bespectacled little fellow looked at her with pupils the size of saucers. He helped himself to a double dose of cream cheese and scurried down the hall.

            She elbowed Damon in the ribs. “That guy’s not from our business unit,” she said. “I saw him on floor 23 at Natalie’s going away. And I saw him on 31, at the baby shower for Meagan.”

            “’Vulture,’” answered Damon, rubbing his side. “A tech from the I.T. group. I guarantee you he’s never even spoken to either woman. Or any woman, for that matter.”

            Ann, with slits for eyes, watched the man skid around a corner and out of sight. “I.T., eh? Their offices are across the street."

            “They make regular rounds throughout the building, swooping down on food set out for meetings, raiding candy jars. I’ve heard stories of their picking a whole conference room table clean in a matter of minutes.”

“Not on my cost center,” Ann said.

Damon couldn’t explain the emotions tearing through his body. There was the pain in his side where Ann had jabbed him. For a woman just over 5 feet in height, she packed quite a wallop. But there was something else, too. Damon felt warm all over.

Little Ann Tilden Smith was big news at Alliance Entertainment. When she’d applied, the human resources recruiter had only cracked her novella-length resume, scanning just the page chronicling her birth, before pronouncing her a“hi-po.” This was the term Human Resources workers used to separate the sheep from the goats; to flag persons of high potential. Even so, the recruiter had had only lower-level management positions to offer.

            “Not to worry,” she said, grasping the signed contract and shaking Ann’s hand, “I have no doubt you’ll make vice president by cocktail hour.”

Ann had risen four pay levels in as many months. It was unprecedented, meteoric. But she had been stuck for a year, now, at director level, the rung on the corporate ladder just below that of vice president. She commanded a high six-figure income, received a substantial yearly bonus and, when flying to meet business partners or re-charge creative batteries on junkets to Rio or Rome, never got near an airport or four-star hotel without a company-paid limousine’s whisking her there.

The humiliation was killing her.

Damon’s eyes welled with tears. By God, he loved this brave woman! How did she stand it? He promised himself he would see her avenged. Even though his computing system was due for an upgrade, he vowed that the scavenging I.T. tech would never again hunt these halls.

            It would turn out to be of little matter for the analyst, for there were thousands of other corridors from which to choose. The Alliance Entertainment company was, in reality, some 300 companies rolled into one. Its influence was literally worldwide, felt as far east of its Los Angeles headquarters as Kyoto and as far west as Osaka – cities situated a pebble’s toss from each other at the other end of the globe. The sun never sets on Alliance empire, the company boasted, and for the second time in history such a thing had been said and was true.

            There were movie studios, television and radio networks, a consumer products division, recording companies, sports teams, cruise lines and restaurants. Were its many communication satellites dispatched to the same reach of outer space at the same time, a goodly portion of the sun could be plunged into eclipse.

            It had a theme park doing boffo business in every country with a stable democracy. But even its parks in Sarevjo and the Gaza Strip did well.

            A workforce totaling 150,000 happy souls, assets in excess of $600 trillion, a name synonymous with all that is good, honest and true – and at the head of it all sat a kindly honey badger named Gus.

            Gus was not a real badger, of course. A real badger would have run the company into the ground moments after incorporation. Gus was a cartoon character, an entertainer, the star of screens both big and small for more than half a century. He had a tender, generous way that children loved. He would not cheat. He never lied. And for this parents loved him, too.

            He was loyal to his pals, a winsome crew that included a misunderstood great white shark and a stinky athletic-sock puppet shunned by others. He had had the same girl for 50 years, a comely musk ox named Francine, and had gone no further with her than to peck her sweetly on the jowl.

Dave is Jerk -- Still

"Dave is jerk" the seething international student cut into my dorm-room door in 1981. His anger burns there still, 30 years later.

As always with his work, the note is beautifully centered and well rendered. This is notable since he'd undoubtedly been in a rush, lest he be seen defacing Azusa Pacific University property. Shy Agus P. Johannes Jusran of Jakarta would never even have dreamed of committing such an act, had he not been so angry.

I was a great fan of a spaceship he sketched in a matter of seconds one day in my room. He called it “The Searcher.” It was a wonder, a work of art. He liked it, too, but was too humble to go waving it about the whole of Second East. I watched as he took a couple of tacks from my bulletin board and stuck it to the inside wall of the hallway closet just outside my door. “It’s up high, where no one will find it,” he whispered. “Only you and I will know it’s there.”

Of course I told everyone.

Dave is jerk. Unfortunately, the unintended effect of his accusation was to draw smiles from readers, since he'd left out the article "a." What's more, he'd identified himself – my lone friend speaking English as a second language -- as the vandal.

We found "a" scratched into the door a day later, off to the side. It must've killed the artist in Jo to destroy the symmetry of his piece. But then he'd always been one to try to get a thing right.




"X" MARKS THE SPOT: When his anger later cooled, the artist attempted to cross his outburst out. Thirty years later, though, it remains.

 

Burying the Hatchetts

It was the perfect day for the burial of one’s father, if there can be such a thing. The Hatchett family sat beneath a sunny sky of turquoise blue – unusual for Los Angeles in the dog days of summer. The air was alive with birdsong and the ringing of chimes hanging from the trees dotting the cemetery hillside. On the graves spun colorful pinwheels.

The fair-haired Hatchetts were thankful for the shade provided by the barrels of two enormous battleship guns which had been placed in this serviceman’s section of the park as a memorial. They made for an impressive monument.

Before the family stood the preacher Steven Hatchett had secured for the service. The pastor cut a dashing figure, calling to mind Barack Obama holding forth from the podium. It was a shame he was having such trouble with “First Corinthians 13.”

“If … I … speak with the, um, tongues … of … angels,” he stammered in sotto voice, looking from the page to the heavens, as though praying for help. It was if he’d never seen the words before in his life.

He’d finally get on a little roll, stringing together a couple of sentences, when a military jet would scream across the sky above the group. The aircraft was part of the coronation-sized service some yards from where the humble Hatchett party sat. At the first plane’s appearance, the preacher stumbled to a halt then looked up pleadingly. By the arrival of the third plane, he’d decided to simply plow on, talking right through the flyovers. The family craned forward, straining to hear. Perhaps he was just moving his lips. It was hard to tell.

The 21-gun salute sounded as he attempted to lead the group in all five verses of “Amazing Grace.” It didn’t appear he knew how to sing. In any case, the tune had never been a favorite of Steven’s father. The service Steven had arranged -- such as it was -- was for his poor father, after all. It was just as well the song died after only half a verse, drowned out by the din.

The pastor took a moment to open a bottle of water and run a hand across his forehead. Michael Hatchett used the opportunity to shoot his brother, Steven, a condemning look. Michael’s wife, who was of Japanese birth, wore a face that shouted, “Shame!” Steven’s mother directed her bewildered gaze into her lap.

Well, he’d tried, hadn’t Steven? He kicked at a dandelion below his feet in frustration. The pastor’s pedigree had seemed high enough when Steven had met him at Starbucks earlier in the week. The man had been affable, cordial and kind. In greeting Steven, he’d given him the chance to display his knowledge of the intricate handshake and hug Steven had picked up from watching BET. He’d even attended the same college as Steven, although he mentioned he’d graduated. Steven had never gotten that far.

Perhaps, though, the man had too eagerly accepted Steven’s offer of a free cup of coffee. And his insistence on working within a speaking framework of “Faith and Family” after being told Steven’s father had had little time for that first “F” probably should’ve been of concern.

“We’ll play ‘Amazing Grace’ over the room’s loudspeakers,” he said.

“But the event will be held graveside.”

The preacher was crestfallen. “Is that right?” he said. “I do so love that song.”

“Dad was more of a Sinatra kind of guy, in any case.”

“We’ll just have to do it a capella,” said the pastor.

The service limped forward after the preacher found the strength to soldier on. “What a terrific family man was … was … ”

“Albert,” Michael announced, glaring at Steven.

Steven knew that look. His brother had been giving it to him his entire life. This fiasco was Steven’s fault, alright. It was another failure in a long list of slipups and miscalculations. There was his famous swapping of electric bulbs for lighted candles upon the Christmas tree when the two were but boys.  “It’s more authentic this way,” he’d told the younger Michael. “It’s going to blow Dad’s mind when he gets home.”

It did. The blaze resulting from his scheme took out half the living room. It was little Michael who saved the rest of the house by knocking down the flames with the old fire extinguisher from the garage. He’d picked it up at a yard sale, just in case.

 There was Steven’s teenaged Hare Krishna phase, during which he shaved his head and demanded he be called “Quicksilver.”

“That’s not even a Hare Krishna-type name, “ Michael told him after studying some of the literature Steven had begun leaving about the house. He was sure Steven had chosen it simply because it sounded cool.

“Be at peace, Little One. And get thee away from my Kiss records.”

There were the adult Steven’s two failed marriages and his expensive purchase of a Blockbuster video franchise the year Netflix was born. There were his six self-published books of nearly incomprehensible poetry about – as best anyone could tell – the thought life of squirrels.

There was “Bi-Curious George,” the children’s picture book he was sure would change the world. “The copyright-infringement lawsuit alone will have you tied up in court for years,” said Michael, shaking his head.  “And these drawings are like scribblings from the bathroom wall at the Abbey.”

Talk about peaking early; it brought Steven little joy to realize the only great thing he’d ever done had happened 40 years earlier, when he’d first slipped on the Dr. Zaius jacket. It was the happiest day of his life. Michael, who was the true “Planet of the Apes” fan among the two, was struck dumb by the moment.