Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [3]
You see, at this particular moment, my employment is in serious jeopardy. My long and valued career—all eight months of it—is, at this very instant, as they say (whoever ‘they’ are), on—the—line. The line. That infamous line no one ever seems to notice until they have pretty much trampled past it, scampered over the hill into the next town and are getting dangerously close to some other unnoticeable line.
But now, as I said, right this very instant, I am merely on the line. My life is flashing before my eyes, every second of it playing before me like a long, boring movie about a man asleep on a couch, and I’m realizing with horror how much time I wasted that I could have at least spent playing video games (or going to strip clubs). It is that serious and life-changing a moment.
So naturally I’m not going to tell you about it, yet.
Instead, let me take you back a little.
This mess began right after Mrs. Abrososa and I entered the room we have set aside for viewing garments. In the business it’s called, interestingly enough, ‘The Garment Viewing Room’. Mrs. Abrososa was present as a chaperone/potential witness for the defense, and I was there to do what many around the company laughingly refer to as my ‘job’.
The Garment Viewing Room is a small antechamber just off the designer’s workshop and its primary function is to hold clutter. Most of the time it’s filled with fabric scraps, loose sequins, discarded feather boas, cardboard boxes, old bolts of cloth, and dead mannequins. But once a week it becomes a makeshift runway for…well…looking at semi-naked girls.
“ Joe Rudi led the league in total bases with 287. . . . ”
“Muttering stats already, Corky?” Mrs. Abrososa asked, amused. “Have you met Ms. Nuckeby?” I asked.
“I have not yet had that pleasure, no.”
“Attractive and charming.”
“Ah, I see.”
“An enchanting sense of humor.”
“Oh, dear. Well, I understand the preemptive strike, then.” “Better safe than sued,” I said, smiling.
She winced. “You sound like your grandfather.”
“Isn’t that the objective?”
“I hope not,” she said distastefully.
Mrs. Abrososa had her issues with the old man, as did we all. But my grandfather owned the place and you followed his rules, no matter how arbitrary. Fortunately, the laws of the state often superseded his and were generally more socially and morally correct, which pissed him off to no end.
I was moving my chair around the varying bits of discarded fabric and thread that had become glued to the tile floor, trying to situate myself in such a way that any . . . em . . . ‘unexpected stiffening of the joints’, as it were, could easily be hidden with a simple and nonchalant flourish of the legs, and a subtle movement of my clipboard, when our newest model, Wisper Nuckeby, stepped in wearing only the bottom half of ‘Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43’ and nearly blew out the front of my trousers.
Panicked by this instant…em…eruption of embarrassingly obvious sexual attraction, I flourished my legs rather too ‘chalantly’ and fell over into the water cooler. Most of its contents sloshed over my groin area as if Moses himself had ordered them to do so, before I could fumble the thing off myself and onto Mrs. Abrososa’s lap.
She, as you can imagine, screamed at the top of her sixty-year-old lungs and with the strength of ten Mrs. Abrososas managed to grasp the gurgling tank, Hulk-like, and hurl it and its furiously flowing contents, several feet mind you, back onto me. With a precision born no doubt of many years playing lawn-darts in the backyard with the grandkiddies, the elderly woman corked a ringer, and for one seemingly infinite and utterly horrifying moment I sat there staring at the