Earth vs. Everybody (3 page)

I had learned from
being fired from other jobs that times like this are your last chance to stand
up for yourself and have some self respect. Show some backbone. As soon as you
find another job somewhere else people will start walking all over you again.
The only time a person ever gets a chance to have any self-respect is when he’s
being fired. That’s when you can stand tall and be a man. That few seconds
there. So from the moment I walked into the boss’s office I was my own man
again.

“Take a seat, Mr.
Burly,” said one of the bosses.

“Take it
yourself, asshole.”

I leaned up
against the water cooler and glared at everybody.

“This meeting…”
began the personnel manager…

“Shove this
meeting up your ass.”

“Er… yes… would
you like some coffee, Burly?”

“In your ass I
would. Along with the meeting and the chair.”

My supervisor,
Mr. Knuckles, cleared his throat. “I think we’re straying from the point of
this meeting. Perhaps if Mr. Burly would stop telling us what to shove up our
asses, we could…”

“Screw you,
boss.”

“Hey look, Burly…”

“No, you look!
I’ve been taking crap from you big-shots for weeks now. And now it’s my turn to
tell you a thing or two.” I pointed to each in turn: “You’re incompetent,
you’re stupid, you don’t like fingers being pointed at you, and you two I don’t
know.”

While I paused to
catch my breath and try to think of a few more choice things to say—maybe tell
them what I thought of their so-called scheduling abilities. Why hadn’t I
gotten my God damned vacation yet?—Mr. Knuckles managed to get a word in.

“We’re promoting
you,” he said. “We’re making you a bodyguard. It will mean a raise in pay,
better hours, and a bigger locker.”

“Like
I said before,” I said, “like I’ve been saying all meeting, thank you, boss.”

Well, I was as
surprised as you are. More, probably, because I know me better than you do.
It’s not very often Frank Burly gets a promotion. All my life it’s just been
down down down. But not this time.

My employers had
discovered that I had a hidden talent they hadn’t known about. Ever since I
joined the Organization everyone in the gang had been instinctively ducking
down behind me the moment trouble started, because I was so big and so slow to
react. I was like a parked car with a brain. Plus, it took a lot to knock me
over. It was so hard to knock me over, sometimes it was easier just to wait
until I fell over on my own. Because of these natural abilities, my employers
felt I would make a perfect bodyguard.

I don’t know that
I’d say I was perfect—nothing in this world is perfect, except, okay, maybe
me—but I was pretty good at it. I never got any complaints from the people
crouched down behind me, that’s for sure. They were safe back there. And they
knew it. And after I’d been doing it for a little while, I realized I liked
being a bodyguard. It was a nice restful job. Most of the time I just had to
stand there being big. I can do that. I don’t have to do anything to be big. I
am big. So the main part of my job was already done.

Of course I had
to take my lumps from time to time. All bodyguards get hit occasionally with
fists, clubs, knives, even bullets. It’s part of the job. I didn’t mind. I’ve
been getting knocked around like that all my life for nothing. Now I was
getting paid good money for it. Life doesn’t get any better than that. Not for
me, anyway.

On the rare
occasions when I did get seriously hurt, the Organization took good care of me.
Made sure I got the best of everything. Why, I remember one time, when it
looked like I might die, they had a famous baseball player visit me in the
hospital to cheer me up. I asked him to hit a home run for me. He said you got
it, just get better, Phil. Frank, I said. Huh, he said. The dying patient’s
name is Frank, I said. Phil, Frank, what’s the difference, he said. Right, I
said. He didn’t hit the homer, despite what he had promised. Struck out three
times then got thrown out at home trying to stretch a triple into an inside the
park home run. They had to carry him off the field on a stretcher he tried so
hard. He ended up in the hospital bed next to mine. When they got the tubes out
of his mouth, he said he was sorry he didn’t hit the homer for me. And I said I
was sorry too because I lost a two thousand dollar bet.

Even with all the
beatings I had to take, I was pretty happy with my new job. I was good at it,
and everyone could see I was good at it. So I rapidly climbed the ladder of
success, guarding more and more important people. Each move upward gave me more
prestige, nicer working conditions, and more money.

I was making a
name for myself too. Younger bodyguards started coming up to me for advice.
Just be yourself, I told them. This is always good advice, because it’s so easy
to do, and so easy to say. But it would usually make their faces fall when I
told them that. They didn’t want to be themselves. They wanted to be me. But
they couldn’t be me. I was me. I was taken. They had to be them. They said okay
they would, but I could tell they didn’t like it. I could tell they thought it
was bullshit.

Then one day I
was told I was moving up again. From now on, they said, I would be guarding the
top man in the Organization. I was told to report to his office immediately. I
was a little nervous about this. I’d never met the Big Boss before. Didn’t even
know who he was.

When I opened the
door to his office and went in, I was stunned. It was Larry Laffman, The
Million Laff Boy, the funniest man in show business. When he saw me he said:
“Howareya!” I laughed so hard I had to sit down and he had to give me some
water.

“You’re the
mastermind who runs organized crime in Central City?” I asked, when I could get
my breath.

“That’s me! Hey
hey!” He made his eyes go around and his front teeth stick out straight. “Wocka
wocka! Boing!” His pants spun around, his hair jumped up and down on his head,
and his right eye shot out and rang a small bell on his desk. This made me
laugh even more.

He did his famous
spit-take when I told him I was his new bodyguard, another when we shook hands,
and two more when I sat down. I couldn’t stop laughing.

“How are YOUUUUU
feeling now?” he asked, giving me another glass of water, and rolling his eyes
in all kinds of hilarious directions.

“Stop it, you’re
killing me,” I protested, holding my sides.

I was dazzled to
meet the one and only Larry Laffman in person. I knew all about him, of course.
He was the master—some say the originator—of all forms of comedy. He could make
one eye go around like a phonograph record. And he could make his ears flap
like crazy. And satirical? How about that eye going around? If that isn’t
satire, I don’t know what is.

He had dozens of
stock laugh lines that were funny every time he said them, like: “Why are you
dooooing this to me?”, “That doesn’t sound like my mother”, “I don’t like
yewwww at all”, and so many more. Sometimes he’d add “asshole” at the end, if
he needed an extra big laugh, or if he happened to be talking to an asshole.

And he could
imitate anybody. He did an imitation of me that had me rolling in the aisles
for almost an hour. In fact we were both rolling in the aisles because he was
still imitating me then.

I asked him what
he was doing here in the world of crime. I always thought he was strictly a
show business guy.

“My agent, Sid,
set up this deal for me,” he explained. “The Crime Industry is a great tax
dodge. You’d be surprised how much you can write off of your income tax if
you’re a big crook. And it’s an investment, too. You’ve got to do something
with your money, Sid says. You’ve got to plan for the future when you’re not as
hilarious anymore. When your eyes only go part way around, and it’s not as
funny because old age is making them go around, not you.”

“But why not put
your money in a business you’re more familiar with, like Organized
Entertainment?” I asked. “I’ve heard that’s pretty crooked too. Couldn’t you
make just as much of a profit there?”

“Don’t ask me.
Ask Sid. He knows all the financial angles. Me, I do the jokes. Boinnngg!”

Guarding someone
as important as Larry Laffman was quite a responsibility for me because he was
such a great man, but it was a million laughs too because there’s nobody
funnier than Larry. No, sir. You could always tell he was coming from several
blocks away, because you could hear me next to him busting a gut. I thought he
was the greatest. And he liked me too, because he didn’t have to be “on” all
the time when he was around me—I laughed at everything he did. He even cleared
his throat funny. Ah-hnnn! Hilarious. Top that, Shakespeare! Give it up,
Wordsworth!

After I got to
know him better I discovered he had his serious side, too. The first time he
started talking real serious about injustice, I laughed my head off for a full
minute, then said: “Wait a minute. What’s so funny about that?”

“It’s not funny,”
he said. “This is my serious side you’re seeing now. Boing!”

“Wow, you’ve got
two sides?”

“Sure.”

“Let me see that
serious side again.”

He made a face
and pointed at it with his finger. “Check it out.”

And you wouldn’t
believe how serious his face looked at that moment. I hardly laughed at all.

And he didn’t
just look serious when his face was all screwed up like that, he acted serious
too. Sometimes he’d spend a whole afternoon fighting injustice. Fighting it
like mad. This confused me a little bit at first, because I always thought
another comedian, Jokey Johnson, was the one who fought injustice. Larry shook
his head. “No, I traded him starving children for that last month.”

“I guess starving
children are important too,” I hazarded.

He shook his
head. “Not to me. Not anymore. I fight injustice now. Every other Thursday
afternoon.”

“God bless you,
Larry Laffman.”

“Wocka.”

I figured I could
learn a lot of inside stuff about show business from Larry. And I was right. He
told me all about the money and the women and the drugs and the credit grabbing
and the whining. I found out show business is just like we think it is: all
play and no work. Which is why their work is so bad, I guess. It all made sense
to me now.

“I tried to get
into show business once,” I confided to Larry one day, after we’d gotten to
know each other pretty well.

“You went to
Hollywood?”

“No.”

“Show business is
in Hollywood.”

“Yeah, well, the
way I figure it, they should have discovered me here in Central City. At my
house. That’s what talent scouts are for. To scout around, looking for talent
wherever it might be. If they were looking for talent, they should have looked
in that chair in my living room. The one in front of the TV. That’s where I
was. If I’m not in show business it’s the talent scouts’ fault. Not mine.”

“Do you have any
talent?”

“Huh? Uh…
probably… what do you mean?”

“I mean, have you
mastered any kind of craft that would be useful in the entertainment industry,
in case the talent scouts ever do find you?”

“No. But I guess
I could master a useful craft easy enough, if I had to. I’d have to see some
money first.”

He nodded. “Well,
you’ve got the right attitude to be in show business, that’s for sure. I’ll see
if my agent can find something for you.”

“Hurry up. I
don’t have all day.”

Usually I did a
pretty good job of protecting Larry from all the people who recognized him on
the street and wanted to run up to him and beat his brains out, but sometimes a
rock or a bullet or a tomato would get through and nail him. This usually
happened when I suddenly doubled over with laughter because I just remembered
one of his great jokes. He would always complain when this happened, but, hey,
it’s not my fault. Quit making me laugh.

Every once in a
while I would see something that made me think that maybe Larry Laffman wasn’t
really the top dog in the Organization—that there was someone above him. That
office on the floor above his, for example. And the way he ran his finger
around his collar when he got a memo from that office. And his code name:
“Number Two”. I asked him about this, but he denied there was anyone more
important at CrimeCo than he was. And since he never lied to me unless there
was a good reason for it, unless there was something in it for him, I dropped
the subject.

Then one day when
I reported for work I noticed that Larry seemed kind of nervous. I asked him
why. He said he had been summoned to see the Big Boss. This made me laugh
because, hey, he’s the Big Boss. We’d already established that. We’d already
had this discussion. I said great, now let’s have another joke. You’re in great
form today, boss. But he said he wasn’t joking. There really was someone above
him in the Organization, though he usually didn’t like to admit it. And he had
to have a meeting with this guy right now. I could hardly wait to meet someone
more important than Larry Laffman. He had to be the funniest guy in the
universe.

Larry had me in
stitches all the way to the meeting, pretending he was scared and didn’t want
to go. I tried to get him to do a funny imitation of the Big Boss, but he
seemed nervous about the idea, and said no. The way he said it made me bust a
gut.

I was still
laughing when we arrived at a door marked “Mr. Theremin”. Larry paused for a
moment, ran his finger around his collar, then my finger, then opened the door
and we went inside.

Seated at the
desk in the middle of the office was a cloud of energy in a suit. Small
lightning bolts moved around its “body” periodically, and there was a smell of
burned wiring in the air. The cloud of energy was dictating a letter.