Chimps and Shrimps

"Isn't there a reason to re-examine your conclusions, donkey-boy?” asked Clarence with the pointed, angular voice he liked to use to assert his authority over underlings when there were more important people in the room.

“B-b-but sir...I didn't realize that you were actually going to use that wrinkled tire tube. It seemed that it would fit perfectly over my head, and there was that big office party coming up, and Larlene was going to do her act, and I needed a reason to ask for forgiveness. I figured that having my cranium wedged into a patch of rubber would be the perfect excuse to have her cover me in linseed oil. Did I know you needed it? Especially with all those bumps!?”

It was always this way on a Tuesday. If it wasn't the constant bickering between boss and prole, then it was the fishes demanding higher pay and more food-flakes.

Life was not very fun in the future. The clocks ran slow and the earth’s core was still runny. The war continued apace with no end in sight, and still no one had volunteered to fight. Even more depressing, halter tops were still all the rage.

Clarence continued his high-pitched caterwauling...until a faint bleating coming through the heating duct heralded the approach of the goats. Every lunch-hour they liked to move slowly among the desks, grazing in the trash-cans and occasionally gumming at the corners of the battered desks.

Initially, most people had thought the goats a nuisance; hardly the sort of thing that went along with the sleek modernity of life in the future. But things at Whorehound Brothers had been like this since before the Great Unwinding, and now they saw little reason to change. Besides, the bucolic agrarian mood was somehow restful, with the added advantage that the goats reminded people that pre-industrial life had been rife with smelly, insistent, not-very-bright creatures, and that in turn prevented people from romanticizing a past they had come to know only through the nostalgic moaning of authors who didn't have much of a clue about what it was really like either.

Bitsy twisted the exhaust manifold hanging from the chain around her neck nervously in her gummy fingers. Clarence and Ted looked to her expectantly. They were waiting, as the always did, for...for...what? This always happened. Bitsy would proclaim loudly that she had “found it,” and then pause for a dramatic, and oft-times gassy, moment. Everyone else in the office would look up at her upon the Weather Beater paint can and listen breathlessly for her pronouncement. And of course, Bitsy would clam up. It didn't help that she had a cleft palette, or that her stockings were full of runs; Bitsy simply reeked of philosophical ruminations and posturing. But then again, this was the girl who thought Jung was a type of easy-to-assemble Scandinavian furniture. People never change. But Bitsy liked to think that they did. She was always offering some little chunk of helpful advice regarding the perfectibility of one individual or another. She rarely shared these observations with the people who were supposed to be perfected, however. Instead, she’d tell everybody else in the entire firm that X was far too greedy, or that Y should try to be more assertive, but never tell X or Y those things. Everyone knew that was impossible. Bitsy herself was in need of much improvement. But it was her view that because she had such a keen, incisive view of everyone else's flaws that she was somehow exempted from having to follow any of her own advice.

Outside, the hot wind howled through the Spanish moss hanging from Bub, the maintenance clown. The toes of his floppy shoes stirred slightly as his massive frame swayed to and fro, stirred by climatic current which had spiraled through the stratosphere all the way from Africa. The night before, Bub had been unable to sleep. He thought of the refrain of an old Joni Mitchell song that had occurred in his life at a couple of portentous moments. Was its arrival now the harbinger of something portentous, or was it merely the random firing of a stray, wiggling synapse that had somehow triggered this sense-memory? Bub didn’t know. And with the shrimp calling softly to him from the galvanized tin tub of ice chips, he didn’t ponder the conundrum very long.

Instead he raised his pock marked face and spat out this question to the gods: “O mysterious veil that conceals all the cookie crumbs and wee rodents of our inner souls! Why must the bed springs squeak and the neighbors peak at all our crafty connivance? With the mothers and the brothers already gone to sleep, the stew bums down on the corner need never know of our twisted tryst. Please, lord, never pop a shim.”

With his plaintive plea already whipped away on the salt-seaed spray, Bub returned to his golf shed to while away the restless hours of dawn. He removed his bonnet and replaced his blue-tinged hair with a cruel and unusual twist of his wrist. It was always saddest at this time of night, when the sea birds called out over the sand bar and the garbage scows tooted past. Even a small plastic friend doesn’t help those long hours roll back and allow the green dawn to wink its wounded welcome to the day.

Bub had spent lord-knows-how-many seamless minutes effervescing at the joints. Not that he wasn't sad about misplacing his tiny plastic pal. That miniature executive had been better than nobody when the chimps were down. And the chimps were down more and more often these days, because they’d been unable to translate their opposable thumbs into dominance of the snack-bar. So instead, they hung around down at the filling station, drinking beers they had hidden in the coke machine for cooling, smoking Fanny Ovals and telling one “shoulda-coulda-woulda” story after another. Their bitterness towards the higher primates festered just below the surface of their furry, noseless faces.

Occasionally Bub would hire them at the beginning of the season to ready the course for the onslaught of golfers, waving their putters and screaming for pin-flags. Establishing troop-leadership among the chimps was tough. Bub had managed it. But he was often troubled by what that had done to the chimps — a weak and comparatively hairless ape telling them where to go and what to do. Sooner or later, they resented it and quit.

At times like that, Bub would agonize, often brooding until he began to weep, his tears fissuring the pasty white makeup with rivulets of grief. The miniature plastic executive would tell him to toughen up, that clowns couldn’t weep, that unless he was prepared to sing “Ridi pagliaccio” right now he could just stop that goddamn silly blubbering.

“You don’t have any idea what it’s like,” Bub would sob.

“Hey,” the tiny executive would say, waving his dinky cigar with a small, dismissive wave, “they have opposable thumbs. They could do more with it. But they’ve been seduced by too many screenings of Planet of The Apes. They think if they just bide their time, eventually they'll run things.”

“It's so pathetic,” Bub would moan. “If—”

“Enough,” the executive would bark. “Chimps is chimps, chumps is chumps, and yesterday’s bologna ain’t nothing to spill your guts on.”

“What?” Bub would stammer, growing annoyed by these elliptical korporate koans.
“Aw, what’sa use?” the executive would huff. “You’re just not corporal timber.”

“Or general mayhem,” Bub would add ruefully.