THE FUNNY THING

Writing has been stifled by the corporate bureaucracy but I'm not surrendering anymore.  There's a me that needs to reassert himself and this is the first step.  The conditions are perfect and I hold all the cards.  Thus and so--take that all you weak-kneed, lily-livered, pinkie-ringed mother-fuckers.  I object to being made to feel inadequate and wanting somehow.  I resent the feeling that my life is being held hostage by people for whom I have little or no regard.  They are caricatures...that's what's even more sad...they're just poor facsimiles of corporate monsters straight out of central casting.  What do they add to the world?  What do they do besides take away from something that they have had no hand in nurturing and developing, something that is itself already lacking substance and meaning?  They are the greedy rapists, sodomizing the comatose body of a mannequin and then stealing its dress and taking a walk down a department store runway, modeling their latest fashion.

Mr. Block...that's RHI Entertainment


(beat)


You worked for RHI Entertainment?


What happened?


A luxury yacht slammed two torpedoes into our side.  We was comin' back from lunch. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Rosamund Pilcher bomb.  47 men and women went into the water. Company went down in 12 minutes. 

Didn't see the first CEO for about a half-hour. Corrigan. 5-1/2 footer. You know how you know that in the water?  You can tell by lookin' from the pinkie ring to the wing tips. What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, CEO's come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the CEO come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that CEO he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away. 

Sometimes that CEO looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a washed up former entertainment executive is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces. 

You know by the end of that first dawn, lost 3 men. I don't know how many CEO's there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged one an hour. Thursday mornin', I bumped into a friend of mine, Jeff Ringler from New Rochelle. Cigar smoker.  Salt of the earth.  I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist.

At noon on the fifth day,  Frank Lupo swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Block here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, 47 men and women went into the water. 39 come out, the CEO's took the rest, August the 18th, 2011. 

Anyway, we delivered the bomb."