fiction by Jason Edwards
Jackson points at a cardboard cut-out of Scott Baio, after that, Jackson’s on the back of a hog, giving us the bird and shouting obscenities in Hindi. Jackson was the sort of person who wasn’t very good at anything except not being good at things, so that when he did something you didn’t think he could, you were impressed for about five seconds and then you got over it. If Jackson ever walked on the moon, that would be it for NASA.
All of us after work walking through the mall. Because we worked at the mall. Who puts a call center in a mall? A guy who knows his shit, according to the guy himself who did it. A mall on its way to rot, to oblivion if we had enough Tyler Durden in us to scratch our itches. Usually our arms were too heavy to lift and so we got used to the itching and felt weird when we were clean.
Franklin O’Harris, a name to get tattooed on the arm you’re going to shove into a chipper to see if you still have nerve endings. Our boss. The genius. They guy who figured out a three month lease on an otherwise empty mall shop was cheaper than a one-year lease in a legitimate office park. The guy who figured out how to minimize overhead by outsourcing outsources. Call center technology had blossomed, from a zit-faced awkward pre-teen girl into a twenty-something roller derby behemoth with piercings and industrial strength dildos. Call center Indians in India were micromonitored 12 hours per day, and the stress to excel at their jobs was too much. Burnout and turnover and training new hires kept costs too high. So Franklin O’Harris picked up contracts and hired dipshit Americans in dipshit America. We never stressed because we knew Franklin O’Harris let the monitoring tools do the work and since he never checked them, we ignored them too. Half the day half of us took calls, the other half made calls. The other half we switched. On a bad day one call would take all day. On a good day we would call ourselves.
Not going to bother telling you who we were because we were as interchangeable as a billion Indians looking for work. If you want to know who we were, just go find a highscool, find the kids who’re dreaming about shooting everyone, blowing the place up, posting weird messages on Facebook and leaving scary post-it notes in the girls’ bathroom. The ones who never get caught, because there’s nothing to catch. And then they grow up and serve time in community college and finally get a semi-decent weed connection and set the cruise-control. That was us.
Jackson points at a cardboard cut-out of Scott Baio, and says, Franklin O’Harris is in love with that faggot.
8 in the morning, a night of call center yippy kay yeah. Let’s say you have a mall with more closed stores than open, how do you help it go even further out of business? Open the doors early. Good for us, though, as we walked empty corridors lit up with nasty neon. We had something to point at and make snide remarks about as we walked to the bus stop at the other end of the mall.
One of those movie stores. They don’t exist anymore. The internet killed everything.
One of us responds to Jackson by recalling a rumor that every girl who visited the Playboy Mansion from 1984 through 1989 had to sleep with Scott Baio. Bunnies included. And not “had” to in the sense that they were forced to, but “had to” in the sense that if you are ever in Arizona, you “had” to see the Grand Canyon.
Someone else suggests that having to see the Grand Canyon is because there’s nothing else to do in Arizona. The actual words spoken are “mother fucking Arizona.”
Someone else tries draw a comparison between the grand canyon and the vagina of a porn star.
Someone else punches that someone in the arm, very hard.
And then it is pointed out that Playboy is hardly porn.
And then it is mentioned that the premier episode of Joanie Loves Chachi was the highest rated show, ever, in South Korea, because in South Korea “Chachi” is slang for “penis.”
And then Jackson says, I have no idea what you faggots are talking about. Jackson used the word “faggot” a lot. When he suggested that Franklin O’Harris was in love with that faggot, that faggot being Scott Baio, he might have been talking about how Franklin O’Harris had a lot of respect for how many Grand Canyons Scott Baio visited at the Playboy Mansion. He might have meant the man respected the man’s work on Charles in Charge and Joanie Loves Chachi. Or, he might have meant that Franklin O’Harris was a homosexual, and that he want to have homosexual sexual intercourse with an accommodating Scott Baio. The point is, Jackson talked a lot. The point is, no one really listened to him.
Except this time, not listening to Jackson meant we were all thinking about how a shitty actor with no chin who could be easily mistaken for Ralph Macchio, for fuck’s sake, gets all kinds of pussy, and we get to work in a call center from 10 PM to 8 AM and will they even lets us drink beer at Denny’s where we go for breakfast when we can afford it before we go home to smoke a little and then fall asleep? No, not anymore. And Franklin O’Harris drives a H2. And Annie Hamilton, a girl we knew, in one form or another, with one name or another, in high school, was finally fat enough now we could probably have a shot at her Grand Canyon, and how pathetic was it that the only way we could ever get with our high school crush was to wait until adipose tissue had annihilated her self esteem.
So then someone else says, my cousin lives right down the street from Scott Baio.
And if Jackson had stopped walking, gotten a wild look in his eye, stood in front of us and had said, We should kidnap that faggot and dump him in Franklin O Harris’s office, we would have ignored him. But he doesn’t. He never breaks stride. He just says, We should kidnap that faggot and dump him in that faggot’s office.
So, when, the next day, same mall, same time of day, same cardboard cut-out of Scott Baio, Jackson says I know a guy who can help us kidnap that faggot, we can’t not know what he’s talking about.
So we go to Denny’s and order beer and they won’t give us any so we get grand slams instead. And Jackson explains how he went to this bar and he was sitting next to this guy in a jeans jacket and a nasty beard and they got to talking about the economy and Barack Bin Laden and teenage fagtards and the guy said something about the American dream was supposed to be about doing what you love and getting paid for it and Jackson said if he was a job creator he’d pay guys to stomp teenage fagtards and the guy said that’s the job for me and they got drunker and drunker.
And then Jackson tells us he hired a biker gang to kidnap Scott Baio.
Scott Baio isn’t a teenager, someone points out.
Jackson says, so?
Scott Baio is actually in his 50s, someone else points out.
Jackson says, so?
Scott Baio is a rabid republican faggot, someone else mentions.
And Jackson says, so?
And then we eat bacon and sausage and ham and eggs and hashed browns and pancakes and syrup and French toast and waffles and oatmeal with raisins and frittatas and one of us has a cheeseburger and one of us has a Reuben and one of us has a club sandwich and after we get done telling as many Mitch Hedberg jokes as we can remember one of us tells Jackson Scott Baio’s address.
Jackson smiles, and stands up, and says, Meet me by the back door tomorrow night. He doesn’t call us faggots. He does walk out without paying.
One by one, the rest of us leave without paying.
***
The next day, or night, we’re there. There’s no way any of it is going to happen. The guy Jackson was talking to, he wasn’t in a biker gang. And if he was, he wasn’t going to be able to get his gang to kidnap someone, let alone 52 year old Scott Baio, out of his home in broad daylight. And if they would, Scott Baio wouldn’t be home. And if he was, and they did, they weren’t going to bring him here, to the back of a rotting mall at night by the door we used to go to work because the mall was closed by then. And if they did, there’s no way Jackson could pay them for it.
This is what we’re all thinking. Someone mentions that maybe we’re the payment. Someone else points out that we can never go back to that Denny’s again. Then we start discussing last meals. What we would eat if we were on death row.
And then there’s a low roar which becomes a little louder and then a lot louder and a bunch of hogs are riding past us. One of ‘em’s got something in a buddle draped across his lap, and shoves it off as he passes us, like it’s nothing, like he’s always shoving bundles wrapped in white off his hog as he rides through an empty mall parking lot in the middle of the night.
The last bike goes by. Jackson’s on the back, giving us the bird and shouting, Bhen ke lode, assholes. We can’t tell if the biker he clings to is a man or woman.
And then they’re all gone, the sound of roaring motorcycles waning but never quit disappearing in the night We walk up to the bundle. It’s roughly man sized, but we can’t tell if it’s Scott Baio sized. It’s wrapped in rope. It’s red in places. It’s not moving at all.
Another roar, this one’s an H2. Franklin O’Harris. He gets out of his stupid faggot car and walks over to us. What’s this? He says. We don’t say anything. He bends over to take a closer look. We don’t say a word, we just fall on him, kicking and hitting and smacking and slapping. We beat the crap out of him. We don’t want to him to find out if it really is Scott Baio.