Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny by Garrison Keillor Page A

years, but I couldn’t help but be a little resentful. I was the one carrying the eggs, not the Jap. I was the one Larry B. Larry was threatening. I made a mental note to myself:
Talk to Naomi and negotiate a contract, and don’t just accept the first offer like a spineless jellyfish. You’re a New Yorker, not a Minnesotan, so say what you want in clear English. Be bold. Don’t underbid yourself. But first, maybe it’d be good to face up to the Boguses as a proof of your loyalty. Tussle with them and get Naomi’s attention, and maybe then she’ll raise your share to 5 percent or even 7 or 8. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Danny at the deli had told me an interesting fact about the Boys. Their names were Tony, Tiny, and Ronnie, and they were former pro rasslers, under the ring names Devastation, Destruction, and Death, and were terrified of spiders, snakes, and bats. “All you got to do is put something on them that crawls up them and they turn to jelly.” A big, hairy spider would do the trick. I had plenty of those in the office. So what’s to worry about?

9
    The Bogus Brothers attack
    AS I GOT SKINNIER, I got great pleasure out of swanning through a crowded room and leaning against a pillar or abutment and striking an elegant pose and watching women fling themselves at me like moths on a lightbulb. On May Day, a child of twenty-one named Moxie hit on me in the Brew Ha Ha. She was plump, like a popover, and wore daisies in her hair and a smock that said
Color Me Happy,
and she said, “I’m sitting over there and I’m going, like, Who is that totally hot guy? And I’m, like, Do I dare walk over and talk to him? And I’m going, No way. And then I’m going, like, Why not. You look hot. Like, how old are you?”
    “Darling child, if you and I were to talk and my shoulder brushed your shoulder, we’d be caught in a rushing torrent of ravenous passion and down the white-frothed spillway and over the roaring cataract of romance and into a whirling vortex of desire—kissing, caressing, clutching, grabbing, thrusting, crying out with hunger and delight—and, beautiful as our intentions might be, it simply wouldn’t work and here’s why—I live in many different verb tenses, such as the imperfect indicative, the past imperfect, and the subjunctive, and you, sweetheart, only in the present indicative. I mean, you’re going, like, Who is that guy? but I have gone or might have gone or will have gone, but you just pretty much keep going, and someday you may look back and wonder where I went. And I’ll be, like, not there.”
    She gave me a triumphal smile. “I had been hoping you could come to my apartment and we might have come to know each other better,” she said, a predicate that almost stole my heart away.
    I might have kissed her then and there, but a scrawny kid with black horn-rims walked up. Black T-shirt, black pants, black tennies, hair dyed black and sitting lopsided on his head. “Where you going with this old dude?” he said to her.
    “He’s chill, Tony.”
    “Chill? You mean like, cold. Like in, laid out on a marble slab. Don’t mess with him unless you know about resuscitation, Mox.” And he lunged at me and took a swing and missed and fell down and banged his noggin on the table and knocked himself silly. His nose was bleeding all over the black shirt. He drew himself up tall and glared at me and dabbed at the blood with napkins and finally came up with a good exit line. “Watch yourself,” he said to me. And exited.
    “How about it? Want to come with?” she said to me.
    “I’m going, like, I don’t think so. But thanks for the offer.” She was very nice, as they say, but too young. I don’t get into bed with a woman who might, casually, in the post-coital glow, ask what the sixties were like. Not my sixties or the other one.
    ODDLY, NOW THAT I DIDN’T need to work a lick, I got a stream of job offers. The phone jingled like a Salvation Army Santa Claus.
    1. Lost