Confessions of a Fuck-Up Artist!

Trying to think of some last minute Christmas gifts, but then it occurred to me that I really could give a flying fuck this year.

I once knew this guy who would fart ghosts.

No joke.

He was an assistant manager down at the cube farm, where for eleven years I did a modest impression of someone who gave a fuck for a living. He on the other hand took pride in having arrived at a station in life where his job was to see what time others had arrived at theirs. He measured our hours into minutes and made us feel each second of it. Don't let the math fool you folks. 480 minutes is a lot longer than 8 hours because 480 minutes is what you clock at the cube farm, while 8 hours is the blink you're allotted to sleep. Even his face was three day old soda flat while he waddled around in office dress code approved khakis that he did not so much as wear as seemed to have been poured into.

But he didn't always fart ghosts.

That didn't start until much later, during my second year at the cube farm and his third year as an assistant manager.

It was during a meeting after lunch when his troubles started. It was some sort of mandatory production meeting that involved the whole adjudication department. The gist of it was something about how weren't allowed to eat anything from the vending machine that might have to be microwaved as it was eating up precious minutes that could be better served at our desks. This was cause for much debate. Because by this new rule, an employee was still free to microwave a snack purchased elsewhere and use the microwave.

My assistant manager was vowing ardently to look into the matter when his stomach started grumbling and his normal meerkat on Prozac gaze twisted into agony. He doubled over as the grumbling grew louder, as if all the plumbing in Dante's Inferno had clogged under a massive Satanic #2 before the sound of a baby elephant being born ruptured out from the seat of his pant.

No one laughed.

Not because we were anywhere remotely mature not to but rather because of the green hologram cloud tethered to his ass like a comic book thought balloon. It began to shape itself in the air above and behind our assistant manager, forming into an eyeless face that groaned with eternal agony.

Everyone but me was too frightened to make a move.

I was actually too stoned to move, paranoid that that joint I smoked with the cleaning lady down in the parking lot for my 'lunch' might've been spiked. Where everyone else around me couldn't believe what they were seeing I was too busy pretending not to be seeing a damn thing.

Then there was another rumble of belly and another blast of rusted trombone as a second hologram cloud, cereal mascot purple, gassed its way from beyond the veil into our world. The face it formed was that of a kindly woman of advanced years which only made the spectral axe embedded sideways into her skull the more disturbing.

"Who dares summon us!" The eyeless face spoke with a voice that reminded me of Captain Picard with a bad head cold.

"Yes," The old lady with an axe in her skull joined in, "Who would be so bold as to pluck us from beyond the realm of life's brief dream?"

At this point everyone ran for the door only to find it was locked.
The horror, like the stink, had become palpable and my employees pounded at the conference room's door and glass walls. However the conference room was right by the call center and with their headphones on no one could hear a thing.

I remained in my seat entertaining that maybe, just maybe, that this was all actually happening.

The two floating faces floated around the room on a wave of dank spectral flatulence to hover above my terrified co-workers pounding howling desperately for help. My Assistant manager was curled into a fetal ball on the floor with the twin gas streams flowing out of pants stained with ectoplasm. The faces began cackling with monstrous glee before stopping.

"Martha?" The eyeless face asked the old lady with an axe in her skull.

"Roy?" she answered turning with recognition. "It's you! Why did you kill me, Roy?"

"Because you spooned out my eyes, woman." the eyeless face barked floating up to her scowl, "With a fork at that. What kind of woman don't have sense enough to spoon a man's eyes out with a spoon?"

"Didn't have a spoon on me you old coot!"

"Martha..." the face growled floating up to hers.

"Roy..." She snarled back into it.

And then the two faces locked into a passionate kiss, one that broke out to a once again stunned silent room. Then the faces broke out of their embrace to begin licking each other's faces in the most lewd and depraved manner.

When the old lady began tongue poking the empty eye sockets one of my fellow employees, a young man with a football player not good enough for the draft's physique shouted out - "Enough!"

From there he picked up one of the office chairs and waved it in front of him menacingly.

The two faces ignored him, as Martha started licking the empty eye socket of Roy as he groaned with a satisfaction most lascivious.

"11 dollars an hour to deal with this shit and NO microwave popcorn? " He howled charging forward with the chair. "I'm not paid enough for this shit."

And he threw that chair clear through the window with a second floor view of the parking lot and dived after it. None of us would ever see that employee again. For all we know he's still running.

But with the window shattered open the ghostly faces were torn out of their phantasmal union and sucked away out of the conference call to where ever it is that ghosts go when they leave us.

Well, that was my assistant manager's last day on the job.

As to how this curious affliction came across my assistant manager, there was no end of scuttlebutt going around the various floors and divisions of the cube farm offered in reply.

Some say he was cursed by a magical wino when my assistant manager refused to give him his left over lunch before depositing in a trash receptacle. Some say he was cursed when he mistakenly wiped his ass with a page of the Necronomicon left inexplicably on the back of a Denny's commode with not a single shit-ticket in sight. Others say that it happened when he accidentally found himself needing to go and having nowhere else to relief himself save a graveyard that was built on an Indian graveyard that in turn was rumored to have once been a dinosaur burial mound.

So what happened to man who farted ghosts after that day?

Nobody knows nor have they made any particular effort to do so since.

Life went on at the cube farm and it wasn't long until another assistant manager replaced him, one with an equal zeal for the measuring of those long 480 minutes.

At least until he started vomiting crickets in the break room, but well, I had called out sick to party with the cleaning lady so I couldn't really tell you much about that.

The school bus is never so slow as it is on that last afternoon ride home before Christmas vacation. I'm of the age when I wore a Harlem Globetrotter worthy afro along with my Captain America Underoos that acted as a shield against the taunts of bullies. 4th grade and the class mates with whom I share a bus route to and from home easily stand a good six to eight inches on me and that's counting the 'fro. They weren't born local, but rather came with their parents when they fled Mother Russia. These were kids with names like Boris and Yuri, Jewish kids who though outnumbered three to one walked away the victors from many a basketball court rumble with Catholic school greasers.

Oh if those Nazi skins from my later days of pits and combat boots could have seen these kids they'd think twice about acting upon their wicked ignorance let me tell you.

However I was the quiet type in class, smart but with no ambition to apply it and big but with no interest in games that involved teams. So usually they just ignored me. So I was free to doodle in peace the flight of a Millennium Falcon (resembling a bloated horseshoe) against a swarm of tie-fighters (which looked like a cloud of impregnated letter H's) in the back of my text book. But earlier in the year it was revealed that like my parents I was an atheist and it was atheists that had drove their parents from their homeland.

They rechristened me 'Bob Moscow'. They launched paper airplanes whose points embedded themselves into my afro. I deflected spit balls the way Wonder Woman deflects bullets off her wrists. Pting! Pting! Pting! They sent me sprawling across the floor of the school bus with thrusts of Converses and slapped books out of my hands with barking guffaws. Their biggest, their champion, would pin me down sometimes and swing wild punches to my everywhere but the face, leaving that only so I could hide it in shame as he knew I would do. Around him his friends would look down and tell me this is what happens to those who do not believe in God.

But then one day something in me did something different. The details a blur now, but mainly it involved me walking behind their champion on the playground, tapping them on the shoulder and smashing their face in with the side of a Dukes of Hazard lunchbox. Repeatedly. Then I may or may not have ended up in a rolling ball of punches that ended me maybe accidentally biting the kid on a wrist that was choking me.

"Animal." The teacher spit in instinctual fury at me and dragged me off my opponent.

I was suspended. I was in trouble. I made mom cry and dad curse. I sat in the Grey Room and listened to the principal tell my folks I was need of serious psychological help. They refused outright but when we got home none of them said more than necessary to me for the rest of the day.

When I came back to school I was left alone... not just by the bullies but by the few friends I had made as well. They're parents had heard about me. About what I had done to that poor child. About my parents being godless. I lived neither in peace or in fear and my only friends for the rest of the year ended up being my parents.


And on that long school bus ride home I stared out the window. The other kids would mumble and cast furtive looks my way before bursting into giggles. But after an eternity of wait it pulled up to 1708 East 4th Street. An apartment that only a child could mistake for being big enough to fit a hundred made kingdoms within. Outside, sitting on the stoop reading a book, waited my father. The door slid open. I got up out of my seat ran down the aisle of the school bus, rabbit hopping over the jut of a shin and even as the bus driver told me not to run I leapt out of the vehicle and landed in a squat with palm thrust on the ground the way they do in the comic books.

When I looked up my dad was standing there smiling and he'd dismiss the driver with a wave as if he was one of the dukes or barons from his books and the bus would rattle off in a sulk.

I'd bound up for a hug and that day dad swooped me up into his arms.

"Welcome back, Flight Commander Wildstar." He told me. "I see you've successfully dodged another dogfight with the Comet Empire."

"Yes sir." I told him as his clothes instantly resembled those of the Captain of the Battleship Yamato from the Star Blazers cartoon we watched together. "I lost them on the edge of a black hole and they all got sucked into it so now they're all squished."

"'Squished', huh?" Dad laughed and carried me towards the apartment with one arm. "Sounds like you've earned a two week vacation and a trip to the comic shop."

And damn near thirty years later and one commute home in a Toy Yoda piloted down 85 like it was Type-O Model 52 space-fighter plane I pull into the driveway. I step out with a salute to the empty porch where I know my father isn't standing there waiting. I salute where he is not. I smile, bittersweet and mock-cocky, - "Flight Commander Wildstar, reporting back to base for duty, sir."


My mother's dog barks in reply from behind the locked door of her empty home. Behind a Mustang rumbles bass in a slow cruise behind me and the dead leaves count as numberless as the planets I once swore I'd visit.

"Now I want you to show me where exactly on the doll that Santa got you for Christmas... just where exactly it was that Santa touched you."