When the Drumming Stops by Steven Wishnia

Author:Steven Wishnia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc.

Underend stepped out of the office for a cigarette. It was around 3:30 Tuesday, a lull in the calls. The air was heavy and polluted. It was like the entire city had been sealed into a miasma chamber of concrete, car exhaust, and heat-blast. Breathing felt like lifting weights. Here I am adding to it with my little baby cancer stick.

Gino, the new guy, was outside too, a short, skinny pale-olive Puerto Rican with scraggly fragments of beard and black eyes like orbs of wrath under his backwards BRONX baseball cap. He leaned on his bike with an unlit Kool in his hand. Underend offered him a light.

“Bitch wanted my fingerprints,” he started in.

“What?”

“I had a job in the mailroom, J.M. Young, you know them? Twelve bucks an hour and benefits. And this bitch from Human Resources comes in, tells us all they’re gonna—what’s that word?—outsource us, they’re turning the department over to a private contractor and they’ll hire us all back at nine bucks. I said, ‘What the fuck? I got a wife and baby,’ and she says, ‘The company has very generously recommended that you all be rehired by the new contractor. We’re protecting your job for you. That’s more than fair.’ Fuckin’ robot bitch.

“And then she says we all have to get fingerprinted, and I ask why, and she says, ‘It’s part of the procedure. Because you’re employees of an outside contractor who will be handling sensitive company correspondence, and we need to verify your identities.’ The fuck? I been workin’ there eight months, you know who I am. And then she puts her hand on my arm and says, ‘C’mon, You-jean-ee-oh. It only takes a minute. It doesn’t hurt.’

“Fuck that! I say, ‘I’m a working man. I don’t steal, I don’t rob, I don’t sell drugs. I’m a working man,’ and she waves to this faggot rent-a-cop, and he says, ‘You’re trespassing. You have five minutes to get your stuff and leave or you’ll be arrested.’

“I’m a go back there. I’m a go back there with my boxcutter and put it up that bitch’s throat. ‘It’s 9/11, mothafucka, I’m flyin’ this plane!’ I’m a chop that rent-a-cop’s faggot ass into hamburger. Cuidado con esa hacha, Eugenio!”

Underend sympathized, but the dude’s fury unsettled him, had a psycho edge that could lash out and slash anyone within range on any imagined provocation, a streetwalking creature with a squirt gun full of nitroglycerin. “Hey, if you’re gonna go out like that, do it to the CEO. He’s the head asshole in charge. The others are just stooges.”

“Fuck them. They’re the ones in my face talkin’ bullshit. But if it makes ya happy, I’m a go back there with a motherfuckin’ bat and pound that chump’s bald head like I’m Carlos Beltran.”

“Yeah, but the way the Mets are goin’ these days, you’d probably swing and miss.”

“Ha ha, that’s funny, man.” Gino slapped him five. They finished their cigarettes and went back in.

Underend felt the same way a lot. A lot of rage in the city.

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