Finally, Some Good News Read online

  finally,

  some good news

  a novel by

  delicious tacos

  For Courtney

  What Do You Do

  Nest Egg

  Second Date

  No Exit

  The Zombie Zone

  Angel of the Morning

  Power Achiever

  Belinda

  I Just Keep Losing

  The Sherman Oaks Outdoorsman

  Aswang

  Festival of Savings

  The Fisherman’s Daughter

  Ghost Wedding

  Talk to Her for Me

  Father of the Sword

  The Big One

  Industrial Society and Its Future

  Red Dawn

  Evaluation

  The Youth

  Blue Moon

  Funeral

  Treehouse

  What Can You Do

  Hyper Elite Disrupter

  Birds of the Amazon

  What Do You Do

  He was on Tinder. What do you do, she asked.

  He was a secretary. His company provided data driven solutions to optimize cross platform branded content. He might have done something else but he’d spent 20 years drunk. The want ad said room for growth.

  He built Powerpoints. When a client was on the phone he hit spacebar. Today, a Webex with Wentworth. The media planning agency. They represented the Clear and Clean Skin Care division of the Nonmedicated Facial Cleansers and Body Washes/ Poufs division of the Consumer Packaged Goods division of Johnson and Johnson. Wentworth was a subsidiary of UAG, which was a subsidiary of Group J, which was a subsidiary of PWW Group. PWW was a holding company based in Paris. Chartered in Ireland for tax purposes. PWW bought advertising time from television stations en masse. Sold it on arbitrage markets it created. The purpose of UAG and thus Wentworth was to help create demand for advertising time. PWW could then buy low and sell high. This was illegal in America. All advertising agencies were therefore subsidiaries of three conglomerates out of Europe.

  The Webex was about Clear and Clean’s possible cross platform branded campaign with Ellen! Its thesis was that J & J should buy in, even at Ellen!’s stratospheric-seeming 46 CPM. J & J’s own market research found that teens and tweens identified with civil rights and related ideals. Engagement hadn’t been this significant since Vietnam. Cementing the brand to environmental awareness and/ or social justice was correlated to a 38% uptick in urge to share branded content. Teens and tweens were tough. But you could seed brand elevation if you got to the moms while the moms still controlled CPG spend. Ellen! had moms.

  Ellen! planned to profile a transgender teen. There were two candidates. Candy, 14, was a figure skater from Oklahoma. Sparkle, 15, a cheerleader/ poetess from Utah. Sparkle was the new face of Clear and Clean’s campaign. Candy had signed with Unilever. Both CPG behemoths wanted in on trans teen anti-bullying. But Unilever’s Dove line was entrenched with overweight over 25’s. Plus, Sparkle was biracial. Her optics were better for Ellen! and frankly, Candy wasn’t hot. Ice sports don’t test well with Hispanics. Unilever would thus be ill-advised to match the 46 CPM Ellen! was asking. Even with the surge in show engagement from Ellen’s newly adopted Pomeranian, Duchess. But for J & J it made sense.

  Clear and Clean’s flagship cleanser was a proprietary solvent derived from Butane. It had been used to hose out tanker trucks that carried juice and other food grade fluids. When it had been found to cause cancer in rats this use was discontinued. R & D tried it as an upholstery cleaner and a mentholated cooling wipe for genitals and armpits. Neither tested well. They settled on a new facial product for teens. From 12 to 17 many young people develop acne. Whether they use facial cleanser or not, it arises, persists, then simply goes away. But brand affinity established at 12 drives purchase through adulthood.

  There were 30 slides. He only fucked up once. The pie chart over a photo of Sparkle. Ass aloft in a strong boy’s hot palm. Silky hair and pom poms flying. She was the spitting image of the star of a video he’d seen on motherless.com. Teen Tranny Gets Rock Hard Riding Bro’s Cock. A Mexican boy with the face and body of a 14 year old girl and a narrow hairless penis with an angry curve like a scimitar bobbed on another boy’s lap. She had moves. He’d been disturbed by his erection. Quickly x’d out the browser tab. He lingered a beat too long until the Regional Brand Outreach Manager impatiently cleared her throat.

  It went well. His team knew Ellen! They’d optimized Target and Tide’s co-branded Ellen! cross promotion of Jane the Virgin. It told Hispanic moms about Tide’s soothing effect on neonatal skin. Tide was a viscous blue serum derived from volcanic ash. The co-branded online video segments garnered 2 million views per day. 1/10th that of motherless.com. If J & J bit: room for growth. A career. In ten years he could run the division. Fifteen more and he could die. It’s boring to talk about, he said.

  Tell me

  It has to do with marketing, he said.

  What do you do exactly

  Why do you want to know so bad

  I’m rad and I deserve a guy who’s rad, she said.

  She did makeup for infomercials. Don’t match dog pictures, he remembered. Small dogs replace a child. Big dogs replace a man. Women with dogs always die alone. She had a pit bull mix. It wore a bandana.

  He messaged her “cunt.” Waited for the three dots in a bubble to know she’d seen it. Unmatched her and opened motherless.com. It was his birthday. He was 39.

  Nest Egg

  He was reviewing his finances. He’d worked two years. Now he had six months of money.

  If I get fired tomorrow and couldn’t collect unemployment. Six months of the lifestyle to which I’m accustomed. About half to rent. Car payment. 30% of it’s interest even though the loan is 6% interest. The car was 16 grand but I’ll end up paying 29 grand if I stay on schedule. How financing works.

  What do I have, he thought. The car. Some guitars. What else. My bike got stolen by the citizen offspring of undocumented whatever you call them now. Rent sixteen grand a year, shit not bolted down always stolen instantly. Like a doughnut on the beach snatched by seagulls. A laptop. An Xbox One with a used copy of The Witcher 3, which replaced a wife or girlfriend. 20 grand cash. 8 grand in credit card debt that had been charged off by the bank for two years now. That he’d been paying down 1% and 1% and 1% to keep Bank of America– actually Banc of America, their credit card division, from suing him. Garnishing wages. After paying 8 grand I owe $13,000 on a $16,000 car. If I pay a grand a month I’m out in about a year. Then hack away at the charge card. Call your creditor, Suze Orman told him. Ask to negotiate up to 50% off by offering one lump sum. They said fuck off.

  Once the debt’s zeroed out I’ll still have the 20 grand. At that point I’ll have paid 21 thousand for the car; it’ll be worth 12. Other possessions clocking in at $1,100. I’ll have a net worth of thirty three thousand. The median for Americans my age. Except for school and a few months here and there he’d worked since fourteen. Farmhand on a cranberry bog. House painter. Laborer scraping pipes on a ladder on a scaffolding. 90 degree heat, face by a fan with sharp blades that sucked up every fume for miles. Brain damage. Body damage. Assembly line at a candle factory. Short order cook. Door to door salesman. Telemarketer. Register at a drug store in a neighborhood filled with Soviet Bloc Jewish elderly yelling and yelling about the flyer not applying to 32 oz. vs. 48 oz. Sunsweet Prune Juice with a Hint of Lemon. Views on Hitler softening. $4.25 an hour. Minus taxes. Janitor.

  When I’ve paid off the car it will break. Wouldn’t put it past them to have a chip in it. It reads the balance from J.P. Morgan Chase. If you read that in the paper it wouldn’t surprise you.

  Another year and a half and the deb
t’s gone. If no additional purchases. No new TV with a higher contrast ratio. Deeper blacks. Even though a lot of The Witcher 3 takes place in caves. He needed a new mattress. Hips like an Irish wolfhound about to get mercy killed. Bones grinding into old springs. He needed new pants but $24.95 from H & M was fine. Who gave a fuck what he looked like anymore. He’d taken a work trip to Japan. An audition for his promotion. Selfie at the Imperial Palace. His eye bags in sunlight like a skin graft from shaved scrotums stitched together. Black people get stomped by cops but white people wake up in their 30’s with a face that better be rich.

  He was eligible for a 401(k). He read up. You can retire comfortably at 65 if you start saving at 23, said Forbes.com. Even with a relatively low yield of 6%. Every 401(k) he’d had earned 1%, lost 2.5% in fees. As for saving at 23: median household pre-tax income is $51,989 per year. Who saves on 40 grand net with a kid. It costs twice that for a school where gas huffing sasquatches don’t commit Rwandan machete genocide. Nobody has money. Nobody gets returns. We’ll all work till we’re dead. Eating shit, having to smile about it.

  If I was married– if my wife could work part time. Cover rent. That’d be something. But there aren’t wives now.

  If you’d invested back then you’d have money now, stupid, said Forbes.com. The interstitial Quote of the Day brought to you by Hewlett Packard. Hewlett Packard made printers that existed to lie about how much toner they had. So you’d have to buy more toner from Hewlett Packard. When the machine told you your half full toner was empty you were encouraged to mail the old cartridge to Hewlett Packard, for the environment. Hewlett Packard then sold it to someone else. The CEO of Hewlett Packard ran for president. No one shot her.

  If I cut back I can save two grand a month. How much more do I need. He searched Windows for “calculator.” It tried to sell him something. A feature of Windows 10 was you couldn’t just search files. You simultaneously searched the web with Bing, which offered monetized suggestions. They sold you the machine and the machine sold you things you auto-paid every month until they became invisible. He paid for Microsoft Office every month, for iCloud every month. He paid for his car every month; when he took it in for service the man told him he couldn’t check the brakes. These tires are so bald it’s dangerous for me to take the wheels off. You shouldn’t even be driving this car. They’d sold it to him a year ago. We offer factory spec tires: 900 parts, 400 labor. Financing was available.

  He went to another web site and typed what he had and what he made and a 6% return and waited to hear how long until he could stop. The phone was ringing. The web site said 25 years. It was his birthday. He was 40.

  Second Date

  I want to suck your cock, she said. They were in her son’s bedroom. The boy was about 12 and he was sleeping. And I want you to suck my cock, he said. But he didn’t. They’d been doing coke for 90 minutes. It was cold in her house. He could feel his dick like a slimy canned mushroom.

  He let her kneel down and take it out from his too tight pants and his day glo pink American Apparel underwear. There it was: a blue acorn. Her mouth was warm but there was a little coke in her spit and it made him feel like her tongue was wearing a medical glove. Listen, he said. let’s wait for this bump to wear off. We can talk.

  She looked up at him and made sexy eyes. It was his birthday. He was 36. There was a small party outside; unrelated. People in her room. He had a trapped chunk of coke burning into his sinus by his eyeball. They’d been impatient chopping it up with his Costco card. He needed to block one nostril, hang his head back and snort up a big full breath of air through shuddering coke snot to get the rock into his throat but he couldn’t. He had to make a serious face back. Otherwise she’d feel insulted. Just let the little coke nugget abrade his flesh and bones, probably smoke through to his brain and give him a stroke. What can you do. I really like you, she said. He wanted to play Xbox.

  It was his birthday but he’d had to buy the coke. Despite progress sex roles persist. The dealer came to Van Nuys in his cream colored Oldsmobile. You had to go out and sit in the car with him with the flashers on in the street. He was from Nicaragua. I’ve always wanted to visit Central America, he said, handing over folded cash. Don’t, said the dealer. Is very bad place.

  Will he sleep through this, he said softly. Yeah he takes anti anxiety medication. His cock was still out in the chilly air and she went at it again. It worked this time. Bend over– here, he told her. She put her palms on the dresser and he pulled her skirt up and her panties down. They’d met on OKCupid. She worked for the public radio station. After a minute she said I want you to get me pregnant. I want you to choke me she said, but he was already cumming. As he pulled out dripping on the dresser he saw the boy’s eyes were open.

  No Exit

  Every morning he thought: I can’t do this one more day. Often by the 5 offramp where a line of buses switching freeways made a bottleneck behind a blind curve. He’d be going fast around the bend and suddenly slow buses like a herd of elephant. Behind them an 80’s Jap pickup with six extra feet of steel pipe hanging out the back. Sometimes with a red rag tied on it. Sometimes not. Drivers from lawless places.

  Pipe right at eye level and once a week he almost got lanced in the face like a jousting accident. He’d read about a woman killed by a flying manhole cover. She was driving and an oil truck bumping over it set it spinning like a giant Chinese star. Through the windshield into her eyes like the Simpsons’ dog with the frisbee. My luck it’d just make me uglier, he thought. Ugly blind and retarded. Then I’d step in the manhole.

  It was Valentine’s day. He’d dated a hooker once. Her busiest day of the year. The johns all wanted to talk. How do you have so many lonely men and 9/11 only happened once. So many lonely men yet science spent billions finding zero calorie sweeteners. Nothing on growing teenage girls in axolotl tanks. Billions spent to make a robot kick a soccer ball when who the fuck asked for one more soccer player. Drones controlled from a storage locker outside Vegas precisely target tables at Yemeni weddings but the killer at the joystick can’t get a second date. They made a movie about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with Siri. Hey Siri, he said. Do you want to talk to me. I’m sorry– I don’t understand that.

  The way she said “that.” He could sense contempt. He thought about ramming today’s Mexican truck pipe. Maybe gripping it two handed like something out of 300, forcing it all the way through his brain. Instead he went to work. Around one he realized he forgot his lunch at home.

  The Zombie Zone

  Marcy Pendergrass was putting up the Halloween decorations. The one hot girl in the office. He’d been promoted but his cubicle was the same. Gray desk behind a gray wall five feet high. She held two rolls of fake police tape with cartoon letters. Do you want the Vampire Zone or the Zombie Zone, she asked.

  I don’t have a preference.

  He’d been looking at a grid of consumer packaged goods branding executives. Now he tried not to look too hard at Marcy Pendergrass. She wore a black tennis dress to work. She’d crouched to pick up plastic spiders, to embed in webs she’d stretched outside his boss’s big glass office. Right across from his cubicle. He saw her panties. The color of toothpaste. Then just pick, she said.

  Vampire please.

  I knew you’d pick that.

  She said it sweetly. But he still thought: then why the fuck did you ask. She slid behind him to string up the tape by his printer. Got on tiptoes. Her hip grazed his arm, shifted the cloth of his dress shirt and gave him ASMR. His neck hair stood up. He hadn’t been touched in three weeks. The warmth coming off her made him self conscious about his posture. Her breath made the cubicle humid. Jesus Christ, he thought, I am turning into a vampire.

  You picked vampires because they’re sophisticated, she said.

  **

  She’d caught him in the parking lot once. He was in his car with the stereo playing Entry of the Gods into Valhalla. It was the Otto Klemperer instrumental. Operas were ruined by the tenor. They sound li
ke retarded men crying.

  She was walking down the concrete ramp with a cardboard tray of low calorie bobas for the sales staff. She had on a gray pleated skirt like a Japanese porno. She saw his face in the open window and he got nervous. By the time she asked what is that he’d been thinking for seconds about how to pronounce Richard Wagner. It’s German opera, he said.

  Well that’s surprising about you.

  I think it would be surprising about anybody, sitting in a parking garage listening to this.

  I wouldn’t have thought you were so cultured.

  I’m just waiting for the guy to pull up with my Grey Poupon, he said.

  It was a mistake. Kraft-Heinz Grey Poupon was a client. The line of mustards had its own branding team. Sales were strong thanks to an iconic 80’s ad campaign. But millennials lacked awareness of the condiment. Now he was thinking about work. Her hair was tied back, perfect black like the girls in the Mel Gibson Mutiny on the Bounty. He wanted to throw Anthony Hopkins overboard and take her to a beach and eat breadfruit. What was breadfruit. Why is she being nice to me. What else do I not know about you, she said.

  Jesus Christ, where to begin, he said. He turned the music down. I wish I could say I have nine secret kids and once killed a man. But I pretty much go to work and floss regularly.

  I don’t believe that.

  On weekends I go to the pond and look at aquatic birds.

  She was about to laugh.

  Recently a belted kingfisher took up residence. An engaging bird. Lot of personality.

  I’m about to turn 41 years old and I pay old prostitutes in Koreatown so someone will touch me, he thought. It got so bad I joined a global terror cell. I just want to die but suddenly I want to bury my face in your jet black cunt hairs and burrow into your hot musk like a weevil. I think that’s amazing, she said. That you like birds and the opera.

  I’m glad someone’s amazed.