Killing My Idiot Boss

Chapter 1

So I’m sitting at Tommy Mooney’s bar in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. I’m not usually an afternoon drinker. But this was a special occasion.

Or so I thought.

Then Roman Novotny appears out of nowhere, sits down next to me at the bar and pokes a gun in my ribs. I almost shit. That goes without saying.

Well, maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps I should set the scene a tad more thoroughly.

It was around 3:30 but it was one of those late January days where it seemed like the sun would set at, what, 4? So Tommy Mooney’s was getting all these warm rays – well, warm-colored, thanks to the fake stained-glass appliqués on the front windows. Tommy’s isn’t exactly a singles bar but it’s not a bad place to meet women. Just not at 3:30 in the afternoon.

So I’m sitting there sipping a beer, casually chatting with Tommy, who I know through my friend Ed and because we spend a lot of time in Tommy’s. It’s just the usual bullshit chit-chat – the Knicks and how they suck, the Yankees and can they ever get back to the World Series, the traffic on the FDR and how it makes you want to start ramming people with your car.

Tommy’s mostly listening, cutting up lemons and limes, restocking the olives – bartender stuff. His bar is on East 54th, between Lexington and Third, where the office buildings are full of lawyers and secretaries and P.R. guys like me – and Tommy’s is a convenient kind of neighborhood spot, not too pricey, not too divey. The kind of place you’ve probably got in your neighborhood. You probably even know a bartender like Tommy.

But I’m talking to Tommy because I’m the only person in the bar – like I said, it’s 3:30 and Happy Hour doesn’t start until 4. Normally I’d be at work but I’ve got an appointment and I ducked out. And Tommy is a nice enough guy, easy to talk to. So I’m saying to Tommy, I’m at the Knicks game last weekend and I’m sitting next to some asshole who gets on his cell, like, before the opening tip-off. And he won’t get off. And he’s talking so loud I can barely hear the public address system.

That’s loud.

Really annoying. And he’s cursing a blue streak. Motherfucker this and cocksucker that. Not that I give a shit but there are young kids in the section and, like I said, he’s yelling into the phone. I had to laugh; he says, ‘Look I’m not saying fuck you. I’m saying fuck the situation. I hate the fucking situation. That’s what I’m saying fuck about. Fuck the fucking situation. Not fuck you. I’m just talking to you, that’s all.’

What an asshole.

I was going to say something but, you know, what the fuck? He’s this huge guy. I just want to watch the game. But then I see this guy sitting in the row behind him. This is an even bigger guy – and he’s obviously not happy to have to listen to this bullshit.

What’d he do?

The guy taps Mr. Talkative on the shoulder and asks him to put the phone away. Now the guy on the phone is already pissed – at the situation, right? So he whirls around and says, ‘I’m not disturbing you. Mind your fucking business.’ And the guy behind him – damned if he doesn’t snatch the phone out of the guy’s hand and peg it all the way to center court.

So what’d the phone guy –– ? Tommy starts to say.

Then he stops and his eyes get wide. And the next thing I know, Roman Novotny is sitting next to me at the bar and he’s got his pistol poking into my side.

I do a double-take straight out of Laurel & Hardy but Roman says, Face front, dipshit. Which is when I notice that Tommy has disappeared. If this was a Roadrunner cartoon, there would be a little cloud of dust where he was standing a moment ago. Now he’s gone, though I can see the last couple little swings of the door between the bar and the kitchen.

So I’m looking straight ahead and what I see – aside from the rows of premium brands that Tommy keeps lined up on the shelves behind the bar – is me in the mirror, sitting next to Roman Novotny. Not a comforting sight.

Roman is probably in his early 50s, steely gray hair at the temples where he lets the gray show through – the rest of it is this unnatural black that screams, Grecian Formula! It’s pretty cold out – hey, January in New York, no global warming today – but he’s wearing a leather jacket that looks more like a blazer than an overcoat.

Well, no, I take that back; it’s black but it’s not really a cool leather jacket. Put it this way: It’s the kind of leather jacket that middle-aged gangsters wear.

Which is what Roman is.

He’s got that kind of solid build, like professional football players – say, a linebacker – had in the 1950s, before the NFL turned into Land of the Giants. Back when all you had to be to play pro football was tough – not a raging steroid freak or some pituitary case from Samoa.

Roman looks tough because, well, he is. Which means he doesn’t have to act tough – because he is.

So he pokes me with the gun, which I assume is to let me know it’s in his hand. When he pokes me again, I glance down because now I wonder if there’s something else going on and I’m just being paranoid.

But I’m not. It is, in fact, a gun, some sort of snub-nosed revolver.

You don’t need to look, Roman says. You know it’s a gun.

A word, if I might, about Roman’s voice: It’s high. Almost falsetto high – and given that he looks like a cross between Harvey Keitel and Charles Bronson, it’s a lot girlier than you’d expect. Kind of incongruous in that sense. It gets me every time and, being particularly nervous at the moment, I can’t help myself. I don’t exactly giggle; it’s sort of halfway between a snicker and a whinny.

You think this is funny, frat-boy? Roman says and I can see his eyes harden as our gazes meet in the mirror.

No, I manage, but it’s all I can do not to laugh out loud.

You know where the door to the alley is? Roman says, quietly – he hasn’t raised his voice above a mutter in all of this. Never mind that there’s no one there and that the jukebox is playing something shlocky from the 80s, like Foreigner or Asia. When I nod, he says, Well, let’s go. I hesitate, just for a second – there must be some mistake, this is not really happening – and he prods me again and says, Get moving or I’ll do this right here.

So I put my beer down and slide off my barstool. Without thinking, I button my suit jacket and reach down for my briefcase, which is standing next to my stool.

You won’t need that, Roman says coldly. So I straighten up and head around the bar and through the swinging door into the back.

The kitchen is empty; Tommy’s short-order cooks don’t usually come in until 4. And there’s no sign of Tommy. Then, as we walk past the freezer, I see Tommy duck out of sight, after peeping at us from the freezer-door porthole window.

We thread our way through the various stations, past the grill and oven, past the slop sink, past the row of dingy lockers and the tiny break area – basically a closet filled with discarded barroom chairs – that Tommy keeps for the waitresses. I push the back door and find myself in a kind of cul-de-sac, connected to a passageway to the street. The garbage trucks can’t get back here; Tommy has to grease palms to get the trash guys to push the bins around a corner to the truck at the curb.

The garbage pick-up obviously is due, because it’s overflowing the dumpster. There’s the sour fruity smell of decaying vegetable matter, mixed with the stink of rotting chicken, the bones from the tons of wings Tommy serves every week. The concrete is slippery with spilled grease, which Tommy apparently isn’t evolved enough to recycle for biodiesel.

I can faintly hear car horns and traffic noises coming around the corner from the street. Then Roman grabs my shoulder and spins me around so that I stop and face him.

Look, Roman, there must be some mistake, I say.

Yeah, that’s what they all say, Roman says. He grabs my shoulder and, with irresistible strength, forces me to my knees. I suddenly feel the cool wetness of I don’t even want to know what soaking through the knees of my pants and bounce back up to my feet.

Hey, I’m ruining my suit, I protest. But I’m barely upright when Roman grabs my shoulder and more emphatically pushes me back to my knees.

Yeah, like that’s your biggest concern at this moment in time, he says, and I wonder which is harder for a dry cleaner to get out of pure wool: fryer grease or brain matter.

Once he has me where he wants me, Roman takes a big windup and brings the pistol to my temple. I can smell gun oil and feel the cool smoothness of the end of the barrel pressed against my skin. I close my eyes because, well, it seems like the natural thing to do.

Except that instead of jumping straight into oblivion – or whatever happens when bullet meets brain – I hear a resounding CLICK! And, before I can open my eyes, another one. And another.

When I finally do glance up at Roman through slitted eyes, he’s got the cylinder open and is spinning it angrily.

Fuck me, he growls. I hate when this happens.

I don’t like the sound of that, but I do know an opportunity when I see one. So, as he’s pawing through his pockets, I casually climb back to my feet.

You know, if this is a bad time, I can come back – I say. What am I thinking? Come back?

But before I’m even all the way upright, Roman hits me in the head with the gun. Which smarts, by the way.

Stay the fuck where you are, he says. I don’t want to have to chase you. You want me to shoot you in the back? ’Cuz I will. I hear that hurts worse.

I can hear this metallic clicking and then his hand emerges from the pocket of the leather jacket, full of loose bullets. He gets two into the gun’s cylinder, then spills the rest on the ground in front of me. I easily resist the impulse to politely retrieve them for him. He starts to bend over to get them himself, then stops and says, Fuck it.

He clicks the cylinder shut and performs the same elaborate windup to bring the gun to my head – it’s the same kind of windmill motion that Pete Townshend of the Who used to use when he was really attacking his guitar in concert. Except the windmill stops with the gun against my temple once again.

####

Chapter 2

We’ll come back to Roman but first, I have to imagine, you’re probably wondering what I did to deserve this.

What could a guy like me – white-collar, still relatively young, executive material – do to piss off a guy like Roman? For that matter, how do I even know someone like that?

Really, I wonder myself sometimes. I mean, I’m not playing dumb; I do know the answer to that. But when I was down there on my knees, that’s what I was thinking: How did I get into this mess? Well, I’ll get to that. It’s the whole point of the story, wouldn’t you say?

But first, a digression: You know how they tell you that your whole life flashes in front of your eyes when you know you’re about to die? I always thought that was just one of those things people say. Total bullshit, casual conversation.

There I am, down on my knees and the one thing I’m thinking is: This place smells like shit. I can only imagine what kind of stains it will leave on the knees of my suit. By the time it actually dawned on me that I was going to die, he was ready to pull the trigger.

I’ll admit: Some of my life flashed through my head – but I only got as far as second grade. I remembered meeting this TV kids’ show host when I was five named Casey Jones and riding the ponies at Queen Anne Kiddieland. And my first day of school and my first little girlfriend. I actually was picturing being down in the basement of Joanie Gaylord’s house, the time she let me kiss her when we were both 7.

And then Roman pulled the trigger.

So I only got about eight years’ worth of flashback. It turns out to be actually true that you do think about your life – but my whole life didn’t make the cut. Which sucks.

Except that Roman’s gun was empty. When that happened, well, I stopped thinking about my past and started thinking about the future again – or at least the next few minutes and how I could stretch it into more than just the next few minutes.

You know what else I was thinking? Around the time he threatened to shoot me in the back, I thought, What would Jim do? So that also could have been my last thought.

Jim always knew how to handle what seemed like a completely untenable situation. At the moment, I really missed Jim. Good old Jim.

Fucking Jim. If it weren’t for Jim, I wouldn’t even have been there.

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Chapter 3

This all started with Jim. It was about – I want to say six months ago but I know it was longer. Time flies when you’re getting fucked, right?

Except that, after a while, you stop noticing that you’re being fucked. It becomes the norm. Your life sucks and you’re used to it and how fucked is that? The world is in a constant state of entropy and we spend our lives trying to ignore that fact, distracting ourselves from how trapped or doomed we are by using drugs or sex or fantasy baseball or scrapbooking or wives and kids and families and jobs. Every once in a while, things get better for a bit, maybe even for a few months or even years at a time. But that’s the exception, not the norm.

Sorry, not very Zen of me.

But this all started with Jim. And his going-away party.

Talk about the end of a golden era, when entropy was held at bay for a solid five years. It doesn’t get much better than that.

At least in terms of work. Sure, there were crises and problems of a personal nature that cropped up during that period.

Like the whole situation with one of my former girlfriends, Lainie. That one went downhill fast – mostly because, after six months together, she figured out that I liked my job more than I liked her.

Well, no, that’s not quite true. We had a lot of fun because she could party as well as any guy I knew. When it came to blowing off steam, there was no one better. And the sex was great. She had a hair-trigger orgasm, which meant I never had to work too hard. We could go as long or as short as I wanted – she was happy either way. But, well, she was always needy in the mornings. I, on the other hand, was already refocused on work. Last night was great, but that was last night. Another day, another pile of dollars.

She couldn’t comprehend that but, really, what else is there? Where else do you spend eight hours a day every day of your life except weekends? As far as work was concerned, those years with Jim were the Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance all rolled into one.

Except, of course, in this case, they preceded the Dark Ages, rather than following them.

I shouldn’t overstate how great this was because, after all, I work at a public relations firm. Which, in terms of contemporary society, is almost as low as you can go – with the possible exception of anyone whoever willingly did the bidding of the Bush administration. Either of them.

I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging but we PR guys are responsible for almost everything that’s wrong with the world today. I’ll get into it later but suffice to say that I lay all of society’s problems at the twin altars of hype and spin, which is what we manufacture.

In terms of working at a job that will doom your soul to eternal damnation, Jim was about as great as a boss could be. We worked at a shop called Dart-Arrow and Jim was the head of the creative group. My partner, Ed Greenberg, and I, worked under him. In fact, he was the one who teamed me up with Ed. He saw something about the two of us that he knew would click together – and we’d become the best creative team in the company. As much of a hotshot as I thought I was when I got to Dart-Arrow, I’ll offer up my praises and admit that Jim taught me everything I know.