AuntShecky
09-26-2008, 03:55 PM
[Author's Note: The following is a work of fiction, in which certain economic realities have been exaggerated for-- what is hoped-- satirical purposes. No opinion on current political parties, candidates, or pending legislation is intended, expressed, or implied. If any reader wishes to reply, please be advised that I welcome all comments, positive, negative, or in-between. However, I urge you to please remember and honor the rules of this forum which forbid commentary on current political figures, parties, and events.]
Free and Clear
Once upon a time there was a country that was a little like Canada, only more humid and less polite. Every person there grew up with the promise that some day he or she might own a house and enjoy a happy retirement in the sunset years. This common aspiration was known as “The Country-that-is-a-little-like-Canada-ian Dream.” (But again, nothing would happen by merely dreaming about it; one was expected to work hard.)
There were give-or-take 200 million hard workers in this particular country. One of them was named Victor Bailey. Victor was employed by Chez Arbrisseau, an exclusive restaurant. He was a sous chef, and he used to joke that although didn't host his own cooking show on cable TV, he made the best sous in town.
With his career on track, a love life flirted near the horizon. Victor had his eye on a young lady by the name of Fannie May, who – he liked to believe – had his eye on him. Whether Fannie may or may not was in question, as their relationship (if one could call it that) was merely in the talking stage. From one of these friendly conversations Victor learned that Fannie hoped to become an investment banker someday. In order to earn college tuition to meet that goal, Fannie worked part-time as a waitress at the Chez Arbrisseau.
Though Victor seemed to be on his way to Easy Street, there was one roadblock: his living arrangement was a nightmare. By present-day standards, it was a “nice” apartment, and it was on the bus line, so he was able to get back and forth to work on time. There were no problems with vermin, at least of the six- and four-legged variety. But there were only three windows in the entire apartment and all three faced north. Victor’s only view was the parking lot. In the winter when the sun hung low on the other side of the sky, it scarcely offered a trace of natural light, thus casting upon Victor’s digs a constant gloominess. At night the parking lot was packed with vehicles, which made him think he was living at the Mall. When he tried to sleep, the security lights on the building across the parking lot intruded into Victor’s bedroom, and even when he shut the vertical blinds, persistent streams of the glare would still sneak in, making a pattern on the opposite wall that was not unlike the shadow of prison bars.
Not only that, the neighbor in the apartment above Victor would park directly below one of the three windows, and leaving both the motor running and car stereo system thumping, he would stomp up the wooden stairs so hard that the few tchotchkes and framed pictures arranged to cheer the place up would tumble off Victor’s shelves and walls. No sooner then he'd set them all aright, the neighbor would pound down the stairs, and the bric-a-brac would fall yet again.
One day Victor was regaling Fannie with this tale o’ woe disguised as a charmingly humorous anecdote. A nearby customer got off his barstool and walked right up to Victor. “Sorry, Sir, “ Victor told him, “I'm on break. Let me call a waiter for you. Kyle! Can you help this gentleman please?”
“No, no,” the customer said, “I'm fine.” Silently, Victor begged to differ. The guy certainly didn't look fine; he looked as if he had – as Victor’s mother used to say – “half a package on.” He was wearing a jacket and necktie, otherwise he would've been denied entry into the restaurant, but the shrieking plaid of the sport coat and the discordant hue of the tie made Victor’s eyes hurt. “Forgive me, but I couldn't help overhear your conversation,” the guy explained. He reached into the screaming pocket next to his lamentable lapels and handed Victor a business card which said: “ Nightflight Realty. Freddy Mack, Agent” followed by a phone number and an email address. “Pardon me, for prying, but may I ask you what you're paying in monthly rent right now?”
Normally, Victor never disclosed personal information to strangers, especially within earshot of a woman on whom he was sweet . When Fannie – class all the way-- took the cue to excuse herself, saying that she was needed at Table Three, this Mack character gave her a tip of an imaginary (though presumably hideous) hat. Against his better instincts, Victor told Mack what he paid in rent. “Really! That much!” Mack’s glee was nearly palpable. “What if I told you that for a hundred dollars – hell, two hundred dollars – less - I could have you sitting in your very own home, a home that you own! No more parking lot lights, no more noisy neighbors, no more broken knickknacks. I can put you in a gorgeous two-bedroom honey quicker than you can say ‘sub-prime.’ ”
“Uh, thanks Mr.-- uh, Mack, did you say? But uh, I don't really have a nest egg in the bank.”
“Bank, schmank! “ Mack scoffed. “No down payment? No problem. Listen, this is Real Estate we're talking about. Property. Land. They're not making any more of it.”
Yeah, Victor, thought. Like oil. “And listen, just between you and me, the value of your house can only go in one direction, Buddy Boy. And that’s up.” To emphasize his point, the agent thrust his index finger into the air and missed poking Victor’s eyeball by a mere centimeter.
A few more conversations later, after a particularly raucous stomping-session from the upstairs neighbor, Victor’s resistance was worn thin. The next day it had disappeared faster than a plate of coquilles Saint Jacques at the Chez Arbrisseau. He selected a one-family house in a semi-suburban section just over the city line. Victor thought the price seemed a little high, but as a “first-time home buyer,” he chalked up his anxiety to inexperience. With a couple of cracks in the foundation and some leaky pipes, the place needed some “fixing-up” as well, but Victor was more interested not so much by what it was, but by what it could be, enthralled as he was with visions of some glorious future of a white picket fence, a lush lawn, and a spacious yard, perhaps with little versions of himself and Fannie running around in it.
At the closing, the initial misgivings resurfaced when he faced the mortgage documents to sign, a daunting ream of pages, in language incomprehensible to a layman and cursorily explained by a jaded financial officer and a cheerleading real estate salesman. Imbedded in the proverbial “fine print” there were terms like “adjustable rate” and “variable,” the murkiness of both making Victor feel all queasy inside. He thought about bolting, or at least phoning Fannie for her opinion, since business affairs were right up her alley, given her field of study, but Victor didn't want to appear weak to a woman, especially one to whom he was romantically attracted. Meanwhile Prescott Potter, the mortgage broker, and Freddie attempted to wave off his fears. Above the storied “bottom line” soon stood Victor’s shaky signature. It was difficult to think of himself as “ Victor Bailey, Landowner” but so he was – or would be -- thirty years down the road.
As soon as the pigeon left the coop, Freddie Mack hightailed it to his Japanese-made automobile in the parking lot of the financial office. A momentarily twinge of envy for Prescott Potter’s vehicle – so upscale that it was no lowly “car” but a “driving machine,” -- was instantly supplanted by the thought of the healthy commission soon to come Freddie’s way. He revved the engine and cranked up the stereo until he heard the thumping sound of the bass and shouted along with the raucously repetitive lyrics: “I Like to Move It, Move It!”
Meanwhile with the ink scarcely dry on Victor’s mortgage, Prescott Potter took the document and placed it with the others in a bundle, soon to be sold to a third party by the name of Allied Amalgamated Services, Inc. (not to be confused with Amalgamated Allied Services, Inc) with the result of another bundle, a lucrative one, lining his own personal coffers. As for the pigeon, both the real estate agent and the mortgage broker had let him fly away without a second thought, for the fate of one Victor Bailey was no longer their concern.
A few days later, Victor packed up his bachelor furnishings and bric-a-brac and moved out of his apartment. For a week or so, the settling- in process was fraught with stress, not the least assuaged by the fact that he was now living farther away from his place of employment, thus presenting a daily ordeal to get to the nearest bus stop. Indeed, a bus driver once gave him a bum steer about where to make connections, but at least being late because of misinformation was better than being late because of oversleeping, after being kept awake most of the night by a noisy neighbor.
An envelope with an unfamiliar return address arrived, and believing it was junk mail, Victor had almost tossed it into the recycling bin. A strange sinking feeling made him open it, revealing itself as the initial statement for his monthly mortgage payment. Victor hastily wrote a check, and immediately made arrangements with his bank to have the amount deducted each month. So long as he could maintain a large enough balance in his checking account, he wouldn't have to worry about it – “out of sight, out of mind.”
When a brisk wind brought a chilling reminder of winter, Victor ordered 150 gallons of home heating oil for the ancient furnace in his basement. When the truck driver delivered the fuel and handed over the invoice, Victor looked at the amount. This was no mere sticker shock – it was ticker shock - because he nearly dropped dead of cardiac arrest. “I'm not buying a whole oil field in Texas,“ Victor said. “I just want to stay reasonably warm this winter.” The truck driver shrugged without a smile. The instant Victor wrote the check to the oil company, he froze with fear. Before the oil truck left the driveway, Victor telephoned his bank. The automated voice on the other end was the same voice he always heard when he called the pharmacy to refill his allergy prescriptions. The recorded instructions told him to press “1" to hear his checking account balance, and the total was – at the moment, reassuring. Victor’s account hadn't been overdrawn —yet.
A few months later, though, Victor had just arrived from a particularly grueling day in the kitchen of Chez Arbrisseau and a torturous commute on the bus when noticed the blinking light on the phone answering machine. The recorded message made Victor wonder if machines talking to other machines was one of the signs of the Apocalypse. Upon playback the familiar recorded voice from the bank informed him that there were insufficient funds in his account, and that he had 24 hours in which to “rectify” the situation or face paying a substantial fee, “if not, in some cases, criminal prosecution.” Overdrawn! Something had bounced – and it certainly wasn't Victor’s mood.
Thus followed days and days of follow-up phone calls and emails in Victor’s effort, if only to discover what the hell had happened. Each time that he was thrust into the Limbo known as “on hold,” the anxiety made Victor feel he was serving a sentence in Purgatory. The inevitable “elevator music” nauseated him; his index finger throbbed by constantly pressing “1" or “2" or “#” according to the recorded instructions. An eternity later, Victor finally found an answer: without warning, his monthly payment had “ballooned” because of the adjustable rate embedded in his mortgage. From now on the payment would be roughly twice what it had been previously.
At that point, Victor did what any red-blooded country-that-is-almost-like-Canada-ian boy would do: he called his mother.
“Oh, hello, Dear!” Her voice didn't sound as cheerful as it usually did when she wouldhear from him. “Isn't that uncanny? I was just about to call you –“
“Mom, listen, I'm in a helluva lot o’ trouble. My mortgage payment doubled ! I'm overdrawn! And they'll probably foreclose on my new house! What am I going to do?”
“Oh, Son, I'm so sorry. It never rains but it pours. I was going to call you to bail me out. Remember how I was getting my pension from Layman’s? Well, apparently their investment brokers had sunk all the funds into some stupid company that went bust. ‘Allied Amalgamated Services’, I don't know, something like that. I read in the paper that the CEO got 55 million dollars when he left. Meanwhile, my entire retirement is wiped out. Now all I got to live on is Social Security , and I don't have to tell you it doesn't go very far with today’s prices. Everything is so dear!”
Still felt sorry for himself, but his mother’s story compounded the misery. If he weren't a man, he'd break down into tears, which would be bring him as close to “liquidity” than he'd ever get. Never in his life had Victor thought of himself as a “loser,” but more and more the evidence was pointing to that possibility. Default may be in the stars, but a little of it also lies in ourselves.
Conducting his own investigation with the on-line computers in the Public Library, Victor found suggestions for “refinancing” or taking out a “second” mortgage with the little house as collateral – which struck Victor as trying to dig oneself out of a whole by digging a deeper one. The notion was nonetheless “dead in the water” – because a subsequent – and expensive!- assessment informed him that the value of his property was three times less than he owed. Victor half-seriously considered sending a piece of “jingle mail” – throwing his house keys into an envelope addressed to the mysterious company holding his mortgage.
Just when the news couldn't get any worse, it did. Next morning when Victor arrived at work, he found a co-worker looking through the windows of Chez Arbrisseau because the front door had been padlocked – fermé a clef ! “Kyle! What’s going on?”
“Oh, hey, Victor. Bad news. We’re closed. Out of Business. We're history. So much for severance pay. Pierre couldn't make ends meet, you know? People can't afford fine dining anymore, I guess. Things are tough all over. Eh, what're ya gonna do? Me, I'm goin’ right downtown and sign up for unemployment. Well, good luck, Victor. It was great working with ya. –“ Kyle said, shaking Victor’s hand. “Oh, before I forget. Remember that little waitress, the hot one?”
Victor didn't like the former waiter’s description of his sweetheart, but he was dying to hear what he knew about her.
“Well, I hear she quit school and ran off with some real estate salesman. What was his name? Frankie? Freddie? Somethin’ like that. I heard both of them are gonna go work for the government.”
It doesn't come down in torrents but deluges. Following Kyle’s lead to apply for unemployment, Victor was forced to take a job the bureau had found for him. In his funny hat and smock, Victor hoped that no one he knew – least of all Fannie – would ever see him working behind the counter at the fast food joint. But one day he recognized a customer who didn't recognize him. Prescott Potter scarcely looked at Victor when he inquired, “How much is the Mr. Bumpety Bump Burger Deluxe?” No sooner had Victor replied, “If you have to ask, you can't afford it,” than he was fired.
At last report Victor was living in a tiny studio apartment in a building invested with vermin of the six-, four-, and two-legged varieties. At any given hour throughout the neighborhood, at least one stereo blasts, more often a group of them , each system vying for decibel dominance.
And just last week the guy upstairs bought a drum set, and as far as Victor can tell, he never skips a practice session.
Free and Clear
Once upon a time there was a country that was a little like Canada, only more humid and less polite. Every person there grew up with the promise that some day he or she might own a house and enjoy a happy retirement in the sunset years. This common aspiration was known as “The Country-that-is-a-little-like-Canada-ian Dream.” (But again, nothing would happen by merely dreaming about it; one was expected to work hard.)
There were give-or-take 200 million hard workers in this particular country. One of them was named Victor Bailey. Victor was employed by Chez Arbrisseau, an exclusive restaurant. He was a sous chef, and he used to joke that although didn't host his own cooking show on cable TV, he made the best sous in town.
With his career on track, a love life flirted near the horizon. Victor had his eye on a young lady by the name of Fannie May, who – he liked to believe – had his eye on him. Whether Fannie may or may not was in question, as their relationship (if one could call it that) was merely in the talking stage. From one of these friendly conversations Victor learned that Fannie hoped to become an investment banker someday. In order to earn college tuition to meet that goal, Fannie worked part-time as a waitress at the Chez Arbrisseau.
Though Victor seemed to be on his way to Easy Street, there was one roadblock: his living arrangement was a nightmare. By present-day standards, it was a “nice” apartment, and it was on the bus line, so he was able to get back and forth to work on time. There were no problems with vermin, at least of the six- and four-legged variety. But there were only three windows in the entire apartment and all three faced north. Victor’s only view was the parking lot. In the winter when the sun hung low on the other side of the sky, it scarcely offered a trace of natural light, thus casting upon Victor’s digs a constant gloominess. At night the parking lot was packed with vehicles, which made him think he was living at the Mall. When he tried to sleep, the security lights on the building across the parking lot intruded into Victor’s bedroom, and even when he shut the vertical blinds, persistent streams of the glare would still sneak in, making a pattern on the opposite wall that was not unlike the shadow of prison bars.
Not only that, the neighbor in the apartment above Victor would park directly below one of the three windows, and leaving both the motor running and car stereo system thumping, he would stomp up the wooden stairs so hard that the few tchotchkes and framed pictures arranged to cheer the place up would tumble off Victor’s shelves and walls. No sooner then he'd set them all aright, the neighbor would pound down the stairs, and the bric-a-brac would fall yet again.
One day Victor was regaling Fannie with this tale o’ woe disguised as a charmingly humorous anecdote. A nearby customer got off his barstool and walked right up to Victor. “Sorry, Sir, “ Victor told him, “I'm on break. Let me call a waiter for you. Kyle! Can you help this gentleman please?”
“No, no,” the customer said, “I'm fine.” Silently, Victor begged to differ. The guy certainly didn't look fine; he looked as if he had – as Victor’s mother used to say – “half a package on.” He was wearing a jacket and necktie, otherwise he would've been denied entry into the restaurant, but the shrieking plaid of the sport coat and the discordant hue of the tie made Victor’s eyes hurt. “Forgive me, but I couldn't help overhear your conversation,” the guy explained. He reached into the screaming pocket next to his lamentable lapels and handed Victor a business card which said: “ Nightflight Realty. Freddy Mack, Agent” followed by a phone number and an email address. “Pardon me, for prying, but may I ask you what you're paying in monthly rent right now?”
Normally, Victor never disclosed personal information to strangers, especially within earshot of a woman on whom he was sweet . When Fannie – class all the way-- took the cue to excuse herself, saying that she was needed at Table Three, this Mack character gave her a tip of an imaginary (though presumably hideous) hat. Against his better instincts, Victor told Mack what he paid in rent. “Really! That much!” Mack’s glee was nearly palpable. “What if I told you that for a hundred dollars – hell, two hundred dollars – less - I could have you sitting in your very own home, a home that you own! No more parking lot lights, no more noisy neighbors, no more broken knickknacks. I can put you in a gorgeous two-bedroom honey quicker than you can say ‘sub-prime.’ ”
“Uh, thanks Mr.-- uh, Mack, did you say? But uh, I don't really have a nest egg in the bank.”
“Bank, schmank! “ Mack scoffed. “No down payment? No problem. Listen, this is Real Estate we're talking about. Property. Land. They're not making any more of it.”
Yeah, Victor, thought. Like oil. “And listen, just between you and me, the value of your house can only go in one direction, Buddy Boy. And that’s up.” To emphasize his point, the agent thrust his index finger into the air and missed poking Victor’s eyeball by a mere centimeter.
A few more conversations later, after a particularly raucous stomping-session from the upstairs neighbor, Victor’s resistance was worn thin. The next day it had disappeared faster than a plate of coquilles Saint Jacques at the Chez Arbrisseau. He selected a one-family house in a semi-suburban section just over the city line. Victor thought the price seemed a little high, but as a “first-time home buyer,” he chalked up his anxiety to inexperience. With a couple of cracks in the foundation and some leaky pipes, the place needed some “fixing-up” as well, but Victor was more interested not so much by what it was, but by what it could be, enthralled as he was with visions of some glorious future of a white picket fence, a lush lawn, and a spacious yard, perhaps with little versions of himself and Fannie running around in it.
At the closing, the initial misgivings resurfaced when he faced the mortgage documents to sign, a daunting ream of pages, in language incomprehensible to a layman and cursorily explained by a jaded financial officer and a cheerleading real estate salesman. Imbedded in the proverbial “fine print” there were terms like “adjustable rate” and “variable,” the murkiness of both making Victor feel all queasy inside. He thought about bolting, or at least phoning Fannie for her opinion, since business affairs were right up her alley, given her field of study, but Victor didn't want to appear weak to a woman, especially one to whom he was romantically attracted. Meanwhile Prescott Potter, the mortgage broker, and Freddie attempted to wave off his fears. Above the storied “bottom line” soon stood Victor’s shaky signature. It was difficult to think of himself as “ Victor Bailey, Landowner” but so he was – or would be -- thirty years down the road.
As soon as the pigeon left the coop, Freddie Mack hightailed it to his Japanese-made automobile in the parking lot of the financial office. A momentarily twinge of envy for Prescott Potter’s vehicle – so upscale that it was no lowly “car” but a “driving machine,” -- was instantly supplanted by the thought of the healthy commission soon to come Freddie’s way. He revved the engine and cranked up the stereo until he heard the thumping sound of the bass and shouted along with the raucously repetitive lyrics: “I Like to Move It, Move It!”
Meanwhile with the ink scarcely dry on Victor’s mortgage, Prescott Potter took the document and placed it with the others in a bundle, soon to be sold to a third party by the name of Allied Amalgamated Services, Inc. (not to be confused with Amalgamated Allied Services, Inc) with the result of another bundle, a lucrative one, lining his own personal coffers. As for the pigeon, both the real estate agent and the mortgage broker had let him fly away without a second thought, for the fate of one Victor Bailey was no longer their concern.
A few days later, Victor packed up his bachelor furnishings and bric-a-brac and moved out of his apartment. For a week or so, the settling- in process was fraught with stress, not the least assuaged by the fact that he was now living farther away from his place of employment, thus presenting a daily ordeal to get to the nearest bus stop. Indeed, a bus driver once gave him a bum steer about where to make connections, but at least being late because of misinformation was better than being late because of oversleeping, after being kept awake most of the night by a noisy neighbor.
An envelope with an unfamiliar return address arrived, and believing it was junk mail, Victor had almost tossed it into the recycling bin. A strange sinking feeling made him open it, revealing itself as the initial statement for his monthly mortgage payment. Victor hastily wrote a check, and immediately made arrangements with his bank to have the amount deducted each month. So long as he could maintain a large enough balance in his checking account, he wouldn't have to worry about it – “out of sight, out of mind.”
When a brisk wind brought a chilling reminder of winter, Victor ordered 150 gallons of home heating oil for the ancient furnace in his basement. When the truck driver delivered the fuel and handed over the invoice, Victor looked at the amount. This was no mere sticker shock – it was ticker shock - because he nearly dropped dead of cardiac arrest. “I'm not buying a whole oil field in Texas,“ Victor said. “I just want to stay reasonably warm this winter.” The truck driver shrugged without a smile. The instant Victor wrote the check to the oil company, he froze with fear. Before the oil truck left the driveway, Victor telephoned his bank. The automated voice on the other end was the same voice he always heard when he called the pharmacy to refill his allergy prescriptions. The recorded instructions told him to press “1" to hear his checking account balance, and the total was – at the moment, reassuring. Victor’s account hadn't been overdrawn —yet.
A few months later, though, Victor had just arrived from a particularly grueling day in the kitchen of Chez Arbrisseau and a torturous commute on the bus when noticed the blinking light on the phone answering machine. The recorded message made Victor wonder if machines talking to other machines was one of the signs of the Apocalypse. Upon playback the familiar recorded voice from the bank informed him that there were insufficient funds in his account, and that he had 24 hours in which to “rectify” the situation or face paying a substantial fee, “if not, in some cases, criminal prosecution.” Overdrawn! Something had bounced – and it certainly wasn't Victor’s mood.
Thus followed days and days of follow-up phone calls and emails in Victor’s effort, if only to discover what the hell had happened. Each time that he was thrust into the Limbo known as “on hold,” the anxiety made Victor feel he was serving a sentence in Purgatory. The inevitable “elevator music” nauseated him; his index finger throbbed by constantly pressing “1" or “2" or “#” according to the recorded instructions. An eternity later, Victor finally found an answer: without warning, his monthly payment had “ballooned” because of the adjustable rate embedded in his mortgage. From now on the payment would be roughly twice what it had been previously.
At that point, Victor did what any red-blooded country-that-is-almost-like-Canada-ian boy would do: he called his mother.
“Oh, hello, Dear!” Her voice didn't sound as cheerful as it usually did when she wouldhear from him. “Isn't that uncanny? I was just about to call you –“
“Mom, listen, I'm in a helluva lot o’ trouble. My mortgage payment doubled ! I'm overdrawn! And they'll probably foreclose on my new house! What am I going to do?”
“Oh, Son, I'm so sorry. It never rains but it pours. I was going to call you to bail me out. Remember how I was getting my pension from Layman’s? Well, apparently their investment brokers had sunk all the funds into some stupid company that went bust. ‘Allied Amalgamated Services’, I don't know, something like that. I read in the paper that the CEO got 55 million dollars when he left. Meanwhile, my entire retirement is wiped out. Now all I got to live on is Social Security , and I don't have to tell you it doesn't go very far with today’s prices. Everything is so dear!”
Still felt sorry for himself, but his mother’s story compounded the misery. If he weren't a man, he'd break down into tears, which would be bring him as close to “liquidity” than he'd ever get. Never in his life had Victor thought of himself as a “loser,” but more and more the evidence was pointing to that possibility. Default may be in the stars, but a little of it also lies in ourselves.
Conducting his own investigation with the on-line computers in the Public Library, Victor found suggestions for “refinancing” or taking out a “second” mortgage with the little house as collateral – which struck Victor as trying to dig oneself out of a whole by digging a deeper one. The notion was nonetheless “dead in the water” – because a subsequent – and expensive!- assessment informed him that the value of his property was three times less than he owed. Victor half-seriously considered sending a piece of “jingle mail” – throwing his house keys into an envelope addressed to the mysterious company holding his mortgage.
Just when the news couldn't get any worse, it did. Next morning when Victor arrived at work, he found a co-worker looking through the windows of Chez Arbrisseau because the front door had been padlocked – fermé a clef ! “Kyle! What’s going on?”
“Oh, hey, Victor. Bad news. We’re closed. Out of Business. We're history. So much for severance pay. Pierre couldn't make ends meet, you know? People can't afford fine dining anymore, I guess. Things are tough all over. Eh, what're ya gonna do? Me, I'm goin’ right downtown and sign up for unemployment. Well, good luck, Victor. It was great working with ya. –“ Kyle said, shaking Victor’s hand. “Oh, before I forget. Remember that little waitress, the hot one?”
Victor didn't like the former waiter’s description of his sweetheart, but he was dying to hear what he knew about her.
“Well, I hear she quit school and ran off with some real estate salesman. What was his name? Frankie? Freddie? Somethin’ like that. I heard both of them are gonna go work for the government.”
It doesn't come down in torrents but deluges. Following Kyle’s lead to apply for unemployment, Victor was forced to take a job the bureau had found for him. In his funny hat and smock, Victor hoped that no one he knew – least of all Fannie – would ever see him working behind the counter at the fast food joint. But one day he recognized a customer who didn't recognize him. Prescott Potter scarcely looked at Victor when he inquired, “How much is the Mr. Bumpety Bump Burger Deluxe?” No sooner had Victor replied, “If you have to ask, you can't afford it,” than he was fired.
At last report Victor was living in a tiny studio apartment in a building invested with vermin of the six-, four-, and two-legged varieties. At any given hour throughout the neighborhood, at least one stereo blasts, more often a group of them , each system vying for decibel dominance.
And just last week the guy upstairs bought a drum set, and as far as Victor can tell, he never skips a practice session.