Front Line Caller
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
6/12/92
She worked for a year as a front line caller at a membership-warehouse store. All day long, she stood at the checkout line and read the inventory code numbers of purchases aloud to the cashier standing next to her.
Until she failed a surprise drug test, and was promptly fired with no references. It was the day after she’d smoked an anniversary joint to celebrate one year of divorce (precisely twice as long as the marriage had lasted). He’d left her and town after a stormy relationship that stopped short of fisticuffs several times. After it was over she decided that a two-party marriage might have worked but not their menage a trois with a bottle as the most beloved partner. She cleaned up, dried out, and went to work. For a year she accurately read one six-digit number after another, placing the often-heavy products up from one shopping cart and sticking them in another cart.
She got by with as little ass-kissing as she could get away with. She never memorized the chain’s Mission Statement. She never participated in nor contributed to company-wide fund drives for the officially sanctioned charity, an outfit that hired ex-sports stars to tell kids to get high on sports not drugs. She got away with her nonconformity because of her unique qualification for the job of front line caller. As a half-Hispanic woman, she was good for management to keep up front as a symbol of the company’s open-minded attitude, even if she never got close to the promotion to cashier that she kept petitioning for. She made an effort to be nice to the older couples who came there to stock up a year’s supply of nonperishable foods. She did not make an effort to be nice to the Bill Blass-suited businessmen leading their underlings to pick out only the cheapest coffee for the office break room.
But that was over now. She was now unemployed, tenuously holding on to the only cat-friendly apartment in the neighborhood in her price range. She was left with no job, no marriage, a renewed taste for moderately priced white wine, and a growing stack of responses to a personal ad she’d placed a week before she was fired. She’d worked to write an ad that would emphasize her likes and dislikes (she liked long walks by the beach and disliked anybody who reminded her of her ex-husband). She got over 200 replies, some of whom sounded more plausible than others. On a lark, she decided to call the least plausible of them all.
He was, in his own estimation, the modern day successor to Jack Kerouac and the Merry Pranksters. He was the new incarnation of uncompromising rebellion against the square society and all its petty rules and regulations. To him, all religion was a sick joke. He watched the fundamentalist cable channel just to laugh at it. Speed limits and auto-emission controls were part of a puritan conspiracy to deprive Americans of speed, the second- or third-greatest sensation life can offer. He lived his life to the fullest and had no patience for anybody who didn’t.
He called talk radio stations from his car phone at least once a week. He loved to get in a good long tirade against anything governmental. He loved to shout about how welfare recipients should get a 60-day notice to get a job or go to jail. Once, the host asked him if he knew where all these ungrateful cheats could get work; he hung up. He wanted to say that he personally employed more minority youth than that whitebread radio station ever would, but at the last second chose not to reveal that.
He provided work to several dozen otherwise-unemployed young men. They served him as wholesale and retail distributors of a popular, highly profitable, illegal product. The retail staff members were trained to stand out in the sidewalk in high-traffic locations, dressed in easily-identifiable garb, making their sales out in the open all afternoon and evening. He realized that this was not the most discreet way to conduct illegal transactions, but he also knew that his workers were highly replaceable. For every one that was jailed, four more were anxiously being groomed by his wholesalers. None of his retailers knew who he was; few had even met him.
In order to appease the Internal Revenue Service with the image of a legitimate wealth source, he also ran several other entrepreneurial endeavors. He owned a printing company that serviced several regional religious magazines. He owned a mail order company that sold megavitamins and weight-gain drink powders. He held a variety of interlocking real estate investments into which virtually any profit or loss figure could be plugged.
Yet for all of the successes in his life, he fully knew that something was missing. He needed a woman. The problem was, most of the women in his income group in this radical-chic town were irritatingly addicted to self-importance. They were ready in an instant to catalog everything that they believed was wrong about him, his money, his way of life. One even told him that she wouldn’t sleep with him unless he donated money to her favorite animal rights charity. He’d have accepted the offer if she was going to have kept the money, but Miss Goody Goody insisted that he had to prove his selflessness. Why couldn’t he find a good old fashioned golddigger? At least somebody who wanted his money for herself was somebody he could understand.
He sent the same photocopied response to every woman’s personal ad in the Weekly every week. The form letter made no attempt to respond to anything mentioned in the woman’s ad. Instead, it listed his personal wealth (“I own a Mercedes Benz 320E, a 28′ sailboat, a waterfront house in Medina, land in the San Juans…”).
She was going to throw away his Xeroxed reply, but on a lark decided that there were worse things in life than a free meal at a good restaurant.
He was glad to see a reply to his reply. Not only was it the first in the last 100 ads he’d answered, but from her phone call she seemed to be his perfect mark: young, seemingly naive, easily seduced by wealth.
During their initial phone call, she declined several requests to give him her home address. Instead, he met her at a bar near her West Seattle apartment. He told her how he was unaccustomed to the tavern’s dusky atmosphere and unsophisticated clientele. He was going to tell a biting joke about the stringy-looking young men at the back pool table, until she turned around and waved to them as longtime friends. He bought her two glasses of wine before it was time to go.
She rode in his personal luxury car to a stand-up comedy club that was one of his investments. He knew he was stuck with another do-gooder when she complained about his using a disabled-only parking space. He resolved out loud that he was going to have a good time anyway, and would make her have one whether she knew she wanted it yet or not.
It was Marathon Night, when 30 struggling young comedians (all working only for the “exposure”) took brief turns providing continuous entertainment. They weren’t slick with experience, but they maintained the highly assertive attitude that the businessman got off on. He clapped and shouted his approval at two comics who specialized in snide remarks against women, blacks and gays. He pounded his shot glass on the table and roared with the best of them, especially after the joke advocating mass deportations against those who refuse to speak English in public. He even applauded at the female comedian who delivered nothing but anti-male insults; he loved to think of himself as someone with the power to make people miserable. He couldn’t have responded more approvingly at a joke advocating mass castrations.
His date, the former front line caller, found nothing amusing about any of these comedians. She told him she was glad she didn’t have to listen to a whole routine by any one of them. He ordered her to lighten up, and ordered her a double. The dinner and drinks were OK, she thought, nothing all that special. But they were free, and the comedians couldn’t go on forever.
They did go on forever; at least it seemed like that after three and a half hours and ten rounds of drinks. She heard at least four comedians who listed the differences between New York and Los Angeles. Six people delivered very similar jokes about the vice president’s most recent speech. Two people joked about the comparative half-lives of nuclear waste and Hostess Twinkies. There was one accordion player (female), two banjo players (male), and one pan flute player (male, bearded). The male comedians variously described women as bitches, lying bitches, whores, sluts, cunts, babes, broads, pussy, twat, poontang, bouncing balls, milking machines, and (from the only black performer) ladies. The female comedians described men as jerks, creeps, dicks, pricks, cases of testosterone poisoning, warmongers, fascists, and penis life-support systems. The comedians of both genders tended to agree that love sucked; all that really mattered was getting yours and getting out. With each round of drinks, the businessman became louder and cruder, while the front line caller became quieter and queasier. He paid little attention to her after the start of hour four; she was a party pooper, just one more square woman who couldn’t take a joke. He refused to let her spoil his good time. When one particularly dogmatic comedian told a joke advocating the resumption of atomic warfare against Japan, he hooted and raised his fist into the air. She lowered her head to the table. On stage, the comedian spotted her and asked what she was, a brown-eyed Mata Hari? Didn’t she love her country? Wasn’t she even alive? Hey you, I know you’re out there. Earth to bitch, earth to bitch.
She sank in her chair, trying to avoid the follow-spot light now aimed on her. Her date forcibly stood her up. She stared hard at the comedian, with the icy heat of focused anger. She refused to speak, no matter how insistently the comedian ordered her to. Hey bitch, don’t you got a tongue? Don’t you got a brain? Don’t you even got ears under that helmet of hair spray? Se habla espanol? Sprechen sie deutsch, bitch? Me talk-ee to you-ee!
By this time, the audience was staring back at her as one unified force. They were waiting for the snappy rejoinder from her, the return insult that would up the level of hostility. Either that, or for her to start crying and run away. Defeat or victory: which would it be?
She glanced at her date in a futile search for support. He slapped her butt, hard. Not like a sexual lecher but like a high school basketball player slapping a buddy. He grabbed her right wrist, to prevent any attempt on her part to flee. He erratically motioned at her to speak up. He loudly whispered at her to stop acting like a girl.
That did it. She knew she had to conquer the moment. But how? If she insulted the comedian back, she’d be doing just what the comedian and everybody else in the room wanted her to do. She’d be descending to their level, just like giving in to the dark side of the force. Through the blinding spotlight, the heckling crowd, her date’s whoop-whoop noises, the comedian’s come-on pose, and her own pre-hangover condition whistling through her ears, she searched for the right thing to do. After the longest ten seconds of her life, a smile suddenly appeared on her lips. From the deepest part of her soul, she began to laugh. Within seconds she was uncontrollably guffawing. She laughed while pointing daintily at the comedian with her left arm. She laughed while she slipped her right arm out from her date’s hold; she looked down at him like a junior high school girl snickering at an immature boy. She grabbed his drink and downed it quickly while smirking all the way, even when she momentarily choked on one swallow. She laughed at the drops of whiskey and spit beading up on her fabric-protected scarf.
The businessman just sat there disturbed and confused; he’d never seen anybody laughing like this in all his evenings at the club. The other audience members sat at their tables stone-faced, except for one couple who tried to heckle her to shut up. Nobody followed their lead. She laughed out loud at them, doubling over. The comedian gave increasingly strident orders for her to shut up and let him continue. He only had five minutes in this lousy pay-to-play club to make an impression, and this cunt here was ruining it! The more seriously he behaved, the funnier she thought he was. After nearly a minute of orgasmic laughter, she took one last look at the comedian while trying to compose herself, gave up and laughed out loud again. She was still laughing as she took her coat and purse and stumbled drunkenly out of the room. Her date made no attempt to follow her. As she walked out, a single male audience member joined in her laughing. The comedian kept trying to resume his routine, but the man’s laughter totally broke his character. The comedian left the stage in defeat. Nobody applauded him except the laughing man, who gave him the full-hand clap of a kindergarten kid.
She finally began to gain her composure as she descended the ramp in the lobby, catching one long breath away from the smoke and the noise. She was stopped by one of the female comedians she’d seen in the early hours of the show. The female comedian demanded to know why she hadn’t attacked him back, why she hadn’t up for herself properly, why she hadn’t told him off or at least given him the finger. You’ve gotta let the pricks know you mean business, she said; that’s the only language they’re ever gonna understand. The ex-front line caller stared in the female comedian’s face until it was in focus through the alcohol blur, shook her head and gave out a quiet laugh. She stumbled past her.
As she continued down the ramp toward the front door, the two middle-aged doormen ended their phone call from the manager backstage. The men stood before her and warned her not to come there again. She darted aside, gave them a wide smile, and trotted out the door.
Outside, she breathed a deep breath of almost-fresh downtown air. She calmed herself down, pulled her coat on, and fumbled through her purse for a cigarette. She walked out into the parking lane and looked up the street for a cab. The pre-hangover noise was still ringing in her ears, but she still heard footsteps slowly approach her from behind. She took another deep breath and prepared herself to confront her date. Instead, she turned around and saw a man from the audience, a nice-looking guy with an open face and a coffee stain on his trenchcoat. He stood just outside of her personal space. They looked at one another briefly. He started laughing. She joined in. They giggled into the next cab together.
Her businessman date strolled out the door in time to see the cab pull off. He was a bit sad that he wouldn’t get to do his patented plea-for-forgiveness routine. Oh well, at least his people were still inside, ready to make him laugh.
