Today’s Excel Spreadsheet, Tomorrow’s Cancer

The guy who used to have my job, sitting at my desk in the same filthy chair with broken rollers, died of cancer two weeks ago.  I learned about this in the tearoom while I read the helpful postings on the wall (I teach Yoga!!!!  $25 a class!!!).  His former co-workers were talking very seriously at the refrigerator – grey-haired monsters who have had the same data entry cubicle job for 15 years – when they turned to me and said, “Andrew, would you like to give $5 so we can send flowers to Howard’s family?”

I didn’t hesitate:  “No.”

My coworkers and I don’t get along.  Actually, I don’t get along with anyone except for ex-girlfriends.  Ironically.  I think that’s irony.  Nobody really knows what irony is.  The dictionary just has a blank entry.  “Irony:  Use it any way you want, we give up.”

The thing that bothers me is the “give money for sick people” routine.  Let’s take a co-worker from my little department who got something or other and landed in the hospital.  I think it was a stroke.  I don’t pay attention to the details.  There are thirteen “Team Members” in my department and each of us gave five to ten dollars.  That money bought a generic bouquet of flowers.  Say, maybe, $35 worth.

My ten year old cousin is a deeply disturbed fuckup slotted for execution before her teenage years by most world governments, though she didn’t even hesitate when I presented that scenario to her.

“What a minute,” she slurred through teeth that have never been brushed, “That means someone made money.”

In the office, I’m often considered to be the anti-social “bad egg.”  This bothers me, mainly because I’m not the one making a boatload of money off of the misfortune, maiming, and death of others.

With that in mind, I made a series of tactless jokes about cancer and left the tearoom.  I can do things like that because I have a disability.  In a way, my neuralgia “episode” (my grandmother pronounces that ep-a-sued-e) that marked the start of 2005 was a blessing.  With something like neuralgia, people assume you’re healthy.  It’s not like I’m stumping around on a bad leg or constantly sticking forks in my ear.  Especially after 15 months and a suicidal bravado built on misanthropy and disrespect for the needs of others, most people get it in their heads that I’m the original bad boy.  Being knocked out, tearful, depressed and sucking broth through a straw for seven weeks really put things in perspective for some folks.  Not the supervisors, of course, but…well, fuck the supervisors.  The truly sick become pariahs after a while.  Left alone to my own games, I sat in the middle of my office and masturbated while making wounded animal sounds.  At least, I considered doing that.  Not being able to talk, the occasional co-worker would spin by and use that opportunity to vent their spleen about how much our sucky job sucks.  One of these spleen-venters is a beautiful and deliciously insane black girl.  So, you see, masturbation…

Well, we’re not here for that.  I’ve had a black thing lately.  It comes and goes.  Sometimes I’ll go months with a black thing, then I’ll go back to my staple — mousy brunettes.  My grandfather gets nervous whenever I go through a black thing.  He’ll come to me every day and say, “I sure like that Brittany O’Connell,” or Sierra or Gauge or Jenna Haze or whoever.  The latter two are a little off his radar because he has trouble with anal whores.  Brittany and Sierra are 90’s girls, but they went anal in the end. There’s no escaping it, I tell him.  All girls go anal in the end.  If they don’t, they’re boring, and you know it.

It seems that there was no such thing as anal sex in the 40’s and 50’s.  I don’t believe him, but he says only the Krauts and the little yellow Japs would consider anal sex.  Stand up Americans, see, never did that.  He says anal sex is the last refuge for the misogynist.

Anyway, he doesn’t like the black thing.  It’s not that he dislikes black people, it’s just that I always make dinner-table threats to marry crazed crackwhores like Vanessa Blue, AVN’s 2004 Award Winning Director for Best Ethnic Series (BlackReignXXX).  Not that I keep up on stuff like that.

It’s unfortunate because black women don’t really seem interested in me.  I believe that black men ride the large cock myth but, in realty, the educated person knows that the average black man’s cock is the same as the average white man’s cock.  Further, black men are no good in bed.  They’re all grudge fuckers.  Me, I take my time.  I’ve trained myself to last several hours.  So black girls have no idea what they’re missing.  I’m bigger and better than Khajid Mohammad Jones, their on-again off-again boyfriend.   Oh, now I sound like my grandfather.

The training is all in the masturbation.  How long can you go?  After all these years, my masturbation sessions can last up to an hour and a half.  I end them, ultimately, because they get a little rough on the old boy.  That’s not something you encounter when you’re balls deep in Vanessa Blue.

Of course, some girls hate lengthy sport fucks.  It’s tough to get everything just right.  My current goal is to start at 11pm and go till dawn.  This allows for 20 minute breaks between orgasms.  No more, no less.  It’s important to have rules.  Like in Vietnam.  Women are like Vietnam.  Lay still in the jungle, afraid to move.  When you do, you get torn to shreds by smooth legs, shoulders, tits, hips, lips and this giant, bleeding hole.

So I’m into black girls until further notice.  Though I have been flirting with this Thai girl.  She’s just the cutest little thing.  I want to stick her onto my thermos like a Powerpuff Girls band-aid.  She must weigh all of 50 pounds, and she has this cute way of talking and I like her tits.  Fucking tits.  Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with me?

After I made the cancer jokes, I went back to my desk and sat down in my filthy chair and started moving papers from one pile to another when my supervisor spun by.

“Andrew,” he said.

“Supervisor,” I said.

“Got a new complaint.”  Pause for effect.  “Just came in.”  Pause.  “Just now…”  Pause.  “Yep.”

“Are you waiting for a password or something?”

“The cancer comments.”

As it turns out, my cheeky cancer-mocking spread like a brushfire through the staff, all of whom are ignorant savages well below me (I have to say that once a day or else I end up nude, huddled in the shower, drinking JD).

It’s another of those marks on my record which, thanks to a complicated web of legal mumbo jumbo that has, in part, replaced the unions, can never be shared with other departments, references or any future jobs I apply for.  Ever since junior high, the threat of “a mark on your record” has been a constant in my life.  It was my first year of college when I learned that the records don’t exist.  They never have, they never will.  Well, unless you punch your boss or shoot up the office, I suppose.  But “being insensitive to the death of a fucking stranger”?  No.

As I reveled in the knowledge that I could get away with murder, if I phrased it right, a strange emotional illness washed over me.  Guilt, perhaps, that I could so easily mock the dead.  I realized, sitting alone in a darkened office, that I occupied the job and, quite literally, the seat of this man who became ill in that same office, left work and, over five years, suffered greatly until he finally kicked it.

I started to think:  Hey, I have something in common with cancer man.  He spent an extraordinary amount of time sitting in my dark office, breathing the sick air blowing through the 50 years of caked-on dust through the ceiling vent, pounding away at a computer and shuffling papers from one pile to another.  I have followed in his footsteps.  I’ve replaced him.  Was the cancer in him or was it in the building?  Would I, too, die horridly while everyone laughed in the tearoom saying that I had it coming?

Should I, given this possible scenario, kill everybody in my office to prevent them from mocking my callous attitude about the death of a fucking stranger?  Since many of them read this page, I’ll leave the decision up to them.  I have begun a cancer fund.  If everybody in the extended department puts $10 in the coffee pot by my desk, they’ll be removing a mark on their record or, as we say here in my house, they’ll be “buying their lives.”

In addition to the $10, I would like a black woman and the Thai chick.  And they’d better have piercings down there so, when they eat each other out, they can play with those pussy rings.  All tongues and metal and weeping, oozing sex while I sit on my desk with a coffeepot full of money and laugh and laugh until I choke up a giant cancer tumor and fall through the drywall into the office next door.  As the occupants of that office scream in horror at my prematurely aged face, riddled with open sores and eaten away to the bone in places, I’ll be able to rest easy.  You want me to rest easy, don’t you?  If you don’t, then you’re a monster, and nobody will mourn you when it’s your fucking turn to drop, my dear coworkers.  Because if the guy before me got cancer from work, and I get it, that means you have it to.  Maybe you get cancer from shuffling papers from one pile to another.  We do that all motherfucking day, don’t we?  Oh, yes.  Paper shuffling cancer.  Think about it.  And pierce your clits.  I’m a dying man.  That’s my wish.  You gotta do it.  Yes, it’ll desensitize you over time but, hey, that’s not my problem.  Dead man walking!