Grey

ecstasy or dreadful constipation, started, Father came to life. He jogged forward and pumped his fists victoriously. A spotlight came on as a cast-iron phallus-shaped podium rose to meet him at the front of the stage. Horns and guitars blasted, the voices wailed, and I thought I heard the words cunt spaceship.

Now Father sashayed back and forth with exactly the same moves he’d been doing for years—a combination of pelvis thrusts, head bobs, and a lot of sliding to and fro on his foot-tall, green-glass platform shoes.

“Slap me! Slap me hard!” he cried as the music—apparently his latest anthem—ebbed away. “That’s You’re My Cunt Spaceship by TastyLung,” he announced, beaming his smile toward the back of the amphitheater as though the house were full. His grin slowly waned in the silence. Leaning forward, he peered into the darkness. “Hello?” he asked, as if afraid he was alone. “What the hell? Anyone out there?”

I was tempted to say nothing, hope he would decide the place was empty, and go away. Instead, I said, “You ruined everything!”

His eyes darted toward me. “I’d like to fire the whole fucked-up piece of fucking shit company!” First he threw a stack of papers into the air, then hugged the podium and thrust his hips into it. “We’re fucked! What do you want me to tell you? It was the weirdest and worst possible thing at the worst possible moment.” Papers rained down on his head as he implored, “How we gave a fucking freeboot an identity and let him right in the middle of our fucking press conference, I have no fucking idea!”

“It’s your fault!”

“Me?” He laughed. “We had everything nailed down—everything completely checked, then out of nowhere— wham! A fucking freeboot with a fashion rifle. And I thought you were dead when you fell over! That was fucking scary. That was shit-in-thong time! And why he shoots your hands and feet, I don’t know. Nothing makes any fucking sense! We’ve been checking everything, but I can’t find any answers.” As if he were shouting at the world, he tilted his head back and cried, “Fucking freeboots!”

My father was an inch shorter than I, but he still worked the machines so his arms where bulky, his legs, sculpted, and his neck, thick. His clothes were as putrid as his taste in music. Today, he wore a long, tailed, green- plaid jacket over a vibrating orange and black shirt, long blue pants with little video screens all over, and the aforementioned platforms. As for his hair, he dyed it dark brown and had it permed into a tight Afro. It looked exactly like moist chocolate cake.

His hairdresser, Xavid, with his snow-capped hairdo and huge square glasses, came running onto the stage, and began to gather up the fallen papers and hand them to Father. Xavid then quickly patted Father’s Afro here and there and headed off.

“Anyway, I feel for you, son! I do. I was watching that date—and holy fucking shit was it boring—but whatever! I was there with my girls, my snacks, and we were all cheering and going on, and then I couldn’t fucking believe a freeboot! They should all be rounded up and fried in oil! Motherfuckers.”

“They’re off the system,” said Joelene, with surprising annoyance. “That’s why they can’t be located and rounded up, as you say.”

Father leaned far forward and squinted. “You’re here, too? Jesus fuckercakes, Michael! Can’t you fart without her anymore?” He smacked his face with one of his thick hands. “God, son, what do you have in your ball sack? Muffins?”

“I want Nora back,” I said.

He shook his head. “You know what I think of MKG, Mr. Gonzalez-Matsu, and that Nora—who, I have to say, seems like the biggest priss hole in the universe? They can suck one of my anal enchiladas!”

“Don’t say that. I love her!”

“I don’t know why. She’s as dull as skim milk!”

I hated his relentless verbal attacks. “You never understand.”

“Thankfully!” he muttered. “Anyway, glad to see you’re better. That color-therapy blasts, doesn’t it?” He paused, as if waiting for me to agree, then shrugged. “Anyway, believe me, someone was behind that shooting. There are too many things that don’t make sense. Like where are the bullets and how in the hell he could shoot the top of your feet?”

“The freeboots,” said Joelene, “despite the families’ miserable view on them, do have some highly advanced weaponry.”

Thrusting his pelvis, Father said, “My highly advanced weapon can’t pee around a corner!”

“The commission is looking into the possibility of guided and disintegrating munitions.”

Father threw his hands into the air. “Anyway! It was a total disaster. Especially for us, because we’re the idiots who are supposed to keep track of those maggots. But forget all that crap for a second. We have to act before the company goes down the toilet, and I’ve got something lard.” Stepping to the edge of the stage, he turned to the wings and hollered, “Watch this dismount!” Until then, I hadn’t noticed his film crew, but there, in the shadows at the edge of the stage, stood his silvery-haired director and the cameraman. Father had everything recorded for an auto-documentary that he was always reediting. Last time he screened it, it was five hundred hours long. Next to the crew stood his hairdresser and his assistant, Ken Goh, who wore his usual loyalty-proving orange and blue face paint.

Then Father jumped from the stage, landed on his green glass platforms, and proclaimed, “Still got it!” Snapping his fingers, he bellowed, “House lights!” He swiveled one of the other chairs around, and plopped down. “First, a few announcements.”  Nodding toward his hairdresser he said, “I just promoted Ken to Financial Distribution Officer and Chief of Positives. And Xavid, who shows lots of ambition, will be our new Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and Chief of Brains. Take a bow, guys!”

Ken gave two thumbs up and winked at father. His hairdresser bent at the waist. When he straightened he smiled, rolled his eyes up in his amber lenses, and said, “I’m just so fucking smart, aren’t I!”

Father laughed. “Oh yeah, tell the world! Got to let them know. So, they’re working hard to sell our stupid assets just so we can keep going.”

“My extreme pleasure!” said Xavid.

“Meanwhile,” continued Father, turning back to Joelene and me, “we look like the world’s biggest idiots—like we can’t even wipe our own asses—and instead of MKG and your dumb-ass Nora schmora from bitchora for the product show, we got tons of empty dick.”

“Stop talking about her!” I told him.

“It was categorically not her fault,” added Joelene. “Nor has MKG been implicated in any way. The family commission has exonerated them.”

Because it was poignant, fitting, and guaranteed to annoy Father, I quoted copy from Pure H. “Her sadness replenished.”

Father slowly turned toward Joelene. “The day he started worshiping that stupid Pure Ham magazine, was the worse ever!”

“Pure H,” I corrected.

“No,” he said, with a laugh, “the H has to stand for something. So maybe it’s Pure Hell or Pure Halitosis!” Turning to Ken and Xavid, he asked, “You hear that? Pure Halitosis!”

“Funny!” exclaimed Ken.

“Witty,” agreed Xavid.

I thought about getting up and leaving since this was pointless.

“Whatever one’s fashion tastes,” began Joelene, “Pure H is a remarkable fusion of influences with a brilliant and elegant sense of individuality.”

“Holy fuck!” he bellowed. “Shut up and hold onto your dicks!” Eying Joelene, he added, “Hold ’em real tight!” She stared back coldly, and it occurred to me that she had come to loathe him just as much as me. “We’ve got someone else.” He winked at me. “Someone scorching hot!”

I sat there and stared at him. It was like my brain couldn’t make sense of the light and sound emanating from him. And even when he handed me a screen, I couldn’t interpret the image.

“Her name is Elle Kez,” he said. “She’s the granddaughter of Konrad Kez, the real estate gazillionaire. He died in that stupid blimp accident and his company went under, but she’s all blue blood and all. Anyway, Xavid knows Chesterfield, her uncle and he’s go experimental security-code model. It uses some micro-organic rRNA chip thingy that is supposed to be super-stable and… then… it… um…” He threw his hands into the air and turned to his men. “It’s real complicated and shit, right guys!”