managers to deliver their midday business reports. Stoner was soon immersed in his work, thoughts of Jack Doyle dismissed.
Chapter 13
Among the numerous targets of RexCom’s recent cost-cutting program was Thaddeus “Red” Marchik, a thirty-year veteran of racing journalism who had been in RexCom’s employ for nearly five years, and fully expected to remain therein until the arrival of what he deemed to be his well-earned retirement.
The “well-earned,” however, was not an assessment shared by Marchik’s immediate supervisor, managing editor Paul Lipscomb. When Lipscomb had received the most recent staff reduction order from RexCom corporate headquarters, he began to compile a list of potential firees. Marchik’s name led off.
As Lipscomb told one of his assistants, “I don’t know why in hell we’ve kept him as long as we have. Marchik has been dogging it since Lassie was a pup. No matter where we assign him, he finds a way to slow down the pace, all the while complaining about how he’s overworked and underpaid. We used to have a summer intern take care of all the racing commission rulings that we publish in two hours a day. Marchik has somehow managed to turn this function-an almost mindless function, I might add-into a full-time operation requiring overtime, for Chrissakes! ”
He drew breath. “Marchik has got to go.”
Co-workers who heard the howl that erupted from Marchik upon being informed of his firing cowered in their cubicles. “You can’t treat a Navy veteran like this,” Marchik shouted, pounding a large fist on Lipscomb’s desk. A broad-shouldered six-footer, Marchik, even at age fifty-nine, made for a formidable sight with his sweaty face as bright as his full head of red hair.
“Red, face the facts here,” Lipscomb advised. “You just haven’t worked out for us. I couldn’t do anything to save you if I wanted to,” Lipscomb lied. “These are orders from the top.”
Marchik looked at him incredulously. “You mean Mr. Rexroth himself?”
In an attempt to mollify Marchik by making him feel important enough to be a personal concern of the media kingpin, and also anxious to get Marchik out of his office, Lipscomb nodded his head affirmatively. “He just felt it would be best for all concerned if you took your talents elsewhere.” Lipscomb struggled to keep a straight face.
Red Marchik rose to his full height. “That tub of guts will regret the day he decided that. He’ll learn you can’t fuck over a Navy veteran.” He then stormed out of Lipscomb’s office.
“Send in the next sheep for slaughter,” Lipscomb said into the intercom on his desk.
Red Marchik came from an extended family of occupational malingerers, one dotted by union officials with phony jobs, ghost payrollers on the municipal side, and a couple of cousins whose careers had been devoted to winning phony accident lawsuits against insurance companies.
Those members of the Marchik family who, like Red, actually held real jobs, usually considered these positions to be either “beneath them,” or “too much for them,” or flagrantly ill-paying. Their working lives were replete with indignation at what they considered to be slights or insults suffered at the hands of supervisors who had no business giving orders.
Someone once said of the late television announcer Howard Cosell that, if he were a sport, “he’d be roller derby.” Similarly, if the Marchiks were considered as an historical entity, they’d be seen as a continually pissed-off but immobilized peasantry.
Later on the day he’d been dismissed by Lipscomb, while sitting at the poker table in the basement recreation room of his modest ranch home on Louisville’s west side, Red Marchik pondered his fate as he tossed down a succession of shots of Jim Beam followed by gulps of Pabst Blue Ribbon. His berating of his former employer become increasingly embittered as the afternoon, and the alcohol, wore on. But no matter how loudly he decried his fate, Red’s wife, Wanda, maintained her composure. She sat across from Red at the felt-covered table, rolling and smoking one marijuana joint after another and nodding her head in agreement at her irate husband.
The recreation room, refinished by Wanda years ago, was the Marchiks’ pride and joy. On shelves dotting the fake knotty-pine paneled walls sat an amazing array of stuffed carcasses-raccoons, coyotes, various other mammals-along with the head of a small deer.
The prized trophy, an albino squirrel with a strikingly malicious look in its eyes, held center stage between a huge National Rifle Association poster and a blown-up photo of one-time Nixon henchman Charles Colson, whom the Marchiks were convinced had been railroaded to prison where he became a born-again Christian.
Red peered blearily at Wanda. “They’re not gonna get away with doing this to me, Wanda. They’re going to pay for this.” He again recounted to her his meeting earlier that day with a member of RexCom’s Human Resources Department. “They ripped me off on severance pay, insurance, pension-the whole eleven yards, the bastards.
“Human Resources, hah! What a fuckin’ name for what they do! Their motto should be Bend Over and Spread Those Cheeks.”
Wanda Marchik was used to hearing such tirades from her husband of twenty-three years, and paid them no heed. She looked upon Red as a delightfully harmless, terribly attractive man, one she had been crazy about since literally bumping into him one night between beer frames at JJ’s Bowling Lanes many years earlier. Wanda didn’t spend time analyzing why she adored her lazy, perpetually put-upon husband. “There’s no explaining it,” she often told her girl friends. “He’s just a beautiful hunk of man, isn’t he?”
Wanda, a diminutive brunette, had wide-ranging interests that Red would have been hard put to explain, had he been asked. He just accepted them. In addition to owning and operating a thriving carpet-cleaning business, one that employed a battalion of industrious Polish immigrants, Wanda was an active member of the NRA, the Sierra Club, the Coalition for the Retention of the Death Penalty, Planned Parenthood-the Marchiks themselves were childless, the result of what Red openly admitted was his “shooting blanks in the sperm division”-and the National Association to Legalize Marijuana.
Such a diverse dossier of memberships never struck either of the Marchiks as unusual; this undoubtedly explained the theme of mutual content that permeated their marriage. Some people are indeed “just made for each other,” and the Marchiks-Red, a lifelong malingerer and discontent, and the ambitious Wanda-qualified on these counts.
Wanda rolled up the sleeves of her Chicago Bears sweatshirt. She then started rolling another joint. “Honey, you really don’t have to work anymore. My business is going great. You’re getting close to retirement anyway. Why not just sit back and enjoy this? Why are you making this so, you know, personal with Mr. Rexroth?
“Those big companies dump people all the time. Good people like you,” Wanda quickly added.
“That tubby turd is going to pay for this,” Red vowed. “Stay out of my way on this one, Wanda.” Red lurched to his feet and stumbled toward the plastic-covered white couch that faced the forty-two-inch color television set. After flopping down, he quickly went to sleep, still muttering.
Wanda smiled fondly at the love of her life. She had heard Red promise punishment to a variety of employers, or foremen, or co-workers, over the course of his career spent performing the simplest tasks in a variety of small- time journalistic jobs. Frankly, she had been surprised when Red had landed-through the help of a friend of his, Chester Langenbach-a position on the
“Oh, you’ll get over this, too, honey,” Wanda whispered to her hubby as he rested peacefully beneath a haze of marijuana smoke and a small cloud of beer and bourbon fumes.
Ordinarily an accurate assessor of her mate’s moods and intentions, Wanda Marchik proved to be way off the mark this time.
As the weeks following his firing by RexCom went by, and his severance pay dwindled, Red Marchik’s fury lingered. Predictably, his half-hearted attempts to find another job produced nothing, and Red appeared to be home free with his twenty-six weeks of unemployment checks. Wanda’s business continued to thrive, so the Marchiks were not confronted by financial worries. It was the bitterness billowing from what he considered to be the huge
