Giant Milk and Mimes

Work is a necessary evil. I don’t want much out of a job. Just something that will let me pay most of my bills, have a little spending money, and occasionally indulge in various drugs. I’d like a job I can be stoned at, that requires minimal human contact, and even less physical and mental exertion. Basically, the kind of job that they’d give to a chimp, if they could keep it from flinging its own shit around the office. It says something about me that even with such modest expectations, I fail quite badly.

The only consolation is that I’ve actually done worse than I’m doing now. When I was 29, I was living in New York, and working as a delivery boy. Just about 30 and my job title had the word ‘boy’ in it. That it was appropriate is beside the point. Best of all, when there wasn’t anything to be delivered at the shop, they’d send me out to hand out flyers. And a soul-destroying little errand it was, too. There’s nothing like getting the fish-eye from a couple hundred people coming out of a subway to really let you know what an inflamed boil on the buttocks of life you are. Daily, I would ask myself, ‘What is happening in my life that I’m a delivery boy at my age?’ Then I’d remember that nothing was happening in my life, and that’s why I was a delivery boy. Silly me, I kept forgetting.

One day, as I was wallowing in such thoughts while out on a delivery, some celestial power decided to show me how much worse it could be.

I was up on 23rd by the Flatiron Bldg. when I saw three guys. Each was handing out flyers for a bank, and each was on a different corner of the intersection. Thing was, one of the guys was dressed up as a giant carton of milk, another was a huge box of Chinese food complete with chopsticks, and the third was the worlds most Grande Latte. Suddenly, my job wasn’t that bad. Don’t get me wrong, humping papers all over lower Manhattan sucked royally, I got paid shit an hour, and I’d been forced to hand out flyers myself, but at least all of this could be done while dressed in my own clothes, and not tarted up as a random foodstuff.

What really drove it home, though, was running into yet another guy in a dignity-sapping costume not half a block beyond where the Trio of Mighty Foods was plying their trade. This guy was surrounded by five or six people dressed in khakis and blue button down shirts, which made his get-up even more odd. Apparently, all of them were working for some kind of nasal spray company, as the cat in question was kitted out as a giant nose. Huge pink-skinned nose, with feet in flesh colored tights coming out the nostrils, and a little mesh view window at about eye level.

The sun came out from behind the clouds, I remembered it was payday, and I walked through the rest of my shift with a spring in my step and a delighted glint in my eye.

I told the people at the shop what I’d seen, and Mike, a pal o’ mine, said he’d run into the Demented Comestible Triad himself a few days before, and had almost started a fight with the milk carton. Mike said Mr. Milk wouldn’t get out of his way unless he accepted a bank flyer. So Mike had poked the guy a couple of times, and Milk had yelled, “Hey, man! Don’t touch the costume!” Now, Mike was an angry young man, and not at all accustomed to taking shit from dairy products, however outsized, so he was more than ready to get into it. Not that smacking this guy around would have been that hard. He was in a giant milk carton, for god’s sake. You’d just have to knock him onto his back like a turtle, and the kick away to your heart’s content.

Anyway, Mike claimed that at this point, Sr. Leche had backed off. Personally, I think the Chinese Food and the Grande Latte had moved in to back up their embattled compadre, and Mike had faded into the crowd. Which I can understand, because this all took place outside Penn Station, and I think you can safely assume that any food hanging about on that block have gone bad. I mean, Milk gets nasty when it goes off, and Chinese is even worse. The Grande Latte is really the weak sister of the three, but all of them together could do you some real damage, you know?

I can understand how the Bad Food Group would be angry. That has to be a crappy day, running around like that. The one I really worry about is the nose, though. That guy must have drunk himself into a coma every night. I can see him, sitting in the crappy apartment his meager wages afforded, sitting on the edge of a nasty unmade bed, still wearing the flesh colored tights and cradling a bottle of cheap gin, glassy eyed, whispering over and over again, “I didn’t go to mime school for this, I didn’t go to mime school for this, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be…”

I have no doubt he shot himself. Just climbed all the way into the giant nose, curled up into a fetal ball with the muzzle tucked under his chin, giving a little squeeze and making it all go away. The cops would have found him a couple of weeks later, when the neighbors complained of the smell. They’d have made a couple of bloody nose jokes, then sent the headless body out to a lonely grave in a potter’s field, to be buried under a stone reading, ‘Here Lies a Failed Mime.’ Yes, I know it’s redundant, but what the hell, the guy’s dead.

The nasal spray company would have gotten there costume back, and would have scraped out all the little bits of brain, and sewed up the little hole the bullet made, and then stuff some other hopeless loser into it. And the cat running the show must have turned to his assistant and said, “Don’t let ‘em take home the costume anymore. Finding a fresh mime is easy, but these cleaning bills are killing the profit margin.”