Some Of The Parts
The True Level Of The Intelligence Of The Government & Industry (Satire-Short Fiction)
By David Wilaru* (DWilaru@gmail.com)
I was sweating too much for the furniture, but I couldn’t help myself. The pseudo-human, erotic simulacrum, Barbi-Doll receptionist clearly resented my overactive pores. I knew she thought that their vigor proved that I was not the sort of person who belonged in the executive lobby of Godzilla Brothers, Inc.
Every few seconds she turned to watch me, apparently afraid that if left unattended I might steal away with the leather sofa, two or three armchairs, and the potted palm. But of course I couldn’t afford to leave, with or without the furniture. Godzilla Brothers had hired me a writer.
YES! Through a tortuous series of bizarre circumstances, somewhat like the silver dollar in the Twenties’ song, I had been passed from hand to hand, man to man, until I finally had arrived at the office of Rodney V. Weatherby, Assistant Vice President for Customer and Public Relations.
A writer, or as Rodney, the flatulent imbecile, had put it, “A real super wordsmith” was needed to explain to the public Godzilla Brothers’ “Products and plans for an ever greater tomorrow,” a project which, to me, was akin to explaining the James Gang to the Union Pacific Railroad.
But it was a writing job, a step on the path away from Sharon and Gaylord the Shrink.
Of course there were drawbacks. Rodney expected me to appear each morning at 9:00 a.m. and instantly spurt out heart-stopping prose as if all the sentences were stacked away in little bins in the back of my head, like tinned goods on a kitchen shelf.
“Yes Sir, what will it be today?”
“I’ll have the Essay of the Virtues of Petro-Chemical Smog, medium, with an anecdote of Civic Responsibility on the side.”
“Very good, Mr. Weatherby. Anything else for you, sir? We have some nice Press Releases today. Perhaps a paragraph or two of human interest with a twist of irony?”
“No, Wilaru, not today, just the Essay — to go. And my compliments to your wordsmith.”
It took me half an hour and an outrageous number of two syllable words to convince Weatherby that a “real super wordsmith” often needed real super inspiration — a word which I discovered he was unable to disassociate from vague memories of the doctrines of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.
So here I sat waiting to see Eugene Gonvoulet, Executive Vice President in charge of Personnel. Apparently I was about to be delivered of at least half of quart of homogenized inspiration on the subject of my first assignment: The Superior Qualities of the Godzilla Brothers’ Mark VI Boozalyzer — an electronic marvel which accepted vodka, gin, vermouth and diverse other fluids and mixed them!
The wonder of the ages brought forth now from the labs of Godzilla Brothers for the betterment of all Humankind.
I know, I know. I have a bad attitude. Oh, oh, Miss Pneumatic Plastic Tits, Teeth, and Hair is staring at me again. “He’s ready for me? Right through there?”
Oh, damn. This is bad. I can see him standing behind his desk. Stout and bulgy like a dough-boy pressed between the bevels of a vice. Greased hair. Hitler mustache. Goddamn, a flower in his buttonhole!
“Mr. Gonvoulet?” I said numbly as I extended my hand.
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Excuse me, I’m. . . .”
“Close the door and sit down. My name is Stubbs. I’m Chairman of the Board.”
Without further ceremony Stubbs held up a rumpled sheet of paper and began to read:
“No prose, no matter how brilliant, can possibly advance the cause of the Godzilla Brothers’ Mark VI Boozalyzer. Anyone stupid enough to buy such a worthless piece of trash certainly can’t or wouldn’t read anything in the first place.”
“Did you write that?” Stubbs asked.
Shit! A hasty emotional response to my new task. I thought I had thrown it in the waste basket after using it to purge my system of the Boozalyzer’s bad vibes. Catharsis with a pencil.
“I thought I had thrown that away.”
“You did. We always search the wastebaskets.”
“You have a man who does nothing all day except search through trash?”
“We have six of them. But that’s what makes Godzilla Brothers what it is.”
“What’s that?”
“Wilaru, I can see you’ve got the wrong attitude.”
“No, wait, I’m sorry, Mr. Stubbs. It just slipped out. I didn’t mean it.”
“Of course you meant it. You’re a smart fellow, Wilaru, that’s your problem. You’re just smart enough to get yourself into trouble.”
Stubbs twisted his wrist with military precision and checked his watch. “I’m going to take three minutes to put you in the picture. Facts of life time. Okay, you think the Boozalyzer is a stupid invention. Right?”
“Well, on a scale from peanut butter to penicillin. . . .”
“Hell, what did you expect Wilaru? People invented those.”
“Who invented this gizmo, Martians?”
“You’ve only two minutes left, Wilaru,” Stubbs said ominously.
I was instantly contrite.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stubbs. Could you explain what you’re getting at?”
“Okay. You’ve got two men. One has an IQ of 200 and the other has an IQ of 150. They become partners and start a business. What’s the IQ of the business?”
Christ, it was like one of those grade-school puzzles that I always screwed up.
“Mary has three cans of beans and four dollars. She walks a mile and a half to the grocery store and wants to leave with one can of beans and five half cans of peaches. How short a skirt should Mary wear?”
I can never figure those things out, but today I restrained myself. I didn’t ask Stubbs if a partnership could be said to have any mentality at all.
“175 IQ,” I answered hesitantly.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong! It’s 87.5. The formula is IQ P1 plus IQ P2 divided by 2Pn, or 200 plus 150 divided by 2 squared. This is naturally the simplified version. The full model takes into account the number of levels of management and the index of job security for each executive. If the employee has tenure the base of the exponent is 2.5 rather than 2.”
“This is amazing, Mr. Stubbs, I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Naturally not! Winslow’s original thesis was suppressed back in ’47. We burned every last copy.”
“And Winslow?”
“Retired to a mansion on Tahiti at the age of 23. But enough of this chit-chat. Your time’s up. Do you see the problem?”
“Well. . . .”
“You still don’t get it, do you? Look, on a good day the intelligence of the decisions made by this company are equivalent to those of a low-grade moron. Actually having a product like the Boozalyzer thought of, designed, built and marketed at a profit is a terrific achievement for a low grade moron, don’t you think?”
I nodded my head dumbly.
“It’s the best we can do. Christ, it was Harvey Firestone, crackpot inventor, who figured out how to vulcanize rubber, not his company. Fleming with penicillin; Carver with peanut butter; Salk and his vaccine; Shockley and his little team with the transistor. No large organization ever has or ever will do anything truly intelligent.
“God dammit!” Stubbs said as his composure broke, “don’t you get it! You’ve been lied to. It’s all a myth. The whole isn’t equal to the sum of its parts. It’s equal to the reciprocal of the number of its parts. There isn’t a company today whose collective intelligence is higher than that of a retarded bellhop. Most of them range from imbeciles to cretins with quite a few basket cases along the way. The Federal Government has the IQ of brain-damaged housefly.”
By now Stubbs’s tie had come askew and he waved his hands in impotent rage.
“When you look at it that way, the Boozalyzer is a triumph! Then along comes some pipsqueak writer who decides to turn up his nose at it and sabotage the project. I won’t have it! Now are you going to help us sell the damn thing or not!”
What could I say? A veil had been lifted from my eyes. I had been shown a great truth, the suppressed calculus of human endeavor. I saw it all in an instant of comprehension. Not the sum of the parts, but some of the parts. No wonder they had Winslow exiled on Tahiti.
Needless to say, I am now very careful about what I throw in the wastebasket, not to mention what I say on the company phone. In fact, now that I see things from Stubbs’s point of view, I’m sort of proud of some of our new products.
Why, for example, today I heard about our new solar-powered fountain pen. It’s called the Wordbuster, and I think that with some good solid wordsmithing . . . .
David Grace is Mr. Wilaru’s alter-ego (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com
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*David G. Wilaru, A Brief Biography
David Wilaru’s early employment was in the creative paperwork allocation and re-allocation sector, but he always knew that his true calling was to be a Wordsmith.
After his divorce from his wife, Sharon, whom Mr. Wilaru once described as: “…as frigid as a penguin in a KitchenAid,” he pursued his dream of a writing career with a stint drafting product manuals for Godzilla Brothers, Inc., penning the user manuals for such cutting-edge Godzilla Brothers’ products as the Delilah Magic Hedge Trimmer, the Trident Electric Fork and Wordbuster, the world’s first solar powered fountain pen.
After leaving Godzilla Brother following his unfortunate involvement with Dr. Werner Buick’s Thirty Day Plan and overcome with ennui, Mr. Wilaru founded SCRAP, The Surrender Company Representing All People, a project that, unfortunately, led to his brief confinement in the Feldman-Margolis Memorial Psychiatric Ward where he edited the patient newsletter, Four Soft Walls.
After his release from the Feldman-Margolis Center, Mr. Wilaru accepted a position as a slogan writer with the 1001 Adult Greeting Cards For All Occasions Company of East Los Angeles, Inc. where he diligently honed his creative talents.
Thereafter, Mr. Wilaru went on to hold a senior public relations position with the Silicon City medical appliances company, BodySpares, Inc. where he directed the marketing effort for the Mirage Artificial Pancreas 690 RG.
After BodySpares’ unfortunate difficulties with the SEC, Mr. Wilaru joined the start-up, Xcitement, Inc., where he designed the marketing campaign for the Xcitement Confidential Adviser (popularly known as “The Brain Box”) and single-handedly coined the slogan “Get Sane At Warp Speed.”
After Xcitement’s sudden bankruptcy, Mr. Wilaru took over as the head of Marketing and Public Relations for Memories-R-Us, Inc. where he directed the advertising strategy for The Dog Box and other Memories-R-Us products.
It was during this high-tech marketing period that, in his spare time, Mr. Wilaru wrote his first paperback novel, the moderately successful Grip Melman, Garbage Detective: The Case Of The Hostess In The Can.
After the unfortunate litigation generated by the book’s Second-Printing Party, Mr. Wilaru obtained a position as a free-lance writer and later as a staff reporter for The American Inquisitor Weekly News Magazine, a post which he still holds today.
A self-described obsessive-compulsive Wordsmith, Mr. Wilaru regularly writes about subjects of topical interest including Gay Marriage, Hollywood Culture, the rapid growth of Amnesiaiology, the Patriot Act, Middle East Developments, and his specialty, UFO Babies, together with other matters of broad general appeal.
