The Solstice
Today, being Tuesday, I was counting out medications into a weekly med box at my desk. Joe was behind me sitting in his beach chair furiously rubbing a scratch ticket with a quarter.
“How long does it take you to scratch one of those things?” I asked, “It seems like you have been at it for fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“I like to be thorough,” Joe said.
“Does it make any difference?”
“When I win it does,” he said.
“Do you ever win?”
“Sure,” he said, “Last week I hit for six thousand dollars. Hey, you’ve just asked me two questions. I thought you were only going to ask me one question a day.”
It’s true. I had meant to have a whole other post devoted to Joe but never got around to it, so I promised him I would ask one question per post until readers feel like they know him. Maybe I should tell you how he was dressed. He was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” tee shirt, a BoSlob cap backwards on his head, a pair of the most ridiculous cargo shorts I’ve ever seen a grown man wear, and giant tennis sneakers with those little non-show socks.
“No,” I said, “That’s not the question I wanted to ask today. My question for today is, ‘what did you do for a living before you retired? PeeWee was an engineer.’”
He brushed off his scratch ticket with the back of his hand and then blew on it. As he tucked it into one of the pockets on his shorts he said, “I did a lot of different things. I had a liquor distributorship in the city, I had a little piece of a couple of restaurants, and I did some carting.”
“Liquor, restaurants, and carting… so you were in the mob?” I asked.
“Mob? Why would I be in the mob?” He waved his hand dismissively, “The mob is run by Italians. Why would they let a kid named McLoughlin in on their racket? Everything I did was strictly on the up and up.” He extended his arm out from him in a flattening motion. “Totally legit.”
“Were your restaurants on the east side or the west side?” I asked.
“The west side,” he said.
“What was the name of one of your bars?”
“The most famous was named the “Taproom of the Sacred Heart.”
“That’s a total mob joint,” I said, “That place was crawling with Westies.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “Now let me ask you a question.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“When are we going to have the solstice party? Today’s the solstice isn’t it?”
“No time soon,” I said, “We follow a Sumerian calendar.”
“The Sumerians couldn’t figure out when the Summer Solstice was?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Why are you asking about the solstice party? How do you know about the solstice party? You just got here.”
“The guy on the phone mentioned a solstice party.”
“What guy on what phone?” I asked.
“A guy called on that phone,” Joe said, pointing to the landline. “I took a message while you were out.”
“You answered the landline?! You’re not supposed to answer the landline. That phone is for our lead titles, Cat Obsession and Wedding Pornography. Only Gary the receptionist is supposed to answer that line… and besides,” I said, now annoyed at my brand new flunky’s total lack of boundaries, “when was I out? I have been here all afternoon.”
“You fell asleep watching the Olympic synchronized diving trials.”
It was true. I had nodded off during the men’s springboard competition.
“Well, what was the message on the phone? Who called?”
“Some editor,” Joe said, taking a scratch ticket out of one of his pockets, clearly unfazed by my rising alarm. “He said he would send you an e-mail.”
“E-mail? That’s terrible! He usually only sends texts. Using the landline is a bad sign, but e-mail is worse.”
I logged on to my corporate mail account for the first time since May. There at the top of the queue was an email from Sam Hughes. It read:
Gutbloom,
You’re off to a terrible start. The Seidner’s mayonnaise people are about to pull their native ad buy. Why haven’t you mentioned them in all of your stupid food blogging posts?
Given that today is the solstice, I wanted to contact you prophylacticly. There is no budget for a solstice party, not even a ‘minor’ one, unless, of course, you want to relent and start running a chum box.
Yours in letters and scotch,
Ted
“This is bad, Joe,” I said, “But not as bad as it could be. I happen to have been working on a chum box for weeks now. I’ve got a chum box for them, alright. A chum box chock-o-block full of chum. The chummiest chum box on the Tubes. We got nothing to worry about. Download a Sumerian calendar app on your iPad, and find me the August Solstice.”
Others in this series include, in LIFO order:
