Farmer Bob

May, 2001: Once a month, we changed out the art at the Cup with new art which Jill believed she personally selected. This was a trick, like when you show a little kid how you can take off your thumb, or tell him to “wait right here outside the bus station.” Jill was always interviewing really bad painters of really bad paintings — dolphins; unicorns; wizards with lightning flashing behind them; 1950s Diner tableaux featuring Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and James Dean. Then she’d tell Diana to book the artist for the monthly opening.

One time when Diana was seven years old, she embarrassed herself in front of company by accidentally tucking her skirt into her underwear and everybody laughed and laughed. She can still tell you about “that one time when I got embarrassed,” because as long as she lived, she never ever embarrassed herself again. She’s all wit and finesse and graceful exits, and working for Jill only made her stronger, like the special school where Navy Seals learn how to not breathe. So needless to say, Diana never embarrassed herself at the Cup and Saucer by following instructions like “Put wine spritzers on the menu,” or, “Wear a little paper hat so everyone knows you’re not the owner,” or “Book this artist. His paintings of snow leopards are really avant-garde.“

So anyway, the manner with which Diana would tell Jill to “wait right here outside the bus station” was a scheme whereby she booked the real artists 18 months in advance. So when Jill would say, “When are those dolphin paintings going up?” Diana would pretend to check her planner, and say, “One year from September.” By the time the date rolled around, “Boy with Dolphin” and “Magyck of the White Wyzard” were faint memories that Jill thought were from her childhood, and she made herself nostalgic reminiscing about the old days when she was a little girl and paintings had lighthouses and matadors in them.

Sometimes, Jill preemptively booked artists herself, and we had to intercept them when they showed up to hang their work. On the first Thursday in May, I was looking out the window at this big guy sitting in a parked SUV, talking on his cell phone and glaring at pedestrians, when an old lady pulled up outside and started unloading what appeared to be framed photographs of kittens in baskets.

“Somebody’s bringing their crappy art in,” I said.

“You’re the art goalie,” Diana said.

The old lady came in, smelling up the place with Liz Taylor’s White Diamonds fragrance. “I’m here to hang my photographs for the opening tomorrow,” she said, with a bright display of dentures.

“Okay,” I said, and pointed at the hole in the floor. “The gallery is down there.”

Hearing voices upstairs, the two obese liquor control agents who were trapped in the basement came shuffling out of the darkness across the dirt floor. They were increasingly troglodytic; pale, shirtless, and shielding their eyes from the light.

“Where are our sandwiches?” said one.

“Somebody needs to empty the chemical shitter,” said the other.

There’s just something about a profane, Chris Cunningham-esque basement tableau that drives away old ladies. As the kitten photographer sped off in the wrong direction up Delaware Street, Diana said, “We can’t leave a gaping hole in the bar floor. Jill won’t do anything about it. I think she’s trying to pretend it’s not there.” It was the elephant in the basement that Jill wouldn’t talk about. She carefully sidestepped the hole while crossing from the bar to the office, but never looked down. We’d lowered an extension cord into the basement so the liquor control officers could charge up their Rascal scooters, and they usually spent the day rolling in sad little circles around the basement.

“We’re hungry!” one of them shouted. “We didn’t get our sandwiches this morning!”

One of our temps came out of the kitchenette. “Jill won’t sign our time cards,” she said. “No time card, no sandwiches.”

“SIGN THE TIMECARDS!” yelled the liquor control officers from the hole in the floor.

Once, when I was five years old, my dad sat me on his knee, and said, “Son, as long as you live, you will never, ever have to see a morbidly obese city employee naked from the waist up.” And now I know my dad was LYING. Thanks, Department of Regulated Industries. Thanks a lot. Child-like faith in your dad’s wisdom is for girls and little babies, so you’ve only made me stronger.

Jill had told the temp service that the dress code was “business casual,” but the two girls showed up wearing tube-tops and microskirts. This wasn’t as much of a distraction as you might think, what with their spectacular constellations of cold sores and brown-edged teeth, and it occurred to me that the at-will labor industry was letting standards slip. Seemed like you pretty much had to be above room temperature to get hired.

“Why are those two fat men living in a hole in your floor?” asked Chico. He was there hanging his paintings, which constituted the real May show. Jim “Chico” Buehler is a talented painter in the traditional Navajo school of zombie portraiture. He painted all kinds of zombies — formal portraits of zombies, cartoony zombies, still lifes of zombie parts, and erotic zombies. There was just something about the burgeoning spring and warm air that put Diana in the mood to book a show of paintings of the walking dead.

“We can’t get them out,” I said to Chico w/r/t the basement guys. “They fell through the floor, and then they split the first three stairs trying to climb back up. I don’t even want to discuss the chemical toilet situation.” Then I said, “Wait. Actually, I don’t think I can stop myself. We lower their sandwiches into the hole twice a day. Then while they’re distracted by food, I have to run downstairs and empty out the chemical john into the floor drain, and refill it with anti-poop chemicals Jill buys from an RV dealership. It smells like a monkey house down there!”

When you see news stories about thousand-pound shut-ins who can’t get out of bed, and who are ultimately removed from their homes via wall-removal and forklift, the reporter always mentions the daily regimen of baloney sandwich preparation their enabling families endure: this is because white bread and baloney are cheap. We couldn’t get Liquor Control out of the basement, and we couldn’t let them starve to death. Every morning, afternoon, and evening, somebody had to make forty baloney sandwiches for the two city employees. This was less of a food preparation activity than it was a simple colation project, and after a misguided attempt at getting the copier to do it, Jill had called up some low-rent temp company called Two-Fry Staffing to send over a couple of office-type clerical workers. And she also called the Xerox repairman.

This was a growing strain on the budget. Plus, Jill had been hospitalized for a panic attack the previous week, and as we scrambled to cover all the shifts while doing Jill’s administrative tasks, it was pretty clear that we needed to hire more permanent staff. That hadn’t happened yet because Jill’s daily schedule didn’t accommodate much in the way of actual business.

“It sounds like you need some help around here,” said Chico. “Are you looking for bartenders?”

“Aw, bartenders are like the Supreme Court,” I said. “Once they get the job, they never leave until anal sex is taught in grade school health class. At least that’s what I heard on this one radio show.”

“So you’re not hiring right now?” he asked. “Because if you are, I’ve got my diploma. The high-school kind, and the art-school kind. And my G.E.D.” Apparently, on the theory that there’s nothing like throwing the curve for a room full of underprivileged teenage mothers right before launching into a university course load, he’d gone to G.E.D. class the summer after high school graduation, as a kind of self-esteem booster.

“Well, we could probably use a bartender for a couple of shifts. And I definitely need help feeding liquor control,” I said. “I’ll ask Jill when she gets here.”

She was always late on Thursday. The sound of toenail clippers is, according to Jill, “the most magical sound in the world,” and combining it with champagne creates some sort of decadent sensory combination. “It’s like peeling off a sunburn while you eat veal. Man, I wish my toenails grew faster,” she says. Look: I never told you I understood how that woman’s head works; I just tell the stories. The point is, every Thursday, she has a pedicure and mimosas on the Plaza.

Anyway, Jill walked through the door, saw me, and said, “Get me some ibuprofen, pecker. I’ve got a champagne headache.” Sometimes Jill gets swears stuck in her head, and repeats them over and over until they’re replaced by something else. That week, “pecker” had been in heavy rotation in her vocabulary, sometimes punctuated with repetitive finger-pokes: “Pecker. Pecker. Pecker.” She looked at Chico up the ladder with his hammer, saw the paintings, and said, “I distinctly remember booking a display of kitten photos for the month of May. Not paintings of old people.“

Diana had this covered. “The photographer died,” she said.

“That’s just stupid! Do you have any idea how much kitten photos are worth after the artist dies? We could have been swimming in goddamn kitten-money. Ask yourself: would you want to have cocktails while surrounded by pictures of a bunch of senior citizens? Is that something you enjoy?” She turned to Chico. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Jim,” said Chico. “Or you can call me Chico.”

“Okay, whatever, I’ll be here when you make up your mind. Look: you’re very talented. I can almost smell nursing home-whiff coming off those paintings. When you’re dead, I’m sure they’ll become very valuable. Can you contrive to fall off the ladder somehow? ‘Cause if so, maybe we can work this out. Otherwise, scoot up there and move those pictures out.”

“Have you signed our timecards yet?” asked one of the temps. Jill acted like she didn’t hear anything. For some reason, she held temporary workers at a level of regard even lower than that of her permanent staff. She wouldn’t make eye contact with them, and kept calling them “the help,” as in, “Diana, does ‘the help’ seem extra-slutty to you today? I didn’t know zig-zag eyelet-seam stockings were ‘business casual.’”

As soon as Jill disappeared into the office, the temps walked out the front door. One of them shouted, “I’m gettin’ Two-Fry! Y’all be sorry!”

Diana went back behind the bar, and started tossing whole loaves of WonderBread and packages of baloney through the hole in the floor. “Honest to god, Chico, if you really want a job, we need help,” she said.

“DOES HE HAVE HIS LIQUOR CARD?” shouted one of the liquor control officers.

“Hey. Yeah. You got your liquor card?” I asked.

“Of course I do.” Chico pulled out his wallet and slapped his liquor card on the bar.

Diana looked at it, and asked, “So, who is ‘Claudio Fantasma?’”

He snatched it back. “Yeah — that’s… it’s my confirmation name.”

To get a Missouri liquor card, you had to present a copy of your criminal history to the Department of Regulated Industries. “Chico, can I assume Claudio Fantasma is somebody without any felonies on his record?”

As it turns out, Claudio Fantasma had died a few years previously, but continued leading an exciting and colorful life via proxy applying for and receiving Pell Grants for his college tuition above and beyond the grants available to James Buehler; magazines that Jim Buehler would not want delivered to his house were mailed to Claudio Fantasma’s P.O. Box. Chico was also represented by a Kansas City art agent named Claudio Fantasma who only made phone calls. All of which we would come to discover later, when Chico’s entrepreneurial foray into the exciting field of identity theft reached a Story of Ricky-grade strangled-with-your-own-intestines crisis point.

Anyway, before I could pursue that issue, the guy who’d been glaring at people through his SUV windshield came flying through the door and grabbed me by what would have been my lapels if I’d been wearing a jacket. “You better have my money,” he said. He was a head taller than I am, which always makes my submission instinct kick in. I’m really good at suppressing it, though, and I didn’t actually wet myself. Instead, avoiding eye-contact, I said, “Maybe. Maybe I have your money. How much money do you want?”

By way of response, he thrust two sheets of paper right in front of my face. “You sign these time sheets, or I’m-a punch you in the head!” This was Two-Fry Jefferson, owner and proprietor of Two-Fry Staffing Services, which turned out to be a subsidiary of Two-Fry Professional Escort Services. The business model was a redeployment of old, withered escorts into temporary staffing positions in office environments.

All of which was kind of a relief, since signing the time sheets was an administrative issue, and Jill didn’t let me sign anything unsupervised. On the other hand, Two-Fry had promised to punch me in the head. By way of redirecting violence away from me and toward other people, I said, “Is there any way I could talk you into punching the owner in the head?”

“Somebody gonna sign these payroll sheets, or I turn y’all’s asses over to collections. And punch you in the head.”

Diana came out of the office and said, “Jill just left out the back door. She checked her calendar and saw Ira was coming to meet with her today.”

Ira was Jill’s accountant, although they had not actually been in the same room together for over three years. During a meeting in which Ira attempted to demonstrate how to change the sales tax rate in Quickbooks, Jill’s mind went even more blank than usual, and she had some sort of transcendental experience whereby she achieved the Zen Bhuddist state of Te, or “oneness,” perceiving the world not as a constructed pattern of abstractions, but as an integrated whole of which her own consciousness was a part. And Jill likes her constructed pattern of abstractions, goddammit. “That was a fucking eye-opener,” she said. “Floating in a clear, existential void is not my idea of fun. That’s why I have an accountant.”

“Look,” said Two-Fry. “If y’all people think I’m some kinda’ dumb punk-ass bitch don’t invoice on a weekly basis, you’re as blind as Marlee Matlin.”

“Marlee Matlin’s deaf.”

“Fuck that bitch! And her seeing-eye-dog!”

“Actually, I bet her dog more like signs with his little paws. Like a signing-paw-dog,” I said, and Two-Fry punched me in the head.

Diana was waiting when I got out of the emergency room. Driving me back to my apartment, she said, “I signed the time sheets while you were unconscious. Then I hired Chico while you were sobbing in the fetal position under the table. Then, while you were sissy-slapping the paramedics, Jill came back and started looking into some sort of boot-camp where you could learn to act more manly. Don’t worry; she won’t spend the money.”

My head hurt, but I couldn’t call in sick the next day because I was already late with the rent. I was as surprised as anyone to learn that the liquor control dudes in the basement had names.

Jim “Chico” Buehler is a working artist. His paintings are for sale, and you can contact him for commissions.