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The! Cup! And! Saucer! Action! News!

PREVIOUSLY:

1. The Department of Regulated Industries vs. Everything good and decent in the world. Plus: how Jill overcame a phobia (hint: it was by passing out.)
2. In which Jill gets in trouble with a temporary staffing service. PLUS: Chico gets hired. ALSO: Paintings of the walking dead.
3. A Season of Baby Ashley
4. Terminal Fatigue

Work was a lot less fun now that irony was dead. Brown terrorists had flown their airplanes into the irony and blown it all up. I’m not 100% sure about the Mohammedan basis for irony-hatred, but George F. Will had declared, in print, an end to jokes he didn’t get, and also the triumphant return of Tiffany lamps, grandma furniture and tipping your hat to the ice man. September 11th was a real cultural slate-cleaning, and I think it came as a relief to a lot of people. But woe betide the irony.

Now all we had was the same hollow, empty feeling irony gave us, only not as much laughing. And all of a sudden, Jill was coming in to work every single day. At least, it seemed that way– in a terrifying turn of events, her sister Jen had quit her teaching job to come and help out at the Cup and Saucer. That was kind of like having two Jills around. So Jen ran the front-end of the Cup while Jill acted all “administrative” back in the office.

“Thank god you’re here,” Jen said as soon as I walked in. “You smell like Drakkar Noir and ammonia,” she added. She handed me a grout trowel and said, “Go scrape all the pigeon shit off the outside tables.” Andee had forgotten to bring the tables inside when she closed the store the previous night, and now they were encrusted with barnacles of pigeon shit. When Jen opened the store, she had actually started scraping until she could no longer suppress her gag reflex, which took about four seconds. I went out and started scraping, and Jen followed.

“You’re good at that,” said Jen. “Henceforth, you are the designated shit-scraper. I’m totally having it printed on your business cards. That way, when people pull your business card out of the ‘Win A Free Lunch’ fishbowl, they’ll know exactly what your talents are. Didn’t you say you dropped out of college?”

“Yes.”

She put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t you wish you hadn’t, Chris?” I just kept scraping.

“That’s disgusting,” said a woman who’d stopped by for a mid-morning latte.

“Honey, the service industry is like making sausage out of Mexican snuff porn,” said Jen. “There are things you can never un-see.” It really was like having two Jills around. As soon as the woman walked away, Jen gagged and went back inside.

“Hey. Excuse you. And excuse the bird crap you’re getting in my croissant,” said Mark Brooks. I was injudiciously scraping the table he was sitting at. He was reading the classifieds over a late-morning coffee.

“Sorry,” I said.

He pointed an accusatory finger at me. “You smell like Drakkar Noir and vinegar,” said Mark. “Why don’t you stand back like, four feet. No, no, downwind, please.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” I asked him, moving to the downwind side of the table. Now I could smell him. He smelled like rosewater and potpourri, which I assumed was what his house smelled like.

“I just quit my job,” he said. Mark worked as a short-order cook at a diner on Fifth Street. “I told ‘em, ‘Screw you, man, I got prospects.’”

“Okay. Why?”

“Some customer sent his food back to the kitchen. He said that I cooked it wrong.”

“And he ordered what, exactly?”

“Eggs. Over-easy.”

“What did you make him?”

Defiantly, Mark said, “Oeuf de Poule à la Florentine.“

“What’s that?” I asked. “Like, over-easy with interest?”

“You’re stupid,” Mark observed. “Anyway. I went out to the dining room, and you know what I said? I said, ‘If you’re sending my oeuf de Poule à la Florentine back to the kitchen, I guess the terrorists have won!’ And I threw it in his stupid face.”

“And that’s why you’re reading the classifieds.”

“Yeah, nice observation, Copernicus.”

“Who?”

“Copernicus. The astronomer? Who proposed the heliocentric model of the universe? And thanks tons for making me explain it. ‘Cause if you have to explain it, it isn’t funny.”

“Yeah. The not-funny was totally was my fault.”

“Look, why don’t you go get me a Boulevard Pale Ale,” said Mark, “and a job application.”

Mark also required a pen, a pack of Camel Lights, and one of the table umbrellas to shade him from the afternoon sun.

My brother TJ worked at the market across the street. He got off after the lunch rush, and drank beer at the bar, while engaging in a leisure activity which involved inserting other people into hypothetical situations. He’d come up with what he regarded as solid proof that time travel was impossible, the mathematics of which relied on insulting me.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s say you had a time machine. And you went back in time. And you took along a big case of Duracell batteries.”

“Why?”

“For your vibrator, buddy.”

“It’s a personal massager, douchenozzle.”

“Yeah, a ‘personal massager’ for your vagina, butt-muppet.”

“Maybe there’s a lot of tension in my vagina.”

“Okay,” said TJ. “You go back in time with a whole case of batteries for the vibrator you use on all your vagina tension.“

“And also did I mention how much my vagina resembles a big horse dick?”

“There must be some mistake because that is what your vibrator looks like. And it totally takes lantern batteries.”

“What year am I traveling to?” I asked.

“1066.”

“Okay. The Battle of Hastings,” I said.

“No. You’re going back to the year 1066 to jerk off to Halley’s Comet. With your vibrator.”

“So I’m a Halley’s Comet fetishist?”

“I can’t even keep track of the pervy shit you’re into,” said TJ. “Look, do you want to hear about how you’re violating a fundamental principle of physics? Or are we going to talk about your weird sexual fixations for the whole afternoon?”

“Hey, you can’t talk that way about my ventral pallidum.”

“Eh?”

“My lizard brain. With its Halley’s Comet fetish.”

“Moving on,” said TJ. “A process can only occur if it increases the total entropy of a system. To an observer in 1066, a big case of batteries just manifested out of nowhere. That’s a quantity of energy that didn’t exist before. That’s a total violation of the second law of thermodynamics, duck-fucker.”

“Fuck the second law of thermodynamics,” I said. “I wanna see dinosaurs.”

“Listen to you two,” said Gerald the Christian. He and Helena were sitting at the bar, wearing extremely baggy black T-shirts that said “Born To Worship” in a Gothic biker font. They’d been listening to TJ’s physics explication with an admixture of confusion and the more familiar territory of righteous indignation. Plus Helena was already angry with me for referring to Wednesday as, quote, ‘hump day,’ so the afternoon had totally started on the wrong foot.

“I guess the terrorists really have won,” said Gerald.

TJ nodded. “Well, think about it: We used to have a whole World Trade Center,” he said. “They blew it up. That has to be, like, getting a man on base…”

“No, no, that’s definitely putting points on the board. In a geopolitical sense,” I said.

“You smell like Drakkar Noir and cabbage,” said Helena.

Mark Brooks walked in with his empty glass and handed me his job application. “If Jill’s here, I’m available to interview immediately.”

I looked over his form. “Yes. Yes, this seems to be in order. Except that everything you’ve written here is a lie,” I said.

“Like what?” he demanded.

“Well, right here, where it says, ‘Have you ever worked for the Cup and Saucer on Delaware Street?’ You’ve written, ‘Yes,’ and where it says, ‘Duration of Employment,’ you wrote, ‘5 years,’ then crossed out ‘5′ and replaced it with ‘10.’”

Actually, the only reason that extremely corporate-sounding question was on the form in the first place was because Jill had stolen a pad of employment applications from Chili’s, crossed out the Chili’s name and logo wherever it appeared, and careted in “Cup and Saucer.”

She was in her office hiding from her to-do list. Jill was always adding items to it as a way of feeling productive without actually doing anything. Every couple of days, the list got so overwhelmingly huge and intimidating that she couldn’t face it. She wound up hiding it and avoiding everything she’d written down, and then procrastinating until the end of the day.

And her version of office procrastination was unusually horrible, because instead of playing Minesweeper or surfing the internet, she would fidget with other people’s psyches. The day Mark Brooks came to apply for the cook position, Jill had chosen her accountant’s new temp as the locus of her anxieties.

“Jill, Mark Brooks is out here with a job application,” I said.

She picked up the phone. “I thought he was working at Cascone’s.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

Dialling her accountant’s office, she said, “I dunno. Listen, Ira has a temp working at his reception desk this week.” Adopting a confidential whisper, she added, “She’s the stupidest person I’ve ever –” She stopped and looked me up and down. “Well. She’s plenty stupid, believe you me… Wendy! Hi, how are you? This is Jill at the Cup and Saucer. Is Ira there? Oh, he’s having lunch. Do you have his cell phone number? Great. Let me just write that down. Oops! Wendy, I’m all out of blank paper. Do you think you could fax me a blank piece of paper?” She gave me an unnecessarily exaggerated conspiratorial wink. “That way, I can write down Ira’s cell phone number. Great. I’ll call you back as soon as it gets here.” She hung up and looked at the fax machine.

“Watch,” said Jill. “She’ll do it.”

“What do you want me to tell Mark Brooks?” I asked her.

“Here, give him this,” she said, handing me the Quarterly Wage Report & Unemployment Tax Return form. “Tell him it’s a pre-employment aptitude test.” She crossed the quarterly taxes off her to-do list, became frightened all over again by how long the list was, and covered it up with her desk calendar. As a blank piece of paper came spooling out of the fax machine, I turned and walked back into the bar.

“What do you see as your greatest weakness?” TJ was asking Mark.

“Well, I’d have to say that would definitely be my tendency to work entirely too hard,” he said.

“Mmm-hmm. Let’s say you sit next to a coworker who is consistently rude to others on the telephone,” said TJ. “You realize that no one else is aware of this. How would you handle the situation?”

“Well, I’d tell him to get the eff out of my kitchen.”

“Mark,” I said. “Jill says you have to take this ‘Pre-employment Aptitude Test,’” I handed him the tax forms. “Between you and me, it’s the quarterly taxes. She’s not very good at decimals.”

“Oh. Do you have a financial calculator?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about it. Plenty of room for slop on the quarterly taxes. Just don’t write down any suspiciously even dollar amounts.”

I walked back into the office, where Jill was back on the phone with Ira’s receptionist. “That’s right,” she was saying. “If I’m going to put Ira’s phone number into my special binder of phone numbers, I’m gonna need you to fax me Ira’s three-hole punch. I promise to fax it right back over when I’m done with it. Just shove it in there!” Jill held the phone away from her head, and I could vaguely hear the sound of splintering plastic coming across the line. “What now? I’m on a call.”

“Okay. Mark is doing the quarterly taxes.”

Gesturing at me with the phone, she said, “Good. When he finishes them, tell him he’s hired.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to interview him yourself?”

“Are you trying to tell me what to do?” said Jill, pointing at me with the telephone, from which the sound of breaking plastic continued to emanate. “Because according to your contract, I’m the boss of you.”

“It’s not a contract, Jill. It’s a job application from Chili’s.” Jill always put way too much faith in the legally-binding nature of her job applications, because blind faith is a lot cheaper than actual legal advice.

“If you’re such an expert in contract law, then why do you smell like you splashed on some Drakkar Noir and formaldehyde this morning?” she asked. Just then, Jen walked into the office. “Hang on — Jen, you have got to hear this. I’ll put it on speaker.” She switched the phone to speaker, and the room filled with the sound of Ira’s fax machine splintering into chunks. Then we heard someone pick up the phone.

“Jill?” said Ira. “I know this is you! Would you explain why my temp is shoving my goddamn three-hole punch into the fax machine?” It was a remarkable display of balls-having, in my opinion. Ira was one of the few people who received income from Jill whom she was kind of afraid of.

Out at the bar, Mark was putting the finishing touches on the tax forms. And TJ was talking to the reason why I smelled like Drakkar Noir and automobile vomit. Her name was Amy, and she was the world’s most beautiful designer imposter perfume peddler. No, really — as soon as she’d walked into the bar, Owen, the Satanicide bassist, jumped up from the table where he was highlighting inconsistencies in the New Testament, shouted, “Hey, look at my abs!” and pulled his shirt up. “I can run eight miles!” he told her. Then he charged outside and started doing circuits around the block.

Where Parfums de Coeur Designer Impostor products had names like Primo!™ and Stylin’™, Amy’s company’s knock-off fragrances had names like “Drakkar Noir™” and “Obsession™ by Calvin Klein™.” With the quotation marks — the company had filed briefs arguing that quotation marks connoted irony, making their use of corporate trademarks a matter of parody, and therefore fair use under copyright law. Look: This is a company that recruits kids with Downs Syndrome, for their sympathetic qualities. I’m not saying they’re right.

Amy had told me all about the company’s business model the previous week. Instead of selling perfumes in stores, it involved putting groups of ten high school drop-outs and entreprenurial ex-convicts into a van, and driving to restaurants and gas stations in surrounding states, where they would desperately attempt to meet the quotas the company required before they would pay a commission, while also dodging the teams of drop-outs and ex-cons selling magazine subscriptions for other companies.

“It is not possible to patent a fragrance,” Amy had explained to me the previous week. “Therefore, our business model is based on the democratization of luxury fragrances.”

“There is the trademark infringement issue, though,” I pointed out.

“That is a matter currently under litigation,” she’d told me sexily.

Now, TJ was sampling test bottles of fake perfume and saying, “…Really? Chris bought two bottles?” He turned and looked at me. “All that cologne isn’t bothering your asthma?” he asked loudly. He turned back to Amy. “Mom sent him to asthma camp when we were kids. Three years in a row. Hey, Chris, you have your inhaler, right?”

No thanks to TJ, I did actually feel one of my panic attacks blooming, with accompanying airway constriction, and I started feeling my pockets for my albuterol inhaler.

“That’s a very nice cocktail dress you’re wearing, Amy,” I wheezed.

TJ produced my inhaler from somewhere in his backpack. “Are you looking for this, sexy?” he asked. I lunged for it, but he Curly Nealed it down his arm, across his shoulders to his other hand.

“It’s really very nice to see you again, Chris,” Amy said. “I have some new items I thought you might like.” She held up bottles of “Unforgivable® Sean Jean®” and “Tommy Hilfiger® Tommy®.”

“Amy! The van’s leaving!” shouted someone from the door. I looked up. It was Two-Fry Jefferson, who, the previous spring, had punched me in the head.

“Two-Fry?” I said.

“Hey, you buyin’ fragrances? Or you hasslin’ my sales associate?”

“I thought you were in the Temporary Escort Staffing business,” I said.

“I got my fingers and toes in pies you ain’t even thought of,” said Two-Fry.

“I have to go,” said Amy. “I hope we can continue this conversation at a more convenient time.” And she was gone, out the door with Two-Fry, and climbing into a van full of pregnant teenagers and methadone outpatients.

“DONE!” shouted Mark Brooks, slapping his pencil on the bar. He waggled an empty pint glass at me. “Beer me! Am I hired?”

My cell phone rang. I answered it. It was TJ, calling from eight feet away at the bar. “Cock,” he said.

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