Viking Therapy

By J. Clarence Lynch

Unearth the wickedly wrathful life of William Grimes, near sixty something, lonely heart, beaten and bruised insurance company lifer whose close to sell buy existence is turned over and tossed about by a crazy Korean grocer, a hyper-attractive female detective hell bent on his destruction, a mysteriously captivating Russian woman, and some powerful Viking psychotherapy from a wonderful female doctor, her stunningly blonde nurse and their medicine chest bursting with potent remedies. Coarsely humorous, grade school profane, and slightly psychosexually tinged (isn't that true of all that modern society enjoys?) This light and tight comedic tome takes a fresh look at the age old question of whether we ever had free will and who needs it anymore? In today's complex and confusing world maybe it's better to just let go of old quaint notions that 'we're in control' and let somebody else hold life's steering wheel as we all go happily over a cliff. Maybe we need to sit back, close our eyes oh so tightly, fasten our seatbelts and trust a caring professional to spin the wheel on life's bus. After all, as our hero finds out, what could possibly go wrong?

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Clarence Lynch
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310939563

J. Clarence Lynch

A grizzled author of many business proposals,reports, and credit summaries J. Clarence Lynch has now turned his sardonic eyes to the world of fiction and humor. Mr. Lynch, a Bronx native, has held a wide variety of jobs including Maine logger, trucking, financial analysis, mechanic, EMT and bon vivant. His work for the US government remains sealed from public view until 2109.

Book preview

Viking Therapy

by

J. Clarence Lynch

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by J. Clarence Lynch

All Rights Reserved.

Unearth the wickedly wrathful life of William Grimes, a near sixty something, lonely heart, beaten and bruised insurance company lifer whose close to sell by existence is turned over and tossed about by a crazy Korean grocer, a hyper-attractive female detective hell bent on his destruction, a mysteriously captivating Russian woman, and some powerful Viking psychotherapy from a wonderful female doctor, her stunningly blonde nurse and their medicine chest bursting with potent remedies.

Coarsely humorous, grade school profane, and slightly psychosexually tinged ( isn’t that true of all that modern society enjoys? ) this light and tight comedic tome takes a fresh look at the age old question of whether we ever had free will and who needs it anymore?

In today’s complex and confusing world maybe it’s better to just let go of old quaint notions that ‘we’re in control’ and let somebody else hold life’s steering wheel as we all go happily over a cliff. Maybe we need to sit back, close our eyes oh so tightly, fasten our seat belts, and trust a caring professional to spin the wheel on life’s bus. After all, as our hero finds out, what could possibly go wrong?

Chapter One

My focus drifted away from him.

Now I began to silently daydream. I looked quietly upwards, taking my confined world in with weary Irish eyes, and began to contemplate the circular perpetuity of the peculiar, and inappropriate, French clock that was before me. Turning our whole lives away mankind’s invention stood high above its subjects, firmly established on the corporate wall, as its busy-and changing-servants labored timidly below it.

I had no idea who invented the clock, I certainly didn’t care either, but I had to wonder if he realized what eternal punishment he had brought down upon his fellow human descendants.

What caught your eye was the particular clock’s off putting dark frame. Grossly apart from any normal corporate office’s decorative scheme the clock’s sharp color and unique personality, something that belonged in a Swiss museum of eccentricities perhaps, stood distinct from the soft tan walls of the corporate office it served. Suits in the company were afraid to remove it; Mister Stevens, the clock’s owner, had a reputation as a boss that you only trifled with once.

I looked hard at the cuckoo clock’s strange facing: tiny clown faces, artfully carved and gaily painted, replaced the numbers; a circus ringmaster, complete with a small leather whip and holding a tiny wooden chair, came out of the face’s opening door on the quarter hours as a tinkling bell tolled to announce time’s unrelenting departure. Hurry up serfs – excuse me, I meant valued associates – you’ve fallen behind in your labors.

The tiny ringmaster kept the troubling clowns all in order; easy to tell that I was, writ large, one of the misbehaving clowns. My life’s current ringmaster sat across from me, running-and ruining-my existence for fourteen hours a day.

I casually noted the lateness of the Friday hour, and then shifted my gaze to the busy and distant freedom of New York’s Fifth Avenue many feet below.

I asked myself would this three hour editing ordeal ever end? Why couldn’t death come along at this very instant and solve all my problems? Come right now, I silently prayed, and let me greet you, dear Mister Death, as a beautiful visitor traveling along this ugly path of life. Mister Death, I really think I need a big hug.

Just carry me away – to anywhere you damn well please – in a cold final embrace I silently pleaded to no one. Then the dark voice came pounding at my head again: Go, join death in his busy travels, go now. I began to look more carefully at the window’s construction.

That distressing inner voice, increasingly frequent nowadays, filled my head-spurring the thought that perhaps I should muster my courage, affirm my tentative decision, and hurry my end along? What’s the good of a good thought without some action behind it?

As I contemplated this wonderful opportunity for life’s conclusion – falling sixty-seven stories guarantees total success at what you have planned, no one will point an accusatory finger and say, ‘Grimes, you’ve failed here’ – I remembered last month’s droning corporate lecture on the one inch thick plate glass that surrounded the lush office space, keeping us all safe, we were told, from whirling New York City tornadoes and errant seagulls.

The expanse of glass had been touted by the suits as a wonderful corporate benefit, a ‘benevolent, transparent gift from management’ as one vested, bespectacled, belted and suspender strapped idiot intoned for our entertainment. I was a philosophical contrarian, I think the suits just wanted us sequestered as prisoners inside their intellectually dank corporate jail.

‘Virtually unbreakable’ is what the smiling German engineer proudly boasted – we all know what ugliness can happen if you disagree with a German, don’t we? What freedom it would now be, I thought, to cast myself through that glass, perhaps taking an office chair along as a comfortable seat to take in the view, and enjoy the solitude of a sixty-seven story drop to the ground. Sixty-seven, sixty-six....We are now at the sidewalk, your final destination, thank you for flying with us this evening. Splat and goodbye.

Just a lone man, a differing business viewpoint, and his final small escapist dreams, making a statement blot on the pavement many stories below. Little chance of getting out of this miserable travail in that manner. Endure, I told myself as I remembered from ice water horrors suffered long ago at basic training in the Navy, one must always endure.

I thought too of a different approach: passing the onerous time by sitting on my hands directly in front of my tormentor. Let me laugh loudly at myself and affirm my own stupidly formed self-image in protest. Something nonviolent, something that a Tibetan monk would agree was all good with a small nod of his shaved head. What could my nemesis do after all? Fire me? That would be a gift second only to death’s arrival.

The office clock’s slowly moving arms now read nine-forty, exactly twenty minutes until the ten o’clock news chick would smilingly report on the day’s basket of fresh tragedies. Serving as the typical nightcap to my boring days at work, last night’s grisly news made my own life look not so bad. Macro tragedy eclipsed my micro tragedies; the day’s full bag of horrors took away my self-focus and kind of cheered me up I’m ashamed to say.

Yesterday the sleek news bunny had her fire red hair piled sky high and wore a dark tan power suit that hugged her tight frame remarkably well, I liked that look a great deal.

I thought of her face. Lovely whitened teeth bordered by red lipstick played well off each other, like a poor man’s Picasso hung on the wall. Her capped teeth and Botoxed lips moved in an artificial tandem of strong urgency, recounting the deaths and travails of another New York City day in a staccato, damning and ironically, highly entertaining manner. Taking her look in its entirety the news woman resembled a burning match, ready to set the combustible world aflame.

I may have imagined it – who knows – but I swear a higher body count produced a larger news bunny smile. Upward death tolls brought happiness and more visible teeth to our news girl’s face. Another molar shown for another murder noted? Perhaps. Something about a tall powerful women that inevitably draws a man’s thought along a certain path of the imagination however; even I found it curious that I never changed the bunny channel.

It didn’t look like tonight – a deserved Friday night off for most, a dutiful work night alone with the despot for me – would evolve into an evening at home with my spreading rear in the thirty year old easy chair. So, if I wouldn’t see her on the television, then why give a damn what the hell the news bunny would wear tonight?

Instead, I watched the corporate tyrant across from me shuffle his papers and get ready to shuffle my life a bit too while he was at it. I felt like the joker in this deck of cards; I sure knew who the dealer was. Quiet TV at home with the redheaded news power chick – ‘anonymous distance dating’ an old Navy friend of mine had sarcastically called it – held little promise for the evening.

Across from me sat Mister Thaddeus Stevens, a plump, and, I must truthfully state, effeminate looking boss – how else could he be factually described – given to garish bow ties and purple pants on casual Fridays. He had been imported from somewhere in Europe; a fifty something, soft and marshmallow puffy man who never genuinely smiled and ignored the New York City indoor smoking ban with heartfelt disdain. I watched as another foul European tobacco cloud came heading west in my direction.

I had tried artful coughing, and a hard swirling of my hand, but it was pointless. The man’s smoking routine never varied. When ten cigarette butts filled the dark ceramic ashtray Stevens would pick up the ugly vessel and dump its burnt contents in the wastebasket. He repeated this action four or five times a day; you can do the math.

Right now he took the lit end of his tan foreign cigarette and pushed the ugly remains of other dead ones around the ashtray. He began to count out loud. On the ten count he took the ashtray up, rose from his chair, moved over to the waste bin, twisted his hand for a quick tobacco dump, took a second out of his busy life to look at me like I had just defecated on his office’s Persian rug, and then moved back to his work.

The smoking habits of the man were notorious companywide, and just as widely ignored. People tended to let Stevens have his way, a ‘wide passage’ he laughingly boasted once. Right now though I watched his editorial pen hover over the financial derivative plan that I had written over the last three months, he moved midway down page thirty-nine; I paid attention to the pen’s ominous red color. Red meant take it out, get rid of it. Bin it.

He cleared his throat and spoke: Parts of this report are still shitty city even after six times chasing, but never quite catching, little Miss Coherence around the old Mulberry bush, Grimes. You must enjoy sitting there like a dope in front of me – maybe you’ve got a longing for my company?

Stevens looked at me for a second, smiled with dark mischief in his eyes, and then added, Relax, Grimes, only joshing with your head.

I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to quickly deny this atrocious late night statement, made when there were just us two here, or give a masculine laugh and jocularly tell him to go to hell. Who knew if he was even kidding?

I stayed where I was and watched the red pen encircle its dying literary prey. I had been over the paper enough by now to know that the two circled paragraphs on the page had exactly three hundred and sixty well researched words – all headed for the dungheap.

Mercifully we were on page thirty-nine of the upper management report, almost done. Forty would do it; after that I could reclaim my failed opus and hear some uplifting exhortation like, Get it done by Monday morning – and I mean early Monday morning.

I watched the page slowly turn. Yellow and green pens held editorial promise; something might need to be gently nudged or something was good to go. Stevens still clasped the red pen tightly, he scanned the last page and rubbed his chubby hand across his brow, like an Irish farmhand that had spent the day toiling in the hardpan soil of a rocky potato field.

I laughed a little under my breath. He hadn’t put out a day of real work in his damn life. I watched another malodorous cigarette get going, and the last page get studied and studied. I knew my paper’s future didn’t hold bright promise.

It sprung from deep within Steven’s throat and landed noisily right in the middle of the fourth paragraph on the last page: a big, thick wad of tobacco rich phlegm that sat marinating on the page until Stevens casually took the report, looked at the widening stain he had produced, smiled ever so slightly, closed the report over and handed it across the table.

Shit, he muttered, nothing but worthless cow shit. Belongs rotting in a wet field someplace, not at an Axon Board meeting.

"First thing Monday with the revisions. Get it right this time, pay attention to our edits, focus on what we want to write here, and get that crap on the last page where it belongs – right straight to the garbage pail.

Let me tell you something else too, something more wide frame picture: it doesn’t look good for your next performance review. I’m almost certain we are looking at a written exit warning, or at least, a hefty salary equalization. Money bestowed always needs to match the talent shown, that’s the beauty of Axon’s corporate life: it has its own rough justice to it.

Axon is looking for financial rewards dispensed, and your own evidenced talent, to be in synch. That’s what equity and fairness in business is all about, that’s the story line of corporate life. Unlike the puzzling vagaries of the outside world we create an equitable world that you can live in, all you need to do is work hard. That’s all we ask; I guess we’ve overstretched you too much here. Your personal corporate ratios are way out of balance. In corporate’s eyes you are too much of a taker and too weak as a contributor. Are we clear about how bad this is for you, Bill?"

He held his hands out – like the mythical balance scales of justice to further make his point – and then kept hitting me in the kidneys, You write and think like a fifth grader, we can get some young MBA idiot to come over from London or Bonn and get the job done at half your price tag. Maybe drag a gorilla in from the Berlin Zoo, feed him bananas, and let him pound a keyboard until a report pops out of his ass.

Stevens smiled to himself after he said that, I think he waited a second