Modern Hobbies

By Christopher S. Bell

Lawrence Thorne has been punching away the numbers at Pittsburgh-based super company Graffius Co. for twenty years; his body deteriorating until a new test program offers the chance to up his productivity. The small silver injections every week give the recipient a much-needed boost in all the wrong directions, Lawrence being one of nine dummy employees receiving their first dose.

Lost in an inevitable swirl of collected nostalgia tied to his deceased girlfriend, Bianca Deist, employee Thorne initially shows few improvements. However, the spark comes in several forms by Friday. Lawrence’s livelong friend, the recently-divorced Grace Emerson, returns to the Burg, soon seducing him into hysterics. Unsure of his feelings, he desperately considers quitting his job and selling off his hobbies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312617988

Book preview

Modern Hobbies

MODERN HOBBIES

A Novel

By

Christopher S. Bell

THIS IS MY IDEA OF FUN #284

Copyright © Christopher S. Bell, December 2009.

Written from October 1st to December 23rd of 2009.

Edited from June 5th to July 1st, 2010.

Re-Edited from February 10th to March 16th of 2012.

Final Edit August 1st to August 25th 2013.

Cover Artwork by Brandon Locher © September 2014.

Copyright © My Idea of Fun, October 2014.

WARNING: THIS IS ONLY WHAT SOME WOULD CONSIDER THE BEGINNING

FOR THIS WAS A LONG TRIP BACK TO THE CENTER

CHAPTER 1

I think of Bianca as I watch the slender and yet pleasantly thick silver liquid slowly empty from the bag and pour inside of me.  They’re called Technorganites, and I’m one of the first to jump ahead of the rest.  Everyone here at Graffius calls it evolution, or at least those above me do, specifically the twins: Glen and Gordon Carpenter.  Despite their two-year age difference, these supervising brothers mine as well have shared the same womb at the exact same time.  One strokes his brown mustache while the other talks about shaving his.  I’m unable to distinguish between them, and considering my weakened condition on this bland Monday morning in May, I don’t see myself trying.

I’m pretty sure there’s some song that uses the lyrics Monday morning in May beautifully, but for the life of me, I can’t think of it right now.  Maybe Bianca and I even listened to it together once, and I probably shrugged it off and told her to home into a better pop music atmosphere, whatever that means.  I was such a prick then.  I guess I still am which only makes me wonder if these tiny and shiny molecular helpers will be able to handle my little quarks.  I’m not ready to share even if these advancements are only here to help.

I don’t remember the last time I took anybody’s aid seriously, and then suddenly it comes down from up above the chain.  These white lights are of a higher wattage than the ones upstairs.  I’m sure of it.  They probably had to put in a special order to establish some kind of illuminant dominance over us less than satisfactory workers.  I’m one of them, although I can’t say that I’ve always felt like it.  The major thing at Graffius, at least for the past twenty years that I’ve worked here, is that we’re all sort of better at making progress by ourselves.

Even Glen and Gordon had to separate before one of them successfully came up with and tested the Technorganites.  They’re sipping through a straw in my veins, almost all down, like a flask of thick grape cough syrup.  I attempt to think of other things, but focus in on the anesthesia.  Lab rats tested strangely the first few times until they upped the drugs so their bodies could handle something else swimming around in the stream.  I wish I wasn’t so awake, and yet it’s impossible.  They want us to look into each other’s eyes, so we can connect on some rudimentary rodent level.

I look at Vicky first.  She’s about the same under the gas as any other workday.  A thick alcoholic grin lines her face as she barely glances at the bag above her head.  The tall lab assistants in white put checkmarks on their photocopied pages.  I had to make those copies for them, which I couldn’t help but read as they zipped out of the machine one right after the other.  Does the patient show signs of seizure or resistance to the Technorganites?  Are they struggling with the subtle boosts following procedure?  Is it all going to be okay?  Will this hair-brained load of insect-like bile turn the fuck-ups into full-blown, functioning members of society?  Or if nothing else, obedient units for the benefit of Graffius Co?

I severely doubt it, and yet I still showed up to work optimistic.  I wanted the room to spin in just the right fashion.  I can hardly remember the last time it’s all happened like that, even after I have enough strength to sit up and look around at my fellow employees.  Steve’s already slobbering over his energy bar and cookie, smiling like the idiot that he is.  He’s been an employee less than twenty weeks, but Gordon and Glen still snatched him right up from the file room and stuck him here with us.  Even the young and idle need some kind of boost for their basic day-to-day.  Steve needs electroshock therapy or a straight jacket, not more bugs crawling around in his system.

Nevertheless, I see him handling all of this better than the rest of us.  Maybe that’s how naïve he is.  One night of heavy drinking and he’ll forget all that’s happened until the next injection.  I wish it were that easy for me.  Their hands hold me up in place, and ask me all sorts of questions.  Marie is a beached whale on the gurney next to me, moaning in odd waves of despair.  She’s in her fifties with hardly any motivation to walk to the supplement machine in the lunchroom, let alone Set the human body in progress almost ten thousand years!  That’s one of the many slogans thrown around my mustached supervisors’ desks.  One thing’s for certain: they always enjoy each other’s catchphrases.

I can’t see Marie or any of the others progressing much, either physically or mentally.  It’s strange that so many of those surrounding me are fuck-ups, and yet unlike me, their number one problem is that each believes their life is working out perfectly.  We’re all evolving, right?  It’s such bullshit.  Clyde’s not going to be considered for any awards other than potential cousin-fucker of the year.  Donald will be dead before they can even chart his progress.  A year from retirement and he’s still trying new things.  I want to throw up more than just the silver.  I want all of my fellow patients to see themselves in the reflective puddle of vomit on the floor of a room we didn’t even know existed in the building until today.

God only knows what other kind of shit has gone down in here.  I can see the ghosts of interns fucking for clarity as they blandly test another bothersome chemical reaction, hoping it will cure cancer.  What nobody ever tells anybody else is that there are so many different kinds of cancers.  I never thought the workers were placed on the same level as a disease, but I was wrong again.

Marcella claims to be too sick to work just as I’ve finished the energy bar.  Its pieces seem thicker than before as my jaw reclaims feeling from the glass.  Marcella always bitches about how she can’t work.  She’s skinny, black, and sounds like the grim reaper on a good day.  I can’t see why The Carpenter brothers thought it would be a good idea for her to harness the true blue power of microbe enhancements.  Maybe they’re just curious as to the major side-effects.  Their newly farmed children are anxious and fluttery.

I clear my throat and look over at Jack, who’s watching Tammy fix her bra.  He’s the only person I really bullshit with in the office, and yet we’re still on completely different levels.  He was a jock in high school or maybe I’m thinking he was just a jackass.  In any case, both of us share an affinity for slacking, drinking, smoking and impure thoughts.  I’ve never thought about Tammy, though, despite the large, tragically-lit fun bags she shows off more in the springtime.  They probably still feed one of her six kids, or possibly her schmuck of a husband I’ve re-introduced myself to every year at the company Christmas party.

Last year was when I finally broke down and fucked Justine.  She’s checking me out from across the white room, sighing oddly as she readjusts to the chirping enhancements.  It wasn’t good sex by any means, but rather another soaked low I’ve hit since Bianca died from the JN 12 Epidemic.  We loved not being married, but acted so much like husband and wife once she started coughing.  I can still feel her cold hands in mine these eight years later.  Maybe it’s just the Technorganites.   I foresee everyone in this room saying this same phrase for however long it takes.  Justine claims we’ll gain something much larger from this experience.  I didn’t gain much from penetration other than the distaste of coming into another employee, less than satisfyingly mind you.

I can almost taste the change as Gordon and Glen talk off of each other, rapping in a way that has proved popular for them in conference rooms and other defunct environments.  They tell us the same things that our parents and teachers told us before.  Thirty some odd years of the norm.  It almost makes me sicker than the truth; that the only reason I’m where I am is because general laziness turned me into a test subject.  I lost my motivation to do anything but the minimum, working for the next out-of-print record, fat joint, thick bottle of sauce or in-between.  I’m an indulgent survivor of nothing too special or significant.

Yet, they keep talking.  They shake hands with us as we grab our briefcases or backpacks, lunch pails and purses before heading up away from this subbasement of Graffius and back to our designated locations.  The injection of Technorganites will improve progress in our tight-nicked central battery of struggling working class bastards.  Oh, it sounds so beautiful, ringing around in my head, back and forth, as Jack steps over behind me, with the shittiest grin on his faces.

I think I feel the change already, he says, shaking his flabby shoulders in front of Tammy and Justine.

They don’t say anything, and I barely reply with a cough before looking at my watch and feeling the same lack of motivation strike my bloodstream.  It’s only one o’clock, and I have a whopping four more hours of running around with files.  There’s no purpose to this madness other than for them to see if I’m up to the challenge of surviving the rest of my day.  They click the viewfinder and see us dropping like flies; ones right after the other.  The motivational speeches are for the whores who only like to hear the sound of other people’s voices, that way they can drown out the idiotic ones in their own heads.  Justine’s thinking about my ass or maybe Jack’s as we climb the stairs; loyal workers in our forties with pasts that don’t necessarily fit in with the general array of common nine-to-five bullshit.

I never told Justine anything about Bianca or anybody at work really. When the JN-12 hit, we all assumed that when somebody wasn’t around, it usually meant they were at a funeral for the gracefully departed.  I missed two weeks in a row when my parents, Oscar and Beverly, bit it with few regrets other than those regarding my life.  They looked at my girlfriend and how she hadn’t given them any grandchildren or cliché reassurances.  We tried to be open about all that had happened before, but it made no difference.  My folks never listened to the reasons, and in that same respect, I wasn’t exactly in the mood to dish.

It took Bianca and I a long time to get where we got to, and even after her death, I can’t help but feel that our upward motion is still going to do more for me than being one of the original ten.  There are probably dozens of smirking shitbags like us across the country, getting told the same shallow and phony lines, except we wouldn’t know about them, because life is a trapped secret waiting to ruin everybody’s birthday.  I could be in better spirits, and I’m pretty sure every one of us is trying to think the same way.  We want these little swimming deviants to make us all better.  We want to be seen on magazine covers, or at the very least, recognized by some drunk at the bar before our deaths.

I sink lower at my desk as the disappointment strikes me like a fever.  My delusions of grandeur used to be somewhat better assessed.  I’ve always wanted to be rich, but more so than that, capable of sitting on my ass and soaking in the real joys.  I want to wake up, fuck somebody I love, get stoned and let soulful jams slowly but surely creep over me.  It’s a simple life, and not in the same way that Lynerd Skynerd shit all over it.  Bianca and I had some choice days where said movements occurred in a logical order, while other times we simply decided against pure bliss.  This city would either get too loud or cold to freely roam around in.

I’ve lost my ability to mentally expand in Pittsburgh, and I’m not sure if it’s all the water that surrounds us, this meticulously cluttered desk or merely my lack of will to adapt in the past twenty years or so.  I think the mold and decay have adjusted better than I have.  They’re caked all over the buildings, whispering sweet nothings to the endangered and semi-tragic hobbyists like myself.  They want us to buy right on the curve, not below it.  Our underground isn’t what it used to be.  Punk feels like disco, while their bastard children swim around on everybody’s dashboards including those of Gordon and Glen, my brand new caretakers.

There’s nothing I hate more than the average radio listener, even though radio has turned into something plugged in through attachments or evaporated on thin computer screens.  My vision flashes in such a way that even with this new assistance, I can’t seem to focus on any of the numbers or expected tasks.  Regardless of what’s meant to make me a better worker, the subsequent effects of a Monday morning are crippling to pretty much everybody on the corporate food chain.  I can see the supervisors jotting down my subtle failures in speedy work ethic over the cubicle walls.  It’s almost comforting to see such concern in Glen and Gordon’s matching faces.  They’ve willed my skin to crawl since arriving ten years ago following the late, great lottery debacle.

I see all the hysteria again as my hands begin to routinely pound away on the keyboard.  I skipped one day of work to drive to Ohio and pick up my lot of scratchy albeit listenable Motown 45’s when the office Powerball pot happened to strike the big one.  I would usually throw in my two dollars every week before that, casually optimistic over possibilities, specifically how much happier Bianca and I would be if somehow I managed to win.  Then we could get away to somewhere with much cleaner air.

I never heard the end of it.  I was a failure in over a dozen different ways, but specifically my shear inability to be lucky.  I tried to casually reassure her that she should’ve known all of these things even before the two of us started pretending that we were never happier, but it was no use.

Even before I met Bianca Deist, I became abundantly aware that a sense of humor was never one of my strong suits.  She would constantly tell me that I wasn’t funny, and I would agree with her, offering up a soft smile before we ended up back under the covers.  I realize quickly that despite my best efforts to ignore the lingering ghost of my dead girlfriend, she appears over and over again.  It makes me wonder why Graffius hasn’t offered to pay for grief therapy yet.  I suppose my sound mind isn’t necessarily as important as my typing skills, which despite recent operations, haven’t exactly improved.  I’m dexterous with two fingers, having memorized the bits of Braille and grease stains from twenty years of diligent work.

Of course, even I know that this figure isn’t completely accurate considering how often our hard drives and mouse balls are switched out for new improvements.  Part of me is surprised that they didn’t simply install said scrolling devices into my palms, that way my hands wouldn’t have to do all this work.  My nail-bitten fingers still ache a bit, and the shaky remains of carpal tunnel and continual video game playing have taken root to the point where I’m not sure anything can save these pains.  My veins are blue-green and swish around, one right after the other.  I second-guess how fast the blood and now Technorganites are flowing from knuckle to fingertip, doing their job the best that they can.

The day flows slower than I expect; each passing thought and slightly distorted image offering me few comforts.  I pop some aspirin and Adderall from the vending machine, trying to perk up as best I can before returning to the empty void of my life in this scratchy city of coughing spirits.  Part of me wished I had just bitten the bad end of the JN 12, rather than sustained immunity.  I reluctantly watched the television set as this very company found the appropriate antibodies to spit out a vaccine a little too late.  These same men eventually left like the lottery winners, and we all ate cake, and watched them slowly glide up towards higher elevations.

It’s three and I glimpse Justine bending over a few yards from my desk.  She’s wearing dark pink panties that seem almost too tight for her fat ass.  I wonder if these monthly injections will help shape us into better beings, that way when the spaceships finally do beam us up, looking for perfect test subjects, even we old farts will get a chance at the probes.  I feel the slightest glimmer of an erection from the sight, before looking away and staring blankly at my screen, hoping that she doesn’t notice me, noticing her.  Jack saves me as he often does while making his laps around the second floor, with absolutely no purpose other than glancing directly down shirts.

He occasionally stops to bug the piss out of me, and yet today my work friend doesn’t bother at all.  I wonder if it’s the mechanical deviants running around in his system or a shear lack of will power to continually disappoint me.  All my fellow guinea pigs do in one way or another, and I can almost guarantee that that’s not going to change.  I’ll be the same asshole tomorrow despite the constant effort of this company to change that.  I try to admire their common procedures, but was raised well enough to notice and call to light the defects in the system almost as much as the breakthroughs.  Some people are saved and others merely passed over, just like God, Moses and most bearded proprietors of faith.

I hear Vicky and Marie arguing over reservations for next year’s office Christmas party not nearly far enough away.  They usually have idiotic conversations over events that aren’t for six months, which only makes me wonder if any of us are going to change at all.  Marcella is coughing on her early way out, as I walk down into the auxiliary hallway between the first and second floor to take a more comfortable shit.  I know to use this toilet because both Jack and Clyde have told me on specific days that they’ve jerked-off in both the first and second floor bathrooms.  I can’t help but enjoy the in-between as my aspirations and weighty fears slowly drift on the white porcelain seat.  I’m at peace, and close to escaping these trampled faces for sixteen hours of paranoid transcendent bliss.

We all give each other strange and fearful looks as time finally smiles down upon us.  Glen and Gordon line themselves under the threshold of the door; the large white banners with red text ironically above them.  Strive for Honesty!  They reassure us failed participants before a softer handshake and the appropriate exit towards the rest of our nights.  I almost wish I had actual plans rather than another evening in my dumbfounded duplex on Meyran Avenue.  My neighbors will be in a traditionally degenerative form tonight, and although I feel almost obligated to tell them specifically what happened to me at work today, I know that I most likely won’t get the chance.

My inability to confide in those who surround me doesn’t necessarily bug me out as much as I know it should.  I walk with my ears plugged into an illegally downloaded Lou Reed, carrying my brown suede briefcase, taking work home with me if only to feel slightly important gracing these streets.  Forbes is a playground of soon-to-be failures, letting their checking accounts get royally fucked by a heightened higher educational cock.  They all stare me down with angst and fury.  An old man listening to a dead man’s looming voice. I travel from point A. to B. and nowhere in-between.  The weather’s too warm at five today.

I pass pierced deviants with electronically vapid attire, reflecting UV rays and an insurgence to follow their parents’ failed dreams till the very end.  The girls are plentiful; some letting their silicone bounce in the wind.  I see Bianca in some, before either the way they walk or gab on their cellular headsets turns me off to the idea that anybody could ever be the same.  She was a college dropout with enough lowered self-esteem to screw me blindly for roughly six years of indecent ecstasy.  I hate myself for even making the comparison, and wonder if I should either set up an appointment with a therapist or finally kill myself tonight.

An unshaved punk with dreadlocks argues with a shit-stained homeless man over the government.  I pleasantly walk around them, taking the longer way to my solemn house.  I get the general sense that I’ve made circular migrations around minor disputes and pulsing decisions my entire life.  I never bought into the hype that I could make a difference, but nevertheless listened to it on a rare occasion when it happened to fit well enough into the pop music fold.

What’s Going On in the winter, in my green rust wagon.  I’m twenty-three and she’s twenty-one, and we’re high as John Lennon.  All three of us.  Me, Bianca and the five-month old fetus in her stomach that is most certainly not mine.

I didn’t take you for a Marvin Gaye type of guy, Lawrence, she giggles, the joint bobbing up and down in her soft pink lips.

You’d be surprised at how much he does it for me, my dear, I joke, making the turn towards the venue.

As I finally cut through to the garbage-soaked sidewalks, it becomes clear to me that these momentary flashes aren’t going to stop, nor will the pain in my hands, or any of the circling faults in my life since she just happened to float away, up into the clouds.  And yet I continue to walk, towards the creaky wooden steps, fumbling with my keys and soundless music device.  I open the door to a house that still carries with it Bianca’s dried charm.  I do all of these habitual and monotonous tasks, specifically for reasons that I can’t exactly comprehend anymore.  It’s almost as if what’s living inside me suddenly doesn’t fear a turn off the beaten path, but instead is simply too lazy to stray, especially considering how all things eventually sink below sea level.

CHAPTER 2

I take the white headphones out of my ears and tuck them into my briefcase pocket.  The first thing I hear is D.L., one of my neighbor’s.  Actually, it’s not so much him, as it’s the new porno quest he’s likely pleasuring himself to.  They’ve hit the one-hundred level mark in a lot of the new ones.  Attachments usually come complimentary in most software packages.  This particular digital slut’s screams are a bit disconcerting as I head up the creaking stairs towards my quaint section of the house.  D.L. (which is short for David Lee, just like that fucker in Van Halen) usually falls back on something a little softer in nature.

I once let him borrow some of my old Cinemax tapes along with a scratchy VCR.  He said they only did it for him for about a week.  When he got his paycheck, he bought the convenience of a better experience coming minus a mate.  Despite D.L.’s best efforts to detach himself from the world (at least as far as sex is concerned) the guy gets laid more than me and his fellow shut-ins, Sasha and Ricky.  Sasha is D.L.’s older sister, currently working the rat races, while I’m sure Ricky is gallivanting around the streets, stealing from the lesser-known convenient stores and living on a minimal amount of actual effort.

I’m somewhat pleased that it’s only D.L. downstairs, because it lets me slip by rather than getting pulled into an endless slew of chalky gab about today’s fickle society.  Sasha will come up and knock on my door an hour or so after she returns home and showers off the thick stink of pizza sauce.  Sometimes I don’t answer.  I often don’t get much out of shooting the shit with those that are roughly twenty years younger than me.  There are no occasional spurts of vitality, but rather sentiments that only make me reflect back on the young and disillusioned person I once was.

I’m relieved unlocking the sticky door to my apartment and quickly falling back in my aged blue recliner; shoes quaintly kicked into a mud-stained corner in-between two crates of vinyl dust sleeves.  The multicolored sentiments of the musically dead are more or less all I have to depend on, and yet I’m almost afraid to click on my stereo system and settle into some Greetings from Asbury Park.  Something tells me D.L. won’t last much longer.  I loathe the predictability of my surroundings; specifically how little these walls have changed since Bianca stopped surprising me.

She would return home with black and white posters or insignificant knick-knacks, all of which have either been buried under a wagon train of ash or still stare pleasantly back at me.  I mark my own breaths in time and try to calm my nerves at the sight.  They seem more erratic than usual, almost as if the Technorganites are heightening every molecule of oxygen around me, turning the air into something less than pleasant.  It may just be the lowered frequency of the day, and more specifically the fact that I’m carrying more on my back than I had initially expected to bring home.

It’s usually just a depressed and yet fundamentally structured body that has continued to keep on keeping on, despite the commonly expressed complaints of not only me, myself and I, but every other ritualistic bastard or dense debutante walking these Pittsburgh streets.  It’s like they’re talking to me without saying anything, letting their looks seep into my skin but not leaving any kind of red marks behind.  I reflect on the strangers that pass me by more than anybody else, which isn’t necessarily healthy.  The walls of my fruitless apartment sensibly trap zero mementos of my dead friends and previously admired escapists.  I never took photographs, and all of the ones that Bianca insisted I smiled for, are on her side of the closet, patiently buried below moth-eaten sweaters and gowns that I would always struggle with after a long and sensationalized night of city boozing.

I consider fixing a drink as I finally stand and flip through my scratchy collection.  Some days I browse through the same stacks of albums over and over again, still unable to find something satisfying.  Other times it’s like lightening.  I know what I need after an eight-hour period of deep thought, and therefore the act of settling in on a record doesn’t exactly carry with it all of the same connotations as other compromises made throughout the day.  I stopped looking for new compliments to my ears a long time ago, and now am content to be that guy who transcendentally dangles in the past amongst bad acid trips and long hikes to the tops of standard-issued mountains, despite how inadequate my work shoes seem for said elevations.

It’s a You Are Free sort of day as I examine the sleeve for a second before letting the needle lower on grungy sludge.  I find myself enjoying the subsequent melancholy of Cat Power more and more each day as my hands soon settle into the drawer beneath our coffee table.  The Green Goblin (a nerdy name for my still intact bong from a rough set down following college graduation) reeks of bad water.  I soon change it, looking down at the polished stacks of dishes in my sink.  They don’t accumulate like they used to.  I can hardly remember the last time I ate dinner with anybody.  Not to say that Bianca was the last, but all meals after the ones we shared together simply didn’t offer the same kinds of sparks.

Maybe I’m just reflectively trapped in this spin, but it’s hard to fall back into place all by my lonesome.  I pack a light circular pattern of Rudd’s newest contribution to my