The Escape Key

By Richard Segal

Three acquaintances gather at a former classmate’s apartment to fulfil a long-determined promise to create and produce the Great American Dark Comedy, with a mix of reverence for the system which nurtured them, but irreverence for those who game it without shame, leaving as prerequisites naming and taming. However, life becomes unsettled upon the discovery of a grey conspiracy theory promoted by an unrepentant website editor, and the rediscovery of a set of blue folders which beholds the source of underwriting for this shady and underhanded campaign. In addition, worlds are rocked when another friend experiences three life events in short succession, including the death of a girlfriend and loss of a job, not long after he’s weaned himself off anti-depressants and concomitant addiction to sugar highs. If truth is stranger than fiction, then what is stranger than truth? The Escape Key is a book that could only have been written during 2020.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665584142

Richard Segal

Richard Segal, an American citizen, resides in London, England, and works as an economic and financial consultant. He has written widely about matters relating to global public policy over the years. His most recent novel was The Man Who Knew the Answer.

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© 2021 Richard Segal. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/12/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8415-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-8414-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

The Escape Key

The Composite Canadian

The Lemon Tree, Very Pretty

In My Study

Runner’s Knee, Tennis Elbow, Skip Ad …

The Mystery Ride

The Waiting Room

What of Next?

A Philosopher Calls, Early the Next Evening

Spiral Galaxy

Tuesday after Work

Melanie’s Funeral

Bringing the Future Forward

Outtakes

Deleted Scenes

No Tools Left in Van Overnight

The Metro Expressed

Choot or Garut?

The Northeast Express

The New Political Correctness

Coastal AM, FM and PM

THE ESCAPE KEY

The Escape Key, by Richard Segal, is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, and actual events, organizations or locations, are intended purely to provide context or reference points. All remaining characters, places, names, incidents, dialogue and opinions are wholly fictional and their resemblance, if any, to real life counterparts is entirely coincidental. No inferences or assumptions about any personal opinions should be drawn from the material enclosed herein, and no such representations should be made.

To Carolyn Lila

and Kerri-Jae, rest in peace

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THE COMPOSITE CANADIAN

Put all those rumors to bed

I had a long dream about a seminar in which I planned to participate actively, but I segued into a daydream when it was my turn to speak. Do statisticians or retired professional athletes make better sports executives? There is no such thing as a natural who letters in only one sport - unless he is on the golf team. In reality, I was on my way to meet David and Russ. We were at long last fulfilling a post-college promise to produce a laugher called Hot Resort, or rewrite a sitcom to view an entire 23 minute episode without shaking our heads in distress at every punchline. And not the one where the high school juniors submit a manuscript to the network, only to be informed their plot line has already been used twice that season. We’d have to transform the narrative sufficiently so that it would be deemed novel of an intellectual property sense and thus eligible for our copyright, and change names to protect the innocent, all subject to the fair use doctrine.

Rather than the reinterpretation of a jazz standard, this would be alchemy, a gem quality diamond from an industrial diamond without sleight of hand, and as for Hot Resort, no bets were out the window after Weekend at Bernie’s. The precept, or reverse engineering, of Hot Resort, was a fusion of Spring Break docudramas, told from the standpoint of guys who just can’t get enough, Windmills that is, the girl who is torn between two lovers, and the lifeguards who are slightly too old for this semi-precious mineral shop show. Still, the scriptwriters and producers are entitled to front row seats to the filming, as long as they promise to keep their voices down and wear sunglasses and baseball caps, to remain discreet.

As time would tell, we would to our low-bar-surpassed credit conclude that Hot Resort was not viable in the new and we’d have to generate ideas worthy of more thoughtful plotlines. Russ, being Irish Catholic, would propose a parody spoof called The Immoral Minority, whereas David would rehash his hobbyhorse of rewriting a sitcom except with Comedy Channel retreads in the starring roles. I battered my brains in search of inspiration until the last instant when I passed a row of billboards and realised cable TV channel huckster Michelle was right and exacting all along with her motto that local knowledge sells houses. Not real estate as such, but my first muse would be based on a clash between small town and small city business morals and mortals, but ramped up into my own lampoon. Nevertheless, my stimuli were prone to shifts in sands and winds, toward, for example, Robbo Cop.

Also in the crew with Russ, David and me was Charlie, although he was too unpredictable to be invited to join the Hot Resort clique, and he wasn’t a man of innovative designs, despite being a learned professor fond of folksy working paper titles, such as the The ‘You’re the one who’s wrong, not me’ Tactic. That is, a guilty party will often twist the tables on his confronter by going on the offensive, and deflect a charge sheet against him by loudly trumpeting questionable accusations against the innocent person. A sure fire sign he knows he’s in the wrong. To Charlie, the paper is more likely to be peer reviewed positively if the language is colloquial.

The four of us met at college, though Charlie grew up in East Africa and therefore spoke with an unusual accent when he arrived in the Northeast. It ‘wasn’t me,’ though for this reason another classmate began to label him Charlie from Malawi, which wasn’t true but it was amusing, once you got to know him. In addition, Charlie was on the outside looking in for a while due to the competition between David and him for the attentions of Rachael King, and in this matter he went too thirsty to the water. This led her to a compromise candidate in the form of the pre-med student Franklin, who became known as the Franklin Original. David was angry because he believed Charlie’s impulsiveness encouraged her to seek another circle, regardless of where her romantic inclinations would mosey.

Despite being unpredictable, he was too intense to be thin skinned and would often regale us with gusto about his faux pas tendencies, for example the following conference call with academic partners:

‘Charlie you’re on mute,’ they said. ‘Charlie you’re on mute,’ they said again half a minute later because he was talking without taking notice, until belatedly he did, turned crimson, and unmuted. Several minutes later he finished his short speech with a conclusion that ‘The jury is still out.’ ‘Yeah, that’s cuz school is still out too,’ a sarcastic colleague rationalized. ‘Perhaps,’ Charlie retorted, ‘but do you really label your podcast the G Zero Network?’ It’s good to have retorts in reserve, I gather. He also had a ‘phrase of the day’ which he either coined or rented from others. My favorite of his was ‘Jesus is love,’ which is a considerate thing to say about Jesus, but it could be construed as too scientific for religion. That is, if Jesus is the definition of love and vice versa, does that make him the mother of all nouns, rather than a person from the history books or the son of a holy spirit? This deliberation is between misguided souls, I fear, because Jesus almost singlehandedly proved the theory of virtue signalling, and only a mortal with access to a fully stocked research library would be able to settle this argument for a modern audience.

It was Charlie at whom I let loose about those who get unnecessarily hyped up about minute matters, aka blow a gasket for no apparent reason. ‘Oh, you’re like that …’ I said, wishing I had the power to extract words as soon as they had left my mouth, but faster than the speed of sound, and place them in my pocket where the meaning would be muffled. In the event, though, his response was ‘I resemble that remark,’ leaving me sorrowful and mortified, but his feelings about the affront uncertain. He is like that, but I could have kept this insight to myself. To wit: if three ‘fuck me, I’m sorry’s’ didn’t do the trick …

The Backed Up Canadian. The social theorist Will Rodder once said that he never met a Canadian he didn’t mind, and I’m about to lease that line. Which reminds me that I’d readily borrow a stanza but not a full joke and when Robbo asked at the start of this literary adventure whether I was going to reference the crazy weekend at Septemberfest or his ‘l’awful punchline,’ I could only respond with ‘but I wasn’t there,’ or ‘that’s your sour partisan joke, Leigh King.’ I cited Rodder, who is famous and only famous for never say never optimism, given fickle contemporary standards, and is akin to JL Horwitz and his tag lines of ‘Hey Moe’ and ‘Hey Larry.’ However, that is sufficient to ensure his fame is admissible and defensible.

Canada is the world’s colossal democracy as measured by geographical reach, but regardless of where he hangs his lasso, a Canadian will be defined by one of several attributes. Whether he’s an anglophone from Montreal, a backwoodsman from Newfie, a smoothie from Ottawa or a decaficionado from Vancouver - or a haddock fisherman from Halifax - he will bear identifying features. The Composite Canadian recognisably plays ice hockey, debates the federalist system, drinks Dry beer, stays up late and has a knee operation at an inopportune time.

In many societies, Canadians are goofed on the same as Kiwis are misunderstood as derivatives from the sub-continent to the north, but grant me leave to say this. If liberal quantities of young adults from the land of curling, three down football, the world’s first zero inflation and Notwithstanding clauses in a Constitution not signed by all its constituents did not migrate to other majority Anglo-Saxon countries, the Commonwealth cultural mosaic would be considerably the poorer.

Well there you go, Robbo, you low octane lager swilling connoisseur of cheap white wine in plastic cups, Cheez Wizz and Silly String, I’ve done it. You told me that if I finished this story it had to include a Canadian because it’s very important they be represented and I have. You said it would help me sell this literary gambit to the world and I doubt it, but if you’ve been friendly with Ebden for decades then you’ve suffered enough and I am pleased to perform for you a favor in this otherwise gratuitous chapter of youthful self indulgence. I cut corners in a manner, incorporating the features of a composite Canadian rather than a single person, but you didn’t set any ground rules and thus I make it up as I go along. Furthermore, I didn’t execute any character assassinations. For example, don’t get carried away by the popular press or the conventional wisdom, and while the Wendy Affair and RJR Jr scandals you adored speechifying were disastrous from a public relations perspective, I can’t believe these two were saints of the business world for thirty years and only carried themselves away with the tide when the stakes got really high.

Rather, they demonstrated a lifetime of pursuing greed for its own merit that follows their aura like a trail of moist sawdust. They longed to be newsworthy enough to be sketched by the august commerce journal of the day on the front page of Section 2 in its trademark tricolore: black, white and charcoal grey. Windswept hair, open necked collar, mouth open with teeth glistening but no smile apparent and finally, a prophetic glint which tells more than can be beheld by a single Bay Street tarot card reader. However, they were caught and hung out to dry by those same newspapers they hoped to hoodwink into proselytising and learned the hard way that idleness is the great equaliser. Hi ho, ho hum, and I hope your knee is better.

These were the words I repeated and recited on the drive over to David’s apartment. When speaking out loud to another I was cohesive with the exception of certain five syllable words such as considerable, but when practicing silently in my head or aloud to myself I stumbled frequently. Nonetheless, I rehearsed in the hope and belief that all would be right on the night.

David’s apartment was on the wrong side of the tracks if this is a permissible phrase. I was one of the first to highlight the dangers of political correctness and the likelihood of a backlash, as well as the inevitability that the helpless-most situation and person combination would be a broken leg on a straight white man when there aren’t any parking spaces close to the supermarket entrance, but this went overlooked. The guardians of Oxford English would be rolling in their graves at the missed opportunities, given the entire lexicon of what twenty years ago would have been regarded as manufactured words and phrases to label the fixated with each other nit-picking of the left and run-away false bravado of the right. To give credit where it is due, only the founders of this language style would be capable of judging whether it is cultural arrogation to visit a university town souvenir shop and buy a sweatshirt with Oxbridge emblazoned across the front, even if the letters are in the unique medieval font and a difficult to counterfeit authenticity tag is stapled to the inside collar.

Quiz at 11. The phrases of the culture wars are being conserved and collated by an independent think tank and will be donated to producers of the 2030s game show Neological, in which our by then obsolete sayings will be fodder for a speed demon trivia round. To add poignancy, the hosts will be dressed head to toe in scapular, but the rolling headline bar on the bottom of the screen will carry a caution that they are not posing as actual prelates whose 14th Century nickname was Oxers. The backlash was inevitable and we should have seen it coming.

However, the founders of the politically incorrect movement have become themselves PC and I did see that coming. This was merely an excuse for them to be ill-mannered and irreverent in public; their agenda was translucent and they didn’t pretend to be on the side of the silent majority, the true normal. With the benefit of hindsight, the backlash served a purpose, to flesh them out, it was a cure for overcrowding, but they have to be disposed of, and we were not forward thinking enough to acquire sufficient numbers of battery powered and therefore environmentally friendly bug zappers to a windscreen on the grey market.

I had a further brainwave beyond the précis of the Composite Canadian, which was another précis, a conceptual framework of comedians teaching joke telling, not comedians telling jokes or old Italian barbers named Giuseppe telling jokes, but comedians teaching joke telling. I was inspired by a wintertime special featuring two legends of the trade, appearing on stage just the two of them in a 20-city roadshow, the first and last taped for commercial reproduction. They would take turns going solo to give the other a break, but also for pssst moments in which one would dirty dig his career-long performance partner who would reappear on stage without realising the joke would be on him, as if they hadn’t practiced being embarrassed in public by a humorous and unusual personal habit for six months beforehand. He can’t go out of the house without spare cuff links in his pocket in case one breaks or accidentally falls out. In the dressing room, though, his buddy has removed one (just one) from his dressy pants while he was in the rehearsal boiler suit he borrowed from his granddaughter. The prankster of the pair nonchalantly says the word ‘cuff-links’ as an element of the completely different, at which point the victim of the joke by habit tucks his hands into his pockets and notices one is missing. Hilarious. What cards.

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I think one of these two invented the gait-step of walking back and forth on stage and telling yarns non-stop while seemingly breathless for effect.

If the comedian Don Rickles were alive, he’d be spoiled for choice as regards set up lines, but the magnanimous man that he was, would probably reverse the tide on convention and spend much of his time praising his antecedents, for example Jack Leonard, for blazing a trail for him and others to follow. Then he would revert to form and explain to America who are the hockey pucks and knuckle heads the country should ignore, rather than heed, like blowhards with so much vulcanised rubber for brains. The Rickles family had to emigrate from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Century, because in the hometown of his grandparents the young and gifted aspired and grew up to be composers, statesmen and scientists, whereas the painters and future comedians cut their teeth in regions at arguably not too great a distance where aphorisms were trademarked rather than sprinkled loosely.

When preparing for his Comedians Teaching Jokes gig, would Rickles - who surprisingly to some was born with a name that short - draw up a class plan, would he improvise or would he too play it by ear? ‘There are no second chances,’ he would inform the class at the start of its first session. What does this mean and what is the intention of asking this? More importantly, is this in itself a joke?

I approved of this opener from Rickles, but had to ask the question myself. As the nerdy economist Lawrence Meyer famously said and said again, ‘It depends.’ It is envisioned to gather a laugh if delivered as such, if the comic laughs after the line is spoken, or if he visibly suppresses a laugh by pantomime-horse style biting his lip. The phrase is designed to be both informative and profound, which he and she, she and he, should understand, alternating by alphabetical order, and if feminists don’t like that ‘h’ is before ‘s’ in the alphabet they will have to take that up with the Cimmerian Sibyl, or Herodotus, the father of history, and by implication, herstory.

The statement is informative because in his opinion audience approval is binary. A joke is well designed and delivered, and laughs ensue, or it falls flat. In the first instance, the comic a) can move on to the next witticism with a pat on his back or feather in his cap or b) has to shovel himself out of a hole. Nonetheless, with a subset of performers, the audience will be ‘half laughed’ in the terminology of this lecturer, and it will at a minimum applaud thankfully when the punchline has been completed. It is conceivable that a listener will hear ‘there are no second chances’ and giggle even if the goal was to be cerebral or technical, either because of the comedic presentation or the underlying assumption that the performer in this moment is self deprecating: what happened to his standing in the relationship when he tried to retract a caustic personal remark to or about a spouse, even though he had been happily married for 65 years, by the desk calendar? It is that timing is everything, but so is knowing when to hesitate and for how long, to prepare the audience for the next leg of the routine.

I pictured Vijay as one of the founding customers of this online class, and at this instant he stopped the video and wrote down a punchline he heard the Saturday before when he drove over to the Comedy Connection with his pal Harry, and tried to dissect it.

‘Plumbers are the new lawyers’

There is one personal noun on each end, side by side, they are necessary, but can either be trusted to be onboard when the shit hits the fan? They overcharge, but for what? Will you have to hire another to clean up after their mess, if their maharishi-given score is 2.9 stars out of 5, but according to the popular review sites they are 4.3, because friends and family have gamed the system in their favor? Lawyers and plumbers are everyone’s pet peeve, no, I can say the phrase pet hate, but they are necessary and even the useless ones will find plenty of work, bad reputation or not. We don’t learn about these barbells, whose hourly rates are probably similar.

However, lawyers wear three piece suits and yellow power ties, and plumbers dirty overalls. Lawyers keep hankies in their breast pocket, plumbers wipe their snot with the back of their good hand. Lawyers take every call and will phone back without delay if they miss yours because they charge by the minute, whereas a plumber will go out of his way not to phone you back. Who can find theoretical and practical similarity between these two professions? This joke is therefore comical because of the paradox of equivalence. Thanks for assisting Vijay, you can go back to your Masters of Small Business Finance studies now.

This is how the three of us, David, Russ and I, can say let’s do this:

The receptionist for the plumbers doesn’t answer the phone or reply to emails except for providing non-answers, but VIP customers are able to get through first time no problem. This leads those who can’t - most of us - to wonder.

Does the receptionist have a bat phone?

Does she give out her switchboard number and ‘info@’ and/or ‘sales@’ email address to the general public, as listed on the plumbers’ social media page, and her private number to the select few red carpet clients on the off chance they will ring with a drippy faucet and need emergency service at so-called mate’s rates? Spoiler alert, though, plumbers are the same the world over. At this hour, there’s a working mother in Ulan Bator panicking over the unwillingness of Temujin & Co to take her call as the bath tub trickles and dribbles, and that the qualified immigrant Uzbek plumbers are fully booked for the rest of the month.

Rickles will close out the introductory lesson with the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted but with a twist that if he is a fool, how did he get his money in the first place, because there’s only so many letter carriers the Post Office can employ. The answer is that the fool didn’t get any money but instead he buys on credit. Credit, but not where it is due. Subprime and sublime.

You can’t get old school beyond Rickles, because he’s the consummate professional who knows the tricks of the trade, not resting on his laurels since 1516 like Bavarian brewers, yet is assumed to have graduated from the school of life. Rather, though, after his stint in the army, he attended a performing arts school. He tried his hand at straight ahead comedy, but soon discovered that his ripostes to the hecklers got more laughs than his