Hating George Clooney, a novella

By Owen Thomas

A little envy, a little hopelessness, and all manner of things become possible. Things that should have stayed unthinkable. Robbery is the least of them.

Times are as tough as they have ever been for Danny. The Baby Cloud crib factory in Tionesta Pennsylvania has closed, leaving him with a pink slip and no way to pay the mortgage. Worse, after eighteen months of trying to hold the marriage together, Danny’s wife, Janice, has finally left him to live with her sister. She’s taken their dog, Juni, and there is no sign of them ever coming back.

The trouble started long before Danny lost his job. The trouble started with the neighbors, Matt and Amanda, comfortably ensconced in the large, expensive home tucked back into the trees at the top of the long driveway at the end of the cul-de-sac. Gorgeous, the pair of them – she, an artist and he, the owner of a furniture factory – a study in vital, unassuming sensuality wrapped in, for all appearances, a perfect relationship. The chemistry within the foursome had been satisfyingly close; supportive and intimate, fueled by innumerable dinner gatherings that Danny and Janis had taken to calling the Matt-and-Mandy Happy Hour. And then one evening, having decamped from dinner into the sueded, overstuffed cushions of Matt’s den, Danny had observed Matt lay his hand on Amanda’s naked ankle. Such a casual gesture. It should have meant nothing. But that’s when Danny had felt everything inside his chest slip a little. That’s when it all started to change.

Now Danny sits at a bar eating a burger on the brink of ruin, his life in shambles. Up on the corner television, George Clooney is sipping an espresso. Janice loved George Clooney. She loved George Clooney, apparently, more than she loved Danny. The comparison between the two men in that moment could not have been harsher, leaving Danny angry and amenable to especially bad ideas about the next few steps to take in his miserable life.
Cue Ross, an old acquaintance of Danny’s who works as the manager of the Foley’s Got-It-All General Store up in Franklin, right near the US-62 almost to Oil City. Ross still has a job. He also has a made-to-order bad idea and impeccable timing.

"Hating George Clooney" is a novella. While it is available for purchase separately, "Hating George Clooney" is also included in a larger work of short fiction by Owen Thomas entitled "This is the Dream."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Owen Thomas
• Release date: Oct 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737737667

Book preview

Hating George Clooney

A novella

Owen Thomas

The characters and events portrayed in this novella are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Text copyright © 2021, 2022 OTF Literary, Anchorage, Alaska

Author Website: http://OwenThomasLiterary.com

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

This novella Hating George Clooney is included in the larger work of short fiction, This is the Dream, by Owen Thomas, Copyright 2021, OTF Literary.

ISBN:  978-1-7377376-6-7

OTF Literary, Anchorage, Alaska.

HATING GEORGE CLOONEY

Noon came and went, a vagabond hour drifting through the day, stale and unshaven, looking for something to pass the time.

Danny paid it no mind. He emptied the last of the cereal into the puddle of sugary pink milk and changed the channel.

It might have been a new experience, weekday-morning television. It might have presented a whole new landscape of entertainment for him while the rest of the world was punching a clock.

It should have been different, at least. Different than what he normally watched after work in the evenings, catching up on the news and then fully reclining for that familiar parade of characters and improbable conundrums, his body letting go, releasing the hard rhythms of the factory floor as the darkness outside thickened and the smell of Janice’s pot roast settled like an aromatic dew over the furniture. Monday-morning television might have offered something new – exotic even – as sunlight splashed the Pennsylvanian autumn through the back windows, painting the floor and the walls of the living room with maple and black cherry.

It might have.

But cable television had destroyed the night and the day. There were no morning shows and afternoon shows and evening shows. It was all one thing now. One endless show. One unbroken river of pixilated light gushing from a black plastic rectangle mounted on the wall.

Danny’s thumb spasmed through another cycle. He would be canceling his cable subscription now anyway. Maybe for the best.

George Clooney was stepping out of a jetway. Walking through an airport pulling a rolling black carryon. Black suit. Black tie. Smooth as can be. Like he owned the future in the same way that death owned the future. Like he walked on time itself, squishing each second beneath his polished black shoes.

George had a job. He fired people for a living. Not George, George’s character. George himself had nothing that even remotely resembled a job. George’s character fired people from a list. One city, then on to another, and another. Danny had seen part of the movie before. He didn’t care to see any more of it.

Janice loved George. She loved George more than she loved Danny, apparently. Probably for a long time now.

Around him the whole house ached and convulsed like an empty stomach.

At one o’clock Danny turned off the television and went upstairs to the bedroom. He changed out of the flannel robe Janice had given him the Christmas after his father passed and put on the same clothes he’d worn the day before. Not because he didn’t have anything else to wear, but simply because yesterday’s clothes were closer to where he stood than the clothes on hangers behind the closet doors. Naked, he bent to retrieve them from their elongated pile – socks, pants with the belt still in the loops, underwear, shirt, undershirt – on the floor by the unmade bed, where he’d left them like a sloughed skin.

He brushed his teeth and thought about shaving. He ran a comb through his hair and then left the house, stepping outside into a deceptively sunny breeze. The air had more of an edge to it than yesterday. A little colder. A little meaner. It rattled the papery red and gold leaves with just a little more menace. Danny locked the front door and climbed up into the truck.

Janice’s blue scrunchy hair do-dad was still around the gear shift where she liked to keep it just in case she needed one when they were out. He kept meaning to bring it inside for the box he said he’d mail to her. She’d have a new one by now.

He started the truck to make the drive into town, as much for something to do with himself as for something real to eat. He backed out of the driveway, cranked the wheel, and then kept slowly inching backward until he could see in the rearview mirror the long driveway up to the large house on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. There was no point to this exercise anymore. Like so much of his life, this too had become an empty habit.

He idled for a few seconds at the row of white mailboxes, looking backward, knowing it would look like he was checking his mail. He even opened his window and thrust his hand out to the box that still included Janice’s name on the front. He didn’t actually open the mailbox. Nothing good would come of that. Not now. Maybe not ever again.

The long driveway behind him lay still beneath a skittering of leaves. Danny rolled up the window, put the truck in gear and drove.

He had never been in McGuinley’s at one-thirty in the afternoon. The lunch crowd had come and gone and the smell of solvent was like a sickly sweet film that found the back of his throat. It was too bright. Too quiet. The tables, which in his experience usually disappeared inside overgrown clumps of hunchbacked, happy-hour regulars, now looked bare and forsaken, like defoliated tree stumps.

Danny took a seat at the bar and ordered a cheeseburger. The bartender gave him a beer and then disappeared into the back.

What the hell’s the opposite of happy hour? Ross clapped Danny on the shoulder and sat down next to him.

Danny had seen Ross coming in the mirror against the back wall of the bar, his hard, thin, black-eyed face seeming to grow out of the neck of a liquor bottle. Before Ross reached the bar, the disembodied idea of Ross had slapped Danny on the back and taken a seat, giving him a second or two to prepare for the company he did not particularly want.

He hadn’t seen Ross since the New Year’s party. He was wearing the same black coat he always seemed to wear, with its carabiner zipper-pull connected to a miniature bottle opener. Danny took a drink before he answered.

Place needs a pink-slip discount, Danny said.

Got that right.

The bartender showed up, putting new batteries in a remote control. He turned on the game but kept the sound off. Ross ordered a shot and a beer. Danny gave him a look.

Seems between the two of us, Ross, you’re the one with a job. What are you doing drinking boilermakers all the way up here in Tionesta?

Slumming, said Ross with a smirk as the bartender delivered the order.

Oh, like Sugar Creek is some kinda heaven. And here you are tying one on at one-thirty in the afternoon.

Called in sick, Ross said, throwing back the shot. I hate my job.

You’re just going to make me mad, Ross. Least you got a job.

I know, he said. I hate it anyway.

Well then give it to me.

Ross laughed and started on the beer.

I just don’t see you selling corn chips and batteries and pork and beans and… goddamned… disposable razors, Danny. Although it looks like maybe you could use a razor.

Danny half-turned to look at Ross and ignored the part about the razor.

"Oh? That mean you see me assembling strollers and car seats and cribs and baby gates even though I don’t have