I’m a Secret Shopper at the Flight Centre

   I have one of the best jobs in the world. I step into a Flight Centre, sit down across from a smiling sales representative and ask how much it is to Tokyo, Korea or Brussels, France. Sometimes they think I’m joking and they laugh but I hold onto an earnest expression until they realize that I only have a grade one knowledge of geography. I ask a hundred other ridiculous questions, to test their patience with customers, and then I sometimes go over to the big map on the wall and ask how much that would cost. I’m a pain in the ass sure but through my dedication to my profession some of the weaker employees have been culled from the Flight Centre. 

    Each story that I’ve written on this blog is something that I’ve included in one of my tours of duty in a Flight Centre. After asking how much a Eurail pass is I’ll go into a rant about my idiot neighbour. Essentially, this blog is where I practice my ridiculous stories that I use in the line of duty.

   I’ve introduced myself as somebody different everyday in order to throw anyone off my trail. I didn’t want to reveal the tricks of my trade. Starting today, however, I’m training other secret shoppers and I’m using this blog as an educational tool. 

   Enjoy today’s story…

 


 

Snakes, Flowers, Gorillas and Mariachi Bands on Planes 

 

   I’d like our flight to take off in the evening, just at the tiniest hint of twilight if possible. I want to fly up as the sun is going down so that we can see the sun go back up again. It’ll be as if the sun is doing a double take on how romantic our evening is. Yes, it’s going to be a romantic vacation for us and I’d like to start it off right, you know, flowers, a mariachi band and a gorilla with flowers. It’s all in this poem which I’ve written for the occasion. Do you know who I’d call to get the green light for all that? I realize there’s not a lot of space on a plane but do you realize that Janice and I are both cancer survivors? Do you realize how important a ten-year anniversary is to one cancer survivor? Can you imagine two? Yes, it’s precious and there’s always room for compromise. Will it upset the other passengers? Well then I have a suggestion for the airline. No Snakes on Planes. I can’t believe they played that movie on the last flight I took to Europe. If the airlines want to reduce air-rage well why not show something a little more relaxing. They can stop their persecution of mariachi bands who want to make an honest living by playing for a cancer couple’s ten-year anniversary. What’s wrong with this country? Won’t all this simply add to everyone’s experience. The sun going down and up and music playing ay-ya-yayayyay. I’ll be getting into my gorilla costume – that’s how Janice and I met – and when I come out with the balloons the pilot will read out my poem. Do you know who our pilot will be? I’d like to ask him about reading this poem. If possible I’d like a pilot who’s survived cancer. Somebody that can relate. When was the last time you survived cancer? Well it’s important. 

 

THE VILLAGE OF FINGERNAIL WONDERS

 

 

    Truth is I’m not a Barbie dealer or even a guy from Seattle interested in Barbie dolls. I just wrote those other entries to take the piss out of something. It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled, since I had the pleasure of pissing anybody off.  For want of a better expression, I’m a washed up punk singer from a band called Lorne Green’s Wet Nipple. The highlight of our lowlife career was touring five cities across Canada in ’87. Towns really. I haven’t done anything of significance since and I thought I’d start a blog to piss some people off. To do a little bit of good old-fashioned shit-disturbing.

   Where have all the punk-rock blogs gone ? http://www.onoffyesno.com/

   So I’m going to write something everyday on this blog to rile the shit out of somebody. If you’re not irked yet, you can complain below.

   So here’ s a story that I hope pisses you off. Everybody’s trying to wipe your ass and make you happy. How about some rancor for a change ? How about a disgusting story about the futility of curiosity ?

   Enjoy…

 

THE VILLAGE OF FINGERNAIL WONDERS

 

    The Explorer slashed his way with a machete through the last strands of jungle to emerge within a small clearing of huts and villagers. The women and children of the village ran into their dung-caked abodes but the men stood their ground. The Explorer laid his machete down to show his peaceful intentions and he raised his empty and filthy hands in the air. At the sight of his hands the male villagers howled in horror. The Explorer was unnerved but he kept his hands in the air. As the villagers approached him he noticed that their fingernails had grown to twice the size of their hands. Some of the fingernails twirled together into single sharp points making a kind of spear-end and other fingernails came together into something that resembled tools. One man’s fingernails, from his left and right hands, grew together to make a bowl that he held at his belly. He was pushed by the others into standing in front of the Explorer first.

    At first, communication, a jumble of gestures and sounds, was slow and pointless but after a couple hours intentions seemed to be clear. The Explorer was from another world well beyond the reaches of the jungle and he was in search of the world’s wonders. The villagers knew of other tribes and cultures and continents but they were content to live out their lives in this quiet corner of the jungle. They lived an idyllic existence of hunting and eating and finding clever uses for their strange fingernail formations. The man with the bowl-shaped fingernails sometimes fed people soup from the coagulated shell forever held between his hands but sometimes he pretended it was a hat to the amusement of the children in the village. The Explorer was charmed at the open-minded nature of such primitive people and he decided to stay for as many months as he could.

   One day on the edge of village, as the Explorer was doing his morning ablutions outside his tent, he happened to notice the extreme length of his fingernails. I’ve been surrounded by such eccentric fingernail formations that I’ve forget about the hygiene of my own, he said to himself. (For in the absence of speakers of your tongue, it’s comforting to hear your language even, if only, from your own lips.) The Explorer pulled out a pair of fingernail clippers from the inside pocket of his rucksack.

     He took the clippers and cut the excess from his index finger but stopped at the sound of a shriek.

     He looked up and saw the backs of three children running out from behind a small bush. They ran into the collection of dung-caked huts where everyone was slowly emerging from sleep.

     “You have offended us deeply with your act of sacrilege. The great hand in the sky has provided us with wonder and you discard it from your body as if it were excrement,” the elder shouted at the Explorer who was forced to the ground by the pointy ends of his extra sharp fingernails. “There is but one punishment in our village.”

     From the other end of the village a giant fingernail clipper was rolled out from beneath a canopy of shrubs and vines. It was the size two canons. The Explorer’s head was placed into the open end and children lined up at the other. One after another, they all stepped onto the end as the Explorer’s head was clipped from his body in an excruciating exercise in patience and cruelty.

    And nobody dreamed of clipping their nails in the village for the rest of their happy days

 

WAITING FOR BARDOT TO GO SHOPPING

     Okay a confession. Yesterday I wrote that I used to be a dealer in Barbie dolls. That’s not the case. I’ve never bought or sold contraband Barbies. I thought it would be funny to write a story from the perspective of somebody with that kind of background.

     The truth is that I’m just an ordinary man in Seattle with 1.4 children and a wife and a garage and an average amount of debt suitable for our position in life.  I’m normal. Almost. I do, however, play with Barbies. That’s my other confession. I play with Barbies and make plays with Barbies. When Barbara (just a coincidence, I swear) has fallen asleep beneath some piece of chick-lit, I sneak out of bed and into my study where I quietly lock the door and pull out two Barbie dolls who I position at a table. Then I write script after script of what they’re doing and saying. I imagine a string that’s pulled in their back and this is what they come up with: 

Barbie Blue: When will it end ?

Barbie Bardot: What ?

Barbie Blue: It.

Barbie Bardot: It ?

Barbie Blue: You see the problem is with that tiny little word “it”. That tiny little word that’s like a keyhole that you stick your eye up against and you try to peek through it but you don’t see much of anything. 

Barbie Bardot: I had my eyes tested last week. The optometrist said that I have perfect vision. I know it.

Barbie Blue: Your last word is a keyhole that I use to peer into the meaning of the rest of your words but I don’t see much of anything. “Vision” that’s interesting. I think of an optometrist with different versions of angelic visions contained in his parking-meter sized eye-tester that goes up flush against your face. The eye-tester flashes different visions of paradise in front of your eye. “Is this better ? Or this ? Now how about this or this ?” You see the Mohammadean heaven and then the Christian heaven flicks up in front of your eye and then the Buddhist heaven clicks in place. Which is the perfect vision ? Which is the eye of the needle that we can ram our perfect paradise through ?

Barbie Bardot: I’m waiting to go shopping.

 

CONFESSION OF A DEALER

 

   Call me Ishy. I used to be a dealer. From the summer of ‘85 to the cold winter of ‘98 I plied my miserable trade mostly in Seattle but really I crisscrossed America like a ping-pong on fast forward, a ping-pong stuffed with the Devil’s dandruff. I raced off to wherever there was demand. You could say that I went everywhere.

     That was a long time ago and you may be wondering why I would open old wounds here for all the world to gawk at. Why not just leave everything buried in the grave-yard of the past ? I wish I could but I wake up some nights in the black of my room and there’s nobody to talk to but those images on the insides of my eyelids are searing like red neon paint that’s been splattered against a wall and I can’t scrape it off. I’ve got to thinking that putting down some of my stories here might help me sleep better. The world’s changed since ’98 and maybe people are ready to hear my side of things. I wasn’t the creep a lot of people made me out to be. Creepiness is also in the eye of the beholder.

    I have stories to tell because for those thirteen years that I was dealing I learnt to keep my mouth shut. That was the major part of every deal.  Keep your mouth shut.  I moved a lot of product. I was a dealer but not your typical dealer. I was a kind of drug dealer but in my case the drug was a plastic Barbie doll.

    There, I said it.

    My name is Ishy and I used to deal in Barbie dolls.

    Yeah I bought and then sold vintage Barbies, novelty Barbies, screwed up Barbies – the Orio Barbie whose moniker pissed off all those Afro-Americans – and even a Hasidic Jew Barbie.  You name it, I could get my hands on her. The worst part of the job was dealing with these sweaty palmed guys who didn’t want their wives or business associates to know about their little collection on the side. They made me into the creep that I became. They were like mirrors. I cocked a suspicious eye-brow and they cocked a suspicious eyebrow. I looked back and forth and they looked back and forth. I reached out with a Barbie doll in one hand and they reached out with the same hand. And then the mirror would shatter with some kind of hitch.

     “Her hair’s like straw,” the buyer said. We were in a parking lot in Chicago and it was cold. It was February. It was a shitty day.

     “Well it’s a ‘68 Miss Astronaut Barbie what do you expect ? Her first owner was probably testing her out in zero gravity under water.” I sometimes tried to make small talk with my clients but I might as well have been conversing with a chair. Their fears were so wrapped up in expectations and money. All they needed was a little pull string at their back: I’m a weirdo who’s blowing money on a secret collection of Barbies.

      I hated them. I hated myself.

     “I’m not paying three thousand for that,” he said and there was a ripple of fear that seemed to go through his business suit. It was like he was scaring himself. What if his bluff blew up in his face ?

    I put on her cute little helmet and held her up in front of him. That was usually all it took. Like I was a cop shining a light into a drunk driver’s face and he would have to obey.

    He shook his flabby jowls back and forth.

    I should have let him have the stupid doll. He sure let me have it. Suddenly he grabbed Miss Astronaut Barbie and started pelting me on the head with her surprisingly hard helmet. My arms went up for defense but it was too late. I gained consciousness an hour later when a security guard rammed his steal toe boot into my side.

    And that story is tame compared to the others. The harsh treatment that I received at other times. Yeah, being sodomized by Doctor Barbie is no laughing matter.

    But those stories will have to wait for another day.

    It’s time to try to go to sleep.