KEVIN LAVEY - FAULTY HEAD WORKS

Kevin Lavey is a retired teacher who now has time to devote to his writing. His novel Rat was published by RockWay press and he's had stories published in online and print journals. He practices the martial art aikido, loves to read and write, and continues to support the Baltimore Orioles.

Faulty Head Works
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    Jerome was irritating him. Jerome should have been paying him private homage. He, Terrance Hickleby, arrived with news of an ownership stake in InfoNetSheet while he, Jerome Norton, shuffled around in his red and black plaid bathrobe, with uncombed hair and unwashed white socks, wondering if the manager at the Blinky’s slotted him enough shifts at the bar next week so he could cover rent. 
    He, Terrance, felt himself glowing with made-it-ness. He wanted old friend Jerome--not exactly old friends; how about fairly well established acquaintances--to give him some attaboys. Or at least one. But stingy Jerome refused, and, instead, told endless bartender stories about Capitol aides who tipped like schmucks, women who tried to pick him up, hah!, and managers who had their collective heads up their collective asses.
“Did you hear what I’ve been trying to tell you, Jerome? Does it even register? My boss, the Queen, offered me an ownership stake in InfoNetSheet. The insider trade publication on the House of Representatives in the United States Congress. Did you get that?”
Jerome blinked from behind thick lenses and out of date, brown frames. He had not shaved for days and seemed jowly and pot bellied or was that the robe that provided an unflattering physique profile? Jerome used to hit the gym and show off the effects with tight t-shirts and abundant cologne.
“Hmm,” Jerome managed while glancing at the muted TV.
“I bought these in celebration of my newfound status.” He pointed to his black and gold Air Jordans, an ankle boot style athletic shoe, resting on the coffee table, that he in his most outlandish imaginings never thought he would purchase. But he wanted to display them to Jerome, his one time superior at the restaurant where he was a lowly barback to Jerome’s bartender, way back in the day when Terrance humped his resume around town. Jerome was an athletic shoe guy. Terrance had known of a dozen, two dozen athletic shoe purchases by him. But not recently, that’s for sure. Not for the past year, at least. Not Jordans. Skechers, maybe. 
Terrance had come over to Jerome’s under the guise of sharing a few beers and his good news, but really, it was to say goodbye. No more listening to Jerome and his stories about the idiots he worked for, the jokers he served drinks to, and more recently about his estrangement from his girlfriend Betty and their inevitable breakup. 
Not to mention, he found out that Jerome had cheated on him with Jane.
“Oh, forgot to tell you. Jane said to say hi,” Terrance said. He waggled his black and gold Air Jordans resting on the pitted coffee table. He couldn’t help himself. He glowed with inner alpha glee. He danced atop the dominance pyramid. For once in his five foot six inch life, he was the man. 
He had got the girl, Jane Robbins, who Jerome had lost.
“Listen,” Jerome said. “I want you to listen to me very carefully. Jane Robbins….” He nodded. “She’s out of your league.” With that powder puff salvo, he deflated. He retreated into his robe.
“Jerome, Jerome, Jerome. Look. Okay. Let’s just look at the facts here for a minute.” He was enjoying this. “Sure you and Jane had your moment, but--”
“A long time ago. Before Betty.”
“She has moved on to greener pastures. Moi.”
Jerome nodded, shrugged, reached to the coffee table and stubbed out his cigarette in the loaded ashtray.
“I ever tell you about Drake Thrush?” he said, sitting back. “Actor who used to come into the bar?”
“Drake Thrush? You expect me to believe that someone’s name is Drake Thrush?”
“He changed it. He’s an actor, what do you expect? The jobs started rolling in. Anyway, Jane stopped in with Betty one night. I introduced him to Jane and within a month the guy comes back looking for some healthy whiskey bottle oblivion babbling to himself. Babbling. Jane had wrung him out like a wet dishrag. Stay away from her.”
“He was weak. You’re blaming Jane because a member of the male species loses alpha status in the Great Game? She didn’t cause his faulty head works. He did.”
“Jack be nimble, Jack be cool, Jack better be careful how he sharpens his tool.”
Terrance had been with her for two months. Two wonderful months. Wonderful until last Thursday. But right now, he kept a game face.
“I’m in love, Jerome. I am in love. We have found one another at the most propitious moment of my life. Evelyn Wilson, the Queen, has offered me a financial stake in InfoNetSheet.”
The day before, the very day before he came over here to say goodbye to Jerome and ride off into the sunset, the Queen, who owned InfoNetSheet where Terrance worked as a reporter and sometimes editor and covered the ecosystem that was United States House of Representatives, deemed him worthy. 
Terrance had zoomed back and forth among influential congressmen and women, staffers, lobbyists, and consultants, those whose very business was the nectar which he absorbed and made into InfoNetSheet honey: information. Over the past four years, he and two others helped build the InfoNetSheet nest into what it was today: the go-to website that kept track of the symbiotic relationships between legislation and the players for whom legislation would benefit. 
Yes, the Queen without question paid homage. She gave him a raise and offered him an ownership package because she found out that he had lunch with a guy who wanted to start up a copycat InfoNetSheet for the Senate. She didn't want him leaving the hive. 'I need you here,' she said. She was forty-six years old, a fashionable dresser, and backed down silver haired congressmen who gave the president himself hemorrhoids. 'I don't want you to leave,' she said. They talked money and status. She slathered him up with a three-year financial package starting that minute. He walked out of her office and Barbara, the worker-bee assistant who was the-most-important-person-in-the-universe for the office management work she did at Info, said to him, "You are the man." Obviously, the Queen and she had talked. "You are the man." They slapped high-fives. 
    He had been grinding for years, gathering tidbits, chewing through binders of budget projections, scribbling notes at meetings. If he hadn't cross-pollinated connections in Congress and beyond, The Reporter, InfoNetSheet's competition, would have routed and crushed them. 
    But, he knew, more important than the subtle, complex, nuanced, intricate, secret, and convoluted relationships he cultivated, he succeeded because he had stabbed The Reporter through its collective, arrogant heart. A stunning coup, a coup granted only to the most diligent, earnest, and feverish of reporters: he exposed a too cozy and unethical financial relationship between The Reporter and an insurance lobbyist (the Queen called it The Taint From God). If his one-man marauding attack on The Reporter had not happened, InfoNetSheet would still be in a life or death wrestle with it for influence. But the field was theirs now, and he was The Man.
    Again, Jerome had sagged back into the couch with its flat cushions and shiny spots on the armrests.
    “I’m sorry to hear about you and Betty,” Terrance said. “Jane told me.  Listen. I want you to listen to me very carefully...” 
He couldn’t help it! Over the years, with every one of his featured news articles or prominent bylines, Jerome had sneered and rolled his eyes and called him a sellout to the, what was his favorite phrase, the Grand Fuckwits of the World. 
“The ferris wheel goes up then comes back down. It will go back up for you again.”
    “Now you listen, you stumpy motherfucker.” Jerome sat up and pointed. “Don’t patronize me. I got a job. I can pay the rent. Some people don’t even have that.” 
But his mouth drooped. Terrance had finally become callused to Jerome’s sad-clown moods. Why were they still friends? Quote unquote. 
Jerome's attention kept shifting from him to the television. He peeled off the beer bottle label in strips, chewed them into pulp, then balled them up and launched them with a fillip through the glow of the television screen into the room's shadows. 
        He'd met Jerome how many years ago? Then, as now, he worked at Blinky’s, a restaurant and bar near Capitol Hill which once upon a time was frequented by junior representatives, congressional staffers, lobbyists, and hangers-on who came for power lunches and happy hour on Friday. “All these people,” Jerome had said to him way back when, knowing that Terrance wanted to be a reporter on Capitol Hill, “basically feed on the same carcass. These are the carnivores you need to know.” At the time, Terrance worked for a local weekly paper by day and as a barback at Blinky’s by night. Jerome introduced him around, and it was through Jerome that he got to know Barbara, the worker-bee assistant who was the-most-important-person-in-the-universe for the InfoNetSheet, who then introduced him to the Queen who gave him a job which launched him into what he found out yesterday would be part ownership. 
So he owed Jerome for those introductions. He sure did. But he’d paid off his debt many times over. He wrote Jerome a check for his rent not once but twice, came over to this dreary goddamn apartment and listened to his stories, and was his main cheerleader when Jerome decided for a season to be an actor and spent time auditioning for plays in community theater.
    So, right this minute, today, here and now, Jerome had nothing on him. Nothing. 
Jerome had one thing on him. Jerome was tall, and he was short. But not only short, roundish: slump shouldered and thick in the chest and back, a pear butt and heavy upper thighs with skinny legs. And whoever the big jokemeister was who waved the magic wand and Created Everything gave him a knock-kneed walk, which was probably why he heard the female shoe attendant say something to her sororal comrade, both of whom giggled, as he tried out a modified white boy pimp-strut exiting the store wearing his newly minted and overpriced gold and black Air Jordans that, if anything, emphasized his stubby rotundity.
    “Did it make you that jealous that we began to date?”
    “No way, man. But remember, I introduced you two. Without me, there’s no you and Jane.”
    Terrance smiled. Yes, he was enjoying this. His friend Jerome Norton had betrayed him with his girlfriend--no, potential fiancée--Jane Robbins, and here he was playing the innocent, wounded guy.
    “Really, Jerome, I’m finding out the meaning of bliss.” He amped up his smile hoping to radiate bliss or at least bliss-ness. He looked over at Jerome, the sod, the sad man, the doormed man-child. Was bliss too heavy-handed?
    “What you don’t realize, Terrance, my man, is that she’s not your type.”
    He attempted a snorting laugh in response, but managed only an exaggerated snort.
    “Man, she’s a beautiful woman. Who cares if she’s three inches taller than me.” There, he got that out on the table. “Did I ever tell you about our first date?”
    “Did I ever tell you that the night I introduced you two, when she and Betty came in, that I knew you fell for her when she asked you to fix the clasp on her necklace?”
    “A damsel in distress.”
    “I’ve seen her pull that trick on three different men.”
    “Jerome, Jerome, Jerome.” He shook his head.
    “Just wanting to let you know. Listen, you want another beer?” 
    He got up and stepped over Terrance’s legs.
    “Sure.”
    He returned and handed him a bottle of Bass ale. “Thanks for picking these up, by the way. Wish they were colder. Goddamned refrigerator is dying.”
    They snapped open their beers.
    Jerome wiped his mouth with his wrist. “Okay,” he said. “First date. Get it over with. There’s a movie I want to see coming up. Space Grace, Mistress of Mars.”
    “She said, let’s keep it simple. She wanted to go out for pizza. Perfect, I thought. Simple is my middle name. We went up to that place in Bethesda. Well known place. What’s its name? Gets a lot of attention. Fat guy owns it.”
“The Palace. Why’s it always ‘fat guy.’ I’m a few pounds heavy right now, okay? All the time, I hear, ‘He’s the fat guy who talks funny’ or ‘I know him, fat guy, right?’ Stuff like that all the time. Show a little respect. You ain’t exactly Gentleman’s Quarterly.”
“What’d you say that for? The guy’s a fat fuck. Let it rest.”
Jerome sparked up another cigarette. “Go on. Jesus. We got the movie about ready to start. You wanted mushrooms, she wanted pepperoni. You compromised, mushrooms and pepperoni.”
Terrance waggled his shoes.
“So a day and a half later you give her a call from work. Giddy moment, you wondered if it was too soon, but you said what the hell.”
“I tell you this already?”
“You forget I’m a bartender. I hear this stuff over and over. Nothing new under the sun, my friend. Nothing new. What’d she say?”
“Said she was busy, but could she call me back. Maybe two days go by, I see it come in. I can’t answer, I’m in a meeting. Later, I hear the message. ‘Sir Terrance,’ she writes--”
“So now you’re a knight.”
“Damsel in distress, remember? Anyway, she invites me over to her place. She made Chinese food in a wok. We ate with chopsticks. We drank saki. We fell in love.”
Jerome frowned.
“I’ve never experienced it. You have to understand. There’s harmony then there’s harmony.”
“Is that the same as bliss?”
“Harmony, bliss. One searches for ways to describe.”
Jerome’s cell pinged and he pulled it from the robe pocket and read. He thumbed a response.
Terrance got up and hit the bathroom. He splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror while tapping a tissue to dry himself off. The stones on that guy, he thought.
He and Jerome faced the TV.
“Watch this. That ugly guy with the beard.”
“What’s that on his face.”
“Swarm of asteroid crickets. Very big drag. There! How do you like that? No more eyes. God, I love this movie.”
Terrance looked at his watch. “Listen, I got to get rolling.”
“Where you going? You’re not watching this movie with me?”
    Terrance placed his hands in his lap. He would do it. Finish this off like he came here to do. He didn’t like kicking people when they were down, but Jerome, he gave him no choice.
“Jane and I, we go out to restaurants. It’s our thing. I pick a place, she picks a place. We kid each other about who chooses the best ones. We go all over. One time we went to Frederick. The restaurant dates, they’re sacrosanct.”
    Terrance pulled out his cell phone. He wanted something in his hand.
    “Long story short. I’m sitting in Miss Saigon on M Street.”
“Good pick.”
“I’ve got a table near the front door, not too far from the fish tank they have in there. She doesn’t show up. First time. I text and call. Nothing.”
“When was that?”
    “Last Thursday.”
Jerome kept his eyes on the TV. He held up his empty bottle, meaning do you want another? Terrance ignored him.
“I saw her over the weekend, but it was strained. You know, a no show? That’s like a dark wing passed over us. I’m in love, Jerome. I’ve got a stabbing pain right here.” He pointed to the middle of his chest. “We’re at the market up near Capitol Hill sitting at one of those little round tables eating pastries and I see the incoming text. She tries to hide it.”
“Well, shit,” he said. He walked over Terrance’s legs again, got beers for the both of them.
They drank in silence while they watched Space Grace, Mistress of Mars on mute.
“We go out once in a while,” Jerome said.
“Like last Thursday?”
“Look, she came into the bar. It was a slow night. I asked Bronson if I could leave. We went out. I didn’t know she had a date with you.”
“She did,” he said as if to himself. "We're friends, Jerome.”
"I'm desperate. I'm thirty-six years old, man. I've worked in a restaurant for fourteen years. I'm going for the real estate license because I don't know what the hell else to do with myself. Robbins is…" Jerome took a long pull on his beer. "She's trying with you. I can tell."
    Terrance shook his head. “Jane goes from you to me, me to you, and I missed it. Didn't come up on my screen. I've been in dreamland."
        "I am a man who recognizes his own weaknesses. It doesn't bother me."
         "That's it?" 
         "Betty's about to leave me, Terrance. She met a guy who created some sort of boutique software for the big game in politics. He helps candidates raise money, so the guy's loaded and he's, like, my age. I said to her, 'Betty, he's a parasite. He lives off…'" He sniffed. "She's tired of this shit." He waved his hand, included the apartment, his life. He flicked an ash to the floor. 
         "Leave Robbins alone." Terrance lit up another cigarette.
         "I can't."
    "She's everything to me."
    "You and me, we're out there scrambling for the same--"
    "We are not…" Terrance started to raise his voice. "I've got a key to her apartment. You got that?"
    Jerome closed his eyes.
    "Jack be nimble, Jack be cool, Jack better be careful how he sharpens his tool.”
    "I need her! I'm desperate. What am I supposed to do? Be noble?" 
    "It's an option."
         He stared at Jerome, who couldn't bring himself to look at Terrance. Jerome's mouth curled downward and he started to cry with dry, coughing, almost comical choking noises. Terrance picked up the pack of cigarettes and walked to the window. He smoked for a few moments then crushed the cigarette into an ashtray sitting on the sill. He arched his back and shifted his shoulders then glided toward Jerome. He stopped and hovered near Jerome's cluttered desk.
    "Jerome," he said sharply.
    Jerome looked up as if attending a far away sound.
    "I need you to let go of Jane. I want to marry her." He felt like Churchill dispensing news to the masses.
    "I can't." He was close to whimpering.
    "Jane wants a family. She's ready to build her nest. We can do that together. I’m ready."
    "The fuck."
    "We're on different--"
    "The fuck. The fuck."
    Jerome was stretched out, bare feet on the coffee table. He’d taken off his socks. Terrance almost laughed out loud at his clutching toes, their angry grasping, gripping movements.
    Terrance tipped up his nose and said, "Jerome, the business of skimming from the cash register at work would not look good on your résumé." There. Now Jerome would understand.
    Terrance started for the door. He felt weird, centerless, off-balance. Instead of discharging a clean sting, it was as if he'd emitted a polluting, antagonizing chemical in the air.
    Terrance intended not to look at Jerome before he left, but he couldn't help himself. Jerome's face was filmed with an oily sheen of sweat. He was silent, utterly defeated, and Terrance paused. Should he get him a glass of water? That was a nasty trick he pulled, mentioning the cash drawer skimming. But how many times had Jerome bragged about it. Yes, necessary maybe--all’s fair in love and war--but nasty and mean and brutish. Except for the clenching, grabbing toes, Jerome was silent and still and gray. Terrance imagined a suicide note. He imagined the tubby corpse being cut down from the showerhead, flopped over a policeman's shoulder like a large pupa.
    “Let me get you a glass of water.”
    "Terrance," Jerome said, his voice unsteady, and Terrance heard it in his head as a vibration. "Have a seat."
    Jerome hiked himself up, legs still resting on the coffee table. Terrance didn't want any confusing talk or negotiations. He wanted to say goodbye to a past in which he once upon a time knew a person named Jerome. 
    He shouldn't have made that crack about skimming from the till―probably most bartenders did it. Jerome went along and took advantage like everybody else.     
"Terrance, sit down a minute, my man."
    My man? That didn't apply any more. Terrance detected whining, and he wished for not one more second of it. But after all, Jerome had been a pal. Terrance sat down on the couch and rested his arm along the back. He crossed leg over knee as if he were a boundlessly patient interviewer for a PBS special.
    Jerome smiled. "Terrance, how you doing at your job?"
    "Jerome, don't you think--"
    "No, how's the job going?"
    "As you know, it's going well, Jerome. Really well." He brushed his pant leg with the tops of his fingers.
    "Good, Terrance. You know," he wiped his mouth, pulled his hand down over his face, "because, you know, I could use a job, Terrance. I really could."
    Terrance took the information with the greatest open heart. His crippled friend limped to him for help. He'd never envisioned this as one of the perks: the friend in trouble. He felt like Rockefeller. Be of service to those in the lower stratum.
    "Sure, Jerome. I can keep an eye out. There's lots of need out there for a guy quick on his feet. What did you get your degree in?" He knew what Jerome's degree was in―political science―but he couldn't help himself. He had climbed to the top of the heap. Zeus was hardly modest.
    "Terrance," Jerome said. The contours of his shining, sweating, pleading face had hardened. His eyes were bright and probing. "You know, Jane and I talk. We’ve always talked. She told me how you forged documents to get that guy at The Reporter to look like he--"
    "I did nothing of the kind." Terrance's heart pounded. 
    "You scammed that guy at The Reporter. You made it seem like he was on the take from the insurance guy and he never was. Jane told me all about it."
    "You and Jane have been drinking buddies for too long. Never happened. Not like you mean."
    “More than drinking buddies remember,” Jerome said softly. 
 The Reporter. He wasn't a politician, a compromiser. He wasn't of a species with those he covered. That was just business. 
    "Well, whatever I mean, it wouldn't smell too good if your boss went in there and started rooting around, would it? You're high up, Terrance. Now it's time you helped a friend. I need a job. Then you can tell all you want about skimming."
    Terrance did his best to maintain a poker face.
    "A good job, Terrance. That's not asking too much. If I got a good job, Terrance, I would start to feel comfortable. I feel comfortable, I don't need to be calling Jane all the time. She's got a savior thing with me. She won't let go before I let go.” 
    Terrance looked down at his shoes. 
    "Where'd you get them?” Jerome pointed. “Sort of bright, don’t you think?"
    "What do you think you're good at, Jerome?"
    He chewed his mouth a moment. "What I'm thinking is this. I got to find out what I'm good at. I know it wouldn't be real estate. You take me in at your thing―entry salary, I know―and I'm your apprentice, and I take off from there in a year or so. I can still work at Blinky’s a few shifts at night during the week. I know I can--"
    "Stop talking Jerome."
     "It won't be so bad, Terrance. Fellow drones keeping the boss happy. What’s not to like?"

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