Petty

When it comes, it comes hard it seems.  There is no end to misery then, nothing but pain and suffering.  It is heavy.  It is wrong.

Remember reading The Book of Job?    I hope you were young enough to have been as rocked by it as I.  I read it my freshman year in college, and it assaulted my sensibilities.  I never recovered from that, it seems.

I've not read it since, so I may have it wrong.  But wasn't God fooling with Job on a bet with Satan?  It seemed to me that it was much as if you heard your mama say, "Go ahead and put the funnel up his ass.  He can take the hot lead enema," *

"Why?" you want to ask.  At least I did.

But the story is supposed to prepare us for the beatings we are going to take, I guess, to put some philosophical wrapping on them.

"It's O.K.  I'm just being tested."

I'm no good at that.

Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong at the factory this week. If this had been a game of hazards, I would have thrown boxcars ten times in a row.  I mean, man, every bet went bad.

So P.G. has been writing to me of late.  I made a mistake there, too.  I tried to tell her a story of my once beautiful life when my girl and I were recognizable figures at the last America's Cup Race in Newport when Dennis Connor lost to the Australians.  But she and I didn't lose to anybody.  Or so I tell it.

But P.G.'s life seems to come straight to me from a movie now.  And from someone who used to live there and had much the same life she has now comes confirmation.  It is the norm.  Manhattan, the Hamptons, the Berkshires, Newport.

They used a photo of her in the style section of the Wall Street Journal as the anchor for a story on the magazine where she works.

But today. . . oh. . . today. . . .  She told me she has been asked to teach a class for a major university.

It crushes me.  I can't breathe.  I'm shrinking. . . shrinking. . . .

You cursed brat!  Look what you've done!  I'm melting, melting!  Oh. . . what a world, what a world.  Who would have thought that a good little girl like you could destroy all my beautiful wickedness?  Ooooh. . . look out!  I'm going!  Ooooh. . . oooooh. . . .

But why should I complain?  I have all this and a foreman's job to boot, eh?

But one thing I know.  Nobody is going to use me as an anchor picture for anything good.


* Inspired and stolen from a Lenny Bruce skit