Beetle-browed and buttoned up, Welsh Losser sits behind a heavy desk that makes him look like a miniature of himself.
On the desk is a small, framed photo of him and his wife on an African safari – she with a hunting rifle slung over her shoulder and a leg up on a rhino carcass, and he sitting on a sleeping turtle in the hot sun.
Another picture, much bigger, shows Welsh’s airbrushed alter ego impeccably dressed in a dark blue suit and sporting an expensive watch that protrudes into the foreground.
“Now let’s see – I need to get the jacket for my new e-book redone,” he says, wiping his flushed bald head. “Oh, and I almost forgot about that luncheon tomorrow with the hotel developers from Zhytomyr,” now thumbing his baby-butt chin.
Losser then lapses into a daydream imagining himself doing a power point presentation in front of spellbound Ukrainian businessmen in cheap suits. The screen displays an ultra-modern architectural masterpiece with gleaming glass panels and a fountain-filled foyer. He parries to the left with his pointer – then, to the right, like a magician whose smile grows more confident as the eyes of his audience tire trying to follow his hand.
“Welsh, Boss Lard’s on Line One.”
“Huh?” The daydream promptly evaporates, and Losser’s eyelids are raised like the curtain in an old-fashioned theater, leaving nothing but an empty stage soon filled with dumbfounded disbelief, an angry ego and an infant lie wriggling to life.
“Tell him I’m out, will ya?”
“He’s out.”
“The hell he is, dog damn it. You tell that son of a bitch that I’m not paying him a lapdog salary so that I can talk to his secretary. My ass is itching, and he’s gonna scratch it…”
“Welsh, he wants you to scratch his ass.”
“Argh! Tell him I’m with clients.”
“And I’m a shine boy with shit in my ears,” continues the irrepressible Lard. “That Buddha-looking buffoon in a five-hundred-dollar suit couldn’t court a client if he were covered in colorful contracts from the crack of his ass to the curve of his lips…”
“Irr rubadubdub,” Losser clears his throat, “Now see here, Boss…”
“See? Hear? You can’t do either one, son. I’d have fired you many moons ago, if there hadn’t been a shortage of ass kissers on this market we’re in… Actually, there wasn’t a shortage outright, but rather weak competition for the kind of use-my-back-as-a-footstool approach that you showed up with…”
The line goes dead and Welsh emits a sigh of relief followed by a plume of verbal pluck as an afterthought.
“Now Betty, if Mr. Lard phones me again, you tell him in no uncertain terms that I am currently unavailable and will get back with him at my earliest convenience and no sooner…”
Phone rings again.
“Oof – gosh darnit!”
“It’s Kate Mustard from the TV station.”
“Well, what does she want?”
“What I want, Welsh, is an interview with an up-and-coming expatriate businessman with new ideas for this old city. I want him to sit in front of me on the air, while I excoriate his character, profession and person. This, I believed, would be you, Welsh, until I saw that cheap video you plastered onto YouTube, replete with an all too obvious promotion of the very book of yours that I was preparing to make a laughing stock of before a live television audience…”
“That’s a copyright issue.”
“You’ve got the copy part right, which would have made for an interesting, and more importantly humiliating, discussion in itself. The only thing is that I have yet to figure out who you copied it from. From what I can tell, your work fits the signature of any number of hackneyed bestsellers little more deserving of the fame they’ve achieved than that which you are still desperately trying to repeat.”
The line goes dead again.
“That’s enough calls for today, Betty – nyuck, nyuck.”
Within minutes, Losser sinks back into his big office chair, secure in the belief that he is, for once, his own man, and not a lapdog for another.
“Executive Director for Charmin Puff Services Ukraine, Moldova and Greater Mongolia. Hmm – not bad Losser,” he mutters to himself as he drifts off into an afternoon snooze.
“Yeah right!”
“Huh!!” Losser starts to see his airbrushed alter ego eyeing him smugly from the framework of that large photo positioned prominently on his heavy desk.
“Surely you don’t think that you can take the credit for getting those e-books published and… and, and now this prize job as Charmin Executive Director for… uh, hmm, do you?”
“Well – er ruppity dup… er, why the hell not?”
“Why the hell not? I’ll tell you why the hell not! You, sir, are a phony … a charlatan, a, ah ah…”
Losser brusquely pulls out a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and slips it over the photo’s frame.
“Ahh, AHH CHOO!” sneezes the photo, sending the hanky flying off onto the desk.
“Now listen here, Losser, I won’t tolerate such insolence… Er, as I was saying… You are fully aware and comprehensively cognizant of the indisputable fact that I, and I alone, have the poise, bearing and panache to massage the masses while rubbing elbows with the elite. It’s me – not you, that knows how to sell, and sell well, even sell like hell, with suaveness and sophistication. Before I showed up – indeed – showered myself across myriad media exposed to expatriates, Ukrainians and others, your public exposure was limited to an occasional appearance in one of Boss Lard’s vanity journalism outlets.”
“Burp!”
Losser, having loosened his tie and cracked open a beer, sits slumped in his seat like a mid-level manager at a trucking company having just finished his shift.
“Losser, are you listening to me…?
The foam of the frothy refreshment now glistens on Losser’s moist small mouth.
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, June 15, 2013