The Joy of Angry Messages

By Vernon Felton

The day is starting badly. In fact, it’s not really starting at all. Just limping along, sour and misbegotten. Strapped here to the cubicle, Morning headache in violent bloom. You get up some days and nothing rolls right. Goodbye, Sunday. Hello, Monday. That was this morning. Stepped in a pile of bobcat shit around six this morning, twisted my knee brushing my teeth at seven…How the hell do you twist your knee while brushing your teeth? Getting older….Shit like that seems to happen all the time these days. Crap.

I’m wearing a power tie this morning. Thought it might help set things straight. Bold scarlet thing with dark blue scallops. 100 percent silk, quality stitching. It’s the Kid Shamrock- ultimate fighter of power ties. I could walk up to Donald Rumsfeld this very instant and make him my prison bitch—by sheer will of my tie alone. It’s that bad a mofo of a tie. And yet, despite my stunning choice of neck-wear, things are still not working right.

Sit down, rub my angry knee, groan at my very full inbox of emails and curse the vigilant eyes of my administrative assistant who is vulture watching my every move….wondering if I am using this time at my respectable suit and tie job to type something for my less respectable cycling job…I miss working at home, in my underwear, all alone save for my cup of coffee.

Coffee—that’s the ticket. I pick up an official-looking folder and leave for the coffee shop under the pretense of delivering something important to somebody more important than me. Weak coffee today. Weak coffee every day. How do people drink this crap? Like sex in a canoe—fucking near water. Oi. I can look down and see right through the “coffee” to the bottom of my cup. What the hell?

I limp out of the coffee shop and then it hits me. Inspiration. I dig out my cell phone and call the Reverend Rich White. Rich isn’t home and I’m not surprised. It’s 7:45 and he’s probably already at work like me. I am not disappointed. I want to talk to Rich at some point, to be sure, but right now, I need to leave a nasty message on his answering machine. When the machine beeps, I begin yelling into the receiver for a good minute straight.

“Hey, Ricky. Jesus, where the hell are you? Look, it’s me—Jack Del Monte from Buffalo. Look tough guy, I hear you’re some kinda race promoter down in California now and I hear that all these little fruit cakes in their sausage pants are lookin’ to ride their bikes with number plates on them. So, here’s the deal—okay, try and keep up with me here, Einstein—let’s you and me put on some races for these fancy pants little bastards. I dunno—maybe we make them ride their bikes through the Wal-Mart fucking parking lot and back. Really doesn’t matter. Who friggin’ knows—the point is these fruitcakes got money and the biggest one of them probably weighs 160 pounds. We can fleece `em good. Remember that gay bar we started in Miami? It’ll be just like that. Take their cash and call it a goddamn day. So, give me a call, you douche bag. Let’s do this job. Call me. You owe me, you lousy prick. I know where you live.”

The message I left was probably longer than this and contained a lot more cursing, but the general gist was the same. Of course, none of it really makes any sense, none of it is factual, but all of it lifts my spirits and makes me confident that my own day will take on a brighter hue. You see, Rich’s girlfriend is going to come home and play the message before Rich gets a chance to hear it himself. This will cause some concern as it implies that Rich is a thief, that he somehow started a gay bar in Miami and then ran with the money and that some stranger knows where Rich and his girlfriend live and will show up angry if Rich doesn’t join him for onemore score. There’s an ominous hint of violence here—that’s key. You always want to end voicemails with a threat.

Again, my message is all just fiction. Rich White is the nicest guy in the world. He’s an avid mountain biker and race promoter. He doesn’t steal money from anyone. There is no Jack Del Monte. But can Rich’s girlfriend be absolutely sure of this? I can already sense the awkward moment when she replays the message for Rich. He’ll deny knowing Jack Del Monte. He’ll deny the gay bar episode, but the more he denies it, the truer it will seem. Shakespeare said something about protesting too much.

Men lie about the little things in life. “No, I never masturbate. Gave that up when I married you. Nope, I’d never dream of drinking milk right out of the carton. That’s so unhygienic.” And yet, women aren’t dumb. On the whole, they are quite a bit smarter than the average man. Women know that men are just slightly bald monkeys and that we never stop wanking. They see the lack of dirty dishes in the sink and they never even consider the possibility that you’ve been washing dishes—they know you probably never resorted to using dishes in the first place. Hell, most guys still can’t manage to pee into the toilet without leaving urine sprinkles all over the bathroom floor. Just how evolved can we really be?

If so many men lie about trivial things, their female counterparts often reason, why wouldn’t men also lie about the big things? It’s logical reasoning, but the truth is that most men tend to lie about small things because fly-sized lies are simple to remember, simple to deny. The big lies take memorization and cunning—like interior decorating and needle point, these are not the forte of the average straight man.

Which brings me back to Rich White and the voicemail I left him this morning—I’ve just hung up and I’m already relishing the awkward moment that will surely ensue when he comes home. Rich is a saint of a guy. A genuinely sincere and loving person, so I’m confident that he’ll eventually be able to trace the call to me and explain his way out of it. I even left my phone number so that he could call and eventually explain to his wife that some jack ass he knows was, well, being a jack ass and that it was all just a joke.

I know it’ll all work out for Rich and the missus, so I’m not giving it much thought. I’m still smiling in anticipation of that awkward moment I’ll never see, but can well imagine. The simple, incredibly enjoyable thought of Rich trying to explain the gay bar to his wife. Priceless. It’s a mental Hey, pull my finger! sort of thing. It’s juvenile in the extreme…and it makes me happy. For a few minutes, it allows me to forget how crappy my Monday morning has been. Pure magic. Just a crank call away. Joy.