Glory’s father had recently been awarded with an Excellence and Efficiency award as a ten-year employee at the Kimberly-Clark paper mill. How those ten years came to pass, however, was a touchy subject. The award was received like paycheck & health insurance & performance review: without fanfare.
Back when he was a young go-getter just out of engineering school, Dennis had offered up an ingenius idea on a polished platter of naiveté. To his new employers, Puffs (a subsidiary of the prestigious Proctor & Gamble), the just-barely-twenty-one-year-old Dennis had developed the idea for a bathroom tissue enhancement he called “quilting.” A longtime admirer and apprentice of his dear mother’s quilting skills, Dennis had looked for practical ways to apply this inspiration in the “real world” of mundane employment. Being a gay African-American male in the summer spice of 1980’s Baltimore, he had more than one Good Solid Reason to become a Respectable Business Professional who could really Bring Home the Bacon [1]. Thus, young Mr. Maycomb brought a family legacy, made of passion, creativity, and fondness for soft things, into a presumably-dreary career on a staff of nameless thousands working toward the production of premium quality facial and bathroom tissues.
Eureka! he had thought, bubbling over with enthusiasm on his way to the last day of his first week plodding along inside the gates with the rest of the Nerd Ignominious Herd [2]. So excited was he to share his idea with the higher-ups, he thought nothing about the insidiously stacked power dynamics that might come into play; his only sensibilities were for the upward mobility of his career and the comfort to weary red noses and rear ends that his invention would supply. When the management team called Dennis in for his first-week review, he spilled the beans on the spot, sharing his well-formed ideas and diagrams with confidence, hardly stopping for breath until he sat back to grin into the faces of the white, middle-aged, heterosexual, imitation-Armani-wearing executives. Go-getter, he thought to himself.
They were highly impressed, but also heavily conditioned and extraordinarily cut-throat, so it showed very little. Dennis was nonplussed as the interview continued in a below-average way, full of mundane daily-grind questions and little pep-talk slogans. By the time they stood to shake his hand and dismiss the meeting, he had convinced himself that there was some special etiquette that was in play, something to which he would surely be made party when his promotion came. It did not, however, come. Dennis was not made any kind of party. After the weekend passed and a deep, vague anxiety had begun creeping into perfectly pleasant moments, he began to feel the effects of ostracization. Resentful. Isolating. Pitiless. [3]
Ridiculous! thought he, refusing to admit that a bunch of toilet paper flunkies could have such a powerful effect on his self-esteem. But as the next week wore on, the worry began to show on his face. It slowed his footsteps and buttered his fingers. It spiked his dreams and spilled coffee on his new tie. It crept along in his shadow.
By the following week, he had made up his mind to Be A Good Cow [4] and concentrate on making little advances. Maybe I came on too strong, he figured, Maybe I intimidated some of the upper echelon. Maybe, he reasoned, there is a mandatory hazing period during which I’m supposed to learn the rules of the gig before I start improvising on the song. (Denny was also a damn fine sax player who sat in regularly with other astronauts of entertainment at jazz clubs of the local underground, so he was no stranger to such rituals.) Yes, that must be the case. I need to pay some respect to the order of things so they don’t think I’m here to steal the show.
To his utter dismay, after two more weeks of exemplary bovinity on his part, the general manager of the Puffs operation team announced to a staff-wide assembly that they were proud to be releasing a new product, set for production by the end of the following year. This product, the first of its kind on the market, would revolutionize the facial and bathroom tissue industry. It was entirely unsettled whether the resounding “oohs” and “ahhs” were actually present in the roomful of TP people or if they were merely a radical hallucination grown out of Dennis’ darkened corner of dismay, but either way, the collective approval in the room produced the effect of a suckerpunch to the gut. When they actually said the word “Quilted” with bright toothy smiles on their self-congratulatory faces, Dennis found himself in need of more than a tissue. Sweating like a cold drink on a summer day, he ran from the room unexcused and posted up in a bathroom stall to spill his guts and shed his tears.
HOW could they DO this? he wept. HOW could I have been such a FOOL? he moaned. WHO the fuck do they think they ARE? he shat. WHEN did human beings become such ASSHOLES? he farted. WHY does the Lord let beauty be used for EVIL? he wailed. WHAT the hell is this life ABOUT? he shuddered.
After depleting his reserves entirely in that toilet stall, he found himself lost in an almost Zen-like emptiness. Minutes blurred. The toilet seat began to deliver its egg-shaped temporary tattoo for overtime sitters. In the quiet of the cracked tile and the leaking sink, Dennis found Great Clarity [5] on three things. One: he had worked himself sick as a dog for a company that didn’t value his well-being one iota. Two: the bathroom was out of toilet paper. Assholes. Three: he was going to walk out that door and present his resignation, right after he used the leaky faucet for a bidet.
-**
1. Not every phrase can be an instant LMFAO success. Let’s look at these abbreviation fails. GSR also stands for Galvanized Skin Response, so no good. RBP could be any number of things: Regular Baptist Press, Rolling Big Power, or code on the stock exchange for the Rainbow Group. (Knowing Dennis, it was the third, wearing the costume of the first, with a wish for the second.) Lastly, since the British Horseracing Board became defunct, BHB is mostly likely to refer to Black Hole Bang, which would offer a good deal of counterintuitive perspective to the context in which “bringing home the bacon” is perceived as a valuable behavior.
2. Nice try, Dennis. National Institute of Health.
5. GC: Gas Chromatography, okay this one counts.