But the real question is:

        What the fuck are you gonna do now?

        Thirty-six years old, belly starting to get so big it
folds over your belt buckle, capillaries broken in your
nose from too much drinking for too many years, hair
falling out of your head prematurely (as if there’s ever a
right time for your hair to start dropping from your skull
like you’re a goddamned chemo patient), teeth yellowed
from the Camel Filters, a strained marriage, and now this.

        Now this.

        You smile, staring across the big oak desk to Gary.
Your skin feels oily with a thin layer of sweat. The
armpits of your shirt (yellowed by the aluminum in your
antiperspirant) are soaked through, and you stink of your
own garlicky odor.

        You can remember when your wife used to tell you
that she loved your stink. When she would lick the sweat from
your chest and neck and face, nibble at your ear. Bite your
nipple the way you like. Now when you have sex it’s just a
quiet exercise in obligatory motion. She spreads her legs
and you put it in and you both quietly concentrate on
getting you to come as quickly as possible, so that you can
both roll over, and, back to back, get some sleep.

        You still love her. You still wish things could be
turned back to the way they were. She’s still the only
woman you ever gave a damn about. With the exception of
your mother, but that cunt proved unworthy of love in the end,
didn’t she? You still love her. But maybe she doesn’t
love you anymore. You wonder sometimes. Like when you go
out to dinner and she stares off into the distance, and you
follow her gaze, and she’s eyeing that well-built waiter
longingly.

        And now this.

        “But Gary,” you say. But that’s not quite right.

        “Gary.” That either.

        “You miserable fuck,” you say. And that feels just a
little bit closer to being right.

        “You miserable fucking piece of shit.” Bull’s-eye.
“I’ve worked here for seventeen years. Since I was a kid.
You can’t just fire someone who’s been working here for
seventeen years.”

        Gary grins at you.

        “I’ve never liked you,” he says. “But it wasn’t my
decision. Your work has suffered. Clients have left and
cited you specifically as the reason. You’ve become a
liability. And yes I can fire you. It’s my job to fire you.
And because you’re you, I also happen to be enjoying it.
You,” he says, “are fired. Have your things cleared out by
the end of the week.”

        What he does next is the reason the police will be
showing up in thirty minutes.

        What he does next is the thing that sends you over his
desk, knocking all the paperwork from its flat surface.

        What he does next is this:

        Action:

        He crosses his arms smugly, leans back in his three
hundred dollar ergonomic black leather chair, and says,
“But in the meantime, make yourself useful and get me a cup
of coffee. Two sugars. Lots of cream.”

        Reaction:

        You jump out of your chair, clawing over the desk,
like a beast, kicking his paperwork to the floor, and once
over the desk, you tackle him, knocking him backwards in
his goddamned chair, and with him on his back, you grab the
sides of his head by his hair, and using his hair as
handles, you bang his head against the floor again and
again and again and again.

        And Gary squeals.

        “Where’s your smug grin now, motherfucker?”

        And little flecks of your spittle splatter him in the
face and glisten on his skin.

        “Where’s your smug grin now?”

        Gary doesn’t answer.

        He’s too busy squealing like a pig at the slaughter.
What Gary didn’t realize until right now was that a pig at
the trough is almost always just getting fattened up for
the hook and the knife.

        You bet he knows what’s up now.

        “Do you know what's up now, Gary? Do you?” And you bang
his head against the floor again, pull it off, and ready
yourself for another slam.

        You stop yourself when you see the puddle of blood
forming beneath his head.

        And now this.

        “Do you wish to press charges?”

        He’s talking to Gary, who’s sitting on the steps
outside the building. Gary, who is holding a piece of gauze
against the swollen and lacerated back of his fucking pig
skull. Gary, who up till right this instant, was staring
down at his shoes.

        Gary looks up, and looks from you to the cop, and he
says, “No. I just want him out. Today. Now. I want you to
escort him into the building, let him collect his shit, and
make sure he leaves the premises. That’s what I want.”

        Then Gary turns to look at you.

        “You crossed the line this time.”

        You nod.

        “I guess I did.”

        “You’re lucky I’m not pressing charges.”

        “You’re lucky I stopped pounding your skull against
the floor when I did. I could have had you eating baby food
and drooling onto a bib for the rest of your life.”

        “Get him out of my face!”

        The cop grabs you by the arm and says,

        “Come on.”

        You walk into the building side by side.

        You never would have guessed before today that
seventeen years of work could fit into two cardboard boxes.

        It doesn’t hit you for real (like a fist to the gut)
till you merge onto the Hollywood Freeway, headed north,
and sit behind a Coca-Cola truck in your white Celica,
moving slowly toward the Valley, where you and the wife
live in a small rented house packed to the ceiling with
cheap Ikea furniture.

        The Coca-Cola truck spits black smoke at you, stinking
of asphyxiation and death, as you sit in the heat with your
window rolled down and your left arm resting on the white
metal of the door, and you think to yourself:

        I don’t have a job.

        And there it is.

        Five words.

        All of them just one syllable long.

        You’re fucked.

        You’ve been hanging on by a very thin string for a
very long time, and now that string has snapped, and you’re
free falling. You’re just fucking falling, down and down
and down, and very soon you’ll hit bottom.

        And what a laugh that is.

        Hit bottom.

        Who knew you could fall down from the floor?

        A horn.

        “Stay in your own fucking lane!”

        You look up to find that you’ve drifted left, into
another lane of traffic, and you straighten out.

        The car you almost hit zips ahead, throwing a voice
out the window before it goes:

        “Goddamned idiot.”

        You loosen your tie.

        Light a cigarette.

        Shift down from second to first and roll through rush-
hour traffic at twelve miles an hour.

        What the fuck are you gonna do now?

        It’s Friday, and come Monday you have no job to go to.
Your wife will probably notice the fact that you’re still
at home when nine a.m. rolls around Monday morning, and
she’s gonna expect some kind of explanation.

        You can’t tell her you lost your job.

        You have to tell her you lost your job.

        You have to tell her.

        You know that.

        You know that if you tell your wife that you lost your
job she will leave you. She’s been thinking about it for a
while. You overheard her talking with her sister, the cunt,
on the phone almost a month ago. “He comes home and he’s
grouchy and he just takes off his tie and throws it on the
bed and stumbles to the fridge and grabs a beer and he
doesn’t want to talk about anything he just sits there and
stares at the tv and it doesn’t even matter if the fucking
thing is turned off he’ll just stare at his own reflection
and he can do it for hours he just sits there in silence
and sucks his beer like it’s mother’s milk and then when
dinner is ready he eats it and he has another beer and he
brushes his teeth and goes to bed and we don’t make love
like we used to we hardly do anything that we used to it’s
just so monotonous and sad and I get loneliest when he’s
home because even though his body’s right there I feel so
far away from him that I get cold inside and I’m just not
happy and I’m thinking of leaving.”

        For almost a week after that you tried to make her
happy. You brought her a dozen roses home from the grocery
store. Red roses. Fifteen dollars. You brought her home a
Hallmark card, and you even wrote a sweet little note
inside. When you had sex that Friday you held off coming as
long as you could, sweating your fat ass off, and tried to
make her come before you finally released.

        You tried so hard.

        And she accused you of cheating.

        Said your behavior was suspicious.

        Unusual.

        You just can’t seem to do anything right.

        You want to do everything right.

        The thought of losing your wife, the only woman who
you ever loved (mother excluded, the cunt) just makes your
guts tighten inside of you, makes your head ache, makes
your mouth go dry, makes your blood tingle and your teeth
itch and your heart go cold.

        It gives you such a fear.

        You’ve been holding off the inevitable for a long time
and now it’s finally going to happen.

        You’re going to go home and tell her you lost your
job, because there’s nothing else to do, and she’s going to
say it’s okay, you’ll find another job, honey, and try to
support your efforts and stand by you -- she’ll do that
because she’s a good woman, even if she has stopped loving
you -- and this will go on for a month, maybe two months,
but when after that time has gone by and you still haven’t
found a job, and you won’t, the economy what it is, the Los
Angeles job market what it is, she’ll finally pack her bags
and leave. She’s a good woman, but she’s a coward, so she
may wait till you’re out at a job interview before leaving
you. A note is easier than having to say the words out
loud.

        You’ll come home and she’ll be gone and you won’t even
be able to blame her, to get upset with her. You’ll just
nod your head and you’ll mumble to yourself,

        “She finally did it.”

        That’s what’s gonna happen.

        She’ll finally do it.

        She’ll finally do what she told her sister she was
thinking about back when you had a job.

        And you’ll come home and find the note.

        And even though you knew it was coming you’ll be
ruined. Destroyed.

        And you’ll walk to the kitchen with the note in your
shaking right hand and tears dripping down your face, and
you’ll open the liquor cabinet and grab the first bottle
your hand touches, pin the booze on the alcoholic, and
you’ll drink that bottle, and you’ll cry, and you might be
young but, fuck, you’re life will be all over now.

        Done.

        That’s what’s gonna happen.

        You idiot.

        You complete failure of a human being.

        You waste of skin.

        You waste of bones and hair and space and teeth and
eyes and life.

        Your Celica simply sits motionless in the driveway of
your small rented house, and you sit motionless inside it,
telling yourself what you think of yourself.

        You lean your head back and listen to the radio. Some
song you’ve never heard before. You listen to it and you
think of what will happen when you go in there and tell
your wife you lost your job.

        You want to sit here forever, listening to the radio
and avoiding the house.

        Avoiding your wife.

        Unfortunately she comes to you.

        She opens the front door and peeks out to see what
that noise she heard was. That noise she heard was and
still is the engine in your Celica turning over.

        You see her and kill the engine and step from the car.

        She says, “What were you doing in there?”

        “Listening to the radio.”

        “Good song?”

        “Not particularly.”

        “Oh.”

        You smile at her sadly. You say, “I just needed some
time to myself. You look beautiful.”

        And the truth is, she does look beautiful. To you.
She’s certainly no idealization. Not the apotheosis of
beautiful woman. But she’s beautiful all the same. Even the
things that people might consider flaws. Her somewhat saggy
breasts. The scar behind her left ear. Those are things
that identify her as her and you love them, even if another
might not. You find them beautiful.

        They’re her.

        Together, the both of you walk toward the front door,
and she says,

        “You seem … different. Is something the matter?”

        You say, “No.”

        “Have a bad day?”

        “I,” you say.

        But you don’t continue. The words are like fishbones
in your throat, and they catch there and you can’t get the
words out. You simply cannot get the words out.

        You can’t stand the thought of seeing her face drop.

        Seeing the disappointment in her eyes.

        Seeing her mouth open to ask what he did wrong this time.

        Seeing the reality of their lack of money hit her.

        Seeing the worry lines crease her forehead.

        Seeing her try to collect herself and be strong.

        You can’t do it.

        Not right now.

        Not like this.

        It’s Friday. It’s early in the weekend and you can’t
ruin the entire weekend before it’s even begun by telling
her this. You’ll still be unemployed come Sunday. You can
tell her then. There’s no reason to run to your own defeat.

        “You what?” she says.

        “I’m just tired. It’s been a long week.”

        You step into the house and slam the door shut behind
you, clicking the deadbolt into place. As if that deadbolt
can hold the truth out.

        Who knows, maybe it can.

        After dinner, you stumble to the bathroom and strip
off your Docker’s and your button-up and your tank top and
your boxer shorts, and you stare at yourself in the mirror.

        Look at you.

        This is what you have become.

        Your skin is white and lumpy.

        You have little dots of acne in odd spots.

        Your penis dangles between your legs, three inches and
soft and cold against your left leg, sprouting from a brown
patch of course pubic hair.

        You walk to the bathtub and turn on the water, and
begin to step into the tub and draw the shower curtain back
when everything that happened today finally hits your
stomach, and you step back out of the tub and turn off the
water and sit on the cold toilet seat, which pulls out
goose pimples on your ass, and the contents of your stomach
snake out of you and into the bowl.

        You lean forward, resting your arms on your thighs,
dipping your head down between your legs, and you let it
happen. Let the stomach cramps roll through you, forcing
the contents from within.

        Sweat beads on your forehead, rolls down your face,
drips from your nose. You feel hot and disgusting. And
still the cramps roll through you, and still you let it
happen. You’ve no choice.

        And you think to yourself:

        This is what you have become.