Also by M.T. Bass
Go to In the Black Page at mtbass.net
“In the Black is Ayn Rand on drugs” ~John Galt
The decade you love to hate…or hate to love. If any time period in American history deserves the Catch-22 treatment, it is the Sixties:
Kansas City, 1965 — Y.T. Erp, Jr. can't wait to leave for college at the University of California, Berkeley to escape not only the work, but especially all the phlegm-brained idiots at his father's aerospace company. Leaving behind a pregnant auburn-haired cheerleader, a sensuous red-headed siren plotting to usurp his familial ties, and his two best friends — one who ends up in Vietnam and the other in the Weather Underground — his "trip" on the wild side of the Generation Gap takes him from the psychedelic scene of Haight-Ashbury to the F.B.I.'s Ten Most Wanted list. Meanwhile, his father is consumed by the task of managing his unmanageable team in the quest to help fulfill a President's challenge to "land a man on the moon."
***~~~***
Chapter 1 — The Memo
M E M O R A N D U M
January 4, 1965
TO: ALL DEPARTMENT HEADS
FM: Y.T. ERP, SR.
From this time forward, all right-handed people will be left-handed. Left-handed personnel will assume right-handedness.
Ambidextrous persons will be dealt with individually.
Sincerely,
Y.T. ERP, SR., PRESIDENT
ERP INDUSTRIES, INC.
YTE/www
***~~~***
“Good morning, Mr. Rangely.”
“Hi, Dirk.”
“Hello, Mr. Rangely.”
“Good, er, ah…”
Like those born into the species Homo politicus, Dirk Rangely, Vice-President/Marketing, had come into this world with the innate understanding that the “Common Folk”—no matter how repulsive or disgusting they were—needed constant attention and frequent hand-holding, for they formed the true basis for power with a capital ‘P’. On their broad and often sweaty shoulders were laid party platforms, legislative initiatives, foreign policies and economic reforms. At Erp Industries, Inc., the “Little Guys” ultimately did the real work that got product built and shipped, triggering the invoices that generated the company’s income out of which Dirk Rangely drew his handsome salary and against which he filed his excessive expense reports. This concept of practical/materialistic/exploitive reverence for the “Little Guys” was by now so ingrained into Dirk Rangely that it had become encoded in his DNA molecules to curse future generations of Rangelys like other families were cursed with Huntington’s Chorea or Dwarfism.
Dirk Rangely’s peculiar genetic trait manifested itself as his tall, trim figure glided effortlessly—Dirk Rangely rarely engaged in any activity actually requiring effort—through the manufacturing plant on his self-appointed mission to greet every person he saw in his quick, New England accent with the phrase: ‘Hi-there-how-are-you-today, [insert name here if known]’. He even encouraged the workers to call him by his first name, though many were reluctant to do so, more out of respect for his position than out of respect for Dirk Rangely himself. This canned phrase had evolved during his lifetime into a completely reflexive response to external stimuli, over which he could exercise no control and into which he could inject no feeling. It, too, was undoubtedly DNA encoded, and Dirk brimmed with pride each time he heard the first words out of his children’s mouths: “Hi-there-how-are-you-today?”
This particular January morning, though, Dirk Rangely seemed to walk through the plant in a daze, mumbling incoherently to himself, “H-the-ho-r-yo-toda…”
He was so curiously oblivious to the friendly, grass-roots hellos he so consciously cultivated that a buzz of whispered conversation followed in his wake like the wind through the dry, summer grass of Kansas prairies. Mort Mortenstein, Vice-President/Finance, noticed that those distant horizons upon which Dirk Rangely usually fixed his steely, Marketing gaze were evidently clouded. Mort Mortenstein clenched hard on his pipe, baring his teeth in a hungry grin.
“So, have you read the latest Memo?” Mort Mortenstein probed cautiously as he met Dirk Rangely halfway down the hall at the drinking fountain. Neither he nor Dirk Rangely noticed the young man bent over the drinking fountain sucking at the loop of cool water.
“Memo??!!” Dirk Rangely blurted out in anguished surprise, betraying the root of his sullen mood. Dirk Rangely had not actually read Y.T. Erp, Sr.’s latest memo, but he had eavesdropped on two people discussing its potential ramifications in the company cafeteria, and had quivered with horror at each of their envisioned scenarios. He carefully surveyed Mort Mortenstein’s shorter, pudgier body and the three-piece suit that strained in places to contain it, momentarily awed at this self-inflated accountant’s ability to detect another person’s open psychological wound and stick his finger directly into it. “Oh, er, sure—of course. You, Mort?”
“I most certainly did,” answered Mort Mortenstein earnestly. He pressed his advantage. “Do you think it will help our position in the marketplace?”
“Huh? Who the hell can tell, Mort?” Dirk Rangely said, gingerly passing his hand over the top of his head covered with thick, yet restrainedly curled, salt-and-pepper hair. “I’m beginning to worry about the Old Man and his cryptic memos.”
“He works in mysterious ways, to be sure,” Mort Mortenstein said, adjusting his ever-present, yet never lit pipe from the right side of his mouth to the left. “But let’s not forget his New Year’s Memo of 1957. He quite literally saved the company.”
“Well, I’m not really that worried about the Old Man,” hedged Dirk Rangely, suddenly sensing danger. After all, Mort Mortenstein’s department was in charge of Payroll with a capital ‘P’.
“A stroke of genius to sell size three-sixty O-rings as Hula Hoops after that Navy contract went down the tubes.” Mort Mortenstein chuckled around the stem of his pipe, which added sinister overtones to his laugh. “The books never looked so good—as black as spades.”
“Did I say worried? Actually, that was a poor choice of words,” Dirk Rangely squirmed.
“Then, there was the Memo of 1958.” Mort Mortenstein was relentless. He ground his teeth on the stem of his pipe, causing the hairs on the back of Dirk Rangely’s neck to rise. “We called it the Sputnik Memo. Now, that was a memo.”
“Of course, maybe the Old Man has been under a lot of pressure lately.” Dirk Rangely glanced feverishly up and down the hall for escape from this conversation with Mort Mortenstein. He might have been able to bow out by taking a drink of water, but that idiot was there, apparently trying to drain the Missouri River single-handedly.
“And then, the Memo of 1964,” Mort Mortenstein intoned softly. He took the pipe from his mouth and pointed the stem directly at Dirk Rangely’s heart like a deadly weapon. “I shed a bitter tear. We all did.”
“I’ll bet lawyers are behind all of this right-hand/left-hand stuff.” Tiny beads of sweat began to form on Dirk Rangely’s upper lip. “Or it could be Engineering.”
“Well, Dirk, I’d love to stand here and shoot the breeze all day long with you, but I’ve got numbers to crunch.” Mort Mortenstein stuffed his pipe back into his mouth and smiled savagely, pleased with himself at so unnerving a fellow executive. He walked past Dirk Rangely, giving him a hearty slap on the shoulder. Dirk Rangely thought he heard Mort Mortenstein chuckling to himself as he walked back to his office in Accounting. “And the Memo of 1960—what a sense of humor. What a sense of humor!”
“You know, the Company benefit plan does not cover accidental drownings in a God damned water fountain,” Dirk Rangely barked at the youth still hunched over the drinking fountain. When the boy stood up and turned around, Dirk Rangely found himself face-to-face with Y.T. Erp, Jr. It was quickly becoming one of those days. “Christ Almighty—just joking, son—just joking. You know, a joke, eh? So, how about that Mort? What a character, eh? Of course, how much can you say about a man whose favorite Marx brother is Zeppo?”
Y.T., Jr. shrugged his shoulders.
“So, anyway, you’re still around, eh?” Dirk Rangely put his arm around Y.T., Jr.’s shoulders and began walking down the hall, pulling the teenager along with him. “Are you down on the shipping dock still?”
“No, sir. I’m working maintenance with the Sugarman,” Y.T., Jr. said respectfully, while at the same time eying Dirk Rangely with suspicion.
“Oh yes, that’s right. That’s right. I recall now, but, hey, shouldn’t you be back at old Harry Truman High?”
“I took an early graduation so that I can start college sooner. Classes don’t start until the twenty-fifth, so I’m putting in a few more weeks here at work for extra spending money.”
“College, eh? Ah, yes.” Dirk Rangely’s eyes suddenly focused far down the hall at nothing in particular. Y.T., Jr. was amazed at how glassy Dirk Rangely’s eyes had become on cue and wondered if this man had ever been allowed to attend any institute of higher education anywhere. “Well, believe me, the days you spend haunting those ivy-covered halls will be the best you’ll ever know. So, which university will you be attending?”
“University of California at Berkeley.”
Dirk Rangely stopped dead in his tracks, knowing that Y.T., Sr. had been a Harvard Man after which he had been a Navy Man (not Annapolis either?) before he became the Old Man, and wondered what to make of this apparent act of disrespect and rebellion on the part of the younger Erp. Dirk Rangely vaguely recalled news reports a few months back concerning students in California stirring up trouble over something typically inane like Civil Rights or Free Speech. If he wasn’t careful, he could get sucked into the middle of an Erp family civil war right there and then. This day had certainly been fraught with danger—first the Memo, then Mort Mortenstein and now this. Dirk Rangely hoped that it was not portentous of the rest of the year to come. Rising to the occasion, he smiled down at Y.T., Jr. and said as sincerely as he could, “Well, I’d love to stand here and shoot the breeze all day long with you, but I’ve got numbers—I’ve got a million and one things to do. Remember what I said, college days will be the best days you’ll ever have,” Dirk Rangely smirked and gave Y.T., Jr. a hearty slap on the shoulder. As he began walking down the hall, he called back to Y.T., Jr., “Good luck to you.” And then under his breath he muttered, “You’ll need it.”
“Good morning, Mr. Rangely,” a secretary said as she passed Dirk Rangely in the hall.
“Hi-there-how-are-you-today, Margaret?” Dirk Rangely responded like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
Y.T., Jr. watched Dirk Rangely say hello to everyone he passed in exactly the same way. He wondered if Berkeley, California, would be far enough from Kansas City and if January twenty-fifth would come soon enough to get him the hell away from the abundance of phlegm-brains surrounding him before they drove him crazy. Y.T., Jr. turned around and began walking in the direction opposite to the one in which Dirk Rangely had been leading him—in the direction he had been originally going—towards the Engineering Department.
“Damn!” Dirk Rangely exclaimed as he slammed the door to his office shut. “How could I have made such a mistake? How could I have let myself be so cornered—and by all people, cornered by Mort? And then! Then, getting ambushed by Little Erp like that!” Dirk Rangely paced furiously and began to soliloquize to the snarling Siberian tiger’s head mounted on the wall behind his desk that he had gotten for a song at a church rummage sale to raise money for Christian Missionary work in Africa after bartering the poor priest insensible and embarrassing his wife into a severe case of hives. “What dark hours are these from which we must forge our days? What troubled waters are these we must navigate on our jour—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Rangely,” said Jo Ann, Dirk Rangely’s secretary, over the intercom into his office.
“Yes—yes, what is it?” Dirk Rangely exclaimed breathlessly, spinning around on his heels to face Jo Ann’s voice as if she were actually in the room.
“Arthur Needleman on line three.”
“I’m in a God damned meeting as far as Needleman is concerned,” Dirk Rangely snapped at the little green box on his desk.
“Yes, sir,” the box responded with Jo Ann’s voice, then stopped hissing.
“This can’t be happening to me—I can’t let this happen to me. Am I losing my edge? I can’t let this happen,” Dirk Rangely muttered to himself. He began pacing his office again like a caged animal. He now ignored the tiger’s head as he became absorbed in his favorite worry: that he was losing his ‘edge’. Dirk Rangely loved to liken himself to a saber, the cutting edge of Erp Industries, Inc., and to keep himself sharp, he constantly ran himself over the whetstone of his past failures and indiscretions. “Imagine, talking to Mort—to Mort! That sniveling bean-counter! And then, on top of that, telling him what I was thinking, not what I wanted him to think that I was thinking. And about the Old Man no less! I can’t let this happen. Jesus H. Christ, I’m getting senile like the Old Man. I can’t let that happen until I’m the Old Man, and then it will be my unalienable right to get senile if I damn well see fit to do so. I will have earned it by then. But a senile Vice-President of Marketing, that won’t do—no, that just will not do at all. It wouldn’t be tolerated. Hmmm, but what if the Old Man really is getting senile? I might have to act senile to prove to the senile Old Man that I am capable of moving up into the Big Office. But at the same time, I can’t really get senile, or I wouldn’t be sane enough to run Erp Industries. Of course, if I did get senile accidentally, it would be the perfect excuse to cover anything up. I’ll have to stay sharp and develop a sound stratagem for this.”
Dirk Rangely began to feel a faint throbbing at his temples. The time arrived for decisive action. He checked his watch, but it was only nine-thirty in the morning, too early to head down to Dante’s for some attitude lubrication with the usual 10W40 Tanqueray martinis. Dirk Rangely paced around behind his desk and sat down. He opened the top right-hand drawer to get out a packet of Alka-Seltzers. He broke two tablets in half. He worked up a mouth full of saliva and dissolved the halves one at a time in his mouth. The effervescent action against the roof of his mouth made him feel giddy. When he had finished, Dirk Rangely sat up and surveyed the fine oak grain of his desk top.
“What to do what to do what to do,” Dirk Rangely sang to himself softly, feeling much relieved that he had banished a troublesome headache and the irksome memory of his conversation with Mort Mortenstein from his mind in one fell swoop. But soon he became distressed when he discovered his finger aimlessly circling a knot in the grain of his desk top. His desk was so neat, while everyone else’s was cluttered with reports, recommendations, statistical charts, P & L Statements, Inventory Control Sheets, Production Run Projections, Production Run Summaries, Daily Totals, Weekly Totals, Monthly Totals, Year-to-date Totals, Supply Requisitions, Specifications, Drawings, Bills of Materials, Expense Vouchers, RFIs, RFPs, RFQs, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Document Change Notices, Document Documentation Notices, various memoranda, letters and who knows what else.
Anyone could look important and competent sitting at one of those desks, and Dirk Rangely wondered if, perhaps, for effect he should do something about the pathetically neat condition of his own desk top. It might not have been such a good idea to instruct Jo Ann to keep all that kind of—of—of stuff out of his office. He wondered what in the world she had done with it all. Maybe it was all crammed into the bottom drawer of that file cabinet out there by her desk that was always locked so that he could never open it up to see what she kept inside. Perhaps if he just asked her politely enough, Jo Ann would let him use some of that stuff to good effect whenever he needed a few props to enhance his aura of competence and efficiency—but no! Dirk Rangely pounded his desk top with his fist dramatically. He was no paper pusher. He was a top-level corporate strategist. Let all those other paper tigers wrestle with their reports and recommendations and whatevers, he had more important things to do.
“Right, Rudyard?” Dirk Rangely spun around and rhetorically asked the tiger’s head on the wall behind him. Dirk Rangely had occasional bouts with alliteration that Alka-Seltzer did not seem to relieve. He turned back to his desk and took a deep breath. On the other hand, he wavered; it wouldn’t be so bad to at least have a few pink telephone messages waiting for him that he could read with an exaggerated scowl on his face before crumpling them in his fist and tossing them into the nearest wastepaper basket in full view of everyone. Or even, if an occasional letter or Telex cable showed up in his in-basket—but no! Dirk Rangely shuddered at the dangerous tenor of his thoughts. He really was getting senile!
Letters and cables usually demanded responses and if there was anything worse than exposing one’s thoughts in conversations with people like Mort Mortenstein, who existed only for the chance to inflict some mortal injury on a fellow worker’s career, it was being irrevocably committed to some indefensibly stupid position or senile opinion in writing.
Dirk Rangely tried repeatedly to shrug off these troublesome thoughts, but his shoulders just got sore as he became more and more concerned about the nothing on his desk, and, considering how difficult it is to get nothing out of one’s system, Dirk Rangely’s stomach began construction again on an all-weather ulcer, despite the two Alka-Seltzers he had just taken. Dirk Rangely knew what he needed: a good, thorough leafing through a trade magazine, the only paper product he allowed into his office besides Kleenexes. Ah, there was something so magically relaxing about flipping each page and studying those soothing four-color vignettes of sleek jets, streaking sports cars and alluring females—the very stuff that full-blown daydreams are made of. But drat, no mail yet today. Dirk Rangely started drumming his fingers on his desk top faster and faster and faster, until they were literally galloping in place.
“What is the problem here? What is the problem what is the problem?” Dirk Rangely sang softly. Suddenly, he reined in his stampeding fingers. “That’s it! Of course! I’m spending too much time in the plant! What am I doing here anyway? I should be out on the road.” Dirk Rangely jumped up and ran over to the door. He pulled it open enthusiastically and called out to his secretary, “Jo Ann, book me on the early morning flight out to the coast. Drop everything and get it done right away.”
“Which coast?”
Dirk Rangely immediately slammed the door closed. “Damn insolent secretary! Why do they always have to be second guessing you?” He thought for a moment, then opened the door again. “Los Angeles. And call Needleman out there and tell him I’ll be out to discuss his forecast.”
“Yes, sir.” Jo Ann smiled.
Dirk Rangely could not be sure, but he thought he saw Jo Ann smile and wondered what it might have meant. No matter. He confidently slammed the door closed, taking comfort in the knowledge that decisive action had been taken and that a business trip was in the works. His spirits could not be dampened now, not even by the fact that he thoroughly despised Arthur Needleman, the West Coast Sales Manager, and often wondered seriously whether Needleman was not, in fact, an agent for the KGB, especially after that night he had gotten Dirk Rangely lost in Los Angeles’ heart of darkness with some dubious directions written out on a cocktail napkin.
Dirk Rangely went back to his desk and sat down to pause reflectively. There was no time like ‘estimated time en route’, he reflected. Dirk Rangely always felt “five miles closer to heaven” every time he sat strapped into a Boeing 707 window seat with a line of midget Tanqueray bottles at parade rest, an in-flight magazine filled with glossy daydreams, and a pair of headsets pouring out the insipid kind of music that so moved his very soul every time he rode an elevator. If only he could be a pilot himself, then his whole job would be to fly from one place to another. As it was now, whenever he got to wherever he was going, Dirk Rangely had to go to work. When he became the Old Man, he would certainly do something about that. Leaning back in his chair and crossing his feet up on top of his desk, he closed his eyes to muse about how things would be when he, Dirk Rangely, became the Old Man.
Suddenly, Dirk Rangely put his feet down and sat up straight. He searched through his desk drawers until he finally found an old, forgotten pad of blank paper. He took his Cross pen from his shirt pocket and, fingers trembling, slowly turned it so the point was exposed. He took a deep, deliberate breath. Dirk Rangely began writing his name, slowly and awkwardly, over and over and over again with his left hand. When he had filled the first page, he flipped it over and began again. It was no use, though. By the fifth page, his hand ached and Dirk Rangely still could not even decipher the twisted and tortured scribbles of his own name. He tossed down his Cross pen in disgust.
“Why can’t I just be right-handed, like I always have been?”
***~~~***