THE BUILDINGS IN NEW YORK were like the crystal shards in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude: they all looked the same till you picked one out and slid it in its proper slot; then all kinds of coolness happened.
On the thirty-seventh floor of the Nonrich Corporation, William Fruehoff, trusted Buford leftenant, unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis, and masturbated furiously. Most everybody had already gone home, but if a cleaning lady happened to walk in, so much the better. One of the many benefits of being William Fruehoff and speaking fluent Spanish was the ability to point out deportation protocols in great detail.
No better head than desperate to stay in the country head, provided he picked the meek ones, and William Fruehoff had the knack for understanding the inner mechanisms that made people meek.
The meek shall inherit the jizz.
Out his window: Rockefeller Plaza in the sunset. In his hand: his dick. The lights were off in his office and the door was closed.
The skyline of New York demanded seed. Every building was a dick of supreme power way beyond simple phallic theory. New York City—and not anyplace else on earth—was the new Olympus, and when Fruehoff finished off his creative round he immediately set out to prove it.
There were thirty-seven reality shows on fifteen networks flipping the Nielsens over and spreading their buttcheeks on a nightly basis. Morning shows and local news devoted entire segments gushing over whatever their network aired the night before. Money rolled in like porn.
Fruehoff, after wiping and zipping, made a note to add Office Politics to the production mill, a reality series about after-hours janitorial workers in one of Miami’s swankiest office towers. The idea had come just eight seconds ago.
Nonrich owned Big Trick Smokes, the outrageously flavored smoke of extreme sporting; Nonrich owned The Goal: America’s Center for Tobacco Reduction.
Slavery. Selective poverty, famine, disease. Every ism under the sun ran off corporate juice. People thought roaches would be all that was left after the Big One, but corporations would be the ones around to train those roaches in rewarding careers.
Fruehoff was high up enough to never have to see the face of an hourly employee unless he chose to. His position was a linch pin, a position he particularly loved. Assholes, by nature, wanted to be at the very top, which was the best place to keep them relatively out of the way. Linchpins, though, were protected by those very aware tops and sucked off by the even more aware bottoms.
He made a note on his tablet for oral sex by Thursday at the latest.
It would take two phone calls to get top advertiser dollars for the run of the unproduced Office Politics. Nonrich would grow another tic. Fruehoff’s home Upstate would be assured another effective layer of insulation. The world would continue apace.
Reality TV worked things out with a simple algebraic equation: actors cost money…so fuck actors. A camera crew, some wannabees and the right marketing and you’d get people to watch anything.
Fuck California, he thought.
Fuck vampires.
He checked his tablet again.
Oh, yeah, fuck all things Thoom and Thoomish.
Remembering those three things was as important as facing the right way toward Mecca.
Upper echelons were still scrambling in the aftermath of the huge Colorado explosion. That had been a linchpin lab and the fuckers had not only found it but destroyed it.
Whether it was Jetstream fuckers or Thoom fuckers didn’t matter to him. Too many damn factions to keep track of anyway. By the time he fell asleep every night it was always him against the world anyway, and the world existed solely to be fucked in all the right places.
Face Mecca again.
Not that he planned on getting directly involved, but William Fruehoff felt a definite hardness to the air outside his office, a major league boner signaling the approach of major coitus.
He left a voice mail for Jones in Stats.
“Jones, can I get the demographics for next week’s debuts by nine-fifteen tomorrow with earnings projections and expected allocations? Oh, and I’d expect you might want to do that up as a presentation, some animation and sound somewhere and sneak some ‘subliminal’ sex images in there for the board, they get a kick out of that, loved the ones from last week, I could tell. Don’t know where you got those images of the First Lady. Top notch. We’ll be having lunch some day,” he said, adding the properly-appreciative laugh. “While you’re at it, if you can get word to somebody that I’m going to need several trays of hot dogs and doughnuts during lunch tomorrow, the sloppy ones from that skinny guy in the Park off Eighty-fifth, the one near the precinct. Thanks. Drinks go without saying.”
He spun from the window to poke at items on his desk. It wasn’t too late to actually get some work done, and having relieved several minutes’ worth of tension, he was prepared to settle down and get to it.
Except he didn’t get to it.
He spun again in that plush leather chair to face the windows where New York waited for him to decide what to do with it, and he wondered: where in the world was Daniel W. Pasck, a.k.a., the False Prophet Buford M. Bone? It was Fruehoff’s turn to know, and in Fruehoff’s world it truly did not pay to not have an answer to that.