Out of Service

Gabe parked himself on the edge of the crusty table, smoking the life out of his last Marlboro.  He shook his head and leaned over to tamp the butt out in the ashtray, knocking a glass over and spilling it’s soured contents across the table.  “Damn.” he swore as he jumped up and grabbed a paper towel in the same motion.  The spoiled milk flowed across the table, where it was partially sucked up by a folded up section of newspaper.  “Not my Classifieds!”  He shook the quartered section of paper open, raining sour milk across the kitchen.  “What else!”  Slamming the paper down, he stalked out of the room, reflecting on the events of the past few hours.

* * * * *

“Sorry Gabe, I put it off as long as I could.”

“Seventeen years, Artie.  Seventeen years and I get this?” he waved the pink slip of paper at the window.  “Seventeen years— gone.  Not a thank you, not a nothing— gone!”  He crumpled the paper and threw the ball in the general direction of the trashcan.

“I held it off as long as I could, bud.  Top Shelf wanted it done two months ago, but I kept putting them off with project after project,” Artie looked disgustedly out of the third floor window.  “You know how it’s become, Gabe.”

“Yeh, I know.  Pretty Boy Top Shelvers and their goddamned affirmative action.”

The executive level of Barney and Sons had been under a lot of heat lately from the Feds to bring the growing company up to the new standards, ever since they had risen to the level of taking the once small consulting firm public.

“Consultants told them what was needed to stay above the line, and they did what had to be done,” Artie said with a sigh and not much conviction.

“Seventeen years, Artie.  I was employee number four, for god’s sake.  Number four.”

“I know.  I know.”  He reached to put a consoling hand on his friend’s shoulder, and was shrugged off almost as quickly.

“Damned quotas.  Whatever happened to the idea of keeping the best man for the job?”  Gabe swept his desk clean with one arm in a fit of example.

“Minorities and women,” his friend agreed.  “Be running everything soon.”

Gabe calmed himself, knowing that Artie had done what he could to forestall the inevitable.

“Got my own pink slip this morning.”  Artie turned for the door.

“Hey Artie—” Gabe stood, apoplectic and apologetic.

“Ah, don’t worry about it, bud.  I’ll be all right.  Hell, you’ll be all right too.”  Artie turned back and took the proffered hand, pumping it gregariously.

Gabe slapped his friend’s shoulder in the comradeship know only between two people through a shared misfortune.  “Good luck to you, Artie.  Good luck to us both.  Good luck to us all.”

* * * * *

Funny how a man’s life can be changed— can be turned upside down— in the span of one morning, Gabe reflected.  He scooped up the want ads section again, smoothing out the now-soiled page.  It was thin, he reflected— thinner than normal.  He sat at the end of the couch and propped his feet across to the love seat.  His eyes traveled down the column of jobs:  Consultants Wanted, Consulting Firm Hiring, Consultant Needed.  EOE, Minorities encouraged to apply.  This company is a firm supporter of Affirmative Action.  “Disgusting,” he grumbled to the coffee table as he leaned over to retrieve his pen and began scribbling notes into the column.

Picking up the phone, he hastily punched in the number that was listed with an ad for a Consulting position with the Federal Government.  After seven rings, he was greeted by an out-of-breath female voice.  “Folsom Post Office, Herron.”

“Hi, my name is Gabe Pinelli, I’m calling about your ad in the paper for a Consultant?”

After about five seconds of dead air, the gruff female voice asked, “Are you a veteran?”

“No, no I’m not a veteran.”

“Are you a member of an acknowledged minority group?” the brusque female voice fired back.

“I’m starting to think so,” Gabe answered disgustedly.

“What was that?” came the humorless response.

Sarcasm wasted here, humor likely as well.  “No ma’am, I’m not a member of a recognized minority group,” Gabe parroted back.

“Female?”

“Female?  No ma’am, not at last look.”

“We are only hiring members of the above-mentioned groups.  Try back in six months.”

“What?” Gabe said incredulously into the phone.  “What do you mean you’re only hiring from the—”

But the connection had been broken on the other end.  “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and then try again.  If you need assistance, hang up and then dial your operat—” Gabe slammed the phone into its cradle, rocking the small table with the force of his frustration.

“Damn.” he swore, feeling for his half-crushed pack of cigarettes in his front pocket.  “They can’t do that.  If I did that, I’d be censured for discrimination.”  He was ranting now to the empty room, his anger and frustration at his situation finally bubbling up out of him and spilling over into the real world.  It felt good… too good, in fact.  “I have to get myself under control,” he said aloud to his Zippo lighter as he lit his cigarette.  He hadn’t smoked in seven months, so he coughed around the first drag as if he were a teenager who had snuck out behind the bus barn back in middle school to try his first cigarette.  A Rite of Passage, both for smoking then and for being unemployed now.  Everyone goes through it, and everyone— well, nearly everyone— gets through it.

* * * * *

“Repent.  Save your own soul— now.  Jesus is coming— are you ready?  Are you ready, sir?”  The angry young black man thrust a flyer at Gabe.  Walnut Street was crowded with lunch people milling about like human cattle in the late spring sunshine.  Gabe tried to dodge out of the reach of the street corner prophet, but found that he had absolutely no clearance for the maneuver.  “Repent.  Save your soul before it’s too late.” The man thrust the tract into Gabe’s hand.

“My soul is just fine.” Gabe tried not to close his hand on the flyer, as if not taking possession of it could stave off the impending verbal scalding.  The man’s eyes lit up as if Gabe’s words had just stoked a fire behind them.

To his surprise, the man’s face took on a preternatural calm, and his voice was little more than a calm whisper when the words came.  “No, sir, it isn’t,” the man said conspiratorially, leaning in towards Gabe a little to closely for comfort.  “You’ve got problems, sir, and Jesus Christ the Lord can help you.”

He didn’t know why he bothered, but Gabe responded, “How can he help me?  Why would he want to help me?  Or you, for that matter?  Or anyone else on this God-forsaken planet?”  Thinking that this would end it, he mentally picked up his feet as if in preparation to be swept away by the swarming lunch crowd.

The man put his hand on the Gabe’s elbow, a gesture that he would have immediately taken offense to had any other person down here in the crowded center city district done it.  Surprisingly, he felt warmth coming from the man’s cleanly manicured hand, trickling into his arm and spreading upward.  It was a comforting feeling.  It was a warm— “Wha—?”   Gabe jerked his arm away, then immediately regretted the gesture as he saw the look in the other man’s eyes switch over from hope to frustration.

Ridiculously, he felt like apologizing.

The man spoke, breaking the uncomfortable moment with his philosophy.  “He does care, Gabe.  He cares about you, He cares about me, He cares about everyone.  And the good news is that He is coming back again— soon.  He wants us all to be ready.”  He said this last with such conviction that Gabe almost— almost— got sucked in.

“If He cares so much, why all of this?” he gestured around him at the swelled, bloated city.  Did he just call me Gabe?  “Why the poverty, why the crime, why the struggle?”  He personalized it— how did he know my name?  “Why have I been unemployed and forced to struggle for the past five months?  Why did I lose my job after seventeen years?  Why all that, Mr. Prophet?”  I never said my name.  Gabe felt his ire beginning to rise, and forced himself back under control.

“He’s testing us, Gabe.  He’s weeding out the good from the bad.  The chaff from the wheat.  He wants the strong ones— the ones that are strong in His faith.  You could be one of those, Gabe.  One of us.”

“Well, thanks but no thanks, pard'.  I’ve got enough problems right now without worrying about my soul.”  He did it again.  He called me Gabe.

“Ok, Gabe.  No pressure from me.  Do me a favor?  No, check that— do yourself a favor— read the tract, ok?  Just read the tract.”

Gabe smiled to himself.  If it would get rid of this person, he would say it.  “Ok, I’ll read it.”  He held the trifold leaflet up in front of him, as if to ward off the street prophet with his word.

The man smiled, and Gabe felt the cordiality from that gesture like he had no known rights to feel the warmth from a facial gesture, even from people he had known and cared about all of his life.  This man, he almost seemed— familiar.

“Oh, and Gabe?” the hand was on the elbow again, warming his arm as if by magic.

He did it again.  Gabe looked at the man one final time before being absorbed back into the crowd.  “Yes?”

The man’s smile broadened.  “When you get there, ask for Michael.  Michael. Got it?”

Gabe was disconcerted.  “Get where?” he asked.  But the street prophet— Michael, possibly— was already fading back into the crowd to become one with the crush of humanity that flocked the city streets like blood through an artery. Gabe mentally lifted his feet again, this time allowing himself to be led away down the street, his own face melting into obscurity as he walked towards the train station.  He knew my name.

Gabe shivered involuntarily as he made his way to one of the unoccupied benches that ringed Rittenhouse Square.  He looked around him and thought it odd that he would find such a bench here in the park, at lunchtime, on such a beautiful day.  After months of being cooped up inside against the nasty Philadelphia winter, people usually flocked outside at lunchtime at the first hint of a break in the weather.  And yet here was an empty bench.

He sat down, making himself comfortable in spite of his encroaching irritation at his encounter with the street prophet he thought might be named Michael.  Looking around to see if anyone was watching him, he self-consciously held the religious tract up and looked at the front cover of the trifold paper.

Pale blue in color, the hue of a cloudless spring sky, the front page of the tract seemed soothing, almost purposefully calming.  It evoked a sense of inner peace that he was powerless to stop.  He sighed, looking more closely at it, squinting to read the tiny letters that were printed in a meticulous script font at the very bottom of the page.  With great effort, he read:  “My Dear Gabe, please go to the bus station at 3:00 today and take the Number Seven bus.  We do love you.”  He squinted harder.  It was signed, “Warmly, Michael.”

Gabe’s hands dropped to his lap, clutching the pamphlet like a life preserver.  He set the pamphlet gingerly on the bench beside him and rubbed his eyes hard, causing them to sting and tear.  How the hell did he do this?  He looked at the tract next to him like it had just spoken to him.  He picked it up and opened it.  He had to blink twice at what he saw.

On the first fold of the tract was a picture.  He examined it objectively and saw that it was a fine quality reproduction, obviously done on a top-of-the-line color laser.  As he studied the print more subjectively, he saw that he was looking at a picture of a black man talking to a white man on a busy street corner.  He caught his breath as he realized that he was looking at the street prophet speaking to him.

Gabe dropped the leaflet as if it had just become a searing, icy-cold missive. He sat a moment, his mind whirling.  Logic gradually took control, and he came to the conclusion that the prophet must have had a photographer set up across the street to lend a sense of the personal and the miraculous to the experience.

Ok, Einstein, Gabe thought.  How’d he get the reproduction to the prophet so quickly, and without being noticed?  He didn’t, of course.  Gabe tried to visualize his meeting with the prophet, realizing that at no point did either of them make any contact with anyone else.

What’s more, the prophet had pushed the tract into his hand when he had first met him.

Gabe looked down at the next page of the tract.  There in clear, living color was a picture of a man sitting on a bench looking at a trifold tract.  It registered somewhere in one of the deeper recesses of his mind that the man on the bench was not dressed exactly like he was— that the man on the bench was him.  Morosely, he wondered if he peered hard enough at the picture if he could see a man on a bench reading a tract on the picture of the tract in the hands of the man on the bench, and so on to infinity, or at least to as small as his eyes could see.

He peered at the next page, which showed the man walking up Ninth Street, stopping for a hotdog at the Terminal Market.  His stomach growled as it registered in his head that he was indeed hungry.

The next page showed the man at the bus terminal, stepping onto an odd-looking bus, market with the “Number 7” and, much to Gabe’s consternation, the ominous words “Out-of-Service.”

He turned the tract over, not sure what he would find, but knowing that he had to see.  It was colored the same sky blue color as the very front page; only, there was no writing.

Gabe sighed, closing the tract and setting it on the bench beside him like it was an alien thing.  So much for free will. “Might as well follow my destiny and see where it takes me,” he said aloud to the pigeons that clamored for his attention at his feet.  “You’re cooing at the wrong person, pigeons.  I certainly have nothing to offer.”

He picked up the tract and stood, starting across the street in the direction of the Terminal Market.  I am kind of hungry.  He fingered the dollar bills he had stuffed into his pocket earlier that morning.  He had put them there for his return token on the subway, but now he figured that perhaps his destiny would take care of that, perhaps he wouldn’t need a return trip.

He had heard from several people throughout his adult life of how people who give up their will to God, or Destiny, or Whatever— have an immense sense of relief in the handing over of their problems to a higher power.  He supposed that was what he was feeling.

Of course it was a relief to set the bricks that life had stacked upon your back down, even if it was just a mental game he might be playing with himself.  He smiled to himself as he felt the warm tide of relief wash over him.

He got the hotdog with the last of his money.  Riding his wave of relief, he dropped the change into the cup of a blind homeless woman who was sitting propped up against the wall of the Terminal.  The coins made a resounding jingle as it hit the empty bottom of the cup.  Gabe was immediately sorry he did not have more money to help this lady out.

He arrived at the bus station just as he finished the hotdog, wiping his face with the paper napkin he had grabbed from the vendor.  He walked around to the back of the loading platforms to search for the Number 7 Out-of-Service bus.

He looked at the empty stalls that lined the back of the bus station.  He saw neither a bus nor anyone he could ask.  He began to chide himself for being so gullible; thinking perhaps the stresses of recent days had begun to have a serious mental health side effect on his mind.

Perhaps?  No perhaps about it— it was causing him to see and hear things that just weren’t there to be seen and heard: like a black street prophet with a mysterious, magical tract that showed him his own past, present, and future with all the clarity of a news program.

He smiled to himself.  Take it easy there, Gabe.  You’ll find a job soon, and all will be well.  He chuckled out loud, and he was startled by the sound that met his ear, an almost maniacal twitter of nervous giggling.  He headed off towards the bathroom to wash his hands and face, hoping to sober a bit to the reality of his situation.

“That’s better,” he said to his own reflection in the cracked mirror as water dribbled down his face.  “Much better.”  He reached out blindly and groped for the towel dispenser, water running into his eyes.  He thought he had heard the creak of the door open as he wiped them free of water.  So relieved was he at that moment, that he did not look to see who had entered the small bathroom.

When he did look up, his eyes were immediately drawn and locked to the stained white cover of the paper towel holder, where someone had scrawled graffiti in large blue letters: “It’s ok Gabe.  We love you.”

Gabe blinked and looked again at the graffiti.  Cold fingers rode up his spine as his arms broke out in goose flesh.

Just then, he heard the unmistakable thunder of a bus pulling into the station outside.  Gabe didn’t know how he knew— didn’t want to know how he knew— but he did know that the bus that had just pulled in to the station was the Number 7 bus.  Out-of-Service, of course.  He looked at his watch, and it informed him noncommittally that it was straight up three o’clock.

Somewhere over the past couple of minutes, Gabe had developed one monster of a headache.  He rubbed his hands across his temples, pressing them hard, seeking some relief from what was turning into a tremendous pain in his head.  Great, he thought.  I go to meet my destiny with a headache.  He slipped through the door of the restroom and saw the bus sitting at the curb.  It looked empty, but for the driver, who appeared to be dressed in a sparkling white uniform, complete with a white cap.  He nodded and smiled to Gabe.

Gabe walked the few feet to bus.  The door hissed open as he reached the bottom step.  “Welcome.  You must be Gabriel Pinelli.  Michael told us you would be ready today.”

Gabe stared at the bus driver for a moment before stepping onto the first step.  He looked to the back of the bus, empty.  “How did you know my name?  How did Michael know my name?”

The driver smiled again, and Gabe immediately felt comforted and reassured in spite of the fact that the man’s teeth seemed— absolutely huge. They were a startling contrast to the man’s dark brown face, taking up almost all of the space in the lower third of the his face.  “Oh, we know all about you, Gabe.”  The driver nodded in a friendly gesture.  “Why don’t you come along now?”

Gabe stepped onto the second step.  “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” the driver said, winking conspiratorially at Gabe as if they shared a secret.

Gabe stopped on the top step, feeling chilled again.  “I don’t think I am going to come,” he said, backing down one step towards the exit.  As his foot touched the step, the door behind him hissed closed, gently nudging him forward.

“That’s not a very good idea, Gabe.  Why don’t you trust me now and have a seat.  We won’t be but a few minutes, and then everything will be just fine.” The driver stood and reached out to Gabe.

Gabe leaned against the seam in the door.  “Please open the door.  I’d like to get off now.”  He started to wedge his fingers in between the rubber insulation that held the doors closed.

“Not a good idea,” the driver said.  “You sure?”

“Open the door.”  The pain in his head had doubled, feeling like he was being struck with—

“Ok.”  The driver pulled the metal handle, and the door folded in on itself with a hiss.  “But I’ll wait here for you just the same.”

Gabe stepped off the Number 7 out-of-Service bus, almost losing his balance the door hissed closed behind him.  The pain in his head had doubled again.  He felt a bile rise in his throat and knew he was moments from either vomiting down the front of his shirt, or losing consciousness.  He staggered back to the bathroom like a drunken man on the deck of a heaving ship.

There was the blind homeless woman— who wasn’t so blind after all— crouched down next to the body of a man who was dressed exactly as he was, rifling through his pockets, a bloody trash can lid sitting on the tiled floor.

Gabe heard the muffled hiss of the Number 7 Out-of Service bus doors open as he fell into darkness.

© Ray Cattie