2 December 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 4

I'm Warning You

by DORENE O'BRIEN

So you get fired for making another offensive comment to a coworker who actually is a fat slob with a bad attitude and fuck that eating disorder and clinical depression bullshit, and fuck your boss, too, with his bad toupee and his multiple warnings and his sweat-soaked upper lip when he looks at your cleavage and asks you to lick his balls while sliding your left middle finger up his ass and you say fat chance and he says I'm warning you like he's actually got some leverage, like you'd actually do it to keep a job any moron could do and you say you look like a train wreck and he says I'm warning you but he's still staring at your breasts and he's mad as hell but his eyes are begging for sex or love or something he's never had and knows he won't get from his wife whose clothes size and IQ both fall somewhere in the high double digits and you say you're pathetic and he says do you want to spank me and you say I want to kill you and he says that turns me on and you say I'm serious and he calls security.

So you walk to the Double Perk and order a latte even though you've never had one and suspect they're awful but no one will say so 'cause it's not cool to call any drink sold in a coffee shop awful but doesn't someone who's just been fired by a pervert with a frayed headpiece have the right to drink something awful and pretend it's hemlock or belladonna or simply bad coffee that poet wannabes and corporate slaves have led the world to believe is tasty and refreshing even though at $4 a pop they know it's a rip-off but God knows people want to drag their neighbors down with them so you order a latte and the guy behind you, some shrimpy little poet type with yellow-tinted glasses and a beret, a caricature of a caricature, pays for the drink and you grab it and walk to a table near the window and shove the second chair off to the side so he won't come and sit down and if you're wondering if you should thank him for the latte you must be one dumb fuck if you think about thanking someone who is clearly pathetic and self-interested and who walks around trying to look like a poet 'cause God knows poets don't look like poets so he approaches the table with a big steaming cup of pretension and says may I sit and you say no and he pulls up a chair and says slashed is the flower from the vine and you say Oh no you DON'T and he says I saw security toss you out of Weimann Ross and you shrug and he says wanna bomb the building and you say you're more fucked up than I am and he says I've been working at it and you know then he's a phony and you leave him and the latte sitting there cold and unwanted.

Three blocks from the coffee shop the shrimpy poet catches up to you and says he was kidding about the bombing and that he could write epic poetry about you and you tear the beret from his head and slam dunk it into a sidewalk trash can and say write about that because that's what life is about, people who hardly know you fucking you over and not giving a damn and come to think of it people who do know you fucking you over and not giving a damn and even people who are supposed to love you fucking you over so why don't you write an Elegy to the Beret or an Ode to the Chapeau because your hat, which makes you look like you're dying to have your ass kicked, by the way, probably means more to you than the last three women or men you dated and he says my mother gave me that beret and you say that's proof positive your mother hates you and wants you to get your ass kicked and he says my mother's dead and you say you're lucky and he says you're gritty and real and represent a perfect manifestation of all the ills of a postmodern technological society and you say I must look like a mirror.

You go back to his pathetic apartment with the dead geranium on the window ledge and a slice of sun ripping through the torn, moth-eaten shade and you say how Bohemian and you just know his mother left him two million Krugerrands and enough IBM stock to wallpaper the Taj Mahal but how can he be a starving artist with a capitalist lifeboat like that under his ass so you figure he just told the executor to hold it in a safety deposit box and refuse him anything until he's so desperate he looks deep into the executor's eyes and says—these are the humiliating, infantile, desperate pseudo-words they agreed would unlock the vault of oppression—"Ga g