“The Sales Manager”

“Bill Michaelson, known as “Dollar Bill,” had taken a wrong turn in the career line, missed the queue for stand-up comedians, where he would have been a star, and instead ended up managing a perplexity of peddlers running about the office like a set of over-wound toys, acting as if they knew what they were doing but being, in reality, utterly lost in the maze of their new profession. Dollar Bill was a tall, loosely-constructed Irishman, with stringy hair the color of unripe persimmon fruit. Thin-lipped, freckled, with aqueous, soft, pastel-blue eyes, which most of the time shone with merriment, he was nervous and high-strung and, like Andre, a heavy smoker. Holding a chocolate-glazed cruller with notched fluting elevated in front of his face, he apostrophized as if he were Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull, “Alas, poor doughnut, I knew you only for a short time but, as the saying goes, you will cohabitate with my belly – it’s only the hips on girls, you know – for a very lonnng time.” With that, he took a bite that erased a full third of the pastry’s length, grabbed a napkin, and wiped his mouth. “Okay, enough fun children, let’s get down to business. Have you heard the one about the priest and the rabbi?” After a stunned pause, we all laughed. It took one’s full attention to keep up with Dollar Bill’s patter. He nested diversions within divagations.  His jokes mocked other jokes. Fully able to bring historic humor into current events, he intercalated so fluidly that the listener needed his full wits to distinguish references to the past, present, and future. But now he was actually getting to the agenda for the meeting.”