Part
One
“Where have you been?”
were the first words screamed at Mr. Mathew Schultz upon entering the
school.
“What
do you mean?”
“Classes
started three weeks ago. You are supposed to be in there teaching right now!”
Schultz
swooned. Panic gripped his innards and yanked them down hard, while a freezing
chill blasted through his body. Three weeks ago? Where had he been? Why
hadn’t he known? Why did nobody tell him anything? Everything was fuzzy. None
of it made sense. The screaming administrator briefly seemed to have three
heads, each berating him for a different malfeasance.
Things
hadn’t even begun yet at his new job and it was already falling apart. First
impressions already ruined. His incompetence proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Students, colleagues, and other random people started to gather round, laughing
at this poor shrimp of a man.
His life was
falling down in a giant puddle of absolute failure. Soon his wife would go, his
children would disown him, he’d loose his house, and end up a bum on the
streets fighting rats for hardened cheese stuck to the top of discarded pizza
boxes.
“And
not only that, you’ve forgotten your pants.”
Schultz
looked down. He had been in such a rush to get to work that he had indeed
neglected to wear slacks. That’s when he woke up and all the stress evaporated.
Schultz’s wife hit him in the face with a pillow.
“Get
up,” she snorted into a pillow. “Don’t want to be late.”
At that he
had to agree. Following the lyrics of the old Beatles song, he got up, fell out
of bed, and dragged a comb across his head. That last part took the longest.
Having a rapidly thinning
top, Schultz worked a complicated weave around his skull to double and triple
flop the hair on top of each other. His hair was incredibly thin, but there was
a lot of it, so Schultz had grown it out very long on his left side, in order
to bend it all back over the spots nature had cursed with baldness. Once the
complicated do was balanced on his scalp, he used an entire bottle of hairspray
to keep it all in place.
He stood back to admire the results and gave himself two thumbs
up.
“Still got it,” he lied to himself.
“Hurry up,” his wife snorted from the other room.
But now he was no longer
dragging. After the hair ordeal, Schultz was always fully recharged and ready
to go. For some it took a hot shower. For others a steaming cup of coffee. For
Schultz, he was never as awake as when he had cemented in his deceptive
hairdo.
Now that the hair was cemented into place, Schultz needed
to finish up all the other gross stuff one needed to go through to make a
middle-aged man beautiful. All that unsightly ear hair was poking out like
punji stakes in a Vietnamese jungle. He got in there with the electric ear and
nose trimmer and rooted out most of the brush, then wielded a pair of tungsten
steel nasal scissors and surgically snipped out the stubborn loners who
refused to vacate, bending his nostrils in odd angles to achieve this.
He repeated the process in his ear canals. First the right,
then the left. He slipped a few times and splotches of blood stained his ears,
making it look like his eardrum had perforated by listening to too many Roy
Rodgers yodels.
Now came scraping off the rest of the stubble off his skin.
Schultz filled the basin with warm water and slapped it against his face. He
disdained shaving foam. A complete waste of money. A nice soapy lather from a
regular bar did the trick as much as any amount of weird whipped cream like
foam. He had spent hours discussing the problem with his wife.
“It’s all propaganda from Big Foam and they’re tied in with
the media. Whenever a man is shown shaving on TV, what do you see? A big face
full of foam, like they’re paid off to. You never see the alternative. Just hot
water and soap! It’s a conspiracy!”
For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst
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