Dim Jim became convinced he had an important engagement at the tallest gray building downtown resembling the stylized beak of an eagle jutting out of the city's pit. Where else? That would explain the briefcase handcuffed to his arm, the portfolio jutting from his inner pocket. "That's who I am," he thought, prancing down the pitted sidewalk, elbowing innocents out of the way. "That's where I'm from! It's in my blood!"
So these citizens wanted to live in total comfort all the time? "Not on my watch," he vowed. "First I'll put on my jacket." He went back to get it.
As soon as he came inside the phone went brrrrRRRRAAANG! Dim Jim's shoulders twitched-he didn't like being interrupted. "Who is it?" he asked himself, setting down the bag of earplugs. The noise came again and he answered it: "Yes, hello."
"Hi, Dim Jim! This is Sonny Sarbo-Socket!"
He squared his shoulders. "I don't know any Sarbo-Socket," he snarled bitterly into the receiver, taking a slug of black coffee to show his stung pride.
"Aw, don't be like that, it's me, Sonny-you remember!"
"What's that name again? Oh yeah. Well, how are you."
"Hey, I couldn't be better! Say, there's another big show at Suck City tonight! It's Rhonda the Washerwoman-you know from the Windshield Wipers!"
"Who? Oh yeah, all right." Dim Jim flexed his enormous padded blue shoulders. "There gonna be a cover charge?"
It seemed like everything in Dim Jim's life was all part of one huge rock'n'roll revival about the recent past as if good things had stopped happening and would never happen again, all the doors trimmed with psychedelic eyes or paisley peacock feather swirls or checkerboards or safety pins or cowskulls, his whole foundation built on rock'n'roll and style and other unreal things. He knew It was time for a change.
The line was dead. Sarbo-Socket must've hung up while Dim Jim was lost in that ramble. He set the phone back in its cradle with a soft, plastic "click."
All the way there on the bus he kept thinking about the kind of person who knew what IT was, someone honest and calm and complete and without pretense, and decided he was, in fact, this kind of person himself. Probably wouldn't last long on a talk show, somebody like that. Dim Jim hated talk shows and had always wanted to host a talk show. Another paradox.
Dim Jim stood outside Lightning Ray's for a few minutes holding a baseball bat, the sidewalk his second home. Subterranean tremors trembled underneath his tennis shoes. "We're on a date, you and me," he told the bat, and gave it a little kiss. He stood there being stared at by stacks of unseeing TVs, and he saw his own reflection in that image. All he knew was pop culture and cushioned living rooms, his whole country a wasteland playland all his life as if predestined to optimum comfort and everything else good guys get. Now maybe all that was about to change in a giant, final way. He couldn't be sure yet, maybe no one ever could. But something big was gonna happen. Everyone in the media knew it. The next thing he did was smear his lips and tongue and mouth all over the window, giving that terrible image of dead TVs watching him a big wet sloppy French kiss. Then he started smashing open all the parking meters with his baseball bat. All the way home.
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