One Mukluk

(continued)

By Barry G. Gale

According to DOST COMPLETELY CONFUSING AND ABSURDLY ILLOGICAL PROCEDURES FOR DETERMINING WHO SHOULD GET THE OFFICE SPACE VACATED BY EMPLOYEES WHO DISAPPEAR INTO THE POTOMAC RIVER POLICY (DOST Order 62121-B), "anyone who wants such space, if such space is available, and anyone who does not want such space, if such space is not available, and vice versa, and versa vice, and any combination of the above, and anyone who has friends who want such space, or friends's relatives or relatives's friends who want such space, and any other people who may be interested in such space but, because of working at DOST for too many years are simply too spaced out to know it, can submit, in quadruplicate, or, alternatively, in four copies, a Disappearance Into The Potomac River Office Space Request, if such forms are available and if such forms are not available, tough luck; and there shall be no exceptions to this rule except those exceptions which can be determined to be rather more or less exceptionable. Or something like that."

My paranoid colleague, Higgensem, who seems to know these sorts of things, among a long list of many other sorts of irrelevant things he also seems to know, told me that DOST's Office of General Counsel had been trying, without much luck, to understand the meaning of this Order since 1979, even though the Order was only promulgated in 1989. Higgensem said that just shows how difficult an Order people suspected it might one day become. Or how difficult it was for the DOST Office of General Counsel to make heads or tails out of just about anything.

The ordinarily orderly process of legal analysis and interpretation, which actually never was that ordinarily orderly at DOST, even during ordinarily orderly times, was nonetheless interrupted when, all of a sudden, out of the blue, green and magenta, and definitely from left of left field, comes one Kareem Kareem El Drama-Mean, who, according to the DOST Daily Tattler, a local gossip and Midwest farm prices sheet sponsored by the DOST Recreation Office, reportedly threatened, if Adams's old room was not given to him immediately, to destroy the DOST Exercise Center by dumping tons and tons of way-way-over-cooked cafeteria turkey meatloaf, usually the daily special there, on all the expensive exercise machines.

I think the poor soul — I mean, El Drama-Mean — still thought the old performance evaluation system was in force, where one's evaluation was wholly dependent on the evaluation that one's predecessor in the same office had received the previous year. Unfortunately for El Drama-Mean, and perhaps the DOST Exercise Center as well, he was never able to fill out a Disappearance Into The Potomac River Office Space Request form under DOST Order 62121-B, not so much because the Department was out of such forms as because DOST had never developed them.

Soon after Adams's disappearance, Clarissa and Jocelyn told me that there was some question as to whether Adams's father would attend the funeral, but in the hurly burly of activity that preceded the event, the question was quickly forgotten. Along with a lot of other questions having nothing to do with Adams's father or really anything else.

Later, actually several months later, the certifiably psychotic Huck Hockenhokey, another of my colleagues at DOST, asked me if Adams had a father. "I mean," he said, "one that is still alive."

I was glad to see, and quite impressed, that Hockenhokey was able to make that important distinction.

"Beats me," was my response. I asked Clarissa and Jocelyn, and they didn't have a clue, either.

All of Adams's ex-wives were distraught about the news, more or less. On the "less" side, wife number three, Kitty, said she expected as much and wondered, now that Adams was dead, if she couldn't get back the LETT's 2000 Millennium Pocket Calendar which she had given him as a Christmas present several years before. Wife number one, Dolores, said it had been so long since she'd seen Adams that she didn't remember any longer what he looked like and, because of that, she had trouble feeling really sorry for him, though of course she felt somewhat sorry for him, gracious soul that she was.

On the "more" side, wife number two, Morgana, said that she was very upset and that she hoped her letter of recommendation to the Canadian Wild North Circus and Bow and Arrow Show on Adams's behalf, which was not successful in getting him a job there, or even getting him an interview there, hadn't contributed in any way to his apparently tragic end. Wife number fou,r Gretchen, who had recently run away with a Schwan's Ice Cream truck driver after having been seduced over the three previous months by free samples of Raspberry and Orange Healthy Creations Fat Free Creme Bars Sweetened with Aspartame, just cried uncontrollably and said, through sobs, that although she liked Schwan's Ice Cream, she didn't really like it that much, never really had liked it that much, and now it sort of left a sour taste in her mouth.

My friend, Bernard, the 7th floor cleaning man in the Marmalade Building where DOST headquarters was housed, directly across Independence Avenue from the Smithsonian Castle, said to me, upon hearing the news about Adams, "Hey, man, I'm scared to death about it. Maybe I'm even terrified by it. You know, you know, if somebody like Metro Adams can't make it — you know, you know, with his gifts, his advantages, his basic sense of right and wrong, and a person who was never a big chicken shit — you know, you know, like you were, a person who was never one of the biggest chicken shits I have ever known, you know, you know, like you were, what does it mean for the rest of us? I don't want to think about that now. I mean, you know, you know, brother, right now I just can't even get myself to think about that."

I've always admired Bernard's ability to get right down to the heart of the matter.