Day 24: Beer, Beer, Shot.

Beginning, middle, and end.  I'm not sure how well the middle works, but all the parts are there, so I'm calling it done.

Beer, Beer, Shot.

Friday morning.

Jeremy Phillips lies in bed staring at the ceiling. Clock ticks over to five a.m. Alarm sounds but Jeremy hits snooze. Which doesn't work. Can't even sleep in, dammit.

Hit the personal gym for thirty minutes. Hit it hard. Throw up a little bit.

Shower, shave, get into some decent clothes. Down the stairs, grab a cab to the office on 27th Street, coffee comma egg and cheese sandwich and then into the elevator. Six a.m. and thirty minutes change.

That's a ninety minute jump on the rest of the office.

People walking by Jeremy's desk at eight get a cheery Hello.

Jeremy likes to have people's backs to him. He can see their desks, their computer screens. He can see when Tanya has washed her hair and the damp ponytail leaves a dark spot on the back of her shirt. He can see when Chris lets his shirt pop out of the back of his pants.

Three spec. campaigns, two client memos. Finish them and don't look back. Only way to make the day.

Now (10am) he's got to talk to Chris Marcy in the conference room because Chris doesn't know he's about to be fired and because there's hope for Chris.

Yes, there's hope for Chris. Also, Jeremy has fired two other creatives this quarter and Jeremy does not want to appear a bad manager.

"Chris, you're about to be fired." Uncomfortable silence. Chris staring at his feet. Chris can't imagine why. So then, Why:

“You can't write a campaign to save your ass and also you don't properly acknowledge leadership. My leadership, specifically, as that is the leadership that will enable you to write a proper campaign.”

And then: important remedial steps to take. Chris scribbles these things tearfully. The meeting ends with a comforting but entirely heterosexual handshake.

Lunch. Three beers.

Afternoon: a round of campaign status meetings. Fighting the delicious urge to pick his nose while the managing director is talking to him. Get two client approvals, one request for re-write, one "sorry, we're going in another direction." Acceptable.

Evening: Cypress Bar at 26th. Beer, beer, shot, beer, shot. Making out in the alcove with Amanda Pruitt. Shot, shot. Hamburger, shot. "You want me, Amanda Pruitt, 'cause I'm a man, and you wanna man...to do it." Oops, no love from Amanda Pruitt tonight. Another shot.

Out for some air. For the hell of it, walk down the ramp into The Garage. White walls, concrete beams. Vendors unpacking their wares from vans with Pennsylvania plates. African masks. Suits from 1937. Suits from 1948. Suits from 1968. Knickknacks.

Jeremy admires the enterprise of flea-market vendors, but despises the filth and disorder they embody. It disgusts him.

Flea markets are for fleas.

The night is young. Keep going, south on the Avenue of the Americas. "Mister Softee makes the very best," reads the side of the truck. Words to live by. That means a large vanilla ice cream, double-dipped in chocolate.

Chelsea: Gays. Tourists. The Barnes and Noble is now a Trader Joe's. Wonder what it'll be in four years. The Village: More Gays, more tourists. Duck into some place for a couple of shots. By NYU: Comedy club pimps. Does anyone actually ever go into those comedy clubs? A shot and a beer at Shade.

Now Jeremy is on the train like a plebeian. Can't actually recall paying the fare. Did he jump the turnstile? Perhaps.

A passage of time during which Jeremy may not be completely conscious. He may have explained how to make gunpowder to the drunk London girls sitting across from him. He may have tried to look up their skirts. They speak in sharp, clever, barely audible sentences with lots of consonants. He laughs and shows that he can take it.

A woman with a bouffant and a man with a fanny pack are on the train, and there is a pleasant debate among all present about how to get them to Times Square. The first step is for them to get off the train and go back the other direction.

Jeremy thinks this through for a stop or two, and discharges himself from the train to look for a cab or a car before he goes too deep into the wilds of the Outer Boroughs.

Neither yellow cab nor livery cab are at hand, but the next corner up looks promising. So does the next. And the next.

Jeremy is next to a long plywood barricade. On the other side, a throbbing. The throbbing gives Jeremy a headache, as he is much closer to sober than to drunk and there is neither water nor booze nearby.

And not a damned car in sight. He must be deeper into Queens than he realized.

Jeremy peeps through a hole in the plywood barrier. Stretched out before him, orange in the sodium glow, a spacecraft. Jeremy knows that it is a spacecraft because of the airlock, the shock-mounted supports, the portholes, the cables and lines and vapors. It's a spacecraft.

Also, aliens, with their eye stalks and their trilateral symmetry? Dead giveaway.

So he mounts the fence. There are two useful possibilities: with his charm and drive, Jeremy would make an excellent intergalactic trader. Either that, or steal one of these ships and sell it to the highest bidder; perhaps the U.S. Government, perhaps Google.

He lands in soft dirt at the top of the blast pit. He hurries toward the ramp that leads down to the ship, for the three-legged monsters are headed for the ship's airlock. No telling when they'll take off and miss the chance of Jeremy's life time. The throbbing comes from the ship; plainly the captain is revving the engines.

A rifle butt to the side of Jeremy's head. He sees stars. Then he feels someone sitting on his chest. He tries to get up, but it's hard, being stunned by a blow and also having 220 pounds of person on top of you.

Straining his neck a little, Jeremy can see from the corner of his eye that the craft's door has shut. The throbbing drops a note, and the craft rises.

The craft disappears into the night sky.

Jeremy's captor allows him to rise. Looks like some kind of Special Forces man, but no patches, no insignia. He turns Jeremy around and frog-marches him to a door in the plywood wall. Jeremy protests, but is pushed out the door, and clubbed again, from behind.

Saturday morning.

Jeremy Phillips lies on the bench on the train platform, staring at the sky. He is cold. He has wet himself. He is somewhere in Queens.

(How does he know that he is in Queens? He doesn't. But he must be in an outer borough. They don't have intergalactic space craft in Manhattan. No space for them. Queens is as good a guess as any.)

The train display ticks over to five a.m. The display changes again, and the speaker comes to life: A Manhattan-bound train, two stations away.

Jeremy praises, well, not God, because he doesn't believe in God, but his own silly good luck.

If he gets on this train now, then catches a cab at 59^th Street, then he can hit the gym and get in a solid four hours at the office and still see the Yankees host the Rays at 1:05pm.

(c) 2011 Michael Bernstein