Not too many people are homophobic anymore. Nobody cares enough to hate or fear anyone/anything. The word faggot is no longer an insult. And there are no more active second-wave skinheads or nazis or rednecks to go faggot-bashing. So faggots are safe from oppression. But they have no interest in going to gay bars and are therefore not actively faggotting, which makes the entire gay and lesbian society a waste of time.
Satan may be the last homosexual on Earth that wears pro-gay pins.
Richard Stein said that fighting for gay rights and parading gay pride are two things that homosexuals publicly enjoyed. If these two things didn’t exist, there probably wouldn’t be as many gays around, because many people find parades and fighting for rights attractive enough to become gay. Stein also said that some people become gay just to be different than everyone else. They don’t want to conform to the sexual preferences that authority has bestowed upon them.
In other words: GAY = ANARCHY.
Satan continues his queer grinning for five minutes. We watch him, scared to interrupt.
Then Satan goes into question. “Are you here for food or employment?”
Christian is our speaker. “Maybe both.”
I didn’t think about the help needed sign until now. Christian always talks about getting a job, but he never actually gets one. I would get a job too, but it’s almost hopeless with my eyes. We apply for jobs everywhere we can, but never get a response or even an interview. Mort, whose always been a worker, calls Christian and I lazy assholes for never working, but we don’t seem to care. Nowadays, the only person you can find in this world is the type that falls into the lazy asshole category.
“You’re the young man that rented me a room,” Satan finally notices Mort, “aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Mort says. “These are my roommates, Leaf and Christian.”
“Christian?” Satan tweaks. “That’s an offensive name to me.” He’s actually joking when he says this, but nobody takes it as a joke.
“Sorry,” Christian apologizes, as if he had something to do with naming himself.
“Don’t worry about it.” Satan waves his hand in a circle. “You’re all okay by me. Well, you are my landlords. The jobs are all yours if you want them.”
“How much do you pay?” Mort asks, still behind Christian.
“I don’t pay in money,” he answers. “Money isn’t going to last much longer anyway. Before the end of the year, the governments are going to say that it isn’t worth the effort and discontinue its value. Dollars will become worthless, and given to the bathrooms for toilet paper. You’ll see.”
“I don’t understand,” Christian says. “You’re talking crazy.”
“I don’t speak crazy,” Satan argues. “Come in the back and I’ll explain.”
We go through the kitchen to a small office, whose door is angry at us when we open him, waking him up. He hits Mort — last in line — in the back, knobbing him right between two links of spinal column, as if too impatient to wait for him to get completely inside.
“What’s wrong with your door?” Mort complains.
“It’s stubborn and doesn’t like its job,” says Satan. “Sometimes it won’t open at all.”
There are five chairs. We sit in them. All but one of them is alive, the one vodka is sitting in, or maybe it’s just asleep. Mine is either nervous or weak, shifting me from side to back to side, with a wrinkled cushy-plastic seat, making whooshing sounds under my butt.
“How come your door is alive?” Christian asks.
“Yes, everyone notices my furniture, everyone loves the cute little furniture.” A toaster tries to be cute, wagging its cord like a tail. “I’m sick of them!” he screams at the toaster, shoving it off the desk to thump on the floor. “They are so damn annoying.”
“Well, what are they?” Christian asks. “How come they’re alive?”
Satan lights up a thin homosexual-styled cigar and smokes it like a penis, rolling it between his fingers to ash. “They are my demons. Bet you didn’t expect demons to be furniture, did you? Well, there are all sorts of demons. You see, I have the touch of life. Everything I touch becomes a living thing, like that door and those chairs, and everything else that is not living that my fingers come across. Then they become my demons, my servants.”
Christian puts his hand in Satan’s face. “Let me see,” he says, lifting his sleeve to reveal a digital wristwatch. “Make this alive.”
Satan touches the wristwatch.
There is a spark of tiny blue light. Then the digital wristwatch becomes a living creature that eats, sleeps, poops, and maybe even reproduces. It cannot speak, but it can beep.
“Weird,” Christian says, staring at his new pet. “That’s what I call a talent.”
“I call it a curse,” Satan says, pausing to take a puff on his cigar. Next to his cigars are a couple of packs of cigarettes called Lung Suicide and Cancer Pricks. Both of them were invented by Satan himself. “Anyway, I need people here. These demons aren’t working out at all. I’ve got a television trying to cook hamburgers, a cash register that can’t even speak trying to take orders, and a credenza trying to work the drive-thru. The only good they do is clean up the place and hold signs.”
“Why don’t you cook the hamburgers?” Mort asks.
“How the hell can I make hamburgers?” Satan yells. “Every time I touch a hamburger it turns into a demon. Same with fries and vegetables and everything else that isn’t alive. Sure, that’s how I eat my food, but I don’t have a choice considering you can’t eat food without touching it.”
“What about using a fork?” Christian argues.
“Yeah, yeah.” Satan gets annoyed. “That’s what everyone says, but every time I touch a fork to eat, the fork becomes alive. And when I pick up food with it, the fork eats the food before I get a chance to. It’s pretty frustrating. Actually, I don’t mind eating live food — it’s all I’ve been eating since the beginning of time. But customers just won’t stand for eating a live hamburger, you see. They get grossed out and scared, and it’s just not good business to scare away customers with demon food.”
“So you need us to manage your store?” Mort asks.
“Yes, completely.” Satan starts a Cancer Prick cigarette even though he is not done with the cigar. “I’ll still be in charge. I just won’t touch the food or do any of the work.”
“You never told us what we’d get paid,” Mort says.
“I’m getting to that…” Satan smiles.
Lenny’s autotruck pulls into the parking zone outside.
Nan and Gin are in the cab, shivering from the cold and the shock. Gin is dead. He can feel his joints getting all stiff, and thinks his skin is shriveling to rot. Nan takes him out of the autotruck and he stretches his legs. The muscles have no feeling in them, but they still move. He cracks his back and broken neck, hearing the cracking sound but not feeling the relief. Then he cracks his knuckles for the same response.
“Don’t.” Nan grabs his knuckles. “You’re going to get arthritis.”
“Sorry,” Gin says. He doesn’t want to argue. Being dead has brought him down a little, his emotions now at junebug size.
Many people say that you’ll get arthritis from cracking your knuckles, but this is a lie. Some people also think that you’ll mess up your back from cracking it. This is a lie too. Then there are the people that believe that you’ll actually break your neck if you crack it too quickly. These are the same people who say if you cross your eyes too much they’ll stick, you get warts from touching frogs, bubble gum takes seven years to digest, and you’ll go blind if you masturbate too much. All of these things were made up by parents who didn’t want their children to do them.