Home > Funny Stories by Dick Oakes, Funny Stories by Dick Oakes, Jr. > Funny Stories by Dick Oakes, Jr.

Funny Stories by Dick Oakes, Jr.

January 8, 2016 Leave a comment Go to comments
Dick Oakes, Jr.

Dick Oakes, Jr.

It was one of those towels by the pound joints. Some fuck of a town beyond the Outlands.

I was in the back room, in a cramped office. I had to fill out a bunch of strange forms, all yellow and in duplicate. I couldn’t figure on any of it.

The owner was odd-looking. She had big bunches of hair wrapped up in a lazily-built bun. She wore no bra and she wasn’t selling it much. She chain-smoked.

“Make sure you fill out all those forms,” she kept whispering softly through the cigarette haze.

“Never seen forms like this,” I said. They were asking for all kinds of crazy shit– they wanted months and years on everything.

“Where are you from?”

“Lankville. Eastern.”

“You’re not in Lankville. You’ve crossed over.”

“Into what?”

She didn’t say anything for awhile. Then: “Didn’t you notice all the big walls? All the checkpoints? How’d you get through?”

I thought about the previous night. Nothing came. I dimly remembered the afternoon– cases of beer in a shopping cart. That was it.

She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. s-l500

“I need someone,” she said. “I haven’t had anyone wander in here looking for work in years. Everyone in Cotton Cones thinks they’re above this work. Ever since that government training program. They didn’t miss very many people.”

I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. I was signing my name for the hundredth time.

“They came along out of the west,” she said, looking off distantly. “They came into churches and schools and said, let’s have these boys and girls. And they took them out of the schools and they trained them for the Initiative. Capitol “I”, small n, small i, small t, small i…”

“Skip it,” I said.

“They trained them all up,” she said, dreamily. “And now nobody wants to work in some sweet fuck-all towels by the pound shop.”

There was a long silence.

“My husband was murdered,” she noted suddenly.

I didn’t have nothing to add to that.

“I’ll give these forms to the Sub-Committee,” she said. “You can come back in five days.”

I hit her up for a little advance. I was thinking about those beers in the shopping cart again. She gave me a couple bills that I didn’t recognize. They were bright pink.

“Take a towel with you. Study it,” she said.

She didn’t walk me out.

 

Categories: Funny Stories by Dick Oakes, Funny Stories by Dick Oakes, Jr. Tags: , ,
  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: