File under: juvenilia. I wrote this funny little story in 1976, when I was 16. It got published in the High School literary magazine (Nanuet Senior High, Nanuet New York – go Knights!). This somehow came to the attention of Charlotte Sheedy, a NYC literary agent. For a period of a few months, she provided me a little support and hope; she was kind, funny, cool, a feminist, and Ally Sheedy’s mom.
The Muzak was blaring, “I Only Have Eyes for You.” It was January twelfth.
Horace was seventeen years old. He was sitting in an office. The office was that of the Empire Komputer Dating service – “We make ‘em, You take ‘em.”
A dull forty-seven-year-old clerk was filling the form. He sounded like a machine when he said, “Expect your return in sixteen days, sir. Good day.”
Horace’s hands were sweating. His hands always sweated when he was nervous. He turned to the door, and left the office.
As he walked through the parking lot to his ‘sixty-seven Oldsmobile, he noticed a Burgaking Supaburger wrapper blowing lazily about in the smooth fluid movements of the January wind. The snow on the ground was starting to melt.
“Maybe there will be an early spring,“ he whispered to himself. He was always whispering stupid things to himself. He knew that it was January, and this was Briantown, New York. And that, between the two, Winter would continue for at least another month. But he still whispered stupid things to himself.
When he spoke with other people, he seemed fairly intelligent. And in most cases, people even tended to think he was semi-human when he said something intelligent. He liked it when things like that happened.
He got into the car, inserted the key and twisted it. The car didn’t start, because he had the key in the ashtray. He removed the key in disgust. He hated cigarettes – they smelled like death to him.
He wiped the key off and put it into the ignition slot. This Time, he looked to make sure it wasn’t in the cigarette lighter or something, and when he found it wasn’t, he twisted the key and the car started.
He drove home.
He was home. The wall clock spoke to him in its Time-language. It said, “Nine-thirty PM.” His mother called him from the kitchen asking him to help her. He did; he always did.
When he’d finished, he drifted lazily into his room. Time to do his math homework. He always did his other homework in the afternoon after he came home from school, and waited until about 10 o’clock before he started his math homework. He did this out of protest; he couldn’t stand math. His best subject grade-wise, but hated it anyway. Horace’s real life-ambition was to be 35 and married-happily-ever-after.
After he finished his math homework, he washed his face. He did this five Times daily, because his acne was on controllable. (Append to his life-ambition: to be cured of acne.) When he scrubbed the thousands of tiny bacteria and other nasty things off his face, and applied his Clearasil — “da heaaaavy medicine,” he went to bed.
It was that simple. He did not have any wild, wonderful nights at the movies with his friends or girlfriends. Mainly because he didn’t have any — friends or girlfriends, that is.
No – he spend his nights in idyllic slumber, dreaming of his Utopia. He never got far, though, because —
“BRRRRRIIIIIIINNNNGGGGG.” The bane of his life, the alarm clock, wouldn’t let him. Every morning he hit it with the hardest punch he could muster. He was sure it was enough to kill any alarm clock, getting punched like that. He would wait and anxious 24 hours to find out if his latest blow have done the necessary damage to the clocks hard he works. It never did, though. That was another of his stupid hopes.
The alarm clock scared him because of its awesome power to cover up its inherent Time-language with a loud noise-language. It seemed almost schizophrenic to him, that such a gentle machine could suddenly suffer a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation and become a screaming maniacal inversion of itself; like a deer turning into Godzilla.
He’d heard somewhere that alarm clocks were unhealthy because they startle the body awake. He agreed with this, and tried to dispose of the clock many Times, but each Time he had the clock where he wanted it, the clock persuaded him, with its gentle Time-language, “Trust me.“ And, like a blind fool he did. Only to be disappointed the next morning by the vicious betrayal at seven o’clock exactly.
He dressed himself, ate a whole grapefruit for breakfast, left for school at seven-thirty, and was bored by his teachers spouting their preprogrammed teaching-lines and teaching-facts. He spent most of his Time in the classrooms looking in the same direction as the other students, namely, in the direction of the wall clock. But the others were only trying to find out what time it was and how much time there was to go in that particular class, using the clock as a source of data to feed their minds and assuage them. While Horace looked at the clock to hear what it had to say, hearing its Time-language flowing smoothly, like a breeze, blowing past, then disappearing forever, only to be replaced by another gust. The wind blows in one direction, though, and toward infinity – that was Time.
And in between classes and during lunch-Time and study halls, he sat by himself, working and looking at girls and watching the clock, like any normal teenager who will grow up to be a normal adult.
And went he went back home, he did his homework and helped his mother around the house and washed his face a lot. And this was how his ordinary day would be.
Days passed. It snowed on January nineteenth.
The form arrived, with clockwork precision, on January twenty-eighth. To the Komputer that processed that form (in less than one-ten-thousandth of a second, it was little more than a blur. Horace Feelby — his whole damn life-story — was nothing more than a world of circuitry, a few impulses encoded on tape, a punch-card, a number. He would be forgotten in another second, to be replaced by someone else, another bleep or were. That’s how it goes, with precision and accuracy.
Anyway, one day Horace opened his mailbox, and the form was in it. There were no words to express the elation Horace felt when he tore open the envelope and pulled out the neatly-typed paper.
Cynthia Kerfker! The Komputer said he was perfectly compatible with a real live girl! His mind whirled. Her name sounded beautiful! He was marrying her and divorcing her and marrying her again and again. For the first Time, his abject loneliness surfaced, he was enlightened! His soul shrieked once or twice, and swim to the surface, a fish kept captive for a long Time, finally filling its gills with clear water.
After all, her phone number was on the form. He did call her.
The phone rang three Times, and then the sharp ringing was interrupted by a click. Someone had answered.
“Hello,” said a female voice.
“He-hello, is this Cynthia Kerfker?”
“No, this is her mother. Who’s this callin’?”
He was instantly embarrassed. He knew Cynthia wouldn’t recognize his name because they’d never met.
“Horace… Feelby.”
“I’ll get her.”
There was a wait. His hands sweated. And Time passed and spoke softly to him. He smiled inside himself.
“Hello?”
Cynthia. To him, she sounded like another abjectly lonely teenager, of which there are so many.
“Hello, Miss Ker – er, Cynthia. My name is Horace Feelby. Remember that application for a Komputer date that you filled out?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“Well, I’m your date. I-I am making reservations at a nice restaurant, and –“
“Wait a minute — I ain’t accepted yet.”
“Oh — I’m sorry…”
“Ummmm… what’s your name again?
“Horace?”
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“No, I’m sure. I’m very sure.”
After a silence, Cynthia answered.
“OK, ummm. Yeah, I’ll come.”
“That’s great – I mean – that’s really nice, Cynthia – I’ll meet you in front of Burgaking at eight-thirty – OK?”
“Which Burgaking?”
“The one by the Mall.”
“All right.”
“Goodbye for now, Cynthia.”
The receiver clicked.
Horace made reservations at DeRitz’s restaurant, put on his Sunday best, and looked at the clock. He had six hours to kill.
He killed them.
At eight-fifteen, he was at the arranged meeting-place, outside of the Burgaking fast-food joint. He waited. Time passed; each second whispering to him in its own way. It was exquisite.
At nine-fifteen, he wondered what was holding her up. He was half-tempted to keep his reservation without Cynthia. But he remembered – the restaurant would close at eleven-fifteen, and it was a twenty-minute drive away.
At nine-thousand-seven-hundred-eighty-five seconds, he went into Burgaking and ordered a Supaburger. It cost him one dollar and twenty-nine cents plus tax. He was past anxiety and desperation at this point – he only wanted to eat and be done with it.
He finished the hamburger. It had to be, without a doubt, the most tasteless and horrible hamburger he’d ever eaten. After he had finished it, he walked slowly out of the Burgaking restaurant with the wrapper to his hamburger in his hand. He let the January wind blow the wrapper onto the parking lot.
He stopped suddenly where he was standing, took the flaps of his overcoat off his ears; listening.
And after he’d heard what Time had to say, he went home and (with a bit of a ritualistic flourish) threw his alarm clock out the window.
Copyright © 1976, 2018 Bob Jude Ferrante