Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation by Adam Resnick

just wordsthese days. We’ve become small.” He swiveled his chair to face me. “They’re bringing in a new honcho.”
    “They’re transferring you to another agency?” I replied, shocked.
    “They’re transferring me to the cemetery. I’m gone.”
    I told him it didn’t make sense, even though it made complete sense. Everything was changing. You could feel it. Places like this and guys like Bob were on borrowed time. Something different was coming—a world where it would be harder to get away with stuff and every battery would be accounted for.
    “Nine years,” Bob sighed. “This place was a dump when I took it over from Kaplan. Lapsed policies? You could wallpaper your house. The goddamn files were in Chinese. Not one thumbtack. Look anywhere. Thumbtacks were like caviar.”
    I assured him his mark on the agency would live on. Then I slid Jeff Glogower’s application across his desk. “You made a sale?” he said, brightening up. He walked over and crushed me in his arms. I told him it was his sale as much as mine. Then I tendered my resignation. He tried to talk me out of it, but I insisted I couldn’t possibly work there without him. Bob admitted I was probably making the right decision. Rumor had it they were replacing him with Len Speece from Doylestown, “a complete fruit.”
    That night, we returned to the Holiday Inn where we’donce celebrated my passing the insurance exam. This time I drank. I toasted Bob, who had vowed to open his own financial-estate-planning-consulting something or other. “Everything’ll be under one umbrella,” he kept saying over and over. “And you’ll be my top dog. We’ll beat the bastards at their own game.”
    Later, he struck up a conversation with a middle-aged woman who sat alone at the bar, telling her she had a “smashing figure.” It wasn’t true, but she accepted the compliment. Neither seemed particularly attracted to the other. Within moments, though, the flicker was back in his eye. As he took her hand and led her to the dance floor, he nudged my ribs and said, “That’s all you can do, pal—take it where you can getit.”

The Agitator Slat
    Fast food, as the saying goes, is shit. The jury came in on that a while ago. Nonetheless, I do find myself indulging from time to time, mostly to keep my ego in check. Only a narcissistic asshole would consider his body a temple.
    When the urge hits me for this sort of fare, two things are assured: I’ll walk into the restaurant, salivating like a Bernese mountain dog, and exit, feeling like a drug mule with a ruptured condom in his large intestine. But looking back on all the years of hamburgers, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and double-wrapped tacos, I’d have to say the most unhealthy thing I ever consumed, compliments of a national fast-food chain, was a milk shake with a razor blade in it.
    This is no urban legend, folks. This is not the woman who claimed her salivary glands became infested with maggots after she ingested unpasteurized honey, or the guy who swore he found a human penis in a box of Rice Chex. What happened to me—this razor blade thing—actually
happened
. It occurred sometime ago at a fast-food restaurant on Ninth Avenue in New York City.
    Before I continue, my publisher’s legal department, in all their Hebrew fanaticism, has required that I abide by the following:
I cannot use the name of the restaurant chain.
The words “milk shake” will be substituted for the name of the actual product, which is indeed a milk shake but employs a minor gimmick in an attempt to stand out from other milk shakes.
I am prohibited from referencing, no matter how obliquely, a rumored sex-slave scandal involving the chain’s upper management. (“And don’t try to get cute with little jokes, ’cause I’ll burn the whole fucking book”—
unnamed lawyer, via telephone
.)
    And now, on with the show!
    It was a typical Sunday. I’ve always hated Sundays. ComeMonday, the shit starts all over again and it