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    1-877-Yes-Quit
    1-877-Yes-Quit
    1-877-Yes-Quit
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    1-877-Yes-Quit

    By Thomas Wauhob

    ()

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    About this ebook

    One man's attempt to stop smoking spirals out of control when he meets someone special. Someone very special, someone who may not be real. Watch the conspiracy of love unfold as Manfry S. Hampton grapples with a meaningless day job, goes in search of his jacket, aspires to bar trivia greatness, and generally loses his mind in this vertiginous exploration of the meaning of compulsion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Wauhob
    Release dateMar 30, 2012
    ISBN9781452432175
    1-877-Yes-Quit
    Author

    Thomas Wauhob

    Thomas Wauhob grew up in Wichita Falls, TX. He lives and works in Houston. His short stories have appeared in Pindeldyboz, SNReview, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Dark Sky Magazine. This is his first long form work. In the twentieth century it would have been called a novella.

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      Book preview

      1-877-Yes-Quit - Thomas Wauhob

      1-877-YES-QUIT

      Thomas Wauhob

      Published by Howler Monkey Books at Smashwords

      Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Wauhob

      All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Part I

      "I got a girlfriend that's better than that

      She has the smoke in her eyes

      She's coming up, going right through my heart

      She's gonna give me surprise"

      - Talking Heads

      Like many life-altering changes, it began with an email and a desire to stop smoking. The desire to stop smoking had no beginning. It came about through a gradation, a slow settling, a sale of lesser self-improvement projects which grew in intensity until the frustration of Manny's being found definition in the fantasy of not being pitted in conversation with Arby Serapaby, oldest employee of the city stormwater department, on methodically staggered smoke breaks. Arby's aureole of cynicism and unexamined unpleasantness was not and would not, Manny vowed, ever, be shared by Manny, but their biological rhythms for selecting smoke breaks were dangerously in sync. It didn’t seem to matter when Manny stalked out to smoke; Arby was out, too—putting the damage on a pack of Newports beside a bitten birch, looking up when Manny caused the glass door to the government building to make its sound, a long metallic fricative. Arby nodded with his chin close to his chest and scraped across the concrete patio in Manny's direction, complaining already about the economy. A simple greeting required too much self-assurance.

      The problem was not that Manny did not like Arby, but that Arby, to the extent Manny could tell, did not like anybody in the world but him.

      Arby's remarks fell neatly into one category: complaints. The complaints came in two varieties: work and the economy—work the buildup, economy the release, every day. No one who worked in stormwater could get anything right. It was pretty clear that this would apply to Manny if Arby had had anyone else with whom to share his vexations. Manny was uncomfortable that he didn't. Too old to give anyone a wedgee, too young to just die, Manny's only solution was to stop smoking.

      Stop he tried. He chewed gum, played cards, ate more. Still nothing was as good as a cigarette. One time he printed out pictures of people with stomas and scotch taped them to the walls of his apartment, but this only made him feel strange.

      When he got back to his desk he doused a fluorescent light loving ivy with a cup of water from the water fountain, and closed the door on a coughing spree coming from down the hall. The boss' wet rasps went off behind the door like reports from a firing range, making Manny the more conscious of his mortality.

      If Manny failed to stop smoking, yet lived to be one-hundred and seventy-six, would he brag that he had seen through the surgeon general's nittering labels and finished each pack with the certainty that not only were the cigarettes making him look cool, but were also including his lungs in beneficial endurance training, like running in the Andes but ten times more effective? He decided he would. The claim would be equally normal if he saw seventy-six years of age, and also within reach if he made it to thirty-six while his boss, who did not smoke and was thirty-five, died today.

      A choking sound came from down the hall, then ceased.

      If his boss was dead currently, Manny continued to ponder, would he feel mollified for smoking? Would he be up for a promotion? Manny wrote, stop smoking, on a yellow sticky and posted it to the edge of his monitor before returning downstairs for another smoke.

      Manny was happy with his odds of not running into Arby since he had already done so before coming in to water the plant, and Arby had gone in before him. Why would Arby still be there? Did he have a problem? Arby was not in the smoking patio when Manny returned to its harsh perimeter of concrete block benches, but the thought that he could have depressed Manny and caused him to perspire. His heart rate increased and he snapped open another button to his collar. A stranger passed by him to the door and Manny looked down at the tips of his loafers, aware that to an unbiased outsider he may appear as if his life were being dealt a traumatic set back. But for all he knew traumatic set backs were happening. How was he to tell what was happening to his life while he was at work? Every sort of devastation could be in wait to greet him when he left his work's parking garage. Every sort. His mind panned over to his deserted one bedroom apartment, its wall-to-wall taupe carpet, its refrigerator.

      He had no life outside work. Who was he trying to kid? With Arby gone who did he potentially have to kid, he wondered to himself, producing a faithful pack from his breast pocket.

      Next day Manny received a raise. It was not as handsome as it would have been had his boss suffered a massive myocardial infarction and been replaced by Manny, but he couldn't complain. Feeling flush with disposable income, he was now more understanding of artificial middle-aged signs of self-worth, such as memberships to the Art Institute of Chicago. The fallout from his last relationship included post-carded pleas from the touchstone paintings powerhouse, where the two of them were frequently seen snickering between inexpensive wine gulps at openings with her art school friends. He missed those friends.

      It was a month before he got around to putting his paid membership to a late afternoon's use, handing himself to the revolving door entrance and then a couple hours of bored circumambulating between rows of tiny watercolors, grand American landscapes, Roman coins, and an Ed Hopper that was familiar to him from a high school textbook. He liked the Ed Hopper. The boulevard in the painting looked spacious and classy, like a scene from a Joan Crawford film. It seemed destined to bustle with night life and grand cars and women in coats made of improbable materials, in just a short time, probably about the time the museum would be closing. Then it would be fun. The painting would be crowded with many interesting people. The boulevard itself and the drowsy diner front would barely be visible at all.

      The museum will be closing in ten minutes, said the attendant. Manny said, what? and she said it again. Her hair was parted almost at the ear and pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a black blazer that all the museum attendants wore. Manny focused on the part in her hair and considered many of the attendants he had noticed in the museum. They were a variation on a theme, the theme being young, beautiful, and bored. They were sending text messages more often than not, they were annoyed when asked where the stairs to the next floor were, and the fact they never looked at the exhibits themselves reminded Manny that while he had paid to be at the museum, they had to be paid to be at the museum.

      Young, beautiful, sending text messages. There were no lads in the exhibit halls, only paintings. What if they were sending text messages to the lads in the paintings? What if they weren't terminally oblivious to the people who lived in the paintings? They could be waiting for the museum to close to join the people in the paintings for dinner, for cocktails. The depressed man in the LaTrec poster was waiting for an attendant to join him for his next absinthe; the sinewy farmer in the Thomas Benton was eager to bring her to an organic orchard to pick strawberries; Francis Bacon's discombobulated imagining of modern man was saving a seat for her at an all night sushi bar. She

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