Diss Scent
Eve Marx
Word Count 838
I had this boss, let’s call him John. He was the editorial director of a magazine whose name you’d recognize in a minute. He hired me after a two hour interview after standard business hours where behind a closed door he peppered me with questions about my personal life, who I knew, who I’d dated, did I dine downtown at Raoul’s or Patsy’s? About halfway through the interview he offered me a toot, which I declined although I generously said to him, “Go right ahead.” Cocaine, it turned out, was going to be the main trouble between us but I didn’t see that during the interview. My bad.
One day, a couple of months into my employment, John sent me to meet the Hampton Jitney where his friend, L., a well-known author and journalist, would hand me a package. What’s inside? I asked. I was told it was a book. I went to the bus stop and L. handed me a package wrapped in brown paper which I brought back to the office. Behind his closed door, John unwrapped it at his desk. It was a book but hollowed out. Inside the cavity was a clear bag filled with white powder. I instantly knew what it was.
I could have been arrested, I said, furious that he’d used me as a courier.
John was dismissive and sent me back to my desk.
For a week or so I fumed about this and other grievances I held against John who had already angered me with his decree that the office was too small for us both to wear leather pants and for giving me all the most annoying freelancers to work with. And then there was the part about how awful he was since he was high on coke all the time. I wasn’t into coke myself. I was more of a marijuana waker and baker. My main observation about coke users was that the drug made them feel important and omniscient. The main thing about marijuana was it sparked my imagination which is how I cooked up my revenge.
The very next morning while walking my little Lhasa Apso dog, Peaches, I collected a thimble sized chunk of her poop which I placed into a tiny square of aluminum foil and then a baggie. I transported this to the office which was located at the time on Third Avenue in Manhattan, not far from P.J. Clarke’s. I got to work fifteen minutes early, not that John was ever on time. I entered his office and shut the door. I unscrewed the mouthpiece cover of his desk phone and inserted the dog shit. Then I replaced the mouthpiece cover and left his office.
Throughout the morning John kept leaving his office to complain about a bad smell. By noon he was frantic, tearing the room apart to locate the source of the foul odor. He had all three editors including me crawling around and under things, sniffing. Nobody could smell anything but they weren’t talking on his phone.
A couple of days later I was eating lunch at my desk, working on my resume as I’d already resolved my days at the magazine were numbered. I was sick of writing about tantric sex and editing features about male pattern baldness. John came stumbling out of his office clutching a bloody paper towel. Blood was gushing from his nose like a geyser. He said he needed to go to the hospital. I helped him into the elevator and escorted him through the building lobby. I hailed him a cab. Back upstairs I entered his office and unscrewed the mouthpiece of his phone. I removed the thimble full of dessicated dogshit and ditched it in the ladies’ rest room at the end of the corridor. An hour or two later when John's boss, Al, the big boss, asked me what happened to John I told him about the nose hemorrhage. When John returned to the office, Al told him he was fired.
I wasn’t exactly promoted to John’s job but I did get a promotion. I was taken off the editorial desk and given a studio to produce and record the magazine company’s new 1-800 phone line. I was given a substantial raise to work far fewer hours.
A year later I was riding the Number 2 train, the Seventh Avenue Express, on my way back downtown after a meeting in Columbus Circle. My head was deep into John Irving’s “The Hotel New Hampshire,” which had recently been published. I felt eyes boring in on me. I looked up to see none other than John glaring from across the aisle. He looked terrible. He’d been a superstar, heralded for his work in what was called The New Journalism at Esquire, New Times and Rolling Stone. But since his firing from the magazine we’d both worked for, he was unemployed.
I barely gave him a second glance when I got off at Sheridan Square. I didn’t feel sorry at all.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
