Parenthetical Hoops Jumping
Patrick Wilson

I woke up sometime around nine this morning and negotiated an extra fifteen minutes out of my alarm clock. My main concern today is to find a paycheck that had gone missing for five days, but first I had to wake up so I wouldn’t sound scratchy and congested on the phone. After smoking three cigarettes and coughing up a lung, I figure I won’t quite sound like I am reeling from a three day drunk when I call Laurel Public Schools. That never really goes over well at nine-thirty in any kind of profession, but especially for teachers, and especially for potential teachers hoping to jam their leg in the respective door. My fear is becoming the teacher one day who will sneak bourbon into his coffee between class periods and I never even want to lend anyone the assumption that I am even possibly heading in that direction.

The public education system has its downfalls, but let it never be said that the legions of secretaries and executive assistants involved haven’t mastered the art of bureaucracy. I begin the hunt for the missing check by calling Laurel Public Schools, only to be ricocheted off three separate, highly personable, but ultimately ineffective secretaries. Each one offering, with flat smiles in their voices, to transfer my request to another extension.

Finally, my call comes to rest on the ears of one secretary who doesn’t have a flat smile in her voice; she simply isn’t interested. She says she can help, but since she doesn’t have my file immediately in front of her she asks if she can call me back. I figure fine, go ahead, I need a shower anyway and I’ll just get a message from her telling me when and where I can pick up my check.

I strip, hop in the shower, and as the shower vacillates back and forth between its two favorite settings: frigid icicle cold and skin melting blistering hot, I proceed to spend the paycheck in my head. Two-hundred and fifty has to go to rent and as I am deciding if the other two-hundred and forty should be spent on groceries or the four-month overdue electric bill, a burst of pain from inside my jaw instantly devours all of my attention.

In the last five years of living with a tiny continent of bone and calcium that is continually colliding, subverting and ultimately reconfiguring the interior landscape of my mouth, I have never deducted a satisfactory explanation as to why it is called the Wisdom tooth. I have yet to receive from it any insight, as it proceeds to relentlessly realign my lower jaw.

With an experimental finger I start testing the soreness behind my molar and imagine that it’s all puffy-white and swollen with blood and white blood cells and little bits of food lodged in there since last Christmas and I begin to wonder where I could possibly find a good enough dentist who, for the mere sum of two-hundred and forty dollars, would gladly wrench this misery out of my mouth. With a sort of sick sado-masochistic glee I start poking at the offending tooth and, using the cute googly voice adults adopt when talking to infants begin to taunt it saying, “Guess who’s getting jerked out? You are!! Yes you are!! Oh yes you are!” Only it doesn’t really sound like that because I have my finger in my mouth.

After my shower and tooth-taunting episode I sit down, smoke two more cigarettes and flip through the television stations. It’s very easy to flip through television stations when I only have five of them. Kelly Ripa is on eight. Soaps are on two. Twenty-five isn’t coming in very well but I think its Tony Danza. Twenty-seven is too fuzzy and I can’t make anything out through the static and on fourteen, a big black woman dressed up like a priest from Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments, is yelling something about redemption while the camera pans out onto an audience that is rocking and swooning in what can only be a mass epileptic seizure.

Deciding that I’ve waited long enough, I go back to my room, pick up the receiver, and find a message on my voice mail. It’s the unfriendly secretary and she wants me to call her back. This could be a problem. It is my experience that any message ending with ‘call me back’, nine times out of ten is almost never good. In fact, it’s up there with your significant other telling you ‘We need to talk’. If it was an issue that they could not possibly address in a thirty-second blurb, then it most likely is going to be complicated, and end in lots of shouting, name-calling, accusations of infidelity, and other vulgar insinuations usually involving the mother of the offending party.

Sitting down in my towel, I call her back and begin to rummage through the small mountain of clothes at the foot of my bed, looking for something suitable to wear. I’ve decided that it is no longer necessary or beneficial to discriminate between washed and unwashed clothing and therefore, instead of segregating them into piles based only on my purely prejudicial analysis of what constitutes ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, to, rather let them mix and roam freely across my bedroom floor.

Now, if I divide the hours I’ve put in at Laurel Public Schools, coaching awkward teenagers, drying teary eyes, administering prescriptions for psychotropic medications and what not, and then tack on the cost of gasoline at twenty miles a day, I figure that my daily salary has amounted to less than this phone call is going to cost me. I would be remiss to omit the fact that phone calls in the Yellowstone Valley area are in fact, toll free.

The unfriendly secretary answers the phone and tells me we have a problem.

“Patrick we have a problem.”

“What kind of problem?” I ask. I’m sniffing at the seat of a pair of jeans I found somewhere towards the bottom of the pile; a sure fire test for cleanliness, when your in a pinch for time, or just flat broke, is to smell the seat of the pants you want to wear that day. But anyway I think she hears my sniffling and I know she’s thinking I’m reeling from a three day drunk in the middle of the week, but I have to let her go on thinking that because I really don’t want to tell her what I’m actually doing.

“Yes. It seems we don’t have your W-4’s on file.”

“Why do you need my W-4’s?” The last pair of pants failed the sniff test. Horribly. I’ve moved on to another pair.

“Without your W-4’s we won’t be able to issue your check. Is there any way you could fax a copy out to us?”

“But you have my W-4’s. I filled them out for you when I came in to get fingerprinted.”

“Then we must have lost them,” She admits with an edge in her voice. I don’t think she enjoys admitting defeat. And then, as if in retaliation, “Is there any way you could fax a copy of them out to us?” She repeats, hammering out the syllables of each word with a tone of malevolence that only a middle-management executive administrative assistant could ever use with any effectiveness at all.

“But you see,” I’ve selected a pair of pants by now. “You’ve already sent me one check last month, so I know you have my W-4’s on file.”

“Well in that case, you’ll receive your check at the end of the season.”

“I thought it was the twentieth of each month that checks were issued.”

“It is.”

“But it’s the twenty-fifth today.”

“Is the season over with?”

“No. We have one more meet this weekend.”

“Then your check won’t be issued until the twentieth at the end of the season.”

“So I won’t receive my check until?”

“February twentieth. Have a good day.” And with a click, she hangs up the phone.