the inmate's journal : the corporation iii : the branch ii

I was a mediocre teller—never balancing, misplacing 100 dollar bills, insufficiently courteous to customers, insufficiently vulgar with Magna.  The days were sweaty vaudevilles of pain.  Hours upon hopeless hours of the filth of money and cheques and bills and drafts, and fat Italian grandmothers would descend from their kingdoms of clean and hand me 20 paycheques for Pesquini and Poosquoono and Boosetti and Ragatoni and Macaroni and Genovese and Bonanno totaling $10,478.33 and 30 bills for flushing and cooking and heating and watering and fucking totaling $1,973.81 and say in barely intelligible English, 500 cash and I’d hand them a deposit slip and ask them to fill it out and ask for ID and all hell would break loose because her greatgreatgreatgrandmother had been the mistress of the Bank’s founder and who was I a skinny cracker to question anything and Magna would say Just cash it Donut and I’d be on my feet for half an eternity and sad Jewish entrepreneurs would ascend from their domestic hells, unable to satisfy Yahweh or their wives, hated and needed by everyone, full of deposits, and I’d be on my feet for three quarters of eternity and slutty crackheads wearing Playboy bunny tshirts and no bras and nipples scratching me in the face wanting $200 from their accounts with -$1.47 in them and eternity sucking me into it like some malevolent fellatio … the entire dreaming parade of hungry humanity squawking in some symphony in which cash was the melody and despair the contrapuntal strain … this is a teller’s job and don’t forget it next time you go to a banking machine.

 

When the doors were finally locked at the end of the day, I’d escape to the lunchroom to get away from the melancholy and mayhem upstairs.  One Friday Magna and Ruth and Geraldine came down after me and sat around the table mischievously.  Magna took a small metal man with a giant penis out of a plastic bag.  Donut, look what Ruth and Geraldine got me as a it’s-the-end-of-the-week present.  She wound it up and it walked across the table, its cock moving up and down robotically.  My three colleagues guffawed outrageously.  Donuts orbited around their heads.  Raspberry jelly began falling gently.

 

Donut.  If Ruth and her tits … don’t stare son—if they was to suggest to you that the two of you go into the vault for a little hankpanky, what would you say?

 

I’m really not …

 

Forty percent for trying.  The correct answer is you’d have to do me first.  Ruth, Donut here wants to do you, but he’s got to do me first.  There’s a pecking order to the world Donut and some of us get first dibs.   I know it’s hard Ruth but that’s the way it is.

 

Mag, you haven’t been done since the flood.

 

Hell no, Harold does me every time I balance.

 

Just like I said Mag, you haven’t done it since the flood.

 

Ruth here’s got a wit as big as her twat.

 

And you got a mouth as big as yours.

 

All the better to eat Donut with.

 

The three of them sat around grinning like a deputation of medieval witches cast by some cackling god into a foreign and unwelcome age.  I tried to place them in my hierarchies of humanity and failed.  I tried to reconcile them with what I had been told about women, and failed.  I tried to fit them into my notions of professionalism and efficiency, and failed.  I thought of New Bank’s diversity program—how it promoted gender and racial and sexual and religious diversity … but friends and adulterers, diversity of genitals and skin color and bedroom activity and god is great; I’m all for it.  But what I’ve wondered many times since is—what about all the other kinds of diversity? Diversity of the things we can’t see? Of words? Of lifestyle? Of insults and inebriation and codependence and madness?  For I’ve watched the grooming of those hacking their way up the Wall Street ladders and I’ve seen the straight and narrow they must walk if they would rise.  Here, though, in a distant satellite orbiting far from the hot power of New Bank’s sun, was real diversity:  freaks from the broom closets of the psyche let loose on the public and on Harold and on me.  I looked at them and all things seemed strangely possible.