You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers Page A
Authors: Dave Eggers
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Humorous, Popular American Fiction, Philanthropists, Reading Group Guide, Death, Male friendship, Loss (Psychology), Grief, Bereavement, Fiction - General, Family & Relationships, Americans, Psychological, Foreign countries, Humorous fiction, Psychological fiction, Americans - Foreign countries
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bring me back. To Oconomowoc and further, to that funeral home prick and what he did to Jack. Of course a closed-casket. What were you thinking, people?
My signature on each $100 meant it was mine. But otherwise the checks bore no sign of ownership; the potential for fraud and misuse seemed enormous. All of these blank things, beautiful though, their crosshatched Spartans watching as I signed, the checks bearing the colors of the sea, a Mediterranean sea, where bathers lie on rocks -- everything so corruptible. But I could make them safer by signing them. Signature -- mine! Blank and impersonal monies all of them until I swooped down and put my name there, swip shoosh swip, on the line. $100 after $100. My pen was so quick, and steady, and I pushed hard to make it clear and legible; the swooping was audible! Signature -- mine! Signature -- mine! Each ten checks a thousand, all mine in the neat envelope. Mine! I began to feel that all that money that had been sitting dormant in that strange account, that godforsaken money market account set up by Cathy Wambat -- she did some minor-league financial planning on the side -- was for once almost real. What had been for so long just a number on a line in a statement mailed monthly was now in a stack on a tray table, made real by hundreds of names, all mine, as hundreds of Spartans looked on.
I got sick of my signature. I couldn't do it anymore; I hated my name. I had signed ninety checks and rubbed my tired hand like they do on commercials for arthritis. And slowly I realized I would have to sign again, each time I used or cashed one, in the presence of the teller or clerk. Five hundred and eighty-six times my signature would claim this money. Mine! Mine! Swoop! Swoop! I hated the fact of this money and couldn't wait for its dissolution.
A man across the aisle, broad torso under blue blanket, glanced at me and my checks, my neat piles and busy pen, and rolled his eyes. The money wasn't mine and he knew it. The money was lost, someone's lost money, money that had been liberated from any kind of logical roost and had flown, madly, to me.
So I'd been given $80,000 to screw in a lightbulb. There is almost no way to dress it up; that's what it was. My boss has a brochure he had his son make up on the computer, a two-fold xeroxed thing with a list of services, past projects and pictures. The last edition, honest to God, featured a picture of me on a stepladder, installing a lightbulb. I have no idea why West Side Contractors would want to so boldly advertise their lightbulb-installing capabilities, but there it was. Was it a joke on me, Will Chmielewski -- something about Poles -- sorry, Polacks - - and their abilities insofar as lightbulb-screwing goes? My boss insisted it was not -- Never! he said, Jesus, Will, no way! -- then went back to his trailer, muffling a guffaw. So next thing I know there's a call from someone at Leo Burnett, the ad agency with the huge building on the river, and they want to know how I like the idea of being immortalized on millions of packages of some kind of new bulb.
We'd just built a sunroom for a family on Orchard, and it turns out the owner worked at this agency, was an art director of some kind, and had the brochure lying around. While putting together logo proposals for the lightbulb maker, she used a silhouette of me on my stepladder, and tried it out on the company, and the company said That! That man is our lightbulb man!
I knew my mom would be proud and my brother Tommy would laugh, so I did it. Here's the logo, for what it's worth, below. In lieu of cash, they offered me stock in the lightbulb company, stock that could mature, with a stock split or two they said, into $10, $12 million -- could be worth that within two years, they said, so good were these new lightbulbs. They were brilliant, I told them.
My signature on each $100 meant it was mine. But otherwise the checks bore no sign of ownership; the potential for fraud and misuse seemed enormous. All of these blank things, beautiful though, their crosshatched Spartans watching as I signed, the checks bearing the colors of the sea, a Mediterranean sea, where bathers lie on rocks -- everything so corruptible. But I could make them safer by signing them. Signature -- mine! Blank and impersonal monies all of them until I swooped down and put my name there, swip shoosh swip, on the line. $100 after $100. My pen was so quick, and steady, and I pushed hard to make it clear and legible; the swooping was audible! Signature -- mine! Signature -- mine! Each ten checks a thousand, all mine in the neat envelope. Mine! I began to feel that all that money that had been sitting dormant in that strange account, that godforsaken money market account set up by Cathy Wambat -- she did some minor-league financial planning on the side -- was for once almost real. What had been for so long just a number on a line in a statement mailed monthly was now in a stack on a tray table, made real by hundreds of names, all mine, as hundreds of Spartans looked on.
I got sick of my signature. I couldn't do it anymore; I hated my name. I had signed ninety checks and rubbed my tired hand like they do on commercials for arthritis. And slowly I realized I would have to sign again, each time I used or cashed one, in the presence of the teller or clerk. Five hundred and eighty-six times my signature would claim this money. Mine! Mine! Swoop! Swoop! I hated the fact of this money and couldn't wait for its dissolution.
A man across the aisle, broad torso under blue blanket, glanced at me and my checks, my neat piles and busy pen, and rolled his eyes. The money wasn't mine and he knew it. The money was lost, someone's lost money, money that had been liberated from any kind of logical roost and had flown, madly, to me.
So I'd been given $80,000 to screw in a lightbulb. There is almost no way to dress it up; that's what it was. My boss has a brochure he had his son make up on the computer, a two-fold xeroxed thing with a list of services, past projects and pictures. The last edition, honest to God, featured a picture of me on a stepladder, installing a lightbulb. I have no idea why West Side Contractors would want to so boldly advertise their lightbulb-installing capabilities, but there it was. Was it a joke on me, Will Chmielewski -- something about Poles -- sorry, Polacks - - and their abilities insofar as lightbulb-screwing goes? My boss insisted it was not -- Never! he said, Jesus, Will, no way! -- then went back to his trailer, muffling a guffaw. So next thing I know there's a call from someone at Leo Burnett, the ad agency with the huge building on the river, and they want to know how I like the idea of being immortalized on millions of packages of some kind of new bulb.
We'd just built a sunroom for a family on Orchard, and it turns out the owner worked at this agency, was an art director of some kind, and had the brochure lying around. While putting together logo proposals for the lightbulb maker, she used a silhouette of me on my stepladder, and tried it out on the company, and the company said That! That man is our lightbulb man!
I knew my mom would be proud and my brother Tommy would laugh, so I did it. Here's the logo, for what it's worth, below. In lieu of cash, they offered me stock in the lightbulb company, stock that could mature, with a stock split or two they said, into $10, $12 million -- could be worth that within two years, they said, so good were these new lightbulbs. They were brilliant, I told them.
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