Writer-Man and his Sidekick, the Captain
It’s time for an office.
Writer-man had an enormous amount of work to get done. Enormous even for a superhero.
He was writing in his home in the southern part of the county of Davidson. He had been tasked to complete a two-act play regarding a peaceful resort town invaded by non-homeowners and street vendors. It was due Tuesday.
“Captain, I can’t even concentrate on this.”
The racket continued to grow out in the lane near the front of Writer-Man’s house.
It seems a television cable company had begun to string its own entertainment cables into the neighborhood. Since the provider was new to the area, the people who worked for them were new too.
“Ouch!” one of the guys up a ladder against a pole shouted.
“These cables look just like the power lines!”
A considerable crackling noise reminded him of which was which just then and was followed by a line of profanities.
Mistakes such as this one had knocked a fellow worker down to the ground earlier in the morning, so the crew was already short-handed.
“It’s just terrible,” said Captain Morgan, Writer-Man’s faithful assistant.
The Captain was a jolly soul, tanned, but rudderless in this pressure-filled world of remote working, where dining room tables across the land had become workdesks.
He had no apparent source of income, yet never seemed to lack anything he needed, especially as it pertained to creature comforts. Some old business cards of his said “private detective” on them, but Writer-Man has really never seen him interested in a case, much less solve one.
He did have a minor disagreement once with the local constables concerning his hobby of peeping into parked cars late at night while exercising his lifelong hobby of studying bench versus bucket seats.
He was invaluable to Writer-Man these days assisting with pencils and new ink cartridges. In fact, he could handle almost anything except bringing Writer-Man a fresh drink if they were on the beach, where the electronic device around his ankle was so profoundly visible in the appropriate beach wear, that it had caused some other beach patrons to be less friendly.
But this time the din of the cable installers outside presented a problem he could not help with at all.
“Sorry, boss,” was the only step he could take at the time.
“That settles it. I have got to get an office!”
This conclusion had been prompted by months of trying to work from his home and being late on the delivery of several manuscripts he had been engaged to write primarily because of the distraction occurring constantly.
He was not sure he could afford one, however, because he did much of his writing for a publication that paid him based on the number of reads he received. That is, of course, no way to treat a writer, but those were darker times, journalistically.
And nobody wanted to read much of what Writer-Man had written anyway, as it did seem obtuse and poorly thought out, overall.
But there is no quit in Writer-Man’s vocabulary, which is not that great anyway.
Writer-Man goes shopping.
Writer-Man and the Captain spent the following day out looking at office space for lease. They looked at several different offices, but most were too big and one was too small.
There was one of course that was just right.
It was a free-standing afterthought of a place that sat rather behind a row of one-story shops reachable only by a narrow alley where most of the more expensive tenants used for parking.
It was a white-painted cinder block building with one room and a bath, whose original use or purpose had long ago been forgotten. It did look pretty sweet to Writer-Man.
It was owned, as was most of the commercial real estate was owned by the grocer H G Wiggly, a smallish man who originally purchased land for his grocery stores where the trolley lines ended.
Now he owned prime real estate everywhere. And you could take the trolley to them.
“I’ll have to take your application and check your credit,” said the owner.
“I don’t think I have any credit,” said Writer-Man.
“I have never paid for anything. Would that affect my credit?” Writer-Man replied to the building owner.
Not qualified.
“Get out of my building and quit wasting my time!” snarled the grocer.
“You wouldn’t qualify to rent a parking space in this town without a quarter to feed it.”
He turned on his tiny little heels, and ushered out Writer-Man and the Captain, not even pausing long enough to take back the blank rental application he had handed to Writer-Man.
As the ultimate derision toward the building landlord, the Captain pulled up his trouser leg enough to show off the ankle monitor that had been known to cause consternation to some people.
The Captain was not a violent hero but was prone to symbolism at times.
After a very quiet and sullen trip back home, Writer-Man asked the Captain “what am I supposed to do now?”
“I can’t make a living if I can’t finish a story and I can’t write stories if I can’t have somewhere to concentrate on them.
“I know I am a good writer and I can craft a good story, but I can’t do it at the MacDonalds!”
The stress and the disappointment wore on Writer-Man until he was so depressed, he could hardly stand it.
The solution.
The Captain pointed out that sometimes when he was faced with a big problem, he could take a nap and when he woke up, he had the answer to the problem. It had been there in his head all along.
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!” said Writer-Man.
“And I wish I hadn’t heard that one, either.”
He returned a couple of phone calls from angry editors wondering about their manuscripts, and then he stretched out on the couch.
I can’t even sleep at night from worrying about my deadlines and my portfolio.
Writer-Man drifted off into a peaceful sleep, the likes of which he had not experienced in the last month or more.
In three hours or so, he awoke and sat straight up.
The Captain was over on the easy chair by the still-dark TV drooling and seeming to hallucinate with some action-packed dream of his own.
“That’s it!” Writer-Man shouted out.
“That’s all I need to do!”
In his dreams, he was logical and sensible, and it occurred to him that since he was a writer by trade, he could simply apply his trade, and create a story for his rental application.
The cable guys on the pole outside unleashed another string of profanities.
Writer-Man had a black pen on his table he had been using that morning since the electricity to run his laptop had been so frequently going off and on.
“Do I look 47 years old, Captain?”
“No.”
“Perfect, then 47 it is!”
“The years of pro bono work as an attorney for the indigent have caused me to look older.
“Then, of course, the reason I became a doctor in the first place was to find a cure for the common aging process.
The only place a self-respecting doctor/attorney belongs is in the autobiography section at amazon.
Writer-Man had to hurry to complete the two-page application, especially after he kept having to add more blank sheets to accommodate his storied past.
It’s in the mail.
Writer-Man mailed the completed document to the landlord hoping to avoid eye contact with him, eye contact that surely would have caused him or the Captain, if not both to explode in laughter if they had to give it to him in person.
“The office is yours!” said H G on the phone, after he had received and reviewed the application, and thank you for your service, general!
Later in the evening, they had unloaded Writer-Man’s pen, a half ream of paper, and the Captain’s easy chair. There already was a desk some earlier tenant had left.
“Is this great, or what?” exclaimed Writer-Man to the Captain.
“Tomorrow we start on the great American novel and solving some crimes.
“Tonight it’s time to sack the bats and head to the house.
“I wonder if we’ve got cable yet…
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