But nothing happened. I actually started to get interested in that movie on TV, and I put down my magazine and actually watched it. I thought they might be interested in that.
The next day my wife and I waited hopefully, even though we knew we had bombed out. Still, you can never tell. Sometimes the public wants to see more of a person’s life. Sometimes a face strikes their fancy and you get signed for a series. I didn’t really expect that anyone would want to see a series about my wife and me, but you can never tell. Stranger things have happened.
Nowadays my wife and I spend our evenings in very interesting ways. Our sexual escapades are the talk of the neighborhood, my crazy cousin Zoe has come to stay with us, and regularly an undead thing crawls upstairs from the cellar.
Practically speaking, you never get another chance. But you can never tell. If they do decide to do a follow-up segment, we’re ready.
GOODBYE FOREVER TO MR. PAIN
Joseph Elroy was nicely settled back in his armchair on this Sunday morning in the near future, trying to remember the name of his favorite football team, which he was going to watch later on the TV while reading the bankruptcy notices in the Sunday Times and thinking uncomfortable thoughts.
It was a normal sort of day: the sky outside was colored its usual blah beige, which went well with the blah browns with which Mrs. Elroy, now grinding her teeth in the kitchen, had decorated the place during one of her many short-lived bursts of enthusiasm. Their child, Elixir, was upstairs pursuing her latest discovery—she was three years old and had just gotten into vomiting.
And Elroy had a tune going in his head. “Amapola” was spinning just now, and it would continue until another song segued into it, one song after another, all day, all night, forever. This music came from Elroy’s internal Muzak system, which came on whenever inattentiveness became necessary for survival.
So Elroy was in a certain state. Maybe you’ve been there yourself: the kid cries and the wife nags and you drift through your days and nights, well laid back, listening to the secret Muzak in your head. And you know that you’ll never crack through the hazy plastic shield that separates you from the world, and the gray mists of depression and boredom settle in for a nice long visit. And the only thing that prevents you from opting for a snuffout is your Life-Force, which says to you, “Wake up, dummy, it’s you this is happening to—yes, you, strangling there in your swimming pool of lime-flavored Jell-O with a silly grin on your love-starved face as you smoke another Marlboro and watch the iniquities of the world float by in three-quarter time.”
Given that situation, you’d take any chance that came along to pull out of it, wouldn’t you? Joseph Elroy’s chance came that very afternoon.
The telephone rang. Elroy picked it up. A voice at the other end asked, “Who is this, please?”
“This is Joseph Elroy,” Elroy replied.
“Mr. Elroy, do you happen to have a tune or song going through your head at this moment?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
“What is the name of the song?”
“I’ve been humming ‘Amapola’ to myself for the last couple of hours.”
“What was that name again, Mr. Elroy?”
“‘Amapola.’ But what—”
“That’s it! That’s the one!”
“Huh?”
“Mr. Elroy, now I can reveal to you what this is all about. I am Marv Duffle, and I’m calling you from ‘The Shot of a Lifetime Show’ and you have named the very tune going through the head of our genial guest for tonight, Mr. Phil Suggers! That means that you and your family, Mr. Elroy, have won this month’s big synchronicity prize, The Shot of a Lifetime! Mr. Elroy, do you know what that means?”
“I know!” Elroy shouted joyously. “I watch the show so I know, I know! Elva, stop freaking out in there, we’ve won the big one, we’ve won, we’ve won, we’ve won!”
What this meant in practical terms was that the following day a group of technicians in one-piece orange jumpsuits came and installed what looked like a modified computer console in the Elroys’ living room, and Marv Duffle himself handed them the all-important Directory and explained how all of the best avenues for personal growth and change and self-realization had been collated and tied directly into this computer. Many of these services had formerly been available only to the rich, talented, and successful, who really didn’t need them. But now the Elroys could avail themselves of them, and do it all via patented superfast high-absorption learning modalities developed at Stanford and incorporated into the equipment. In brief, their lives were theirs to shape and mold as they desired, free, and in the privacy of their home.
Elroy was a serious-minded man, as we all are at heart, and so the first thing he did was to search through the Directory, which listed all available services from all the participating companies, until he found Vocationeers, the famous talent-testing firm of Mill Valley, California. They were able to process Elroy by telephone and get the results back to him in fifteen minutes. It seemed that Elroy had the perfect combination of intelligence, manual dexterity, and psychological set to become a topflight micropaleontologist. That position happened to be open at the nearby Museum of Natural History, and Elroy learned all he needed to know about the work with the help of the Bluchner-Wagner School for High-Speed Specialized Learning. So Elroy was able to begin a promising career only two weeks after he had heard of it for the first time.
Elva Elroy, or Elf, as she called herself in wistful moments, wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She looked through the Directory until she found Mandragore, Inc., makers of Norml-Hi twenty-four-hour timed-release mood-enhancement spansules. She had them sent over at once with the Ames Rapid Dope Delivery Service—”Your High Is Our Cry.” Feeling better than she had in ages, Elva was able to face the problem of dinner. After careful consideration, she called Fancy Freakout Food Merchandisers—”Let Us Administer to the Hungry Child in Your Head.”
For their little daughter, Elixir, there was BabyTeasers, a crack service that cajoled the spoiled scions of oil sheiks, now available to the Elroys on ‘round-the-clock standby basis to get the kid out of her temper. Elixir was delighted. New big soft toys to order around! What could be so bad?
That left the Elroys with world enough and time in which to discover each other. They went first with Omni-Pleasure Family Consultants, who, on television in Houston the previous month, had revitalized a marriage that had been pronounced terminal. One counseling session brought the Elroys a deep and abiding love for each other whenever they looked deep into each other’s eyes and concentrated. This gave them the necessary maturity to take the Five-Day Breakthrough with the Total Sex Response people of Lansing, Michigan—which, too, was a success in terms of new highs reached and plateaus maintained. Yet a certain anxiety crept into Elroy’s performance and he felt the need to avail himself of Broadway Joe’s Romantic Sex Service—”Illicit meetings with beautiful sexy broads of a refinement guaranteed not to gross you out.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Elva when she heard about that, and instantly fulfilled a longstanding desire by calling Rough Traders Sex Service. She had been attracted by their ad in the Directory: “Dig, you want it rough, raw, real, and sweaty, but you also want that it shouldn’t be a turnoff. Right? Right. Call our number, baby, ‘cause we got your number.”
They both got a little freaked out from it all, and cooled out with Dreamboat Launchers of Fire Island and their famous motto: “Meditate the Easy Way, with Dope.”