Free The Tao of Apathy by Thomas Cannon Page A

his friend.
“Actually, I heard why. Come sit down, Biggs.”
    Bigger sat down on an old waiting room chair
that had been in the Butt Hutt since the seventies. “I have never
seen you like this. Why are you pissed off, Joe? Oh, sorry,
Father.”
    “ Shut the fuck up, Bigger. I got
bigger things to worry about than you using the P word. They have
renamed me Spiritual Concerns Services and bill patients a
consultant fee if I visit them, but I am not allowed to mention
God. Which is a good thing because I am now convinced that He can’t
hold a candle to modern medicine.” Father jerked his head away then
as Bigger, Dan and Joe stared at him.
    “ You see Joe like this everyday,
Bigger,” Dan said, putting his hand on Joe’s shoulder. Dan had
blonde hair, an adolescent mustache and red eyeglasses. He had been
too nerdy in college to smoke, but now that he was married, he
smoked and kept a bottle of caffeinated Pepsi in his
desk.
    “ Hey, how’s the wife, Dan?” Bigger
asked, then felt bad for making the jab.
    Before Dan could get into one of his whining
sessions, Joe said, “I should have known better, but I actually
believed those people when they said all of us that hadn’t had our
wages go up were finally going to get a raise. I know you don’t
care about a future here, Bigger, but this is my career. I need a
raise just for the sake of getting a raise.”
    “ I’d take a raise,” Bigger said
looking up from massaging his forehead. “Ain’t they giving us
one?”
    “ Dan says no.” Joe lit a new
cigarette off his old one and snubbed the old one out. His fingers
trembled as he did so. “Because if they give us kitchen workers,
the housekeepers and the guys in central supply--all of us at the
bottom--more money, then that would throw off the pay scale. If
they give us a raise then they would have to give raises to
everyone above us which is friggin’ everyone, a raise. Well, they
don’t want to do that because the professionals all got raises at
the beginning of the friggin’ decade.” Joe picked up the metal
ashtray and flung it across the room. “In other words, we don’t
make enough god-damn money to get a raise.”
    “ So let’s get this union going,”
Dan said in cheerleader fashion. “Everyone is talking about
unionizing, but this may get people to actually do
something.”
    “ Yeah,” Bigger said, his spirits
returning with a little color in his cheeks.
    “ No,” Joe said flicking his ashes
on the floor. “It doesn’t pay. This proves to me that losers always
lose. And we are losers.”
    This took the wind out of Dan’s sail. “My wife
wouldn’t want me in a union, anyway.” Dan stood up to leave. “I
mean, I know, I’m not a loser. I already got my raise. But you’re
right, Joe, in the end the administration will win. Those guys are
my friends and even I’ll admit that they hate us.”
    “ I hate them first,” Joe said.
“But I’m too busy to cultivate my hate like the management does.
It’s our job to work, but their job to screw us over. Basically,
their meetings, which are all they do, are strategy meetings to
battle their employees and keep us in check. They are able to hate
us employees eight hours a day, five days a week.”
    “ Perhaps only the lonely and
bitter make it to the top,” Bigger said. “Maybe that’s the secret
of their success.”
    “ I thought I told you to shut up,
Casper,” Father Chuck said, flicking his cigarette ash at
Bigger.
    The words lonely and bitter slammed around in
Dan’s head. They had been floating around since his honeymoon, but
they took on pointed edges with Bigger saying them. He was happy
with his light workload, weighty paycheck and ample vacation
allotment, but each day as a professional with a stable home life
did seem to make him more bitter and lonely. So because his wife
would hate it and because Bigger dared him, he decided that he
would help organize the union. “It will serve the bitch right,” he
said aloud.
    “