96. Yosser Hughes Eat your Heart out.

Christ, fiction is so much harder than the truth.
I’ve spent three days working on the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever written.
Two pages of lies, fabrications, grandiose exaggerations and utter bollocks.
I have sweated, I have cursed, I have stared blankly at the screen until a fine layer of dust has settled on my eyeballs and they have dried like the eyes of a fish in the sun.
Every word had to be dragged out of me like a diseased molar from an abscessed jaw.
No flow, no skipping sentences dancing across the page, no playful double entendres or bleak flashes of painfully remembered horror.
And the title of this masterpiece?
What could be worthy of such pain, such tortured creation, this literary golum molded from naught but my own sweat and sacrificed hours and the very writhing of my tormented soul?
Two letters:

C.V.

Yes, that’s right.
I am trying to escape.
Like a downed pilot ensconced behind the grey walls of Colditz Castle, I am quietly making plans.
My hair is short and it is smart and my face is cleanly shaved.
My suit is pressed and my shirt is fresh and my tie is confident yet conservative.
I have a number of days leave squirrelled away should I need to attend an interview.
I have vacuumed the crap from the insides of the family car and I have paid six pounds for Eastern European men to wash and wax the exterior until it gleams.
I have cut down on the booze.
I am prepared.
All I need now are the necessary faked documents and I will be ready to flee for the border.
And this is where I come unstuck.
The C.V.
It is pitiful, it really is.
When I list my professional achievements with brutal honesty it is enough to make me weep.
Twenty two years of doing the same job, in one guise or another.
There are only so many ways you can fluff up the sentence ‘career history: reprographics, from 1989 until 2011′.
Fuck me. I’ve just realised that my working life spans four decades.
That’s a long time using an NT cutter – surely by now I’m adept enough to painlessly open up my fucking wrists?

An old college mate has contacted me.
He runs a studio, a slick professional outfit.
He wanted to know if I was still in the trade, if I was interested in applying for a job.
I said yes and yes.
But when I got to my C.V., dusted off an old mac that still had a fucking floppy drive, and I looked at what I had listed as my great achievements in this most prestigious of career choices, I realised there was only one thing I could add to it.
Years.
All I did was press tap…tab…tab… until I got to the part about years-in-service and changed the number from 14 to 22.
22 years.
In eight years I’ve achieved the princely sum of FUCK ALL.
The years before that are not much better.
And as those years sneak past, my urge to leave is slowly overwhelmed by the bleak fact of my increasing unemployability.
Any employer worth his salt is going to look at a C.V. that reads ’22 years in reprographics’ and think ‘what the fuck is wrong with this bloke??’
It’s a question I’ve asked myself many, many times.
So what do you do if your C.V. is a perfect study of minimalism?
You lie.
Everyone lies on their C..V., of course, to one extent or another, but nothing compared to what I’ve got to do.
So I’ve been inventing lies for three days and now I have a horrible taste in my mouth, the taste of concentrated bullshit.
I look at what I’ve written and I gag.
Am I writing about me? What happens when I get asked a question in an interview, and my mask slips to reveal my real face pulling spaz faces at my prospective employer?
I’m fucked, that’s what.
So I’ve decided to write an honest C.V., a C.V. I can put out there and honestly claim it to be mine, a C.V. packed full of achievements and life experience.
Here it is.

Name: General Lucifer

Address: The City of Dis,
Fifth Circle,
South of Heaven.
email: g.lucifer@rocketship.com

I have been employed as a reprographic mac operator at The Factory for twenty two years now, and in that time I have achieved naff all. I have shown great consistency and diligence in irritating my supervisors to the point of complete nervous breakdown, and I have successfully avoided a much deserved sacking on any number of occasions.
My wealth of knowledge and experience will prove beneficial to any prospective employer, as long as that employer is in the business of having sex with drunk women, hiding in the toilet for prolonged periods of time, drinking vast quantities of tea and seven different styles of malingering.
I can also offer a broad range of other skills, such as Eating Bacon, drawing cruel cartoons of fellow employees, griping, talking rubbish and tossing-it-off.

CAREER HISTORY
Four colour planner (1989-1996)
I started work at sixteen on a five year apprenticeship that took seven years to complete and by this time I was already drinking quite a bit. I had not started fucking anyone yet, apart from myself, but I was a very keen learner and considered fucking to be a skill that I had a very great desire to master.
At work I was making tea, cutting up film and shit, and using paint the colour dog crap to spot out negatives.
An old man shoved his cock in my ear.
I consider this to be the moment I lost my virginity.
It was disappointing.
I grew my hair really long and started listening to rock music.
I started drinking a lot.
A girl finally let me fuck her but it was quite a let down. When I tried to massage her clitoris she said, ‘Ow, give over, your trying to frig me, not remove a fucking stain.’
I shot my bolt too fast.
I realised I’d need a lot of practice to get good at this.
At work I was sleeping in the darkroom and lusting over a girl in accounts. I took her on a date but made the mistake of treating her with respect so she dumped me. It turns out she was wanking off all the printers in their cars after work.
I didn’t have a car so I never got wanked off.
It is against the law to be wanked off on a bus, I think.
the seven years of my apprenticeship finished and I was finally a fully qualified four colour planner.
Everyone in the factory gathered round and cheered as they stripped me naked and threw me in a massive vat filled with cold water, piss, glue, ink, rotting food and mashed paper.
After I got clean I discovered that they were getting rid of film planning and were buying Apple Macs.
Seven years wasted.
Fucking typical.

Apple Mac Operator (1996-present day)
I trained to be a mac operator under the expert tutelage of a man in his fifties who had messed about with a mac for a few weeks and who now considered himself an expert.
He had a big moustache and he picked his arse and sniffed his fingers and he didn’t wash and he thought that the only thing you needed to disguise the smell of shitty fingers and body odour was the sweet smell of a sucked fruit Polo.
I used to like fruit Polos.
Now the smell makes me dry retch.
The man with the moustache used to say, ‘One of the things I really hate about you Lucifer, is…’
Insert what you like. He really hated me.
I bought a house and fucked girls in it.
I started getting pretty good at it, and even started fucking other men’s wives, I got that good.
I was drinking more by now and I’d also started smoking cigars the size and colour of Linford Christie’s cock. I’m guessing.
By now I had A Reputation, both at work and locally.
Locally I had A Reputation for being drunk and for fucking.
At work I had A Reputation for being hung over and for being fucked.
Both were true, after a fashion, but not as bad as people made out.
Not that I can remember.
I was pretty drunk, after all.
Then I met a girl and settled down a bit and got thrown out of America and went to Italy and got drunk and got engaged then got married then had some kids.
I happened just like that.
It’s all rather a blur.
And with a house and a wife and some kids I couldn’t afford to fuck about so much.
I actually started to try.
At about this time I started writing.
So I put the hours in, worked hard, lost a bit of the reputation as a drunk trouble causer and got a couple of breaks.
I was given a nice little design role, and at the same time I was made a kind of assistant studio manager.
I liked the design part because I’ve always been a bit artsy craftsy glue and bits of paper. I liked the managing bit because I got to chat to the office girls and dress a bit dapper and I got a good wage by taking the piss with the overtime.
The skills I can bring to a management role are the an ability to laugh loudly at shit jokes, to nod seriously like I have heard important information when I’m actually listening to music in my head, and I am also very good at prioritizing work according to the amount of thigh or tit the account executive has flashed at me.
The skills I can bring to a design role are the ability to dress up a crappy piece of direct mail like the cheap whore it is, make it tacky and gaudy and appealing to the sort of person who chooses to advertise their product with something as hideously ugly and crass as a direct mail marketing campaign.

I am no longer a designer, and I am no longer an assistant manager.
I got rather good at laughing loudly and whoring my art and ogling tits and thighs and nodding seriously, so good in fact that people made noises about giving me a permanent job.
So my boss got cross and demoted me.
I lost a lot of money, and I lost my house, but I was allowed to keep my wife and kids.

So I’m just a reprographic mac operator again.
I’d rather be a writer, but I’m not.
Yet.

Now are you going to give me a fucking job or what?

~ by generallucifer on June 27, 2011.