My name is Marlowe
The Big Clean
It was going to be one of those days. I was watching for fate to walk through the door, but all I could see was opportunity drifting out the window. Then I remembered the door was locked. I wondered if I should get up and unlock it, but my reluctant arse objected and clung ferociously to the leather padded chair. It's probably for the best I thought, as my mind tried to shake off a jingle from the radio that was circling my brain, corralling my thoughts like Apaches on horses. It had kept me awake and restless all night, shooting arrows at my head every time sleep approached. "T'is the Season to be Jolly" it rang, over and over. "Jolly"? What in hell's name is "jolly"? It didn't mean a damn thing of course. Some writer had made it up because he couldn't pluck anything else from his vocabulary to rhyme with "holly". It was the same creeping demolition of the language as the word "punt", though I hadn't heard that rhyme on the radio for a while. Alley walls and peeling billboards yes, along with crude attempts at aerosol illustration of where some sad Joe would like to stick his pole.
I reached for the nearest whiskey bottle, but it was dry as Utah, There were others scattered randomly around the dusty place but they were empty too. Waiting was all very well, but I had to do something. I turned on the small TV in the corner and flicked through the channels. It seemed the media nobs decided to restrict me to indistinguishable variations of Big Brother, X-Factor and Celebrity Dancing. What was the world coming to? Famous faces presenting themselves as morons, and morons pretending to be famous! The Telly was suffering from terminal dementia, and in full knowledge of this fact was spewing out the infectious dribble on an unsuspecting public.
I was getting nowhere. If things didn't change they would stay the same, and somebody had to get proactive to break out of the glooming stagnation. That someone was me. I studied the room carefully, using the corners of my eyes so as not to draw attention to myself. As I thought, dirt was everywhere, coating everything with a dusty coat of dirty dust. Maybe I couldn't clean up the English language or the excrement on TV, but I sure as hell could clean this office. Perhaps it would shake of the black clouds gathered over my eyebrows. But where was a Dick like me, used to dealing with broads and hoodlums in sleazy Bars, going to start? I was out of my depth and I knew it.
I needed a plan. A subtle plan. A plan meant rolling another cigarette, but I could already sense inertia tangibly holding me down on the chair. I had to start now, and build my tactics on the fly. It didn't take an Einstein to figure out that I needed to begin with a one handed operation, leaving the other one free to chauffer the hot-headed slutty white tube back and forth to my feverishly demanding lips. That narrowed my options; I could start by cleaning out the inside of my nose with a finger. A quick perimeter check left me happy that no Slinky Blonde was likely to slither in for the next ten minutes or so - The door was locked, the walls were plasterboard and the window was six storeys up. My following move would be to scrape out the grime under my fingernail using the sharp edge of my chipped front tooth. I was going to have to trust in faith that the rest of the plan would fall into place before I took the last drag on the cigarette, ground the sad butt into the arm of the chair and sent it's stiff corpse spinning across the room with a flick of my freshly cleaned fingernail....