nothing to divide

In those days, the prevailing attitude toward Wiley Ouellette was that he was a fascist, not a socialist. However, he swore up and down that he was apolitical, even at those city council meetings where he’d step up to the podium and talk about Eugene Debs, Joe Hill, and the Industrial Workers of the World.

In 1976, he was diagnosed with acid reflux, gingivitis, and narcolepsy.

He couldn’t have cared less;  he’d been suffering from ulcers and conjunctivitis since he was eleven.

The year his father left him out of his will, he wrote a novella entitled “Victor the Hermit,” about a nogoodnik who was the embodiment of kitsch.

When he went to the post office to mail out a hundred and two copies of his sublimation, the clerk behind the counter asked him, “Whaddaya, expecting immortality?”

“Just a good piece of a*s,” Wiley said.

As the rejection slips piled up, he used them to wallpaper his outhouse;  it looked as though he would have to keep his night job as a remittance processor for the state’s largest newspaper.

His supervisor called him into his office after his ninety-day probationary period.

“Wiley, you’re very quiet,” said his supervisor.  “I find there are two kinds of quiet people.  The kind who are quiet, but you know they’re happy.  You’re the other kind.  I don’t know if you’re happy or not.”

“Just know that I’m alive and well and living within my emotional means,” Wiley said.

His supervisor stared at him as a fire drill alarm interrupted their silence.  “We’ll finish this when we come back,”  he said.

As Wiley was standing in the parking lot with the rest of his coworkers, he noticed his supervisor lurking in the shade, nipping from a flask.

Ten minutes later, the security guards signaled the end of the fire drill, and the employees were allowed to reenter the building.

When Wiley got back to his supervisor’s cubicle, his supervisor wasn’t there, so he went back to his desk and emailed him:

“DON’T FIGHT PRESSURE WITH PRESSURE,” he wrote.  “YOU’LL ONLY END UP BROKEN-HEARTED.”

After Wiley hit the ‘send’ button, he clocked out, walked to his car, and drove to the library, where he checked out Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax.