|
by Bill Corbett
 Hi, Bill Corbett here. You know,
friends and family congratulate me on having such a great
job. And they are certainly right - to a point. What they
don't understand is that I wasn't hired by Best Brains Inc.
to show up here everyday. No sir. I was hired by Crow
himself - after an excruciating and sometimes physically
painful screening process. (The cat'o'nine tails seemed a
bit much to me.)
I am in fact on Crow's
personal payroll. I am here to make life easier for Crow, as
he has too many greater responsibilities to attend to. I
think of myself as the Jeeves to his Wooster, even though
Crow tells me "Don't dignify yourself with the comparison!"
He's only joking, of course. Then he yells and curses and
spits on the floor in front of me, but he's still just
kidding, I think.
 It's a
tough job, being a lowly mud-crawling lackey (his preferred
term) to an ingenious but temperamental small gold robot.
Let me share a sampling of the duties I have to Crow (or, as
he instructs me to call him, Your Excellency) during the
course of the week:
- Fix his favorite
breakfast: Fruit Loops with Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee Beef
Gravy.
- Drive him to the dog
track.
- Help him with his times
tables.
- Read the entire medical
encyclopedia to him, just for kicks.
- Perform hand puppet shows
that he can boo loudly and abusively.
- Oil his beak to keep him
in fighting trim for his bouts with bad movies.
- Rent great classic movies
so he can shout out highly complimentary remarks.
("Everyone needs to unwind", he says.)
- Be the designated driver
when he goes out pub-crawling with Servo. (Yes, I have to
wait in the car.)
- Fix his favorite lunch:
cranberry cheese melt with Altoids.
- Drive him to the dog track
again. Lend him lots of money.
- Ghost-write his
scandal-soaked, tell-it-all, sex-filled
autobiography.
- Maintain his Kim Catrall
correspondence in good order (see item directly
above).
- Call and try to get the
Dalai Lama to endorse his new line of high-tech whoopee
cushions.
- Help him put on his
disguise to avoid celebrity gawkers in public. He puts on
a Trent Lott mask, and does nothing to disguise his body,
so people are generally just frightened.
- Fetch his spear gun and
Bowie knife for him and then wait in the broom closet
until he tells me I can come out. (I don't know what this
is about, and I don't dare ask.)
- Dutifully try to finish
off the fights he picks in bikers' bars, even though it
means frequent hospitalization for me.
- Actively seek out and call
foreign dignitaries who will have him as a pampered
celebrity guest. ("Ruthless dictators are the funnest",
says he.)
- Fix his favorite dinner:
chateau briand, white asparagus, roasted new potatoes and
caeser salad. And oh yeah, with Fluff all over
everything.
- Review the day with him to
see what I've done wrong, very wrong.
- Tuck him in to his
waterbed with his Harold Robbins novels, a bottle of
single malt scotch and a big handful of Cuban
cigars.
It is a good life indeed, if
challenging and a bit unhealthy. But if I can be Holmes to
his Watson, then... [Ooops. Sorry. Crow just saw me typing
this, and finds this analogy a bit off. Correction:] If I
can be a tubeworm to his Olympian God, then I'm
happy.
Gotta go. Time to polish his
scrimshaw collection.
[posted 7/98]
|
