It was a monday busy morning, and John was sick of his boss. He had his office on the top level of the building with a mahogany desk and portraits his brat son suffocating any who dare to enter. He spent more on booze than he earned for the company and whenever he did leave his office he made sure to not look at the “filthy” employees in the eyes. A week before Christmas break, when our annual bonuses should’ve come in, he had all 2,125 employees bonuses taken away and given to himself, because he was “going to stay in the office for Christmas break”, which was a complete lie. He sent the messages out on sparkled, colored, and cheerful christmas cards. Randy quit after that day, and he was the nicest man in the office. After the market dropped this morning, I wasn’t in a good mood and the boss wasn’t helping. I decided to go to the elevator that lead up to his office where I’d tell him his behavior was unacceptable, give him back his christmas cards, and then head back downstairs to work for the rest of the day.
***
“No! No! No! This isn’t right! This story sounds like garbage.”, the old man scratched his head with his pencil. “I can’t write this nonsense!”
“You don’t like it, sir?”, the butler asked with his hands wrested reassuringly on the old man’s shoulders. “I thought it was good.”
The old man shook his head and swiveled his chair to look out the window. “It’s tasteless Albert. Get me some whiskey.”
The butler deftly poured a glass of the vintage 64 year old Macallan into the old man’s glass. The old man snatched the glass, spilling a few drops that the butler would have to clean up later. The old man stared out the spotless window which captured the entire city in a beautiful shot. People would’ve paid thousands to get a photograph like this and the old man had the view for free everyday. “See those people down there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right now when I read this story it’s like I’m reading it from down there, looking up here. I want it to be my perspective. That means that in order to heighten the perspective and view of life, I’ll need to create a deeper theme and representative of the human nature, a greater slice of life. You know what I mean?”
“I think so, sir.”, the butler said quietly.
“My only issue is that, though I may be a rhetorical mastermind, my arts lack in a... statement.”
“I believe comedy is quite a popular and well thought statement of this day and age.”, the butler said unblinkingly. The old man rationalized this for sometime, for the odds of popularity he’d like comedy, but his art would lose the masterful craft of heart-pumping realism. “Albert, you may have a point. The quirks and continuous possibilities of fiction and comedy draw my eyes. I could paint the picture of man like Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel! I’d open the minds of men and crawl through all their deepest sins to paint a deity of literature. Yes Albert!”
“Great, sir.” Albert said as he picked up the old man’s glass.
“Albert, you and I are going to create the true portrayal of man. Everyone will love us!”, the old man said with his lips drawn back in a smile.
***
John had a revelation, his tranquil thoughts turned on a dime and he wanted revenge. He wanted to go up to his boss’s office, throw him in a cage, and he wanted to throw the key to the cage out the window. Together with a group of his best friends, they invaded the janitor’s closet, to arm themselves with broomsticks, mops, and bright yellow plastic buckets. If anyone else was to see the group of unruly employees, they’d call them a circus. But they were circus men with a job to do: find the boss. Even the local security guards backed away from the horde of angry men as they swarmed into the elevator.
***
“Albert, how does this ending sound to you?”, said the old man. He cleared his throat and read, “They rode up the elevator in silence, as they didn’t have anything to say anyways, they all knew what they had to do. They all looked at the wall because they didn’t need to look at each other, they knew each other’s faces as well as they knew their computer screens. When the elevator reached the top floor, with the loud “ding” that disturbed the calm, the circus was ready.”
Albert nodded approvingly, “It sounds excellent, sir.”
The old man continued, “The group emerged on the lady sitting alone at the information desk, tieing her up and throwing her like a sack of potatoes into the elevator shaft. They were a raging storm, until they reached the boss’s door. No one dared knock, from fear. Until John, the same man who’d started this mess, put his balled fist up to door and-”
Knock. Knock. Knock. The sound ringed across the large room right to where the old man and the butler stood.
“How odd, I didn’t get a call saying someone was coming.”, the old man said. He pointed his finger to the door, “We’ll work on this later, answer the door.”
The armada of men stormed into the office, loaded with mops, buckets, and brooms. Before the butler could react, they’d had him tied up and gagged. With the mops in hand, they slabbered the old man and beat him until his skin was a garish purple. While the rest of the employees dragged them out of the room, John looked briefly at the old man’s large desk. A script with the title, A story of men, lay on the desk. “What a stupid title”, John thought. He picked up the script and threw it in the trash right next to the mahogany desk.