Word count: 1010 | Reading time: 5 min read
Pretzel Logic
A dead Kennedy’s girlfriend on a resume? What was I thinking?
The woman at the window was incredulous.
“Marilyn Monroe?” she asked. “You sent a resume with a Marilyn Monroe stamp? My God, man, what were you thinking?”
That sick feeling of guilty nausea welled up in my stomach.
My God, what was I thinking?
After two years of housebound stir craziness, my wife blasts out a pack of cover letters and what do I do?
Stick Marilyn on ’em.
Banish ’em to the don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you pile.
Condemn my tortured spouse to an eternity of mommy-mommy-Zacky-bit-the-bunny mania.
All for the use of a 32-cent piece of gummed paper
But, hey, it wasn’t my fault.
Not really.
How the hell did I know that a picture of a dead Kennedy-paramour would incite such feelings?
Let’s begin this beguine at the beginning.
I come home late one evening and, after bicycling my sorry butt home, walk in thinking of a close encounter of the third kind with the glowing box of wisdom.
Silly me.
“Honey, I have these resumes to mail, could you drop them off?” asks my wife in that way wives have.
No problem, I tell her.
Besides, the trip to the post office will give me a chance to catch the Mets game on the radio. For some reason, I can’t pick up WFAN at home. So merrily I am off, Bob Murphy’s golden voice bringing back memories of 30 years of listening to baseball on the radio.
Even the dearth of parking at the 30th Street branch fails to sour my mood. Isringhausen is on the mound and winning, Murphy is calling the game and all is right with the world.
I pay the beggars who hang out at the post office no mind, although I do wonder whether their large numbers have anything to do with the raising of the postage rate from 29 to 32 cents.
Walking into the cavernous office, I am confident in my mission, which I have planned to the last detail.
Step up to the window, plop down my buck-ninety-two for six stamps, and lickety-split I’ll be gone.
But then there she was.
Marilyn.
Beckoning to me from the self-serve machine.
Calling out with her sad eyes and pouty lips.
Urging me to take her.
Well, out of the machine anyway.
I was shocked.
Because I never was really a Marilyn man. My taste in dead actresses runs more toward Veronica Lake or Rosalind Russell. Marilyn never did a whole lot for me.
I could have taken the black aviator.
Or Satchmo.
Or any of the half-dozen other dead folk waiting to be licked, slipped through a slot, stuffed in a bag and shipped God knows where.
But I just couldn’t take my eyes off Marilyn.
I had to have her.
And I did.
I didn’t listen to that little voice.
That tiny, tinny nagging little voice that was telling me, “You’ll be sorry. You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”
Oh sure, said the voice. Marilyn was sexy and all. But what about those stuffed shirts who would get your poor wife’s resume?
I pictured two people who would get the resume.
The first, a fat, bald man with bad breath.
The other, a prim, school-marmish 50-year-old virgin with no sense of humor.
Each different, but each with the same reaction to Marilyn.
Harumph.
The little voice should have made me worry.
Would the resume receivers think my wife a brazen hussy for stamping the envelope with the ultimate brazen hussy? Or would they figure the truth? That it was just her dumb-ass husband screwing up yet another errand? And if they figured that out, would they want somebody with a Marilyn-stamp-licking, errand-screwing-up husband, anyway?
Quickly, though, the little voice is drowned out by another voice. The voice of Bob Murphy, the only man whose voice I have heard nearly as often as my father’s, reminding me to hurry up and get back to the game on the radio.
So I lick the stamps, carefully place them on the envelopes and walk up to the counter.
I shove them in a pile on the desk, but not before briefly catching the eye of the clerk behind the counter.
Is she mocking me, I wonder?
Is she making some swift moral judgment?
I don’t want to take the time to find out.
I will never see this woman again, I think. What difference does it make what she thinks?
Little did I know how wrong I was.
I drive around, do a few more errands, listen to a few more innings of Bob and head home.
I walk in, once again thinking of that great ion-emitting tube of wonder. Only to be greeted by “Honey, you’ll never believe it. I messed up two of the letters.”
Well, being the great husband that I am, and knowing that a trip back to the post office means a few more innings of Bob, I tell my wife that I, ace conniver, will find a way to stop the letters and avoid her the embarrassment of having prospective employers read her gaffs.
So back in the car I go.
I fire up the engine. Flip on the game. Drive and drive and drive to find parking.
I park.
Walk past the bums.
Into the building and up to window 54.
“Excuse me,” I say. “But I have a dumb request. Is there any way I can stop a couple of letters I just mailed? It’s for my wife, you see. She kind of…”
Before I can finish, the woman smiles.
It was she from before.
She with the judgmental gaze.
“I remember you,” she says with a pleasant smile. “You’re the one with the Marilyn stamps.”
I am awed.
Twenty million pieces of mail and she remembers my letters.
“So, what’s so important about these letters?” she asks. “What’s in them?”
Resumes, I tell her.
“My God, man. What were you thinking?”
I still don’t know.
But it could have been worse.
I could have used Nixon.
