“Speak calmly,” she said in a quiet voice, “The world will wait for your input.” I sat there with a stupid grin on my face waiting to be silenced by a potentially angry crowd just beyond the curtains. It was time for me, Eddie Boggins, to deliver the speech that I’d been dreading for the past five months. Five months of planning, grinding my teeth and losing sleep over something I could not stop. I worked for the Bloomerville Vacuum Company and I had done so for the past fifteen years as their spokesperson and “Presenter of Innovative New Products.”
Today, I was gearing up to present the new Carborneon 5000. This was a vacuum that not only sucked with ten times more force than our previous model, the Carboneon 4000, but it was also rechargeable and had a cool, adjustable strobe light as well. The idea was to make vacuuming more exciting.
The calming voice was my assistant, Lillian Keldron. She had always been by my side, at least for the fifteen years I had been working for Bloomerville. We were just friends. We tried a fling once, but both decided it mucked our business relationship up too much. As Lillian and I sat backstage, we looked intensely at the plugged in, charging vacuum about to be demoed for a filled auditorium. We both knew the pressure was on.
“Just be yourself,” she said. “This is an amazing model. People will love it. It will sell itself.”
“I know, “ I said, “But I got no sleep last night. I kept having dreams about being sucked into a black hole of nothingness. I kept feeling insecure.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said with a glowing smile.
The Carboneon 5000 needed a full 12-hour charge before it worked properly. I’d had my colleague, Larry Schmirdtlandt deliver the vacuum to that back stage room some seventeen hours before. I wanted to be more safe than sorry. My career was hinging on this.
Five minutes until curtain and my palms were sweating. My tie was feeling tight and my mind was racing.
“I can’t do it!” I yelled.
Lillian looked me square in the eyes and said, “Yes you can!” With that she gave me a devilish and warm smile and the kind of deep kiss I will never forget. It felt like it lasted hours, but it was probably only a couple of minutes.
As our mouths separated, she said, “Do you feel better, now?” I nodded having been rendered speechless. What did this kiss mean? Did she love me? I thought we had defined our relationship as strictly professional! Did it mean nothing? Was it merely a morale booster?
Indeed, somewhat flummoxed and a little woozy, I rose to my feet in preparation for the inevitable. I unplugged the vacuum from its console and took it to the stage with me.
As I was set to enter, I took a brief peek beyond the curtain. These people didn’t look so bad. Mostly eager men and women in business suits. They weren’t going to hurt me.
I entered to our commercial jingle playing over the loud speakers. “Bloomerville Vacuums for cleaning every day! / Bloomerville Vacuums, gonna suck that dirt away!” I was proud to work there and I was happy with my work but this irksome ditty ran through my nightmares like hauntingly eerie carnival-ride music. It was the kind of tripe that Middle America sucked in like candy and modern life had made me too apathetic and jaded to still find enjoyment in the midst of its calculated folksiness. Let’s be frank. The crap turned my stomach. Although, at that moment, that may have been my nerves due to the presentation I was about to deliver.
I opened my mouth and I realized the microphone was really sensitive. When I began to speak, I heard my voice reverberate and echo. This might have made me feel like a deity calling down from the mountaintops had my nerves not rendered my voice an uncharacteristically squeaky mess. “Hello,” I said, my voice cracking in new ways I’d never heard before, “I am Edward Boggins and I would like to welcome you to this year’s Bloomerville showcase.” With that, I cracked a few jokes. Most of my material would have flopped in other settings – like, for instance, places that actually knew the definition of humor, but here, with this stiff, starched crowd, I came off like an unworthy superstar. Most of my jokes involved sucking references, since after all, that’s what vacuums do. (Nothing filthy. I didn’t want to work blue. Get your mind out of the gutter. That would have been a little too on the nose.)
A few minutes of this mindless, corporate banter and I was feeling like a king for a moment. Even if this was nothing more than public schmoozing on a grand scale consisting of inside jokes about business memos and the ins and outs of the industry. I was spewing verbal diarrhea and it was working. By the time I was ready to unveil the Carboneon 5000, I was really full of myself. It was a small and somewhat portable unit. I had wheeled it out with me as I’d entered the stage.
I gave my pitch. I talked about how advanced it was in comparison to the 4000 model. I even went as far as saying, “This will revolutionize house-cleaning for the next generation! Welcome to the future of clean!!” I admit that might have been over-selling it, but I just got so caught in the moment.
Beside me was a bucket of sawdust. Hillary Swenson, the intern had dyed the sawdust a bilious shade of green for effect. I reached down for the bucket and spilled its contents all over the stage. This was going to be my moment. This was going to cement my legacy! I grabbed the Carboneon 5000, switched it to the on position and………nothing happened…..
My brain froze. My fingers tightened. I could feel copious amounts of blood rushing to my face. My wrists hurt. My neck ached and my stomach sank down to my feet. Had I not been sweating with anxiety for the last few hours in anticipation of this event, I might have wet myself right there and then. But, thankfully, my reserves seemed to be empty. I was stunned and I was numb. A walking corpse set for a business-casual funeral.
What had happened? Why wasn’t this damn thing working? Why me? Was this some sort of payback for the unexpected joy of being able to briefly make out with Lillian back stage? No. I actually felt no guilt about what happened between Lillian and I. In fact, if given the chance, if I got out of here alive, I knew I was going to take her back to my hotel room and show her a good time, if she’d let me. But I digress.
I couldn’t help but think I might be cursed. To this audience, it must have looked like I had unraveled within a five-second window. I loosened my tie, gave out an awkward, strangely high-pitched giggle and glanced out to see if I could find any caring eyes in the audience.
No such luck. They were all waiting for something that wasn’t going to come. The poor bastards.
I managed to locate Larry three rows back. He just gave me a stupid look and a shrug. Thanks for having my back, brother! Indeed, it was all Larry’s fault. When he had set it up backstage, he’d plugged the charger into an unplugged power-strip. This was his fault!
The pressure was too much. I felt my chest tighten and my arm go numb. The spotlight was too harsh and blinding for my eyes to handle. I closed my eyes, fell over and passed out. The last sound I heard was the thud my body made as I hit the floor.
And with that, it got hazy….
I had lived a very uneventful 37 years. I had had the same job since just after college. Never partied. I’d never really lived. My few flirtations with Lillian had constituted the most substantial relationship of my life. And I saw every moment fly by as if my mind were in rewind-and-reset mode.
One memory lingered.
When I was sixteen, I remember going to visit my cousin Wilbur upstate for the summer. Wilbur was my age and admittedly much more adventurous than I was. I remember we slept in a tent outside his house every night just on the off chance we’d get to catch a glimpse of his impossibly beautiful neighbor, Gwen Thornhill getting ready for bed through her window. Night after night, we would hope to see her naked body through the window, which we both imagined was quite glorious. While we kept our eyes peeled in our tent placed between Wilbur’s and Gwen's houses, we told each other ghost stories, corny jokes and stories about girls we liked but were too afraid to talk to.
One night I fell asleep rather early. In the morning, Wilbur told me he saw her. He wouldn’t stop talking about her perfect figure and how gloriously toned and tan she was. He said it was as if she’d been lifted out of a painting. No…he then backtracked and said her body was even more magnificent than he thought existed. He was crying with joy as he recalled this fleeting sight. I wanted to kill him. More importantly, I hated myself for needing sleep. Part of me wondered though, had he really seen her or was he just making it up?
Here I was, about to die after a mere 37 bland years and this was what was crossing my mind? Adolescent fantasy? Missed adolescent fantasy in fact. It was pathetic. But strangely, it was the moment I felt the most alive. In the years since, I had taken myself too seriously. School was my main focus, followed immediately by work. And I’d sacrificed my own happiness.
The more my dying brain thought about it, the more I realized that I should have dated and married Lillian. She was my rock. She always knew what I was thinking before I did. She always had my best interest in mind. And I felt exactly the same way about her. I wanted to make her smile and laugh every day. As I came back from lunch, I would always tell her some jokes on the way into my office. They were always mind-blowingly lame, but she always laughed nonetheless. I should have worried less and snatched her up. But I didn’t. I was sensible. I didn’t listen to what I really truly wanted.
37 years and here I was, a dead vacuum company mouthpiece who had never lived. My time was cut short but I’d been dead for years. I wish I’d lived. I wish I had sang more. I wish I knew what it was like to make love on a beach at dusk. I had plans I never put into action that now they were fading into the ether.
I was a victim of my fear, my nerves and Larry’s stupidity. That unplugged power-strip proved to be indirectly lethal. Didn’t any of us think to look to see if the red light was on to see if it was indeed charging? No. We were too lost in our own worlds.
The event drew to a grinding halt the second my cold body hit the floor. I was pronounced dead somewhat immediately. It took ten Bloomerville “experts” to figure out why the vacuum hadn’t worked. Once they determined the cause, they set it up to charge correctly backstage and the next night had Larry attempt the presentation again. Lillian was too upset to attend.
Larry lacked style. He wasn’t smooth in the least. He was the kind of guy who had questionable hygiene and who you’d occasionally catch munching on his own shirt-sleeves if he thought you weren’t looking. He collected various kinds of stuffed birds and golf balls signed by golfers who weren’t famous. He was an odd fellow, but for him the demonstration worked. His speech and his jokes didn’t hit as well as mine did, but perhaps the crowd members were still in shock after seeing me die before their eyes the previous evening.
The tone got a little brighter once they heard the whooshing of the Carboneon 5000 as it revved up and removed the green sawdust from the stage. It was just as effective as promised and became one of Bloomerville’s most successful products to date. I’m not sure its success can completely be attributed to its stellar performance. Many of the industry bigwigs in attendance urged others to buy Carboneon 5000s out of a nagging, somewhat haunted guilt about what happened to me.
In the end, Bloomerville made a fortune. In fact they made enough money to build a bigger and better office and nearly double their staff. So, that my friends is how my sudden death revolutionized the vacuum industry.
Please remember me when you clean up a mess.
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