Page 160 - Just Deserts

Scrubbers

entire agency knew that Billy Rubin was an idiot savant, the key to
Earl Wells’s success. Billy was in his late twenties, but looked and
acted younger; he had no sense of how to dress or use verbal and
body language to appear as if he belonged at Bodkin/Thomler.
Advancement was out of the question. He could barely execute the
simple tasks in his job description—managing to find the file he had
lost just in the nick of time, apologizing in such an appealing hang-
dog fashion that no one had the heart to upbraid him or call for his
dismissal. In a period of less than three years he had become a
fixture, the butt of office jokes and a constant reminder of the inanity
that lurked behind the professional veneer of big-time advertising.
For Earl Wells, however, Billy was a walking fount of inspiration.
The pearls of mass-marketing wisdom that could gush from his lips,
however, were normally blocked in their flow by the youth’s inability
to express anything coherently. Those fleeting flashes of genius
transiting Billy’s consciousness rarely found the means of expression,
requiring some external stimulus to draw them forth. Like Earl sitting
him down and interrogating him until that pure stream of original
thought finally percolated through layers of obtuseness into sounds
recognizable as English words.
The executive had discovered this wild talent seemingly by
accident one day while Wells was wracking his brain for something—
anything!—to show Wolfdown Muck. Billy had bumbled into his
then-smaller office with a parcel (addressed to someone else, as it
turned out); to Earl’s irritation, the mail clerk was loudly humming a
tune. The off-key melody tried to ring a bell in Earl’s memory of pop
music, but failed. He had crumpled up the sheet of paper on which
he had been working, just another doodle beginning with a tray of
frozen chili and beans and ending in a snarl of crosshatched
frustration.
“What the hell are you doing, singing in here like that?” he had
demanded, a storm of trouble brewing in his bloodshot eyes.
Billy had merely stopped in his tracks, a foolish grin on his ill-
shaven face. He tilted his head to one side, a dog intent on some
internal Victrola. Then he had laughed. “Why, sir, don’t you know
‘The Organ Grinder’s Song?’”
Wells had frowned, towering up from his desk enraged.
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