Brock Downsized: A Novel

By Robert Riche

"Brock Downsized" the story

When the prostheses and condom manufacturing factory where Bill Brock has been Communications Manager goes belly-up Brock finds himself out on the street. In this comic but ultimately serious novel, Brock is obliged to take up the somewhat undignified role of wedding videographer. At the same time he is suddenly faced with a series of mid-life setbacks. His prostate goes floppy down, and the jolly, high-spirited doctors prescribe every type of wrong medication, while at the same time the nutty sexy wife of his nutty psychiatrist tries to seduce him, his aged father is dying in a nursing home, his nextdoor neighbor draws him unwittingly into a kiddyporn ring, and his artist son is implicated as a terrorist storing fertilizer and metal bomb parts in the family's backyard, while his daughters infatuation with a married man is about to drive him crazy. After all this, and quite a bit more, Brock finds himself, one could say, a bit discomfitted. Brocks spirit is indomitable, however, as he flounders about attempting to gain control over his life. The humor is laugh-out-loud comical, and yet the book has moments that are often deeply moving, while eschewing false sentimentality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477275689

Robert Riche

Robert Riche has been a newspaper reporter, a United Press staff correspondent in New York, and later, a freelance correspondent out of Paris. He has been a staff organizer for the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers Union. As a freelance writer he has written travel and food feature articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Town & Country, Forbes FYI, Robb Report, and Italian Food & Wine. He is the author of three novels, many plays, and several books of poetry. He is a recipient of a NEA grant, Connecticut Foundation for the Arts grant, Advanced Drama Research Grant, and winner of the Stanley Drama Award. His plays have been produced in many areas of the United States and at the Bristol Old Vic, England. He is a Norman Mailer Writers Colony scholar and a Breadloaf Writers’ Conference scholar. Riche has been married to painter Fran Riche for forty-nine years. His son is a sculptor working out of San Francisco. His daughter is a painter whose work appears on the covers of several of his books. Riche holds to the view that all children are created equal, and should be given equal opportunities in life. He lives in Connecticut, and spends part of each summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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© 2012 by Robert Riche. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/09/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7567-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7568-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012918065

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover Illustration by: Michele Schuster

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

About the Author

For my girls: Franny, Michele, Charlotte

CHAPTER I

Here comes the bride. Fair, fat and whatever. From where I’m standing I can’t quite see her yet, but I know she’s on her way, proceeding regally down the aisle on the arm of her Dad, because the organist has let fly at the Lohengrin, the congregation is standing, and the ushers and the bridesmaids have all entered and taken up positions in front of the altar, blocking the view from where I’m stationed with the latest model heavy-duty digital camcorder on my shoulder just behind a pedestal of lilies, freesias, stephanotis and gardenias.

I don’t want the ceremony ruined by you hopping around up front at the altar while Debbie makes her entrance, her mother, Mrs. Hopgood, explicitly warned me just a week ago during an instructive harangue in my wife’s photo studio (the converted garage behind our house), during which she continually waggled her head disapprovingly as though I’d already shown up at the ceremony in an orange jacket, no shirt, earrings and my fly open. We were at a wedding last week, she went on—These people go to at least one wedding a week—and the camera man—

—Videographer—

Whatever—He was all over the place, like a monkey. I don’t want to see you, I don’t even want to know you are there.

Normally, I might have told her to stick the wedding, but it would have been an embarrassment to my wife, Annie, (who has a good reputation in town), and also, I need the money.

Wedding videographer. It’s a new career for me, entered into at the suggestion of Annie, whose gorgeous wedding photographs are legendary around town, where she has dominated the still photography field in Fairfield County for the past 15 years. What started out as a hobby for her, while I labored in the fields of marketing and communications, has turned into (at the moment) our sole source of income, since my long-term employer, Pro-Tec Industries N.A. (prostheses and condoms—the latter ribbed and candy flavored) went belly-up six months ago, thereupon putting me out of a job, and simultaneously providing the parent company, Pro-Tec GmbH, headquartered in Cologne, Germany, with an excuse for terminating its employees’ vested pension plans, not to mention the loss of my 401(k) contributions due to the company’s wizard investments exclusively in Pro-Tec stock. Annie says I should sue them, and a lawyer I talked to said he would be willing to go to Germany and investigate my claim at a rate of only $200 an hour, plus travel expenses.

This is my first wedding video, and frankly, being the perfectionist that I am, I’m a bit nervous. At first thought, I really wasn’t sure I could handle being a videographer, but Annie through persistence persuaded me that I could. I get lots of requests for video service, she said. You could be my video partner. We could have a lock on the local wedding business.

I don’t know anything about video, Annie. I can’t make the VCR work. It took me two years before I could set the clock to stop that goddamn blinking light.

You can do it, she said. I work with guys who have the most appalling sensibility. Moonlighting firemen. Cops. They’re all making extra money doing videos of weddings.

They know how to operate mechanical things. They work with ladders and handcuffs.

I can teach you the mechanical stuff. I’m buying you the equipment for your birthday.

That’s thousands of dollars, Annie.

It’s an investment. It could be a new career for you, Bill. It might buck you up. It was the first time there had been any pointed alluding to what reluctantly I confess to have been experiencing recently as a somewhat low state of mind. When Pro-Tec went belly up I vacillated for perhaps a month over whether or not it might be time to just pack it in, retire, live on our meager savings and soon upcoming Social Security. But after examining our finances, and considering our modest but comfortable lifestyle—good food, good restaurants, travel abroad at least once a year—it seemed as though maybe I ought to look for something else. Fortunately, we have no mortgage on the house, so as long as I can pay the town taxes, they are not going to foreclose on us. Two houses on our street are actually in foreclosure, so I have a leg up there, at least.

Since the bankruptcy I’ve been vigorously going about looking for a new job. It’s been six months now. These are tough times. I just finished a course along with some other downsized executives on how to go about winning the game of life and landing that dream job, advice on how not to get discouraged, how to project a youthful presence at a job interview. So far the results for me have not been outstandingly rewarding.

Thus, when Annie brought the subject up, despite some initial hemming and hawing, I can’t say that I was totally averse to trying my hand at wedding videography. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say, and the Hopgood wedding was my first assignment. I certainly did not want to blow it by implanting in Mrs. Hopgood’s mind even the slightest doubt that I might perform like those other monkeys that had spoiled so many of the weddings she had attended. Then, too, the bride-to—be, Debbie, called, just three days ago, pleading with me not to ruin her wedding. She doesn’t even want video, but her fiancé talked her into it.

I don’t care, she said. But just don’t fuck it up.

Dum-dum-de-dum. Debbie and her Dad must be halfway down the aisle by now.

I have no idea, because my camcorder is aimed at the pant’s seat of the best man who has parked himself directly in front of me, and when I try to peek around him, jostling the pedestal of lilies, and drawing less than a beatific expression from the minister who is gazing beatifically on the procession coming down the aisle, I am obliged to move back to my original monkey stand. The best man must have sat in gum, or something, because there’s a big gob of muck on his left cheek. The camcorder is grinding away. Meanwhile, all I’m getting is the back of the best man’s pants, with the goo. I wonder if they’re going to like this.

The bride comes into view! Debbie arrives at the altar, and the groom greets her, positioning himself beside her, with her Dad on the other side. I’ve got them in the lens’ view.

Dearly beloved— The minister begins beatifically—

Wow! This is great stuff.

Who gives this woman in marriage? Rev. Beatitude inquires, as if he has no idea in the world why Debbie’s Dad is standing there next to her with an arm clenched tightly in hers.

Her mother and I do, says Dad. He lifts the veil, gives his daughter a kiss, shakes hands with the groom, and retires to a pew directly behind Mrs. Hopgood who is wearing on this occasion an organdy lavender dress with an enormous wide-brimmed hat smothered under what looks like a platter of fruit and vegetables. I catch a glimpse of Mr. Hopgood’s head from time to time bobbing up from behind the fruit bar as he tries to view the proceedings. It turns out (information from Annie) that he and Mrs. Hopgood have been divorced and have spoken only through intermediaries for the past 10 years, but have agreed for Debbie’s sake to be seen together today and to pose for pictures with her, just so long as they are not required to look at one another, or to speak.

Debbie is great looking. I mean, great! And Nick, that’s the name of her husband-to-be-in-a-minute, is great looking, too. What a couple. The all-American duo. To think that 30 years from now she’ll look exactly like that lump in lavender organdy with the tilted head and saccharine mouth wobbling on two chins is almost more than I can stand. I’d like to freeze the ceremony, stop life right here. It will never be more beautiful. After the honeymoon in Bermuda, and two weeks of uninterrupted crawling over one another, they’ll settle down into domestic life. She gets pregnant, doesn’t try quite so hard any more to attract the stamen to the pistil, and starts growing chin number one.

Anyway, by anyone’s calculation it’s a lovely ceremony, and Rev. Beatitude is asking each of the celebrants if they take the other for their lawfully wedded opposite, to have and to hold, to cherish in sickness and in health. I am experiencing a lump in my throat.

From this day forth, and forevermore. Life. Loyalty. Love. Courage. Devotion. I can’t help it, I let out a little sob, causing the Rev. Beatitude to glare at me again. Well, so what? I can respond to beauty. This beautiful Debbie, this beautiful Nick, and all these beautiful words. I clear my throat. I wonder if I am destroying Mrs. Hopgood’s daughter’s wedding. Mrs. Hopgood herself is not tearful. Rather, she wears a look of triumphant accomplishment on her face, as she revolves her head around the congregation to determine if everyone is properly impressed by the arrangements. That means flowers, the beauty of the couple, and no presence of a monkey up on the altar.

And now, by the grace of God and the powers bestowed upon me by the state of Connecticut—

Holy shit, the Rev has his hands out over their heads, looking like he expects to ascend to heaven, they’re going to kiss, and the Mendelssohn processional is about to boom out, and I am still at the front of the church. If I don’t get a shot of them from the back, when they leave the altar, Mrs. Hopgood will really go ape.

’Scuse me, guy. I push past the best man, bump the groom slightly as I slither past him, and race down the aisle, the camcorder still whirring, picking up (as I will see later) a surreal brushstroke view of the ceiling and walls, and wide eyes of amazement (particularly on the part of Mrs. Hopgood) all focused on me instead of on the celebrant couple at the altar. I station myself at the very back of the church, just as the Mendelssohn commences, and I get the newlyweds in focus, maybe I caught the kiss, maybe I didn’t, and Nick and Debbie, her attendants swarming around her so she won’t trip on her train, start up the aisle. I’ve got them in the lens, the recorder button is on. They are coming. They smile at the camcorder, and wave! Wow! Will that look good, or will that look good? Mrs. Hopgood will forgive me, and bless me for my initiative.

Meanwhile, Annie is working. I know because her flash keeps bouncing off the nave of the church, and I almost trip over her, backing up to keep the newlyweds in my lens as they parade up the aisle.

Jesus, Bill! Watch it! Annie hisses at me. How was I to know she was directly behind me? This is hard work, and calls for concentration, and in fact, as the newlyweds go through the opened front door of the church, and stand for a moment on the steps while Annie mounts a snowbank in front of them and snaps their picture, (after waving frantically for me to get out of the frame), I realize suddenly that my shirt front, tie, even the lapels of my blazer (the one I wore to so many meetings at Pro-Tec) are all soaking wet from perspiration.

Shouldering the camcorder, I grind away. Whatever goes on I capture in my lens. Mrs. Hopgood, like the Queen Mum who has just hatched an egg, parades triumphantly up the aisle on the arm of some baldy she’s recruited for the purpose. She owns the place. She’s trailed by the ushers, including the guy with the glue on his pants. I decide maybe some good Samaritan ought to tell him.

Excuse me, young man—

What? Snappish. Too late I realize he is putting the make on one of the bridesmaids, and certainly doesn’t welcome the old guy with the camcorder interrupting his routine.

You’ve got something on your pants, I say to him.

What?

Nice wedding. I got some good shots of you from behind during the ceremony.

Oh.

This is my first sense that if I am to pursue this new career I am no longer to be respected as an executive with a certain status. Being taken for the old guy with the camera who either gets in the way, or interrupts the festive good times with unpleasant tidings, available to be hailed (rudely) to get over here and get a shot of me and my buddies—this is going to take a bit of adjusting to, I think. Up to this moment I have tended to think of myself as somewhat distinguished looking, a perception that a lot of people, I might add, would probably agree with. I have a full head of hair (grayish, closely cropped). I make a point of standing straight, shoulders back, I don’t want any of this old man osteoporosis scholar’s stoop look about me. I can slap my face in the morning, after washing and brushing my teeth, and bring a bit of pink glow to the cheeks. I tend to be trim, even fit, working out two or three times a week at the local health club, lifting barbells, riding the bike, then playing a few sets of tennis—usually singles. So—Well—Let it go.

There is a lull as the guests, bundled up in their furs and overcoats, pass along the reception line on the cleared sidewalk in front of the church. Annie and I pause a moment to regroup. I’m packing the camcorder in the carrying case. Despite my wet shirtfront, I’m not cold. I’m still sweating from the effort, and also it’s not a bitter cold winter day. In fact, it’s a heartbreakingly beautiful day, with the gleaming white steeple of the church framed by sere tree branches outlined against a deep blue sky. The wedding guests, with pink cheeks and great good humor stand about, gibbering, waiting to head off to the reception.

Annie and I pack our gear into the back of our old Subaru. Consulting Mrs. Hopgood’s written directions to the inn where the reception is to take place, Annie instructs me on how to get there.

There must be 200 guests invited to the reception for Debbie and Nick at this romantic Connecticut Inn on the edge of a frozen stream, with a giant water wheel turning and creaking outside a grand picture window, the opposite bank of spruce and hemlock trees burdened with branches of fresh powder snow, golden, reflecting the late afternoon sun. The guests drive up to the front of the inn where a couple of local high school kids in bow ties, white shirts and no jackets park their cars. I get a video of all of this, including the entrance of the bride and groom through the doorway to the inn, tracking them into the dining room with its picture window, and the round tables with flowers, and overhead wagon wheel candelabras. There’s a log fire blazing in the stone fireplace, and a small band at the far end of the room is playing, A Kiss to Build A Dream On. I’m videotaping, and tapping my foot to the music, and at the same time finding myself feeling this unaccountable wave of sadness.

Annie and I should have had a wedding reception at an inn like this when we were married 30 years ago, instead of in the backroom of Emilio’s Bar & Ristorante on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village (long demolished, lo, these past 25 years). A half dozen of Annie’s pals from her job and another six or seven friends from my checkered past helped us celebrate, toasting us with Dixie cups of Scotch. It was a miracle, in itself, that we had married at all. She had been working for some liberal Congressman from the Bronx. Her serious approach to life, and dedication to whatever she was committed to at the time, in contrast to what up to then had been my own somewhat dithering, if not dilettantish, stumbling about, almost sank us during the four years that we lived together, on and off, in my dump of an apartment on the lower East side. I had been working as an office temp, intermittently collecting unemployment insurance. We met at a folk music hootenanny advertised in the What’s On section of The Village Voice, a fund-raiser event for striking workers at some plant in Newark. It seemed at the time a likely place to meet girls. Well, there she was. Annie. Immediately I became a fervent defender of workers’ rights. True, my initial enthusiasm for the workers had waned a bit by the time she agreed to marry me (at a civil ceremony in a basement room of City Hall), but memories of those poignant early days and our marriage always are with me whenever I am at a wedding, which may help to explain my tearful interruption of Rev. Beatitude’s homilies.

I’ve taken a lot of atmosphere and establishment footage, and there isn’t much to do for awhile except mingle (unobtrusively) with the guests at the bar and around the hors d’oeuvres buffet table set in the middle of the room, with the ice carving of a swan and the raw vegetables and dip, and cheese. Waiters, of course, are moving around the room with trays of hot hors d’oeuvres.

Thankyou, I will. Well, it’s hard work, and I’m hungry, and Mrs. Hopgood told Annie that we should feel free to avail ourselves of food and drink.

Annie has a few moments respite, too, and she joins me at the bar, where she orders a club soda, with lemon, and I order a martini.

She looks at me, frowning. You’re working, she says.

Don’t I know it.

You don’t want to get drunk.

I have no intention of getting drunk, I reply, and down the martini in one quick decisive tilt of the glass to blunt any further discussion of it.

She gives me a quizzical look, then turns to wave gaily at Mrs. Hopgood who is surrounded by well-wishers, and basking in the glow of compliments aimed in her direction. Annie is a consummate professional, never taking an alcoholic libation herself while on the job. Well, that’s the way she is. Me, I need sustenance. My shirt is still wet, and I need something very dry to dry me out. Soon, I will be obliged to go around to the various tables, and record expressions of congratulations to the couples, and believe me, that’s going to take some fortification.

Debbie, your mother and I have known each other since you were a little girl, when you used to come over to our house with my Wendy to nibble on Jemima’s cookies. And now you’re both grown up, and I know Wendy would have loved to have been here today, if she could have gotten here from Jakarta. But I just want to say I hope you and Nick will be as happy as Ted and I were all those years before our divorce. God bless you, darling! That’s all. Shut off the camera.

Two hundred of those. Well, maybe not two hundred, but everybody who’s important. Annie has a list that Mrs. Hopgood gave her. I need another martini, which the bartender pours recklessly, leaving out the vermouth.

Right now it’s time to sit down, and eat. The Hopgoods are unusually generous, in this regard, permitting Annie and me to sit among the guests, so that we can hop up and down easily and get any photos (or videos) of memorable moments. Annie says that at most weddings they put her and members of the band in a corner of the kitchen, and serve dry chicken sandwiches. (Actually, the band is eating in a side room today). Mrs. Hopgood, however, has figured out correctly that it serves her purpose better for the photographer and videographer team to be closer to the action, so as to permit them to capture the best man’s toast to the wedding couple, the toast by the bride’s father, other toasts, and moments of tenderness between the bride and groom, who are seated at a banquet table with the wedding party at the side of the room in front of the grand picture window opposite the fireplace.

Annie and I are not seated together. My dinner companion on the left is an attractive lady of about 50, with a wide crimson mouth, sporting a bolero dancer’s black sombrero cocked over tightly coifed jet black hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon the same color as her lipstick. She doesn’t seem to have an escort. The person seated to my right is another lady, a frump, whose husband is with her. My bolero lady dinner companion is obviously very stylish, what we in Connecticut certainly think of as sophisticated. She is wearing a short jacket that proffers an ample bit of breast every time she reaches forward for her wine glass, which is pretty frequently. Sneaking a glance under the edge of the table, I note that she is wearing high soft leather boots that reach above her knee, leaving a fairly extensive expanse of stocking up to the hem of a very short miniskirt. I am thinking she’s lacking only a riding crop, and possibly something to ride on. Between sips on my martini John Thomas has given signs of stirring, if just a bit nervously.

That was quite a dash you made up the aisle of the church, the señora says, with a trace of humor.

I was hoping nobody would notice.

She explodes in good natured laughter, and takes another quaff of her wine. You were the star attraction.

Mrs. Hopgood said she wanted me to hog attention while her daughter was kissing the groom.

"Do you do this