J. B. Thompson

Approached by celebrity self-gratification guru Dr. Randy Pandolphian during a late night visit to an ATM last year, the Authorial Rabbit agreed to edit his A Manual for Perfect People. The Rabbit’s own work had been moving slow, and no one could say it was remunerative.

The manual is now done, thank heavens, and available at Amazon.

A strange bird, Dr. Randy. I had not heard of him at that point, never encountered his marketing, which, such as it was, was I guess restricted to media I did not use, darker corners of the web, National Enquirer types of hardcopy presences. Dr. Randy, either a true believer or a rampant promulgator of conspiracy theories. Or both.

At first, in the small compartment housing the ATM, I thought he was a homeless person: the shoulder-length stringy yellow-white-grey hair like the bedding territory of seabirds at the end of winter; the stained incomplete beard barely protecting the face’s crevasses; the cavity of a chest; the rag and bones wardrobe; the untied dirty shoes.

As it happened, I was writing a story about one of these unfortunates, and so I turned from withdrawing my money to engage him. He had the wild eye of STC’s Ancient Mariner.

He glared at me and I feared for the modest sum in my pocket and worse. He was no spring chicken, but I knew madness can perform feats of prodigious strength.

“What? What do you want?” I whispered.

No answer. Just that stare, his red-rimmed eyes burning into me. I noticed he was carrying one of those brown accordion folders bound by an elastic cord.

Muscling up, I asked, “Do you need money?”

“It’s not what I need, it’s what you need!” he shouted as if into the Grand Canyon, shoving the folder at me, and I jumped back.

After a few seconds of shock, I decided to try again to be the good person. “No,” I said, “I mean . . . I mean . . . .”

He tightened his lips in a bitter laugh, shook his head, the strings of hair performing a Medusa dance around the ruined face. “You are not perfect, my son, you will never be perfect.”

His eyes held me. He was the mongoose and I the snake, the imperfect serpent.

“Yeah, well, time to go,” I tried.

He barred the way. “Time to listen and learn,” he said.

And so in that ATM and during later visits to downmarket shops that served only drip coffee, he told me the story of his life, stressing his innocence, the attacks upon him, his climb to eminence.

Evidence for the climb and the eminence was weak on the ground. Was he the Howard Hughes of his generation? On the run from the wealth and empire he had built? Finding now in me his own Mormon?

Finally it came out. He needed to make his mark, preferably not on my face or on with his falling body on a distant damaged piece of ground.

And so I took the folder and I took on the task, partly for the money, of which surprisingly he did have some up front — I supposed from the mysterious corporation the manual so brightly advertises — and partly to help the poor devil survive another day.

I tried to insert my voice in a few places, in the footnotes and here and there, if only to tether the thing to the real world. Phone calls would come late at night, from where I had no idea. It was my character that was not measuring up, my lack of perfection, my not knowing my place.

All true. The writer’s destiny. Eventually the calls stopped. The project had been finished, it was in the public domain, my role was done.

In the ATM I sometimes feel him near. I twist my head, I listen. But the rasping voice is still, the mongoose eyes are closed. Dr. Randy lives on in a perfect realm.