R.V. Roush
Every morning, just to get through the day, Norm had his mind bent by professionals. He�d been instrumental in the decision of two psychiatrists to fold up their couches, form a partnership, and open a stress-free bait shop in Minnesota. There, they sold fresh tied wooly worm lures to men whose brightly colored vests provided more excitement than any fish should expect�the lures were warm and fuzzy, a concept that the former psychiatrists admired from a weekend seminar they�d taken in Transactional Analysis.
Norm�s neuroses were elemental and vigorous on Monday mornings, and he brought out an insensitivity in his psychiatrists that stayed with them the rest of the day. Eventually, they came to accept the damage they did to the psyches of other patients who were, irrationally, vulnerable to being slapped by their psychiatrists for their petty concerns. Then Norm read an article about preventing soil erosion and came up with the idea of psychiatrist rotation, not seeing the same one every Monday morning. His psychiatrists appreciated the importance of Norm�s solution; he�d proposed it without breaking out in a rash. A definite improvement.
Something else happened on Monday mornings. The stock market rolled out of bed after sleeping restlessly all weekend, cracking its commodities elbow on the trading room floor, which made the market good and pissed the rest of the day in early October, 1987. It was Norm�s job to find out how grumpy the market would be and to inform the brokers at R.J. Cantrell and Associates of which stocks to steer their clients clear of.
�We�re so egoistic,� Cyril had said. �If it�s not about us, we�re not interested. Everything we make, we make for ourselves.�
Norm had said, �Hmmm.� Norm tolerated Cyril�s unsophisticated cynicism. Not many of the other brokers had been as receptive as Cyril when Norm expressed his empathy for Chinese small businessmen whose unlicensed rickshaws were being confiscated and dumped into overcrowded impound lots.
This Monday morning, Norm had arrived at R.J. Cantrell and Associates at ten, fresh from terrorizing his psychiatrist du jour. Telephone receivers were already molded to the brokers� cheeks, jostling against their shoulders so they could placate customers and play Etetris on their computers at the same time.
When Norm arrived at work, everybody noticed him, though nothing about his appearance, aside from the occasional skin molt, swarthy-looking 10 a.m. stubble, or the red and purple patches that adorned his cheeks and neck when he was nervous, made him a magnificent or ominous presence. Taken together, these characteristics all contributed to his wiry handsomeness. He was tall and chronically tense, which his needly, crew-cut, graying black hair emphasized. His eyes were a soft, milky blue but had an interesting way of turning gray and going out of focus when he was anxious, which was most of the time�blue skies turning gray. To his co-workers, Norm symbolized an approaching storm; his arrival reminded them to keep their umbrellas handy.
� 2004 R.V. Roush