Sample Sunday: Excerpt from "Stuffed Shirt" by Barry Ergang

Barry Ergang is back this week with an excerpt from his short story e-book STUFFED SHIRT.

STUFFED SHIRT

by Barry Ergang

Label it instinct, intuition, or clairvoyance—when I met Theron Claymore, I immediately sensed a predator in our midst.

When he strode into the department alongside Haskell, art director at Danforth Advertising, I thought Claymore was a model. Tall and blond, with appraising slate-blue eyes, he carried himself with the erect confidence one associates with a California surfer. He lacked only the deep suntan. Sensing his superficiality, I was astonished when Haskell announced him as the newest member of our ranks.

Claymore gave the room and the occupants of its glassed cubicles a conquistadorial scrutiny. Haskell then individually introduced him to us.

“This is Eric Dennison,” Haskell said, smiling benevolently beneath his heavy mustache, “our senior artist.”

Despite my repulsion, I shook his hand and murmured, “Nice to meet you.”

Within a short time my initial assessments were confirmed. Claymore’s work had a draftsmanlike competence but lacked the passion, if such a term may be used with regard to advertising, necessary to our type of illustration. Haskell, however, apparently took to it. Perhaps Claymore’s greatest artistry was his ability to sell himself despite the charming sophistry of the product.

Indeed, charm was his biggest commodity and he used it like a chameleon, adapting himself to suit the various agency personalities with whom he had to contend. His good looks and forceful manner endeared him to many of the women, but he was equally adept at bantering with the men. He had none of the newcomer’s reserve and quickly became the focal figure in the art department, magnet for the irreverent remark or salacious joke. Tales of the women he purportedly bedded were incessant.

Most of it I was able to ignore. In my five years at Danforth, I had for self-protective reasons kept distant from my colleagues, which allowed me to work with a relative freedom from interruption. What I could not ignore was Claymore’s camaraderie with Haskell, my immediate superior. Their time together was not spent exclusively on matters of agency business. They lingered in the corridors exchanging jokes and stories, they went out for drinks after hours, they lunched together—often with other department heads. During my tenure I had never socialized with the upper echelons; Claymore exerted a disproportionate amount of time insinuating himself into their circles.

My mother would have been appalled. When she returned to the workplace after my father died, she performed her duties diligently and reliably but shunned the intra-office politicking common among her colleagues and thus never received the promotions she deserved. “I don’t understand them,” she would say of the other women in her office, “fawning and bootlicking and backstabbing to be noticed. No woman—nor man either—should have to stoop that low.”

Up until her own death, she did not possess the pragmatism necessary to deal with Theron Claymore’s sort. She never knew her child did—never knew, for instance, that the  disfiguring “accident” in high school chemistry which befell one of my classmates avenged an affront; never knew that during my first year at Danforth, the occupant of an apartment in the building next to mine died to prevent disclosure of what he saw when, upon arriving home from work one evening, I carelessly left the bedroom curtains open.

Barry Ergang ©2013
Stuffed Shirt is one of a number of Barry Ergang's books available at Amazon and Smashwords.