"And I set her up with an incredible job. Far surpassing reasonable expectations, above and beyond what’s expected of a typical freelance job coach. Her big chance—her words, not mine—just running errands for hospice workers, and within one hour, just one hour on the job, she’s high from a patient’s morphine drip..." He paces his Stream-liner, rattling his home.

"But now, because of her, I can’t won’t work the homeless shelter this morning because she has compromised my professional.... Hell, I mean the bitch told the police that she had agreed to steal the morphine for me, that she was just checking the goods, quality control nonsense..." Reggie grabs a bottle of whiskey from the floor, gulps a third of it, and the tosses the bottle into a pile of dirty laundry, "but see if I don’t drag that freak from next door to the Labor Ready Cash Paid Daily, see if I don’t get my cut, my due, see if I don’t put that freeloading creep to work.... teach him that he can’t get something for nothing..." Reggie races to the window and peers through a pair of binoculars that he, earlier that night, had grafted into a twisted musical stand, after he had decided that he’d make Leonard his charge.

"False alarm," he growls as he stares at the light from his neighbor’s basement window. He perceives the light as iridescent, thus disgusting, though it is just a bare bulb hanging from a rafter. He leaves his surveillance station and continues fulminating, "And because of her, that beast with her big chance for a free buzz, that, that nasty Shelia, that toothless hag with her enriched macaroni gut…Or was she as thin a rail? From whose Adderal prescription I skimmed, just a couple of weeks ago? Can’t remember, don’t can’t care, the important thing is that because of her I can’t face my colleagues, for I’m now the laughing stock of all the free lance job coaches, at least among the low-brow job coaches with whom I fraternize.

"Oh, I can well imagine the jokes, the knee-slapping if I were to show up this morning.... I’d be recruiting creeps to carve up hogs or drop documents into shredders, something stupid, and along comes the police with a few questions for me just because some goddamned client of mine had to get high....

"Whoa, was that barking?" He races back to his surveillance station, scans the neighbor’s yard, and seeing nothing spectacular, resumes raving and pacing, "...And when they take extreme measures to get their next high, it’s always the job-coach, the responsible party, who gets screwed … and then one gets black-listed, shunned by the profession, investigated and stalked by casserole crusaders, persecuted just ‘cause I tried too hard, bent over backwards, let my zeal, my heart, get in the way of my business sense, and made bad investments in rotten sonsabitches who want it all, instantly, bliss and glee without blood, sweat, and tears. I mean, you can’t don’t make omelets without cracking eggs. It all stems from an unrealistic and foolish idea of life: fuckers just want to sit around all day, get high and soak their feet while waiting for apples and oranges to fall from trees..."

Reggie eyes the clock, 4:45 AM. He goes to his kitchen counter, grinds capsules of Dexedrine into powder. The job coach then pores a gram of cocaine and mixes the two mounds together. He snorts, sighs, snorts, growls, and snorts some more, gnashing his teeth all the while.

"Leonard," he snarls, "a squatter, no doubt, but nevertheless I’ll drag him by his misshapened ear to the Labor Ready Cash Paid Daily, he’s too stupid to know better. I’ll just lurk down the block from labor agency, maybe trick some jerk out of his methadone, and then when Leonard is done dragging bricks from one pile to another, shoveling shit or something senseless like that, I’ll take a third for the hook-up, the retarded free-loading bastard." Reggie begins hyperventilating as he recalls Leonard’s face, bloated, ridged, pocked, and sloped; his body corpulent and asymmetrical, which moves grotesquely, a body’s stubbly legs chasing the momentum of a tilted head. Reggie stares, hates, hyperventilates.

The sun rises. What’s this, Reggie thinks, a dozen weiner dogs...fucking A...a dozen damned weiner dogs with, with good god, Vermillion sweaters and tassels and...and with glitter around their eyes, leaping and barking, now scratching at the wretch’s door. This, this is true depravity, worse than Shelia, who’s a mere ingrate, a bad investment, compared to this...these circus shenanigans to amuse an indigent squatter...Oh, the idiocy that arises when a freak sits on his ass all day, left to his own devices. It’s sick…sickness such that I haven’t seen the likes of

a three-legged weiner dog enters Leonard’s lawn. She runs up to Leonard’s door, barks and scratches at his door. A tall and lanky girl in filthy clothes follows. She bounces a ball, and pleasantly blathers nonsense that amuses her, smirking and delighted all the while. She arrives at the door, reaches to knock, but the door opens first and Leonard, flamboyant and decorous, comes outside.

His hydrocephalic head is donned with a beret; his jutting jaw is enclosed by a mouth organ brace. He wears a soiled black leather tee with zippers a’ la Thriller era Michael Jackson and nineteen-seventies gym shorts, from which his gargantuan testicles sag with each step—an outrage to be sure, for Reggie, but a matter of no importance, nor any regard, for Leonard, the lanky girl, and the three-legged Weiner dog whose barking and leaping up and down becomes a blur of discordant motion, all those disgusting weiner dogs…Oh Christ, my heart is beating far too fast…perhaps I’ve taken one pill too many. No, no it’s just that underage slut with rug burn on her knees, and that freak with the gimp ball bearing in his mouth, must put a stop to this, end this charade, drag the sonabitch to Labor Ready, get a commission off the books.

Reggie staggers from his surveillance post. A decreasing supply of oxygen constricts parts of the job coach’s mind. Reggie’s body twitches, swoons, and buckles; his malicious delusion demands what remains of his essence. He leaves his Streamliner and staggers through the lawn, a junkyard of car carcasses and scavenged appliances—a mess of durable goods from which he had extracted little profit but many municipal citations. The job coach falls onto the hood of a dead VW Bug, rolls onto the ground, bounds to his feet, staggers, lunges forward, and trips over a half-buried riding lawn mower, which launches the job coach into the hedge bushes that separate his lawn from Leonard’s. He flops and convulses but several minutes later achieves a shaking squat position in the shrubbery.

Leonard and the girl are seated in the grass; they toss her ball back and forth. The three-legged weiner dog leaps at the ball, barking and wagging its tail. Leonard attacks his mouth organ; he sprays spittle and curious melodies out of his mouth organ. The little girl laughs and blathers a stream of monosyllables, coos, and squawks.

What maniacal nonsense, thinks Reggie, what an asinine waste of energy.... foolishness: a, a, a couple damned dozen of weiner dogs standing on their hind legs and pantomiming clapping, while warbling and yodeling before a retarded gimp and a child prostitute. And, oh good God, how gross...

Leonard’s testicles ebb and flow onto the grass and back into his shorts in rhythm to his harmonica playing while they toss the ball back and forth, as the one-legged weiner dog barks and leaps at the ball.

Reggie roars and leaps into Leonard’s yard. He draws breath to launch his assault, swooning and swaying, but then collapses. Leonard and the little girl watch silently as the three-legged weiner dog licks the man’s dying face.