Pancakes for Algernon

Chapter 12

Suddenly, I was struck by a frightening thought. Well, frightening thought, mace, same thing. By this time I had developed what I like to call a “mace groove” from the numerous blows to that one spot in the back of my head. You should know that I didn’t perfect my mace-handling overnight. It took me years of hard practice and blows to the mace groove to get where I am today. Anyway, I digress. My point is, mace-handling is a difficult skill to master.


Chapter 13

Oh wait. Wait.

Chapter 12

Sorry, my mistake. So I was hit with a mace. I awoke some time later, or in the past, but I doubted that.

“The year is 1969,” I heard a voice say. Apparently I actually had awoken in the past. “A man, then a young man working for the Warner Bros. crime syndicate, had a dream.” Oh, I get it. It’s like a flashback.

“Hey,” the voice said, “Open your eyes and pay attention.” So I did. I was stunned at who I saw before me, sitting on my windowsill; so stunned that I didn’t even notice where I was. Actually it turned out later that I was still in my apartment.

“You’re –“ I said, not finishing my thought because I figured he’d interrupt me and say something like, “Precisely. You must be wondering why I assaulted you with that ball-and-chain.” But he didn’t, he just stood there for a second. After I had waited for that second, I figured that he was definitely going to say something to try to alleviate the awkward silence, but again, he just stood there and didn’t say anything. This went back and forth for I think an hour before I decided I’d say something.

“You’re –“ I said.

“Oh just say it already, for Christ’s sake!”

“The CEO of AOL Time Warner!”

“You’re damn right I am!”

“You know, my Road Runner isn’t working.”

”What do you mean?”

”It cuts off completely like once every three days for six or seven hours at a time.”

”Oh, that’s normal. If we were to offer you unlimited broadband service, we’d have to charge you five times as much as we do now. We’re cutting corners and passing the savings on to you. Well, to me first, then to you.”

I didn’t understand, but I figured he’d explain it to me later.

“Now, back to my story. The year was 1969, and I was working for the legitimate front of the Warner Bros. crime empire. I directed a movie here and there, while behind the scenes we were pretty much murdering people left and right. It was the summer, and sometime in June a new bunch of thugs had moved in, operating under the front of Time Magazine. Led by the most unscrupulous bastard you’d ever want to meet.

“I remember it so clearly. Called himself Joe. I never got his last name. At any rate, the higher ups were very impressed by my work, and I was soon promoted through the ranks of the syndicate. At the same time, Joe was climbing the ladder at Time Magazine, and had begun a very lucrative business selling people exploding telephones. The man was a genius.

“Excuse me, the year was 1971. Sorry. One brisk autumn evening – it was autumn, too, not summer. Sorry. One brisk autumn evening, Joe and I met for the first time on the roof of the Time Magazine headquarters. I had been ordered to kill him by any means necessary, and I had that in mind as I shook hands with him and we introduced ourselves.

“’Wish I had thought of the exploding telephone first,’ I said to him. We shared a laugh, but things soon became more serious.

“’Look, I want to make an offer to you, sir. Sorry, I forgot your name,’ he said. Unfortunately, my policy is to never tell someone my name twice. ‘We are part of two of the most powerful crime families in the United States. Now look – I feel like if we don’t call a truce now, we will butt heads at some point. And I think it’s best for both of our organizations if we join forces. If we do that, we may be unstoppable.’

“I weighed his words carefully…”

At this point, he seemed to be pretty engrossed in his story, and I was thirsty, so I went and grabbed a soda from the fridge. That only took a minute, so he didn’t notice I had gotten up and never stopped talking.

“…over the head a few times with my pistol, because it had jammed, you see, they always sent me with faulty machinery…”

I realized I had left the fridge open, so I went and closed the fridge. Then the phone rang. It was a bill collector, so I politely told them in a Chinese accent that the owner of the house was dead.

“…right down his throat and twisted it a few times, so he started making this god-awful gurgling noise, and son-of-a-bitch if the gun didn’t unjam and go off right down…”

I think I nodded off here.

“…his wife and kids down the well. It was a tight squeeze, but anyway, they stopped crying. Needless to say, I was rewarded handsomely for my work, although I was reprimanded for killing his entire family and a bunch of other random people. His death opened the door for our quick takeover and restructuring of the Time Magazine operation, and we quickly opened up business under the name Time Warner.

“Well, at first, all we sold was magazines and exploding telephones and some movies here and there. You know, as a front for all the murdering. We mostly murdered rival companies. I still remember that little upstart company, what was it… Consolidated Exploding Phone. They certainly weren’t bargaining for a consolidated exploding warehouse, I’ll tell you that.”

He stopped there and began to laugh really hard. I could tell that was his favorite part of the story.

“So yeah… Time Warner had really gotten off the ground. We were branching out, finding new ideas to invest in. At this point I had already murdered everyone above me in the company, so by the mid-80s I was CEO. It was at this point in Time Warner’s history that we would expand into a brand of evil so heinous that everything else we had done before would pale in comparison.

“Absolutely terrible, unreliable cable television. And this is where you come in.” Just then, he scooted over to adjust a little on the windowsill and fell out.