Emmy Appleseed

He works off of Denver West Blvd and Colfax.  The nice part of Colfax, with malls on either side of the boulevard.  He drives from Highlands Ranch every day.  Where the rich people squirrel away their money to buy homes that are indistinguishable from any other on the block.

He takes C-470 all the way down into Lakewood.  Kisses his four children on the head on his way out every morning at 6:30.  He is never late.  His wife stays at home.  She picked some bullshit major in college like psychology or humanities, lived off of the success of her parents and finally married him.  She doesn’t have a resume.  She’s never worked a forty hour work week.  She will never work as long is he is upper-middle management which supports their upper-middle class lifestyle.

He works as the IT business manager of a company that makes lung aerosol technology that delivers cancer drugs into the body.  It is a very efficient and successful technology.  His company has cornered the market.  They are international, with branches in every region of the world.  His job is to make sure everybody knows how to use the technology.  He is a professional schmoozer.  He has to translate boring IT information into something a business executive would understand.  He has to be appeasing.  He is very good at his job.  He makes two hundred thousand dollars a year.  He has an office on the top floor of the company, the only floor with wall-to-wall windows.  He has meetings almost all day everyday.  Most of the meetings accomplish very little.  He wishes he could just work individually on his portion of the work.  He would never bring this up to anyone of course, as he is always placable.

At the end of the day, he drives away in his luxury SUV, gets on the highway and drums his thumbs against the steering wheel.  Though he is the only bread winner, his family makes much more than they need each year.   Despite that, they never vacation.  He just keeps going to work.  Gets a 4% raise each year.  He counts up his raises years in advance, tabulating how rich he’ll be.  Secretly, his wife wants to have another baby.  She wants to keep him locked down. He’s just so distant with his family.  He is his job.  At night, he sips whiskey until his brain goes numb.

In the morning, it is coffee, it is a banana perhaps, he eats very little. Then six thirty rolls around, he revs up his car, a car that can carry eight passengers.  His children have ridden in it twice.  He revs up his car, turns on his seat warmer, he drives away.  The neighbors across the street are in the process of getting a divorce.  They haven’t told anyone, life in Highlands Ranch is oddly competitive.  They envy him, her, their four kids.  They know very little of what goes on behind the luxury blinds.

He pulls off on Colfax Ave on I-70 and sees a bum on the corner.  His sign says “Why lie? It’s for beer.”  He avoids eye contact, curses the street he works on, wonders why even here this filth infects its sterility.  He turns up the heat, turns the volume up on the radio, blasts the visage of the bum from his sensory perception, and zooms into work.