Ozymandias
Ozymandias was originally published in Metazen magazine

The invoice was for a triple-decker, Campaigner waterbed. It had two levels of bureau drawers on either side for a pedestal. Balanced on top of that, a sleek waterbed frame with shiny brass trim on the corners, worthy of Ozymandias, king of kings, who performed at the Blue Note Lounge from six to midnight on weekends. That was the name on the invoice. Someone had named their kid, Ozymandias, many years ago expecting great things from him from the sounds of it.

The Blue Note Lounge was a smoky, middle-aged piano bar for leftovers on the
outskirts of Suitcase City. I drove by that dump all the time on deliveries. Not exactly worthy of a name like Ozymandias. I was starting to think about the future, my future, my small ripple in the cosmic pond. I wasn’t an Ozymandias, or a Prometheus, I was a Wilbur unbound, and I wanted to be more than a dream mechanic, a wishy-washy subcontractor for Morpheus, and a deckhand on his barge drifting down the rivers of Oblivion and Forgetfulness. The Law School
Admission Test, LSAT, was my ticket off the shit creek I was headed down.

Morpheus, who sculpts in dreams, is a jealous demi-god who works the night shift with his brothers, Phobetor and Phantasos. They kept me up with a white night of their shenanigans before the test. I walked out of the auditorium when the Law School Admission Test was half over. I was an LSAT desperado.

“None of the above,” I shouted to the attendees hunched over their number 2 pencils, answer sheets, and briefcases full of loan applications.

I went to the Schlitz hospitality house to bemoan fate and the hospitality that lasted for two free beers before the hostess pointed to the exit. Leave it to a carload of freaks in a white, Plymouth Valiant to change the mood. I was on my way to Ozymandias’s, king of kings and late night performer. Clouds spit rain. The crazy, goddam freaks hung out the open windows of the Valiant. They shouted and waved like they knew me. What the fuck? I couldn’t figure out why they were doing it, but I waved back. Maybe they were heading to the hospitality house for two free beers. Maybe they had just taken the LSAT. Maybe they were Morpheus and his brothers in disguise, guiding me from the shadows of a side street.

Ozymandias was a short guy about fifty years old with gray hair and a dark, poolside suntan. He greeted me at the front door of a bottom floor apartment. He was dressed in an outlandish African shirt of a tribal chief that I recognized from old copies of National Geographic magazine. The shirt was orange, blue and green, and looked totally out of place on an old, white guy. He smelled of a sour bouquet of nicotine, formaldehyde, and alcohol. He was already half drunk, swaggering, and half the man he thought he was. Maybe he was a pygmy, but I had never seen a short, white pygmy.

“He’s here, honey,” he said to someone in another room, then paused with an acid tone. “Finally. You’re late. We’ve been waiting all morning for you.”

Before I could tell him I was busy that morning turning fate into murkier gumbo, something happened. It was like a pygmy’s poison dart of déjà vu puncturing my neck. I had been there before in the conga line of my experiences. Qzymandias was gone. I was somewhere else. Morpheus and his two sidekicks must have abducted me.

“You’re late,” the shadowed face of Jonas McAlister reminded me from behind the screen door.

He glared at me with the beady eyes of a manager who had clawed his way all the way to the middle. Scruffy beard and bald globe of skin.

“Can I get the cars in the driveway and some of the stuff on the porch moved?” I asked. “So I can back the van into the driveway?”

His wife and children stood behind him at the screen door.
​
“Get out there and clean off the porch,” McAlister ordered. “We’ll help you unload the van, seeing that you’re taking our old mattress away.”

I could see Dave opening the van and having McAlister’s pee-stained bedding pop out like a jack-in-the-box. He’d fire me.

“I’m flying to Minneapolis tomorrow for a meeting, and I don’t want the wife to worry about it,” he said.

McAlister was lying through his shiny, porcelain white smile. I didn’t have to pass LSAT to know that. An hour later, with the waterbed set up on a butcher-block floor and thoroughly inspected by middle manager, Jonas McAlister, he followed me to the van. I went there to return the toolbox to an inconspicuous
place in the back.

“I’ll help you load the old bed now,” he said.

“I need to get something out of the driver’s seat,” I replied.

He thought nothing of it until I was seated in the cab and turned the engine over.

“The Salvation Army,” I yelled. “They’ll pick up your old mattress.”

​”What kind of a gyp joint are you running? The owner said you’d take it. I’m going to have you fired.”

“He didn’t say anything about taking your bed.”
​
Before he could decide to grab me, call my boss, Dave, or scribble an angry memo, I stomped on the gas pedal.

“HEY!! Where are you going?” McAlister shouted.

I screeched the tires, spinning out of their driveway. When I looked up Morpheus and his crew had returned me to Ozymandias, king of kings. A middle-aged woman, shorter than Ozymandias, appeared. She also had a dark tan and wore a red, terry cloth, beach outfit. A brandy-colored Pekinese they called ‘Precious,’ almost the same color as her tan, yapped at my feet in the shadow of my looming toolbox.

“Stop it, Precious,” the woman, Victoria, said to the little dog.

Her voice rose in pitch, then cracked and trailed off like an old 78 rpm record. She was wobbly and full of anti-something-or-other elixirs and drugs.

“This way,” she said, motioning me in.

“Come to Daddy, Precious,” Ozymandias reassured the little dog.

“I want it right there against that wall,” Victoria said.

She pointed to the wall, but apparently she didn’t notice the king-sized bed on box springs. Morpheus was up to his tricks again. Trying to invade the day shift with his tumbleweeds and fabrications. I blinked, hoping his little four poster joke would disappear. It didn’t. And to top it off, there was Jonas McAlister on the mattress, stretched out in boxer shorts, pointing an accusing finger at me.

​”You want it where?” I asked.

“Right there. You’re supposed to take out the old bed for us,”
she said.
​
Jonas McAlister nodded like he had accomplished his task then disappeared.

​”I am?”
​
“What did you say to the lady, Chip?” Ozymandias exploded.
​
“My name is Wilbur, and I don’t take’em down or haul’em away,” I e
xplained. “That’s outside my, uh, uh, jurisdiction.”

“Listen here,” Ozymandias said.

“Ozzie, please,” Victoria pleaded.

“I’ll take care of this,” he threatened.

He turned towards me.

“This lady has just divorced her husband. That was their bed and she wants to get rid of it and him at the same time,” Ozzie said. ​His face reddened.

​“I’m not taking the bed down or hauling it way. There’s too much personal history piled up on most people’s bed for me to just haul away to the dump. You can’t see it, but it’s there like the ruins of an ancient city. It won’t all fit in the van.”

“What do you mean?”
​
“Just what I said.” I was adamant.
​
“Ozzie, can’t you help him take it down? We can put it in the other room for now. Until we decide what to do with it,” Victoria finally suggested.

​”I guess so,” he said reluctantly, but not pleased with the outcome.
​
Ozzie helped move the mattress and box springs to another room then he retreated to the living room where he practiced with an electric guitar plugged into an amplifier. He sang cheesy Frank Sinatra and Don Ho songs into a microphone on a makeshift stage or perhaps it was his portable throne. Shooebee doobee do and Tiny Bubbles wafted in from the living room.

I carried in the waterbed made with dark-stained pine, trimmed on the edges with shiny golden brass. Precious stared at the set of double bureau drawers that fit under the bed frame. The small dog followed me into the bedroom and cocked its head with a curious look. I positioned the bureau drawers on top of each other, then opened one on the bottom and the small dog hopped into her new bed in Ozymandias’s pygmy monument to his greatness that would be more lasting than the time he would spend with Victoria.

I wish I could have said the same for Ozzie and Victoria. With the bed set up in three tiers – two for bureau drawers, one for the bed frame filled with water – something was obvious: they were both too short to climb into it. They’d need a stepladder to get into bed each night and a stepladder didn’t come with the waterbed. Morpheus had outdone himself this time, puncturing reality with another dram of disjointed reverie. He and his brothers must have gotten a hoot out of this one.

“Have you gotten the papers from the lawyer yet, sweetie?” Ozzie called from his bandstand in the living room.

​”I have a call in to his office. I’m expecting to get them anytime now,” she answered. “Everything will be in writing, and I’ll get the settlement money from Larry.”
​
When I heard that, I could see that Ozymandias, king of kings and late night crooner was looking out for his future too, except he was bypassing LSAT altogether. He was a pygmy alright, a pygmy rattler. I wondered how long he’d stick around once she got her settlement – and he got his.

​“Can you get me another beer out of the fridge, honey? My gig starts in just a little while.”

​When I came back two weeks later to lower the bed so that Victoria with her still swollen eyes and trembling voice could get into it alone without anyone’s help, Ozymandias and his bandstand throne were gone. His monument remained, though lower by one level of bureau drawers. The brass had already started to blur and tarnish on the bed, but that didn’t stop Precious from hopping in one of the bureau drawers and sniffing for the king of kings.