Stalker's Night Live!

He gritted his nicotine stained teeth, staring at the computer screen that illuminated his sweaty face. Pressing his finger to his temple, he shouted into the empty room “Come on, Barnaby Willickers, send me the next telepathic message!”

Rick had completed all of the secret missions. He had gone nine days without food. He had eaten his own dirty toilet paper and garbage off the ground. He had run naked through the streets of downtown Cleveland, hopping on one foot and shouting gibberish until the police arrested him on a 5150. Why hadn’t Barnaby contacted him yet? If he was to be the successor to Barnaby’s television program, he needed to keep the lines of communication open. It wasn’t often a normal man such as himself was chosen for something as important as all of this, but Rick had something special about him, he could feel it, sense it, knew it. “Two thousand pages of valuable material deleted,” Rick thought to himself, “But it was for the good of my family! If the C.I.A had seen that the celebrity aliens and I conspired to log their mind control experiments then Barnaby would never give me the writing job!”

Suddenly, Rick had an idea. He had an awful idea. He had a wonderfully awful, horrible idea. He raced outside to his parents’ garage and grabbed a hammer off the shelf. Its weight felt right in his hands and continued to feel satisfying as he brought it down, smashing onto his laptop, sending plastic shards and glass flying all willy-nilly. “I’m doing it! I’m beating the game!” Rick shouted with delight.

Grabbing the shattered remains of his MacBook Pro, Rick dashed over to the kitchen sink and dumped them inside of it, opening the faucet and letting loose a stream of tap water that sent sparks flying and steam hissing throughout the room. “Game, set, match, Barnaby. You’ll have no choice but to give me that writing job now.”

With a swift motion, he grabbed his car keys off the counter in front of him and then raced outside and leaped into his father’s Mini Cooper, racing haphazardly down the suburban street, “New York, here I come!”

Barnaby Willickers sat behind his cherry oak desk, sipping a glass of Chardonnay. He motioned to his assistant Marissa, an attractive young twenty-something NYU graduate whom he had paid for to secretly have an abortion just three months prior. “Marissa, schedule me an appointment for a massage at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday,” Barnaby said, giving her that knowing wink and a pinch on the cheek before walking out of his penthouse suite office and down the hallway into his private elevator. His chauffeur was waiting down downstairs to take him to his private box at the Metropolitan Opera, a monthly occasion that he had promised his wife after she confronted him three months prior about the Planned Parenthood bill on their insurance.

Derek McWinters fumed. The lousy writers still hadn’t given him the script for this week’s show. He slammed the cue cards down on the table in front of him. It had been 20 years of this crap. Thinking back, he remembered the first day he had arrived in Manhattan, and felt that the hope and joy he had felt that day had long since disappeared. “Now it’s all ‘Derek, you misspelled Peter’s last name. Rewrite scenes two through ten. What’s that? You had an idea for a sketch? I’d let Barnaby know but he’s awful busy. Maybe next time buddy.”

His eyes darted back and forth around the airport lobby, scanning the crowd at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport for possible celebrity sightings, murmuring under his breath, “Any moment now I’ll see one of the stars of Barnaby’s show. Yes, of course! They have professional makeup artists and therefore must be wearing elaborate disguises. That homeless man by the curb outside was Kristen Nari and the Asian lady behind the Delta ticketing booth is Peter Frell. The ole’ switcheroo! An obvious yet clever trick; Clever, but not clever enough!”

Despite the other airport patrons and their increasing uneasiness around the unstable man, Rick threw back his head and let out a manic chuckle, staring at the supposedly disguised Peter Frell-Asian lady hybrid. “You won’t fool me with a bait and switch like that, but I won’t blow your cover. There’s nothing Barnaby hates more than breaking the fourth wall.”

Walking up to the ticket booth housing the now clearly frightened Asian woman, Rick winked, then said: “One ticket for LaGuardia, please.”

It was eight o’clock and Barnaby had arrived at the opera earlier than his wife. He walked up to his private box and motioned for a drink menu to the attendant, who upon seeing who the patron was this evening, smiled warmly. The attendant quickly stepped aside, presenting a bottle of champagne, saying, “This is Dom Perrignon, sir, the finest bottle we carry here. We would like to present it to you as a token of appreciation for your continued patronage.”

Barnaby took the bottle and turned it over in his hands, carefully inspecting it with satisfaction. He smiled firmly at the attendant,

“What’s your name, kid?”

“It’s Rick, sir.”

The corners of Barnaby’s mouth dragged downwards into a sour grimace. He held the bottle out by the neck, rejecting the attendant’s offer to take it. A manager who happened to be walking by saw this and rushed forward, taking the bottle and falling over Barnaby with apologies. With a sneer on his face, Barnaby asked the manager to remove the attendant, who left choking back tears. As Barnaby watched him walk away defeated, he sneered, thinking to himself “'Rick,' I’ve never liked that name.”

When the box attendant named Rick returned to his apartment that evening, he turned off all of the lights and took seven Aspirin, three more than he normally would, hoping it would end his life. This proved ineffective, so he attempted to use a Gilette Mach 3 razor to slit his wrists but was unable to get the blade out of the plastic cover, so he drank half a bottle of Nyquil and fell asleep.

“Mr. McWinters, Barnaby would like to see you in his office.”

Derek complacently set down his cue cards. He had been expecting this for some time. Willickers was a bit of a sadist and enjoyed calling Derek into his office in order to review scripts and bounce ideas off of him, of course, all the while knowing that poor McWinters would never get a chance to see his sketch ideas see a live broadcast. He took the elevator upstairs, following Marissa into the suite to see Barnaby rising up from the chair behind his cherry oak desk, smiling that smug grin he had.

“Derek, baby! Good to see you. Take a seat.”

Sitting down in the chair across the desk, Derek maintained the calm and thoughtful mask that he wore to hide his seething, resentful hatred of the Executive Producer.

“I’ve got a great idea for a sketch, it’s a real whiz-banger. Ha! I like that word. Marissa, write that down. ‘Whizbanger.’”

Derek chortled “Yes, whiz-banger, that’s brilliant.”

“I’ve never heard anything more stupid.”

“It’s all about this guy called Rick. He’s a big schmuck.”

Derek chortled again, “Yes, Rick, what a schmuck, brilliant.”

“One day I’ll murder you.”

“Everywhere Rick goes he messes things up. Nobody likes him.”

Derek slapped his hand on his knee and let out a loud guffaw. “You’ve done it again!”

“If I had the gall I’d take that stapler off the desk and beat you with it about the face until you hemorrhage blood from your eyeballs.”

“And Derek, I’d like you to write the sketch.”

McWinters choked on the plastic laughter rising up in his throat, his eyes opening wide. “Th-thank you, sir.”

Barnaby walked around his desk and extended his hand for Derek to shake, and McWinters took it with newfound gusto, tears welling up in his eyes. After all this time, his big break had finally come. Maybe now his daughter would start talking to him again. They hadn’t spoke since his wife divorced him when she was fourteen. “God, what does she look like now? I hope she’s as beautiful as her mother.”

He felt the clap of the Executive Producer placing his hand on his shoulder, and looked into Barnaby’s eyes to hear him say with a broad toothy grin “Also, can you grab me a latte, steamed milk, two Splenda?”

The airplane bathroom looked smaller on crystal, and Rick wasn’t certain if this was normal or if he was especially high. He took one final hit off the glass pipe and inserted it back into his rectum, feeling a pleasantly painful singe. He still wasn’t certain how this part of the mission was applicable to his screenwriting career, but Barnaby Willickers was the most successful Executive Producer in television history, if he needed Rick to smoke meth in the toilet of a 747, then by God, he was going to do it.

There was a glow about Derek as he walked around the set that day, playing around with this "Rick" character in his mind, concocting all sorts of devious plots and possibilities. When he saw Barnaby that afternoon, he read him his list of ideas, saying, “Peter could come out on stage wearing a garbage bag filled with dead fish. Then Kristen says, ‘You smell better than you normally do, Rick,’ then Peter takes a big bite off one of the stinky, dead fish and looks at the camera like ‘Whuh-oh!’”

Howling with laughter, Barnaby leaned back in his chair and snapped at Marissa, saying “Tell Patricia in corporate that from now on Derek is in charge of all of our ‘Rick’ skits.”

McWinters’ eyes welled up with tears once again.

The owner of the guns and ammo shop eyed the skinny, disheveled, dark-haired young man who entered his shop with suspicion, but he was an avid NRA supporter and believed everyone had the right to bear arms, so when the man asked for a nine millimeter and a box of hollow points he sold it to him, although before he did he checked his photo ID and smiled, saying “We’ve got the same first name.”

The show had wrapped for the night, and Derek glowed in the wings, his eyes scanning the joyous crowd as local football star Jay Pranchanski thanked the audience. His cell phone rang and he saw that it was from his daughter.

It had been yet another successful night, and Barnaby was sipping on yet another glass of Chardonnay in the backseat of his car as his chauffeur directed it down 5th Avenue. He glanced out the window and saw a thin, wild-eyed, dark haired man screaming obscenities and waving a gun as police advanced on him. Barnaby laughed and said aloud “Now that guy, he’s got ‘Rick’ written all over his face.”

The chauffeur, hearing this, gave a weak smile and closed the center divider, letting his eyes drift off the road briefly to scan his own nametag on the dashboard, reading the letters “R-I-C-K.”