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  CASUAL FRIDAY

  A Short Story Prequel to

  The Intern’s Handbook

  Shane Kuhn

  Simon & Schuster

  New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi

  My name is John Lago, and I am an intern. I know what you’re thinking. Loser. Right? I don’t blame you. The word intern triggers many emotional and intellectual responses, most of them negative. But the response I’m most interested in is indifference, which is probably the most common. Intern is spiritually synonymous with inconsequential. After all, any American willing to work like a dog for free is either desperate to make a career change or, more commonly, too green to warrant financial consideration in exchange for labor. Back when we actually made things in this country, it used to be called apprentice. Let’s say you wanted an exciting career in the animal husbandry or confectioner trades. You would simply apprentice with a journeyman in one of those fields and learn from experience. Not a bad system. In contemporary society, as we sell our national soul to outsourcing, work has become a compartmentalized system of nonsensical tasks connected by a robot oligarchy posing as progress.

  When you are a paid employee in this system, you are already a nameless expendable until such time as you can move up to the executive level and get paid a king’s ransom to do absolutely nothing. Only then, when you have reached the height of the leisure class, will you exist. Knowing all of this, you can imagine how low on the relevance totem pole you are as an intern. Buried, that’s where. Employees have a better rapport with the slack-jawed ex-con selling hot dogs outside their building than they do with an intern. An intern can tell his name to an employee a hundred times and the employee will never remember it because she doesn’t have to. Making nice with someone utterly incapable of advancing one’s career is, put simply, a waste of time. As a result, interns are the embodiment of anonymity and relegated to permanent wallflower status.

  And that’s exactly how I like it. Then again, I’m not an intern in the traditional sense. Like a normal intern, I clock eighty hours a week getting coffee, answering phones, bitching at the copy machine, and doing all of the shit work no one else wants to do. What’s different about me is that I’m not there to try to make a killing in the corporate world. I’m just there to kill someone. I’m not a fresh-faced young buck with big business aspirations. I’m an assassin, and everything I do at any company is for one purpose: gain access to my high-value target so I can execute a clean, untraceable hit. And let me tell you, brothers and sisters, there is no better cover for someone in my line of work.

  My employer, Human Resources, Inc., was founded on this axiom. As I stated, interns are inherently anonymous in corporate or big government environments. Perhaps more importantly, interns are also basically indentured servants. The lazy, entitled employees of today’s modern workforce are loath to do anything that they either deem too taxing or simply below their self-appointed station. Thus, the critical day-to-day tasks of running a business are heaped upon the backs of interns, like mine shaft donkeys being mercilessly laden with ore. These facts have all been recently cemented in the annals of modern culture by our beloved twenty-four-hour news cycle. Can you say Condé Nast with a straight face?

  All of this is important to my work in the following way: in order to ensure the free-labor work flow is never interrupted, the aforementioned lazy employees will ignore corporate security protocols (trust) and make proprietary documentation, private records, and restricted executive areas available to interns (access). Trust and access—these are the keys to the kingdom when you are an HR intern because eventually, after you’ve gained them through persistence and a solid work ethic—rarities in the corporate world—your target will trust you with his life. And that’s when you will take it.

  So, you’re asking yourself, how does one get into this line of work? The answer is that I didn’t choose this career; it chose me. I was what you might call a disenfranchised youth, a Dumpster baby with pink slip parents, dangling and twisting on a merciless string of foster homes, pediatric mental facilities, and juvenile detention centers. After murdering the heroin-dealing foster parents in San Francisco who forced me to be their balloon mule, I got sent to juvie. After four long years while the court mulled over whether or not I should be tried as an adult, I was approached by Bob, the CEO of Human Resources, Inc. When I was twelve he offered me a way out of what was starting to shape up as life in prison with men who would have most certainly made me their community glory hole. The way out was to become one of his new recruits and an assassin trainee. Of course I said yes (duh), and the next morning we were on a plane to New York. I have no idea what Bob did to disgorge me from the jaws of the legal system, and I don’t want to know. Suffice to say that Bob’s connections go deep into the brain center of the people who really run this country.

  It may seem harsh that someone so young would be brought into a cabal of elite killers—and it is. But when you look at it from their perspective, it makes good business sense. Interns need to be young to be believed or at least socially accepted as interns. Our retirement age is twenty-five because Bob felt that after that age people begin to take notice if someone is still working for free and fetching coffee for execs born in the same decade—and being noticed in our business is a potential death sentence. Thus, in order for HR, Inc. to get a solid seven to ten years out of us (I started at seventeen), recruits need to start young. So while other kids my age were playing soccer, going to school dances, and rotting their brains with multiplayer gaming, I was mastering the pistol course, learning fifteen different deadly martial arts forms, and identifying the myriad of areas on the human body that, with the right weapon application, will yield instant death.

  By the time I was twelve, I was assisting other interns in executing kills. When seventeen rolled around and I could pass as a man, I had my first assignment. And now, at age twenty-five, I am probably the most decorated intern in the history of HR, Inc. Of course, that couldn’t possibly be verified, as HR keeps no records of its contracts, but Bob has alluded to this fact many times, and Bob does not blow smoke or sugar up anyone’s ass when it comes to the notches we put on our rifle stocks. Suffice to say that with thirty-four kills in eight years, I am an MVP with Hall of Fame stats. But you can read all about my illustrious career in my new book. That’s right. Lady Gaga and Rush Limbaugh aren’t the only swinging dicks around here that can land a book deal. The Intern’s Handbook, my memoir slash definitive guide to life as an HR, Inc. recruit, is coming out this spring. And yes, the Hollywood vultures are circling my carcass for a potential movie deal.

  Just to give you a little taste (like any good pusher would) of what life is like as an office button man, I’m going to share with you my first assignment and the most difficult of my career. Of course, it follows that anyone’s first assassination attempt, regardless of training, would present significant difficulties. However, inexperience was not the reason this assignment was so difficult for me. It was a royal bitch because every possible thing that could have gone wrong—even the things I had no control over—went wrong. Murphy’s Law became the Magna Carta on this fucker and brought a whole new meaning to the phrase trial by fire.

  So sink into the wavy lines of the TV flashback and join me eight years ago in the Manhattan offices of HR, Inc. That was the year we moved into our posh new digs and
Bob was in top form, strutting around with the sword of Damocles up his ass. He had a stellar class in the field taking motherfuckers out like General Sherman, a new round of financing from his star chamber of wealthy power elite backers, and he was about to unleash his prize recruit (me) on the world.

  He called me into his office at the end of the day, poured me a glass of some obscure South American cane liquor with a painting of a clown beheading a black rooster on the label, and flashed his hallmark cynical grin while he watched me choke it down. He took two shots himself and lit a brown filterless cigarette that made his office smell like a French whorehouse.

  “Ready to pop your cherry?”

  “Don’t you have enough blood on your clown suit as it is, Bob?”

  “You got a mouth on you, kid.”

  “A pretty mouth?”

  “Jokes plus you equal zero.”

  “Well at least I’m funny-looking.”

  Bob took another couple of shots as he tried to ease his mind about unleashing a profoundly antisocial smart-ass prone to violent mood swings, uncontrollable fits of rage, and an insatiable libido on the world. Me. I relished his discomfort, just like I relished the discomfort of every authority figure that ever tried to swing his boss pecker in front of me growing up. Bob considered me very talented, maybe even his best recruit ever, but he was so vexed by my wildly hostile and annoying personality that I’m surprised he didn’t just put a bullet in my nuts and bury me up to my neck in a fire ant hole.

  “So, who’m I going to whack, chief?”

  Bob hated my mobster voice.

  “I got a special assignment for you, John.”

  “Snuffin’ a nun for playing Immaculate Conception with Father Murphy at the airport Radisson?”

  “John, if you don’t square yourself away right now, I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.”

  “Fine. Jesus.”

  “Why do you have to act this way? You know it infuriates me.”

  “That’s why.”

  “Well, how the hell am I supposed to trust you won’t fuck around out there? Sometimes I think you’re out of control and I should just put you down like a dog with a screw loose.”

  Two more shots. I had him on a roll. Truthfully, I was a pretty coolheaded smart-ass punk. I liked to get a rise out of guys like Bob because it made me feel powerful in an otherwise totally fucking helpless situation. I would mouth off to anyone and everyone, and the bigger the reaction—even to the point of physical violence—the bigger the victory. “You can trust me, Bob. You know this.”

  “No I don’t, John.”

  “Then send another one of your space camp retards in my place.”

  “No. I’ll send you now. Either you’ll get greased or you’ll settle into this. Either way, I’m covered.”

  “Good. Let’s drink to the high-value NSA operative you’re sending me to cloak and dagger.”

  Bob laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You actually think your first assignment would be anything other than the world’s biggest fucking cupcake? NSA . . . That’s a good one.”

  “Thought you said I was no good at jokes.”

  “You are when you’re the joke.”

  Bob laughed it up some more and I waited impatiently, imagining all the ways I could bitch slap him into early retirement.

  “Come on, Bob. Whoever it is isn’t going to whack himself.”

  “True.”

  Bob composed himself and looked at me evenly. Then he burst out laughing and started singing, “You outta be in pictures.”

  “I guess now I know why you’re so fucking annoyed with me all the time,” I snapped.

  Bob put a finger to his nose, charades-style, and deflated back down to the humorless, impossibly fit thirty-something man I had grown attached to like a malignant tumor. Bob and I survived in a diabolically symbiotic union. He drained my blood and I chiseled years off his life. Without each other, we would have become irrelevant and boring, respectively.

  “Los Angeles. You leave tonight.”

  “Smell-A? What a treat. Skin jobs and ponytails sucking down propofol smoothies in the Polo Lounge. I guess I was right. You do despise me, Bob.”

  “You’re complaining about going to Los Angeles?”

  “Yeah. Fucking place isn’t fit for the rats that run it.”

  “I thought you would like this assignment.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Because the placement is a movie studio. And you, my friend, are mad about motion pictures.”

  This sank in. He was right. I fucking LOVE movies. And I never dreamed I would set foot on a studio lot. He had my interest. Big-time.

  “This is true,” I admitted. “Who’s the target?”

  Bob threw a Variety magazine on the desk. On the cover was a picture of a jowly troll with pockmarked skin and hair plugs.

  “Izzy Katz?” I asked. “The fucking studio head?”

  “The one and only.”

  “What’d he do, diddle some oil sheik’s daughter?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not why he’s been greenlit. Guy raised financing for eight movies last year and only three are in post. The other five were bogus productions he used to launder studio money into offshore accounts. Then he put them into turnaround—which basically means no one does shit for an indefinite period—and the money ended up in his pocket.”

  “And people wonder why movies nowadays suck. How much?”

  “Three hundred fifty million and change.”

  “That kind of money will be missed.”

  “Yeah. The top shareholder happens to be the kind of man that used to cut a man’s Achilles with a rusty rose pruner if he didn’t pay his book and vig promptly.”

  “I smell garlic and goombahs, Bob.”

  “Exactly. So you go out to the Coast. Have few laughs. And show Izzy how we skin a fucking cat in New York.”

  “Good one, Bob.”

  “Execution profile is old school goodfella making an example out of a Hollywood mook that thinks he can skim from a boss.”

  “When do I leave?”

  “Now.”

  Two of Bob’s ’roid rangers (my pet name for them back in the day) stood hulking at the door with my baggage.

  “Good. You hit Barneys for me already.” I smirked.

  “Weapons.”

  “I’m going to check all that noise?”

  “You’re flying private, dumb ass.”

  “Sweet. Need my rapper shades.”

  The ’roid rangers and Bob all burst out laughing. When I got to the private airstrip, I found out why. I had a first-class seat on a military transport plane full of greasy stinking Hummer parts. I puked five times from being airsick slash asphyxiated by the horrific petroleum smell. When I got to LA I looked like something the cat ate, disgorged, and then dragged in. Insult to injury was the shithole apartment Bob had rented for me in a place called “The Valley.” The only thing valley about it was that it resembled a deep gash that had been scabbed over with strip malls, quickie marts, and Habitrail housing developments full of failed hyphenates: actor-singer-dancer-waiter-stripper-fluffer-junkie-hobo-corpses. The sun was more of fast-food kitchen heat lamp that glowed fuzzy orange through the polluted sky and made everything look like it was slowly decomposing.

  I’m not at liberty to tell you the name of the studio. even though you’ve already Googled, Tweeted, and Pinned it. I’ll just refer to it as RKO because that studio—as grand as it was—is now extinct and fossilized in the fifty-year-old gravy pool outside The Pig ’n Whistle. I will tell you that the historic films made there brought me to tears. As I sat staring at the wall filled with beautifully framed posters of masterpieces by Ford, Huston, Eastwood (personal favorite), Bergman, Scorsese, Wilder, and Welles, I looked around at t
he disposable minions shuffling around the lobby and thought to myself, They don’t make ’em like they used to and they never will again. Of course, as soon as I started working my internship, this gentle musing carved itself in to a stone block of gloom that weighed on my chest the entire time I was in Tinseltown.

  “Shit, I have no idea what to do with you.”

  That was Trey, the waste-of-space development executive with hot-ironed Lego hair that was in charge of me and two other intern plebes.

  “They’re always sending you people to me and I . . . don’t drink coffee, or need any copies, or have any fucking dry cleaning to pick up. God, those hopeful, eager looks on your faces are going to drive me fucking insane. Stop looking that way!”

  We stared at our shoes. I could tell from the ammonia smell in the room and by Trey’s vampire pale skin in a town where just about everyone’s face could be made into leather goods, that cocaine was his weapon of choice. He had all of the telltale signs of a man who was spending way too much money on the dealer’s low-grade baby powder cut that was probably mostly speed resin and arsenic. His eyes were constantly darting around, searching in anticipation for some antagonistic force that would never come. He wore tight, thin pants that looked like they came from the women’s department, his fingernails were chewed to the nubs, and he was always dabbing Chap Stick on a small cold sore in the corner of his mouth that never went away. And he was a world-class douche with a V8 motor mouth, catastrophic mood swings, and a psyche so fragile you could crack it with a dirty look.

  “Hey you,” he said. “You!”

  He poked my arm. It took everything in my power for me to keep from snapping his finger off and feeding it to him.

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “Shut up. What’s your name? Fuck it. I don’t care. I have a question for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I said shut up. Okay, question: what the fuck are you good at?”