Phield was so smart that almost everyone who knew him figured (as maybe Phield did, too) that success was going to overtake him at some point without much of an effort from him. But although he had an answer for just about everything else, he couldn’t figure out why after dropping out of one private school and one public, two colleges, and a couple of marriages, he was working as a counter man in an auto supply store and barely making the rent. His second wife, incensed at the divorce court’s refusal to grant her alimony, called the judge an idiot and Phield a loser, whereupon the judge threw her in jail for contempt, to which Phield remarked when he came to bail her out, “Prophecy fulfillment is your version of serendipity, Jesse Bale; that’s why evoking damnation on everybody else will always get you what you want, self-abasement being not the least of it,” to which Jesse replied, “Fuck you, Phield! I’ll stay in jail!” Phield walked paths strewn with mysteries, and trailed enigmas in his wake.
His boss, the cheapest man in the county, would give the employees a set of windshield wipers and a lottery ticket each for their end-of-year bonus, and one year, Phield won $100 thousand dollars. Naturally, Phield became a self proclaimed fiscal authority: an oracle no less. People didn’t as much seek him out to ask for advice as that he sought them out to give it. But he needed his bona fides, so he enrolled in a correspondence school (because he felt that he was too mature for the campus crowd) and in six months had a doctorate from the
But Phield was more than your everyday princox. He had a genuine empathy for the less fortunate, the indigent, the homeless, the oppressed. His emotionally charged letters to the editor (which he signed Dr. Phield Downe Lohr, Phd.) decrying the lack of public charity towards life’s (and the economy’s) victims were of such literary quality that the newspaper offered him a job. Phield began by taking sports scores on the phone from stringers covering games in the outlying towns, a system crying for modernization on a newspaper fighting not only for black ink, but for its very life. But as the spokesman for the local literacy council and the fair housing authority, Phield got to write an occasional column outlining the problems of not only the outer fringe’s economically challenged, but of small businesses fighting for survival. People began writing in to Phield for advice in almost every aspect of life. And the newspaper was compelled to let Phield answer them in print:
Dr. Phield:
My husband and I have been married for ten years and have eleven children all boys, who have been driving me crazy, and lately, Ursus has been ignoring me romantically. I feel so used and abandoned. What’s the answer? – Empty in
Dear Empty:
If you hadn't emptied out by now, I'd be really worried. But anyway, while he’s sleeping, check behind Ursus’s head just above the hairline, and if it feels like he’s got an implant there, give it a tweak. His libido just might re-awaken. And don’t worry about the kids; they’ll be abducted pretty soon. If you don’t find a nodule, count your blessings! And sign the boys up for midget football. – Dr. Phield
Dr. Phield:
I am a Jewish man married to a Gentile. I love liver smothered in onions, but she keeps giving me liver with two strips of bacon the way she eats it. Should I divorce her? – Unclean in
Dear Unclean:
You’re worried about a little bacon in
Dr. Phield:
I’m a white woman married to a black man and we have two children ages one and two. What should we call them? - In Limbo in Lakeview
Dear Limbo:
Don’t call them anything but DeJuan and Brittany! And get them out of Lakeview where they’re liable to be called things you’ve never heard of in your life. Take them to LA and audition them for the movies. With any luck, they’ll be called to play the roles of the children of Will Smith, who people don’t think is all black, or of Angelina Jolie, who people don’t think is all white. – Dr. Phield
The circulation of the paper went up five hundred percent and they bought some computers and raised the newstand price and their advertising fees. But they fired Phield for giving a bad tip in his column on a Chinese stock, Soon Ghat Lei, that made IUDs with lead content. The stock fell to near zero, and on top of losing his job, Phield felt compelled to buy as much of the stock as he could from the people who had been foolish enough to buy it on his advice.
Living in total dishonor, and abject poverty, holding nearly worthless paper, Phield came back—miraculously—into his own, as everybody knew he would. Life was made for men like Phield.
The Chinese improved their salesmanship, and Soon Ghat Lei surged in sales and value with its popularity along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, the India/Bangladesh border, the Mexico/USA border,
In time, even a man like Phield, will have trouble (maybe using the five degrees of Kevin Bacon?) relating the horseshit pride of a gangbanger in the bárrio to the holocaust in
Noe.
