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hurt the store. So, naturally I..."
           ...so he had taken all ten thousand of them—all carefully addressed, sealed and stamped—and thrown them into the city dump!

8

    With the school term finished, I got a full-time job in another department store—a tumbledown old emporium on the outskirts of the business district which catered largely to the farm trade. It was a strange place, operated by a baffling network of absentee owners and concessionaires. Although an approximate fourscore people worked in it, the auditor and I, his assistant—and a few custodial employees—were the only employees of the store proper. The others were all in the pay of the various concession owners.
           A man named Carl Frammich was the auditor. Our duty was to keep tabs on the concessions—the grocery and clothing departments, the cosmetics counter, the cream-buying station, the barber shop, the restaurant, and a dozen-odd other stores within our store. We collected their receipts, and supervised their help.
           Complaint department? That was us. Credit and Collections? Us again. Personnel, Purchasing, Payroll? You guessed it. Everything that no one else did—and the clerks did nothing but sell—was handled by the auditor and his assistant. Frankly, I was soon overwhelmed by the job, and, for much of the time, didn't know what I was doing or why.
           Carl Frammich...Of all the weird, off-trail characters I have known, he was the weirdest, the most off-trail. Stacked up beside Carl, my old friend Allie Ivers was a dull-normal person. Carl looked like the devil—literally, not in the slang sense. He was Satan come to life, and he had the devil's own cynicism; and he could rarely say three words without two of them being blasphemies or obscenities. Yet his voice was angelic. It was the sweetly piping falsetto of a five-year-old. Musical and high-pitched, and with such a pronounced lisp that it was often impossible to understand him.
           "Tompn," he would say, "bwing at doddam fuddin cash ledger in here an ess oo an me twike a skewin balance on uh sonabitsin bastud." Or, "Tompn," he would say, "do down and tell at doddam assho in weddy-to-weah to top skewin up his salestickets or I'll tum down air an kick uh fuddin kwap outta im..."
           Despite my own errors in that direction, I have always said that no man can work while he is drunk. But I say this with one mental reservation—lisping, Satanic-looking Carl Frammich. Carl was dead drunk throughout the three months of our association. He came to work drunk, and he drank throughout the day. Straight alcohol when he could get it, anything from horse liniment to "female tonic" when the alcohol was unobtainable.
           He would stagger up the stairs in the morning, bottles protruding from every pocket, and lurch wildly toward his desk. Sometimes he would make it on the first try, but more often than not he would wind up in a corner or sprawled on the floor. And once he almost went out the alley window. But whatever his difficulty before he gained his desk, he would never allow me to assist him.
           "Need the fuddin etertise," he would explain solemnly. "Dot to teep in tundishun. Always watch oor doddam skewin helf Tompn and oo be awright."
           Once seated, Carl seldom arose until the day was over...and the day we worked was never shorter than twelve hours. He didn't eat anything. He didn't go to the toilet. When he had to urinate, he simply scooted his chair around, hoisted himself up on the arms and let go out the alley window. Since the window opened on the store's parking lot, there were frequent and bitter complaints about this practice. Customers were constantly grumbling that Carl's urethral discharges had seriously damaged the paint on their cars, and one guy declared that several holes had been eaten in the hood of his vehicle. All the complainants got short shrift from Carl.
           Could they