Ray Zardetto - The Five Jerks You Meet on Earth: An Unauthorized Parody

11. THE FIRST JERK
AL MITCHELL MEETS ON EARTH

12. THE SECOND JERK
AL MITCHELL MEETS ON EARTH

13. THE THIRD JERK
AL MITCHELL MEETS ON EARTH

14. THE FOURTH JERK
AL MITCHELL MEETS ON EARTH

15. THE FIFTH JERK
AL MITCHELL MEETS ON EARTH

A L M ITCHELL WAS a quality guy without a quality life.

He played by the rules: good grades in school, worked hard, honored his father and his mother. He was honestwell, with the exception of those few liberties he took on his taxes and the exaggerations on his rsumbut who didnt do that? Anyone would tell you Al was steadfast, loyal, and imaginative. So how could it be that Al stood on the brink of middle age with a life as empty as a theater hosting a Paris Hilton film festival?

Perhaps it was his sense of priorities. They were always a little off. When he was ten, Al obsessed on the earliest generation of video games while the rest of his friends joined Little League. When the baseball bug finally bit hard in his teenage years, Al found that his friends were turning their attention to girls, cars, and the Jersey Shore, leaving Al alone to bat his balls.

Not that this bothered Al very much. Being alone was easy and stress-free. Besides, he never did make friends easily or suffer foolish company gladly.

As they grew older, Als friends filled their weekends at the Jersey Shorethe Seafarer Beach and Boardwalk, to be specific. Because Al worked two jobs to make it through college, he rarely joined them.

When Al graduated, he got a nice job with LoonaTechnologies, an East Coast conglomerate that developed communications systems for NASAs moon landings. LoonaTech now sold all manner of communications devicestelephones and cell phones, pagers, walkie-talkies, and intercom systems. The regular schedule of a single full-time job at least allowed Al to join his pals every weekend on the boardwalk. Trouble was, his circle of friends was quickly diminishing as his buddies succumbed to the tug of domestic life or lucrative job opportunities somewhere else. It wasnt long before Al was the last of the boardwalk regulars practicing the sacred ritual of a boardwalk weekend.

Just what was a boardwalk weekend? It was Friday night bar-hopping to the tune of fifty-cent beers and dollar shots (vomiting or passing out before sunrise was frowned upon). It was sleeping most of Saturday on the sand of a sunlit beach, the sounds of the ocean waves creating the ultimate Valium. It was early cocktails and a seafood dinner followed by a night of dancing and singing with local bands, each one piercing the salty air with blazing riffs that echoed up and down the coast. It was enjoying the poets, belly dancers, folksingers, odd talents, and drifters who entertained along the boardwalk until dawn just for the toss of a few coins from passersby. It was sleeping until noon on Sunday followed by a brunch at one of the local hotels. Finally, as Sunday evening approached, it was realizing that the fun was over and contemplating how to survive another week until Friday night came again.

It was during one of his solo barhops, twenty years ago, that Al met Liz Buckman, herself a self-styled bohemian queen of the boardwalk weekend. She was the forevertanned blonde on the posters and commercials enticing visitors to the beach. Liz loved to sing and dance with the Saturday night bands. Al had seen her a few times before, but on one particular night, he bought her a drink and they danced. He admired her faceclassic and round, features softly sculpted, her eyes a hypnotic hazel, as Al came to call them. She smiled with the best of the beach beauties, but it was her let-it-all-loose laugh that closed the sale for Al. He admired her graceful and fluid motion, and he admired her ability to have a good time. In fact, Liz glided through life with few cares and fewer worries. She had no particular ambitionhaving never held a job longer than six monthsbut she respected ambition in others and it looked like Al had more than enough for the both of them. Partial to large sun hats and colorful saris, Liz herself was an attraction on any boardwalk weekend.

Al and Liz came to look forward to their time together on weekends and soon began seeing each other more frequently. After a courtship that Al managed to squeeze between business trips, they married, but Als heart remained entwined in his career at LoonaTech. Al gave up boardwalk weekends as his dedication and ever-present work ethic took him to a vice presidency after fifteen years at LoonaTech. Liz continued visiting the boardwalk solo for a while, but there wasnt much a married, encroaching-on-middle-age housewife could do for fun alone down there. She complained for yearsbut didnt every wife? Only after some time in marriage counseling did Al realize theirs was a broken union, and by the time he turned his attention more fully to his wife, she had long ago turned her attention to someone else, somewhere else.

The divorce broke Als stride, if not his heart. Much as he loved Liz in his way, his inner turmoil was as much about failing as it was about lost love. Al hated failing at anything, and this divorce was a failure he could not come to terms with.

He lost his footing at LoonaTechnologies. His boss, Richard Lynn, a decent guy and a good friend, helped cover for Al in his difficult times, but a year ago a new management team came in and things changed for the worse. During their years climbing the corporate ladder together, Richard constantly reminded Al that their careers were just one incompetent moron away from coming to an abrupt end. That moron showed up on this new management team and unsympathetically swept Al, Richard, and many of Als colleagues to the unemployment line. After twenty years, there were no more projects, no more meetings, no more higher-level butts to kiss. Al was suddenly on the outside looking inno thank you no gold watch no job.

Al maintained the veneer. None of these setbacks was going to do him in. He always looked the partconfident, wise, patrician. He was almost always the tallest guy in the room, with thinning wavy hair swirling with gray, and a pair of unnervingly blue eyes that made people think he was more intense than he really was. He was only a few pounds overweight, but his stooping shoulders made him look heavier. He remained a good writer and a raconteur, but those talents were known only to an exceedingly small circle of friends.