“I don’t know, man. I feel a little iffy about this job,” Savoy said. “But I can’t tell if it’s a gut feeling or if it’s just because working in places decorated for Christmas feels like a bad omen.”
“Bad omens? We got fuckin’ Rudolph up here guiding the sleigh tonight. There isn’t a better omen than that,” Nero smartassed.
“Wow, that’s an original fuckin’ joke,” their driver, the aforementioned Rudolph grumped. “Why don’t you tell one I ain’t heard a million times before?”
“Damn, Scrooge, who pissed in your porridge?” Nero asked. “I was just trying to lighten the mood.”
“Look, man, if I wanted to hear the same tired-ass joke over and over, I’d go back to working retail,” Rudolph said.
“It’s not even the reindeer, is it?” Braum asked to both commiserate and change the subject. In his experience, the codenames were almost never actually about the thing they seemed.
“Nope. Rudolph Valentino,” Rudolph said.
“Was your controller that woman with all the black and white pictures of movie stars in her office?” Selznick asked excitedly.
“Yep.”
“She was my controller too!” Selznick said. “Her office is wall-to-wall photos of old movie stars. It’s like the Brown Derby in there.”
“Yeah, she wanted to go with Sheik but it was too short, she said,” Rudolph explained. “And Valentino was too long. So now Christmas is way fun to work every year ’cause everyone thinks he’s the first guy to think up a smartass comment about the driver being named Rudolph.”
“Well, fuck, man, sorry,” Nero said in a way that belied that he had no sympathy at all for this salty son of a bitch. Dude needed to get some Christmas spirit.
This story was part of my 2019 TRL event.
A Syndicate fella that’s named Scrooge (based on McDuck, but crews don’t often figure that), and how he ironically hates taling jobs in December because of the constant jokes. Maybe have our friend Braum there to sympathize with names.
-Paupers Run
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