Omar Bricks' Day Off

Long about this time every year, the days just get too nice to be wasted sitting around the commune offices, modifying my wrist rocket or flinging boomerangs out the window in the hope that they'll hook back into Raoul Dunkin's window for an Aussie Good Morning. When it gets this nice, it becomes imperative to take the day off, but not the kind of weak-assed "authorized" days off that normal chumps take. Nope, Monday I decided it was time for an Omar Bricks Day Off, the kind where everybody thinks you're still at work but you're actually far away, pushing a greased pig in through the back door of a titty bar somewhere.

Now, though it may sound like all fun and panicked strippers to the novice, an Omar Bricks Day Off is actually a complicated undertaking. If word got to Bagel that I was going to fuck off for the day I'd be in some serious shit, because he'd definitely want to tag along and there's no way I was going to have that big sack of weird following me around all day. I somehow ended up at a boat show with Bagel one time and that Zagnut actually tried to buy the convention center, so he could lock the doors and claim ownership of all the boats and people in attendance. How embarrassing. So needless to say, I needed to bust open a big can of covertness, and fast, unless I wanted to spend the day listening to Bagel talk about how he was suing the television show Method and Red for stealing his character.

At first I tried to set up a mannequin at my desk, to fool people into thinking I was actually here but just really bored, but that idea quickly went over like a fat man in a hot air balloon. Every time I left my office to get more stealthing supplies, I came back to find that somebody had mistaken the mannequin for Raoul Dunkin and knocked its head off. After the third time I thought about trying to bolt the head on better, but with my luck somebody would set the damned thing on fire while I was gone, and then my ruse would be up and somebody else would have their whole day ruined when they found out Dunkin was still alive.

So instead I tethered a monkey to my desk and put a Jane Fonda workout tape in the VCR, which sadly was enough to convince most of the staff that I'd made it in to work for the day. It probably would have fooled Bagel too, except the ape went monkeyshit when the tape ended and it couldn't find the rewind button on the remote. I've heard conflicting accounts about the kind of mayhem that ensued, the only constant being that at some point, the monkey definitely ate Lil Duncan's brassiere.

So from what I hear, from that moment the hunt was on, with Bagel stopping at nothing convenient to find out where I'd gone and why I hadn't invited him. That's what I hear anyway, I was at the discus factory by that time, still under the impression that the goddamned monkey was doing his job.

At some point Bagel stopped by my house, jimmied the lock with the key that got melted in there during a hot-doorknob prank last year, and questioned Foghat as to my whereabouts. At which time Foghat passively resisted by pissing out an open window. Great dog.

From what I understand Bagel made his way to the uniform store from there, thinking that was a place I'd go, which was a plain stupid move on his part. I'd already been there earlier in the morning, and that trail was colder than a passed-out hooker on a winter morning. By then I was borrowing Bob Dylan's Jesus jacket from the Hard Rock Café on the other side of town, a move Bagel wouldn't intuit until hours later, when he caught wind of that afternoon's surprise Dylan concert in the park.

I finally gave Bagel the shake later in the afternoon by listing the lost frames of the Zapruder film on eBay; I hear the bidding got up to a quarter-million before somebody realized I had just scanned in the negatives from my trip to the Ferrari museum. Sure, it screwed my eBay rating, but it got Bagel off my ass long enough for me to ride in the Black Power parade, and that was well worth a couple of death threats in my feedback listing.

Even though I never got to the Louvre as planned, the day still ranked as a stellar Bricks fuck-off, and convinced me that I should really do this kind of thing more often. The question is: Would every day be too often? There's only one way to find out.

Bricks off.

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