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Junior fidgeted as he struggled to fill out the application. Why did they always have to discrimiate against guys like him who couldn't read? What the hell; he always did all right on the top line where all they wanted was your name; it was all those other stupid lines underneath where you had to be able to read the question that fucked him up. Finally after about an hour, the manager came out of his office.

Mr. Spradling Johnson grabbed the application out of his hands. He was a harried looking doughnut belly, going bald fast with a big, half-moon sweat stain shaped like a gorilla under the arms of his yellow shirt.

"Look, Junior, never mind about all this crap on the application.

Business is booming, and we need a warm body. There's a goddamn epidemic of bed bugs in this county. You want a job? You got a job. You can drive a truck, right?"

"Oh yeah, I can drive a truck."

Junior sighed in relief. He'd had a 100,00 miles under his belt until the Missouri State Patrol caught him a few beers west of St. Louis. But, so what? That was then. This was now. He'd always wanted a job where you wore a uniform, and RIDZIT Xtermination had sharp, all-white outfits with little white hats that made you look like ice cream vendor at Disneyworld.

"If you can drive, then you're the man, Junior. We pay seven dollars an hour, plus a bonus if you get a customer to sign a long-term contract. Now just go through that door over there, down the hallway, and talk to Little Charlie. He'll show you the ropes. You can start this morning."

Junior pumped Mr. Johnson's sweaty hand that felt like a raw pork chop and went down the corridor to see Little Charlie. Charlie was a beady-eyed midget with a Love/Hate tattoo on his neck and legs about as long as a bottle of Jim Beam.

"So you're the new idiot," Charlie said as he paced the loading dock, surrounded by a fleet of little white RIDZIT trucks and barrel upon barrel of stinking chemicals.

"You know what the life span of a RIDZIT driver is?"

"Huh?"

Junior grunted, trying to figure out whether or not he liked being called an idiot. Well, it was better than a moron.

"Huh? You're a sharp one, aren't you, Junioreroo. OK, pal, you'll do fine in this line of work."

Charlie looked Junior over.

"Yep, too damn dumb to know if you're alive or not. So, let's get started. I'll introduce you to the various chemicals that can kill you, show you which are for what insect, and bingo you're a certified RIDZIT technician out on the road."

"This stuff can kill you?" Junior stared at Charlie in alarm.

"Only if you drink it straight like a mosquito does." Charlie lit a cigarette and grinned.

Junior didn't know whether Charlie was joking, but he laughed anyway and said, "Well I ain't going to drink it straight. I'm a whiskey man myself."

"Smart boy," Charlie said.

"Now come over here, and I'll show you what you need to know."

A half-hour later Junior sat behind the wheel of the RIDZIT truck, happily listening to a recording of the company song as he searched for 814 Ebony Drive.

The woman at Ebony Drive met him at the door. She was a well-built blonde, decked out in a black negligee and high heel slippers.

"So you're the Terminator from the exterminating company? I didn't expect someone so large, manly, and handsome. My name is Titty. Titty La Rue." She took Junior's hand.

Junior blushed. He didn't know a lot about women in negligees or even women in work boots. "The work order says here you've got bedbugs, Miss La Rue," he stammered.

"Yes, and beds are so very, very important if you know what I mean?" Titty drew Junior into the house. It was a strange place with purple walls and lots of gleaming white pictures of nude women. Trying to hide what was going on in the trousers of his RIDZIT uniform, Junior followed Titty upstairs.

The bedroom, which was completely surrounded with mirrors, featured a king-sized bed with a purple canopy. Titty flung back the bedspread.

Junior gasped. Oh, oh! Yuck. There were thousands of little nasty critters the size of punctuation marks crawling this way and that.

"There they are," Titty cried.

"The vile creatures that God sends to make us repent our sins. Can you destroy them for me? End their evil little lives? I'd appreciate it so much."

She stared into Junior's eyes like he was the second coming.

"Them's bed bugs," Junior said, trying desperately to remember what Charlie had told him about which chemicals needed to be mixed to eradicate bedbugs as opposed to cockroaches.

However, with Titty warmly clutching his hand, his usually highly-efficient brain refused to compute.

"I'll just run out to the truck and get what I need," he finally stammered in confusion.

"You do that, Sweet Dream."

The various barrels of poison in the back of the truck suddenly looked like an advanced algebra problem to Junior. Was it a two parts mixture of barrel three and barrel five that was to be used for bed bugs? Or was it three parts of four and one part of two? As Junior tried desperately to remember, Charlie's immortal words clanged through Junior's brain.

"Don't worry if you make a mistake, kid. All this shit is poison and kills bugs. The only difference is what's left standing after the bugs are dead."

Junior relaxed at the memory of Charlie's words. If what Charlie said was true, he couldn't go wrong. He used the little squirt gun that RIDZIT had supplied to mix a half-gallon of barrel three and barrel five. Trying not to inhale the noxious fumes that made him woozy as hell; he screwed on the sprayer cap and hurried back into Titty's bedroom where he began to spray like crazy.

As the bedroom filled with a cloud of stinking gas, an army of bedbugs keeled over instantly, while another regiment or two of tougher ones dashed for cover. Junior stared at the sheets littered with dead insects. Mr. Johnson hadn't told him to, but he figured he'd better clean up the mess.

When he had swept the dead bedbugs into a pile, Junior suddenly noticed that Titty's sheets were turning purple. "Oh, oh, screwed up," he said to himself as Titty swayed back in the bedroom.

To his horror she screamed. "Look at my bed. It's turning purple. What have you done?"

"Just killed them bedbugs, m'am."

"You've ruined my bed, my precious bed. I'm not paying you, and I'm calling your company to complain."

Junior groaned. That was the story of his life. He'd been fired so many times the people at the unemployment office knew Herbert was his middle name.

"What do you want me to do with these here bugs, m'am?" he said.

"You just go ahead and eat them,"

Titty said in such a way Junior could see she was really pissed because he wouldn’t ever eat no bedbugs. He got the dreaded call over the cell phone as he was driving to the next customer. Mr. Spradling Johnson was furious.

"What did you do to that poor woman's bed?" the boss roared.

"I couldn't quite remember which chemicals to use," Junior mumbled, already feeling the blade of the axe cold on the back of his neck.

"Well get back here and hand in your spray gun, Scroggins. You're through!" Johnson roared.

"Oh is that so?" Junior shouted. "Well, I didn't want to be no exterminator anyhow."

As soon as he was out of the RIDZIT uniform, Junior noticed something strange. He could still smell the bedbug spray and his head felt so light he could hardly keep his balance. He was staggering out of company headquarters when Charlie hustled out of the loading dock and blocked his path.

"Hey you, Brain Boy, I hear you got canned. Tell you where you can get another job no problem. Friend of mine needs a night watchman. You could start tonight."

Charlie thrust a card in Junior's hand. "Gee, thanks Charlie, you are a peach tree. I need me a job," Junior said. "I'll get right over there."

However, before he could walk across town to Mentation Plantation Inc., he felt the urge to get a beer. When he staggered out of the Sharpened Blade a few hours later, the sidewalk appeared to be sloping towards the street at a 45-degree angle. It was all he could do to keep his balance and wave at cops as he walked along singing "Whiskey For My Man, Beer for My Horses" at the top of his lungs.

Mr. Shortley, the boss at Mentation was a dark fellow with a wild head of crazy dark curls, a fierce set of whiskers, and baggy pants that only reached his ankles. He looked at Junior suspiciously until Junior explained that Charlie from RIDZIT had sent him.

"Oh, in that case you'll do fine," Mr. Shortley said. "You'll report to work at eleven. That'll give you time to get sobered up. Now there's one thing that's very important on this job. You are not to fool with the apparatus, do you understand? We deal with some very high-tech brain transition equipment with potentially dangerous effects, and it's absolutely imperative that you guard our equipment from intruders and not touch it yourself. Do you understand?"

Junior nodded. Hell that was easy enough to understand. Don't fuck with the equipment. Bosses were always telling him that. What kind of dunce did Shortley think he was anyhow? Junior knew what a night watchman was supposed to do: read comic books and sleep in the can.

"And have you had any experience manipulating fire arms?"

Junior stared at Mr. Shortley, trying to decipher his meaning.

"Guns. Have you handled guns before?"

"Oh? Guns. Yeah, I got me a .22 rifle, " Junior said, excited about the prospect of bearing arms. He'd always wanted to wear a holster.

"A .22 rifle? In that case I think we'd best just have you carry a walkie talkie." Mr. Shortley raised his eyebrows. "Now if you'll step in my office,

I'll get you ready for what you'll need tonight."

As the boss rummaged for the inevitable paperwork, and the walkie talkie, Junior stared around the office. It was peppered with pictures of strange machines that looked like hair dryers in a fat girls’ beauty parlor. Baffled by the writing underneath the pictures of the machines, Junior asked,

"Just what kind of machines exactly do we make here, Mr. Shortley?"

"Brain transfer apparatus." Shortley didn't look up from where he was rummaging behind his desk.

"Brain what?"

"Machinery to transform the human psyche, transmission of alternative brain wave patterns via electrical stimulation, n-grams, neurons, spectrawaves, what have you. Alternative personality experiences on demand."

"Oh," Junior said, his eyes wandering to the ball gum machine in the corner of Shortley's office. Now that was a machine of more interest. He'd have to remember to bring some pennies and see if he could get him a piece of green ball gum.

"Now what you have to remember, Scroggins, is this. These apparatus in our warehouse are extremely delicate and extremely dangerous, You must, and I repeat, must not touch any of these machines. Do you understand?"

"Gotcha," Junior said, thinking Shortley must think he was pretty dense. Hell he'd just told him the same thing ten minutes ago.

"And there's one other thing, Scroggins," Shortley said. "You'll be starting at five dollars an hour."

"Five dollars?" Junior was outraged. Five dollars was what they paid flunkeys. How there was probably monkeys some place made seven dollars an hour. Oh well, a job was a job.

That night, still woozy from the bedbug chemicals buzzing in his brain, and decked out in his night watchman's uniform with a flashlight and a walkie talkie at his waist, not to mention a big holster on his belt, Junior was so damn glad he was out of the exterminator business and into something clean and non-chemical, he couldn't wait to get started on guarding the warehouse except for one thing--five dollars an hour. Why who in the hell did Shortley think he was hiring--some damn Mexican stoop laborer?

The warehouse was as dimly lit as a whorehouse bar, sending shivers down Junior's spine as he prowled among rows of the strange machines, each one with a warning DO NOT TOUCH sign and some other strange lettering that Junior couldn't read. Up and down, up and down, Junior marched. Soon her realized being a night watchman was about the most boring job anybody could have ever thunk up. And all for five dollars an hour.

Hell, it was past midnight; he'd only made five dollars and fifty cents; and he was already bored out of his mind. Why there had to be something to pass the time. Then it hit Junior. Of course, the damn machines.

He pulled out his big flashlight and studied the writing on the machine he was standing in front of. Down below the DO NOT TOUCH--DANGER warning, it said something about Fundamentalist. Junior stared at the word. F-U-N-D-A-M-E-N-T-A-L-I-S-T. What the hell was a F-U-N-D-A-L-I-S-T? Well whatever it was it had to be good because it had to do with FUN. And nobody liked fun more than Junior. Why he'd just stick his head up under that dryer and turn on the power, and see what this warehouse was all about.

No sooner than Junior's head was in the hair dryer than the room lit up like the 4th of July with siren's going off everywhere. But that wasn't nothing to compete with what was going on inside his brain. It was like somebody had put his head inside a barrel of exploding fly spray.

By the time Junior got the machine switched off, every light in the warehouse was on, and Charlie, Titty, and Mr. Shortley were standing there staring at him with raised revolvers.

"Ah ha," Charlie said, "you are exactly as stupid as we hoped you'd be."

"The perfect idiot," Titty echoed. "You will carry out our terrorist plans perfectly."

"What terrorist? Who you talking about anyhow?" Junior said, formulating a wonderful lie. "I just seen one of those machines light up and I tried to fix it."

Mr. Shortley roared with laughter as Junior felt a wave of religious enthusiasm wash over him. "Bet you people haven't been borned again?" Junior shouted. "You need to have your sins washed in the blood of the lamb. Amen, brother, amen."

"What are you babbling about?" Charlie sneered, gesturing with his pistol for Junior to come towards a different machine. Junior couldn't read the word, but he could make out the lettering S-U-I-C-I-D-E B-O-M-B-E-R. He began to croon "Rock of Ages."

"Will you shut that mess up?" Charlie screeched, trying to hurry Junior into the Suicide Bomber machine.

"Miss Titty, you need to renounce your sins and get them dirty pitures off your wall," Junior said, refusing to be pushed by Charlie. "The devil's working day and night to steal your soul, but it's not too late to take the son of God as your personal savior."

"Such a mixed-up, boy," Titty said.

"Very mixed-up and stupid too," Mr. Shortley agreed.

"Hey, y’all better stop calling me stupid!" Junior cried, digging in his heels. "I've been washed in the blood of the lamb."

"Well you're about to have your brain washed in terrorist ideology,"

Charlie said, hammering Junior on the elbow with the butt of his gun. "You are going to blow up a building with a bomb strapped to your back."

That was just a little too much for Junior. If these turkeys were going to play rough, he could play hardball too. He reached in his holster where he'd stashed the chemical mixing gun and sprayed Charlie right in the nose with a blast of bedbug blaster.

With a convulsive gasp, Charlie folded up like a gassed insect. Then before Mr. Shortley and Titty could raise their weapons, Junior gave them a dose of RIDZIT too. He'd had about enough of being called "idiot" for one day.

Then as the two of them hit the concrete floor, gasping for air, Junior stood over them and began to preach, his voice rising in impassioned shouts.

"I was a sinner too," he wailed, "but grace, the grace of our Lord and savior came to me, and I was made whole out of nothing. Now you sinners in the grasp of Satan can save your butts too. Take my hand, little snotbox lambs, and feel His divine presence surging through me. HE wants you to be as little children again."

The three urban terrorists stirred at Junior's words and, gasping as they hugged the concrete, began to crawl like gassed bugs towards the door and fresh air.

Meanwhile Junior was relieved to see them moving. He hadn't really wanted to kill them anyhow. Couldn't kill somebody over a five dollar an hour job and some crazy machines. His head was beginning to clear now. Yeah, there was something funny about Charlie, Shortley, and Ms. Titty, but he wasn't quite clear what it was.

And so, as they lurched across the warehouse in the direction of fresh air, Junior climbed up on a machine and began wailing "Amazing Grace" at the top of his lungs, urging his captives to crawl faster, for he was dead certain the Lord's mercy was waiting beyond the door.