It all started the day Benjamin Hooker won the prize for being the best liar in the company. We all were asked to submit tales, we’d either heard, or made up. Ben came up with this tale about how The Twizzle Stick Company, which employed several hundred people making swizzle sticks, for primarily the martini market, and some of the Puerto Rican Rum trade that couldn’t find enough wonderful things to do to rum. We were to be terminated.

Ben thought of himself as a fun guy. Now when you describe it that way, it sounds like whatever he was doing was funny, whether the people he was doing it to thought it was or not, was questionable.

Not many people liked Ben, for that very reason. He was the kind of guy that laughed at funerals and mall shootings, stating they were fictional stories that couldn’t possibly be true. It was a political hoax designed, to "take our guns."  

When the pink slips came out, everyone assumed it was a prank, and being all fools day, we all pretended to laugh. There had been no rumors about anything out of the ordinary going on in the swizzle stick business, as a matter of fact, sales had soared after the first stay at home orders went into place. 

Jeronimo Rum had come out with a new contest. Anyone who could come up with a fashionable diet, dedicate primarily to rum and its associates, would receive an all-expense trip, after the quarantines were lifted, to the Island Paradise of their choice. 

Given the fact that people no longer could go anywhere without risking death, they stayed home and experimented with rum. The trick Gil my neighbor taught me, in case I might be tempted to enter, was to think of rum as something that tasted too much like rum, and therefore needed to be erased by, “additives of the utmost persuasive authority.” Being that I no longer drink, rum that is, I had no interest in making the taste of rum unforgettable. 

We were to have our big April Fools Party, we called the Swizzler on a Stick party, for no reason anyone could remember, but were to indifferent to change the name, so it remained, like so many of us who had been there since the company Hiram Swizzle started on a lark was born. 

A bet to see if he could come up with a way to rid the city sewers of plastic straws which were becoming a problem for the treatment plants, not to mention the increase in subway derailments in some of the deeper tunnels.

As they say, a piece of history was born. He patented his way of redistributing the molecules in the plastic to incorporate the saliva left by users, to form a hardening agent that turned the tooth marks into family crest designs, rivaling those of the late fourteenth century. It was said to be the physical display of ones DNA. It was claimed that his bicuspid patterns rivaled those of Sotheby’s. He started the company with just two employees, and Ben’s father Chester Applegate the third.

Ben never liked his father or his name, so had his changed right after he was kicked out of the family for smoking in a bed, not his own. It was his uncle Horatio who got him a job in the stock room separating straws by toothmark patterns and indentation parameters. You could say he moved up the swizzle ladder in biting time, and you’d be correct. 

We had one thing in common, Ben and I, we didn’t like each other. I was in charge of distribution and Ben was in charge of marketing. Marketing required promoting those that promoted you, so he spent many a night practicing what they preached. Needless to say he developed a dependency problem which allowed him to believe that he was far more humorous than anyone besides himself would have given him credit for. But being the odd man out, didn’t affect Ben in the least. He’d developed a shell that diverted negativity directed towards him, to others that were forced by need of a pay check to tolerate his moods, and remain silent, if not forgiving.

Ben had apparently thought handing out pink slips would get people’s attention; he enjoyed being its focus. He was intelligent enough in his more astute moments to realize for the ruse to work, it would require time to simmer, which is why he said, “God invented Fridays.” And he was right. Not that God invented Fridays, although He probably did, but that getting a termination slip on Friday allowed an entire weekend of mask less drinking to Ben’s bad health, and hoping he’d be hit by a meteor while sitting on the toilet, to fester. 

Of course only some of those things happened, as people being more civil for the most part than given credit for, sulked in their basements experimenting with rum and all its possibilities, in hopes of being able to flee the world to a paradise, and never return. Rum will do that to you. 

So, as you can imagine, come Monday morning, the majority of the work force showed up hung over, but optimistic that they had invented the concoction to end all concoctions, and would be able to tell good old Ben where to stick their pink slip. 

Ben of course, having forgotten his attempt at hilarity and pink slips, arrived late as usual, and couldn’t help but comment as he walked through the swizzle stick factory on his way to his elevated office that, “people sure look unhappy. Did someone die?” He’d asked over the loud speaker system. His interjection of humor, didn’t manage to change one attitude that I could tell. 

I watched the floor from my adjoining office as Janice Magill, a secretary and second in command of research and development, pulled something from her desk and marched across the floor, up the metal stairs that were designed to act as an alarm system, should things go terribly wrong. Janice knowing the ins and outs of the business had rendered the stair alarm mute with super glue that weekend when she was angry and disappointed at having lost her job of forty years, and having groveled under the perceived proactive advances of Benjamin Reedsport Hooker. 

We watched, I watched in amazement, as Janice, who is built like a linebacker for the Chicago Bears, any pro team really, nimbly climbed the stairs three at a time, and before Ben had a chance to lock the door, Janice had sprung into his office. He, as we had been trained reached for the phone, while simultaneously activating the emergency medical alarm button, which would theoretically send a request for immediate assistance to Our Savior’s Hospital and rehabilitation center. 

Janice in her obvious state of agitation, and incapable of controlling her instincts, threw the disk she had dictated her resignation on, at Ben, who when it hit his carotid artery hadn’t even found the time in his surprise, to scream for help.

The applause was thunderous, until we realized that it was not a reenactment for our benefit of an old sitcom, Days of Our Lives, but that Janice had for all practical purposes, found Benjamin Hooker’s prank not to be as hilarious as Benjamin had surmised it was destined to be.

The irony does, as most often is the case, arrive until the Sunday editorial pages have interpreted the facts of the matter. Janice had accidentally uncovered a scheme perpetrated by the Rum Manufacturers of the Americas to award Benjamin Hooker, the leading advocate and promoter of their products, as winner and recipient of the Paradise Prize for best experimental rum concoction of the year.

The irony of course comes with the understanding that if the winner, if for whatever reason is unable or willing to take advantage of the Paradise Prize, it would go to the runner up, who happened to be in this case, Janice Magill. She, was unable to accept the award, having as yet to be sentenced for the accidental death of, Benjamin Hooker. She suggested I receive the prize, as it was I who had mistakenly phoned the dog impound lot instead of 911, which was unfortunate for Benjamin, but kept her resignation from falling into the wrong hands.   

I, not being associated with any of the obligatory requirements of contests, was awarded, the Liar of the Year title. I learned of this while tanning on the white sand beaches of Puerto Rico. The award was for best performing artist in the field of, Rum Soaked Literature during a pandemic.

Janice has agreed to accept the award on my behalf, should she be released early from her work study duties.