Missing Pinky

Missing Pinky

(Assignment: Write about a character who develops a special ritual to cope with something. ANGST)

By David J. Haviland

Copyright c  2023 by David J. Haviland

Missing Pinky

It happened over six months ago, yet Bob still woke up every morning wishing it wasn’t true. Hoping against hope that it was all just a bad dream. 

But alas this nightmare was as real as the rising Sun on a bright June day. Bob’s beloved Pinky was here no more. And the loss of his Pinky sent Bob into an emotional death spiral.

Day after day, he kept the shades down in his tiny apartment. The darkness fed his grief-stricken mind and soothed his tear filled, blood shot eyes. The loss had rattled him to his very core. He would wring his hands, moan and cry, and toss pillows around the house. Whiskey bottle after whiskey bottle disappeared as Bob drowned his sorrow. 

But no matter how hard he tried to soothe his horror, his rage, his agony, the truth stared him right in the face.  Pinky was gone forever.

There had been no religious ceremony or funeral or wake. None of that nonsense. Nobody got up to memorialize the slender one who had been ripped from this good life way too soon.

The tragic event was ever fresh in Bob’s mind. That terrible, terrible Tuesday afternoon played incessantly on an eternal video loop in Bob’s mind, replaying the horror of it all.

He remembered the ambulance. The police sirens and the loudspeakers telling people to stand back. The stabbing pain. The freakish screams. Nobody deserved to see the blood… the carnage… the destruction.

It took the Cops just seconds to finger the likely culprit when they arrived at the scene. He was green, and scaly and lounging poolside in the summer sun, right outside the sliding doors leading to Bob’s humble abode.

Bob should never have tried to move that 300 pound alligator by himself. “He could have taken your life, buddy,” the State Trooper in the dark shades admonished.

Instead, the big nasty alligator just took Pinky. But Bob needed Pinky. Pinky meant more to Bob than his alcoholic Father Bob Senior, his controlling sister Meg, and his blood sucking nephew Emmanuel all rolled into one.

 For Bob, one of America’s foremost Hand Models, whose masculine hand had graced every major men’s magazine in America and Europe over the past ten years, holding that quintessential cigarette or crystal goblet of gin… the gator may as well have ripped out his very heart.

 “Sure I’m depressed,” Bob said as he dabbed at his blood soaked bandage, all the while gazing wearily toward his shrink of the past five years, wondering if the guy was even listening to him at all. You’d think the $200 per hour fee would buy Bob something in terms of comfort, or compassion or consideration.

Forget about it! Bob knew that if he was going to deal with this horrible roadblock in his life, he’d have to be strong. And he’d have to figure out some creative way on his own to get past it all. He left his shrink’s office that day $200 poorer but immeasurably richer in terms of a commitment to get some relief from the pain of missing Pinky.

“Give ‘em the finger!” That’s what Bob really wanted to do to all the ad agency executives, empty suits and assorted imbeciles who now looked the other way when it came to hiring the once renowned Hand Model for photoshoots. Bob wanted to just give ‘em the old middle finger right up the kazoo.

“Marlboro won’t touch him,” one corporate bozo exclaimed. “Land’s End asked us never to send his photos again,” an art director groaned. And yet another ad agency clown proclaimed, “If we needed a four fingered model to hold a goblet of Johnny Walker Red, we’d have hired an orangutan!”

Bob was hurt beyond belief. At the following week’s therapy session, he watched his shrink unravel one of those cigar cylinders that‘s used to house only the finest of cigars. The shrink looked more interested in the stogie in front of him than in Bob’s problems.

But it sparked an idea of epic proportions in Bob’s scheming brain. Bob would no longer grieve the loss of his beloved Pinky… reacting angrily to his former employers by giving them the finger. Now he’d try a whole new tactic and instead, he’d be “giving them the finger” in a whole new way.

Within a week, Bob had ordered over a thousand fake rubber fingers from a practical joke factory in the heart of China. At the same time he paid a cigar plant in Havana to drop ship a crate of empty cigar cylinders to him post haste. Bob had some wild new scheme up his sleeve.

To each of the big shit clients who once happily shook his (five fingered) hand, he anonymously sent a rubber finger in a cannister with the cutest little message inside, printed on a fortune cookie paper. “I’m giving you THE finger,” the note read, “You know where to put it.” 

Within days, Bob and his beloved Pinky were both the talk of the advertising world. And each of those corporate bozos who had suddenly denied Bob a living as the famous Hand Model that he had once been, were now creating the most bizarre, yet intriguing, and humane Ads, Posters, Billboards and online posts that the Ad World had ever see.

On a brand new Marlboro Billboard, that famous cigarette was suddenly back in Bob’s four fingered hand, while Pinky lay next to his four brethren, separate but equal, puffing on his own mini-sized Marlboro. While his four brethren tugged on a Land’s End polo shirt collar on a Catalog Cover, Pinky stole the show by lying next to them, resplendent in his own mini sized shirt. And while his four brethren hoisted a glass of Johnny Walker Red in a national TV spot, Pinky was “Inside The Glass” acting as the straw that stirs the popular beverage.

The moral: Despite missing Pinky, Bob celebrated his digit’s memory by giving him a brand new role that took the Advertising World by storm. At the same time, his grief stricken depression was replaced by a feeling of creative self satisfaction. Bob quit his useless shrink, stopped giving his ex clients the finger, got his job back as a famous hand model, and made bank in the process.

Bob still visits Pinky’s grave and waves to his tiny headstone with his four fingered hand.

He proudly wears the alligator boots that have Pinky’s name imprinted on them.

He has made famous the new Pinky Special four fingered glove.

And he finally beat the depression he suffered when he lost his job as the World’s Most Famous Hand Model….

For this and so much more --- .”We’ve Really Got To Hand It To You Bob!!!”

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