The Best Part Is Not Wearing Pants

By Phil's humble estimation, the best part about the pandemic was being able to work from home without wearing pants. It was even better than the superiority he felt from being "pretty much bilingual thanks to Telemundo" in a country of arrogant English-only speakers. Even better than not having to smell a client's day-old-tuna-fish breath. Even better than turning up to a job jelly-limbed and wasted, which he could do so much more easily now.

Take today, for example. Nine in the morning and he'd already downed three Irish coffees, which gave him both a blissful numbness from the whiskey's buzz and a laxative-like jumpiness from the espresso. And best of all: there was no Bill to tell him not to.

And bestest of all: no pants.

He could hear Bill's voice now, reproachful like a jellyfish, if a jellyfish could speak. "Phil, cocktail hour isn't until you get home" or "Phil, you have to wear pants—yes, even on a Zoom call!" or, as was the case the week before, "Phil, I don't think this relationship is working out between us anymore."

Well, who needed him? More Irish coffees for Phil.

And anyway, everyone knew couples with rhyming names had a fifty-percent success rate of staying together. If it hadn't happened last Friday, it would've eventually. Maybe not on a Friday, but it would've happened. Phil was sure.

No sooner had he had that Friday thought—or was it Thursday? Irish coffees made it so difficult to keep the days of the week and the number of fingers being held up from blurring together—than his laptop blared with the squawking of an incoming Zoom call. He shuffled to the couch, set his fourth—okay, maybe it was his seventh—cocktail of the day down on the coffee table next to his laptop, and adjusted the angle of the computer screen. When his pantless lower half was sufficiently out of view, he answered.

His boss, Mr. Miller, appeared on the monitor. Or, rather, his darting eyes and the bridge of his pug nose appeared, much too close, enlarged like a raisin that'd been exposed to too much sunlight. It had been only a few weeks since the company had switched to Zoom and there was so much transitioning, so many subtleties, that Mr. Miller had yet to learn.

Phil bet he was even still wearing his pants.

Next came the faces of the others in the office—there was uppity Brenda, who tried to get Phil fired last month after she smelled his liquor-crusted breath in a meeting; there was sweet-sweet Randy, who tried to get Brenda fired for unfairly discriminating against an LGBTQIA2S+ coworker; there was Dil, who Bill (good riddance!) once remarked, at an office party, looked "nice" dressed as Santa Claus.

Now, Phil encouraged the possibility of a relationship between them, wished it might happen. He knew the truth about rhyming names.

On screen, at Brenda's request, Mr. Miller repositioned his webcam, so now they were treated to a view of his mouth and nothing else whenever he spoke. "I shouldn't have to tell you," his uvula was saying, "but this deal is major. Major! You know this. It could mean the difference between our company having a future ten years from now or all of us being absolutely fuc—"

In a blink, a call brringed on the screen, interrupting Mr. Miller's saliva-heavy pep talk. A new set of faces emerged, and Phil recognized them as the clients. Or, at least, he recognized the big guy in the middle with the fuzzy caterpillar mustache above his lip.

Mr. Miller greeted them with his best attempt at non-Telemundo-aided Spanish, loudly finger-poked a few buttons on his keyboard, took another step back when Brenda told him to.

Phil caught a glimpse of khakis.

"Mic check, mic check," Mr. Miller wailed into the computer with all the authority of a first-time DJ. "One-two, one-two."

To this, apropos of nothing, perhaps to break the tension, or perhaps not, Phil responded with the first two bars of Gangsta's Paradise, a song whose lyrics he couldn't recall while sober but could recite with Coolio's natural steez while he was one or two or seventh Irish coffees deep. He finished, expecting applause for his rapping prowess, or at least quiet admiration in the form of hip-hop-head nods. Then he realized he'd said the words only in his mind and his mouth was instead wrapped around the rim of his coffee mug.

He took a sip.

The meeting limped forward like a horror movie survivor, slowly and painfully. Phil took coffee sips in between translating the negotiation offers between Mr. Miller and the fuzzy-lipped man, whom he had taken to calling "Tomás Selleck," but only in his head—and maybe once out loud, but he'd quickly faked a sneeze to throw anybody off his scent. 

It was only later, during a five minute recess, as he returned to the couch with a steaming fresh drink in hand, that the voices started to morph.

When Mr. Miller resumed the re-negotiations, his voice began to sound to Phil as though he were scuba-diving on Mars, somewhere far away, somewhere khaki-less. Phil could still pick out keywords here and there—"million" and "counteroffer" and maybe something about Bitcoin. But mostly it just sounded like the adults from those old Peanuts movies, like womp-womp and all that jazz. He translated to the best of his ability, making a judgment call to to leave out that Bitcoin part. 

As Tomás sat on the other end of the line and rubbed his non-caterpillar chin with one finger, Phil took a moment to look at the daily newspaper rolled up beside his laptop. He wondered, then, if they still ran Peanuts in the Comics section, the way they still ran the movies every holiday.

When he and Bill were together, they would read the Funny Pages every Sunday, and though they'd only been broken up for a week, Phil conceded that it wouldn't have been impossible for Peanuts, the comic, to stop being printed after the newspaper heard about his breakup. A lot could happen in a week. He knew that now.

What a shame that would be though. He kind of liked that one piano kid. And the girl who played keep-away with the football. And the kid who liked to eat all those hamburgers. Or was he thinking of another comic? Damn, it was going to eat at him if he didn't figure that out.

He glanced back at the screen where Tomás was leaning toward the screen of the man beside his, the two of them whispering behind their hands like kids playing a game of telephone, even though they were in separate rooms, separate buildings. It looked like it might take them a while to deliberate.

Phil decided checking the paper would be too loud, too crinkly, too distracting. Instead, he chose to Ask Jeeves, because he supported the underdogs in life.

With the silence of a subpar mime, he minimized the Zoom call, opened Google Chrome, remembered that whole mantra about supporting the underdogs, closed Google Chrome, then opened Ask Jeeves. That's when he found out it was now just called Ask.com.

"You learn something new every day," he whispered. Or maybe he'd thought it. He hoped he'd thought it.

He was knee-deep in Wikipedia's rabbit hole (he considered Wikipedia an underdog, because you weren't allowed to use it to cite your sources in college essays) when he heard Tomás's voice. Only, Phil's rabbit hole spanned a total of thirty-three tabs across his browser, and only twelve of them had loaded, and his piece of junk nine-year-old computer took now of all times to freeze. He caught the first half of the sentence, "Estamos listos," but the second half promptly got Marie Antoinetted.

"Come on, come on," he muttered, frantically trying to close as many tabs as he could. Which was none, because the computer was still frozen, and his apartment was quiet, filled with neither English nor Spanish, and certainly not the Spanglish with which he was trying to champion Telemundo. The clock behind him ticked. The sound of Ctrl+Alt+Delete tocked. He finished his drink, refilled it.

Two minutes and one promise never to support the underdogs later, the computer gave up on its practical joke and unlocked. At once the Wikipedia pages vanished, even the one he wanted to read about Marxism, and he maximized his Zoom screen again and immediately wished he hadn't.

There, right there, on the webcams of his six coworkers, his boss, Tomás Selleck and his mustache-less associates, all eyes were on him, waiting for him to do his job. To translate and make the decision final. To boldly send the company ten years into the future and allow them to buy hoverboards and robot dogs and Mega-Twinkies and whatever else came a decade ahead.

Phil weighed his options.

He could ask Tomás to repeat himself. No shame in that, right? But no—how could it explain his silence for the past few minutes, his absence from the conversation? The Marxism?

No, doing that would just make it seem like he hadn't been paying attention, like he was showing up to his job drunk again. Which wasn't untrue, but still. He could already see the twist in Brenda's upper lip, the way she could turn from friend to foe in an instant. He could spot an "I told you so" from a mile away. Bill taught him well.

"Well, Phil?" Mr. Miller said. He looked more like a Basset Hound than a pug now, in a way that Phil could see but was too drunk to articulate. But trust him on that one.

Tomás made a sound of disgust, like when you go to a buffet and realize they don't use sneeze guards. "Él ésta ebrio!" he huffed, pointing a finger into his webcam in the direction of Phil's video square, as though he could smell the stench of whiskey from the other side of the screen.

"Yeah, I agree," Mr. Miller said hesitantly, with all the authority of a second-time DJ who was only brought back because no one else was available.

It seemed to Phil at that moment, with the accusation of him being drunk threatening to take away his Mega-Twinkie dream, that there was only one option.

Tomás was convulsing on his webcam, speaking rapidly, a single word with the sound and the fury of many: "Ebrio, ebrio, ebrio!" And perhaps because he talked so fast, or perhaps because the rest of Phil's coworkers didn't have an Xfinity package that offered Telemundo, no one bothered to search for the word's translation.

And that was just the opening Phil needed.

"Deal!" he shouted, feeling particularly inspired. "That's what he's saying. Ebrio. It means deal. In Spanish, you know. They want to accept our counteroffer."

The line went quiet for all of a second. Then, like a firework, exploded.

Tears streamed down the features of Mr. Miller's Basset-Hound-pug face. Dil let out a ho-ho-ho, for old times' sake. Brenda made a face that Phil vowed to remember for as long as he lived, or as long as he remained drunk. Whichever came first.

It didn't matter. The company was going ahead. Forward. Into the future.

Then, in the midst of the joy and the celebration, just as everyone was deciding how to spend their upcoming fortune, a sound rang out through the ether, a noise like thunder meeting the side of a tree. They turned to see the source.

Tomás had clapped his hands together, just once, not in a gesture of late applause for the Gangsta's Paradise rendition that Phil had never actually rapped, but to get their attention. And it worked.

Everyone went quiet long enough for Google Translate's robotic voice to flood the call, first in Spanish: "Él ésta ebrio!" and then rendered in English even Mr. Miller could understand: "He is drunk!" Tomás made a show of singling out Phil on the translation. Then, because he could, Tomás also ran the word "liar" through Google Translate.

Later, Phil couldn't recall which had happened first: Brenda's Heath Ledger smile poking out from the shadow of her lips, followed by her sanctimonious "I told you so," or Tomás shaking his head and, in the style of a game show contestant, saying in perfect English "No deal!" and exiting the call, with his other associates logging off right after him.

Mr. Miller and Phil and the rest of the team looked around, watching the light fade from each others' eyes, the dreams of technology and beach houses and mega-junk food turning into steam, wisps, slipping through hands and fingers and cracks.

And just like that, it was over.

Then, apropos of nothing, perhaps to break the tension, or perhaps not, Brenda said, "I told you so" one last time.

Mr. Miller's face was splotched red, like he'd washed it with ketchup and then paprika. And the others must have taken that as a sign, an omen, because Phil watched each of them drop the call one by one—first Randy, then Dil, then that one lady who looked like Brenda with a blonde wig, and then even Brenda herself, smiling and waving a Phil like a cartoon character ending a broadcast.

It was only Phil and Mr. Miller after that.

"Phillip Carney," he said, each name like an accusation, like a surprise witness being called up to the stand. "Phillip Carney!"

Phil supposed there was a kind of dog for what his boss looked like now, but he couldn't think of the name. Now Mr. Miller's temple veins were showing, a network of cross-shaped insignias from the base of his skull down to his eyelids. An incoming call came from Brenda, no doubt changing her mind about not wanting to watch. He didn't want to give her the satisfaction.

With each word getting louder and louder, Mr. Miller said, "Do you have any idea what you've just done to my company? What you've just cost me?" He leaned forward. His uvula was back on camera. "You miserable, little fuc—"

Whatever his boss was going to say was cut short, this time not because of the computer freezing, but because Phil lunged forward in a flurry of arms and legs and closed the laptop, plunging the apartment into the type of silence found only after a song from a Milli Vanilli concert. He was spared.

He had a pretty good idea of what Mr. Miller would've said, though.

And then that word left his own lips and he completed Mr. Miller's sentence for him as he felt a painful, scalding sensation running down his leg. Wincing, he looked down to find his Irish coffee mug toppled over, the liquid running along the underside of his laptop, over the newspaper on the table, down his hairy, bare, exposed leg. So much Irish coffee.

Maybe Bill had had a point about cocktail hour. Maybe Bill had had a point about a few things.

Outside, the morning sun filled Phil's living room with light and the promise of a future. Not a future with robot dogs or Mega-Twinkies he could claim, but a future he'd have to stride toward regardless.

With a sigh, he grabbed the newspaper that was soaking up the coffee like a ShamWow and a pen from the cup by his TV. He flipped past the Funny Pages, Peanuts and all, straight to the soggy Help Wanted section. He could tell it was going to be a long day. Maybe he'd get an interview if he was lucky.

But first, he had to put on some pants.