The Humble Assessment Read online

  PRAISE FOR KRIS SAKNUSSEMM

  “James Ellroy meets David Lynch.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Kris Saknussemm’s sincerity, wisdom, and writing talent make Sea Monkeys something which is half way between a memoir and a Molotov cocktail.”

  —ETGAR KERET

  “Kris Saknussemm is a brilliant writer.”

  —MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  “Kris Saknussemm has a voice like no one else’s.”

  —JOAN WICKERSHAM, National Book Award finalist

  “Saknussemm is a rare visionary of American culture, a fearless artist with his very own skew on the western world. Reverend America is brilliant!”

  —JONATHAN EVISON, New York Times bestselling

  author of West of Here

  “One is hard pressed, while reading him, to recall the existence of any other reality.”

  —THE BOSTON REVIEW

  “...an original blend of noir procedural, horror, and dark eroticism.”

  —SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Enigmatic Pilot is a rip-roaring trip through a fantastic mid-19th century America...written in the spirit of Mark Twain’s novelistic journeys.”

  —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  The Humble

  Assessment

  A PLAY

  IN

  THREE ACTS

  OF

  DESPERATION

  BY KRIS SAKNUSSEMM

  With a foreword by Phil Abrams

  and an afterword by the Author

  A LAZY FASCIST BOOK

  Lazy Fascist Press

  an imprint of Eraserhead Press

  205 NE Bryant Street

  Portland, Oregon 97211

  www.lazyfascistpress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62105-081-0

  Copyright © 2013 by Kris Saknussemm

  Cover art copyright © 2013 by Matthew Revert

  Cover design by Matthew Revert

  www.matthewrevert.com

  An earlier version of this work was first performed at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne Australia, April 2010.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the USA.

  “It is the remarkable intermingling of the communicative and defensive aspects of speech which characterizes every interview.”

  —Otto Allen Will, Jr.

  FOREWORD BY PHIL ABRAMS

  INSTRUCTIONS FOR READING

  THE HUMBLE ASSESSMENT:

  1) Take a deep breath. 2) Shudder as the stark images and truth of the narrative sink in and swirl around your psyche.

  At once, names like Ionesco, Beckett, and Albee come to mind, but then are topped by the understanding that this voice has an even more unsettling, hard-hitting edge. As you reach the epilogue, Kris Saknussemm plunges, then twists his theatrical knife deep into your heart—deeper than you can imagine or necessarily want! Like a cat o’ nine tails working you over, your flesh is raw, exposed, and ready to receive the human condition in all its brokenness and frailty.

  You can’t help but laugh. You can’t help but gasp. You are unnerved.

  At the age of twelve, I was introduced to the Theatre of the Absurd at a summer arts camp high in the mountains of Southern California. Ionesco’s The Chairs, which features a ninety-two-year-old man, was the first show I performed. I was shy eighty years, so right there, pretty absurd if you think about it. In subsequent summers, came The Bald Soprano and Albee’s The Sandbox. This genre indelibly etched into my heart and mind a perspective on the world that has informed my life and my professional career as an artist on stage, in television and film. It cannot be by coincidence that I also met Saknussemm a couple of summers later at that same arts camp and we realized we had a shared experience of the ‘odd.’ This led to a life-long friendship that has included adventures into derelict America, Twilight Zone marathon viewings, and a keen, mutual appreciation of the bizarre.

  When it comes to odd, Sak is the master. Whether it is a short story, novel, or play, he is able to find the ‘disturbing’ in the commonplace and conversely, the ordinary in the ‘unusual.’ I can only hope that you are as touched, disquieted, and enlightened by The Humble Assessment as I am.

  ***

  In 1981, Phil Abrams began his professional acting career in San Francisco, starring in Memory Hotel at the renowned Magic Theatre. He continued performing at many local theatre companies before relocating to NYC. After a stint touring internationally with The Reduced Shakespeare Company, Phil relocated to Hollywood in the 90s. His film credits include White Frog, The Island, Nancy Drew, Saving Sarah Cain and close to one-hundred television shows with a variety of recurring roles and guest stars: The Office, The Big Bang Theory, ER, Lost and NBC’s Parenthood, to name but a few.

  The Humble

  Assessment

  THE CHARACTERS

  Mr. Humble: A disheveled and yet still somehow overly neat man in his mid 50s. Classic drab suit and tie.

  Interviewer 1: Female, late 30s. Wears a formal skirt and expensive high heel shoes, but on top wears only a black lace bra.

  Interviewer 2: A man of indeterminate age in a wheelchair.

  Operations Manager: A man in a white tuxedo and a rubber gorilla mask.

  Applicant #4: A man who appears wrapped in bandages like the Invisible Man.

  THE SETTING

  Nominally, an office in the Human Resources/Personnel division of a large anonymous company. But the stage is virtually bare, other than a long, unusually wide desk and some unexpected furnishings, which attract no special notice from the actors.

  [The stage is pitch dark. We hear the hints of ambient street noises and unidentified mechanical sounds…then a disembodied, machinelike voice over the PA system.]

  VOICE

  I have lived and died long enough to see the towers of shimmering glass fleshed over their skeletons of Chinese steel rise above the hopes and the hopeless that hide in the crevices below…creating a necropolis of shadows, where there is neither light nor darkness, but rather a perpetual state of sustained dwindling…grief verging on rage…the gluttony of starvation…empty cocktail laughter and menus better read than eaten from.

  Beneath the shining pillars of uncertainty, the streets are filled with forms that resemble people, better photographed than met.

  And I am one of them, a denizen and not a citizen, of a wilderness of billboards…an oasis that erases…a vast bazaar that retails ever more ingenious forms of crisis to bewitch us into believing that the marionette machine still works.

  But of course it works. Of course. For if it were ever to stop…even for a moment…

  [The voice distorts into a mess of static and we hear fragments of mangled news reports:]

  The stock market was down again today…

  The alleged shooter will make his first court appearance…

  Protesters have taken to the streets of…

  More violence rips the capital in…

  [The voices and static end with a sharp mechanical clunk.]

  ACT I

  INTERVIEWER 1 sits at a three-quarter angle with her back to us. We never see the person’s face. The INTERVIEWER’S chair is noticeably taller than the chair HUMBLE will occupy, so that the INTERVIEWER is always looking down, and HUMBLE always looking up, when seated.

  The suggestion of the office is almost entirely in shadow, but lights beat down on the surface of the desk, which is polished to a mirror-like finish.

  On the desk is what looks like an empty goldf
ish bowl. The INTERVIEWER is eating a piece of cake on a paper plate when HUMBLE arrives. The INTERVIEWER also has before her a big ledger pad and a pen in a holder. With each entry made in the ledger during the interview, the pen is returned to the holder, so that there is an overtly ceremonial intensity to each notation.

  On the floor beside the desk is an opened enormous white umbrella.

  [HUMBLE wanders in vaguely out of the dark, clutching a bunch of flowers, which he absently drops on the floor the moment he passes out of the shadows into the light. The light seems especially harsh on him when he finally sits down.]

  INTERVIEWER 1

  [Looks up, mouth full of cake.] What’s your view on disabled parking for obese people?

  HUMBLE

  Excuse me?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  [Swallows, wipes mouth.] Come in, Mr. Crumble.

  HUMBLE

  Humble.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  You’re humble? Well, don’t be shy too. Take a seat.

  HUMBLE

  I’m a Humble. [He sits down rather gingerly, obviously vexed by the height of the chair.]

  INTERVIEWER 1

  A humble what?

  HUMBLE

  That’s my name. Richard Humble. Didn’t you—

  INTERVIEWER 1

  I’m sorry about that.

  HUMBLE

  [Smiles.] Are you…making fun?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Why? I’m sure plenty of others have done that.

  HUMBLE

  [Now a bit miffed.] I haven’t gotten your name…the girl on the desk—

  INTERVIEWER 1

  No, you got a rather silly name. But I’ll just call you 16.

  HUMBLE

  16? You’ve done 15 interviews for this position?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Why would you think that?

  HUMBLE

  Because you just said 16…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  That’s only because it’s an easy number for me to remember. Are you trying to work out the odds—what your chances are?

  HUMBLE

  Well, I’d like…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Given your age—and from what I know of actuarial tables—I’m not sure you’d like to know the odds of you even still being alive.

  HUMBLE

  Now wait a…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Do you know how many men your age have had fatal strokes? I had a younger man than you keel over right in this very office. Same chair you’re sitting in. You should’ve heard the sound when his head hit the desk. Actually, I think a stroke is the wrong way to put it. It was more like a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Doesn’t something like one in three men your age suffer from impotence?

  HUMBLE

  W-what?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  I’m sorry, erectile dysfunction. I can see why the term impotence would worry you. Dysfunctional sounds better than impotent, doesn’t it?

  HUMBLE

  What are you talking about?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Are you being treated? I’ve heard there are side effects.

  HUMBLE

  Listen, I’m here to apply…I thought this was an interview for—

  INTERVIEWER 1

  My job? Is that what you’d like? You’d like to run the interview? Sit on my side of the desk…watching as all the miserable, washed up suits with their pink slip faces wander in, begging not to be thrown on the scrap heap?

  HUMBLE

  Look, I don’t know what the story is here, but I just came for an interview. I had an appointment. The financial controller position.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Is control an issue for you?

  HUMBLE

  Pardon?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Well, you seem to want to take control of this interview. Why is that, 16?

  HUMBLE

  I don’t want to take control of anything. I just—

  INTERVIEWER 1

  So, you don’t want to help keep the company’s financials in line and drive us toward greater profitability and sustained growth?

  HUMBLE

  [Voice rising.] I didn’t say that, I said—

  INTERVIEWER 1

  How about self control?

  HUMBLE

  Is this a joke?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Do you know any good jokes?

  HUMBLE

  Are you kidding?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Is that your idea of a joke?

  HUMBLE

  What do you mean?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  I asked if you knew any good jokes. A test of your flexibility—quickness of mind. Your ability to relate and connect. Communication, lateral thinking. Financial controllers don’t just manage numbers, they have to integrate with the whole of the business. They have to understand people as well as figures. Is that why you lost your last job?

  HUMBLE

  I didn’t lose my last job. I resigned. Didn’t you read my letter of application?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Well that is something of a joke. I read your whole file. Says you enjoy cigars and 16-year-old bourbon.

  HUMBLE

  What’s…wrong with that?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  When’s the last time you had any 16-year-old bourbon?

  HUMBLE

  Listen…I…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  And your favorite song is “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford.

  HUMBLE

  I didn’t say anything like that.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  You might as well have. In response to our personal interest questionnaire, you’ve listed Glenn Ford as your favorite movie actor. Glenn Ford!

  HUMBLE

  So?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Do you know that 95% of the people working for this company are too young to even know who Glenn Ford was? You go on to cite Fate is the Hunter as your favorite film. I had to Google on that. Suzanne Pleshette was in it too. What a saucy little strumpet she was in her day. She the kind who does it for you?

  HUMBLE

  I don’t like your tone.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  And there the list ends. Have you ever heard the expression, “As boring as bat shit?”

  HUMBLE

  That’s very rude. I—

  INTERVIEWER 1

  No hobbies listed!

  HUMBLE

  Well…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  You don’t collect stamps. Don’t play racquetball.

  HUMBLE

  I…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  No golf. Or fly-fishing. You don’t build purple martin feeders or coach Little League.

  HUMBLE

  I used to coach Little League.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  You really think that’s a skill base we should take into account?

  HUMBLE

  Look…don’t you want to know what software packages I’m familiar with? The scale of businesses I’ve worked with?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Software packages. Yes…spreadsheets and debit columns. Very important. May I offer you some sponge cake? Angel food sponge cake.

  HUMBLE

  [Fuming.] No…thank you.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  You know the secret of angel food sponge cake? It has to be moist. Moist and light. Lighter than air. Then you don’t feel guilty eating it. Right?

  HUMBLE

  I have over 25 years of experience…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  You look like you do.

  HUMBLE

  Is this some sort of new interview technique? Insult people—try to get them off balance?

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Do you feel off balance? Off kilter…out of whack?

  HUMBLE

  [Slides awkwardly off the chair and has to right himself.] No! I’m just…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Just what? Eager to
take someone else’s job?

  HUMBLE

  No…I…

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Steal someone’s livelihood right out from under them. Move a meal from one table to yours? All you can eat.

  HUMBLE

  I thought there was a vacancy.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Vacancy?

  HUMBLE

  I thought the position had just opened.

  INTERVIEWER 1

  Vacancy? Vacancy is a not quite empty parking lot where a young girl was brutally raped. What would you know about vacancy—except for the vacancy inside yourself? I’d hate to be behind you in a buffet line.