Not long after the elves first showed up, I thought I had it made. I had
been at my wits end trying to make it in the mailorder business (a pursuit
that my ex-wife thought to be the best way to make my first million
without breaking a sweat) and I was broke and depressed.
I couldn't understand it. It worked for the man on late night tv. I saw him every night draped in luxury, his pick of beautiful women, gold chains and rings- even a gold tooth. He had it made. I, on the other hand, could not sell pornography to junior high students (yes, I tried, but now the court order prevents me).
So there I was. My wife left me. I was kicked out of my apartment. I was eating my last can of tuna surrounded by the cheap merchandise provided by Ron O'Hara Inc. that I could not move for the life of me. That's when I met them. I had heard a noise toward the back of the warehouse and went to investigate.
They were small (I'd say about four foot) and sort of greenish-blue. I have never been one to harbor prejudice to color or height, so this is not what phased me. What phased me was that these elves were busily tearing apart my inventory- stripping it all down to its base materials.
"Hey- Damn you! Get out of here," I yelled. They looked up at me for a moment and then went right back to what they were doing. I stood there stunned for a while and then I sat on the floor and started trying to open the lines of communication.
The elves were a secretive and privacy-loving lot but in the next hour I was able to piece together some of the facts. It seemed that they were on the run and needed a place to hide out for a while. They needed employment to take care of their basic needs, but, more than this, they seemed to have a need to keep active, moving, and busy. They had little patience for idle chit-chat and seemed to not need to take a break- even though they were working very hard and they glistened continually with fresh sweat from their exertion.
I figured whatever their plan was I had nothing to lose, so I went back to the little office on the other side of the warehouse and slept on the sofa. Let's face it, I had no place else to go and little hope.
When I awoke the next morning, I was in shock. The front of the warehouse was filled with newly made shoes of every shape and size. These were shoes unlike any I had ever seen, however. They were weird. These shoes were all made from the unwanted garbage I had in storage. What's more, upon closer examination, I found that they were poorly made. These shoes, thousands of them-some not even in pairs, suffered from even shoddier manufacturing than the garbage they were made from.
I walked back to where the elves were and found that they were still all there and hard at work. In fact, there were now more of them than had been the night before. It seemed that their number had doubled. There was a sickly sweet smell in the air that I attributed to the sweat that stained, and in some cases, gushed from every elf.
"Hey boss," nodded the elf who seemed to be in charge. I again sat on the floor and tried to engage in some meaningful dialog. I found that the elves were on the run due to trouble in their home region. Something about ethnic cleansing.
I shook my head and decided to go for a walk. I was getting a little light-headed from the stench. On my way out the door I filled a medium sized canvas bag with a few dozen of the shoes and left for the day. I figured at the least I'd have an odd day of show and tell, and at most I might be able to pawn them off somewhere for much needed funds.
At the shoe store the owner eyed me incredulously while he looked over the contents of my bag. "What have you done?" was what he said when he lay the shoe he had been holding down on the counter. "And more important- why have you done it?"
I told him that these shoes were all the rage in Europe.
"I'm not a rube. This is garbage," he said. "But I'm not without heart. You must be in real dire straits to try and pawn off this crap. Look, here's a twenty for your troubles. Just don't come back."
So I left with my new shoes and the twenty. I didn't have the luxury of pride. I walked forty minutes to get to my pal Jerry's place to show him the merchandise and tell the story to a friendly set of ears. When he recovered from his laughing fit, he looked the shoes over a second time.
"Jesus, what were they thinking." he snorted. "This reminds me of shop projects from the seventh grade. Remember the wooden gumball machine we made that didn't work?"
"Hell yes. But this is different. I've got a whole warehouse full of this shit. If I had insurance I'd torch the place, but I don't have that option."
Jerry paced back and forth for a while. "Elves, huh? You'd think they'd be good at making shoes."
"Well they're not. But the worst part is that they work at it around the clock. I don't think I'll ever get rid of them."
A wicked look crossed Jerry's face. "Why don't you convert the place into a kind of a peep show?"
"I don't think they're that kind of elf, Jerry. Besides, they don't seem to do anything but make crappy shoes."
"That's what I mean. Look, you've come here and told me that you have elves; further, that these elves are working tirelessly making shoes of a very questionable quality for you. I'm taking you at your word but I may well be crazy for doing it. Buddy, If you have elves, that's something that I'd be interested in seeing. That's something I think you could charge people to see as a novelty. Who knows, maybe you could even sell a few shoes as souvenirs."
I had to admit it was a plan that made some sort of sense. I had nothing to loose; and Jerry seemed eager to see the elves for himself. I left the bag of shoes at Jerry's house- over his protests- and we set off. I still didn't know if he took me seriously but he was playing along until the end, just like I knew he would.
When we approached the entryway to the warehouse, Jerry started to make a face. "What is that smell?" he asked. I had forgotten to warn him about the stench. I filled him in as I fumbled with the keys.
When we got into the building we were witness to a sight like no other: what had once been a sparsely filled storage warehouse was now filled with shoes as far as the eye could see, stacked up in obscene mountains- each shoe more inferior than the next. As we made our way through the stacks we marveled at the site- the deeper in we went the worse it was. We were seeing things that brought into question the very definition of "shoe."
As we approached the back the stench really hit us. We rounded a shoe mound and then we saw the elves. They were still hard at work, still sweating, still making shoes. But now their number had increased threefold. There were elves of both sexes and all ages. There were elves working who appeared to be as young as three. Pregnant women. Old men. The sick. The infirm. All working. All sweating. The cement floor of the warehouse was damp with perspiration.
"Boss!" the head elf jumped down from his work-perch and hugged me, inadvertently spraying me with a liberal quantity of his ...essence. "Boss, you are the greatest. We are here to stay. Don't you worry, You will always have shoes. Always." He immediately went back to work.
Jerry and I retreated gracefully into the night.
We decided that this was a perfect time to drink heavily. On the way to the bar Jerry complained several times about the smell I had acquired from the head elf. Still, he trudged along with me to the local watering hole. I guess the smell was not so bad that he figured a few stiff drinks would not enable him to deal with it. As we walked down the street panhandlers moved to get out of our way.
When we arrived at the bar and seated ourselves at the counter the bartender come over and wrinkled his nose. "If'n yous guys mean to stay here you best have money. And ya best sit over there, or I'll have yous both bounced." The thick man pointed to a table in the far corner next to a small window.
Disgruntled but eager to drink we did as the man said and moved to the table. "You smell really awful, buddy. We should have stopped by my place and had a shower. A long shower," said Jerry as he scooted his chair a ways back. "It's a lot worse in an enclosed space."
I knew that what he was saying was true but I responded with a sharp glare and he got the point and shut up. It really wasn't all that bad. I was starting to get used to it. We just sat there quietly until the waitress came over.
This place was not well known for its service and we came here mainly due to its close proximity to the warehouse. The place did have its good points though and after a while one of them approached in the guise of our barmaid for the evening. I didn't know who owned this place but he certainly had a fine eye for the help. Not to mention good taste in staff uniforms.
"What'll it be this evening, boys?"
"Two beers," I said. Jerry looked up and said, "Make mine Whiskey." He looked over at me and then added, "Make it a double."
I was starting to feel a little self conscious. Perhaps I should have stopped off for a shower after all.
Then something happened that was quite unexpected. The waitress threw herself in my lap, kissed me and said to me in an adoring tone, "I'll be right back. Promise me you won't go anywhere."
It turns out that elf sweat is a powerful pheromone. That was the only explanation that we could come up with. You get enough of the stuff on you and you can't keep the women off you. After all this time, things were finally looking up. The rest of the evening was spent with a number of very attractive young women from all over the area. They just kept pouring through the doors to the bar and making a beeline for me. It was amazing.
The only person who was not having a good time was Jerry. After the novelty of the situation wore off he got the message fast that the women wanted nothing to do with him or any other man who was not emitting the smell of a hard working elf. Sometime near the end of the first hour he left. Next thing I knew he was back and the women were all over him too. Seems he went back to the warehouse and, wasting no time, grabbed the first elf he saw and rubbed him briskly all over his body.
When we left the undulating naked mob, taking with us a few of our favorite groupies, it was well after one in the morning. We went back to Jerry's place and crashed. It had been a hectic day.
When we woke up in the morning we were alone. It appeared that the stuff wore off sometime in the night. "This is great!" intoned Jerry. "A working pheromone that lasts around 12 hours. This is a marketing goldmine." We were going to be rich. We spent the rest of the day at the warehouse determining how to best collect the sweat. We arranged to have the piles of shoes carted away every day and burned. Our head count indicated that there were 742 elves in the building- more than enough to get production started in quantity.
We found an immediate market in Asia for the cologne, which we called "Elfin Groove Juice (not for internal consumption- see directions)." Seems that they knew of the stuff already and there was an immediate built-in demand, their previous source having recently dried up.
The market in Europe was easy as well, especially in Eastern Europe. Word of mouth spread our product far and wide and by the end of our first fiscal quarter we were worth well in excess of 50 million each. The market in the west was next and we put our money to good use in a marketing blitz: infomercials, product placement, celebrity endorsements. It was easy to get popular female celebrities, as we just used the elf juice to get them to do the spots for free.
In February Jerry and I shared the cover of Time magazine. We were world celebrities. We could do no wrong.
Then He arrived.
Jerry and I showed up at EGJ Inc. to find him in our executive offices, splayed out in the Hot Tub, waiting for us.
He was an older man, his hair white with age, but his physical form was superb. He was in good shape and appeared to be in excellent health despite a slight weight problem. His muscles rippled as he sat up, took a deep puff on his cigar, and addressed us.
"Seems you boys are doing well for yourselves," his deep voice boomed. "Nice office. Cute Secretaries. Interesting corporate stationary." He looked around the office appreciatively. "Mind if I take the tour of the facilities?"
"How did you get in here?" I asked.
"More importantly, who the hell are you?" Jerry added.
The man laughed a hearty laugh and threw his cigar into the empty fireplace. "Boys, I am Mr. Big. I've been in this business for as long as this business has been around. And I hate competition. I want to know if you are infringing on any of my patents. A man has got to protect his livelihood."
"Get out before I call the police," Jerry said, pointing at the door.
"Watch your mouth, youngster," the old man snapped, "You don't want to be on my enemies list. I'll give you the choice- you can show me around the facilities like good little boys or I'll come back with an army of lawyers and a subpoena and cause some serious harm to your bottom line. Make your decision. I haven't got all day."
Our backs were against the proverbial wall. Both of us believed the man and feared the shutdown of our business, even if only temporary. Jerry and I talked it over and decided that there was not a problem with patents, since we were using all natural ingredients. We also had no fear of competition, as you were nowhere without the elves and the elves were a loyal bunch. There wasn't much you could say about the elves, but they were loyal. We felt sure that a tour would scare the man away.
So, the old fella dressed and we left for the production wing. The old man seemed to be invigorated as the three of us strode down the hall and the smell hit us like a ton of bricks as we approached.
"Ah, refreshing, refreshing!" he sang. "I feel like a man half my age."
As he went into the production room the man let out a hearty laugh and all the elves stopped work and looked up at us.
"Holy Crap, It's Santa!" screamed one of the elves toward the front.
The lead elf screamed, "Kill him, boss, kill him, he'll do us all in."
Santa moved quickly to the side so that his back was to no one.
"The elves are coming with me, boys. They're my property. You fellows have stolen my goods and horned in on my business. Still, if you leave now I'll let you be and let you keep what you've made so far."
"So you're the guy they were escaping from," I said. My mind was reeling. Everything now made sense.
"Fight him, boss, fight him," pleaded the head elf. "Our lives under his totalitarian rule are a hellish nightmare that only ends when he kills us in our old age."
Jerry's eyes grew wide. "So that's what they meant by ethnic cleansing."
Santa put an open hand toward us while maintaining his defensive stance. "Boys, boys, Santa kills only elves who are no longer productive- race has nothing to do with it. My use of these elves is no different than yours. They are a commodity, when they are no longer useful I get rid of them for their own good- and for the good of the genepool. Surely you two are businessmen and can see the logic behind a well reasoned out eugenics program."
What the elves had said was true. Santa used the elves up and then killed them. Further, the elves were not allowed to choose their own mates but were selectively bred in order that each generation would sweat more profusely than the last.
"When they first came to me I was a simple cobbler and they only sweat a normal amount for their size," Santa told us. "And you've seen their handiwork boys, I was no fast success in the shoe biz. Then I started conducting a few simple genetics experiments and you have seen the fantastic results for yourself. I use the proceeds from the elf sweat sold in the east to give presents to the good little boys and girls in the west. It's a symbiotic relationship. Give up boys, and all will be forgiven. You may even find something nice under the tree next Christmas."
"This is bullshit," Jerry shouted. "I've never gotten anything from Santa. You're a fraud and you're going nowhere with these elves."
The elves let out a cheer.
Santa pulled out a little book from his vest pocket and quickly looked through it. "Oh. You see, Santa doesn't bring the Jewish kids presents," said Santa as he glared at us from over his glasses.
Jerry charged at him and then I felt a hard blow to the back of my head and everything went black.
When I awoke we were tied to chairs and Santa and his wife were removing the elves from our building.
"So long, rubes!" Santa laughed as the last elves were led away in chains.
"I'm just glad that they never found out what the shoes were good for," added Mrs. Claus on the way out the door.