It was big. It was red. And it was all Gary's.
Unfortunately, Gary had developed an allergy to plastic clown noses. So the big red nose would have to remain in his top drawer, right next to the pack of Delta Airlines playing cards which he had brought back from his first trip to the world's third-largest database conference in San Jose. Somehow, Gary's dream of making children laugh had been replaced by developing fault-tolerant database systems for large banks.
Not that it would matter now, anyway. Clown noses made Gary itch.
Gary Friday was the first and last man to participate in the United States Government's Bionic Nose program. It was a secret, military research experiment, only recently declassified (hence, the photo of Gary's ugly mug on the cover of last week's Time Magazine), in which Gary was implanted with a "bionic nasal operator" in the center of his head. Gary's nasal operator acted as a prototype super mucus pump, among other things, and also allowed Gary to swallow food, albeit not very easily. Those bagels of his were especially difficult. Gary liked to have his "everything" bagels with butter, cream cheese, and jelly, a combination that got looks from New York City deli employees that might usually have been reserved for budding suicide victims who threatened to jump off a rather low bridge. It didn't matter how bionic Gary's nose was. It wasn't going to help him get a glob of edible glue down through the titanium chamber of his bionic nasal operator. In case of emergency, Gary carried a small pipe-cleaning brush to clear out his nasal passage whenever it got clogged with bagel. One morning, when he forgot the brush at home, he had to use his index finger right at his desk at work. The other computer programmers had come to expect Gary's eccentricity, so they merely cringed, took a swig of Mountain Dew, and went back to bookmarking Internet porn sites.
Difficulty in eating was only one of the reasons the Bionic Nose program was cancelled. The government realized that the Bionic Nose User would still have problems in a gas chamber filled with anthrax, smallpox, and pepper spray, even with the computer-aided ability to limit one's oxygen intake to one breath per two minutes. And Gary never did understand why a six-million dollar nose was supposed to protect his eyeballs from habanero pepper flakes.
Now that Gary was middle-aged, he was beginning to think that his lifelong dream to become a clown would be snuffed out by a government experiment gone wrong. But Gary no longer held any ill feelings towards Brigadier General Stetson, the head of the program. Gary knew that he had signed up for the program of his own accord, and that maybe he should have paid more consideration to the small print.
But never, ever, would Gary forgive the credit card companies. If it wasn't for his $35,000 debt, he probably never would have thought about allowing an obscure department of the U.S. Army to replace his nose with titanium, silicon, and that new manmade biological agent known only as "Substance R". Substance R was a bioengineered material that scientists had created in order to bridge computer microprocessors with human cell nuclei. Substance R allowed scientists to tell cells what to do. And what scientists wanted to do with Gary's nose was nothing that normal cells would normally have anything to do with.
Now Gary was free of credit card debt, but had an artificial nose full of Substance R. Somehow, Gary felt like he'd been gypped.
To be continued...?
