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“Yup, if I were a dame, I’d be happy to get my hands on a pair of the Birdie specials.” He looked up quickly. I’ve got to stop talking to myself out loud, he thought. They’ll have me committed just like they did Cousin Vince. Now there was one crazy cat.
    The Muzak piped in from a seemingly invisible speaker started to play “Luck, Be a Lady Tonight.” Barney found himelf humming. Talk about luck, he thought. Whatever possessed him to take a walk past the old panty-hose factory that night he didn’t know. He’d worked there in the maintenance department for years, until nine months ago, when they finally had to shut the place down. Business wasn’t good enough. The owners never realized that specializing in panty hose for clerics just might be a slightly outdated idea. And now the place was going to be demolished.
    But in the meantime his fellow maintenance worker Richie Blossom had been hanging around the place, setting up a little research lab, tinkering with the machines, up to his usual business of trying to invent something useless. But when Barney peered in the window that night and watched Richie fiddling with scraps of fabric, he just got a feeling that this time it might be different.
    Barney’s curiosity was piqued. He knew that if he knocked on the door, Richie wouldn’t tell him what he was doing. So he went home and searched through all his maintenance uniforms, which he sentimentally kept heaped in the corner of his closet, and found what he hoped might be there. A key to the side door of the panty-hose factory.
    The next night he waited outside until Richie had left, gave him fifteen minutes in case he had forgotten something, then let himself in. Armed with his flashlight, he started looking around.
    The old picnic table where they had gulped their coffee during their strictly observed five-minute breaks hadn’t been moved; Richie was obviously using it as the command station for his project. Barney couldn’t count the number of times he’d ended up with a burned tongue as he rushed to swallow the black brew that was passed off as coffee.
    The gray time clock attached to the wall was still there, clicking away. Barney went over and gave it a punch, remembering all the misery it had brought him. “There,” he smirked. “I didn’t forget to punch in.”
    Stacks of cheap paper with a printed message, the kind that people force on you when you’re running down the block late for an appointment, were lined up on the table. Barney picked one up, and with the glow of his flashlight began to read Richie’s literature on his new invention. “One size fits all! Superior-quality hosiery that will not run or snag. You can’t afford to pass up this offer!!” Give me a break, Barney thought. I wonder if he sat around all day suffering from writer’s block as he tried to think that stuff up, or if those catchy phrases came to him naturally.
    If you’re going to try and sell something as unbelievable as run-proof panty hose, Barney mused, you better get someone like me, a born salesman, someone who could sell ice to the Eskimos, to do it for you. I’ll write your ad, I’ll even act it. Barney always thought he would have been a great salesman, but his mother said that one Willy Loman in the family was more than enough and urged him to get into the maintenance workers’ union when he had the chance. May she rest in peace, the poor soul.
    Barney leaned over and shuffled through the papers. Photocopies of handwritten letters to various hosiery companies asking them for a few minutes of their time were scattered on the table. It doesn’t look like he’s had to start a file for responses, Barney thought. It’d probably be easier to get an audience with the Pope.
    As he straightened up, he scanned the room with his flashlight, and started to walk toward the machines. Before Barney knew what was happening, he tripped over a cardboard box and fell to the floor, his flashlight cracking in the