The Rabbit and The Hound

 

I don't have much of a story, but I was left with this one image from my nighttime dreamworld escapades. The rabbit, played by Manny Salazar, an ex-employee of YC Honda, was an embezzler extraordinaire. Bugs Bunny-like, he made a sport out of outwitting the owner, the befuddled but relentless hound, played by John Hitzler, owner of Hondo Die Supply, a place I worked in LA in the '80s.

John Hitzler (yes, we all referred to him as Hitler behind his back) was the archetypal slumlord absentee owner, showing up to work just long enough to check his books to see how much money he could re-route to his personal expense account. All of the needs of the company and its employees he overlooked while making certain that his sports car was freshly detailed and his country club dues were paid in full. He wasn't well liked, and most of his employees had worked out their own methods of extracting personal benefits from the company to compensate for their stagnant wages. 

Whether it was using the company vehicle as a moving truck, as I did to make two moves (one of them over 500 miles), or using his private office with bathroom and shower as a temporary residence (as I also did during my last two weeks of employment there), the company proved to be a fruitful tree of embezzlement opportunities. One worker, Kay Doering, even entrepreneured her own private collection agency, soliciting cash payments (which she would pocket) from some of the delinquent accounts in exchange for a reduction of the bill. 

In my dream, Manny was going to quit his job but wanted to retain access to the free motor oil that was a fringe benefit of working in the shop. He went about this by drilling an access port into side of the bulk oil tank, which was conveniently located off-site, in a residential neighborhood. He could then drive up anytime and siphon off as much oil as he needed, bypassing the regular locked and metered pumps used in the shop.

"But Manny," I asked him, "Won't this throw off their inventory?"

"Sure," he said, "But he'll never see my access port, so he'll never know how the oil went missing."

It was true. His drilling was camouflaged with a professionally installed valve which he'd painted to look like part of the original equipment. Certainly, no one with John Hitzler's level of involvement in company affairs would be able to detect or identify the inconspicuous device. 

"I don't know, Manny," I told him, still unsure. "He said just the other day that he was closing in on the embezzlers. He said he was 'circling the wagon' and that it was just a matter of time until he would catch them."

Manny laughed at this remark. "They aren't closing in on shit. There aren't any wagons, and he's just going around in circles. That fool will never catch me."

I knew this was true. Manny had always been too good at covering his tracks. He had always been two steps ahead of any of Hitzler's crackdowns or investigations in the past, and this would be no different. Elmer Fudd would be left scratching his head, while Bugs Bunny casually munched a carrot from his prized garden with impunity. As determined as the hound was, he was outmatched by the stealth and speed of the rabbit.

That's all I've got. As you can see, I'm really reaching to make this little dream snippet into more of a story than it really is. The real characters are far more fleshed out and dynamic than those in my dream were, so I'm borrowing from them liberally.