Dilbert On Ice

When Scott Adams was in his cubicle sketching the first drafts of the creature eventually known as Dilbert, amid the sundry discomforts of downsizing, restructuring, and repositioning, there was one perfect fix in which he neglected to ink his very squarest of pegs - a cell. Then again the intrepid illustrator probably never imagined that any of his fellow Pac Bell cube rats would be shackled to anything other than their own insecurity.

Adams obviously was unfamiliar with Jimmy Lerner - one aisle over, three stations down - the Dilbert with the killer inside him.

You Got Nothing ComingIn You Got Nothing Coming (Broadway, $24.95), family man and worker bee Lerner slips (there goes the family), slips again (there goes the job), then falls (bam!) hard and head first into a Nevada state pen, presciently chronicling what we all now well know: the road from telecom to con is not as circuitous as it once seemed.

Funnily enough, the fall is all the more comic for its angle of descent. Surpassing Adam's strip syndicate "ha ha," Lerner takes an almost-blue stand-up timing and a Shakespearean cliff note sense of tragedy, peppers both with a litany of corporate "betterment" programs, and comes up with a fish in hot water story scalding - and tragicomic - enough to illicit a barrel of laughs.

Smartly, Lerner knows those laughs are on him, and from the relative safety of his county suicide cell to the immense vulnerability of the Big House yard, our occasionally flappable, laughable hero manages to keep a stiff upper smirk. It's a smile he frequently almost has wiped off his face - permanently. But backed up by a little blindside ingenuity, a whole lotta luck and the expert guidance of - irony of ironies - a Nazi Low Rider (sic) named Kansas, this nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn makes it past numerous "heart checks" (the ritual of testing an inmate's mettle) with, well, heart in check.

And, thankfully, pen in hand, hooked up by a scab-topped skell, driven by a merciless Scud, and hounded by a D.I.R.T. bag Sgt. Stanger, through and around Surenos, Nortenas, Crips, and peckerwoods, and ever under the watchful girth of Kansas, Lerner carefully concocts a sinister send-up of very dire consequences. More, in the process he even finds his inner thug. Now that's funny.

But as humorous and harrowing as the prison stint sequences are, they seem - to this con anyway - far less ominous than the corporate pin cushion he left behind. Nor does being on ice quite equal the chill brought about by the events leading up to the murder of the man deemed "the Monster." Here - wisely - Lerner doesn't seek comic relief (though he does admirably sometimes submit to self-pity), instead writing an increasingly disturbing tale of being backed into a cold black and blue corner from which there's but one way out.

It's a Helluva price to pay - a body for a book. But from Lerner's account if anyone had anything coming it was the Monster. Despite odds to the contrary, Lerner gets his too. For not only did he do (much of) the time for his crime (that's something), in the end he took in title the mantra most uttered by con and keeper and made of it a rallying cry for his own redemption (that's really something). Put that in your self-help crackpot.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

 

 

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