The Maltese Futon

Driving along this evening, I passed a store that, on the quickest glance, was called "Raymond Chandler Furniture."

This set off the whole set of thoughts that only come when driving, like what would it be like to work there? I imagine a store populated with down-on-their-luck salesmen with names like Mickey and Jack, who could make a sale but always wound up paying for it. They'd be grim, straight talkers, with an angled hats and suits that hadn't been crisp since they'd had their first drink twenty years before. Real hard luck cases. Masters of the hard sell because they'd seen it from both ends.

It seems like the sort of store you could go into and say "I want a table with legs so long, you'd have to have two dinners to give them the full once over."

Oh, sure, you'd have to get a little roughed up to get your purchase home with you, and there'd be customers wandering through who looked like they'd seen the business end of the hard-luck stick. But it'd be worth it just to sit on a couch so comfortable you'd tell it your secrets and say thanks when it stole your remote.

The only problem was I don't know if I need furniture.