Chapter 1: In the Beginning There Was Humple

10:19 pm Tuesday, in Apartment 307D in Bremerton, Washington. Leonard K. Humple sleeps peacefully on his recliner, extender foot rest erect and sagging from the weight of his massive calves. The big toe of his left foot pokes out of the yellow banded tube sock, the sock, however, does not match the navy blue banded sock on the other foot. Regardless of band color, they both smell like mildewed boot leather. His white fake leather Velcro shoes sit in disarray at the foot of the recliner. His belly spills out of his unbuttoned, pleated knock off Dockers slacks.
The muted television flickers images of Ron Popeil’s infomercial for his famous Ronco Showtime Rotisserie Grill.

“Not one, not two, not three but four easy payments of thirty-four ninety-nine.” He mouths over the screen into the yellow light of the room. Leonard farts and shifts in his recliner.
“That’s right folks, all you have to do is SET IT AND FORGET IT.” Ron says with a silent plastic smile. Sadly, that is what life has done to Leonard, set him and forgotten him, turning him in the hot steamy rotisserie of the Puget Sound lower class of life.

Tonight is like every other work night. He falls asleep with his tinted industrial bifocals snuggly resting on his pudgy Santa Clause nose. After his nightly delicacy of TV dinners, or frozen burritos, or ham and cheese flavored Pizza Pockets and one liter of Mountain Dew, he likes to sit down and read the paper, again, and always falls asleep watching Star Trek reruns. He has a bed, but rarely sleeps in it because he has been falling asleep in that recliner his whole life. When, at the age of nine, he became to overweight for his mother to carry him to bed and simply stopped sleeping there. With the sounds of cars passing by on Highway 16 and Pop Tart crumbs in his blonde and gray mustache he sleeps through the night.

Leonard gets up around 6:30 am every morning. He hardly showers at this time of day. That uncomfortable ritual is usually reserved for Sunday evenings or weeknights in the summer when even he can’t stand his own sour smell. Some mornings he changes his socks, or at least one of them. Other mornings he changes his white Stafford orange and green striped tighty whitey underwear, especially if he had a small accident that day. He has three pairs of pants that he rotates depending on the amount of stains they obtain. He always struggles over his gut while sitting on his high twin sized bed to put his HiTek bargain store hiking boots. He ties them with a single knot. If he overslept, or snoozed the alarm to many times, he might even skip brushing his teeth. Leonard chews Wintergreen Grizzly Chew anyways, an acceptable breath freshener in his mind.

He also has five shirts on constant rotation. He wears the Friday shirt through the weekend. The Friday shirt is yellow and has the most ketchup stains out of all the other colors because Friday nights he stops at Dairy Queen on his way home from work. He likes to watch the pretty high school girls dance and giggle while they wait for their Blizzards and milkshakes. He appreciates their simple happiness and is not perverse in his internal affections for them. He is still a virgin at the age of forty-three and has never even kissed a girl, the prospect of intimacy is so lost on Leonard that sexual thoughts rarely enter his mind at all. The royal condiment stains on his shirt never see the light of day either because his work coat is always buttoned to the second to last snap.