Mezzanine/Penthouse Prize

…The corrugations on his brow had anyway eroded quite markedly since the entrenchment of the mezzanine/penthouse prize selections regime. The thousand yard stare had softened to a benign professorial hyperopia, and the dark beard had grown out and seemed now a little shinier and silkier and not so bristly as before. Withal, the White Willy kept yet the habit of insinuating, nay, of thrusting itself into spaces in which it…

…of the crowd, and there was in foro publico unveiled – literally, figuratively and metaphorically – the newest mezzanine/penthouse prize candidate, this person being bestowed with the honour in question by virtue of adopting the number 12 in our system. This was Strapon my accountant, as of course I well knew, having myself devised the numbering system and the algorithm for mezzanine/penthouse prize selection, as well as having presided over…

…subordination as Herod’s creature to that wretch’s Operational satrapy, yet was operating quite outside the parameters of the mezzanine/penthouse prize algorithm agreed between management and myself as the representative of the human guinea pigs. This blackleg scab rushed to do the bidding of his fatcat capitalist bosses rolling in cash, and thought nothing of running roughshod over the legitimately democratic and democratically legitimate aspirations of the ordinary rank-&-file gym-going members…

…papist fuckery was a primitive and atavistic auto da fé, taking the form of an acceleration of the mezzanine/penthouse prize selection process. It was determined that on this holy occasion no less than three penitenti were to be subjected simultaneously to the ministrations of the microbe hunters.

…of the surviving Spartacists; these latter being loth to suffer the torments undergone by their predecessors in the mezzanine/penthouse prize assizes, and also vexed at their having been sent to Coventry by the management of Pex ‘n’ Quads. The samizdat media, those fell bruiters of idle innuendo, noised abroad that Emanuel Künt had constructed a wax effigy of the White Willy, and that this sorcerer had seduced certain of the…

…it began to seem more and more likely that I would escape in the final reckoning of the mezzanine/penthouse prize process. For these reasons, the black cloud which had been hovering over me gradually yielded to a guarded optimism.

…The change in the weather, and the concomitant thinning in the crowd who danced attendance on the mezzanine/penthouse prize process, appeared to have wrought a peculiar change in the mood of our ringmaster Herod, who seemed to become more impatient. Comme une enceinte s’approchant à l’heure de son accouchement – que d’une ironie. Sooth, he might almost have heeded the Parthian auguries flung by that lurking Cassandra Aeromonas Annie, for…