No Opinion : The Short Tale of Dedrick Dolotta

Dedrick  gets on the train, sits down with  his legs crossed, with his knee hovering over the seat beside in such a way that he knew the average commuter would walk past, in search of a seat by the dreamed of skinny, polite person, with no scent what-so-ever.  He was reading the Red Eye, a free paper in Chicago that sits in boxes outside of every train station, on city corners of any traffic at all.  A teaser of words with the headlines from the Tribune, but enough words for a lot of commutes.  Not his.  He skipped the sports and gossip and anything that might be boring, finishing the few stories left during the first three of the fifteen train stations he would pass on his way to work.

He collects bills.  Bill Collector.  He likes having that title on his business card.  No euphemisms for him.  There is nothing, ever, in the paper about bill collecting.  He half-assedly folds up the paper, shoves it down in a crack between the seat and the quivering wall of the train.  "Opinion."  He says the word out loud, knowing the people around him hear his words, and feeling like someone had to say it.  He was nothing if not brutally, excruciatingly, honest.   He told people the reason he had been divorced three times was because he refused to lie to the women.  "They looked like shit some day, I pointed it out.  Do better.  What the hell is wrong with telling someone to do better?   My boss rides the entire office all day about doing better -- put up new motivational posters every month, sent from a corporate supply house in New York, with phrases meant to, bottom line, make them make more money.

"What did you say?"

He turns and looks at the voice.  A pleasant enough looking guy, who thought he was talking to him when he said 'opinion.'   "I was saying the papers are just full of opinions.  No one knows for sure what is going on in the world, and if they do, it is probably not in this paper."

"Oh.  Cool."   The guy looks back down into his book.

He looks out the window and wonders if it was his opinion, or her opinion, who was correct?  His latest fling, Amanda, lived in the same apartment complex, just  someone else who was lonely, and who lived close enough for an easy intimacy to sneak up on them over the course of the last few months.  He was sick of her opinions.  He wondered if someone could have no opinions?   Just answer the rest of the questions in his life with just one phrase, "I have no opinion."

He imagines a wandering monk surprising people as he treks across the country with a sign reading, "I have no opinion."  

Opinions were dangerous, like his boss said.  He had to get money from people who did not want to give it to him, who had that money laid out for something altogether different than paying some guy for an old health club membership loan from five years ago.  If he started listening to why they needed the money, they would suck him into a 'toxic' conversation.  Toxic as in unproductive.  Can't let the customers make you unproductive, no matter how they will try to get you to listen to some story that has nothing to do with giving him a credit card number or a check by phone right then, that night. 

'My boss is now a voice in my head.  I think his words like my own thoughts.  As if he were a prophet and I am his disciple'  
The thought surprises him.  He wonders if he should write that down, maybe send it to the motivational poster company?