by Steve Jordan
“Yeah… capitalism sucks,” I said. “And what are you gonna do at the end of the year? Are you even working?”
“Hey, one thing at a time,” Pete said. “First, we have to fix you up! Some time spent in town will be just the thing. You have baggies?”
“Huh?”
“You know, a swimsuit! And none of those speedo things, it just sets off the girls. In a bad way, I mean.”
“Uh, no,” I said. “I didn’t think to pack any…”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Pete said, “we can get you fixed up…”
He was interrupted by a ring from the doorbell. Pete crossed the balcony, the dining room, the living room and the foyer, and opened the door. From the balcony, I watched as the opening door revealed a woman, just a head shorter than Pete, wearing a flowery minidress and high-heeled sandals that showed off her kickin’ body and incredible legs. Her hair was long and brown, and hung on her bare shoulders in attractive ropes. She smiled at Pete from behind oversized sunglasses.
“I thought that was your car outside. Sorry to bring you the bad news, babe… but I’ve come for the Cuisinart.”
Pete returned her smile and, as jovially as you can imagine, said: “You little b***h. Come on in.”
This was Gail.
Pete’s ex-wife sauntered into the apartment and turned towards the kitchen, apparently not seeing that Pete had company. Pete followed her, looking to the balcony and waving me to follow him. As he walked, he was saying, “Are you at least gonna leave me the steak knives, babe? And maybe a whisk?”
“Not sure I can trust you with steak knives,” I heard Gail say from around the corner. I finally reached the kitchen, where I found Pete watching as Gail was knelt down in front of a cabinet, her upper body completely hidden inside the space.
“Wow,” I said, “those cabinets must be deep.”
“You kidding?” Pete said. “I could hide her in one, and no one would find her for days.”
I’d seen Gail stiffen when she heard my voice, realizing it wasn’t Pete’s. As Pete had cracked about stuffing her inside the cabinet, she had eased herself out, her arms wrapped around a blender that God himself must have made on the eighth day, and stood slowly up. She tilted her head down, so she could see me over her sunglasses, and after a moment, she smiled and put the blender on the counter.
“Well, hello, Mike! Long time, no see!” She came over to me and gave me a big hug, which surprised me a bit. I looked over at Pete, but he didn’t seem to be at all disturbed by his little brother getting a hug from his sexy ex-wife.
“Uh, yeah, you too, Gail,” I said finally, when she let me go. “I didn’t expect to see you, since Pete said—”
Before I finished, Gail turned to Pete and said, “You better not have told your brother I died, like you did that car salesman, or so help me—”
“Not me,” Pete said, throwing his hands up in surrender. “I only told the salesman that because I knew he wanted to hit on you, and I was trying to spare you the grief!”
“He might have been nice, you know,” she said.
“Girl, he sold used Corollas,” Pete asserted.
Gail paused, then shrugged with her eyebrows. “Point taken.”
“So,” I said when I finally had the chance to speak again, “I guess you two aren’t exactly beating each other up over this divorce thing.”
Pete shrugged. “Naw, not really. It was more of a professional disagreement than anything else.”
Gail nodded. “Specifically, he didn’t like that I had a profession.”
“That’s not true!” Pete said quickly. “I just wanted to travel some, that’s all.”
“Some,” Gail repeated, then looked at me. “Like, for a year, on a boat… that he wanted me to buy! When I told him I couldn’t leave my job here, much less would I buy him the boat he wanted, he turned into a whining a-hole for a solid year, and I finally said, ‘enough is enough’.”
I stared at my big brother, trying to imagine a year of his whining. Actually, it wasn’t hard. “And you drove her out over that? What kind of a moron are you?”
Pete shrugged. “The free spirit kind of moron,” he said. “Anyway, we’re still friends and all. But this way, if I get the travelin’ bug, I just go.”
“So why haven’t you gone anywhere?” I asked.
Pete grinned sheepishly. “Well, right now, I’m a little low on travelin’ funds, so I’m—”
“Looking for work again,” Gail finished for him, giving him a wry smile.
“Hey, that computer store gig was the pits,” Pete said. “The employee discounts are crap at BuyMore!”
Gail shook her head sadly, then turned to me. “Well, hopefully, with the more level-headed brother around, you’ll be able to get your sibling back together again.”
I frowned. “Then again, maybe not.”
Gail immediately saw the tension in my face, and the playful banter fell away. “Is something wrong? What happened?”
“Well,” I explained slowly, “I got thrown out of my job and blackballed in Baltimore.”
“Which isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds,” Pete put in. “Or… sounds worse than it is… or something…”
“I’m between jobs now, too,” I went on, ignoring Pete.
“Weren’t you doing web design?” Gail asked. “How do you get blackballed out of that?”
“Influential clients who like to blame others because it’s easy,” I said. “One of them had a DOS attack, and decided it must have been my fault.”
Gail had hung out around computer geeks like me and my brother long enough to know exactly what I was talking about. “What kind of moron blames a web guy for a denial of service attack?”
“The powerful enough to get people blackballed kind of moron,” I replied sadly.
“That really sucks,” Gail said, and Pete nodded sympathetically. After another moment, she put a hand on my shoulder. “Well, don’t fret. You’re a smart guy. You can do web design anywhere, you certainly don’t need to stay in Baltimore for that. You’ll get a new job going.”
Then she took her hand away, and turned back to the uber-blender. “Look, guys, I gotta go. You two take care of each other, don’t do too much crying on each other’s shoulders, and I’ll catch you later.” She wrapped her arms around the blender and cradled it against her chest, and started out of the kitchen. Before she passed, she stopped and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Chin up, smart guy.” Then she left the kitchen.
As she passed Pete, he called out, “No kiss for me?”
“No, but you can bite me,” she shot back amiably.
“Just let me know where and when,” Pete grinned as she walked out the door, using a shapely leg to pull the door closed behind her. Pete continued to grin at the door, until he turned my way and saw the incredulous look on my face. “Oh, shut up. C’mon, we have to get you some baggies.”
5: Blind and Confused
“Are you still here, man?” Pete asked as he approached me.
“Hey, you brought me out here to San Diego,” I said.
“No, I mean: Are you still sitting on your butt on the beach, instead of up and chatting up some of these babes walking five-deep around you?”
I looked around. As my brother had alluded to, there were a lot of pretty girls on the beach around me. I had a great view of them, too, as I had been sitting in a lounge chair all morning as they had been going by.
But, in truth, I’d barely noticed them. I couldn’t get my mind off of my work situation, trying to figure out if I could have actually done anything to piss someone off at me specifically (pretty sure I didn’t), or if I could have done something that would’ve let me keep my job (couldn’t think of anything). I’d checked my messages numerous times on my cellphone, but my e-mail and phone mailbox were still empty… and it had been four days now.
Pete, to his credit, took one look at me and knew exactly where my mind had been. “Look, bro,” he said, sitting down in the lawn cha
ir next to mine, “if you’re gonna get back into the game, you have to clear your head… and moping about the past isn’t gonna help. You’ve got to get some R&R, you know… rest and redheads! And brunettes… and blondes…” he continued to muse, only partially distracted by the sexy hardbodies walking around him. “Listen, I know a girl who’s staying with a few friends in a timeshare off of Orange for the rest of the month. We should go by and see if they’re up to a bit of jet-skiing, and then maybe we can bring them back to our place, and you can get your mind off of things. Oh, for God’s sake… haven’t you even touched your mojito?”
I looked at the glass by my chair, sitting on the sand. “Man, it’s not even eleven.”
“Which is important because..?” Pete waved a hand to dismiss the notion. “Bro, you are on vacation from work. Loosen up and relax!”
“You know,” I said, trying to derail the subject a bit, “I can’t believe you can’t find work anywhere. I’ve seen your troubleshooting skills, you can find your way around a bad server or through a network with the best of ‘em. I mean, what happened to your BuyMore Nerd-Herd job?”
“Boring!” Pete sing-songed. “Man, they’d send me out to some grandmom’s place where I’d have to listen to them crying that three mouse buttons were too confusing for them! Or I’d be there in the shop, stuck in the cage in back, loading crappy software onto PCs that were barely powerful enough to run Word on! I just couldn’t take it! So, when Gail and I broke up, I decided to cut the ties and live a little!”
“In other words, you took the settlement money you got from Gail, and just quit to live off of that.”
“Didn’t I say that?” Pete said, smiling.
“Why’d she even give you a settlement?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not like you can’t work.”
Pete paused a moment before answering. “It’s, ah, complicated,” he said finally. “I encouraged Gail to give me a financial settlement, so I wouldn’t be tempted to sell a few things here and there in order to make ends meet.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well, mostly a few electronic… documents and files. Stuff of a nature that could lead to personal embarrassment if it was found out in the wild…”
“Oh my God,” I goggled at him. “What did you do, make sex videos? You lecherous little monkey! You blackmailed her with your own sex tapes!”
“Hey, she liked ‘em, too!” Pete defended himself. “And she never told me I had to delete them! But she wanted to make sure I wasn’t tempted to out them for beer money.” I looked at him… but partially because, in the back of my mind, I could picture my good-looking brother, and that smokin’ hot Gail, going at it in front of the camera… yeah, I’d bet that tape would be worth a few bucks. “It was her choice… I didn’t twist her arm!”
“Man, you are a piece of work,” I said, finally reaching for the mojito and a respite from this nightmare. But before the glass reached my lips, it was plucked from my hand. I looked up, to see Gail standing there, holding my drink. She stood barefoot in the sand, wearing a mini-skirted business suit, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, and her high heels in her free hand… I swear, with her body, she had the kind of look that could drive East Coast businessmen to abandon wives and drain bank accounts, though I supposed that around here, no one would even notice it. Much. And after just talking, and thinking, about her in a sex video… well, let’s just say it was just a good thing my baggies were… baggy.
“No time for booze, Schitz-boys,” she said to me, “I’ve got something for you to do.”
6: To Do
San Diego is a small town, relatively speaking… so it didn’t take long to get back to Pete’s apartment, change into some street clothes (which, around here, apparently means putting underwear on under your baggies, and optionally adding a shirt), climb into Gail’s sleek white Eclipse, and head back to the “mainland” and into the hills. The ride was better for me than for Pete, who crammed himself into the Eclipse’s tiny back seats, but Gail had explained to him that he didn’t have to go, so his discomfort was pretty much on him.
On the way, Gail explained what was going on. “My friend Fritz is a writer. He was having trouble selling his last book, so he decided to sell it as an e-book.”
“You mean on that Kindle thing?” I’d seen a few of them on the subway once or twice, and I knew the newspapers were making a big deal about them, but I really didn’t know much about the things.
“Not all e-books are for Kindles,” Gail explained. “I, myself, like to read them on my Blackberry.”
“You read books on a Crackberry?” Pete said from the back seat, and snorted. “Told you she was nuts.”
Gail threw an exasperated glance at the back seat, then continued. “Anyway… Fritz is pretty sure he can make decent sales… but he just found out he needs to do better than that.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Apparently,” Gail explained, “he was having some money problems thanks to the last book’s not doing so well, and he was hosed by his publisher. Practically no payout at all. So he had to re-mortgage his place, and the guys he went with have turned out to be on the shady side. They’re trying to force him out if he doesn’t come up with his next payment by the end of the month. So he needs to get these books sold, pronto.”
“What’s the book about?”
“It’s science fiction—”
“Oh, Christ.” Gail looked at me with wondering eyes for a moment, before she had to look back at the road. Even I knew that sci-fi fanboys were the cheapest sentient beings on the planet. Trying to make money selling anything to them was a lot like trying to extract your molars through the pores in your thigh. And with an e-book? Any web guy knows the average person believes electronic files are essentially worthless, since you can’t just hold one in your hand. It was that kind of provincial thinking that often made my profession harder than it needed to be, while we wasted time explaining to them why information had value beyond its container.
It’s the reason why e-books have made virtually zero progress in twenty years (although I don’t know much about the Kindle itself, I know plenty about e-books), at least until Amazon started selling their Kindle thing, and suddenly people had something concrete to associate their books with. In a way, they were probably setting the e-book industry back another decade by doing that, but what did Amazon care? As long as they made their money, they’d sell the books letter by letter if they thought they could get away with it…
But this guy apparently wasn’t selling through Amazon, which meant he had to negotiate the world of competing formats, confusing e-book sites, self-promotion and secure storefront madness that kept even people I knew out of the self-publishing biz.
“Listen,” Gail went on, finally deciding not to wait until I responded from my internal monologue, “Fritz is a good guy. And I know you, Mike… you’re great with this stuff. I want you to help him out. I’ll pay you for your time.”
“You? Why should you do this?”
“I told you, Fritz is a good guy. He’s dating a friend of mine, and I’d like to see them hit it off… but he can’t do that if he’s homeless. Besides, if it works out, he can always pay me back.”
“I don’t know what I can do for him,” I started to say.
Gail interrupted me by saying, “I’ll pay you a thousand bucks if you can help him.”
“But I’ll think of something,” I finished.
We pulled up to a house in a modest neighborhood… mostly one-story adobe-covered bungalos, in every bright color you can imagine. Gail and I got out, and didn’t bother to wait for Pete to unfold himself from the back seat as we approached the front door. Before we reached the door, however, I heard a rapid patter that my well-honed city-sense identified immediately: A dog approaching at ramming speed.
I threw my head about in every direction, trying to find the source of the sound, when I saw it: Just coming around the side of the house, was a medium-sized all-white husky-or-something,
and he had already locked his sights on Gail. Before I could react, grab Gail or step in front of her, the dog had left the ground with a single bark, and was arcing through the air directly at Gail’s head.
7: The E-book Author
Gail had seen the dog coming, too. Without hesitation, she pivoted on a heel, leaned back, threw her arms out and caught the dog on the fly around its midsection. The momentum caused her and the dog to spin completely about on her planted foot, and when she stopped spinning, she was laughing, and the dog was happily licking her face like she was made of milk-bones. “Hi, Frosty! How’s my good boy? You’re such a good watchdog, yes you are!”
After a few more seconds of this, Gail put the dog down, pausing a moment to brush the dirt off of her suit, while the dog came over to me. He got up on his hind legs and leaned into me, sniffing at my chest (because that was as high as he could reach) and giving me one of those looks that tells you, if you were a foot shorter, you’d be getting the milk-bone treatment, too. Apparently having bestowed the Good Frosty Seal of Approval on me, he then dismounted and headed for the front door, waiting for me and Gail to meet him there. He barked twice at the door while he waited, and by the time we got to the landing, the door opened.
Inside was a tall, lanky guy with stylishly-tousled black hair, wearing shorts and a T-shirt with the Jeff Wayne War of the Worlds album cover art on it. He looked like that “Deiter” guy from the Volkswagon commercials. He saw Gail, and opened the screen, allowing her to step in (after Frosty), and giving her a fraternal hug and a kiss.
Then he looked up at me and Pete. “So, these are the guys?”
Gail, in response, nodded at me. “He’s the guy.”
He looked at Pete next. “Isn’t that your ex?”
Gail shrugged. “Yeah, but he might be useful anyway.”
Pete narrowed his eyes at her. “After that, I’d wait in the car, but I’m afraid I’ll be caught in it if it shrinks in the rain.”
