Denial of Service Episode 1
Page 5
At that moment, two hands reached out and turned my head around. Gail was at the other end of those hands, and she smiled at me. “You are brilliant,” she said, and kissed me in such a way as to make me believe it. Or at least, to make me believe she believed it.
She stopped kissing me, and immediately afterward, her lips still sweet on my tongue, something cold and hard clunked against the back of my head. I turned the other way, to see Pete hovering over me, a strange light in his eye, and a cold one in his hand. “Have a beer, bro.”
Being grateful that he hadn’t just given me a concussion, I took it.
14: The Future Looks Bright
I was still amazed by the popularity of Fritz’s sci-fi masterpiece. Two days after he had posted it online, he had made four grand! Enough to pay off the loan sharks, though we all had doubts he’d need to, now.
I’d asked him what story could be so compelling to his audience. He told me it was a modern treatment on an old story called “Metropolis.” I vaguely remembered a movie called that… I thought Adam Ant was in it… and everyone knows Superman lives there, but that was my extent of knowledge, which I was dumb enough to reveal to Fritz. He then tried to explain to me how the original story was heavily metaphorical, overlaid with superficial imagery and tellingly provincial in its worldview, and how he had found a modern and realistic way to present the same themes with modern elements and realistic memes… but I’d lost him by the second beer. And before the end of the third, Gail was pulling me out of my chair, and into the guestroom while Fritz tried to explain Germanic Proto-expressionist literature to Pete.
No question who was in the better situation at that moment.
Somewhere in the evening, as night finally began to fall, we came up for air, and lay panting giddily on the floor, sitting with our backs to the bed (don’t ask… we might actually tell you). The whole “sweat drying and cooling on the silken sheets” thing can be nice, but at that moment, neither of us had the energy to crawl back up there, so we decided it would have to dry and cool out on the carpet.
While I sat there, I reflected on the chain of events that had driven me here, and especially, the one link that had set it all off. Not for the first time, I thought about the fact that being blackballed out of Baltimore wouldn’t exactly look stellar on my resume. I really needed to figure out what had happened, and find a way to correct it, or at least to document my lack of fault, if I ever hoped to work in a serious web job again.
On the other hand, I supposed there was something to be said for less-than-serious jobs, as the cash Gail had handed me for my services to Fritz had demonstrated. It had been good money, especially since I had a free place to stay (I knew a few guys in Baltimore, in the moving business, that I could pay to pack up and ship my stuff at a moment’s notice)… if I decided to stay, that is.
In the dining room, we could still hear Fritz and Pete talking, and judging by the sound of both voices, I guessed they had moved on beyond proto-expressionism to subjects they both had in common (like girls, beer, beaches, beer with girls on beaches, etc .). Gail could hear the conversation too, and I think the most important corollary of that was that if we could hear them out there, they certainly could have heard us in here.
I looked at Gail at that moment, and I think she could tell what I was thinking, and why it was important. She leaned into me significantly, and said, “It would be great if you stayed here. Think of all the good things you could do.”
“For who?” I asked.
“Whom,” she said.
“Don’t change the subject. Do you want me here for you, or for the overall welfare of San Diego?”
“Well, for me, of course,” she said without hesitation. “And if you can help out the rest of the citizens of this great city, that would be nice, too.”
“And what about Pete? How am I helping him?”
Gail shrugged, and looked at me. “Your brother is a good man, Mike. But he isn’t very responsible. I think your staying here would be a good example for him, to help ground him a bit.”
“Ground him,” I repeated. “And is that why you left him—and are now sleeping with his brother under his very nose—to help ground him?”
“May I remind you,” Gail said, “that you’re new to this relationship—” She blinked, and caught herself. “—this former relationship. Pete and I are history, and we are both fine with that. And in the meantime, you have someone who wants you madly. How could you possibly have a problem with that?”
One thing I know, as a web guy, as a businessperson, and as a human being: You don’t just tell someone they’re lying to your face, unless there is nothing they have that you want. So I didn’t answer her question. Instead, I stood up and headed for the guest bathroom, saying, “I’m ready for a drink.”
Gail continued to sit there, staring at the closed curtains on the wall, and said, barely loud enough for me to hear: “Aren’t we all?”
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Table of Contents
1: Good Morning
2: State of Denial
3: Cross-Country
4: Pete and the Ex
5: Blind and Confused
6: To Do
7: The E-book Author
8: Planning
9: Preparation
10: Distracting with Porn
11: Gail’s Place
12: Publication Day
13: DOS Revenge
14: The Future Looks Bright