by Neil Plakcy
“Awesome!” Julian said, and he let go of my hand so we could shake on the deal. There was an electricity between us as we shook, but I forced myself to ignore it, and the way my hand tingled once he had released it.
I took a deep breath. “I’m going to need to copy all the stuff you have on your laptop and import it into my development environment. That’s going to take some time. You need the laptop, or can I get it back to you over the weekend?”
“Everything I have is here, so I can’t give it up for too long. Can you copy it now?”
“If you don’t mind hanging around for an hour or so,” I said.
He nodded. “I can do that. We can look over the contract together while we wait.”
He e-mailed me the contract and I got an empty jump drive from my bedroom. I plugged it into Julian’s laptop and began the copy process.
“Can I have a glass of water?” Julian asked.
“Sure. There’s a tap in the door of the fridge. Can you get me one too?”
While he was in the kitchen, I printed the contract. It looked pretty generous to me, with a competitive hourly rate and a chance to earn equity in the company as well.
“What’s Grupo Argento?” I asked when he came back. “That your company?”
“That’s my dad’s business. Like I told you, he and my uncles lent me some cash.”
“Mexican?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, I was born in Mexico City, but I went to school here in the States.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “There are a lot of Mexicans in Homestead. I had a bunch of Mexican friends when I was a kid, but then, you know, they moved on with the harvests.”
“I see why you and I hit it off so well,” Julian said. “I’m glad we could meet tonight. I have a feeling we’re going to make a terrific team.”
That’s when it hit me, and my dick finally wilted. I’d been foolish to think that anyone as handsome and sexy as Julian Argento would be interested in me for anything more than my keyboard cred.
4 – Working the Weekend
I slept restlessly and woke up around eight on Saturday morning. When I walked into the kitchen, Manny was already there, sitting at the table sipping his café con leche and reading the newspaper.
He looked up. “So, you and the Silicon Valley guy?”
“Just business,” I said as I opened the refrigerator in search of orange juice. “I’m going to do some programming for him.”
“That’s not a euphemism, then?”
“No, it’s not.” I poured myself a glass of juice and slotted two pastries in the toaster. “Not for lack of trying. I kind of made a fool of myself.” I told him what had happened.
“Ay, Dios mío,” Manny said. “We’ve got to work on your conversational skills, mi hijo.”
After breakfast I had to install and configure the development environment on my laptop, because in the past I’d always used resources at school for development. Fortunately I still had access to the SQL server at FU, using my alumni e-mail address and password.
It took a couple of hours to get everything configured, and then to read through the code the guy before me had written, and understand what each routine and subroutine did.
When Gavin came home from his shift at Java Joe’s, he joined me at the dining room table. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I agreed to do some programming for Julian Argento.”
“He’s muy caliente,” Gavin said.
“Yeah, well, this is all business. He can be caliente or frio; it’s all the same to me.”
“As long as he’s got money behind him, right?” Gavin leaned back in his chair.
“He says he does. But he’s Mexican.”
“Mexicans can be rich too,” Gavin said.
“Not where I come from,” I said. “In Homestead, if you’re Mexican, you work in the fields, and you move around following the harvests. I figured that’s what his parents did, because he said he went to school in the States.”
Gavin laughed. “Julian Argento went to Phillips Exeter,” he said. “This fancy prep school in New Hampshire. And then to Stanford. He stayed there for his MBA.”
I looked up at him. “Really?”
“Really. You never heard of Grupo Argento?”
“He said that’s his father’s company, but I didn’t ask what kind of company it was.”
“They distribute cell phones throughout Central and South America,” Gavin said. “Worth beaucoup bucks. How else do you think a young guy like Julian can dress the way he does and have the cash to start up a business from scratch?”
“I never thought about it,” I said.
“He’s paying you, right?” Gavin asked. “No cock-for-code deal?”
“He’s paying me. Really well too.”
“Good for you,” Gavin said, standing up. “Think with the big head, not the little one.”
He walked out, and I looked across the table at the view of the bay. So Julian Argento was rich, not the son of some migrant worker. I’d made a fool of myself yet again, comparing him to the kids I’d grown up with, and I’d let myself believe in stereotypes too. How many more stupid mistakes would I make before I finished his project?
I sighed. Probably a lot. I went back to the code, trying to figure out what else had to be done to create this marketplace Julian had envisioned. I kept taking notes and writing out schedules. Several big routines hadn’t been started yet, and I wondered if I could subcontract those to someone. I e-mailed some classmates from the FU computer-science program and also went online looking for coders.
As I got into the specifics of the project, I realized that Julian was paying me less than I should have asked for, especially now that I knew his father was rich. Well, Julian was the business guy, after all, so he knew how to cut a deal. I was the hired help.
Throughout the afternoon, I heard back from my friends. None of them were available to do the subroutines I needed. I began to write up documentation for the first routine I needed, the one that would split the royalties between the contributors and then display what each member of the team—the writer, translator, proofreader, and distributor—would earn.
That had to tie into the routine that connected to the bank account of each person. That routine had to be super secure, so I couldn’t contract it out, or even buy an already-produced routine, because you never knew what kind of malicious code some stranger could insert.
I started a list of questions for Julian. Some were technical, like which subroutines had to interact with one another, and some were more about the functionality of the site—which players would need access to which sections, and so on. I texted him and asked if he was free that evening to go over a few things.
I didn’t hear back from him for a while, and I worried that he might think I was either not competent enough, or that I was manufacturing reasons to meet with him. Then my phone rang around five. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner,” Julian said. “I was getting a massage, and I had my phone off.”
I was working my butt off, and Julian was getting a massage? That kind of sucked, especially as I thought about the way I’d underestimated the work.
“How about if I buy you dinner, and we go over your questions?” Julian asked. “There’s a new Italian place on Alton Road I’ve been dying to try. Maybe in an hour or so?”
I got the name of the restaurant from him and agreed to meet him. Was I misreading things, or was this a date? My dating experience was severely limited, but as far as I knew, when a guy offered to buy you dinner, it was a prelude to something else.
I showered and put on a polo shirt and a pair of jeans that hugged my ass. I looked it the mirror. I was still a skinny beanpole, but at least I was a moderately fashionable one.
Alton Road was busy with early-evening diners and moviegoers and the last tourists returning from the beach. I dodged my way around old ladies with grocery carts and hipster dudes with flat-faced bulldogs on expandable leashes.
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br /> Julian was waiting for me outside the restaurant, though I was a few minutes early, and my heart gave a little jump at how handsome he was. He hugged me hello, and my whole body tingled with the contact.
The server led us to a tiny booth at the back of the restaurant, and I had to keep my long legs hunched up to avoid banging against Julian’s. He ordered the shrimp fra diavolo. “You know what means, don’t you?” he asked.
I shook my head. I’d grown up on basic American fare—fried chicken, pot roast, fish sticks—and my palate wasn’t very adventurous.
“It means ‘brother devil,’” Julian said, with a twinkle in his eye. “Very spicy.”
“Then not for me,” I said. “I’m more a fettuccine-Alfredo kind of guy.”
“I can see I’ll have to work on you,” Julian said. “Devilish can be fun.”
His leg nudged against mine, and I resisted the impulse to pull it back. If Julian Argento wanted to flirt, then I was going to follow his lead.
The server took our order, batting his eyes at Julian, who turned on the charm. Then, over glasses of a sparkling Italian wine Julian said was called prosecco, we started to address my questions.
He was all business then, and I wondered if this was a date or not. Our food arrived, and we kept talking, primarily about the business he hoped to start. By the time he called for the check, I was thoroughly confused. What was going to happen next? Should I invite him back to my apartment? Would he ask me to his? Maybe we’d just go for a walk along the beach. That would be nice.
Instead, Julian’s phone beeped, and he said, “I wish I could spend more time with you, but I’ve got another meeting. Did I answer all your questions?”
“You did.” He’d just answered the most important one of all—that he had someone he preferred to spend Saturday night with.
I trudged home by myself, kicking myself for my naïveté. There was no reason for Julian to be interested in me. I was a geek and a scarecrow, and he was handsome and sexy.
I went back to my computer and found a site for Indian programmers who were willing to work cheap. I sent out queries to a bunch of guys listed there. I had no idea what time it was in Mumbai, or wherever they were, but I hoped to get some answers within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
My mom called around nine. “It’s not too late, is it? I never know when to call you. You have such strange hours for a working person.”
“No, it’s fine, Mom. What’s up?”
“It’s Leroy’s birthday tomorrow. It would be nice if you could come home for dinner.”
I was one of five—two boys before me, then two girls after. Leroy was my second brother, two years older. I’d completely forgotten it was his birthday. And it looked like my folks had forgotten to invite me until the last minute. But that was nothing new. “Sure, Mom. What time?”
We fixed up the details. “Angie and her parents are coming too,” Mom said. Angie was Leroy’s longtime girlfriend; they had been dating since they were about sixteen. “I think they might have an announcement to make.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said, though I meant the opposite.
As I hung up, Gavin walked in. “You want to go to JJ’s with Manny and me?”
I shook my head. “Working for Julian.”
“Come on—you might meet someone.”
“I’m going to geek out. You have fun.”
Manny came in around midnight, but I was so deep in my code that all I did was look up and wave. My brain was firing on all circuits as I worked out situations, tested them, then revised. It was so much more engaging than anything I was doing at work.
Gavin came in around two with a guy he was dating, but I kept on coding, hunched over my laptop, until the sun’s first rays glowed off the balcony. I stood up and stretched, and realized I’d been in the same position all night and my joints were stiff.
It was funny; this felt like the work I was supposed to be doing. Was that because I was better at it than I was at app development? Or because I was doing it for Julian Argento?
5 – Hometown
I crawled into bed and slept until two, when I had to head for Homestead, a few miles from the southern tip of the peninsula. It was only a mile from our house to the Florida Turnpike, and though Homestead was the gateway to the Florida Keys, it was more like a little Southern town than a vacation hot spot.
I was born in South Miami, where my dad was an electrician at a small hospital. When he got a job at Turkey Point, the nuclear power plant, we moved farther south. Hurricane Andrew had ripped through town a few years before we moved in, decimating the area, and as I was growing up, our neighborhood was peppered with ruined houses, never rebuilt—the shells of people’s hopes and dreams.
The land around us was an endlessly flat plain of farms and rodeos and migrant labor camps. I felt like some kind of foreigner dropped in there. I used to have these nightmares that my dad would come home from the power plant glowing like an alien and tell me to get ready, we were going back to our home planet.
When I got to our house, our driveway was already full, and cars lined the street two houses down. I parked where I could and trudged up to the front door. My parents never locked the door when I was growing up; there were too many of us kids, always going in and out. It was weird that it was locked, and I had to ring the doorbell.
Angie answered, which surprised me. “Hey, Larry.” She leaned up and pecked me on the cheek. “Come on in.”
Leroy and Angie had been going out since high school, and she’d been in and out of our house a thousand times. But there was something weird about her answering the door as if she lived there.
Angie had always been a bit wild—leather boots and granny dresses in high school, her hair dyed a dozen different colors, with assorted piercings and tattoos. That day, though, her hair had returned to its natural light brown, and though it was close-cut on the sides, it was a normal length on top and at the back. She had a mix of earrings and ear cuffs, including a tiny silver cross hanging from one ear. Her short-sleeved blouse showed the butterflies she had tattooed up and down her arms.
She led me into the living room as if I was a guest. Her parents were sitting there stiffly, in hard-backed chairs pulled in from the dining room, looking like those farmers in that painting with the pitchfork.
Leroy sat on the couch opposite them. Though we were close in age, we didn’t look much like brothers. His hair was thicker and darker than mine, and he had Mom’s sharp edges to his face, while my features were more rounded. “Hey, Wee-Roy, happy birthday,” I said. When I was a baby, that was the name I’d called him, and he hated it. Even more once I had my growth spurt and started to tower over him.
“Geek-o-matic,” he said. That was his pet name for me. I liked it about as much as he liked Wee-Roy, but hey, we were brothers. We were supposed to irritate each other.
“You want something to drink?” he asked, standing up. “Come on, I’ll get you a beer.”
Again, I was freaked out. It was my frigging house. I knew where the beer was.
“Thank God you got here,” Leroy muttered as we entered the kitchen. “Angie’s parents are driving me crazy.”
“Get used to it,” I said. “You’re going to marry her, aren’t you?”
“Mom told you?”
“Dude, I’ve been watching you with her for years. Mom didn’t tell me anything.” I opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a Bud. Not my beer of choice; over on the Beach we go for fancier stuff. But it would do.
I looked at Leroy. “Hey. Are you really going to do it?”
He nodded. “I asked her last week.”
“Congratulations!”
“Her parents think we’re both losers.”
My first impulse was to say they were right. But even brothers need to be nice sometime. “Dude. You have a solid job at Turkey Point. That kind of work keeps you going forever. You’re totally far from Loserville.”
“Yeah, tell them that.” Angie’s parents
were heavy-duty Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they disapproved of anybody who wasn’t.
“When’s the big event?”
“Like maybe Christmas. We’re not sure yet.”
Our mom came into the kitchen from the sunporch, where we kept an extra refrigerator and freezer, carrying a tray of sandwiches. She was tall for a woman, nearly six feet, and had the same flyaway dirty-blonde hair that I did. Her family were early settlers in South Dade, and I had lots of ancestors buried in local cemeteries. I could totally see her as one of those pioneer women growing her own crops and washing her family’s laundry in a river.
“Larry,” she said. She put the tray down on the kitchen table and gave me a big kiss. “How is your job?”
“It’s cool. I’m learning a lot.”
“And you’re feeling well?”
“Great. Thanks, Mom.”
As usual, my family didn’t know what to do with me, because I didn’t fit in—either with them, or at school. My classmates were children of farmers who grew up riding horses and performing in the rodeo, or migrant kids who showed up for class for a few months and then dropped out to work the fields or moved on with their families, following the crops.
When I was eight, I was friends with Rico Rodriguez, whose parents were Mexican and only spoke Spanish. One day when I went to Rico’s house, his parents were packing up to move, and I asked them to take me with them. I didn’t care where they were going, as long as it was far from Homestead.
Of course they said no, but as I got older, my sense that I didn’t belong in Homestead, even with my own family, kept growing. I didn’t think my parents knew I was gay. Gay was such a foreign country to them. The only gay people I was exposed to growing up were a couple who owned an antique store in downtown Homestead. My mom is the crafty kind, and she’d make these straw people and animals and sell them on consignment there. Every so often I’d go with her to make a delivery, and they were as funny and catty as Paul Lynde on old reruns of The Hollywood Squares—telling me to go play in traffic, for example, when I got fussy.
My mom went back to the living room to entertain her future in-laws, Leroy following. My dad was hiding out in the sunroom. I waved hello to him, then went upstairs to the bathroom.