by Neil Plakcy
“Not mine,” Kevin said hurriedly. “Only a job I’m working on.” He scooted his chair back to his own cube.
Late in the afternoon I finally had a chance to check my personal e-mail, and there was a message from Julian. My father says he heard that Amazon is working on a similar project to mine, he wrote. He wants to know how soon I’ll be finished. I have to hit the market first in order to gain any traction.
Julian knew I had a full-time job when he hired me. The work would take as long as it would take. I was already busting my hump, and I’d subcontracted out as much as I could.
I resisted the urge to write back quickly because I was pissed, and because I was still wondering how to approach the idea of those photos I’d seen of him. Instead I deleted a bunch of spam and went back to work. I’d respond to Julian when I had something positive to say. Maybe if I was lucky, I’d get out of AppWorks at a reasonable hour and get some work done at home for him.
By nine o’clock, my code was bug-free, except for a problem with verification. I wasn’t strong on information security, so I’d have to ask one of the guys for help. But they were all busy playing Counter-Strike, so I sneaked out of the office and rode the bus home.
I had received new routines from Rajesh and Rajneesh in India, and Julian had e-mailed me some basic graphics to replace the temporary ones I’d put in.
It had been a real image-oriented day, I thought as I uploaded the new ones to Julian’s site and began linking them in place. From the model photos for Victor’s app to the bridal pictures Kevin had been having trouble with. And then there were those dirty pictures of Julian.
I tried to remember what they looked like, but I was missing key details. Around midnight I took a break and decided I needed to refresh my memory. I went back to Julian’s website and opened the image folder.
The pictures were all still there. I knew it was wrong and creepy and almost stalkerish, but I couldn’t help myself. I downloaded the whole directory to my laptop so I could look at the photos whenever I wanted to. Maybe I couldn’t have Julian in real life, but I could still dream, couldn’t I? And those photos were great prompts for fantasies.
I had finished downloading the files when Gavin came in. I quickly shifted my screen back to my development environment.
“You are turning into a real nerd,” he said, looking over my shoulder. “Constantly glued to that computer.”
“Like I was ever any different,” I said.
“You used to have some fun. I hope this dude is paying you a ton of money.”
I looked up at him, and he must have seen my lust for Julian in my face.
“Oh, Christ. You are getting paid, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.” I had put Julian’s check into my wallet because I hadn’t gotten to the bank yet, and I pulled it out to show Gavin.
He whistled. “And this is a partial payment?”
“Yup.”
“Shit. I should have studied programming at FU.”
“What did you major in, anyway?”
“Communications. But you know me; I’m not much of a student. Probably forgotten everything I learned already.”
“Yeah, right.” Gavin liked to pretend he was an airhead, all good looks and no brains, and usually he got away with it. But I knew that behind that handsome facade he had functioning brain cells, and he sometimes surprised me with his insights.
He went to his room, and I stretched. I was stressed, and I wondered how long I could keep doing two jobs. At least I could see my way to finishing Julian’s project within a week or two, and then I’d be able to settle back into my old routines, but with a nice chunk of extra cash in my pocket.
Then I realized that once I finished Julian’s job, I wouldn’t have any reason to see him anymore. Yeah, we had started building a friendship, but he’d get busy running his company, and I’d be back at AppWorks, and we’d probably hardly see each other.
I had an app on my phone for my bank, which let me check my balance, photograph checks for deposit, and so on. I used it to deposit Julian’s check, and I realized that if I could reverse engineer it, I might be able to figure out the verification problem I was having with Victor’s app.
By then my brain was fried, so I shut everything down and went to sleep. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep up such a punishing schedule; it was like being back at FU during final exams, only these tests seemed to stretch out endlessly ahead of me.
When I got to AppWorks Wednesday morning, I asked Dom for help with my verification problem. He rolled his chair over to my cube. “What’s up?”
“I can’t figure out what triggers this call,” I said, pointing at the screen.
He grabbed my pad and pen and started sketching. “See, you start with this,” he said, pointing. He walked me through the whole routine, and by the time he was finished, I understood how it worked, and I was impressed with Dom’s ability.
“You ought to be a teacher. You have a real talent for explaining this stuff.”
“I’ve been taking classes online for my master’s,” he said. “I mean, I waste so much time playing games I figured I might teach a class or two sometime, once I have the credentials. It’s not like I have any other life.”
He looked at me. “So, um, you think you could, like, hook me up the way you did with Dylan?”
He had crumbs in his straggly beard. His shirt strained at its buttons, and there was grime around the collar. His pants were flat and tight against his belly, his dick probably hidden down there beneath layers of fat.
I’m not the kind of fag who lusts after straight guys, and the thought of Dom in a sexual situation grossed me out.
“You want my help?” It was weird that I had become a style guru—it was like the one-eyed man being the king in the country of the blind.
“I want a girlfriend. I mean, yeah, to get laid, but you know, to, like, have someone to go out with on the weekend.”
“Dom, man, I don’t know.”
“It’s because I’m fat, isn’t it?” he said. “Like, even a gay guy wouldn’t look at me.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, you’re kind of huge, and that’s not something you can change overnight. But dude, look at yourself in the mirror sometime. You’re a slob. And that’s gonna turn people off.”
“I hate to look in the mirror.”
I shook my head. “It’s more than that. You need to take a shower or a bath every day. This climate down here, it’s brutal. Everybody sweats. And sweat stinks. There’s a whole lot of you to get sweaty and stinky. And like, go to a barber and get your beard trimmed, and keep it clean. You do that, and then we can talk.”
I was worried I was going to piss him off, but Dom looked more sad than angry.
“It’s about valuing yourself as a person,” I said. “If you don’t take care of yourself, it sends this message that you don’t like who you are. And who wants to get involved with someone like that?”
I gave his chair a push. Man, he was heavy. “Now, go back to your own cube and let me work for a while.”
Using Dom’s advice, I solved the verification problem, and then I got Lilah to do some testing for me. She broke the app in a variety of creative and interesting ways, and I had my hands full fixing everything. It was late in the afternoon by the time I was ready to e-mail Victor to take a look at it. I suggested he ask some clients to try it out too, to give me real feedback.
Before I went back to my code, I checked my personal e-mail and realized I hadn’t answered Julian’s note from the night before. And that reminded me of those naked pictures of him. I was glad I had my legs hidden under my desk so that the boner I popped wasn’t evident.
What could I say to him? Sure, Julian, I can finish your project right away, so you can beat Amazon to the punch? One of my dad’s favorite sayings was “You only get one chance to make a first impression,” so I knew it was crucial that Julian’s business launched with as few glitches as possible. But I just didn’t have the time to p
ut in.
Dear Julian, I understand the urgency you have to get your site launched ASAP, between Amazon and the pressure from your investors. But I have to be honest with you. It’s more work than I anticipated, and I can’t devote as much time right now as I need in order to finish quickly. I’m happy to turn over my code to another programmer along with my notes, and you can just pay me for what I’ve done. Sorry to disappoint you. Larry.
I took a deep breath. Did I really want to cut my ties with Julian?
Then my phone rang with my mom’s ringtone. It was strange for her to call me during the day, and I got worried. “Hey, Mom. What’s up?”
“Can you come home, Larry? Now?”
I sat up in my chair. “What’s the matter, Mom? Somebody sick?”
I heard some yelling going on in the background, but I couldn’t pick out whose voice it was. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. No one’s dead, or in the hospital. But we need a family meeting.”
“Traffic’s going to be miserable heading south,” I said, looking at the clock. It was already rush hour. “But I’ll leave here in a few minutes.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said and blew her nose.
Well, that settled it. If I was going to have to deal with family drama too, then I sure as hell wasn’t going to have the time to work on Julian’s business. I hit Send, and after the message had whooshed into cyberspace, I shut my computer down.
I stuck my head into Boris’s office. “Family emergency,” I said, “Okay if I cut out? I sent the model-agency app off to the client, and I’m waiting for feedback. I’ll make up the time tomorrow.”
“Sure, go ahead,” he said.
I was lucky and caught one of the free electric shuttles that took me up to Lincoln Road, and I hurried from there on foot. Got into my car and headed for the causeway.
All the time I was obsessing over what the big deal was. Nobody was dead, or sick enough for the hospital. But it had to be something huge. Had my dad been laid off? Lincoln or Leroy done something stupid and gotten arrested? Maybe Lisa or Lori was pregnant.
Jesus. When you have a big family, there’s sure a lot of things that can go wrong. I tried both my brothers’ cell phones, but neither picked up.
Most of my friends in high school were girls, and at FU, I hung around mostly with girls or with gay guys. But my brothers were still so much closer to me than my sisters, because we’d shared a room for so long. And Lisa and Lori always had this twin thing going on, inside jokes and stuff, and they were both so girlie, everything pink and princessy, that I didn’t like to play with them in case anyone thought I was girlie too.
I didn’t even have their cell numbers in my phone. I’d have to fix that.
Traffic was miserable on US 1, the road my father called Useless One, creeping through the run-down parts of Coconut Grove, then the manicured lawns of Coral Gables, the fancy campus of the University of Miami fronting the road, yet cut off by the elevated tracks of the Metrorail.
Traffic picked up past the turnoff to the flat western suburbs of Kendall, pockmarked with gated communities and big-box retailers. The Metrorail stopped, but there were still the old Florida East Coast tracks to the right, the train that once ran all the way to Key West until some hurricane smashed it to bits. The left side of the highway was one long, uninterrupted strip of shopping centers, fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and car dealers.
I made it to my parents’ house around five thirty. I surveyed the usual cluster of vehicles outside as I walked up to the front door; the only one missing seemed to be Linc’s monster motorcycle.
The front door was unlocked, and I walked in. My mother and my sisters were sitting in the living room. It was strange how they looked so much alike in that moment, my mom an older version of the twins. They were even all wearing blouses in a similar color of blue.
My dad was talking to Leroy by the kitchen door, his arm around my brother’s shoulder. My dad looked older than usual—his faced was lined, and there were more flecks of gray and white in his dark hair. He’d started to shrink too, so that he was now at least an inch shorter than Leroy.
My brother looked like he’d been hit by a train. Tear tracks stained his cheeks; his hair was mussed and his posture slumped.
“What’s the big emergency?” I asked. “And where’s Linc?”
“He ran off,” Lori said.
“With Angie,” Lisa said.
15 – South Beach Express
I plopped onto the sofa next to my mom. “Huh?”
“Leroy came home for lunch,” Lori said. “Angie had the day off, and he thought he’d surprise her.”
“He sure did,” Lisa said. “She was in bed with Linc.”
“Get out of here!” I said. “No way.”
“Way!” they crowed in unison.
“Girls,” my mother said. She turned to me. “Leroy got very upset. He and Lincoln started to fight. Angie called me at work, and I rushed home.”
My mom was a waitress at a restaurant at the end of the turnpike, where the highway died and US 1 took over for the long, twisting ride to Key West.
“By the time I got home, Lincoln had a bloody nose, and Leroy was screaming at Angie.” Mom dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.
“We never liked her,” Lori said.
“She’s a tramp,” Lisa said.
“Yeah, thank you for the Greek chorus,” I said. “Let Mom finish.”
“We’re not Greek,” Lori said. My mom shot them a look before Lisa could chime in. They always reminded me of the Siamese cats in this Disney movie we saw when we were kids, Lady and the Tramp. They had that same smarminess.
“Angie packed a bag, and so did Lincoln,” my mother said. “Then they left on Lincoln’s motorcycle.”
I looked across the room. Leroy was crying, and my father, never the most demonstrative of dads, was patting him on the shoulder. Fuck. None of us were the touchy-feely type, but I got up and walked over.
I opened my arms and hugged my brother, and he cried on my shoulder. “I know it hurts,” I said. “But you’ll get over her, eventually.”
“How about some dinner?” my mother asked a bit too brightly. She stood. “I’ll see what I can rustle up.”
Leroy left to wash his face, and my dad joined my mom in the kitchen. I went back to the Siamese twins. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.
“Nobody would say,” Lori said.
“But we think for a while,” Lisa said.
You get what it was like growing up with them. Two girls sharing one brain.
Lori leaned in close to me. “They were in Leroy’s bed,” she whispered. “Isn’t that creepy?”
“Creepier if Leroy was in there with them,” I said, and she and Lisa both looked aghast.
“Angie always worked weird hours,” Lisa said. “We think she was trying to be home with Linc when nobody else was.”
My oldest brother was a motorcycle mechanic with a bike shop in Homestead. He often worked in our driveway—he said it was hard to concentrate at the shop. Yeah, now we knew exactly what he was concentrating on.
“How did they ever think they were going to get away with it?” I asked. “I mean, there are so many people in this house; somebody was bound to stumble on them sometime.”
“People having sex don’t think straight,” Lori said.
Lisa added, “They never think they’re going to get caught.”
I looked at her. They’d always been my baby sisters, but they were twenty years old. Plenty old enough to have serious boyfriends. I wasn’t about to spill the beans about my dating life, though, so I didn’t quiz them about theirs.
Mom called us into the kitchen, and we sat down to eat. My mom made the best meatballs. When we were kids, we used to help her make them, and she’d freeze big tubs of them and make spaghetti and meatballs for us on nights when she had to work late and needed something quick.
“What’s this?” I asked, picking a pasta curlicue out of m
y plate. I’d never seen anything in our kitchen cabinets other than store-brand spaghetti.
“Angie bought it,” Lori said.
“Fancy,” Lisa said.
“I’m going to kill her,” Leroy said.
Jesus. You ask a simple question, and you get death threats. “You aren’t killing anybody, Wee-Roy,” I said, deliberately using that nickname he hated to get him off track.
“I’m killing her, and I’m killing him too,” he said. “I’m going to buy a gun and shoot them both in the head.”
“You have to aim for body mass,” Lisa said.
“The head is too small a target,” Lori added.
“Girls,” my mother said. She turned to me. “You have a couch, don’t you, Larry?”
I was still thrown by the curly pasta instead of spaghetti. “A couch?”
“Leroy doesn’t want to sleep in that bed,” my father said. “Or in Lincoln’s either. We thought he could stay with you for a few days.”
“With me? But South Beach is awful far from Turkey Point.”
“Leroy is taking time off from work,” my mother said. “He’s too upset.”
“You don’t want him pushing the wrong button because he’s pissed,” Lori said.
“The whole plant going up in some nuclear explosion,” Lisa said.
I wanted to smack them, and I could see my parents did too.
Leroy didn’t say anything, so I turned to him. “You want to come stay with me? I don’t think you could stay on the sofa, because I’ve got roommates. But you have a sleeping bag, don’t you? You could put that on the floor in my bedroom.”
My heart skipped a beat. What the fuck was I doing, inviting my straight brother to come stay with me and my gay roommates? Would I have to make him wait in the lobby until I had a chance to de-gay the apartment? Or would he be too zonked-out to notice?
“Angie and I went to South Beach once,” he said. “I didn’t like it.”
He was another one who needed a smack. “Going to the Beach isn’t the same as living there. You want to come with me or not?”