[Steven Lyle Jordan]

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 chair 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?”

“Bor-ing!” 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.”