Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 12:04:49 PST From: Horatio Nimier Subject: THE BUSINESS TRIP The post contains innuendoes of homosexual relationships. This is a scene-setter and will help you understand why other things happened. If you read only stories of graphic sex, skip this story and continue with the next one titled COLIN. If homosexuality, sexually explicit language, or swearing offends you, or if reading material that contains these violates any law or personal or religious beliefs you must exit now without proceeding further. If you're under 18 years old you may not read it either because it is against the law. I regret this because I was once a randy teenager and I feel somewhat two-faced in helping enforce the law. Hopefully, one day, censorship may disappear along with other vestiges of Big Brother and Mother Grundy. The story is fictional inasmuch as things did not unfold as portrayed. It is based on events that happened on two business trips that did take place. These memories have been cemented together with strips of fiction to make the story cohere. Names and places have been changed. The stories are dedicated to the memory of my friend, Kerry. THE BUSINESS TRIP ================= I dragged the damp T-shirt off my back, opened my tankbag and took a sweatshirt out. The sun-dried, unironed fleece felt warm on my arms and shoulders and as I pulled it down to my ass I arched my back to let the material rub on my nipples. "Fucking air conditioners," I muttered under my breath as I completed this summer morning ritual. My office was so cold that one could store meat in it, even though it was the beginning of July -- just before the Independence Day long weekend -- and outside it was hot. So hot that stopping my Honda VFR700 for any reason on my way to work caused the sweat to break out under my leather jacket and soak my T-shirt. "You're crazy to ride with leather in this weather," people in the office who knew nothing about bikes would say. I was tired of explaining, so my stock reply had become "I'd rather sweat than bleed." But I did have this little fantasy. (I actually have many fantasies, but they're for some other time and after many beers). Anyhow, in this fantasy, some straight guy makes this remark and I reply matter-of-factly "No, it's just that I find leather to be an enormous turn on and wear it as often as I can. In fact it's so good that sometimes I even sleep in it!" I'd played the scene in my mind so many times that I had it visualized to the last detail. The momentary look of horror flashing across his face. Then the confused attempt to recover and pretend to be broad-minded and, finally, the mumbled excuse and the hurried departure. The humor in it made the response tempting. Almost. I hung the T-shirt on a hanger out of sight behind a filing cabinet to dry. I grabbed my coffee mug and was half way to the door when the phone rang. I cursed softly to myself glancing at the empty cup, then turned round and picked the phone up. "Hey Leather Boy, we've got us a project." Hearing Colin's Southern accents took some of my annoyance away. Colin, another of the sysprogs on the team, came from Georgia and was a fellow biker and a real good buddy of mine. We'd joined CentIns within days of each other. Our newness had formed an initial bond, which had firmed into a friendship and was now more than that. Colin sounded keen. But then Colin always sounded keen. Colin would have sounded keen if he were a lemming and had been told of an outing to the beach. I had two years of DP work under my belt (a full year more than Colin which made me an old man in the trade). In my vast experience, projects had, more often than not, turned out to be the half-baked idea of some computer-illiterate director who was too short-sighted to see the potential of the electronics and wanted them to merely do faster what was already being done by hand. We would bust our asses, writing code and rewriting specs simultaneously so that the final result was something that not only worked but was useful as well. Then, when all the congratulations were being showered around, the kudos would go to everyone else other than the Data Processing Group. Colin and I were good for each other. His enthusiasm balanced out the cynic in me: my skepticism kept him within the real world. Colin knew me well and correctly interpreted my silence. "C'mon, Chris, it ain't that bad. You get to ride your bike to South Carolina, stay in a nice place in Charleston for six weeks and be back here for Thanksgiving and CentIns pays for it all. Man, you'll be happier than a three-dicked dog." There was the clue -- Charleston. "Fuck, no. It's Project Chicken. Count me o-u-t, buddy. NFW." The project was in reality named Project Eagle (even though there was no secret to what we were doing. It had even been written up in the press. But some frustrated Eisenhower decided that this project should have a code name and thus Project Eagle it had become.) Anyway, our insurance company, already well into gouging individuals and becoming rich, had decided to take over some other insurance firm in the Carolinas. Project Eagle was the combining of the two data processing departments. But when we'd studied this other company's computer operations we'd changed the name to project Chicken. "Hear me out, fuck it!" said Colin in exasperation. "You will like this one, Chris." "Uh-huh....six weeks living on the sixth floor of some flop-house where the elevator doesn't work, doing gens and conversions for an old VS system that has no documentation. Sure I'll like it." There was silence at the other end of the line while Colin patiently waited for me to vent. He and I both knew that, however much I carried on like an old woman with wet pants, I would take the project. I realized it was pointless putting Colin's tits through the mangle over this. I folded. "OK, Buddy. What do I have to do this time?" Colin's enthusiasm notched up again. "Rod wanted to tell you himself, but you decided to be the prima donna and come in late today and he's got a meeting so I will, as Rod says, 'Brief you'". Rod was our manager. A dyed-in-the-wool insurance guy who was smart enough to have fast-tracked up to a fairly senior position in management by the age of thirty. Now at thirty-eight he ran the entire computer operations department. He and I had had a rough beginning as he tried to make a good corporate citizen out of me and I bucked every rule there was. But there was this one time when he'd pulled my balls out of the fire when I went way out of line with a senior vice president. And there was another time I'd worked for eight days without leaving the office, catching what sleep I could under the desk, in order to rescue a project where the designers had totally forgotten to budget for the resources required. A few incidents like this and we'd come to realize that each of us had skills that the other lacked and an unspoken, but deep, mutual respect had developed. He really did, I came to realize, do everything he could for us within a system run by lunatic accountants. I would do a bunch of stuff for Rod that I wouldn't for anyone else. "OK, come to my office and 'Brief' me." I said. "Be there in five," said Colin. He added "You are right about it being Chicken, but we're not going to convert. We'll run VM. That's where you come in, Lover Boy. We'll have both our shit on MVS and their stuff staying on VS under it. We'll move it here and convert at our leisure. He paused. Rod says he thinks a team of six of us can go. We get the standard per diem and we can do what we like with it." He paused -- I could sense the grin on his face. "Rod says you're in charge and you can choose the team." Another pause while Colin waited for a reaction. No big deal: I was normally in charge when Rod wasn't around. "OK, buddy, I'll bite. What's up?" "Well now, you just write the six names down on a piece of paper of the people you want on the team. I've done an itty-bity list of my own already. When I come in we'll see how closely our lists match." The light went on. I'm not normally that slow, but I was going through severe caffeine withdrawal real bad. "You scheming shit." I replied starting to laugh. "You know the team I'll choose." "Five names, yeah. It's who you'll pick for the sixth that has me wondering" My brain started to pound the inside of my skull, begging for a chance to get at the coffee machine. "Give me five minutes to kick-start my body then come on over here." I said. "We'll have to talk this through." I grabbed the coffee mug and went into the vestibule to fill it up. I'd swallowed half of it by the time I sat down at my desk. I picked up a legal pad and quickly wrote five names down the left-hand side then matched each with a job assignment on the right. I left a few lines blank and wrote one more job assignment, but when I went to match it with a name, my pencil paused. By the time Colin came in I had only three more names and all of them were followed by a question mark. As the cowboy boot pushed the door closed carefully so that his coffee didn't spill, my eyes ran up the straight-leg blue jeans. The bulge below the wide black leather belt was central so he was probably wearing briefs, or maybe a jock strap today. The white shirt had the sleeves rolled way up showing off his well-muscled arms. As he strode across to my guest chair he had a mischievous smile and I guessed that he was going to take me somewhere where I didn't want to go in this meeting. He pushed his pad across the desk to me. "OK, Chris," he grinned at me. Let's see yours." I stood up and made as if to unzipper my fly. "No, you sex-crazed biker," he crumpled a piece of computer paper and threw it at me. "I meant show me your list." "Oh," I said in mock amazement. "Then why didn't you say so?" I pushed my list across to him, picked up his and studied it. Sure enough the first five names were the same as those on my list. Chris, that's me, and Colin would be the sysprogs. Neil and Mike would handle the application programming part of the project and Dave would do the JCL and job scheduling. The question, of course, was who would be the DBA on the team. Between Colin's and my lists were four possible names. Of these only one appeared on both lists: Pete Chisholm. I laid my pencil down on the list with its point on Pete's name. "Looks like Pete's the guy," I reflected out loud. No question of his ability: Pete was probably the best database admin guy we had. The big question was how he would fit in with the team I had chosen. Colin's long fingers scratched his thigh. The tight denim made a loud rasping noise in the room. "Well you and he are like two catfish in a pond." My knowledge of catfish is slight, but I got the gist of what he wanted to say. Pete and I had spent four years in Seattle at the University of Washington. We'd first met when we were busboys at a local restaurant and later had spent many days together hiking in the mountains north of the city. We were too broke then to afford reliable transportation and it was rare that both his Bug and my bike were running at the same time. One night we had manhandled the engine of his VW into our room to work on it out of the endless Seattle rain. Somebody complained about the smell of gasoline and when a university cop had walked in the atmosphere in the room was the ideal 14:1 carburetor mixture. We were fined and banned from living on campus, so we rented a room and a garage in the house of an elderly lady. This woman, most beautiful of humans and filled with wisdom, became Aunt Gillian to us and we both owed our degrees, if not our lives, to her. Her humungous sandwiches and thermos jugs of coffee had helped us through exam cramming. It was she who I had hauled out of bed at three in the morning when I found Pete lying comatose on the floor, the carpet under his head crimson and wet. One look told her that it wasn't blood as I had supposed but the disgorged excess of a more than a gallon of strawberry wine. She and I had worked until dawn reviving Pete and cleaning the room. It was she who bailed us out of a Tacoma jail where we'd been put to calm down after a post football game brawl. The bail had come from money she set aside for her entertainment and the conditions she set down were that we would not only pay her back the money, but would also escort her to the symphony concerts, operas and ballets she went to. That was our introduction to the arts. Pete and I had gone into her house as friends. With her nurturing we came out as family. But in spite of good intentions, after college we gradually lost touch. He had gone back to the East Coast and I had gone down to Silicon Valley. Two weeks after I joined CentIns, I'd seen his name on a telephone list. I'd punched in the number and we had picked up where we'd left off just over two years before. One night his girlfriend's friend had no date, I'd made up the foursome and it had ended up with she and I going out together for about two months. But no matter how far back we went and what we'd been through together, bringing Pete into the team would be taking our friendship to the limit. The problem was Pete was straight. Not only was Pete straight, but I had never given him any reason to doubt that I was, too. "Yeah. The 'buddies' will last right up 'til he sees you and me sixty-nining, or Mike and Neil shagging each other like rattlesnakes." I remarked. I sat back and reflected for a while. "We'll just have to do like we do here -- be straight all day and meet in someone's room at night." "Well, we're not exactly going to have our own rooms," said Colin looking at the ceiling. Colin liked to be mysterious sometimes. "What d'ja mean? Share rooms so we can get into a better place?" I went sarcastic. "Wow, Colin, that's a good idea. Pete'll never figure out why he gets to spend the night alone while his roommate is off somewhere else and comes back in the morning with weak knees and his cock dragging on the floor." "Well...it's not exactly that, either." "Colin, for shitsake cut to the chase. What the fuck are you trying to tell me?" "OK, man, OK. He held up his hands. I've got this aunt in Charleston. When Rod told me the plan I phoned her trying to figure where we could stay. I found out we can get us a house a tad outside the town. It's up the coast a bit, but it's private. And if we pool our per diems we can afford it." Now that was a radical idea. "We can't do that. There'll be five naked guys walking around with perpetual hard ons. Mike and Neil can barely last eight hours without shooting their bolts. Dave jacks off so often that he has to wear asbestos gloves. Are you fuckin' nuts? Pete'll go ape. "Colin. It's a great plan, buddy, but it ain't going to happen." Life in Georgia must be hard, because Colin had learned to be persistent. "Pete might learn to enjoy another side of life," he reasoned. "Have you heard the homo jokes he tells?" I asked. "There's some pretty mean stuff." "Uh-huh. But we laugh at them, don't we? He has no idea we're not straight." Like a cobra Colin unfolded from his chair in one smooth movement. About four paces in those cowboy boots brought him round to me. His hand lifted my sweatshirt, ran up my stomach, grabbed my nipple and squeezed. "Have you ever touched him? Have you ever told him? Have you ever given him one little hint? Have you ever told him to shut the fuck up?" I liked it when Colin got angry. He went all Southern and the single-syllable words all became two syllables. Fuck uh-up? "You, me, Dave, every-fucking-one of us tries to act more straight than a Baptist preacher at a prayer meeting. I am so tired, so fucking tired of living this lie. Now we have a great chance to be ourselves for a while and you want to give it up because of Pete?" He let go of my nipple. "We ain't white trash. If Pete knew about us I don't think he'd be mean like that. You and he are friends. What has he ever done to hurt you?" He paused and gathered himself. "So maybe he can enjoy himself with us, maybe he can't. Well if he can't, then tough shit. He can live in make-believe land for six weeks like we do our whole fucking lives." Colin walked back to the other chair. Before he sat down he looked at me. "If he's so straight as you say, then why the biker jacket? Huh? He hasn't got a bike. Why the tight jeans even when it's just guys going out? When were showering after working out, why does he strut around butt-naked afterwards? There're no girls there. He must know guys are looking at him." His eyebrows raised, his mouth closed in a straight line. It was a challenge. "He's no different to us. I dress like I do whether there're guys around or girls. It's what turns me on. Pete likes to show his body." "I dunno," said Colin. "He sure isn't shy when there are guys around." "Whatever." I argued. "There's something else, too you haven't thought about. You're expecting Neil and Dave and Mike and me to come out, too. It's not that simple, buddy. I've been there, you haven't. This isn't fucking California." "If you and I are going to move in together then we're going to have to. I've talked about coming out with Mike and Neil, too, over the past couple of weeks. We think it'll be OK. Don't push it and don't smooch or fondle at work, but be honest where we stay and who we go out with. It'll be like a spring storm. Lot of noise in a little time then sunshine." "It'll be a fucking hurricane in an Alabama trailer park, more likely." I corrected him. Calm had returned to Colin. "Chris, no offense, but face it: Your family is really screwed up. There are always going to be people who hate and your daddy and brother are like that. But you can't let them rule your life. You'll be like a squirrel in a dog's mouth. Chris, nobody should have to go through what you did. It wasn't right and it wasn't fair. But you are letting your fuck-up brother rule your life from a thousand miles away. Everyone likes you here. Nobody's going to hurt you. But you have to be yourself. You have to live your own life." I looked at him. He'd touched a nerve. Yeah, Colin, you're right. I'm a Judas. I sell my principles daily to live. Maybe I live a lie, but I live. Just try coming out and then see where you get. You're fucking lucky if you're alive let alone making a living. "So your plan is ......?" Colin got up and walked over to the door and opened it. He turned around, grinning. "It ain't a plan no more. I already put my own check in the mail just now for a deposit on the house. You guys can pay me back later. This is the chance of a lifetime for us. We can't pass it by like a dead possum on the road. But Rod put you in charge, boy. He has faith in you. So do I. Fix Pete." He moved through the door quickly so that the pencil I threw at him hit the wood. I got another cup of coffee and sat back down and thought. It was a real good idea. Colin, buddy, you'll probably never have a better plan than this. But Pete. Pete will be what makes or breaks it. "Fix Pete". That's what Colin had said. Pete was my buddy and I didn't want to lose him. I couldn't handle seeing him look at me with hate in his eyes. I let my mind wander over the last few months since I joined CentIns. (c) 1999 Horatio. I relate these stories because I enjoy writing and I enjoy the subject matter. If you have any comments you can email me at horatio_nimier@hotmail.com I'll even accept criticism if expressed in an adult, objective and polite manner. Hate mail will be flushed without reading. Grow up.