like warm sun on nekkid bottoms
by
Chuckles Austen
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Wild and Wooly Press for Smashwords
Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms
Copyright © 2010 by Chuck Austen
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Dedicated, with love and admiration,
to the woman who makes all things possible.
My beloved wife, Ann.
If, on that particularly warm night in April, you had been anywhere near the one hundred seventeenth exit of the US 108, just south of the city where the road first wanders off like a drunken frat boy and begins to flirt with the dangerous curves of the coast, you likely wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway because of the fog.
But if you had wound up there—in spite of the lack of visibility, and the fact that no one goes there unless they’ve read the map wrong, gotten directions from an incompetent friend, or been forced to stop due to some bladder-related emergency—you likely would have parked somewhere near the old stone fence off the side of the recently resurfaced road to wait out the sudden, surprisingly thick and disturbingly dark mist that had swept in from nowhere to envelop everything, including the hypothetical you.
Had you been there, you might have yelped a bit at the unexpected, unusual, and more than a little scary, low-to-the-ground lightning that suddenly erupted from the center of that eerily dense fog. Perhaps you would even have turned off the engine, moved away from anything metal, and begun muttering a prayer or two to whatever god you thought might be able to help.
Had you been there, in the right place, at the right time, and had something been visible once the low clouds and mist had begun to fade along with the intense lightning strikes, and low, rumbling thunder, you might have seen the deeply worn, patchy, and faded, ostensibly white 1956 Rambler explode toward you from the center of those flashes and booms like a cannonball shot from the mouth of hell.
Had you seen, you undoubtedly would have watched with fear and concern as the dingy car slid headlong toward you with considerable speed and lack of control until its brakes locked, its tires skidded, and the heavy machine swerved to an eventual stop on the rain-slicked asphalt mere inches from where the front of your bumper would have been, had you been there.
If you had then stepped out of your automobile and moved closer to the steaming, pinging, rusted old driving machine that had nearly crawled into your lap, you would have seen a very pretty—and very frightened—young woman staring out the front windshield. She would not have been staring at you, not at anything so much physical as the flickering ghost images of her short, but mostly happy life as it continued flashing before her eyes, complete with end credits, catchy song and special thanks to the producers.
You might have noticed she was sweating a little, shaking a bit, and breathing heavily as she gripped the steering wheel tightly in white, blood-drained fingers. You might have seen her swallow, once, very hard, as if downing a small rodent that had become lodged in her mouth but would have preferred to stay right where it was.
As she would have sat there staring emptily at the space before her, and you would have stood there staring emptily at her, you might have noticed movement along the side of the road, and—with her—turned your gaze to see one of those irritatingly healthy couples who do everything together, including power-walk their excess caloric intake away in public with the specific intent of shaming the rest of us for our lonely, passive, and sedentary lifestyles.
You might have seen them smile nervously at the frightened woman in the Rambler and then continue along their way as the driver, in turn, watched them stride off energetically toward their evening protein drink, relaxing sauna, and erotic massage.
If you had paid particular attention, you likely would have picked up on the fact that the woman in the Rambler was paying particular attention to the tight-fitting tank tops, spandex shorts, and name-brand running shoes of the passing pair.
And if you were close enough, you couldn’t have helped but notice the nervous, sweating, yet still remarkably lovely young woman glance down at herself and say quietly, “Damn.” Then shake her head sadly as she—and you—realized that she was entirely naked in her little car. “I knew I forgot something.”
If you were asked which you think a man would prefer: a long, hot, road trip to a comic book convention with the hygienically challenged Morgan Wiggen; or hours in a room full of sexy supermodels wearing wispy undergarments, the answer might seem rather a no-brainer, wouldn’t it?
No, it would not. I went to the comic book convention.
Wipe that look off your face. I am decidedly heterosexual (assuming we are, of course, excluding that awkward seventeen minutes in Mervin Wosserman’s gym locker after the annual homecoming ‘drink-yourself-sick-athon’, which wouldn’t even merit a mention if not for that damnable video which, for obscure legal reasons, is still available on some offshore websites).
The fact is: anything can get old, even beautiful, sparsely clad women shamelessly baring their this ‘n’ thats—especially when you’re not allowed to touch. It’s a lot like going to a strip club, for those of you who have never been. I imagine there are still one or two of you out there, mostly women, or, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, Republicans, no doubt.
Some men consider a strip club delightful fun, but most of us find it a rather uncomfortable exercise in sexual frustration—though we’ll still run right out and do it again if there’s nothing good on television. There are far more colorful terms that might do a better job of conveying said frustration: ‘Too much wood up for no good’, for example. ‘Called to attention with nowhere to march’, would be another. Or my personal favorite: ‘Stiff as a bored’; which really works only in written form I suppose. Maybe that’s why I’m the only one who laughs whenever I say it.
Food for thought.
In my grandfather’s day, the semi-naked parade was far more entertaining I’m sure. Hanging with the feminine undressed has far greater appeal when you’re not even supposed to see your own wife in the all-together. How children were conceived in those days is not something I ever want fully explained.
My grandfather, himself, certainly found girls vastly amusing, particularly unclad girls, at least until they acquired rights and became unclad ‘women’. Once what my grandfather considered ‘flirting’ became ‘unwanted sexual advances’ all the fun seemed to go out of it for the old bird. The birth of the sexual harassment lawsuit truly, and forever, destroyed his impressively active sex life.
Of course, even after a good several million was turned out in settlements, the randy old fart continued to enjoy the aforementioned ‘semi-naked’ variety of female while managing—mostly—to avoid actual physical contact. And as long as he could call it ‘business’, the many restraining orders allowed him to ogle and drool to his vaso-constricted heart’s content without legal entanglements. But for myself, women in skimpy underwear have become rather an annoyance. I’m sure you see what I mean.
You don’t? I’ll elaborate.
Did I explain that we run an undergarment company? I didn’t? Good God, I’m so sorry! No wonder things seem a bit confusing. Drove into a mental tree there apparently. Let me back up the brain truck a bit and reroute, so to speak.
We run an undergarment company. Rather, more correctly, we own an undergarment company. My family. One of the world’s largest (the business, not the family, although we do seem to have an ungodly number of relatives, most of them apparently waiting for Grandfather to die). Wopplesdown Struts, purveyors of fine briefs. (Wopplesdown is pronounced ‘Woo-puhls-duhn’. I don’t know—it’s an old-world English sort of thing. Somewhere back in the depths of time we may have been British. Or pretended to be. Now we’re just snobs.)
So, part of my job at Wopplesdown is seeing how our undergarments look on actual women. Well, not actual women rather supermodels who stand in for actual women. Real, actual women look more like my secretary, Mrs. Abrososa, a rather smart-looking, gray-haired sixty-year-old, but hardly the kind of vision to hold up traffic when seen semi-naked on a very large billboard; at least, not for the reasons that sell undergarments. Not that I’ve seen her naked on a very large billboard, but I can imagine, unfortunately.
And me? My name is Corky. Corcharan Wopplesdown, to be more formal. But please don’t. Corky works just fine. It beats the hell out of having to explain the proper way to pronounce ‘Corcharan’ (Cock-ran). Or worse, ‘Wopplesdown’ (one paragraph up). With a name like mine at least once a day someone is seemingly required to point out to you: “But . . . it’s spelled Cor-CHAR-an WOP-puhls-DOWN.” Which requires me, in return, to open my eyes and mouth wide in mock surprise, shake my head politely and pretend that particular pronunciation never once occurred, nor was ever tactfully pointed out in the twenty-some years I’ve possessed the name, and had it endlessly sounded out to me by kind-hearted, amateur, English pronunciers.
So call me ‘Corky’. Not a significant improvement, but at the very least simple, and more pithy. (I like the word ‘pithy’, though it does tend to remind one of dead frogs.)
I am the third grandson, fourth grandchild, of the aforementioned oft-sued-elder Wopplesdown, and as such remarkably useless. My job for the family business became—some two years ago, and roughly coinciding with the expansion of the scope and limits of various restraining orders, now also encompassing my father, brothers, and sexually ambiguous sister—to perform any and all functions necessary within a fifty-foot radius of whatever supermodels we may employ. Initially, for a man whose main interest had been, to date, masturbation, this function was a godsend. But as I mentioned on a previous page (or in a previous lungful, depending on whether you’re reading this, or having it read to you), anything can get old. Especially when you learn, as we all should eventually, to prefer being touched over touching oneself.
So my job—specifically—with Wopplesdown Struts, is to convey information to and from management, to and from designers, and so forth, after viewing and taking notes upon countless minimal forms of garmentry. This could ordinarily be accomplished by seeing our clothing on rather surprisingly attractive plastic mannequins, which also barely resemble real women. But since mannequins rarely file lawsuits, that job can still be handled by my various and sundry—and I do mean sundry—relatives. So my job is—exclusively—to view our clothing on actual near-naked women and not get sued. There is, of course, a men’s division, but that’s handled by Mervin Wosserman. The family gave him a kind of ‘pay-off’ job after the drink-yourself-sick incident, and it’s worked out quite well actually, as I have even less inclination to see men in wispy undergarments, and Mervin seems to rather enjoy it.
The thing is (and there’s always a thing that ‘is’, isn’t there?) The thing is: I want to keep this job, and do prefer it to my previous one; that job being primarily lying around inhaling, then occasionally exhaling whenever the need might arise. Being the useless, inert, pampered grandson made it rather shockingly easy for me to live up to family expectations, largely because family expectations were so incredibly low.
So now, having exceeded minimal familial expectations by actually performing a job with arguable efficiency, and a complete absence of subpoenas, I have discovered something extraordinary, something I believe may be referred to as ‘pride’, though I can’t be sure, and want to maintain the illusion of relative competence in my family’s eyes by only escaping my ‘work’ from time-to-time. One of those times, of course, being right this very minute.
You see, at this particular moment, my employment is in serious jeopardy. My long and valued career—all eight months of it—is, at this very instant, as they say (whoever ‘they’ are), on—the—line. The line. That infamous line no one ever seems to notice until they have pretty much trampled past it, scampered over the hill into the next town and are getting dangerously close to some other unnoticeable line.
But now, as I said, right this very instant, I am merely on the line. My life is flashing before my eyes, every second of it playing before me like a long, boring movie about a man asleep on a couch, and I’m realizing with horror how much time I wasted that I could have at least spent playing video games (or going to strip clubs). It is that serious and life-changing a moment.
So naturally I’m not going to tell you about it, yet.
Instead, let me take you back a little.
This mess began right after Mrs. Abrososa and I entered the room we have set aside for viewing garments. In the business it’s called, interestingly enough, ‘The Garment Viewing Room’. Mrs. Abrososa was present as a chaperone/potential witness for the defense, and I was there to do what many around the company laughingly refer to as my ‘job’.
The Garment Viewing Room is a small antechamber just off the designer’s workshop and its primary function is to hold clutter. Most of the time it’s filled with fabric scraps, loose sequins, discarded feather boas, cardboard boxes, old bolts of cloth, and dead mannequins. But once a week it becomes a makeshift runway for…well…looking at semi-naked girls.
“Joe Rudi led the league in total bases with 287. . . . ”
“Muttering stats already, Corky?” Mrs. Abrososa asked, amused.
“Have you met Ms. Nuckeby?” I asked.
“I have not yet had that pleasure, no.”
“Attractive and charming.”
“Ah, I see.”
“An enchanting sense of humor.”
“Oh, dear. Well, I understand the preemptive strike, then.”
“Better safe than sued,” I said, smiling.
She winced. “You sound like your grandfather.”
“Isn’t that the objective?”
“I hope not,” she said distastefully.
Mrs. Abrososa had her issues with the old man, as did we all. But my grandfather owned the place and you followed his rules, no matter how arbitrary. Fortunately, the laws of the state often superseded his and were generally more socially and morally correct, which pissed him off to no end.
I was moving my chair around the varying bits of discarded fabric and thread that had become glued to the tile floor, trying to situate myself in such a way that any . . . em . . . ‘unexpected stiffening of the joints’, as it were, could easily be hidden with a simple and nonchalant flourish of the legs, and a subtle movement of my clipboard, when our newest model, Wisper Nuckeby, stepped in wearing only the bottom half of ‘Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43’ and nearly blew out the front of my trousers.
Panicked by this instant…em…eruption of embarrassingly obvious sexual attraction, I flourished my legs rather too ‘chalantly’ and fell over into the water cooler. Most of its contents sloshed over my groin area as if Moses himself had ordered them to do so, before I could fumble the thing off myself and onto Mrs. Abrososa’s lap.
She, as you can imagine, screamed at the top of her sixty-year-old lungs and with the strength of ten Mrs. Abrososas managed to grasp the gurgling tank, Hulk-like, and hurl it and its furiously flowing contents, several feet mind you, back onto me. With a precision born no doubt of many years playing lawn-darts in the backyard with the grandkiddies, the elderly woman corked a ringer, and for one seemingly infinite and utterly horrifying moment I sat there staring at the bottle as the thing pointed down into my lap, its remaining contents now ‘plugged’, as it were.
Ms. Nuckeby seemed, surprisingly, to approve.
“Nice save,” she said.
“Yes…wuh…well,” I stammered efficiently, dropping my voice an octave in an effort to sound more in control of the situation than a man with a sopping wet erection stuck in a water cooler bottle could ever possibly sound. “I’ve been practicing.”
“Really?” she asked, seeming genuinely surprised.
“Um…no. I’m kidding.”
“I knew that. I was also kidding.”
“Oh.” She was good. “Well, I knew that.”
We both chuckled slightly at one another and the loveliness of her smile helped tighten the fit of my newly acquired codpiece. I looked at my lap and considered removing the blue plastic container from my whatsit. But the image of said whatsit exposed to the air—soaked, bolt-upright, clingy, silken Natazzi slacks revealing its every swell and curve as they gripped the thing more tightly than a sailor’s wife greeting a husband who’s returned home on leave—possibly her own—froze me into immobility. After assessing various rapidly considered options, I simply laid my arms across the bottle as if I’d planned for the thing to end up there all along and smiled at the semi-nude Ms. Nuckeby.
“Well,” I said finally. “Shall we get started?”
“Get…what? You want to…?” she asked, amazed, as I struggled desperately to make it seem as though every high-powered executive must, from time to time, conduct business with a water cooler bottle clamped tightly to his mighty manhood. “Get what started?”
“The posing. The modeling.”
“Oh!”
“Showing us your…what is that you’re wearing?” I said, trying to sound nothing-more-than-curious while crossing my legs, leaning on the water bottle, and rubbing my chin with my best author’s-photo-on-dust-jacket contemplative expression.
A rather large bubble ‘blooped’ up around my ‘cork’
Ms. Nuckeby, her lovely mouth hanging open, watched the bubble in stunned amazement, and only after considerable effort managed to shake her brain and loosen its stranglehold of horrified interest on my nether regions.
“You want me to continue posing?” she asked incredulously.
“These designs are behind schedule, and the fashion show won’t wait I’m afraid.” I smiled, attempting to be firm. Mentally that is. “Time is short.”
“That’s about all that is.”
The red of my cheeks flushed even redder, and I moved the clipboard to block her view. She continued to look there as if she could still see it anyway. Perhaps she was yet another of the many sole survivors from the planet Krypton.
“Um…sir?” she asked. “Are you sure you don’t want to…”
“Nope.”
“Maybe just take a minute to…”
“No. Thank you.”
“But there’s a bathroom right out…”
“No time, Ms. Nuckeby.”
And besides that, little Corky would…
Hah! I just got that. Little ‘Corky’. Kind of a pun, if you…
Never mind.
Ms. Nuckeby paused and stared at me as if my head were three sizes too big, and not because it had extra brains. Mrs. Abrososa did the same.
“Well, all right,” said Ms. Nuckeby finally. “As long as you’re comfortable.”
“I’m good.”
“I’m sure the water bottle thinks so too.”
I flushed again.
“What is it you’re modeling for us, today?” I asked, gesturing toward the fluff that dangled before her fertile crescent.
“This?” she asked, surprised, while turning her magnificent hazel eyes downward to examine her own—in my obvious opinion—flawless womanhood. It clearly did not have the same debilitating effect on her that it had upon me. “I don’t know. This is just what they gave me.” She turned to look at it from all her many fabulous sides and another bubble blooped.
Truly, the wisp of a nothing she had entered wearing was barely cloth. The design was little more than a red, translucent, heart-shaped panty-like thing adorned with a few feathers and a bit of a fringe. The feathers were—presumably—for creating the illusion of potential flight, while the fringe was intended to obscure the view of her…em…
I made a note to have the fringe removed from the design immediately.
Three thin strands of alleged fabric connected this bit of gossamer fluff to something even more insubstantial in the rear, which wasn’t even really trying to cover what I considered to be her—and I’m sure others would have agreed with me on this point—glorious backside.
Gloop, bloop.
“Yes. Of course,” I said, ignoring the rising bubble, then creating another when I turned my attentions to the faint indications of neatly trimmed pubic hair through the shear weave of fabric. I turned away, flushing, and scribbled more notes on my clipboard, supposedly in English, but I’m not entirely sure.
“Of course,” I repeated, my voice cracking like a tree frog being devoured by a python, and subtly adjusted my clipboard in another pathetic attempt to cover my ten-gallon fish tank and it’s lone swimmer. I looked toward the ceiling and did my best to appear disinterested. “But isn’t there supposed to be…oh, I don’t know…a top of some kind?”
Ms. Nuckeby, now suddenly concerned, looked down at her clearly well maintained breasts and scowled a bit. She absently reached up and cupped them as if she needed to feel that there was, indeed, truly-and-honestly, nothing between them and me. Multiple bubbles gurgled, and more water splished to the floor. Finally she turned her large, liquid, doe-like eyes to mine, smiled, and shrugged, which did delightful things to the aforementioned boobs.
Bloop.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. This is all they gave me,” she said.
I turned—reluctantly I admit—away from Ms. Nuckeby and consulted my clipboard through the blue of the water bottle. “According to my notes, and the original drawing, this version of Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43 is supposed to have a top. Corkscrew patterns with little hearts in the center to match the…uh…your…uh… ” Glurgle. “…the panties.” Creak, ribbet, gulp.
“This is all they gave me,” she repeated nervously, shrugging again as if that settled the matter. The shrugging made her now obviously natural and unaugmented breasts bobble yet again, and that settled the matter for me.
She smiled apprehensively and waited. I smiled stupidly and waited. What were we waiting for?
After an uncomfortable pause I realized my gaze had drifted down and I was staring, again, at Ms. Nuckeby where one should never stare at a woman one doesn’t know—semi-clothed or otherwise—especially when smiling, silent, and erect. Instantly embarrassed, I jerked my attention upwards back to her face and smiled even bigger and more pleasantly, as if reassuring her that this certainly could never be her fault. She wasn’t responsible for the missing bit of non-clothing. I wasn’t staring at her crotch. I was ‘working’. ‘Assessing the product’. ‘Contemplating the viability of sales’. And the conclusion I had reached was that if our customers looked half as good in this as Ms. Nuckeby did at that particular moment, we could cut our fabric costs in half and exceed every stock estimate for the next ten years.
“Manschingloss?” I called out, suddenly enough that both Mrs. Abrososa and Ms. Nuckeby jumped a bit. I made a considered effort not to glance over to see how the abrupt movement had affected Ms. Nuckeby’s chest—but failed miserably.
Bloop.
After sufficient time, during which the room could preload Manschingloss’ silent irritation, the large, bear-shaped man strode into the room wearing lipstick, a floppy pink hat, a rainbow-colored scarf, and the kindly smile of an ogre whose every fiber screamed, ‘anything you might think, say, or do from this point forward can only aggravate me’.
“Manschingloss,” I asked. “Is there some reason Ms. Nuckeby here wasn’t given the top to her…em…ensemble?”
“Is there some reason you’re having sex with a Sparkletts bottle?”
I blinked.
I saw his point. What was I thinking? Was I thinking? I believe the answer to that is patently obvious; so patently obvious that it cannot be tautologically over-expressed.
I stood, intending to exit, and in so doing proved my penis to be not only robust, but also filled with determination and resolve. The bottle remained suspended before me.
“We’ll postpone the viewing until the other half shows up, shall we?” I said, ignoring the fact that no one in the room was looking at my face.
“I have it right here,” Manschingloss said, holding out what looked more like a pair of comedy glasses than something an attractive woman might wear over her…em…
Gloop.
“I can put it on her now,” Manschingloss said. “If you, and your girlfriend there can just wait a moment.”
He began draping the bits of fabric over Ms. Nuckeby’s breasts, and I walked into a door.
“No. Necessary. Not. Later. What?” I said, and managed to get out on the third try.
After I had been gone a moment, I heard Manschingloss sniff. “Had I known all this time he could fill a ten-gallon bottle, I might have been nicer to him.”
And this brings us to ‘the line’.
My job description—as written by my grandfather, personally—contains just three words, though one is a contraction. ‘Don’t get sued.’
So you might be wondering why I didn’t simply exit the viewing room once the water bottle had made its interest in me known and put an end to the relationship quickly and cleanly with a minimum of water bottle sex. Any sane man would have. The answer to that is quite simple really: I am not sane. And besides that, more tellingly, I wanted to continue looking at Ms. Nuckeby.
Hence-o, Facto, Problemo.
I’d seen many a beautiful woman in my years with the family business; a high percentage had been erection-worthy. But there was something electric about Ms. Nuckeby that clearly revved up the old lust-engine where others had left it merely idling in park.
Even now, here in my office several minutes later as I stood shaking out the front of my trousers in an effort to—I don’t know, give the water molecules a ride—I was still fighting my way out of the ‘undergrowth’.
“Your grandfather’s going to be furious,” said Mrs. Abrososa, watching me pace in a failed attempt to hide my obvious and continuing attraction to Ms. Nuckeby.
What was in that water bottle, topical Viagra?
“Furious? Why?” I asked, stunned, and somewhat frightened. Being at Wopplesdown Struts and hearing the words ‘Grandfather’, and ‘furious’ conjoined was a lot like being lost in the jungle while wearing barbecue sauce and hearing ‘lion’, and ‘ravenous’ in the same sentence. It instilled the kind of reaction the makers of incontinence briefs live for. “Why furious?”
“You just did a pole dance with a water bottle in front of a naked girl. A naked girl employee.”
“It was an accident! I didn’t do it on purpose!” I studied her for a moment. “You were there. You don’t think I planned that, do you?”
“No, I don‘t think you planned that,” she said, irritated, as if she were a motherly sixty-year-old woman, and I was headstrong child, young enough to be her…
Suddenly our relationship made much more sense.
“But don’t you think,” she continued, “you should have called off the meeting—maybe unstuck little Corky there and not made her stand around and watch you do…whatever it was you were doing?”
I gasped. I steadied myself against the desk. I looked around the room for a clearly marked exit.
“Make her stand there?” I said. “I didn’t make her…” I paused. I studied my secretary-slash-mother-figure and slowly felt sadness and fear overwhelm me as I realized she was right.
“Well, I didn’t mean to.”
“What did you mean to do?”
“Nothing. I just…” I paused, unsure if I should admit it, then suddenly realized that in retrospect maybe it wasn’t all my fault. “She could have walked out.”
“Don’t be such a Wopplesdown!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re being a sexist pig! She couldn’t have walked out! You’re her boss! Her employment hinges on staying and doing what you tell her to do—even if it makes her uncomfortable! Do you understand that this is why they call it harassment?”
Well, I did now.
“Oh, God. Really?”
Her expression said: ‘Yes, dumbass. Really.’ She could be brilliantly nonverbal, Mrs. Abrososa.
“Oh, God,” I repeated. “What have I done? This isn’t what I wanted, I just… ” I looked at her sheepishly and decided to just get it out there—as if it wasn’t already. “I’ve just never seen anyone so beautiful in my life. I didn’t want either of us to leave. I just wanted to stay there, and…be near her.”
Mrs. Abrososa’s sarcastic demeanor faded, and she studied me with deepening sympathy. After a tender moment, she moved closer and put a gentle hand on my shoulder, looking me in the eye with genuine affection.
“What are you, an idiot?”
I flinched, physically.
“That’s how it always starts!” she said and smacked the side of my head. “Men never mean to. But they still do! They like it, and they don’t think about the woman! This is why we need laws—and more lady judges appointed by Democrats!” She put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “That girl was naked! Vulnerable! And you made her stand there and watch you with your dick in a bottle! You think she found that attractive? I sure didn’t. If she doesn’t sue you, I should!”
Blood left my brain. My knees wobbled. My breathing shortened. I could already feel Grandfather approaching with my severance package in his right hand and a one-way ticket to shantytown in his left. I had no job skills. No interests. I would be homeless, and probably still erect. I wondered how much money one could make as a male prostitute. Maybe Mervin Wosserman could point me in the right direction.
Mrs. Abrososa was right. Unfortunately for me, and our family coffers, staying to enjoy Ms. Nuckeby’s immense beauty while performing ‘Live Sex Show with Plastic Container’ could also be interpreted as ‘intent to further inflict suffering, and harm’ by the sort of masterful legal minds who spend their days handing out business cards at funerals. At its simplest level, my staying in the Garment Viewing Room might have seemed innocently lecherous. But there’s another, very fine line between innocent and stupid, and I think it’s becoming rather obvious that I am on the other side of that particular line.
The…er…stupid side.
Quite plainly, I am not in a position to judge the ‘reality’ of the situation. I am too close to it. And I am a man.
If you’re not a man—and I’ll assume some of you may not be, or are unsure—you may not have experienced precisely how incoherent a male can become when confronted with an object of immense desire, and/or female, so I’ll try to make this as visual as I can. Are you familiar with how cattle are slaughtered for their meat? Do you have access to the Internet? What happens to a heterosexual man in the presence of a deeply attractive woman is really quite similar to what happens when meat producers fire those bolt-gun things into the unsuspecting brains of a cow: instantaneous brain death followed by several minutes of wide-eyed tongue lolling, and mindless squirming. It’s enough to make one a vegetarian. Or celibate.
Jokes seem funnier, especially your own, the sun shines brighter, and what happens for the woman really doesn’t enter into it.
Given all this, surprising as it may be to you, in my line of work until today I had never felt the need to impregnate a Sparkletts bottle. Even with the seemingly endless parade of stunning young nubiles that have wandered up, and down the halls of Wopplesdown Struts, I have managed to avoid—aside from the occasional brief stiffy—any more significant attraction, and the resultant gibbering, thrashing, and lawsuits that proceed therefrom. Because for some reason, in order to overcome my intense, mind-numbing shyness, and fear of failure in order to actually approach a woman, I—until today—needed to be stimulated by a woman’s mind, as well as her body. My grandfather believes this is because I am a homosexual.
So in my case, the fact that I have found some woman a-ttractive—debilitatingly so, even without so much as knowing her political affiliation—and have managed to overcome my innate insecurity and forced her to remain in my presence while I kept throttling my bottle, so to speak, puts me way, way, way over that damned line I mentioned earlier, and into a part of the world where English is, at best, a second language. Worse still, even now—as lawyers’ numbers are likely being speed-dialed throughout the building—I am continuing to feel a junkie’s desire to rub up against poor Ms. Nuckeby while removing Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43 with my tongue, entirely convinced that she might find it appealing.
Brain-bolted indeed.
‘But…’ you ask, being the romantic that you are, ‘…isn’t it possible, by some miracle not yet known to modern science, that she might actually want you too?’ HA! You obviously know nothing about me.
Beyond that, there is a reason the number of company lawsuits far, far exceeds the number of successful model/boss relationships at Wopplesdown Struts (the actual number of the latter being zero.)
Take a moment to refer back to my job description.
I’ll wait.
Back? Good.
While you were gone, Mrs. Abrososa went, at my request, to check on whatever trauma I may or may not have induced in Ms. Nuckeby, while I attempted to dry my pants with the iron I keep around the office for just such occasions. It might have been more effective, and less painful, had I removed the pants beforehand. But I was trying to hurry the process and avoid being caught—literally—with my trousers down. Fortunately for my future generations, Mrs. Abrososa returned and saved me before I singed off something important.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, snatching away the iron. Then, gesturing disgustedly toward my Natazzi’s. “Give me those.”
“What? You mean take them off?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Here?” I said, horrified. “Now?”
“What? You think I’m going to see something I didn’t see back there with Ms. Nuckeby?”
I grimaced at the thought.
“Did you find her?” I asked. “Was she upset?”
“From what I hear,” she said. “I don’t know. I didn’t see her.”
“She’d already left?”
“If she did, she wasn’t wearin’ nothing but the company undies. Her clothes were still in the dressing room.”
The thought of Ms. Nuckeby running through the city wearing the bottoms of Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43—in slow motion—once again caused the little soldier to pop up out of his foxhole.
“My God, boy,” Mrs. Abrososa said, apparently quite amazed. “You’re like a party balloon how you inflate. Lord, have mercy.” She held out a hand. “Now, gimme those pants.”
I withdrew from her. “Mrs. Abrososa, really…”
“I got twelve kids…”
“Twelve?”
“…most of ‘em boys—and twenty-seven grandchildren. You ain’t got nothin’ I never seen before.”
“But . . . we aren’t even on a first name basis.”
“Agrapanthila. Hand ‘em over.”
“Agrapanthila?”
She raised the iron and gave me a menacing look. “You want kids of your own?”
I still hesitated. “Wouldn’t this constitute harassment?”
“I got an iron!”
I stripped off the slacks without further hesitation.
Once I’d handed them to her, she stood there folding them over her arm and continuing to stare at my crotch. I moved my hands to block the view, and she looked up at me with disgust.
“I ain’t admirin’. I’m waitin’.”
“What? These, too?”
“They wet?”
I considered. “Damp.”
“Gimme.”
I paused, perhaps a beat too long, and she reached for them. I recoiled and my voice rose to a chirpy soprano.
“I can do it,” I said petulantly.
Trying my best to keep everything as tucked away as I could under the circumstances, I removed the silken boxers and handed them over.
Mrs. Abrososa—Agrapanthila—looked at them with revulsion.
“Haines?”
I shrugged, humiliated. “They’re softer than ours.”
She grumbled and headed for the door carrying my shame, stopping briefly in the open entryway to turn back to me.
“It’s sort of sad, really,” she said, glancing down. Not the sort of thing one wants to hear as a woman studies your privates. “She seemed kind of impressed with it, before you went and molested her.”
“Impressed?”
“Oh, yeah. You two might have made a real cute couple.”
I felt suddenly flush with the thought of Ms. Nuckeby asking me to bare my boyhood for her—smiling and reaching for it.
“Right up until she sued you for everything you got,” my evil secretary concluded.
My fantasy degraded as Ms. Nuckeby stopped reaching and just pointed, laughing riotously at my shriveling crotch while rolling around naked in my inheritance. Somehow even that was erotic.
Gloop.
Mrs. Abrososa exited, laughing hysterically.
Rather abruptly my immediate situation overwhelmed me. Naked from the waist down. In a place of business. Erect. After having—mere moments before—sexually assaulted an attractive female employee. It was a rather compromising position. Someone might come by and see. Someone with authority. Someone who’d prefer that, while engaged in my profession, I wore pants.
What if ‘someone’ was already on their way? A representative from Human Resources with anti-harassment literature, disapproving looks, and things I’d have to sign while not wearing underwear? Or the police to discuss my lewd and lascivious behavior—or worse—to arrest me and haul me downtown in my overexposed state? Or perhaps Ms. Nuckeby’s Schwarzenegger-like father with a machete in one hand, an Uzi in the other, and a cigar to light the explosives he was going to shove up my ass?
Terrified, I called out through the door.
“Mrs. Abrososa? How long do you think it’s going to take?”
“Gimme half an hour,” she replied.
I felt a jolt run through me. I couldn’t stay in here—literally buck-naked—while SWAT teams converged on the area! I looked around, nervously trying to figure out what to do next when the phone rang.
And rang.
“Are you going to get that?” I called.
No answer. Must have gone into the bathroom, or the closet, or the company kitchen to show off my skid marks to other employees.
I looked at the phone. Internal line. Reasonably safe. Besides that, all the tension was ‘felling the old redwood’, if you get the supreme subtlety of my meaning, so I felt less perverted and more able to pick up the receiver.
So I did.
And heard the sound of an indescribably sexy voice on the other end.
“Mister Wopplesdown?” Pronounced correctly.
Gloop.
“Yes.”
“Mister Cor-CAR-an Wopplesdown?”
Well, .500 ain’t bad.
“Corky. Yes. Who’s calling?”
“Um…sir? This is Ms. Nuckeby.”
‘Mini-Me’ noisily banged a cup of pencils off my desk.
“What was that? Is everything all right?”
“Fine, Ms. Nuckeby, fine,” I said as if, for all the world, I still wore pants. “What can I do for you?”
“I don’t know if you know who I am, sir, but…“
“Of course I know who you are, Ms. Nuckeby. You’re the model. The one wearing…”
“No top.”
I breathed deeply and fought to keep blood vessels from bursting in my brain. “Yes. Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43 with no…no…no…em…correct.” I turned nervously, and my ugly stepson slammed the phone’s cradle to the floor where it clanged, banged, and ranged.
“Did something fall?” she asked. “What’s that ringing? Do you have to answer another line?”
“Yes. No! Something…uh…I have a…uh.” I picked up the phone cradle Polyphemus had trashed in his blind rage and tried to silence the ringer, “…the phone got…uh…hit by…” there appeared to be no off-switch, “…knocked down by…” damn, where was the “…it fell. It fell, somehow, all by itself, and…” I smacked the noisy thing against the desk, and it shattered into a million pieces, one of which continued to ring pathetically. “Sorry. All good. Speak.”
“Woof.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Just kidding. I…uh…I wanted to come by and see you, sir. I…”
“No!”
She paused. Struck.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I was hoping that if I saw you…”
“I’d rather you didn’t come to see me, Ms. Nuckeby.”
“Oh.”
“Right now, I mean. Parts of me at least. All of me. What there is of me to see.” I sucked air. In lots of ways. “Now is just not a good time.”
“Then when might be? See, I was hoping maybe I could buy you lunch, and we could discuss…em…”
What? Settlements?
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
Another pause. “I see,” she said finally.
I flushed again, but from a different kind of distress. “I didn’t mean…what I meant to say was: I’m in the middle of something.” I looked down angrily at my throbbing, insistent little friend. “An unexpected guest has popped up in my office and is demanding my undivided attention.”
Her voice fell. “Oh.”
“He and I—we have other pants. PLANS!”
I repeatedly bit my tongue, angrily punishing it for its failure to get off its lazy ass and do its job properly.
“Oh. He?” she said, sounding—what—I don’t know—relieved? “Of course. I understand. Then maybe we can schedule another time?”
“Ooooh, I don’t know, I…it’s probably best if you talk to my lawyer.”
“Your lawyer?”
“He’s much more equipped for this sort of thing than I am. He’s intelligent.”
“Well, you see, this is what I was afraid of, Mister Wopplesdown…” She paused a moment as if carefully considering her financial demands and my greater malleability over lunch as opposed to facing actual legal counsel with functioning brains that didn’t have to struggle with competing thoughts of her mostly naked. “See, that was just a really strange and awkward situation down in the storage closet, just now…”
“Garment Viewing Room.”
“What?”
“It’s called the Garment Viewing Room. It’s not a storage closet.”
“Really? It seemed more like some kind of storage…”
“I would never force you into a storage closet, then make you stay there naked. I mean, while you were naked. I wasn’t naked. I had pants on then. And now, too, if you must know. You were naked, true, mostly, but I was just…”
“See, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I think you have the wrong impression of me. If you would just see me for a moment…”
“Honestly, Ms. Nuckeby,” I said, throbbing at the memory of already having seen most of her. “I saw all of you I need to see. I MEAN…”
“Oh!”
“That came out wrong!”
“No, I’m sure it didn’t. I’m truly sorry to have bothered you Mister Wopplesdown.”
Click.
“Ms. Nuckeby? MS. NUCKEBY!”
Why I yelled louder, as if somehow the sound might actually explode out the other end of a disconnected line, I don’t know, but I’m a man, and as I’ve said, when an attractive woman is involved, the brain farts. I just desperately needed to reconnect with Ms. Nuckeby and tell her I was sorry, please don’t sue me and take away all my money, and, oh, by the way, let’s make lots of babies together. So I refused to be deterred by the fact that her extension was already resting in a cradle somewhere deep inside the building.
Wait.
Somewhere deep inside the building.
I looked at the reader phone and read the extension.
4912.
I ran around the desk, grabbed my address book and looked through the various numbers.
4912. Henri Manschingloss. We still hadn’t changed the directory to reflect his insistence that he was now a single-named celebrity.
I dialled.
“Manschingloss,” he said with clear irritation.
“Henri, is…”
“Manschingloss.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Manschingloss. Is Ms. Nuckeby there?”
“Why? Did you want to be rude to her some more?”
“I wasn’t rude to her.”
“Then why was she crying?”
“She was crying?”
“Actual tears. She stained my crinoline.”
“Can I speak to her, please?”
“You could. But she’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Shopping. The movies. Nude horseback riding, perhaps?” He paused. Waiting for a laugh I suppose. It didn’t come. Not from my end. “Home, I would imagine,” he continued. “She’s a good model you know. Dedicated and professional. Not like some of the prima donna flakes we usually get around here. You could have forgiven her.”
“Forgiven her what?”
“The topless thing! It wasn’t her fault she walked in wearing only half an outfit. I was fixing a stay. She didn’t even know there was a top. Sometimes there isn’t you know.”
“I do know. Of course I know. Our designs are sometimes barely even clothes.”
“My designs are more than clothes.”
The mounting tension in his voice thickened the air around me and ate at my life force like some evil Star Trek vampire alien. A really ugly, cheap-looking one from the original series.
“Of course they are, Hen…Manschingloss,” I said. “They’re beyond all, verbal description. But back to Ms. Nuckeby. She was upset because…” I found it hard to believe. “…because she was topless?”
“Why else?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “Lots of reasons, I suppose. None of them litigious. Perhaps she didn’t like the room, or Mrs. Abrososa, or…”
“…your preference for fucking plastic?”
Okay, that hurt.
“Really, Corky. Water bottles? Ugly men with no fashion sense? God knows what else. There are other options you know,” he said with significance.
“I keep telling you, I’m straight.”
“I know. You keep telling me,” he said seductively. “The closet is a lonely place, Corky.”
“The water bottle thing happened because of my reaction to Ms. Nuckeby.”
He paused, apparently confused. “What reaction?”
“The…you know…the erection reaction.”
“You got an erection because of a girl?”
“Yes, because of a girl!”
“Wow. I figured you were thinking about me. Or Mervin.”
“I—am—straight!”
“Since when?”
“Since always!”
“Then what about that video?”
“You’ve seen the video?”
“It’s on my desktop right now. I watch it all the time.”
I heard him click something with a computer mouse and pause while he absorbed.
“That video is not allowed on company property.”
“You did this, and you claim to be straight.”
“I’d been drinking!”
“Alcohol reduces inhibitions, Corky. It doesn’t change your orientation.”
“I thought he was a girl!”
“He has a beard.”
“I’m straight, I’m straight, I’m straight! Can we get back to Ms. Nuckeby?”
“You got an erection because of a girl—then made her stay and watch you do the nasty to a water bottle?” He paused and considered it. “She should sue.”
“No, she shouldn’t,” I said, my voice squeaking as a life of potential moneylessness flashed before me like an independent film with big name actors about ugly, drunken, mean people; the ‘arty’ kind of movie everyone thinks is ‘brilliant’, and ‘moving’, and a ‘surefire winner’ because they don’t actually have to live it.
Then, finally, something in his answers seeped through the porridge I like to call a brain.
“Is that why she called?” I asked, choking on the words. “To sue?”
“What, Wisper? No! She called because she was afraid she had done something wrong by walking in mostly naked. She was afraid she’d get fired. I tried to tell her that if she could make a homosexual hard, she should be extremely proud. But maybe not so much.”
“Uuumm. Manschingloss. Does she think I’m gay?”
“Everyone thinks you’re gay. There’s video, remember?”
“I thought he was a girl!”
“And you claim a pretty thing like Wisper got you hard. Can you understand our confusion?”
“I was drunk!”
“In the Viewing Room?”
“In Mervin’s locker! I…” Suddenly something hit me. “Wait a minute. Did you show her the video?” I asked, humiliated, clasping my hands over my face and saying a silent prayer that even Manschingloss could never be that thoughtless.
“Of course I showed it to her.”
“Of course you did. So she thinks I’m gay. And that I like hairy men. And that I’m going to fire her.”
“Boy, does she. Which is good. Otherwise she’d sue.”
I considered what he’d said and realized he was probably right. She would never want to go to court and have it on the public record that the idiot who could mistake a hairy man for a woman—even when drunk—had become sexually aroused by her. I suppose I should have left well enough alone at that point, but I really have no common sense.
“How can I get in touch with her?” I asked.
“Why?”
“I need to talk to her.”
“About what?”
Good question.
“Do you have her number?” I asked.
“What am I? HR?”
Then I heard horrifyingly familiar, intimate moaning and slurping sounds in the background.
“Sooo.” Manschingloss asked, clearly distracted. “You’re not gay?”
I hung up and called HR. They had no home phone number for Ms. Nuckeby. She had come to them through one of the smaller agencies outside the city, and they wanted me to remind her, when next I saw her, that she still hadn’t given them her tax ID number. I made a mental note to do so, filed it under ‘Things To Promptly Forget’ and hung up, very frustrated, in more ways than one. I was about to call Manschingloss and fire him just because he used crinoline, when a nagging thought in the back of my brain bitch-slapped me.
Manschingloss was two floors above me. I could still reach Ms. Nuckeby before she escaped the building.
I raced for the doors of my office, threw them open and ran out into the usual madness beyond: secretaries, designers, seamstresses, delivery men, all of whom gasped and screamed because I was still naked from the waist down.
I ran back into my office and slammed the door behind me. Even more frustrated I began pacing, which only added injury to insult because all my thinking about the potential nearness of Ms. Nuckeby had brought the little general to attention again, and it kept bumping objects, getting caught in things and knocking breakables off my desk. It was like it had a mind of its own and was trying to do it, the little prick.
Heh. Funny. I didn’t mean to do that.
I was just about to call security and have Ms. Nuckeby physically restrained from leaving the building when Grandfather burst in, an apoplectic Yosemite Sam in a tailored business suit with a face like a cherry red, out-of-tune piano.
“What’s this I hear about you fucking a water bottle in public?” he yelled, not really asking—other than rhetorically.
“It’s not…”
“Is it true you performed some kind of sordid sex act in front of one of our models?”
“Sordid? Nooooo… ”
“Trying to impress some young hottie who’s modeling for us?”
“Trying to impress? If I were endeavoring to impress some ‘young hottie’ as you so eloquently put it…”
“’Endeavoring?’ ‘Eloquently?’ Speak English, you damned re-tard! This is what I get for sending you to Oxland.”
“Oxford.”
“Shut up! I gave you this job because you were the one person I thought I could trust not to cross the line! You know: The line!”
“I am aware of the line,” I said, staring at him and seething a bit myself. The only reason he thought he could trust me with the models was because he—and everyone else in the company, apparently—still thought I was a homosexual. Or at least bisexual with a leaning toward men. Damned Miller Lite. “And I haven’t crossed any…”
“Oh, you’re a lawyer now, are you?”
I didn’t answer. He knew I wasn’t. Or was fairly certain. He was never really clear on exactly what I’d achieved at ‘Oxland’.
“We can’t afford another lawsuit, Corcharan. I made that clear when I gave you the job, and I thought that you—of all the family members available, including that damned, bush-diver you call a sister—could control yourself!”
“I have it on good authority she isn’t planning to sue. And until now, I think I’ve controlled myself quite admirably considering the circumstances, thank you very…”
“So you’ve been good up till now, and you figured it was the perfect time to start sticking your dick into water bottles…”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!”
“…in some sordid, attempt at foreplay?”
“Foreplay?”
“You’re not intending to date her, are you?”
“What? Date her? I’d be lucky if she could think of my name without laughing, let alone…”
“As a beard, or something?”
“I am not a homosex…”
“Lawsuits are one thing. It’s to be expected when you’re rich, though we’d obviously prefer to avoid it. But dating? Potentially marrying away significant portions of the family fortune to a commoner just to hide your perversions? You know the rule!”
I choked. The ‘rule’ was the only thing that thus far had managed to keep my oversexed family truly in line. We all knew the rule: ‘Date outside the accepted, social circle of the equally rich,’ and earn instant disinheritance. Immediate pauperdom’. “I know the rule. I would never…”
“I’d also hate to lose this model. I hear she’s good. Professional. Not like the prima donnas and flakes we usually get.”
I squinted at him, wondering. That was almost exactly what Manschingloss had said just moments ago. “Were you in the room when I called Henri…”
“Manschingloss.”
“…Manschingloss? Because he said something…”
“I was trying to sort out your nonsense before it went legal!”
He said ‘legal’ as if he were saying ‘nuclear’. Or ‘nuke-yular’ if you’re from Texas.
“Were you in the room?”
“Waiting outside. I met with this Nuckeby girl as she was coming out. She’s a real looker. I can understand how you’d falter—even outside your own preference.”
“It’s not outside my preference…”
“All right, outside your ‘genetic determination’ then. Your ‘sexual orientation’. ‘Need for speed’. Whatever the PeeVee term for it is these days.”
“P.C. term.”
“Shut up. You couldn’t help yourself. I saw her. I understand that. She’s damned attractive; the kind of girl who could turn a man such as yourself, if only for a while. So I had to make certain she wasn’t going to involve lawyers. Fortunately for you…”
He stopped cold. He was no longer aware of me, as a whole, but was instead staring down with a deeply frightened expression at my…er…‘be fruitful, and multiplier’. Pale, lips quivering, eyes expanding madly like Peeps in a microwave (try it. It’s fun). I adjusted my hands to cover my ‘Ballpark Frank’ and Grandfather ratcheted his attention away from those ‘plump-when-you-cook-‘em’ loins back up to my face, and seethed, rather spectacularly, for several seconds.
“What the hell is wrong with your head?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“The water bottle soaked my pants so Mrs. Abrososa…“
He closed his eyes as if in pain and held up a hand to stop me from going further. “Mrs. Abrososa? I can’t hear this. Now you’ve involved Agrapanthila? I knew her husband. We were friends. He was a pious man, offended by the very notion of sex.”
Unlikely, I thought, with twelve kids. But I let it go.
Older generations have an interesting gift for compartmentalizing their sexuality away from their real lives, honestly seeming to believe themselves sexless and disinterested—as if just saying so makes it true—often in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Of course, counter to this fact, Mrs. Abrososa had apparently reached a greater comfort level with her own—suddenly, images of my elderly secretary monkey-loving her wrinkled, dead husband exploded into my brain, and I had to steady myself against the desk.
“Armando Abrososa was not the kind of man who would approve of you parading your wood around in front of his beloved wife, Corky. Hell, no one would! ESPECIALLY OUR LAWYERS!”
“Mrs. Abrososa offered to dry my pants,” I said, still weaving a bit, but I managing to banish most thoughts of my elderly, rutting secretary. “And the water bottle was an accident. It fell on me…”
“…and you sat there with your dick in it, then made the Nuckeby girl stand around and watch you.”
He made it sound filthy. A lawyer would likely do the same. I wilted. Most of me anyway. I suppose it was kind of filthy. What the hell was wrong with me?
Grandfather rubbed his temples and opened his mouth as if hoping to expel demons.
“This ‘sexual harassment’ bullshit is going to be the death of me,” he said quietly. “No more, you understand? I need this model for the show next week a lot more than I need someone to take notes on clothing designs,” he said pointedly. “You get me?”
I got him. And seeing that I had, he gestured toward my family tree as if it were diseased.
“So, if you want to keep your money, your house, and your cushy ride on the Wopplesdown family gravy train, you will learn—like the rest of this oversexed family—to squelch your urges, and keep that thing where it belongs—under at least two layers of clothing!”
I lowered my head and spoke softly. “I’m sorry.”
“And until you can, you are to come nowhere near this office—or that model! In fact, I never want you to see that model again! Ever! Even in your imagination!”
He paused a moment to let the hot lava in his veins distribute itself evenly.
“Now, take the week off,” he said. “Take two! And before you leave today, Human Resources has a video. I want you to get a copy and watch it—repeatedly—and don’t come back to Wopplesdown Struts or its affiliates until you can quote it back to me, verbatim. You don’t have to believe it—lord knows I don’t—but know it! And if you ever come back to a job, here—any job…”