Marketing Beef

  “You need something?” Dillon asked. He was next in line.

  “Oh, no. I’m good.” You’re a fool. Control yourself.

  Dillon ordered. He reached into his back pocket to get out his wallet and then into his front pocket for change. My mind flashed to a naughty image of what might be in those pants. Don’t let your meat loaf. I looked down at my crotch and crossed my legs. I was at full mast again.

  “Hey, Evan,” Dillon said. “You don’t happen to have an extra one, do you?”

  “Um.”

  He stood there waiting. The guy behind him looked at his watch.

  The cashier put down two coffees and Dillon took them.

  Two coffees?

  She put out some sort of pastry.

  “You mind?” Dillon said with a flick of his head, motioning me to come over.

  With the palm of my hand, I pushed my erection down, wincing. I tried to confine it against my inner thigh, tucked away as best I could. This is the height of embarrassment.

  I got up, staying bent at the waist, and winced again.

  Dillon met me halfway. “Thanks, man.”

  I handed him a one from my wallet, took a coffee, and walked, bonobo-like, back to the table.

  “You all right?” he asked as I sat down.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. “Oh, just hurt my back a little.”

  “Oh, dude, sorry. That sucks.” He went back to the counter, grabbed the pastry, and rejoined me at the table.

  Dead nuns, dead nuns, dead nuns.

  “I got you a refresh. I thought you’d like a little more caffeine,” he said.

  I couldn’t look him in the eye. “Well, thank you,” I said to his shoulder. “You didn’t have to.”

  He looked behind him, where I had been staring, and then back at me. “But I still owe you a beer. A promise is a promise.”

  I snickered nervously. “All right.” Oh my God. You’re a fucking case. No wonder you’re single.

  He cut the pastry—a muffin of sorts—in half, took one and pushed the plate toward me. “Have some.”

  I held up a hand. “Oh, no. I’m good.”

  He leaned his head back and dropped a few granola crumbs he had pulled off the top of the muffin into his mouth. He looked back at me. “I’m sorry.” He covered his mouth with the back of his hand. “I haven’t eaten all day. I’m ravenous.”

  “That’s fine.” Was I staring again?

  “You avoid empty calories. Good man. Now I know how you keep your hot…” He turned red, cleared his throat and looked down. He pinched off some more muffin. “Now I know how you keep your fit body.”

  He just said I was hot.

  There was an awkward silence.

  I’m hot?

  “So what are you reading?” he asked and pulled the bonobo book from my table.

  Oh God! “Oh, nothing. That stack was here when I sat down.”

  He looked over at me and frowned. “You come to a bookstore and don’t look at books?”

  I grabbed the journal and held it up. “I was here for a journal and a cup of coffee.”

  He nodded. “So you’re a writer?” He pulled the plate closer to him.

  “Not really. I just use it for record keeping.” I picked at the cardboard that the journal was wrapped in. I wasn’t good with this casual conversation thing, and this was getting a little too personal.

  He leaned back in his chair. I could see his nipples protruding through his shirt. He patted his stomach. “I don’t mean to be scoffing down in front of you.” He pushed his plate away. “It’s very rude.”

  “No, it’s not.” I took a piece of his muffin and ate it.

  He smiled and wiped his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m glad I came.”

  ****

  When I got home, I whipped off my shirt and stripped out of my jeans. I cranked out fifty pushups, did five minutes of planks, and a round of body extensions, before going back to another set of pushups. Vigorous exercise helped me burn off excess energy.

  “One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, four…!” I collapsed. I rolled over onto my back—on the living room floor—and stared up at the ceiling trying to catch my breath.

  After Dillon and I had sat in silence at Barnes & Noble for a while, he said he had to go off and meet some buddies for a bite to eat at what sounded like a trendy bistro on the Waterfront in Boston. I had told him my Saturday night plans were to coordinate a camping trip to Maine. Loser. But it was really just a night alone deciding which package to select from the L.L. Bean website.

  Secretly, I had been hoping Dillon was going to ask me to join him and his friends. Not that I would have gone. I knew myself. I would have used the camping trip research—or some other lame excuse—to avoid going. But I still wanted him to ask.

  I got up from the living room floor and grabbed my T-shirt. I was soaked and wiped the perspiration from my underarms. I hadn’t turned on the air conditioner. The heat was good for sweating out any toxins. I threw the shirt in the hamper. “I need a shower.”

  Funny thing about living alone, you talk to yourself more.

  As a kid, I considered myself more outgoing. Then my mother died of breast cancer when I was twelve. My dad was not much of a talker to begin with, but after her death he fell into a depression. He’d leave early in the morning to work the assembly line at the Ford plant, come home late, eat, and then go to bed. Those were pretty much my teenage years.

  I turned on the shower and stepped out of my boxer briefs. As the room filled with steam, I went over to the mirror and looked at myself.

  “Dillon Deiss, would you ever want a boyfriend like me?” I covered my birthmark, as best I could, using two hands. “I’m not bad looking. Am I?” The wine-stain mark spanned part of my chest and traversed underneath my left side.

  “You should be lucky it’s not on your face,” my mother used to say. “Some kids can’t hide theirs under a shirt.”

  I went over to the toilet, peed, flushed, and stepped inside the shower. The hot water felt good on my sore muscles. “Not a bad workout,” I said and rubbed my abs.

  The Pretenders’ “Middle of the Road” came to mind. I had played it in the car on the way home. The Pretenders were my favorite band. I began to sing while I lathered up with a bar of the oatmeal soap I picked up at Whole Foods. When I started washing my groin, Dillon came to mind and soon my erection returned.

  “Again,” I said and looked down at it. “Well, it has been a while. Maybe if you…you know…you’ll stop popping wood at the thought of a bulge in a pair of khaki shorts.”

  I had one hand against the cold tile and the other…well, down there. It felt so good; I couldn’t stop. I tried to—just a few little tugs and hold back—but I just couldn’t. Not anymore.

  The next thing I knew, I was in an all-out fervor. My knees began to quiver. The water sprayed against my erection and sent a shiver up my spine.

  “OH GOD.”

  I continued. Part of me wanted to stop, but it felt too good, and my hand just took over. It was a blur. “Stop, stop.”

  I felt the wave. I was too late. I screamed. My knees buckled, and I fell onto the shower’s tiled floor.

  I leaned forward and let the water pulse against my shoulder blades. My semen washed down the drain. “Jesus Christ.” I sat back and let the spray hit my chest, trying to catch my breath. “Dillon.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Four

  The next day, as the rain came down in sideways sheets, I planned out the rest of my camping trip to Little Point, Maine—for a kayak and camping adventure given by L.L. Bean.

  “Yeah, next weekend,” I said, into the phone, to Ron. He and I had come to know each other from previous L.L. Bean trips.

  He told me he had booked the same weekend, and started on about his investment firm. Both of us being in finance was something else we had in common. I think one of the reasons I connected with him was because I felt I could talk shop withou
t needing to get too personal. Yet he had this way of pulling things out of me.

  I looked out from my screened porch while he went on about a recent stock run for Ogle Inc. The lake was barely visible through the rain. “Yeah, I still got about half the shares I bought back in 2002. They’ve seen a good run lately.”

  “Good?” he said. “’Hundred fifty percent is more than good.”

  Years ago, before college even, I received a small inheritance from my grandmother, and I invested it in the market.

  In a moment of weakness, I had shared this with Ron. He would sometimes bug me for information on solid growth stock and was forever trying to calculate my net worth. “You a millionaire yet?”

  “Hardly,” I said and changed the subject. “So I’m going up Friday night after work.” I leaned up against my porch’s wooden column. I could smell the ozone in the air. “I should get to Little Point around eight.”

  “I’ll stake out a spot for our tents,” he said. His voice sputtered from having me on speaker in his car. “I’m leaving work early and should be there by five.” Ron lived in New Hampshire and was closer to the site.

  While our friendship had been platonic, last summer when we had camped together things got a little heated. We had had a few beers at Woody’s, the tavern near the campsite. It was our last night camping. A rainstorm came through, and Ron’s tent sprung a leak. He wound up staying with me. I was in a spell of self-inflicted abstinence and was apparently pent-up. One thing led to another, and we wound up masturbating together, each of us in our own sleeping bag.

  He got naked, pulling off his shirt and shorts, and waving his wand about for me to see. “So fucking horny,” he had said.

  We popped off together in a series of masculine grunts and groans.

  I, of course, had kept my shirt on and made a mess of it. Afterward, I had to change it discreetly in the dark. Gary has been the only one to see me completely naked.

  While I’ve never really been one to mess around much, that one time in the tent, was just that.

  Well, until the next morning…

  Around five a.m., it got really cold outside, and he climbed inside my sleeping bag. The next thing I knew I was on top of him, fucking like I was in a remake of Brokeback Mountain.

  Even though I enjoyed it—he had a solid body from years of rock climbing and felt good pinned underneath me—I wasn’t one to have sex without emotion, but for whatever reason my guard had been down.

  Ron and I haven’t talked much about it. But I think he too felt it was a no-strings-attached biff. “God, I needed that,” he said when I rolled off him. “Thanks,” he added.

  It was like I had let him borrow a power tool or something. I felt a little guilty. “You’re welcome.”

  Even though, as of late, I’ve been as horny as a sex addict at a porn convention, I’m hoping this time his tent is waterproof. I think we work better as just camping buddies.

  “The weather is supposed to be nice,” he said, to which I concurred. We said our goodbyes and hung up.

  ****

  Since it was raining, and I didn’t have much to do indoors, I decided to go to the office. It would be quiet, and I’d be able to catch up on some reports.

  The wipers on my Explorer were on full speed when I pulled into the parking lot. “Glad I didn’t choose this weekend to go to Maine,” I said, as I pulled in next to an Accord, the only other car in the lot. I got out and ran to the door of the building.

  Surprisingly, I didn’t need my badge to get in. I wiped my feet on the rug in the lobby and headed for the Finance section.

  “It’s in the bag. Not a problem.” I heard a voice say from the second floor’s walkway that overlooked the lobby’s courtyard. “The media’s going to have a frenzy with this thing.”

  I heard the elevator door open and tried to catch a glimpse of the speaker, but the voice trailed off. “Who the hell was that?” I shrugged my shoulders and went through my department.

  When I got to my desk, I flipped on my computer and started to settle in. A clap of thunder roared overhead. “Definitely glad I didn’t go camping this weekend. Next weekend will be so much—”

  My computer wouldn’t log me in.

  “Hmm.” I tried my password again. “Account does not exist. Huh?” I typed over my username to make sure I had had it right, entered my password again and hit enter. “What the…?”

  I picked up the phone to dial the help desk but there was no dial tone. I huffed. “Great. Must be the weather.” I spun my chair around, opened my file cabinet drawer, and took out a hard copy of my report. “Back to ancient times,” I said and sat reviewing it with my mechanical pencil and a calculator.

  After an hour, I stood up and stretched. My abs were killing me from the prior day’s workout. I bent backwards and winced in pain. The lights went out. “Oh, come on!” It was late afternoon, so it wasn’t really dark inside, but with the storm going on outside I at least needed my overhead light in order to go over the EBITDA report. “All right, this is just a waste of—”

  A loud bang came from what sounded like the other side of the wall in front and to the right of me—which was where the IT department kept their servers. I started to walk toward the sound, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a small fleet of black SUVs pull into the parking lot.

  I walked over to the window. “What the hell is going on?” They pulled up front and parked in the handicap spots and got out. “The FBI?”

  ****

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know what happened,” I said to the man who had showed me his badge and made sure the lights went back on.

  “And you’re the head accountant?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m not the head accountant, but I am an accountant.” My stomach felt queasy. I was nervous, even though I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Okay, Mr. McCormick. Just stay there.” I was sitting at a table by the Danvers printer.

  The door to the department opened. Mr. Whitfield walked in and, behind him, Bill—the Vice President of Finance. My boss.

  I stood up.

  My boss looked at me. “Evan. What are you doing here?”

  “Uh, I just came in to run the EBITDA report.”

  He shook his head.

  I picked at my fingernail. “What’s going—”

  The FBI officer, a tall man with a five o’clock shadow, was suddenly by my side. “Let’s keep it down, Mr. McCormick.”

  A couple of other officers came over. They huddled in discussion and then brought Whitfield, my boss, and me into a conference room—the one by the door, we used to prepare for board meetings. They left us alone, with a guard at the door, and went back to moving file cabinets about and unplugging more computers.

  Mr. Whitfield’s face was white. My boss avoided eye contact.

  I stood up and started pacing. I looked out the window and into the department. “Does this have anything to do with—?”

  “Shh,” said Bill. “The place is probably bugged.”

  Mr. Whitfield cleared his throat. “Bill, you’re going to be the death of me.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Five

  “Evan, this place is beautiful. I feel like I stepped into Pottery Barn,” said Madeline when she walked into my house. “I didn’t know you had such flair.”

  I scratched the back of my neck.

  Dillon looked around. “Wow, it is nice.”

  “Well, it is Pottery Barn furniture,” I admitted. “But I got it at an estate sale—nearly furnished the whole house for the price of what that leather couch,” I pointed to the living room, “would go for at retail.”

  Dillon shook his head. “Leave it to the finance guy to bargain hunt.”

  While the rainstorm had passed Monday morning, I knew Thoroughbred would be closed, but it felt weird to not at least show up at my usual time.

  Sure enough, the doors had chains around the handles. There were a couple of news crews, and the televisi
on was abuzz with talks about the Ponzi scheme along the North Shore. Whitfield and my boss were arrested. I was mentioned as an “unnamed party that was released and had just happened to come in on a Sunday to catch up on work.”

  Dillon sat down on my leather couch. “It must have been nice living so close to the office.” And it had been. Many days I would walk, bike, or jog to work.

  Peter, Dillon’s buddy from Corridor Marketing, came to the door with a coffee-box from Dunkin’ Donuts and behind him was Barry from Sales, carrying bagels. “Nice digs,” Peter said, and put the coffee on my granite island.

  I felt a little strange having so many people at my house. In the five years I had lived there, it had never seen so many visitors. I went to the kitchen, while my colleagues admired my little two-bedroom, two-bath home.

  As I rummaged through the cabinets for some plates and napkins, I felt the need to apologize for my house’s rich appearance. “I bought it at the right time. It was a foreclosure. The previous owner had put in the granite. It just needed some finishing touches.”

  Dillon and Madeline were in the guest bath admiring the décor. Peter opened the coffee and took the first pour, while Barry opened the bagels.

  I put down some plates on the island.

  Barry pulled apart a sesame bagel. “I would have put this on my expense account but that’s been ceased.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind chipping in,” I said.

  Barry took a bite of his bagel and put up a hand. “No, no.” He spoke with his mouth full.

  Madeline walked up with Dillon behind her. “Well, you’ve certainly done well for yourself, Evan,” she said and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  “Thank you.”

  Barry licked cream cheese from his finger. “Who would have thought Whitfield and Cheevers were scamming people.” He shook his head. The buttons of his blue shirt looked as if they were going to pop.

  Madeline stepped closer to me as Dillon grabbed a cup and started to pour. “These guys are bigwigs. You’d think they’d be smarter than to get involved in something like this.”

  “Well, we don’t know the extent of their involvement,” I reasoned. I didn’t want to get into the Firkins Fiduciary Fund and took the cup of coffee Dillon poured and handed to me. “Thank you.” I leaned against the countertop.