Chapter 6
On that crisp late May evening the well-wishers at The Sterling who had gathered to celebrate the four boys’ births came away with particular, mostly unique, perspectives on why Sterling had run afoul of the law. Various versions of the events indicate different speculative approaches, if not biases; even the mere facts are in dispute. Several of the young girls, who had arrived in twos and threes without plus ones, could have sworn, and would certainly willingly do so if required in court, that Sterling was mistreated, indeed manhandled. His very human rights had been trod upon no worse than if he had lived in a communist dictatorship, the People’s Republic of Carolina. Had the young cop Ben been serially watching too much TV? Had Fox or the CW written his instruction manual? These girls had captured the events on their phones and were forwarding the videos to their friends via the usual channels, evidence of the alleged police brutality. Others in the crowd had viewed the proceedings from a slightly different angle. Why had the boy acted like he was on the FBI’s most wanted list or in one of COPS’ staged encounters? They would contend that he had provoked the scuffle with the young policeman who, inexperienced with perps of Sterling’s statue – a tough, disrespectful son of a cop who knew the tricks of the trade – had been baited by a word or a flick of the elbow into overacting, rather than being able to bate his response, something a more seasoned policeman would have done. Same event; different takes. Mutually exclusive or potentially inclusive? However the truth unfolded – if indeed truth ever exists – it was nevertheless certain that various narratives were being explored and transmitted digitally. This was far from unusual as Sterling’s life itself was little more than a collection of often conflicting narratives. Tweets from downstairs:
@SlimSally 8:32 p.m.: Arrogant U resists cop. Decks him. Blood. Vaney3 defend. Soooooooo cute. Need @ 4 Vaney.
@MaryJoYutt 8:32 p.m.: Indian and lady cop rescue whitey cop. Baton Sterl in head. Unconscious. Dragged to car. Vaney 3 heros.
@EllenGGirl 8:32 p.m.: hunk cop decks U. Like totally unprovoked!!!! bloody nose. U to ground. 3vaney rescu triplet heros bffs lol
@BBuffeau 8:33 p.m.: Anyone know a good lawyer for U? 3 blond singers got in the way.
@DutchSWm 8:34 p.m.: Give to Sterling’s legal defense fund. Via PayPal #SmileyBoy
@SlimSally 8:34 p.m.: DM DutchSWm Is no contribution 2 small? Can U share Vaney contact detail? They into female?
@JCZVaney1 8:34 p.m.: Illegal music downloads get you arrested. Video of Sterly U arrest at https://www.TheVaneys.com/promotion. Lord bless Sterly U.
@JCZVaney2 8:34 p.m.: Buy our album. https://www.apple.com/itunes/Vaney3 God loves all sinners, even music pirates. We tried to save him.
@ JCZVaney3 8:34 p.m.: hot flash: Sterling U memorial fundraising concert. Follow our blog: https://www.TheVaney3.com/blog
@JCZVaney2 8:34 p.m.: DM @JakeConnorZackVaney1 Dude. Slimsally chick hot 4 u. u want to fk it or should I? Lord bless.
@JCZVaney3 8:35 p.m.: DM @JakeConnorZackVaney2 Dude. My turn but go4it. Lord bless.
The Trips were pretty certain why Sterling had been arrested. He was a music pirate, little different from a common thief who, when invited to dinner, steals bread off your very own table when your backs are turned. Sterling deserved to be smote down. On the matter of copyright law and earned royalties, the brothers were adamant. The thief U now had to pay the consequences.
The dynamic trio knew that Sterling was a formidable hacker. File sharing was his second nature. They also knew that Sterling was familiar with their repertoire, too familiar not to have copies. He was forever quoting their very words back to them, poking fun at their syntax, grammar, rhymes, and alleging the existence of a hypocrisy between their lyrics and their lifestyle. Sterling had admitted that he knew by heart the lyrics to every track they had recorded. Yet he boasted he had never bought their CDs, nor would he ever buy their CDs. On his last visit, for Christmas dinner, he had ranted:
“Let your god send locusts, scare the bejeezus out of me with thunder and hail, turn the great Mississippi into blood. Bring on the boils, frogs, lice, mosquitoes, cockroaches. Cut out the lights. Murder my firstborn. Still, I’ll not buy your fuckin’ CDs.”
They had often warned the blasphemer not to curse God even in his heart. All that their admonition produced now was a characteristic “Fuck you, from my heart.” And then he had beaten them up, a well-trained boxer, for no apparent reason, taking full advantage of the three muscle-challenged look-alikes. For that abuse alone he deserved to be smote down. Tonight, with Sterling’s arrest, God had spoken. They had been revenged. And the ingrate hadn’t even thanked them for saving him from a drug bust.
The boy’s aged parents were upstairs sipping tea in a sub-group that included Sterling’s grandparents and Sara’s parents at 8:32 P.M. when the arrest had gone down. Mr. and Mrs. Vaney had not personally witnessed the involvement of their sons in this sordid affair, but everyone confirmed that their boys had played the heroes, which is nothing less than the parents expected. Every night they thanked God for His gift of such a Son. Over the years they had begun to consider the triplets as a single unit and although they followed convention and used the plural pronouns they-them-their, the singular counterparts would have sufficed. Even after seventeen years there was no differentiating between sons; that had made them as easy as pie to raise. As the mother explained, you just have to think of a single son with a large appetite, who uses a lot of toothpaste and toilet paper and keeps the washer-dryer busy 24/7 and you have Jake-Connor-Zack Vaney. Especially at this very moment they thanked the Lord that their son had decided to pay back his Maker by sacrificing his entire life to Christian rock rather than getting arrested as a criminal of some sort. They loved Catherine and Pandely; they had known them and her parents since they had first arrived in Durham. As for their little Sterling – tarnished sterling, they would joke to each other – he was always such a trouble maker. Kate and Pan deserved better, but the Vaneys would never say that to their faces. You never share with friends anything critical of their children, not if you want to remain friends for long. The Eumorfopouloses had planted little Sterling on a wet cement pedestal right from the gitgo. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be able to dislodge the pint-sized egghead. Yes, they had a lot to thank God for. Some people (agnostics and atheists) attributed miraculous birth to techniques such as in vitro fertilization, but the Vaneys knew that not to be the case. Ovulation induction, ejaculation into a cup (most embarrassing for Mr. Vaney), and multiple embryo transfer in the treatment of subfertility are just techniques. They may move things along when there seems to be so little hope, but one cannot forget that God acts in mysterious ways. It was Vaney Faith, not the petri dish, that produced their bundle of joys. Their friends Catherine and Pandely have never thought much of organized religion, but in their heart of hearts they do share with the Vaneys a belief in a Supreme Being, responsible for each and every one of us. Sterly, according to their own sons, seems to lack even that tad of Faith. They pity their friends, while at the same time they are relieved that the four babies didn’t get mixed up in the newborn nursery room. It’s not for nothing that there’s safety in numbers and different colored bracelets.
The parent Vaneys had cell phones, a business necessity. But neither they nor the other parents were Twittering. Some of the mothers had discovered Twitter and text-messaging in the past several years, but almost everybody upstairs preferred email, the former straight-forward technology remained their telegraph of choice. That the parents had picked up the discarded habits of their children should come as no surprise. It was not by happenstance that the children below had nudged their parents into this 21st Century technology. The children had anticipated a phenomenon that it would take researchers yet another year to confirm: that parents who occupied themselves with handheld devices pay less attention to their own children. A study that would come out
in autumn 2010 was presented in a dramatic bar graph in the New York Times. Researches had studied Chicago parents including Sharmila Rao Thakkar, a mother who described herself as a “good multi-tasker.” Over the course of the research Ms. Thakkar had spoken 3,088 words to her child when her smartphone was switched off, but only 1,454 words when it was on. The same phenomenon held true for most other Chicago parents in the study. Often children spot trends much sooner that these trends are verified by academics. Thus, it was not surprising that some of Sterling’s friends had convinced their mothers to buy a BlackBerry or iPhone as a gift for their husbands, or had convinced their fathers to give their wives such a present. In several cases a couple had exchanged identical boxes from the local Apple Store last Christmas morning, to their children’s delight. Not only did smartphone enablement lower parent-child verbal exchange rates, as the study showed, but there was an added benefit: less communication between parents, which the study did not pick up on, although the children knew this also to be true. And, as all children know, when parents don’t communicate with each other, it’s the children who benefit the most. Children can either play one adult off the other (as with separated parents or those in the pre-divorce stage looking to score points with their children) or as in a mildly dysfunctional household the parents merely disengage from their children, leaving the latter to their own handheld devices. Fortunately, the US has not yet begun to imitate Japan, where many parents and children prefer to communicate primarily through their PDAs, texting each other frequently throughout the day. Japanese adults and children alike utilize, rather than avoid, the technology. For now, however, American parents had not explored the potential of these devices for controlling their offspring (save for the GPS monitoring capability put in the phones of smaller children). At the moment children have the upper hand in this war; it is a rare case where the kid shares his or her Facebook or MySpace page with a parent, and rarer still when the parent asks to be friended.
The observer might have thought that John Dewey Davis was oblivious to Sterling’s arrest. He seemed so enthralled with his tablet computer, tapping his foot in three-beat sequences and bending from the waist in a slight bobbing motion. On the surface he was preoccupied with solving his mathematical puzzle, and thus he appeared to be unaware of what was happening a few yards away. “Not the case; not the case; not the case,” would have been John Dewey’s reply if it had wished to verbalize a response to the insult suggesting he was clueless. Behavior therapy had broken JD and his classmates of most of their echolalic responses; now verbal repetition usually accompanied something new – a new question to answer, a new situation to comment on, etc. – or it was used for emphasis and was thus just a characteristic of the way he communicates. Tonight’s arrest of Sterling is the type of event that could trigger his echolalia.
As his family and friends know best, JD is anything but clueless. Quite the opposite; he is quite perceptive, so much so that his siblings and parents have long accepted the reality that he is without rival the most perceptive member of the family. It was he, wasn’t it, who was the first family member to notice that his siblings had lost their virginities, on separate occasions, of course. Using whatever clues he had assembled, JD commented to both siblings on the occasion of this life event. In fact he had waited up past his normal bedtime each time to inform them “You got laid; you got laid; you got laid.” The siblings’ responses were identical: immediate denial, followed first by wrath, then admission, and finally an apology. His sister had complained: “What type of autistic are you?” In the end both James and his sister had accepted that their little brother had merely stated a fact, had meant no harm and had simply told the truth, in his own fashion. He should not be held accountable for being socially graceless; tackless was what JD was; unfortunately he seemed always to be within their parents’ earshot when he announced to the world his siblings’ adventures and misadventures.
Granted, his non-verbal repetitive motions, clinically diagnosed as stereotypic movement disorder, makes him appear feeble-minded to people who know little about autism, which is to say the public at large, including sadly some families with autistic children. As with echolalia the so-called stereotypies do not relate to intelligence either; bright autistics can evidence repetitive behaviors as well as stupid autistics. As he had aged, JD has dispensed with his earlier habits such as hand waving, teeth grinding and nail biting, but the rocking movements remain, especially at times of stress. JD’s doctors were of two minds on why he manifested this stimming (for self-stimulation), which in his case are fortunately never self-injurious. On the one hand, for children with an understimulated nervous system, repetition may provide needed nervous system arousal, releasing beta-endorphins. For hypersensitive people, in contrast, it may provide a “norming” effect, allowing the person to control a specific part of the world that they perceive through their senses; it is thus a soothing behavior.
As Sterling was being driven off, JD’s bobbing had increased in intensity, and this had prompted James to get his parents. Obviously the boy was stressed out and maybe needed meds; it was only his parents who gave him medication. James took JD aside and tried to soothe him. James put his hands on his brother’s shoulder, taking advantage of the fact he is among the handful of people allowed to touch the boy.
“It’s OK, John Dewey. It’s not like TV. They don’t beat you up on the way to the station house. Whatever this is is going to blow over. Sterl will be back home tonight or tomorrow.”
The boy, nevertheless, continued to bob and tap his foot. He was working on the puzzle more and more furiously, tapping violently, giving the tablet screen a run for its money. The tablet buzzed indicating he had solved the puzzle.
“Send me a message, JD. Send Sterling a message. He’d like that.”
The parents arrived, but James motioned he has things under control. JD switched the tablet into email mode and tapped out a message, more calmly. When that was finished, James led him to the family car.
JD had sent the message without showing it to James. His email was private, even as this very private person defines privacy. The mail had been directed to Sterling:
blame me. tell the cops it was my idea. they wont dare touch me.
blame me. tell the cops it was my idea. they wont dare touch me.
blame me. tell the cops it was my idea. they wont dare touch me.
Whether the repetition was involuntary or part of JD’s sharp humor that Sterling so appreciates is something known only to JD. His message, however, does give us a clue why the boy was stressed out. For him the crime Sterl committed – correction, had been alleged to commit – was not music piracy, as the Trips thought. JD shared most of Sterling’s opinion of the blond threesome, trianalsapiens indeed. They patted JD on the head and offered “Lord Bless” as a way of condolence, their condescending way of treating morons, a strata of God’s less fortunate creations. JD had once involuntarily kicked one of them in the shins after one too many hair mussing episodes. From then on they had kept their distance. Music piracy wasn’t the issue; otherwise, every teen in the world would be in chains. No, Sterling had been caught for a white collar crime, one for which John Dewey had participated. He was quite right to offer to take the blame for Sterling because the stock trading episode had indeed been JD’s idea.
When he had first enrolled in the beta-testing project, one of the first toys he received had been a smartphone. That was in December 2006. He showed it to Sterling who on the spot had fallen in love with the handheld. In a matter of minutes, John Dewey showed off all the functions. Sterling suspected it was the new Apple product, a phone long rumored to be in the design phase, but he had no way of knowing for sure. John Dewey, however, had burrowed his way into some help files and come up with some lines of code that had accidentally made their way into the file. One of the lines of that code (which was temporarily erased from the view of the testing public but includ
ed in the file that would be activated when the phone went public) read “Copyright 2007 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.”
JD had told Sterl: “Buy now, buy low, sell high, make a bundle.”
He wasn’t sure Sterling understood so he began to repeat: “Buy now…”
“I got it the first time, John Dewey. Can I have the phone for a second?” he asked. You took something from JD without first asking at your own peril. He surrendered his phone.
Right then and there, Tuesday Dec 26th 2006, Sterling used the iPhone twice. First he accessed his Charles Schwab account. He liquidated everything and immediately bought Apple at $83 and change. Secondly he used the phone to make a phone call to William Duke Senior, advising him to buy AAPL, “all you can swallow.” Asked why, he replied simply: “A little birdie told me to.” Senior thanked him for the advice. A year and a day later APPL reached its highest price to that date, $202.96. Sterling took the capital gains, on which he had to pay little tax (Duke Senior’s bookkeeper saw to that.). He reinvested in APPL again at the beginning of December 2008, when it again had fallen to a low in the $80-$90 range. For the moment he was holding on to what he had, selling only if advised to do so for tax reasons; he wanted to buy more, if only Duke Senior would finance him. Together they would make a bundle.
Although guilt was an emotion mostly alien to John Dewey, he felt a tinge of something in his gut when Sterling was hauled away on account of the investment opportunity the former had opened the latter up to. A behavior therapist would say that was progress; Dewey would say it was just sad, though not fully understanding the meaning of the word.
Brandon Buffeau had a much different take on why his classmate (schoolmate actually since Sterling rarely attended classes) had been arrested. Brandon did not know Sterling well. The former had been at Durham Prep for only a year, arriving with his family when his mother had taken up a university position created just for her, one “which the family could not refuse.” As a junior transfer, thus, he did not have a history with Sterling. His sources of information were almost exclusively his (and Sterling’s) classmates, all of whom initially said they really liked and admired Sterling and all of whom over time dissed “The Sterling” as a reaction to the lack of respect he showed them. Almost from the first day he touched the campus, Brandon had been exposed to the myth of Sterling U. At first he thought it was only a myth which would be expected to have only the skimpiest factual basis. Gradually he understood that such a phenomenon actually existed. The classmates especially didn’t like the special treatment Sterl was always accorded, just because he helped raise the class average on test scores. Sterling was a test-taking phenomenon and that also helped produce a jealous response among his classmates. He was a real showboat, they argued, but he just did what he wanted to, only reluctantly joining required school activities, not participating in extracurricular or sports.
That Sterling was the smartest student in the school was not in dispute; that he would certainly be next year’s valedictorian was taken as a given, that he was universally envied also needed no discussion. With his straight A average Brandon, himself, thought he was slated for those accolades; he would certainly be top scholar in this, his junior, year; and he would surely win the coveted Harvard Book Award for outstanding junior. So he thought. These were certainties until you factored in The Sterling, who at end of term merely emailed the principal with the As and A+s he had obtained in his coursework at local universities. This included credit from classes he audited at Duke or the scores he obtained when he sat for AP exams (he was running out of AP exams to take); but in some cases it involved courses he created for himself, so-called independent study, in which he churned out a paper for a sponsoring teacher who, knowing less on the subject than Sterling, had little choice but to give him an A.
Sterling, both myth and reality, in Brandon’s opinion, was a total scam. He knew how to game whatever system he found himself unfortunately to be part of. Not unfortunate for Sterling but unfortunate for those who cohabited the system, a Sterling-controlled system. Brandon, himself, was not about to be so easily manipulated. He had recently had a nice chat with Sterling’s best friend, a slender gay kid named William, who seemed to be Sterling’s self-appointed PR director. William included in his laudatory babble an aside that confirmed rumors Brandon had heard at school: that Sterling was a paper hustler, specifically a term-paper ghost writer. Brandon did not have all the facts but he suspected that Sterling operated a paper-writing ring, an income producing sideline, where he would sell term papers to lazy college students – some of the best colleges have the laziest students. There are no reliable estimates of how much cheating like this occurs on American university campuses, but if someone told Brandon that thirty percent of all submitted papers were authored by someone other than the professed author, he would not be surprised. Professors, of course, could discover only cases of blatant plagiarism, by checking data bases to determine if a submitted paper was actually a resubmit, but if you actually paid someone to write an original paper on a specific subject (on a theme you had even discussed with a professor), that would indeed be difficult to detect. Brandon suspected that Sterling had not been as clever as he thought; that he had not completely covered his tracks (email exchanges, bank accounts, internet searches) or that a client had given over his name to save his own skin. Or that he had underestimated the foxiness of academics. A number of urban academic myths, likely involving some truth, abound: One professor on reading the electronic copy of a submitted paper went to the Word “properties” menu to discover the identity of the real author, not the student claiming to have written the paper. Another turned on the “track changes” function to discover such heavy editing by the author’s girlfriend that the professor apportioned half credit to each, resulting in the boy’s failure. (The faculty senate said the professor had invaded the student’s privacy – going through support files in Microsoft Word is like rummaging through one’s trash – and overturned the grade, awarding the boy a marginal pass). It is generally acknowledged among the cognoscenti: clean the file before submitting, or in the vernacular: wipe after shitting. Brandon has no idea how many laws Sterling has been breaking: trafficking in stolen property, violations of interstate commerce rules, tax evasion, corruption of a minor (Sterling himself), abetting a theft (in that the college student who had put his name on Sterling’s paper had in that very deed stolen intellectual property). As Brandon watched the squad car remove Sterling from his less-than-adoring public, he thought about two quotes he had learned in Chinese and Latin classes:
“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” – Don Vito Corleone, The Godfather, often misattributed to Sun-tzu (544-496 BC), The Art of War
“Verbum sapienti satis est [A word to the wise is sufficient] ” – Publius Terentius Afer aka Terence (195-159 B.C.), Phormio (III, 3, 8)
Sara had been busy replenishing canapés and serving refreshments minutes before she was alerted to the squad cars’ arrival. She had just had a run in with the Trips who she had caught pouring something from a hip flask into their cups of punch. They said it was medicinal; she suspected medicated Vodka. She likes the Trips even if they qualify as the world’s biggest hypocrites. The distance between the image they give their fans and how they live their increasingly dissolute lives grows year by year with their degeneration. On that matter Sara believes that Sterling is right on. The “wholesome threesome,” as they are often self-promoted, had gone outside for a smoke; moments later, events started unraveling. She had no idea what first to make of the commotion; Sterling’s parents were in a private conference with the arresting officers; she did not feel comfortable interfering.
The more Sara thought about it, however, the arrest was not too much of a surprise. Sterling lives on the edge. He can be pretty sneaky, artfully withholding the truth, if in a naïve sort of way, and Sara imagined that something stupid he had done had finally caught up with him. S
terling lives his life fairly simply. He is in control, period. When he is not in control, he abdicates. He disengages. Whatever is happening, even if it directly involves him, when he is not in control, he is consequently not involved. Obviously his arrest pointed out to his not having been in control in some sort of previous situation he had wrongly ignored. Like parking tickets that just pile up until one day a big fat summons falls in your lap. That, of course, is not the specific case with Sterling. First, he is a careful driver and has not gotten a ticket (except on his bicycle). And second, one of the advantages of having a cop as a father is that the son will not be ticketed by his father’s colleagues, unless first advised to do so by his father (as with the bicycle). If there is an incident, short of vehicular homicide, fellow cops would first go to the father and he would be expected to take care of it. Sara does not approve of the strap, but it serves a purpose. It helps Pandely sort things out with Sterling. Now, however, Sara is confused. Why had the police not gone first to Catherine and Pandely? Surely, this was not such a serious matter – Sterling as a sleeper terrorist, for example – that the parents had been kept out of the loop.
On one matter Sara is not confused. She knows for certain that whatever Sterling’s misbehavior, it surely involves computers. They will be the death of him, she thinks. She had had a long conversation about this with Catherine saying that the best thing that could ever happen to Sterling would be for some thief to sneak in and steal all his electronics. He needs to de-digitize, to humanize, the women concurred. Catherine blames herself for that first major blunder in child-rearing: giving her son a poisoned apple, that first wretched PDA, which instantly became the go-to parent, answering all his questions, offering him parental advice which he accepted without argument, becoming a third, preferred, nipple to suck on. From that day on Sterling became an obsessed plug-in. Like it or not, this was a character trait; and you take Sterling, the good with the bad. Sara accepts that she has to live with this quality, for trying to change Sterling – being a full time job – was not going to be her life’s agenda. She had other plans. Still, she gets annoyed from time to time. She has learned that subtlety is not a good weapon against someone of Sterling’s mettle. You go in with all guns blazing, steal his control but prevent him from disengaging. This had been her policy last night: she had set the romantic mood and the cute, sensual penguins were frolicking on the ice cubes. Sterling arrived in that sexy shirt with his hair all amiss, smelling of the manly perfume she had bought him, with his sweats hardly able to contain his enthusiasm. Then she got more than a bit pissed off when the only thing on his mind was his friggin’ iPhone. He became a bit ruffled when the iPhone was not where he always left it, on the bedside table. When it didn’t respond after he had sent himself a text from the iMac he was really confused, unable mentally to sort out the problem. Then, noticing Sara, he asked incredulously:
“Do you have my phone?”
Sara started to rise, saying: “It’s me or the phone. Your choice.” In other words, to put it coarsely, whom do you want to fuck, Sterling, me or your phone?
Sterling, to his everlasting lack of regret, fortunately, made the manly decision and put his handly out of his mind until he woke up (for real) in the morning. As for the phone Sara had actually shut it down, removed the battery so it couldn’t self activate (if it had such a feature, she was not aware) and then hidden it in the back of a bottom drawer behind a compulsive row of paperclips. That’s how she deals with the competition.
Sara’s best guess is that the incident that was causing Sterling the current grief involves hacking of one sort or another. He has a group of friends, originally from the Friday night gatherings, and several of them were very computer savvy. One in particular, Jeremiah, seems to be able to go anywhere and do anything, as long as there are “Do not Enter” signs along the way. They have used a variety of proxies for cover, routed themselves through East European servers, and stole Wi-Fi from unsuspecting downtown businesses. Passwords were only a minor roadblock; Jeremiah was forever showing some neat trapdoor or sidedoor or backdoor where he could get into the most secure system. Left alone Sterling would not take the criminal initiative; but with Jeremiah at his side, they would abandon any risk-aversion that Sterling brought to the dynamic duo. Most of this was hush-hush; Sara did not know details but she had overheard that Jeremiah had been able to program one ATM to empty itself almost on whim. She didn’t think Sterling actually participated in the crime, but he knew about it, in fact probably personally witnessed its commission. It was likely something like this that had gotten her boyfriend in trouble. Better he learn his lesson now and reform than get into really big trouble when he matured. Sara indeed loved Sterling; his immaturity was an issue both she and he needed to confront. That, she feared, could be the summer’s agenda.
Sara’s concerns were echoed in the immediate actions taken by another guest, the very Jeremiah who life’s goal is a place in the hackers’ Hall of Fame. Jerry was at the party, as a former Friday Nighter, rather than as a classmate. He hadn’t been anyone’s classmate from the day of his sixteenth birthday, also the occasion when he had sent an anonymous email to the principal’s private email account (known only to his mistress) and told him to resign (take early retirement) within 24 hours or have his affair exposed. Jerry had never bothered to follow up, to see what actually had happened. It was just as well Jerry was no longer part of the educational establishment; his stringy hair and unwashed appearance certainly kept him from adhering to the dress and minimal hygiene codes of the local schools. At sixteen Jerry had gotten himself legally emancipated, so his parents could not touch his income, which is now in the six figures. His day jobs (actually afternoon jobs since he sleeps in mornings away) include serving as a consultant to various listed corporations, which he has more or less blackmailed into hiring him. He has hacked into their systems and then turned himself in for the reward: employment and a guarantee he would make them hacker-resistant (hacker proof, being a fantasy). At the moment Sterling was arrested Jerry was worried about his own skin, fearful that if Sterl went down, he would quickly follow. Before Sterling had even squeezed into the squad car, Jerry was doing all he could remotely do to save his own hide. First, he phoned his desktop and told it to self-wipe and then freeze up. It could not be rebooted without a 187 digit password which Jerry himself could, of course, not remember. He had duct-taped the password to the bottom of a brick which he had mortared into the back wall of the garage. Then he had called Sterling’s cell phone and erased any trace of his existence in his friend’s email trail and address book. Then he shot upstairs and activated a sleeper bug in Sterling’s iMac that mopped away any remaining connection with Jerry. Finally he took a deep sigh and went downstairs for some more of Sara’s snacks.
At the time of the arrest William Jr. had immediately pulled William Sr. aside for a serious word. He had explained to his father the reasons Sterling needed a lawyer, a Constitutional expert, Junior emphasized. His father, who never much conversed with his son – Sterling was a good substitute in that regard – needed to figure out if the matter was as serious as his son made it out to be. Junior tended toward hyperbole in mannerisms, dress, speech, just about everything.
“Are you sure, Junior?”
“I am one-hundred percent certain, sir.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“See if I am right. Ask his parents.”
“Then you’re not ‘one-hundred percent,’” he said, explaining the basic logic to his son.
“Oh, I am. It’s only you who need confirmation. When you get it, I have the name of the lawyer to call. This could be very expensive, sir. My trust fund’s never been touched.”
Senior takes that last statement under advisement, for further ignoring. There’s no way he’ll let Junior break into his trust fund which, since Senior is at the moment its sole Trustee, affords Duke Enterprises with countless investment
opportunities, arrangements and details far too complex for Junior to burden himself over. Yes, lawyers are expensive, add a few more zeros for Constitutional ones and their research staff. Something can be arranged, but the kid will keep his gay snout out of his trust fund, which he’ll inhale only over Senior’s dead body.
“Don’t make me look like a fool, son,” he warns as he goes over to talk with Sterling’s parents.
William Jr. was taken aback. It was not that his father didn’t want to be made a fool by something foolishly done by the son. That was understandable. And Junior had done his share of foolish things in life, not the least of which, his father undoubtedly felt, involved his current orientation. What shocked William Jr., however, was that Senior had called him “son.” He could never remember being called anything but Junior. His mother called him Billy, Senior’s second wife had called him Will, and the current one calls him Will Junior. Senior has always stuck with Junior. Junior didn’t know what to make of this salutational platonic shift. But he suspected some of his father’s previous affection for Sterling might now be redirected to himself. Respect is not a zero sum game, but in this case what Sterling looses, William Jr. seems to gain. Something good can come of something bad, Junior reasoned.
One might wonder whether, by his action of support for Sterling, William Jr. has not crossed over the boundary set for BFFs. Spouses and family members are expected to make sacrifices for one another: giving kidneys and the like. Relationships between “significant others” are also like those between life-partners, regardless of whether there’s a piece of paper to hold them hostage. Sterling and Billy, however, did not fit in these classes: not spouses, not family members, not lovers, although Junior did seem to have some left-over puppy love for his childhood friend. Thus, one must ask if William’s proffered beneficence is appropriate and justified. Is it not more than what friends should do for each other?
The threat to tap into the trust fund was just that, a threat. William Jr. might not have the sly business acumen of his ol’ man, but he has a fine nose for smelling the stench of that acumen. He had been aware for some years that this high-falooting trust fund was nothing more than some sort of tax dodge set up by Senior to keep money away from the government. In inheritance matters Senior shows off the trust fund as he would a bauble. Hiding assets in plain sight is always best. You can gasp and gape, but not touch. Junior figures the fund hides assets from his father’s three wives, none of whom could be seen as opposing such a kind set-up for the son who is perceived of as especially deprived in financial matters. Short of hiring himself an emancipation lawyer (Jerry’s had charged $2,500), there is no way Junior can find out what the trust fund actually contains, whether its original three hundred thousand has been stripped naked or whether it is now the bulging repository of all the paper millions that Sterling’s investments can fabricate. The answer to the earlier question, therefore, is: Yes, most best-friendships would not normally include an offer to pay what could amount to thousands of dollars in legal fees. Constitutional issues tend to become drawn out as they rise through different levels of justice, with appeals. But, the answer is also no, for it’s like saying: “Best friend, I’d walk to the ends of the earth for you.” This is not to be taken literally (the earth has ends only in the Bible). It’s just a nice gesture for showing support. Junior’s promise of accessing the mysterious trust fund is an empty one. Junior is just playing hardball. Both father and son know it would take a court order, at the minimum, before the bookkeeper would open up for Junior. That’s one reason why Junior wants to set up a legal defense fund. He knows he can’t squeeze much blood from the Duke turnips.
Whether Sterling deserves such support from his friend is an entirely different matter, but one producing the same mixed response: yes and no. Perhaps one can question the quality of Sterling’s advice, but that’s not at issue in regards to friendship. If you only had friends who gave you sound advice, you would probably have no friends at all. Over the years Billy has demanded a lot from Sterling, whereas Sterling ostensibly asks little from his friend, other than the right to drive his X5. He feels privileged to be chosen as the one who must listen to Billy’s whining, and he appreciates Billy’s being his own main booster and principle liaison with his mother. And Billy manifests hardly any jealousy over the fact that Sterling has such a good father-son relationship with Senior. If Billy took more of an interest – any interest at all – in the things Senior likes, such as hunting, financial investment – he’d be closer to his father. Sterling takes up the slack. Finally, he doesn’t mind that Billy has a crush on him; that’s nothing new. Maybe he should let him touch him once (but just once), if it would give him so much goddamn pleasure. It’s only sex, Sterling thinks. There are a lot more important, less ethereal, things to life. Sterling doesn’t get hot and bothered over his friend’s repressions. All in all, no question, their relationship is strong, even if they are occasionally using one another. It’s consensual after all.
Arresting the hosts’ son can be a real party-pooper. The remaining parents of the downstairs mob figure it is time to get home. Most are departing.
Senior is winding up a long and apparently involved chat with Catherine and Pandely. They have given him an obviously complicated explanation of the events surrounding their son, which Senior has taken in without comment and which has sobered him up. He put down his bourbon and branch water a while back and hasn’t given libation additional thought. To most people Senior comes across as a stereotype of the old South. He promotes this image, with his drawl, his Mark Twain moustache, his suspenders and bow tie and linen suit. No doubt he is a shrew businessman, or perhaps he is just well leveraged; like commodity speculators and has seen his share of good times and bad times; he hardly recalls the latter. Thanks to inheritance he is landed gentry, but successes of his own doing follow a simple pattern: he is instinctive; he doesn’t mull things over. He is a decider. In this regard he is very much like Sterling, which is why he takes such a keen interest in the young man and has been closely following the parents’ analysis. But instinct has an associated negative: impulsivity. What some people call rashness, Senior calls impulsivity. Over his career he’s come to believe that the quality of his decisions (based on their eventual outcomes) bears no relationship to the length of time it took him to reach them. He does not consider impulsiveness to be a negative quality; quite the opposite. Wanton impulsiveness is not desirable, of course, but to be a risk-taker, a successful risk-taker, is a true achievement. The mold from which Senior was cast, he feels, is the same that produced Sterling, but not his own son, who is now getting impatient as he tries to decide whether he should interrupt his conversation with the Eumorfopouloses. Junior is too well bred and indecisive to interrupt, so Senior offers his condolences and heads back over to his son. What a contrast with young Sterling, he thinks: one incisive and impulsive and the other so wishy-washy that it took him three full years to announce he’s queer. You either know or you don’t, don’t you? If you have to think about something for a long time, then it’s just not worth thinking about.
He reaches William Jr. who is holding a piece of paper with the name of a lawyer. For a moment they exchange no words. Junior looked anticipatory, fearing a bad decision from his father, who said:
“We’re gonna sit this one out, Junior. That means we are not personally involved, you understand? Your friend has to get out of his own mess. Now you set up a meeting between this Constitutional lawyer and Sterling. Just them. He can send me the first bill, you understand. Make that perfectly clear to everyone, FIRST bill. Now get your car and drive us home.”
Junior looks at his father; he wants to hug him, but that would be a first and it could give the ol’ man a stroke or worse.
“Thanks, dad,” he says.
If that didn’t give Senior a stroke, nothing could. In his seventeen years on this planet, during most of which he’s been qu
ite verbal, William Junior has never, not once as far as Senior can recall, called the elder Duke “dad.” It’s always “sir.” It would have been less of a shock if his son had called him “you son of a fuckin’ bitch” and maybe more appropriate, but to be called “dad,” well, that just calls for another bourbon.