The Human Condition Ch. 04

"Thanks, but it's not necessary."

"Of course it is. You can't be expected to put up with that heat," she shook her head. "I'd forgotten about the ceiling window when I had the new roof done. Oh well, it can't be helped now. Get your clothes and come over to the house."

She darted away. A lifetime of giving orders had convinced her that I wouldn't say no. I wasn't so sure how happy she'd be when I told her she was wrong.

"Lucy, wait," I caught up to her. "I appreciate the offer, I really do, but I'm going to have to refuse it."

"Your very pig headed. Normally that's a trait I admire, but not when it's taken to extremes."

I grinned. "Better not look in the mirror then."

She was about to retort when a beat up old panel van pulled up in the driveway. The passenger door slid open and Joe jumped out. A tall guy with sandy blonde hair and a wicked grin followed close behind him. I'd met him before. Beauchamp "Beau" Maxwell star receiver for the Wolverines was from Alabama. It was said that his daddy didn't stay around long enough for his momma to get his last name and that Beau didn't get his first pair of shoes until he started school.

I had no idea if any of that was true. I did know that, myth or not, Beau liked to perpetuate the stories of his white trash origins. But for all his good ole boy posturing, there was intelligence in his eyes and gentleness in his manner that revealed his true character to me. I had met him the year before, when he was a freshman, and he had been the only one of Joe's teammates who I'd gotten past the hi, how's it going stage.

"Hey Ross. How's it hanging man?" He didn't wait for my answer but turned and slid the back panel of the truck open.

It was dark and I couldn't see into it because of the glare of the sun but I did detect motion. A mountain appeared at the doorway and I blinked.

It was Abdul Marsh, all nine feet, 800 pounds of him. Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating, but trust me; that's how big he looked. He was a center for the team and I had only met him once before.

"Mike," he said to me in his disconcertingly high voice, "good to see you man." He stood there in the doorway of the van squinting and didn't seem to be in any hurry to get out until a voice from inside started to whine.

"For fucks sake, would you move your fat black ass. I can't breathe in here!"

Abdul complied in Jabba the Hut movements and Ronny Gould jumped lightly out behind him. Ronny was not a member of the football team though he was an athlete with every bit as big a fan club as our beloved Wolverines.

He was a gymnast and his team bronze and individual silver at the last World Games along with his Opie cute looks and smart assed mouth had made him a media darling. He was maybe 5'7" tall and standing next to Abdul should have made him look insignificant, but it didn't. Not by a long shot.

"Just because I'm small doesn't mean I don't need some room. Christ, Ab, you had your ass stuck so far into my face I thought you wanted a rim job!"

I cleared my throat, Lucy was still standing next to me and although I realized there was no heat to Ronny's complaints, I wasn't sure how she'd react. Joe saw my concern and stepped to the rescue.

"You must be Ms. Galway," he walked over to her and stretched out his hand. "I'm Joe Lassiter and these ill mannered jerks are unfortunately my friends."

The rest of them immediately realized that they were in polite company and started to fall all over themselves to make amends. Lucy looked at each one grimly until they finally fell silent their eyes downcast, looking more like little boys than the stars they were. Ronny was even kicking the dirt in front of him with the toe of his sneaker.

This impasse might have gone on forever if Beau hadn't screwed up his courage and stepped forward. "Ma'am," he said in a Southern accent that dripped with honey. "Ma name is Beauchamp Maxwell and I would like to apologize for our appallin' behavior here today." Then he took her tiny hand in his and raised it to his lips and kissed it.

I sucked in a breath and held it waiting for the inevitable blast of put downs I was sure were going to come out of Lucy's mouth. Instead, I watched with astonishment as a slow smile appeared on her face.

"Oh," she laughed and shook her head. "You're good. I'll bet you could talk a nun out of her habit."

Beau had the grace to blush and the wits to follow up with his very charming smile. The rest of us just breathed again.

"Okay," Lucy continued. "You're all forgiven this time."

Thank you Ms Galway's were heard from every mouth including my own.

"And call me Lucy, I have no desire to be treated like a librarian."

That seemed to break the spell. One by one the others introduced themselves to Lucy. After he'd done his duty, Ronny ran up the steps to my apartment and opened the door I'd forgotten to lock. He stuck his head in, then quickly retracted it.

"Goddamn, you were right Lassiter, it's hot enough in there to melt your dic..." He stopped and looked sheepishly at Lucy. "Sorry."

Lucy looked at the heavens, but I could tell that she'd decided that she would be amused rather than insulted by the vulgarity that Ronny couldn't seem to stop coming out of his mouth.

"Lord give me strength," she said, then changed the subject abruptly.

"Who wants lemonade?"

As usual she didn't wait for an answer but set off to the house to get the refreshments.

"What are you guys doing here?" I said when she'd finally disappeared through her back door.

"Gotta a housewarming gift," Joe grinned. "Jamal will you do the honors?"

"I guess," he groused. "Shoulda known the only reason I was let in on this honky gathering was to do the heavy lifting."

But there was no rancor to his words and he turned back to the van and stuck the top of his enormous body into the back. When he reappeared he had a huge box clasped to his chest.

"Up those stairs?" He looked at Joe for direction who nodded in agreement.

I watched in fascination as the big guy lumbered up the steps and winced as a couple of the boards screamed in protest from his weight. Luckily they held and we all followed him up to the hell on earth that was now my home.

Abdul set the box down in the middle of the room and I went over to examine it. It was already opened, so at first I didn't dare hope that what was inside was really what the writing on the outside said it was. But when I looked at the contents I realized that miracles occasionally do come true.

It was an air conditioner. It was the biggest fucking air conditioner I had ever seen. The box said it could cool a whole house and looking at the thing, I had no doubts as to the truth of that statement. I turned and looked at Joe who was watching me with some trepidation.

"Look," he said in a rush. "I know you hate anything you think of as charity but that isn't the deal here. The way I see it is I'm saving my life and anybody else's who's stupid enough to want to visit you."

I thought about making him sweat but then I realized that, like the rest of us, he already was. He was right, under normal circumstances I might have protested such an expensive gift, but this time I decided to just accept the offer.

"Shut up, asshole," I said in my most gracious manner. "I think it's great."

He grinned and I realized how worried he'd actually been that I'd refuse his largess. That bothered me a little but I decided to think about it later.

"So let's get this mother set up so we can cool this fucking place off," Ronny whined.

It was then that it dawned on me that there was no place where we could put it. As I mentioned before, the windows were small. There was no way that monster was going to fit in either of them. My breath came out in a whoosh of disappointment. It looked like my reprieve from Hell was not to be after all.

Lucy came through the door with a tray of lemonade. She stopped and looked at the box we were all staring at.

"Mr. Maxwell," she spoke briskly. "Come with me and I'll show you where the chain saw is kept."

We all looked at her completely clueless as to what she was talking about.

"Well you'll need something to cut a hole in the wall, won't you?" She turned and sped out of the room with Beau trailing dutifully behind her.

"I love that woman." Joe said. "I wonder if she'd be willing to bear my children?"

The next couple of hours were not fun. Well yeah, maybe they were in a kind of perverse, sado-masochistic sense. We sweated and swore and hammered and sweated some more and somehow through it all I gained three new friends along with a cooling unit that turned my little hot box of an apartment into a refrigeration unit that could keep ice from melting.

After it was done Ronny, Abdul and Beau said they had to split; the van was from the store that Beau worked at part time and they had to return it. Joe decided to stay awhile and help me unpack so the two of us said our good-byes to the others and started to really move me in.

"Hey," I said after about ten minutes of shoving everything into the kitchen cupboards. "What did Abdul mean about seeing me on Friday?"

"Didn't I tell you?" Joe's voice was casual, too casual, and my spine stiffened suspiciously.

"Didn't you tell me what?"

"Nothing really, just that I told the guys that you'd thank them for their help by having a poker party here on Friday."

"Nice of you to ask me first." I said it sarcastically but I shouldn't have wasted my breath.

"Knew you wouldn't mind."

"Wait," I remembered something. "This Friday?"

Joe nodded. "Has to be, next week starts the pre-season."

"I can't do it this Friday," I protested.

"Why not?"

"Saul and Kevin are coming over."

Joe shrugged. "So, don't they play cards?"

"It's just that it would mean there would be seven of us. That's too many for a good game."

"Aw bullshit. You know how these things go, half the time nobody ever shuffles a deck. It's really just a chance to drink some brews and shoot shit. It'll be fine."

"Joe..."

He lifted a hand to stop me. "It'll be cool Mike, trust me."

I shrugged my shoulders and let the subject drop. Maybe he was right. At any rate, I'd promised myself that this year I was going to try and be more of a friend to Joe. Apparently he believed that should include mixing our two worlds. I was just going to have to go along with it and hope for the best.

Joe stayed for a couple more hours to catch up on the summer and eat most of the pizza I ordered in. He had finally broken up with Missy when she'd given him an ultimatum, a ring or the door.

He said he'd made the right decision but still it had made him think about the possibility of settling down. He knew Missy wasn't the right girl, but he figured that pretty soon somebody would turn up who would make a trip down the aisle seem like a great idea. Even the thought of it made me nauseous.

I was still thinking about it after he'd left and I was finally getting ready to go to bed for the first time in my own apartment. I'd been over Joe for a long time, but still, the idea of him with a wife and that kind of commitment to another person made me a little jealous. I was the one he came to with all his personal baggage. I didn't know how I'd handle it if I slipped into the number two position.

Christ, even writing it makes me feel like a selfish bastard. But I've seen a lot of friendships, both gay and straight, that haven't been able to stand up under the stress of one of the friends finding a life partner. I didn't want our relationship to end up the same way.

Oh, I knew that eventually he'd find somebody to share his life. I just wished it'd be later not sooner. But we were all getting older and this was probably our final year together anyway, I was just going to have to accept that.

The next day, I was back at work at the law firm I'd been working at for the last year. Yeah, yeah, I know, if I'd been working there how come it'd taken me so long to figure out that I wanted to be a lawyer? I can't really answer that except to say that what I did there was so far removed from the legal profession that I rarely even saw a lawyer.

See, I worked as a data processor for them. I entered the billable hours into their accounting system. It was boring as hell, taking stacks of papers and transcribing them into the computer (this was before they'd upgraded to a lot more amenable system), but I could pretty much set my own hours, and the pay was great by college standards. At least, it got me away from paper hats and flipping burgers, which is what I had been doing before I landed this job.

When I returned to school for the fall semester, I'd expected to take up where I'd left off but when I got to my office there was a note asking me to go to Personnel and see a Ms Grey. Uh oh, I thought, they're going to tell me they don't need me anymore. I went to the office already half resigned to resuming my stellar, no-growth career in the fast food industry.

Instead, when I got to Ms Grey's office, I was informed that a part time job had opened up in the research department, sort of an assistant's assistant. Since I was now planning on making the law my career, it was thought that I might be interested.

I was, very. Not only would it get me out of the basement where my lonely cubicle was located, but I would also get to do something I might actually like. It wouldn't hurt my chances of getting into graduate school either.

There were five stories in our office. Each rise in elevation also included a raise in status. I was shown to a new desk on the 2nd floor, a huge step up from my former dungeon. I had my own PC and I was across the hall from the law library the firm maintained.

A young black woman with Whoopi Goldberg dreads and a very pretty smile was told to show me around. Her name was Penelope Washington, but she told me to call her Pen. She was a senior research assistant and already in her first year of law school, though I found out later she was younger than me. Pen wasn't smart; she was brilliant.
She showed me through the stacks and told me which lawyers were approachable, and more importantly, which were not. After an hour, we were calling each other girlfriend and I was sure that with her help and friendship, I was going to like this job just fine.

A few times during the morning, we ran across some of the legal eagles that walked those hallowed halls. Pen would smirk and simper and invisibly pull on her forelock like a good little serf, and I'd follow her lead. The Suits themselves, would barely acknowledge us. After a while I started to get a little pissed.

"Are they all like that?" I said after one of powers that be had brushed past us with barely a nod.

"Nah," Pen shook her head. "There's 83 lawyers in this firm; some of them are bound to be actual human beings."

"Oh yeah?" I wasn't sure I believed her. "Show me one."

"There," she pointed. "Exhibit A. Culvert Atchison Montgomery IV. Bad name, but good people."

She rambled on, but I wasn't paying attention anymore. I was too busy gawking at the God standing in front of me.

Culvert Atchison Montgomery IV was all my wet dreams rolled into one. As tall, or maybe a little bit taller than me, he was bronzed and fit with a Kennedy smile and Paul Neuman eyes. He couldn't have been much past 30, and his hair was dark honey with streaks of gold that looked natural. His face, was all hard planes and handsome as Hell even with, or maybe because of, the slight flattening bend in his nose that told me it had been broken at least once.

It had been a while since I'd had a bed partner. Rick, the guy I'd been seeing in the spring, had graduated and moved to Atlanta. My hometown had never been a hotbed of homosexual activity and traveling to one of the more cosmopolitan areas in Pennsylvania had seemed like too much effort for a summer fling. I knew I'd be coming back to Ann Arbor, so it'd been just me, and my hand, for longer than I cared to admit. Now, just one look at the lawyer Adonis in front of me told me it was way past time to go looking for somebody new.

He noticed us at about the same moment my jaw dropped open. He came over to us with a big smile on his face that showed 32 white teeth that must have cost a fortune in orthodontia.

"Hey Pen," he said in a bone-melting bass. "How are you?"

"Fine Cam," she answered with a grin. "Just showing the new slave how to pick cotton."

"Hi," his baby blues turned to me and my knees got weak. "I'm Cam Montgomery, one of the partners."

I managed, just, to shut my mouth, and took his hand as he offered it. My cock twitched at his touch and I could feel a flush of arousal spreading across my chest. I looked down and realized where I was staring. I quickly looked up again and saw amusement on his face. Oh God, I could feel the red spreading to my cheeks only it was embarrassment that was causing it now.

I stuttered out my name and we talked for a few more minutes but I couldn't begin to tell you what we said. Eventually he left and when I could breathe again, I noticed that Pen was looking at me with a big shit eating grin on her face.

"Liked that did you?" She asked.

"Oh yeah," I grinned back. There was no point in denying it; the girl wasn't blind.

There was also no point in pursuing it. Not only was the guy sort of my boss, he also had a big gold ring on the third finger of his left hand that told me he was probably unavailable. I was also pretty sure he was straight, even if my obvious attraction to him had seemed to amuse rather than offend him.

"Girlfriend, you are not alone," Pen told me. "I don't think there's a gay man or straight woman in this building who hasn't wondered what that guy would be like between the sheets. Even the straight guys fawn all over him, wanting to be his best buddy and all. If he wasn't so nice, I could really get to hate him."

"Everybody's hot for him, Eh? That include you?"

Pen grinned again. "Didn't I say gay men and straight women?"

It took me a minute to realize what she meant. "You're gay?" I finally asked stupidly.

"Same as you, sweet pea, only with a different focus, if you get my drift." She grabbed my arm and pulled me down the hall in the direction of the elevator. "But I can see the attraction." She admitted.

"Well I guess that's all anybody's going to get anyways."

"Come again?"

"He's married. I saw the wedding band."

Pen shrugged. "I don't know much about his personal life. He only transferred here from the big office in Chicago about two months ago. He might be married, probably is, most of the partners are. I know that so far he's not been a player, at least not in the office. Many offers have been made, none have been accepted."

I realized suddenly that we were outside. "Hey, where are we going?"

"To lunch, then the law library at the U." She turned and poked me playfully in the stomach. "Then if you're real nice, I'll take you back and give you another peak at Mr. Gorgeous."

I laughed and we changed the subject to our favorite lunch hangouts. But in the back of my mind was the image of Cam. He may have been out of bounds, but he sure was fun to look at.

But I didn't get a glimpse of the eye candy again that day or for the rest of the week for that matter. Instead, I settled into the new routine and found that I really loved my new job with or without the attractive Mr. Montgomery. Maybe, I thought, this lawyer thing was going to work out.

Before I knew it, Friday rolled around. I had shoved the prospect of the poker party to the back of my mind. Now it was the big night and the reservations I had about hosting the event came back with a vengeance.

Part of it was just the nerves that came from having a party of any kind; this was the first one I had ever given on my own. But a lot of it was because of those same old feelings about being gay and not fitting in to the so called normal world. Would the very mixed group that was coming tonight work?