Experienced Writer for Your Project

Justin

It’s been twenty years since that foggy evening in the South Bay when Kaya got off my road and traveled down another.

Our paths have never crossed since.

There have been many forks.

Sometimes, you can travel down one road a bit and then double back.

Sometimes you can’t.

Some roads cross; most never again intersect; that seems to be our fate.

Some say that, in the end, all roads lead to the same place; perhaps that is where we will meet again.

Who can know these things?

One might as well go where the journey takes you, as I see it.

Hell, half the time, other things—people, circumstances, events—decide which direction you should take.

You can pretend; you can fight it. But you might as well just give up.

I did.

I work in the Wells Fargo Building. Sitting smack on Bunker Hill, it is one of the tallest 

skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles. There’s no fuckin’ way I wanted to end up here, but I did.

That’s just my point!

I have a fancy office on the twenty-third floor and run Piedmont Textiles on the West Coast.

I damn well know that I don’t belong in this large office in this fine building, and I certainly shouldn’t be running Piedmont, but I do.

Matter of fact, nobody else thinks I should run the place either, but they have to eat, so they come to work.

They have no control; we share the same fate, we are ‘dealt a hand,’ so the old saying goes.

I met my wife twenty years ago, and we wed three years later.

Let me tell you, it’s no easy feat to please a woman – or to raise a son, for that matter.

The fact is, my wife never wanted me to be a businessman; she married a thinker, not a dealmaker. I think she figures she didn’t get what she’d bargained for.

Well, join the club. Most people don’t get what they bargain for; that’s how I see it.

Lacy is a woman of style, sophistication, and excellent manners. I, on the other hand, can come off a bit gruff and uncouth.

People get confused when they meet us; we’re kind of an odd couple.

I suppose they figure opposites attract or something like that – a simple explanation.

Lacy rarely comes downtown to visit me at the office.

She doesn’t like deal-making, and deal-making is my thing.

We live in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

We receive invitations on fine cardstock from rich, connected, and “interesting” people, people with a pot to piss in, people who could do me good, but Lacy can’t stand any of them.

She declines most invitations, and if we do accept one, she bitches all the way home about “those people.”

I’d tell her, “Lacy, you sound like Ol’ Bobbie Lee, talking about the Yankees: ‘Those people.’ He’d called them that.”

“Justin, what are you talking about? Just shut up!”

I spend my Saturdays with my son, David, and Lacy spends her Saturdays talking to Velma on the phone.

We’re not Ozzie and Harriet; it’s not a perfect marriage; hell, it seems like I spend half my time in the doghouse. If it isn’t about how I eat, or dress, it’s about my attention to work.

“Justin, all you care about is making money; it’s all you think about. You care more about Piedmont than your own family; you’re never home, you’ve changed! Where’s your humanity; you used to pray and shed tears. What happened to the humanist?”

She’s probably right, but I always fight it off.

“What the fuck? I’m doing the best I can! I support a kid and a big fuckin’ house, and you live in it – that’s what happened!”

“You love it! All you want to do is work!” she’d retort. (Nothing could be farther from the truth. What I do is useless; anybody could do it. I do it to make money.)

Sometimes, she persists.

“What a crybaby! My daddy works a thousand times harder than you and never cries. You cry like a little girl.”

Most of the time, I hold my tongue, but sometimes my emotions get the better of me.

“Your daddy, your daddy! He drove the fuckin’ company into the ground! If it weren’t for me, your whole sorry-ass family would be out on the streets instead of living where they’re living right now.”

Sometimes, I reckon that none of this struggle with life makes any sense, that it’s one big stupid battle… and for what?

I’d rant at anyone who’d listen. One day I told Willard, the security guard at Piedmont,

 “Ya know, Willard, here we are working our asses off inside this frickin’ building, and out on Sixth, I saw this bum harassing pedestrians. He’s sitting outside Starbucks, under a frickin’ umbrella in the sun, watching the chicks walk by like he’s on an island or something. The motherfucker’s on vacation! He’s doing what I do on vacation: sitting in the sun, watching the girls, and drinking booze from a bag. Come on now, Willard, who has a better life, us or them?”

Willard smiled and said, “Well, Mr. Larkin, I never thought about it like that.”

I’m sure he thinks I’m plum crazy, but I mean it!

All day long in the office, it’s the same useless activity.

I waste hours arguing with some slump on Santee Street about a fuckin’ shipment date.

Who’s the fool, the bum or me? I have this great office with this massive glass wall – don’t get too close to the edge, or you might fall through, fall down…

I sit behind the conference table (to feel safe), and I can see the futuristic Frank Gehry Disney Concert Hall below.

Out of the same window, I eye old brick high-rises with ancient fading script.

Off in the distance, I spy Broadway, like a teeming Mexican village, and the Los Angeles River beyond that.

I am living a life, one life; to others, it might look like the perfect life, the rich life, the fancy life, or the good life, but I’m not so sure.

The way I see it, there are so many possibilities and roads to travel, but it seems we just get stuck going down one, and there’s no way of escaping.

I try to bring up questions like this with the guys over a Coke and Meyers on a Friday night at McCormick and Schmick's or the Los Angeles Athletic Club, but I never get too far.

Try to talk philosophy with a bunch of half-drunk salespeople on Friday night and see how far you get.

I drive a Jaguar and run around in fancy suits.

Once a year, Lacy drags me down to Brooks Brothers on Seventh and Figueroa to buy them so her daddy won’t be upset if he sees me—he’s a sharp dresser and thinks a suit makes a man.

I was going to school in New Orleans when I first met her.

I was awestruck when I first saw her, and twenty years later, her beauty remains untarnished.