note: ten-part series continued! | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, he found himself on his couch flipping back between golf and tennis on his television while sipping on a cold bottle of Sam Adams. Both sporting events were of smaller tournaments, but the big names were still playing. He especially looked out for Tiger Woods and Roger Federer because they were both number one in their respective sports. How does it feel to be the best in the world at something, he wondered. And something that makes a ton of money. He reached for the can of Planters Honey Roasted Peanuts on his messy coffee table and grabbed a handful. Like his father, he always felt that beer was best enjoyed with a complementary anju. He flipped back to tennis when they started showing John Daly whipping out a driver. How pathetic – that guy looks like me, he thought as he rubbed his protruding belly. He then watched in awe as Federer easily handled the Australian Lleyton Hewitt to win yet another tournament.

The three-day weekend had been unexpectedly pleasant. He took a sick day on Friday because he drank too much beer on Thursday night while watching re-runs of reality shows on VH1. He eventually got out of bed on Friday around 3pm and willed himself into making ramen noodles. He even remembered to crack two eggs and throw in some of the spoiled kimchi for extra flavor. For the rest of the day, he browsed various Internet sites, reading up on various celebrity gossip, techie news, and even a few New York Times articles before it all degenerated into pornography. The dangers of mindless web surfing: the slightest hint of sexuality anywhere – perhaps a photo of a celebrity in a revealing outfit or a pop-up advertisement with an air-brushed image of a hot model – was enough to give him a tingle and an automatic click of his Windows Media Player, the preferred venue for the delivery of fantastic audio/visual aides. He hated the way Japanese videos always blocked out the genitals with a pixelated blur, but he sometimes found the girlish screams of the women to be arousing. While nobody ever visited him anymore, he still kept the bottle of Jergens lotion in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom. He always remembered to put it back.

He was in the middle of a self-love session on Friday evening when his cell phone rang. He glanced to see if it was a call from his parents, which, if it was, he would ignore. It was a number he did not recognize. He turned the volume down, wiped his hands, and picked up the phone.

“Hey, it’s Greg. What’s up?”

He paused. He hadn’t heard the voice in many years. They had seen each other at parties and gatherings several times after their friendship-ending argument, but they avoided any direct contact. They had exchanged feeble greetings here and there, but rarely made eye contact. They discreetly inquired after each other through friends once in a while, but never went any further.

“Hey. Nothing much. How’re you doing?” he asked, detecting a slight tremble in his own voice.

“Not too good, man,” Greg said, letting out a sigh.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Well. I was laid off last month. I don’t know what to do. I can’t keep asking my parents for money,” Greg replied.

“That sucks. Sorry to hear that,” he said, in a serious tone, “but why are you calling me? Do I owe you money or something?”

“No,” Greg said. “Listen. I heard about you. Your divorce, your shitty appearance, and your stupid job. What the fuck? User support? Com’on. You’ve got to be kidding. You don’t even like tinkering with computers.”

“Okay, so I’m not the glowing success that I thought I’d be. What the fuck do you want with me?” he asked. Who is this asshole, thinking he can talk down to me after all these years, he thought, growing angrier.

“Calm down. I’m not calling to piss you off. I’m here to make amends, okay?”

“What amends?” he asked.

“Look, we’re both down and we both know it sucks. Why don’t we just forget about what happened ten years ago? That shit is trivial now. We both fucked up, so let’s just admit to it,” Greg said.

“And what? Be friends again? You think it’s really that easy?” he said.

“Okay. Let’s forget about that for now. I’m desperate, and you’re not doing so hot either. I’m thinking about getting into it again. Our old business. And I want shit like it was before. The market is hot right now. We can make it happen,” Greg said, beginning to sound more optimistic.

“Are you for real? We’ve hated each other for the past ten years, and you’re asking to be business partners? Is this some sort of joke?”

“No. I’m serious. Let’s meet up. Monday, 8pm at Wolfgang’s. My treat. If shit doesn’t work out afterwards, at least the meal will be free. Deal?” Greg said.

It was happening too fast. Minutes before, he had been watching close-ups of a woman’s breast being molded by a man’s hand. Now, he was being asked to consider a career change. What did he have to lose? He searched his mind for an answer. Nothing.

“Okay, I’ll see you there.”

“Great. See you then,” Greg said.

After they both hung up, the conversation kept repeating itself in his head. He stared blankly into the screen, which continued to play the porno clip. How did Greg get my number? This is weird. He dragged the mouse cursor to the upper-right hand of the screen and clicked on the X. He was no longer in the mood. He needed a beer.

He woke up unusually early on Saturday. He even made the effort to grab coffee from the nearest food cart on the street. He spent the greater part of the day familiarizing himself with real estate and interior design again. In ten years, he had not completely abandoned the industry, having read a few articles from magazines from time to time and helping a few family friends to arrange things in their new homes; but he hardly considered himself an expert now. Tastes had changed and technology had made things different as well. He read various magazines to get a flavor for recent trends. He browsed through the real estate section to see the value of properties in the city. The prices were nearly four-fold from what they were a decade ago. More and more, people, it seemed, had shelled out a great deal of money for property. Less was being spent to let others design the space; people began to place more faith in their own abilities to lay out and style the interiors of their homes. They watched Martha Stewart on television and read House&Garden.

He returned to his apartment with a notepad full of things copied from books and magazines as well as a few original ideas. He felt as if his blood had begun to flow again. Productivity, and more importantly, the desire to be productive had breathed in a sensation of rebirth. How long it would last, he did not know, but he wanted it to go on. He went to his desk and began to browse the web for more ideas. He closed pop-up ads without a thought and pored through online photos and sketches of rooms late into the night.

He watched as Federer held up the winner’s cup, a small and insignificant-looking item. He wondered where the cup would go on Federer’s trophy case along with the championship items from the Grand Slam finals. After taking his last sip of beer, he turned off the television and got on his feet. He opened up his closet and reached for a black Adidas shoebox. It contained photos and notes from ten years ago, of projects he had worked on with Greg. He remembered the days when they took cab rides all over the city, measuring tape and Polaroid camera in hand, eager to scope out new spaces or find treasured antique furnitures at corner stores. Within the pile, he found a photo of himself, Greg, and Janet. Janet had been a personal assistant of a high-powered real estate lawyer who had recently purchased a brownstone on the Upper West Side. The lawyer had asked her to find the right people to design his new property and to oversee the process.

The first time they met, she made him wait in a chair for twenty minutes while she sorted out an issue regarding a late payment by one of the lawyer’s clients. Boy, does she sound like one nasty bitch, he remembered himself thinking at the time. Yet, it was hard to deny her attractive features – her thin yet determined body, her shiny black hair, her fierce almond-shaped eyes, and her full lower lip. Twenty minutes was a blur in the mind of a man in the presence of a pretty woman.

He shuffled through a few more photos and then put away the box. It was still only the afternoon. He decided to take a walk to Chinatown to see what sort of furniture they carried these days.

note: ten-part series continued! | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

The nasty smells. He seemed to notice them more and more every day. And in most cases, he found himself doing a double-take with his nose. The lingering puff of smell from a burp. The salty steam of urine hitting the urinal. The composite smell of shit emanating from the row of stalls in a public bathroom. The stagnant air of garbage on a hot summer day. The odor of sweaty armpits sans deodorant. The smell of rotten decay from a homeless man asking for change. He blew out his morning breath up his nose. Cigarettes and whiskey – that bitter, sour smell. He did it again and again until it made him nauseous. Then he breathed in the smell rising up from the warm stream of yellow as he stood in the bathroom, scratching the back of his head.

He remembered the way Janet smelled after her accident. Soft cheese and gym lockeroom. He kept his head near her bed, breathing in all the odors from her bedridden body. On some mornings he caught a whiff of her morning breath. The nurse hadn’t come by yet for her daily hygiene care. She was bitter and impatient. She often asked him to go home and leave her alone, although he had used up all his vacation days just to come see her. She was disappointed. Not with herself, but with the fate dealt to her. She had trained obsessively for years and spent many weekends on the bike or on a jogging trail getting herself into shape. She had become a regular on the triathlon circuit, having traveled to Hawaii, Oregon, and other parts of the country to compete in invite-only events. He was always with her to support her, to catch her driven expressions on camera, and to comfort her with Gatorade and a towel after grueling competitions. It was a bike fall that had shattered two of her ribs, her right wrist, and her left leg. It would be crutches and frustration for the next six to eight months.

He had met her fiance once. It was at the hospital. He had left work early to come see her. It was a tall white man with an angular face. He was lanky but muscular. The man reminded him of Lance Armstrong. He brought flowers for Janet and gave her a peck on the cheek before leaving the room. He was standing by the door when the man walked by, not even acknowledging his existence.

“Who was that?” he asked her.

“A friend. He’s also a triathete. He just came to say hi,” she said. She turned on the television and watched.

“Oh. Introduce me to him next time,” he said.

“Sure.”

He stood by the door and looked at his wife. A breeze from the window blew over Janet’s bed and towards the door. It smelled of fruity shampoo.

note: ten-part series continued! | 1 | 2 | 3

“We used to work on two or three clients every month. It was all by word of mouth. We would take a look at the place, take some measurements and some photos, and then imagine how we could make it look nice. And then we showed our clients a few ideas, let them have some input, and got to work.

“To stay within the budget, we did all sorts of shopping. We visited garage sales, flea markets, and warehouse closings, and even picked up things off the curb. Some clients let us splurge and we were getting things custom-built or ordered from Europe. But what mattered more than the brand of the furniture was the entire theme. We made sure that, on the whole, everything just worked.

“Some of the jobs were worth half a million and some were worth less than ten thousand. We didn’t really discriminate. Each one was a challenge. We took a non-negotiable 7% fee from the project budget. It was a fair sum, and money wasn’t what really drove us anyways.

“Greg handled a lot of the creative work while I did the talking with clients and suppliers. We rented a loft in Brooklyn, back when it was really cheap, and turned it into our home office. We worked in basketball shorts and t-shirts. We had an indoor hoop and shot baskets while brainstorming or picking swatches.

“We never studied any of this in school or worked under anyone before. We started by volunteering to do some interiors for friends and took good pictures of our work. Somehow word got out and we were in business before we knew it. It’s an intoxicating feeling. Running your own show only a few years out of college. We thought we would be doing it forever.”

He paused and looked down at the food. He wondered if she would sleep with him on their first date. She looked much better in person than in the photo she had sent him over email. He liked her sharp nose and thin face. He liked the way her shoulder-length hair was shiny and very black. He wondered what sort of sound she would make if he kissed her on the back of the neck.

“So then what happened?” she asked. She tried not to look too hard at the pock marks on his face. He could lose a few, she thought. But she had seen worse. It was her eleventh date in the past three weeks. Since posting “SAF seeks nice, gentle guy – 29” on Craigslist, she had been exposed to men she never even knew existed: the tall, athletic-looking attorney with blue eyes who swept her off her feet only to admit later that he had wife and kids; the fashion model with washboard abs and sculpted back who seemed too enamoured with himself; the chubby PR exec whose booming voice hurt her ears; the black policeman whose conservative views seemed so out-of-place to her; and many other interesting characters. This was her first date with an Asian male; an obligatory chance given to a poor SAM. At least dinner would be free – again.

“Greg and I had an argument and stopped working with each other,” he said.

She didn’t know if she should ask for further details. She nodded slowly and tried to give a sympathetic look.

“Yeah, it’s worlds away from a desk job. I don’t even know much about computers, and yet, people call me to fix them every day,” he said.

“Why don’t you quit and go back to what you were doing?” she asked.

“That was ten years ago. I don’t have such ambitions anymore,” he said. He realized he wouldn’t be getting any that night. Fuck – women like ambitious guys, he thought.