How My Special Naked Friend Came To Be

In 2006, I was working at the Soul-Destroying Job downtown. I was making money, and hitting the trifecta of crying nearly every day. I would cry on the subway going to work, I would cry at my desk, and I would cry on my way home. It was simply awful.

One of the agents of my weeping was a terrible little man named Paul. He was the facilities manager, and when his face wasn't in the lap of the company CEO, he was busy scurrying around making life difficult for everyone else he perceived was below him on the corporate totem pole. He had obviously, at some point, decided that "managing up" was going to get him further than "managing down," and so he tore through the place in a whirlwind of condescension to the women, officiousness toward the men, and oily sucking up to upper management. As far as he was concerned, it only mattered what one person thought of him, and that was the CEO. To myself, I called him Sammy Glick.

The CEO was himself an ineffectual man with angry eyes and depressive tendencies, who would emerge from his office in the furthest reaches of our floor and walk through our side of the office with his coffee mug, like a wraith who barely existed except to leave behind whiffs of rage in his wake. A nasty divorce had left him with a free-floating hatred of women, and he was fond of saying things like, "it's cheaper to keep her," in the hallways. He had also lost most of his business to a former employee, who left after being promised on a handshake that he would be made a partner after the divorce decree was signed and was instead given the shaft. So Arturo (not his real name) walked, taking with him the most glittering client list in the business, which included the company that I now work for.

I suspect that Arturo's company was spun off by the CEO with that client list in order to hide assets from the CEO's wife, and when the promised partnership didn't come through with the divorce, Arturo simply said, mine. Ugly lawsuits ensued, in which the underdog with the shiny client list prevailed, and the CEO's company has been in a slow death-spiral ever since.

I sat in a cube farm behind John, the largest man at the office. He stood 6'4", with a shaved head and goatee that made him look exactly like the biker he was. He wasn't much of a talker, instead moving deliberately through the office like some 280-pound battleship, letting his size speak for him. Clients loved him.

We liked each other immediately. We both came from blue-collar, Pittsburgh families, and we shared an affection for mechanical things and the Pittsburgh Steelers. He made it clear that he appreciated the way I looked. He once found me hyperventilating in the packout room over the latest Sammy Glick insult. When he asked me what was wrong, I began to cry, and he just stood there, patting me kindly on the back with one hand big as a catcher's mitt.

I think what we were doing was the human equivalent of dogs sniffing each other.

One day, mid-August, after Sammy Glick had administered his latest petty tyrant indignity, leaving the office with his chest puffed out on his 5'4" frame, I wrapped up my work in a rage and left. As I stood, seething, in the elevator lobby with its black linoleum and black-painted walls, John came around the corner. He was leaving, too.

We stood in silence while we waited for the elevator.

"I am not going to be staying here much longer," I said finally. "So if you want to come home with me and fuck me, now would be your chance."

There was no surprise and not even a pause.

"Okay," he said.

And that's how it began.