"David, my man, my man! What up?! What up?!!"
Dontravious slapped him on the back, laughing loudly. The man sitting near David at the bar in Steel Danny's Grille looked around, and saw a smiling, dark-skinned Dontravious standing at 6-foot 3 with his sculpted chest, shaved head, a muscle shirt, and his cargo shorts hanging down below his ass. The man promptly got up and left after dropping cash on the bar. He had not needed to do that. There was plenty of room. He could have just moved. David and Dontravious were the only patrons in the place before Happy Hour started in a bit. It was five o'clock somewhere, but not in Steel Danny's yet.
David chuckled. Don, who had a PhD in classical Greek literature, who was fluent in German, and who grew up outside of New Canaan, Connecticut, turned on the Black thing when he wanted to scare white people. He pulled up his pants and sat down on an empty bar stool next to David.
David shrugged and kept quiet.
"Oh, for Christ's sake. You're the one who called me and left the message. Am I going to have to fight to get it out of you now?" Don asked.
Then, as the bartender appeared, Don ordered a screwdriver.
"Randi and I broke up," David announced.
"What?! How? When? You two were supposed to be getting married in a couple of weeks."
David shrugged again.
"We had a big fight. I think that's it. It's over."
"Well, thank God is all I can say. That bitch has a screw loose somewhere. You dodged a real bullet there."
He looked at David.
"Oops. You're really upset by it. Sorry. 'Extracts foot from mouth...,'" he said, trying to mime the motions of extracting an errant foot from a mouth, but looking instead like he was pantomiming a reverse blowjob.
The bartender delivered the drink. Don promptly drank half.
With a sigh, he said, "OK. Tell Dr. Don the story."
Dr. Don had been born Donald Thirman Butler, Jr. His neurosurgeon father's and his lawyer mother's professional backgrounds, Dr. Don's Jesuit high school education, where he excelled, and the family's ability to pay the tuition in cash certainly helped to get him into Harvard for his undergraduate years, where he also excelled. He then went to Yale for his master's and doctorate. He excelled there, too.
But, as Dr. Don had explained to David some time ago, when it came time to getting a tenured assistant professor position at a university, he could not simply rest on his Ivy laurels. He had decided early on that he needed to "pimp his ride" professionally and had changed his name to Dontravious. He waited until after his father had died to do so. He didn't tell his mother. He wore a dashiki shirt to his job interview at the university, put on a big Afro wig, and thought the old white guys in the classics department were going to cream their shorts at the diversity cred that they would get by hiring him. Maybe the university chancellor would get off their backs finally about his "sparkle pony" equal opportunity hiring initiative, which required all hiring decisions to be informed to a certain degree by the gender/race/ethnic "sparkle" that each candidate brought.
It helped that the hiring committee did not like the other leading candidate either. He was Greek, after all. Impeccable credentials, of course, but if Greek was his mother tongue to begin with, wasn't he really just phoning it in with knowing ancient Greek? It would be like hiring a Chaucer expert from England. Not really much of a stretch.
"And do we really want someone who is just going to rest on his laurels at Northern Florida University?" they wondered.
Thus, they hired Dr. Don, who took to teaching like a fish to water because he was a natural performer. They still made Don teach introductory courses and, through some staff vacancies and the belief in the registrar's office that knowing literature in one language was as just good as knowing it in another, Don had wound up teaching David's first-year college English survey class. That semester, David asked for feedback on a story he was writing in a composition class. Don saw promise in David's writing, encouraged him, critiqued writing samples, and became a mentor and friend. As a result, David was one of the few people who knew that Don was gay.
Yeah, Don pulled a fast one on the hiring committee, but the fast one he pulled had not actually been about his racial bona fides. Growing up as a Black Catholic in buttoned-down Connecticut, he had learned early on that, while white folks could put up with a Black man who cleaned up nicely and spoke proper English, what they did not like at all were fags. Being gay was fine hypothetically, maybe, but not if the fag lived next door.
Northern Florida, of course, was far worse on that point back in the 1980s, but Don thought he would kill himself if he had to put up with one more winter up in the North. And Miami's South Beach was too in-your-face for his tastes. So, he made some compromises and, using the skills he had learned as a wannabe magician from his teen years, merely misdirected everyone's attention. Now, in the mid-90s, things were a little more accepting, but not that much. After all, Congress had passed the Defense of Marriage Act just the year before. Don looked at his life now like his own version of "Don't Ask; Don't Tell."
"We were fighting about money, Don," David said finally.
"Something most marriages break down about, so they say," Don replied as he nodded his understanding.
David said nothing. Don looked at him and then sighed. He was going to have to dig after all.
"What exactly were you fighting about that had to do with money?"
David waved his hand in a gesture of resignation.
"I think I told you about her mother before, right?"
"The nutjob that hates men, right?"
David nodded. He had told Don before about how Randi's dad had cheated on her mom and cleaned out the money when he went off to live with his much younger stripper mistress. As a result, mom had drilled it into Randi's head that, for a marriage to be successful, the wife had to control the family money, especially if she was making more money than the man. Otherwise, she was setting herself up for disaster.
"We've talked about how things will go when we get married. She's been insisting on separate bank accounts and says her money is hers, and my money is ours. I'm the man, so I am supposed to be the provider, even if my wife makes more than I do. So, I'll have to pay all the bills. Her money is for whatever she wants. She doesn't want to be "owned." And her mother got one of the lawyers at the firm where she works to do a pre-nuptial agreement. Randi just got that high-paying real estate job, so her mom says that income needs to be protected. The pre-nup says that that if we split up for any reason, I can't get any part of what she has saved or invested during the marriage and can't claim alimony, but she gets 60% of anything I saved or invested."
Don nodded.
"I wouldn't worry about that pre-nup much."
"No? Why not?"
"You still working at Erol's Video?"
"Yeah."
"Then you are never going to have any savings or investments for her to take."
"Ouch."
"Frankly," Dr. Don said after draining his glass, "I don't understand how you're not writing a brilliant novel by now. You've got enough imagination that you convinced yourself this selfish, silly twat actually loves you and that you could have a successful marriage with her, even though she treats you like shit. Plus, you also think that people are going to want to rent VHS videos in the next millennium. Shit. They've just come out with these Digital Video Discs I've been reading about."
"Erol's Video has been good to me," David protested. "I'm like a pioneer! Video rental is the future. We are dominating the video rental battlespace in Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Norfolk, Virginia and, now that we are in Jacksonville, we are expanding all through Florida. We are going to totally transform the movie-viewing paradigm. I'll bet we'll be renting those Digital Video Discs before you know it! Movie theaters are doomed. You'll see!"
"Oh, for God's sake. Have you seen the quality of porn on the Internet? That's all digital. It's only going to get better, especially when we move to fiber optic or cable and everyone gets off dial-up Internet service."
"It's going to take a while for that to catch on. We're going to ride the transition profits pony in the meantime."
They ordered another round of drinks. Don sighed and looked at David with the sort of sympathy a doctor puts on when he is going to give an end-of-life prognosis.
