I get more pussy than any ten of you men reading this combined. Still, you may not envy me. There are different ways to "get pussy," it turns out. And the way I get it may not be the way you want it. On the other hand, I'm very much in demand by a lot of women, most of them pretty attractive. They tell me I satisfy them in ways their husbands and boyfriends can't, or won't. Not many of you can say the same thing.
It's not as if I'm out living the bachelor's life. I've been married to Valerie for eleven years nowâthe first six had been happy.
Valerie was a spoiled little rich girl. Her father was one of those "self-made men" who really thought he was self-made. None of it was luck; it was all his intelligence (though he was really a bit slow and bull-headed) and his hard work (well, I had to give him that). Jack thought no man was good enough for his little girl, his only child, and he seemed to think that I fell even further short of the mark than others. But Valerie loved me. Eventually, she convinced her dad that she couldn't be happy without me and he grudgingly gave his blessing to our marriage.
I have to give it to Jack; he did more than that. He gave me a job in the business he'd built: a steel manufacturing business. It wasn't as if it was a industrial empire, but it was stableâgrowing slightly when the economy was goodâand it produced a decent profit. And it certainly generated a high standard of living for Jack and his family. (They weren't running with the billionaires, but to a middle class kid like me, who met Valerie in college only because I qualified for a needs-based scholarship, they looked very rich.)
The old bastard would probably have wanted to start me off as a janitor or an office assistant, sharpening pencils and sorting paperclips. He would have liked to test me as hard as he could and, I always suspected, he would have liked it best if I'd failed the test. It would have vindicated his original judgment of me. I'm guessing it was only by the grace of Valerie's appeals that I wound up starting in sales. I was just kind of an apprentice salesman, but I wore a suit and had a private office. And I was bound and determined to prove myself.
Things worked out pretty well for the first five years. I learned the ropes quickly. I was good working with the customers because I was a pleasant and witty guy. I garnered lots of bonuses for getting some large contracts on favorable terms. Valerie was happy. We bought a houseâwith a lot of help from Daddy, but a house of our own, nonetheless. I think Jack was even beginning to reconsider his opinion of me.
And then it happened. I fucked up. I fucked up badlyâand very expensively for the company. I messed up a multi-million dollar deal and lost the company somewhere around three-quarters of a million in profit. It was my fault. There were no excuses to be madeânot that Jack would have accepted them anyway.
I knew I was going to take a lot of grief for my fuck up. But I never thought the son of a bitch would fire meâhis son in law. He did. I was canned, out on my ass. And I wasn't going to get a job anywhere else in the steel manufacturing business; Jack made sure of that.
Losing my job didn't have the same consequences for me as it would for a lot of men. I wasn't going to go hungry or lose my houseâat least I wasn't going to get evicted. Of course, I couldn't pay the mortgage but "Daddy" saved his little girl from the embarrassment of having to move out of her lovely house. He made me sell the house to him and allowed Valerie and me to live there for free. Val had the income from a pretty significant trust fund, so she could still buy her expensive clothes and drive her Z4. (I'd never made enough to support her expensive tastes, anyway.) Now, she was also paying for everything for both of us.
Not surprisingly, I went into a funk. I looked for a job and couldn't find anything at all. I went into a deeper funk. I wound up staying at home all the time, sometimes not even dressing properly for the day. I was in front of my computer most of the day. When Val came around, I was "looking for jobs." (You know those "Boss keys" that, with one touch of a key, will bring up a spreadsheet to cover your Tetris game or the porn site you'd been looking at? Well, I created my own version of that. Whatever I was doingâand Tetris wasn't my diversion of choice these days, though I was often up for pornâwhen I heard Val's steps approaching, I could press a hot button I'd assigned and pull up Monster.com.)
I lost a lot of respect for myself. More importantly, Val lost a lot of respect for me. In fact, I think Val lost exactly as much respect for me as she'd ever had. She tried to be supportive at first, but as I sank deeper into my misery and showed no sign of pulling myself together, she started giving up hope. I could see it in her eyes. She thought I was useless. And she was right. I couldn't argue with that.
Things took a turn toward my current state of affairs when Val came home late one night from a evening out with the girls. She'd been drinking--pretty much it appeared. I was at the computer, looking at some great porn, when she came in. I quickly hit the "Val key" when I heard her come in and pretended to be tuning up my resume.
Val stopped by the door of the den, where I was "working," and just watched me for a second.
"There's a good executive opportunity at the State Department of Transportation. I'm just going to tune up my resume for that position," I said in a way that I thought was convincing.
It wasn't. "Oh, knock it off!" Val said with disgust. "Shut down your porn and get your ass into our bedroom."
"I wasn't ..." But it was no use. She knew, and I knew that she knew. I wasn't looking for jobs anymore. And I guess she knew what I was spending most of my time doing. I shut down the computer and followed her to the bedroom sheepishly.