Steve's First Job by Pete Brown petebrownuk @ yahoo.com
Read all of Pete's stories at Groups.yahoo.com/group/petebrownseroticstories
Part 11
Steve and Stu:
The two "s's"! I corresponded with your father almost every day for almost forty years. There were times when we didn't exchange messages for a week or so when I was abroad on a business trip, or your parents were on vacation, but other than that it was pretty much every day until your father's tragic death. The notes we exchanged in those last few weeks when he knew he was dying are some of the most moving things I have ever read, and they have lived in my memory for ever.
They were better, or worse, even, than those he sent to me when your mother, Mary-Lou, was killed in that tragedy in Rome, where they were vacationing: I doubted his sanity sometimes, so deep was his grief, and wondered if he would ever recover - but from it he left the world "Remembrance", so perhaps that terrible incident did have at least one positive consequence. Your father and Mary-Lou had the ideal marriage, and in everything he wrote, Stu never once criticised, or complained about anything Mary-Loud did, and their mutual love shone out in every paragraph. I didn't think he could survive her loss, but I think it is generally agreed that some of his finest work came after that, as he wrote and wrote to try to recapture the happiness they had experienced.
When it became obvious that Stu was going to be the finest poet of our generation - some would say the best we have produced this century - we mutually agreed that we would destroy all the correspondence between us. Our relationship was too precious, and the things we said were sometimes so intimate, that we neither of us wanted them to be picked over by future biographers. Stu's work stands on its own merits, and does not need "interpreting" in the light of things that were going on in his private life. So the fragment of this enormous correspondence that I have enclosed is all there is, and even though I could perhaps write a personal memoir of Stu, and have been endlessly pressed by biographers and academics alike to do so, I will not. I leave it to you, Steve and Stu, to decide what to do with it. Stu is long since past caring, and I, too, now have only a short time remaining and I am writing this to you to "tidy up" a few lose ends.
Those days of our youth are now so far in the past, but re-reading our e-mails, they seem like yesterday. In my mind I can still see Stu, sitting there in the calm of his study as he read the notes from me, and when I was at the office, or in a hotel room, or at an airport and I read the latest missive from him, I knew I was somehow "at home". I moved around constantly in those early years as I chased promotion, and your father's notes to me were a welcome piece of stability in an otherwise difficult life.
I miss Stu still, miss him dreadfully. And for the past forty years, every time I turn on my screen in the morning I still feel a twinge of disappointment that there isn't an e-mail from him waiting for me. It is not appropriate, and not relevant, to tell you whether we ever resumed the "mutual fun" we enjoyed as school kids, and, if we did, whether it ever went beyond mutual jerking off. I'll leave that for the biographers to speculate over.
I will however tell you that Stu did one extraordinary act of friendship, that went far, far beyond anything that anyone has a right to expect. You will know that I like men, and I have never made any secret of it. It did not ever affect my career, and when I joined the company, I swiftly and ruthlessly rose through the ranks. On dad's death I used my inheritance to buy a further substantial tranche of company stock, and thus got myself elected to the Board. Once there, it was a much smaller step to be appointed CEO, and then, in what is still talked about as the coup of the century, I staked everything on raising an enormous loan in conjunction with a private equity investment house, to buy out the stockholders and take the company private.
I am, and have been for many years, the sole owner of all the trucks, planes, office buildings and slaves who make up the country's largest - some would say only - distributor. I propose to pay back your father's generosity by leaving the company to you two, and my doctors tell me that it will now be but a short time before you will inherit. I've had a long and interesting life, and I will not regret leaving it now as it is so tiresome to be so weary all the time - but take care of that which I built.
That act of generosity was to give me a son. Your mother agreed to accept some of my semen to give me that which I most desired - a son to carry my genes on to future generations. She and Stu and I discussed it at length when they heard I was planning to buy a female slave and have her inseminated, and they persuaded me from this course of action by pointing out that children should grow up in loving homes, where parents could cherish and guide them. As I was still forging my career I would not have time, and a slave was hardly suitable to be entrusted with parenting. Over the years I have seen you both grow and mature, and your parents truly did an excellent job: you are both so confident and mature that only this background could have given you these tremendous gifts. I was in favour of keeping your parentage secret, but Stu and Mary-Lou would have none of it, and so I know that this revelation is not a complete shock to you. And, with my "special" knowledge, I think I detected that as half brothers you were not inhibited from truly bonding with each other in a way that men can.
The only regret I have is two. What would have happened if, defying convention, I had bought him that next week at the auction? We'll never know, of course. But you have two examples in your lives: your parents, who lived for love and where Stu only achieved fame and fortune as he neared death; and me, who lived for his career, and who had both fame and fortune from an early age but who never really had a close relationship - except for the written one with Stu.
Think closely about your objectives in life. You will never lack for money. You have the huge advantage of having been loved, and of knowing love for each other.
Would I do things differently if, by some chance, there really is a ju-ju waiting for me in the sky who grants me a second chance? I don't know. Would I stop at the gate, gently brush the rain off two's skin, and tell him not to worry as he would spend but a short time caged at the auction house before he was once more my trusted "sergeant"? Sometimes I replay that scene in my mind and spin tales and dreams of the life we might have had together. Would I trade what I did achieve for that chance of happiness? I still don't know.
Nothing I ever did subsequently - none of the important jobs, none of the boardroom coups, none of the major deals - ever really gave me the satisfaction that I got when, at nineteen, I won the County Fair competition: I sometimes think that was the crowning achievement of my life. And none of the rewards with which I have been showered were ever as satisfying as the way the slaves showed me their devotion that night. If you get to my age and you can say that you had one true friend, and you did just one thing that you remember for ever, you will be truly fortunate. But perhaps it is different for half brothers, who have had the opportunity to grow up together and discover for themselves the strength of the ties that can bond one man to another. Continue to love each other, as your father and I loved each other, and be happy.
Tears are filling my eyes as rereading the correspondence has been both painful and joyous, rather as sex can be. Do as you will with the correspondence - I now no longer need it, and soon both the main protagonists will be dead, and I imagine the slaves are long gone as their work will have worn them out. Not that that is a real consideration as they were, after all, however much I liked them, slaves. But then, how much did I really know them - it was only nine whose name I even knew, and two was always just that to me - his real name, his family, his own life, were always unknown and so he must remain. Who knows - one of his sons, as I believe he had sired children before enslavement - may even read this memoir, should you choose to publish it.
For the last time, as typing is now so tiring. Steve.
THE END.
Pete Brown. London and Dublin, October and November 2005.