DIRTBAG CHAPTER 1

    Dirtbag: noun \ˈdərt-ˌbag\  A very unpleasant person, a lowlife scumbag…  Some people might consider Nigel Mann a dirtbag.  He certainly didn’t apologize for who he was and he didn’t care what people think; most of the time he didn’t care what came out of his mouth either, especially when he was drunk, talking to the guys about women, “You want to know what a women is good for?  Doing the dog,” and then he would sing, “I’m a back door man, baby, and I likes it down and dirty.”  His low-life buddies would laugh at how ludicrous he was acting.  None of them were getting a lot of tail, or could say they had a steady girlfriend.
    At work in the office, he was another person: while he once was rude and overbearing, now he was mostly polite and shy around women, almost as if he felt guilty for abusing their character so ruthlessly with words the night before.
    By mid day, he was feeling good, looking forward to the weekend.  Today was Friday and there was a hard rocker inside of him, that wanted to come out and play.
    A woman he never met before, incredibly good looking, appeared in his office doorway, his temporary office and she was looking sexy in a tight fitting miniskirt, when he unexpectedly flicked out his tongue and wagged it at her suggestively.
    This was the first time he ever tried such a move and he was sure his lewd behavior would result in a slap across the face, but Mary Donovan thought he was kind of cute and his lewd behavior provocative.  He was surprised when she sauntered over to him, as if she were a stripper in a nightclub.  Standing before his desk, with a seductive expression on her beautiful face and a hand on her luscious hip.  Stunned by her perfect body and her silky blond hair and ample breasts, he stared at her, then he was on her like a hungry wolf, leaping over his desk and bringing her back down on top of it, their lips locked in a passionate kiss, tearing at her skin-tight garments, rolling over a stapler and forcing files and file holders to the floor, while he pressed his flesh into her’s, pulling off her clothes, as she tugged on his jacket to remove it.
    Neither of them took much notice of the tall man standing in the open doorway, watching them take their office relations to a new level, he cleared his throat.  “Excuse me,” he said and the couple was startled to see him.
    Blair Thomas was as slender as he was erudite, and he smiled like he caught them in an offense in which they could be fired and he was a climber, who took no prisoners.
    Alarmed, they both sat up and straightened them selves out, a guilty expression on their faces.
    “Oh dear!”  Blair said in that thick British accent of his.  “What have we here?  About 10 infractions in the code of conduct book I should say.”  His fingers along one cheek, his thumb pressed firmly under his chin, he eye’d them askance.
    Mary looked worried, knew him to be a real penny pincher, a stickler for the rules: one of them being, no fraternizing during work hours; he was always a perfect English gentleman, which made it even more galling.
    Feeling more confident than he had a right to be, Nigel said, “Come on Blair, we both know you’re not going to say anything, or you’d be telling everyone in the office right now.”
    He seemed amused.  “Really?”
    “Yeah,” getting in his space, Nigel faced him, “what are you going to do about it?”
    Turning to leave Blair simply said, “You wait and see.”
    “Close the door on your way out.”  Nigel said, feeling hawkish.
    “No wait, Blair, please?”  Mary was thinking about her job, her future.
    “I’ll see you in the conference room.”  Blair left, leaving the door wide open.
    Nigel closed the door and faced Mary, as she was about to leave.  “Don’t worry about him,” he said, “I can handle him.”  And by him, he meant her as well.

    Blair was waiting for Mary in the conference room, where they were working together, updating selected files, and Mary took this opportunity to ask him a question, “If you wouldn’t mind?”
    “Certainly not,” he said cordially.
    “You saw Nigel and I together.  You and I know you could hold this over my head for some favor, why aren’t you?”  She knew the Englishman and there was no way he would let this infraction in the code of conduct book slip by him.  “What do you want?”  She asked, being a straight forward person.
    “Oh, I think you’ll find out.”
    There was a sinister look on his face that left her cold.  “What do you mean?”
    He would only smile.
    “Is there anything I can do or say?”  Mary pleaded with him.
    “Oh, Mary, anything?”  Blair had a provocative look.
    “Within reason,” she said, “dinner, I’ll take you out to dinner.”
    Blair wasn’t interested in dinner.  “Dinner,” he scoffed at her.
    “For a year… I’ll take you out to dinner once a week for a year.”
    If she thought Nigel was a well paid manager, because he was in a big office, then she was in for a huge surprise, because he was really a professional junior college student, with no future.  That was what Blair was thinking about.
    “Talk to me,” Mary plead, “tell me what I have to do, to make this go away.”
    “…and ruin the surprise,” he said, laughing and patting her arm gently.

    On the way out to the parking lot, Nigel, a man of medium build, ran into an old friend he’d forgotten about, a size large.
    His friend had a scar above his right eye, and he was muscular, like he worked out a lot and knew how to fight, dark eyes and a crew cut, tattoos on both arms, depicting a girl, a grave marker and one he couldn’t see on his neck, near the hairline.
    “Nigel,” he said, “remember me?”
    Suddenly, Nigel got an idea who it might be and tensed up, remembering a day that brought a lot of policemen to the school yard, a day of blood and death.
    “It’s your old buddy Dan.”
    A look of recognition came over Nigel, followed by an awkward silence.  He wanted to know how his old friend found him, but that was a question for later.  Now he had to act as though Dan was some long lost compadre.  “Wow, good to see you.  When did you get out?”
    “Just today,” Dan said¸ then pointed at his old friend and laughed.  “It looks like I got you.  Didn’t recognize me, did you, thought I was the boogeyman at first, didn’t you?  Oh that was beautiful, the look on your face, I’ll never forget.”
    Nigel took his old friend’s jabbing with good humor
    “So what you into these days?”  Dan asked.
    Feeling like he should show some strength, Nigel said in a masculine voice, puffing himself up, being proud, “I’m involved with… water polo now.”
    “WATER POLO?  Isn’t that a girls sport?”
    Nigel was crestfallen and went on the defensive.  “You ever hear of the Olympics, or the National Water Polo Association: it’s a respected sport… for men!”
    “Sorry,” Dan said gruffly, “no offense, my mistake, water polo is for sensitive  men.”  He laughed, “Get it?  Cause you’re so sensitive.”
    Nigel forced a smile, pretended he was all right being the brunt of the joke, then started making excuses and edging toward his car rapidly, saying, “Hey, it’s been great to see you, got to go to class now, so if you don’t mind… maybe later?”
    Pouring on the charm, Dan rushed up to his old friend and threw one hugging arm around his side, while jovially saying, “Hey, you don’t mind if I tag along, do you?  You wouldn’t refuse a brother, would you?”  Nigel was thinking, "I have to get rid of this guy before my big date with Mary."

    Dan sat in the bleachers, while Nigel swam with his team mates in the pool, doing laps, then a practice game; the players divided into two teams.
    Nigel, a thin muscular guy was in the forward position, facing Tiny Man, a six foot nine inch monster with a creviced face and pock-marked too, ugly, and his pal, Jack, the leader of the pack, a good looking square jawed guy with blue eyes and the Norwegian, a huge Scandinavian guy, with gray hair, aged 21.
    He knew jack and his buddies had it in for him, wanted him off the team, cause “he sucked,” as Jack said, “he keeps missing the ball and throwing lousy.”  He complained to the coach once, as if that would do any good.
    During the game, Nigel brought back the ball to lob it over to a teammate, when Jack or one of his cronies, always stationed near him, would grab the ball away from him before he could throw it.  Then Jack had the ball and Nigel tried to get in his face with his hands, which Jack found annoying more than anything, so he threw the ball and held Nigel under water with both hands on this cranium, while his pals, Tiny and the Norwegian swam in close proximity to make sure Nigel stayed under water.
    The coach was yelling at Jack and his pals to “let Nigel up,” and Dan stood up, his old protective instincts in play, to fight for an old friend if necessary, and stand beside him in a time of crisis.
    A fence between them couldn’t keep Dan back from going around it.  As he ran up to the waters edge, he saw a his old pal being held under water with one hand on his cranium, as he fought with both arms to rise up out of the water, his mouth a foot from the surface, a breath of air just out of reach.


 Copyright 2016  William Leslie