here's a starter for you...

Chapter 2

From the moment I saw her sitting at the table in the break room greedily slurping the last bits of a Cup-o-Noodles, I was in love with Alexandra Gunderson. Eight months later, I watched her across the newsroom from my desk as she stood flustered in front of the office network printer. She’d tried everything listed in the ‘clearing procedure’ from the user’s manual to no avail and stood there with her toner blackened hands up as if prepared for cardiac surgery. A wisp of strawberry blond hair that broke free from her tightly pulled rat’s nest fell in front of her left eye and she curled her mouth to blow it away from her face, only to have it fall right back into view. She was dressed appropriately for early June in the Midwest with a silky off-white blouse, a mid-length skirt that ended just below her perfect knees and a pair of orange and white New Balance running shoes with ankle socks. I’d seen her in her ‘interview’ shoes, too. A pair of closed toe, conservative mid-height heels did wonders for her legs, but I preferred the casual aura of sneakers. Unlike many of the women at the Times who showed up for work looking like a cross between Courtney Love and Bozo the Clown, she rarely applied more than some subtle lip color.
Benjamin Punzel, my best friend and the Times’ news editor, would tell me that I should get up and go help her. It would have been a perfect opportunity for me to save the day, maybe make some small talk, impress her with my wit and in-depth knowledge of all sorts of Hewlett Packard hardware. She glanced my way with a double take and waved with a warm smile. My stomach clenched. “What the hell just happened?” I thought. I just stared at her for a second then looked around me. There was no one on my left. I couldn’t imagine that she would ever wave to me on purpose.
And she hadn’t. I peeked over my right shoulder and walking confidently down the aisle of desks like Moses through the Red Sea was Ben, waving back at Alex. He stopped next to my desk and grabbed a chair from the opposite cubicle.
“Dave, why don’t you just go talk to her?” Ben offered, still smiling toward Alex. “She obviously needs help with the printer. That’s a pretty good ‘in’.”
“Hmm…how ‘bout I don’t.”
“So, you’re just going to stare at her, all creepy like?”
“Something like that. Yes.”
“Are you at all worried about the inevitable harassment complaint that follows creepy staring?” Ben leaned back in the chair and massaged its foam rubber arms.
“Not as long as I have my sympathy magnet.” I pointed to the aluminum forearm crutch that was leaning against the navy, fabric covered pseudo-wall of my work space.
“You know, that thing doesn’t give you carte blanche to just go around ogling young women.”
“It does, actually,” I pointed out, “It’s in the Union of American Cripple’s constitution. Under paragraph 2a. Better parking spots, bigger public toilets and unlimited ogling.”
Ben chuckled, “Damnit. If I’d only stepped in front of that bus earlier this week, I could be undressing Alex with my eyes, right now.”
“Hey now!” I scolded, “Find your own girl.”
“My friend, you don’t get to call her ‘your’ girl,” and he made bunny ear quotes with his fingers, “until you grow a pair and go talk to her.”
“I have hope as long as I don’t talk to her,” I sighed. “Once I limp over there and she gives me the puppy dog pity eyes, hope dies.”
“You’re making a pretty harsh judgment on Alex. Has it occurred to you that she might not condescend? She might just see you as an intelligent, witty guy with a limp.”
“A limp? It’s rather more than that. Don’t you think? It’s not a cute little limp, Ben. Tiny Tim had a limp. That Dr. House guy has a limp. I hobble along like Quasi-fucking-Moto.” It wasn’t a new subject for Ben and me. We’d gone around like this a hundred times.
“You’re going to have to get over the self-pity, ‘I’m not good enough’ bit, man. Not all people think like that.”
“Well, a lifetime of experience tells me otherwise.”
Ben capitulated, “Alright, alright. But if you don’t get laid soon, I think I’ll probably have to shoot you. I can’t take much more of this.” He got up from the chair, slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans and ambled back up the aisle to his office.
I was born with pseudarthrosis of the tibia. In layman’s terms, my lower right leg was broken while still in my mother’s womb, at about six month’s gestation. It did not heal completely and the healing that did occur resulted in my tibia bowing from just below my knee down to my ankle. The bowing subsequently created a growth disparity between my healthy left leg and my gimpy right leg. Between the fact that my condition went unnoticed for a time and that my mother had very limited means, it went untreated until I was four years old.
Even after the “successful” corrective surgery, my right leg remains three quarters of an inch shorter and I will always be at a high risk for future fractures. In fact, I’ve broken my leg eleven times since the operation from such adventurous activities as crossing the street to perilous maneuvers like getting out of bed. I have to be sure not to put my entire body weight on my right side not only because my leg may break, but it’s also incredibly painful. I don’t need pain medicine every day but if I’ve had a particularly busy day, say a trip to the mall or grocery store; I get pretty grumpy and take a Percocet with dinner.
My experience was that women preferred dating men that could take walks on the beach or twirl them around the dance floor all night long or scale a flight of stairs in less than fifteen minutes. The only attention I ever managed to garner from women was pity, condescending courtesy or friendly encouragement.
“Oh David! You’re so funny,” they would giggle. “I don’t know where you get that stuff. You’re gonna make some girl really happy to have such a funny boyfriend.” Some girl. I supposed they meant some girl with an eye patch or cleft palate or another abnormal equivalent. Keep the gimps together, that’s what I say!
I imagined that Alex was the kind of girl that sought adventure. She ran 5K’s for any variety of charitable causes nearly every weekend in summer. She ski’d the Birkebeiner and Finlandia every winter. She was a bit of an action reporter, always flipping her cell closed and racing to the stairwell to fly down the six flights of stairs two at a time to get a scoop. Even when she was stuck in the newsroom working her stories she couldn’t seem to sit for very long.
She must have had an important print job. Most people would have given up but Alex, ever hopeful, opened more panels and turned more knobs trying to clear the printer.
Just as I was calculating the opportunity cost of grabbing my stick and hobbling over to the printer, Justin appeared from the elevator with an ironic ding. He wore his usual three-button, athletic cut suit. The suit was charcoal wool and he sported a black polo, black leather belt and black Edward Green split-toed Dovers. The hair was short, blond, perfect. When asked the time, he would somehow manage to bend his arm without tearing the suit with his sculpted biceps and read from his Tag Heuer Calibre.
I would never have been able to identify his shoes or watch, but Justin was always happy to point them out. “Yeah,” he’d offer unsolicited, “I couldn’t decide on the Joe Abboud herringbone or the Hickey Freeman, so I got them both.”
Justin Teff wasn’t a journalist. He managed the marketing department. He was a glad hander and concerned only with making money, regardless of the implications on the reporters’ craft. The board of directors of The St. Cloud Times was very fond of Justin, mostly because he was good at his job. He managed to keep the paper profitable when many others were buckling under the pressure of internet news access. Justin wasn’t going to bring any Pulitzer prizes to the Times, but he was savvy for a guy just two years separated from graduate school.
Ben was highly regarded by the board, too, but because he was a seasoned newspaper professional, not a businessman. Together, it was thought, Ben and Justin were the perfect pair to take the Times into a very bright future.
Unlike the board, Ben and I hated Justin. The problem, aside from the fact that he was a pinhead, was that he thought his responsibilities included editing stories and columns in an effort to increase circulation. Once, Justin intercepted some political copy before it got to Ben. He red penned several revision ideas and dropped the article on Ben’s desk with a Post-It attached that read:
Thought I’d help you guys out. –J
When Ben returned to his office and saw Justin’s gift, he picked up the phone and hit the intercom button, “Attention. May I have your attention, please? Effective immediately, all article revisions submitted by our crack marketing staff should be routed first through the fiery gates of Hell, then up your ass, and finally onto my desk. Thank you. That is all.” Click.
Justin was at first upset that Ben had embarrassed him in front of the entire staff, but after some discussion with the board, it was determined that Justin had no editorial jurisdiction and it was best if Justin stayed away from the news. However, just because he avoided Ben didn’t mean that he kept his ideas to himself. He instead would stop by our desks and ask us what we were writing about, and then offer changes he thought were appropriate and may be more popular with advertisers. A lot of the other reporters and columnists would smile and maybe even make the changes. I could not tolerate taking orders from a slick MBA, so if he even walked by my desk I would shout, “Ben! Justin would like to talk with you!” and Justin would shake his head as he picked up his pace past me.
He stopped at the printer and smiled as he talked with Alex. She smiled back, but I couldn’t tell if she was happy to see him or just being cordial. She didn’t perform any of the other rituals I’d seen other girls use with Justin. No hair flip. No goofy giggles. No leaning in with a gentle touch of the bicep. He said something that had both of them looking my way. He strutted his way over to my desk.
“Hey guy. That chick is having problems with the printer and I hear you’re like a guru with them,” he was trying to sell to me. “What do you say you give us a hand?”
“Ben!” I shouted. Justin’s eyes opened wide and he watched for Ben to stick his head out of his office door. I snickered, “Just kidding, guy.”
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