Billionaire Secrets of a Wanglorious Bastard Read Online Free PDF Page B

racial weirdness?”
    “Minorities treat me fine.”
    I laughed, thinking Taylor was cracking jokes.
    “Where'd you go for undergrad, Taylor?”
    “Howard University.”
    “The black school?”
    “Howard was diverse. They even had affirmative action scholarships for white people.”
    I didn't want to press it. I mean, race discussions on the job weren't copacetic.  
    Maybe I was wrong thinking Taylor could identify with my concerns as a person of color. Maybe he was white after all. Perhaps Taylor liked talking about race because Taylor was racially cool and understood black issues from his Howard days. After all, there is a difference between application and interpretation, meaning one could understand the motivations and issues an individual faced without agreeing with those motivations and issues.  
    “There's some racist-ass shit here, Taylor.”
    “Maybe they're not really racists, but just jerks?”
    “The intruder alerts? Being mistaken for mailroom workers?”
    Taylor tittered.
    “I don’t know, Taylor. I mean, you’re from Howard, you know about institutionalized racism. Is it better to be invited to a club that won’t accept you as a member and feel like a loser or to not be invited at all?”
    “I’d rather be invited. The pay is better than the alternative.”

12

    THE DAY O' disappointment melted my musculature. I barely dragged myself to my apartment. Not that the loud music helped.  
    Death metal.
    Made me feel homicidal.
    I never understood what she saw, or really heard while listening to it. Other than dudes that sounded like Cookie Monster. “Nom nom nom nom” was all I heard. It made me wonder if she had some Muppet fetish. Thank the Lord I hadn't found out by now. And if she did? I'd take an earful of Cookie Monster music over me in a blue furry suit trying to schtup her while singing “C is for Cookie” anyway. And that was for damn sure.
    “Hey, baby. How was your first day?”
    That was Rhage.  
    Pronounced like rage, not like the Kurosawa movie Ran with the letter J. My girlfriend, which is so weird to say, given my past romantic failures. Our current relationship was, how do I say, more mellow than it had been in the past. You'd think because she was on some meds that made her less prone to violence as well as reduced her libido.  
    But she wasn't on anything.
    In fact, she claimed we had sex too early in our relationship, and that was what caused a lot of our earlier conflict. She claimed that being sex free put her in a better place now.
    I wondered if she was cheating, but didn't have any proof. Other that the lack of sex, our relationship was in a better place. You’d think that not getting any would make me randier for her.
    Quite the opposite.
    Our sex life before she started abstaining was so bad that it made me long for the days of masturbation.
    No exaggeration.  
    She blamed that on our having sex too early as well. She said we didn't know one another for who we were, as our passion blinded us. Still, she was my first, so I had no point of comparison, other than porn. And I was fully aware that porn was fantasy.  
    Still, I wondered. And there's nothing wrong with wondering, right? My father would tell me that looking wasn't doing. Thinking wasn't cheating. Flirting was innocent until you did something. I did wonder if Rhage's sex abstention was some passive-aggressive way of breaking up with me, which is funny in and of itself, because in the old days of our relationship, Rhage was anything but passive in her non-sexual aggression. We'd kiss, hug, spoon, but that was it. Soon as I grabbed a tit, she'd smack my hand, and I'd feel all rapey, so I'd stop. When I went for her butt or goodies, she'd get up, leave the room, and cry about how I didn't love her for her and how she wished that we waited.  
    Totally killed the mood and made me feel like shit.
    Anyhoo, that's enough about that, because I'm depressing myself.  
    Rhage was splashing paint on a floor-sized