Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 01:16:26 -0800 (PST)
From: Pete Brown <petebrownuk@yahoo.com>
Subject: Steve's First Job, Part 11

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.