I'm thinking of starting a new series. Would love to have your feedback and critique on the prologue and 1st chapter and see if it has the bones to carry on.
Prologue
Don't get me wrong, I've had a good life up to this point. It's been filled with highs and successes, many professional and personal, such as becoming a senior family law associate at one of the most prestigious firms in the city before I hit 30. But it's also had its downs, but whose hasn't? If someone were to read my life's story in a book, some might say that there have been more lows than highs. I suppose it's in the eye of the beholder. You can never judge your own life unbiasedly, because you're too close to it. But I do feel I'm a happy and successful lawyer at 28, which is near the official middle-age mark, if you consider the average life to span about 70 years. If you thought 50 was middle age, I'm sorry to break it to you. But very few people hit the 100 year mark, so chances are, you've already joined the middle age club. Welcome.
Looking back, I'm sure some of my downs have been really low, but I choose not to focus on it too much. Although, I admit my downs have influenced how I approach life. While I try to be a helpful, positive and kind person, I freely admit that I don't like men. Why? Because of a particular down I lived through when I was 11.
But that's so long ago, I hear you say. True, it's been a few years. But I think the passage of time has just helped me to realise that my resentment towards men is well-founded. Some might say my chosen field of legal practice is a direct result of my animosity towards men, and some might be right. Not to brag, but being on track to become the youngest ever junior partner at Kelly, Flock and Associates, I've built my reputation on only representing women in their divorces from their husbands. Don't get me wrong, a break up of any family unit is something to mourn, and I don't delight in seeing the demise of any union. But I pride myself in being there for my clients when they realise what I've known all along: that all men are entitled pigs.
You may wonder how, as a proud and out gay man I have so much disdain for the male sex. Well, just because I'm gay doesn't mean I like men. In fact, I actively dislike them. I can name a number of reasons why I feel this way, but it would be exhausting for both you and me to do so. Instead, I'll try to summarise it in one sentence: I feel men are self-important, ego-centric, entitled, disproportionately narcissistic, power-hungry, self-obsessed, self-aggrandising, shallow, selfish, ego tripping scallywags who assume the world owes them everything and everyone should care what they say when they enter a room because they're men.
Now that we're on the same page. But it's not to say that I don't believe there are good men out there. I do, my dad taught me that there are always exceptions to every rule. And I've met a few good guys along the way who still force me to believe in the goodness of man. But like I said, they're the exceptions to the rule. I've just found, and especially in my line of work, that most men aren't that pleasant to be around, the fact that I'm attracted to them notwithstanding.
Women have always been my saving grace, quite literally. They've saved my bacon more times than I can remember. From protecting me from bullies on the playground, to helping me keep my sanity when having to deal with bullish colleagues. I'm of the firm belief that gay men have a debt to their girlfriends that can never be repaid, but I try to pay it forward in life, by helping women get out of bad marriages and to leave better off than what their soon-to-be-ex-husbands would want them to be. If I can stick it to the exes in the process, all the better.
This is how I've arrived at what some would call my meteoric rise in my career. I've never lost a case in court in my entire record. A few years after graduating and entering the job market, I started getting a bit of a reputation as a bulldog, which meant that I hardly ever the inside of a courtroom anymore. Most of my cases end in settlements because of my reputation as a dogged fighter for my clients, who all happen to be women. It confuses my opposing counsels, and their clients. Am I a man hater? Why do I fight so hard for my clients? Why do I exclusively represent women? I like to keep them wondering, because while they're trying to figure me out, I'm running circles around them and securing the best outcome for my clients.
You too may wonder why I take such a hardline against men, and it's a fair question. I don't usually share the origin of my outlook on life, but since we're getting to know each other a bit better I'll indulge your curiosity.
Chapter 1: Emotional damage
I grew up on a farm in the heart of corn country, the only son of a farm manager. The hot weather of our home state mixed with the open plains of nature was all a kid like me needed to go on many adventures with my best friend, Noah. Noah's father, a kind man who owned the farm, was my dad's boss and friend. They got along great, as did my mom and Noah's mother, which was even better for us, since we had even more opportunity to hang out together.
Noah was two years older than me, and everything I wanted to be when I grew up in those two years to get to his age, which seemed to take forever. And wouldn't you know it, as soon as I caught up with him, he'd be two years ahead of me again. I'd often wondered what it would've been like to be in the same year as him at school. We could've hung out more, sat together in class, had lunch together. But I still got the benefit of having him as my best friend, because he took care of the annoying schoolyard bullies, which is what you would expect from a best friend who was actually more like a brother. A brother that I liked very much.
Look, I didn't understand it at the time, I just knew I liked Noah. Liked him a lot. I liked how I felt when I hung around him. I definitely liked it when he ruffled my hair and smiled at me, and I loved it when he praised me for doing something entirely banal yet made me feel like I'd achieved some major invention. I even secretly liked it when he put me in a headlock and rubbed my head until I squirmed free and then he'd grab me again and push my face into his sweaty armpit and keep it there and make me inhale his almost-teenage-boy scent until I nearly passed out from lack of air or from an overload to my senses, I could never figure out which.
I don't know if Noah's affection towards me leaned in the same hero worship than I had for him, but I think he was fond of me, as fond as you can be of a small-for-his-age gay boy who worshiped the gravel you stepped on. In retrospect, I can appreciate that the pedestal on which I'd placed Noah was an impossible standard to maintain. But that's as much leeway as I'm willing to give him.
My favourite memory of growing up with Noah as my neighbour and best friend came one extremely sunny summer afternoon when we were desperate to cool down. The farm had a small pond, which to us seemed like a whole entire lake. It was there to act as a watering hole for grazing stock and an easily reached water source when needed, but Noah's dad had built us a dock leading into the pond so we could sit and catch fish when we wanted.
Noah was always good at building stuff, and designing stuff too for that matter, and had built us a small raft that we used to go out into the pond and just spend hours drifting around from one side to the other, talking about everything that existed under the sun and nothing whatsoever. When we reached the other side of the pond, one of us would kick out our foot and push the raft back to drift us to the other side of the world again.
Mom had only allowed us to go on the raft after we both completed a swimming course, even though the pond wasn't that deep honestly. Whenever I threw that argument at her, she'd look at me seriously and say 'Arthur, you can drown in a glass of water if you're not careful,' as if that explained everything. But we did the course, and we got to ride the raft, and we got to dream for hours on our backs, head to head, feet dangling in the cool water of our lake.
On that afternoon, we'd taken a dip to cool down and had been laying on the raft to sun dry when we noticed Mr Orwell, the grumpy foreman, walking up and down doing something really important. We didn't much like Mr. Orwell. He just about tolerated us because my dad was his direct boss, and Noah's dad was his boss's. It was easier just to stay out of Mr. Orwell's way, but I blame the folly of youth on our really poor decision that followed.
Mr. Orwell was a hunk of a man, and I'm not talking about him being a hunk. He was basically a slab of muscle mixed with fat. That came in handy in his job as a farm foreman, but it didn't make him very nimble, which is why we mistakenly thought we could get away with our deviously genius plan. The sweat of the day's work had soaked Mr. Orwell's shirt to his shoulders, and he was shuffling along hauling a wheelbarrow around with feed for the small number of livestock kept on the farm.
