“So, how long are you in New York?” he asked me.
“Three weeks. Ford is teaching me to be a model.”
“Whatever,” he dismissed it. “We have a new toy. It’s a jet-propelled water board.”
My fun meter just went off in a good way.
“Devin, my best friend in the whole world ... when can we go play with it?” I begged.
“Before you get on it, you have to sign one of those waivers which say you can’t sue me if you die,” he teased me.
I got a serious look on my face.
“Can we go now?” I begged.
“Sandy says I’m a bad influence on you. I probably shouldn’t,” he taunted me.
“Okay, if it’s my firstborn you need, I’ll sign him over, right now. Come on, let’s go have some fun.”
“I wish we could, but you have work today. Let me get it set up for Saturday. I’ll get a video crew so you can get paid to play. We’ll make a commercial out of it.”
I really think Devin was more excited about playing with his new toy than I was.
THE CATALOG SHOOT TOOK forever. Nine hours straight. I made Devin take me out to a late dinner.
When I got home, it was almost eleven. I sent Tami a text to see if she wanted to video chat. She jumped on and I was in the middle of telling about the toy Devin was going to let me play on when Trevor appeared. He saw me on her PC.
“Hey, David, how’ve you been?” he asked.
“I’ve been just fine. Sorry to have interrupted. Tami didn’t tell me she had a guest.” I said, trying to get off the line gracefully.
He laughed.
“Nah, I just stopped by to get a DVD I need to return.”
“Well, you kids have fun. I’ll call you when I get some free time,” I said and disconnected.
My smile dropped as soon as I was off. I felt like I was having a heart attack. My next ‘free time’ would be when Hell froze over. Dang it, I needed to get this jealousy under control.
Saturday July 19
MY HOUSEMATES COULD tell my mood had shifted come Thursday morning. By Friday afternoon, they had an intervention and made me tell them what was up. I guess I needed to talk because I went on for almost an hour before I ran out of steam. By the end, I realized Tami and I, as more than friends, were over. I finally came to grips with us just being friends. I’d just needed to work it out. I felt much better after our talk.
I’d thrown myself into working out like a madman to relieve my frustrations. I also tried to model every second of every day, so I wouldn’t think about Tami. I was surprised when my phone rang and it was Harper.
“Why haven’t you called Tami for the last few days?” she accused me.
“Oh, hello, Harper. How are you? What? No small talk? I’m sorry, I’ve no idea what you’re calling about. Tami and I have gone a week or more without talking in the past. Why are you mad about two days?” I shot back.
“She said you were acting like a dick,” she told me.
“When have I acted like a dick?”
I could just see her giving me that teenage girl look like I was clueless.
“You said you’d call her, and she’s been waiting for you to call her back. Don’t tell me you haven’t had time, either. You’re acting like such a boy.”
“You got me there. I just happen to be a boy.”
“Buster, don’t make me laugh. I’m chewing your butt out for being an insensitive jerk. Now call her!” Harper ordered.
This was so like Tami. Instead of just calling me herself, she was sending someone else to chew me out. This was also exactly the wrong way to handle me today.
“Harper, I have nothing more to say to her. I told her I was happy for her. What more does she want from me?”
Harper got frustrated with me and hung up.
I was debating whether to call Harper back and apologize when Missy called.
“David, why did you make Harper mad? She was just trying to get you to see reason.”
“Missy, let’s just cut to the chase: Tami’s mad at me for not calling her. Instead of just sending me a text, she asked Harper to chew my ass out. Since that didn’t have the desired effect, she gets you to call me. Well, for the record, I’ve been working nonstop for the past couple of days. When I get some free time, I’ll call her. If she has something urgent she needs from me, she knows how to reach me ... directly.”
“I’ll pass that along,” Missy told me, and then hung up.
I’d planned to call her this morning, but this little stunt changed my mind.
THANK GOODNESS, DEVIN had just the distraction I needed: his jet-powered water board. I was really looking forward to trying it out. I met everyone at a dock on the Hudson River, and Devin and Lou showed their toy to me.
“It’s hooked to a jet ski and the engine pumped water through a hose that you could either shoot water into the two jets that pointed down for lift or use the back jet to shoot forward.”
It looked like a snowboard on steroids. I was ready to lock my feet in and try it. Devin could tell I was impatient.
“Just show him how to turn it on,” he told Lou, his friend and the product development guru at Range Sports.
Lou explained the controls and then stood back as I sat on the edge of the dock and fired it up. I had it on hover mode, so as it lifted I stood up. I learned by trial and error. At first, it was mostly error. Devin and Lou boarded a pontoon boat and followed me with a cameraman to catch it all. I would have to get a copy of the video.
I learned how to tilt the board forward and pick up speed. If I rocked back and forth, I could slalom above the water. If I rocked all the way to the side, I could do a barrel roll. Okay, the first time was an accident. The next eight were disasters. I was worse than Tami digging for gossip—I wouldn’t give up. Once I figured out you just went for it, I was fine. I knew I had it when I did two full rotations.
Then I switched to the back jet. You could skim along the top of the water, then point the nose up and rocket straight up like you were strapped to a jet plane. The only limitation was the hose attached to it. Then I figured out I could do barrel rolls with the back rocket also. It was all great fun until I broke it.
I figured out two things very quickly. The first was too many barrel rolls would snap the hose from the water board. The second was once there was no longer a supply of water, you dropped like a rock. Of course, I was forty feet in the air when that happened!
Hitting the water from that height felt like I’d landed on concrete. All I can say is thank God they put me in a full life vest. It was also good that they had a lifeguard trailing me on the Jet Ski. I had knocked myself out.
I woke to Devin and Lou arguing.
“I think it’s a design flaw,” Devin told him.
“No one told me you planned on doing barrel rolls. I’ll have to redesign the whole coupling mechanism. It would be easier to just tell people not to do it,” Lou explained.
“Yeah, right, like the first thing I’m NOT going to do is try that. That was too wild. There’s no way you can tell a kid like David he can’t do it. It’ll make them do it faster. Then we’ll have some dead kids.”
“Just make them sign the death thingy,” I offered.
“Hey, it lives!” Devin cheered.
Lou looked at me, all concerned.
“We’ll have you in an ambulance in just a minute,” he assured me.
“Hell, no! I want to go again!”
Devin and Lou about lost it. What they didn’t know was everything was being caught on camera. When they found out, their marketing people recognized what a gold mine they had. They released it to all the local New York TV Stations first. It had everything you wanted for nightly news: a kid doing all kinds of tricks on something with a jet strapped to it; a spectacular crash, where the kid looks like Wile E. Coyote as he steps off the cliff; me coming to and talking about signing the ‘death thingy’ and wanting to go again. Then Devin was interviewed and he said he thought they could probably make it so people wouldn’t die on it. Lou was shown in the background, shaking his head.