INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Two.

Chapter two.

Fritz had been my business partner back then. He was homeless, yet he had a plan for penetrating his predicament.

I had a steady income, back then, from working as a cashier at a jewelry store. It was by virtue of this income that I could afford to drop nearly forty dollars to pay for a meal to sustain him one morning, at Callendar's Pies. He had as rambunctuous a material appetite as I had an intellectual one, and between my trying to convince him of the validity of religion in the face of scientific orthodoxy, I watched him devour a meal of hash browns and potatoes. I did not even notice that I had spent forty dollars on him until we received the check.

I let it slide, naturally, but I did not let him forget this fact when he began to castigate me for having spent several hundred dollars on sending an e-mail to an old friend and, to my dearest hopes, prospective marital partner. What followed was a heated argument. It had been the first argument betwixt us that I could handle with a cool head.

He had been homeless for one week. His plan was to use the money that our company would make to escape his predicament.

We had just started the company. Our intent was to develop software. We had no programmers, but only a designer and an artist. We were idea people. His plan was to spend several hundred dollars, as a company, on hardware. He had looked into all of the details. I was the only one with money or an income, for that matter. I was also in the process of quitting my work to pursue my intellectual endeavours with greater fervour and concentration. Answering to a manager who questioned her sanity routinely was beginning to take its toll on my own.

He told me that, for the company to work, he needed my earnest promise that I would never do anything 'like that' again. He said it as though he were convinced that everyone within a hundred miles of us knew what he knew, with absolute certainty. My decision to spend two-hundred and then some dollars on a social networking account was as Unacceptable by his standards and convictions as heresy. I do not exaggerate. I did not tell him what my reason for this preoccupation had been. I just hinted that his own sentimentality towards girls, being a personal matter, rendered his judgement towards me an act of hypocrisy.

That day, our business relations ended. I would not see him again for three years.

Dm.A.A.