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[Writing] A Man of His Word (Short Story by J.R. Stark)

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Part 1/?   

                Mike sat in his truck, staring at the house as he had done many times before.
           He had been called over there so many times, and he came each time. Mike wasn't a stupid person, he was just a man of his word. Many years ago he had made the mistake of telling a friend “anytime you need me”.
           As it turns out “any time” was now, and it had also been last week. The week before had also been “anytime,” as well. He shouldn't have made it so open ended; it just led to more trouble.
           Mike had money, so some might say he was doing well. There were others that would say he was rich.
           He tried to hide his money by driving a shit truck and wearing old, baggy clothing. Neither of these would help. In fact, this only accomplished in making him look like a rich boy rapper wannabe.
           Mike stepped from his vehicle and walked to the front door. He barely had his hand raised to knock when the door swung open.
           “Come in, I...” Stan's voice wavered, and his sentence was left unfinished.
           Mike stepped in, and instantly wanted to leave. The first thing he noticed was the large stack of papers on a coffee table.
   When Stan simply asked for a couple thousand he could "borrow," Mike gave it to him and walked away. He didn't like when he was invited in.
           Then there was Stan himself. He wore the same old ratty, torn up gray pin stripped suit he always wore. Mike was sure he had found it in a dumpster. He never stayed around long enough to find out, but he was sure that Stan slept in it.
        “What do you need, Stan?” he shifted his glance from Stan to the puddle of liquid pooled in the middle of his living room.
        “I need one of those guys, with the towels.”
        “Okay.”
        “I mean, the ones that wear the towels,” Stan said as he paced and clapped repeatedly.
        “A turban,” Mike sighed. What the hell was Stan on this time?
        “Yeah. Okay, I need a guy wearing a turban, like a Hundi or something. I got-”
        Mike held up his hand, and Stan stopped and froze where he was standing.
        “So you want me to make somebody wear a turban. What are you high on this time?”
        “No, nothing like that. Wait, something like that. I need somebody to wear a turban and meet with some guys. He doesn't have to do anything. He just has to stand there...”
        “And wear a turban. Okay.”
        Stan made his way to his coffee table, weaving and bobbing as if going through an obstacle course that only he could see. He grabbed a sheet of paper from the center of the pile and pulled. The top half of the stack slid to the floor, but Stan didn't seem to mind, or notice.
        “Take this.”
        He shoved the crumbled piece of paper into Mike's chest and stood there. They stood, still and silent for a moment before Mike took it.
        Seven words sloppily scribbled across the top: “Harper mall you and Dean seven nobody else.” He read it a couple more times.
        “What the hell does this mean? Dean seven nobody else?”
        “No, see. Harper mall, that's where the meeting is. You and Dean. That's who he said could come. He said nobody else.”
        “Me and Dean. Who's Dean?” He shoved the noted into his pocket.
        “No. When I said you I meant me. I'm you.”
        “Okay, then who's Dean?”
        “Nobody. I made him up. I need a dude to wear a turban and say he's 'Dean'.”
        Mike knew the only proper answer to this. He left.
        Before he could start his truck Stan was clawing at the window.
        “No, please,” Stan gasped, “I need your help!”
        Mike let his hand fall from the ignition.
        “Okay, get in.”
        “Good, good!”
        The disheveled idiot quickly made his way around the truck and into the passenger seat.
        “So, you said something about a turban?”
        Stan replied with a blank stare.
        “Hello? You alive over there?”
        “Oh. I.”
        He jumped from the truck and disappeared inside his home. When he returned he was holding a tattered white sheet.
        Once inside the truck he handed it to Mike.
        “No. This is stupid. Nobody is going to be fooled into thinking this shit stained sheet is a turban. People makes jokes, you know, about turbans, but they are completely different from sheets. This is not a turban.”
        “Okay.”
        “What? That's not a proper response. That adds nothing. Who are these people anyway? When we show up wearing sheets on our heads, are they just going to shoot us? Drugs, I knew it, drugs again. It's always god damn drugs with you.”
        “No, this is something else. This is a job. So calm down, and by the way, I won't be wearing a turban. I changed my mind. I'm going to explain what happened. So please, calm down.”
        Mike made an audible sigh, “see how damn calm I am?”
        He started the car and began driving to the mall.
        “So, why the turban?”
        Stan answered by shrugging.
        “Man, I need to know.”
        “Do you even know what I do?”
        Mike smiled, “lots of drugs.”
        “No man, I mean, like my job.”
        “You have a job?”
        “Okay, funny.”
        Mike winced at the sudden pain to his stomach. The sadness in Stan's voice had been completely unexpected.
        “Dude, I'm sorry. What do you do?”
        Stan turned his gaze to the passenger window, “do you really care? If I died tomorrow, would you be sad? How long have we know each other, man? What does any of it mean to you? Are we really friends, or am I just an annoyance?”
        “I...” the words seemed to stick in Mikes through as he tried to find the right way to say, “...no.”
        “Thought so.”
        “I'm sorry man, but who are you, really? I have known you for a long time, but I don't know you. You only call if you need help getting out of some jam. We've never hung out. You've never said 'Hey come over and we'll have some beers'. It's always 'Hey, I stole $20,000 in drugs, come help me not be dead!'”
        “Sorry.”
        “Maybe... Maybe after we're done with this, we go grab some beers?”
        Stan glanced at Mike, a smile on his face, “OK, sounds good.”
        “So, why the turban.”
        “Oh, the turban...”
        “Yeah?”
        “I work as a P.I.”
        “Really? What do you investigate?”
        “Marital disputes.”
        “Sounds, interesting. I guess I'll keep asking, because it seems I'm getting closer to the answer ever time I do. What's with the turban?”
        “The guy who hired me said I had to wear a turban while following his wife. He thinks she's been cheating on him. I followed her, and recorded what she did. I didn't find anything damning. I don't think she's cheating on him. She doesn't really do much; I think he's just jealous.
        “He said I had to wear the turban because it was his religious belief that people he hire have to wear turbans or something.”
        “What? Somethings not right with this whole thing, man.”
        Stan shrugged, “nothing feels off to me.”
        “You'd better look harder. Does he wear a turban?”
        After a moment of silence, “no.”
        “Then why would he want you to wear one?”
        “He said-”
        “I know. His religion or something. If he did believe in that stuff, don't you think he would wear a turban too? I say something's wrong with this whole thing.”
        “We'll find out soon I guess,” Stan said, “we’re here.”
        Harper mall.
        They parked and entered, but neither dared to speak. A sudden air of danger was stifling their words.
        Mike followed Stan to the meeting place: Hungry Monster, a small family restaurant.
        A man in a fine suit sat at one of the back tables. Without the suit he wouldn't have stood out at all: he was the epitome of the “average Joe”. That is, if he hadn't been wearing a one-thousand dollar suit. And the warm, colorful decor contrasted his fine suit so much as to make him stand out even more than if he had been dressed as a clown.
        It seemed a strange place to hold a meeting with a private investigator.
        They sat and shook hands.
        “I assumed the job is finished,” the man slid an envelope onto the table.
        Stan reach for it, but pulled his hand back, “not fully.”
        The man's dead stare shifted for a second to Mike, then back to Stan.
        “What do you mean?”
        “I followed your wife, but she's not cheating on you, man. I also didn't wear a turban.”
        The man stood, and withdrew a large handgun from his jacket.
        “We're going to take a little trip to my limo, and we'll talk more there.”
        He placed the gun back into his jacket.
        Together they walked to his limo. As they approached, an elderly man in a tuxedo jumped from the driver's seat and opened the door for them.
        Once inside, the man pressed a button on the armrest of his seat, “take us to my place.”
        The limo started and they were off.
        Stan begin to rock back and forth, “hey man, I don't know why you're mad. If you're mad, are you mad?”
        A grin, then a soft chuckle.
        Mike asked, “so, any chance you can let me go? I'm not really part of this.”
        “Not part of this, you say? Then why are you here?”
        “Not sure, really. I was told I was needed.”
        Stan seemed to be more interested in the floor of the limo than the conversation taking place.
        “If you just let me out here, I'll walk away and you'll never hear from me again.”
        The grin seemed to grow.
        “Do you want to hear my plan?”
        “Plan? There was a plan?” Mike asked.
        “You see, I needed Stan here to wear the turban and be seen following my wife.”
        Mike shrugged, “OK.”
        “No!” His grin was gone, “None of this is 'OK'. It appears that my character judgment on him was wrong. I didn't hire him because I believed he would be good at his job, no. I hired him because he's a mess. I was expecting no less than a horrible job to be done. He stumbles out of a bush, falls out of a tree, nearly gets hit by a motorist or something. He accomplished the job flawlessly because he ruined everything.”
        Stan nodded.
        “Okay. Now what? Are you going to bring us to your place and make Stan wear a turban? Do you and your wife have to be stalked by a man in a turban to get it on?”
        The vehicle stopped, and the elderly man exited and opened their door.
        Once again, he produced the gun and motioned for them to exit the limo.
        This wasn't anybody's residence. This was nowhere.
        “Wait!” Mike made a grab for the man, but was quickly struck.
        “I can't have you two around.”
        It was a cold quiet night momentarily interrupted by gun fire.
        Mike wasn't a stupid person, he was just a man of his word. All those years ago he had told a friend “anytime”. It just turned out that this time he shouldn't have answered the phone. He should have stayed home.
        Now, he would lay bleeding in the middle of nowhere with a possibly dead junky lying next to him.
        He felt tired, was it normal for a bullet to make you tired?
        If he did fall asleep, he didn't know if he would wake.
        He wasn't too worried about that right now, so he could worry about being alive later. There were many reasons to continue living. One of the many reasons he couldn't die now was that Stan owed him a beer.
        Mike is a man who pays his debts, and will fight tooth and nail to make sure others do the same.
        He closed his eyes as the soundless night lulled him to sleep.




Tune in next week to find out what happens next...
« Last Edit: May 25, 2015, 09:24:38 AM by boe »
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Okay, I technically cheated because I proof read this before it was posted, so I'll be posting a response super early. :B

*LIKELY TO CONTAIN SPOILERS*

There isn't much more critique that I can give you at this point, but I think there's a lot to be said about Mike's...erm, commitments? He's a very interesting character, but one thing's for sure: He's not very assertive at all. Sometimes, he tries to be. I can see some people mistaking that for a unstable representation, but I think it makes the story a little more realistic. Real people are never consistent.

In fact, it's the realism of this story that gets to me the most. It's easy to associate a story like this with something that would actually happen. At first, it seems like a dude helping out his high and goofy friend, but then takes a darker turn. There was also a bit of foreshadowing that I noticed, with the way his friend reacted like his life was on the line.

Thinking back on it, the route to the ending is just a little blurry to me. I didn't quite think on it, as I was following the general flow of the story, but the whole ending was only dimly lit in my mind. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, because the confusion of what exactly happens and why it happened is something that Mike himself must have been experiencing.

If there is one thing that I'm unsure of, it's the friendship between Mike and Stan. Sometimes, he admits that he doesn't care about his friend, despite being willing to spot him $1,000+. By the end of the story, Mike seems to almost want to leave his friend to die, and perhaps that is why he receives the cold fate that is brought upon him.

In a strange sense of irony, he makes a note to always get involved with his friends, and this ends up bringing him to an involvement that becomes his downfall. Pretty classic.

Now, did Mike have that sort of thing coming? Maybe, because he was willing to give too much of the wrong things, in my opinion. It seemed like when he realized that his life was on the line, he was willing to leave Stan to his death. But at the same time, he was under the impression the whole time that he was helping somebody by simply giving them the material things that they needed.
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yuyubab mad a cool logo 4 her sotry so i did 2
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I read Yuyu's "From the Woods" and then this one, and I gotta say you both led me to an ending I wasn't expecting at all. Which, in my books, is aces. ;]

It was a very REAL sort of story for me, too. I'm more of a fantasy sort, but in this scenario is was best with how it went. I agree with Yuyu, the inconsistency in Mike and Stan's relationship spiraled and went in a direction to be expected by how crazy it was!
I mean, this kind of scenario happens in life experiences. It is real. So messed up, that it is real.


I enjoyed it. ^^

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Thank you for reading.     : )
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Following your style:
What I liked-
I like that there was a point to the story. That Mike was there because he was a man of his word even though he didn't particularly want to be.

What I didn't like -
I'm a paragraph girl (as you well know lol)  I wanted more paragraphs xD

What I was confused about -
Why did the guy want them to wear a turban? What was that all about?  :o  Why did he kill them? That whole part of the story didn't make much sense to me mostly because I didn't understand it. But then maybe that was the point!  And if so hat's off to you sir, because you did it well!

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Why did the guy want them to wear a turban? What was that all about?

Part 2 will explain all that. :3
(Edit: Or maybe part 3, who knows. : O
Not sure how long this will be in the end.)

:o  Why did he kill them?

They knew too much. :(
He couldn't have loose ends floating around.
« Last Edit: March 25, 2014, 01:18:29 AM by Lord Stark »
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I figured that lol :P  I just didn't understand what they knew too much about.  I didn't even realize this was going to be part of a series, looking forward to reading more!

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[spoilers]
Because it wasn't just about following the wife, and when stuff goes down later, he didn't want anybody around that could link him to it.
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We need a "To be continued" at the end o.o might clear stuff up B)
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ok :V

Quote
Tune in next week to find out what happens next...

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Oh, yeah, definitely a "To be continued..." would be good for this one since it's an open ending.
I followed ok where everything was going, though.

Looking forward to finding out more on this! ^^

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The thing that really made me enjoy this story was the chemistry between Mike and Stan. I've known too many friends that just use each other for help and never hang out with them, and I've had a couple like that on my end as well, so the realism really hit home. The whole turban thing was rather odd, but since you said that it'd be explained in the next story or so, I'm intrigued as to what the purpose of it is and/or what it represents. I also chuckled at the 'horrible job' line.

The things that bugged me, though, were the formatting and the cursing outside of the character's dialogue; I won't say that the formatting makes the story look like an absolute eye-sore, but it looks really weird; almost like a giant post. The cursing by itself, of course, I didn't mind, since profanity isn't exactly an unforgivable sin, but since the story is apparently being told from a third-person perspective and not a first-person one with, you know a narrator, I don't think it fits nearly as much outside of the casts' lines, as it feels kinda thrown in.

Other than that, it's quite a gripping tale. Nice job, my friend!

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This story is very mysterious o.O I personally laughed every time the Turban was mentioned (just because it was strange)
I  cant wait for the part 2 (or 3)

I think I only found 1 error and that was "He shoved the noted into his pocket." :V

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Needs more paragraph.

Dude, this is sick. The banter between Mike and Stan is just golden. It just feels like a friendly conversation between two old buds! And it's done so well! Very entertaining. As complete as it is- and I truly think it is- I cannot wait for part deuce!

This piece's strength lies in the dialogue. The other details are just that- details- and honestly take a back seat to the conversation, as it should be in this style of storytelling.

Oh yeah, a few spelling errors, and the aforementioned grammar, blah blah blah... whatever, gimme the next one. 


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« Last Edit: March 27, 2014, 06:58:12 AM by EvilM00s »
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Fuck, dude, your writing style is off the chain. It seems not everyone was on board, but I am. The reason your characters chemistry and dialogue work is because the rest of your writing is so direct. It's to the point, and although there is a small want for a little more phrasing, I was honestly content reading the whole thing as it was. Your dialogue was spot on, and felt extremely human. Your story went somewhere, and wrapped itself together nicely.

If you were to add more writing to it, I'd want to get inside your main character's head a little more than what is going on around them, such as the color of the car seats or whether it was a dark and dreary night. I would definitely read more of your writing without hesitation.

you awoke in a burning paperhouse
from the infinite fields of dreamless sleep