&nbs
p; Kate
I was certain that Walter hadn’t meant to, but amid all his rambling bullshit, he had given me an ingenious idea.
I wanted to convince Sean Donovan to let me shadow him for a couple of weeks. I knew he wouldn’t let frumpy Kate Asher from Sports Insider Online tag along to his games and after-hour parties, but he might let a buxom blonde journalist from Playboy or Maxim, especially if he was trying to get in said buxom blonde’s panties.
I left Walter’s office and went straight down the hall to chat with Drucilla Darcy, the amazingly-talented graphic artist responsible for the design of the Sports Insider Online website and the layout of the magazine.
Drucilla – Dru to her friends -- was a thirty-something lesbian with buzzed hair and no boobs. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and dressed in men’s jeans and loose flannel shirts. She tells everyone that the only reason Walter hired her was because he thought she --“Drew”-- was a man. And she didn’t bother correcting him until several months after she was hired.
I’ll never forget the look on Walter’s face right after Dru told him that she didn’t have a “cock and balls” (that’s a quote). His mouth fell open and he sort of froze for a moment. His eyes went up and down Dru’s thin frame, then he cleared his throat and said, “Well, of course, you’re a girl… I mean… I knew that… What kind of idiot do you think I am?”
Dru’s door was open. I stuck my head in and asked, “Hey, you busy?”
Dru looked up from the massive computer screen on her desk and gave me a smile. “Hey, you,” she said. “What’s up.”
“Can I talk to you about something?” I asked.
She pushed back from the computer and waved me in. “Sure…
I closed the door and pulled up a chair so we could talk quietly. I said, “I need some business cards.”
She blinked at me. “You mean you need to order more business cards? I think Walter’s secretary handles that. I just lay them out and send her the file for the printer.”
“No, I don’t need more of my Sports Insider business cards,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t even give those things away. I need a special business card, one that will get me in the door at Kings Stadium.”
Dru leaned back and folded her skinny arms over her flat chest. She gave me a sideways look. “What’s going on, Kate? And don’t give me the old ‘it’s better if you don’t know’ routine. If I’m going to forge a card for you, I need to know why.”
I glanced at the closed door and leaned in to lower my voice. “Do you know who Sean Donovan is? Wide receiver for the Kings?”
“Of course,” she scoffed. “Lesbians follow football, too, you know. What about him?”
“I want to interview Sean Donovan,” I said. “But he won’t talk to anyone from SIO. We’re even banned from the stadium. So, I was thinking…”
“You were thinking that you could pretend to work for another magazine, which means you’d need a business card with that other magazine’s name on it,” she said. A devilish grin crossed her thin lips. “Let me guess… Playboy? Maxim? GQ?”
I smiled at her. “How did you know?”
She waved a hand in the air between us. “Sean Donovan is a swinging dick,” she said, rolling her eyes. She nodded at my boobs, which were pushing against the material of my t-shirt. “You go in with the right business card and the right blouse, you flash a little cleavage, and you might get an interview. Heck, you might get laid. Is that the idea?”
I bit my lip. It sounded crazy when she said it. I said, “Yes, that’s the idea. I mean, not the getting laid part, but the rest. Do you think it’ll work?”
“You’ll never know unless you try,” she said, turning to her computer and resting her fingers on the keys. “So, Playboy or Maxim?”
“Playboy, I think.”
I watched her Google the words “Playboy logo”.
The screen filled with images of the famous bunny head. She selected one of the images and pasted it into the business card template she had called up in her graphics program.
Next, she clicked a link to get the address of the Playboy offices in New York City, then added that to the template.
“What’s your cell number?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder at me.
“Why?”
“For the card,” she said, tapping a finger to the screen. “You don’t want me to put the real Playboy office number on there. What if he tries to call Playboy to check you out and discovers that you don’t really work there?”