Joyce, Elijah B.

[Deleted]

full name Elijah Benjamin Joyce date of birth 03.01 (25) home town Greenwich, Connecticut current city New York City, New York education Columbia University occupation Attorney at Latham & Watkins LLP ________________________________________ August 4, 2014 Office of Latham & Watkins 885 Third Avenue New York City, New York 10022-4834 Extension #47244, 3 pm Eli: Teagan, is my 8 o'clock meeting tonight still on with Mr. Zaccone? Eli: Teagan? ... TEAGAN. T.E.A.G.A.N! Teagan: Oh my god, Elijah i'm so sorry!! I forgot I had you on the other line. I was dealing with Jerry and the missing package we sent to the IRS last week. I must have switched the tracking number on accident when in the mail room. Such a stupid mistake, I- Eli: Fucking christ, please bore me some other time. I don't care. What I do care about is if my dinner meeting tonight is still on with Frank and Mr. Zaccone. Teagan: Oh, right. Yes, 8 pm at Le Bernardin. Eli: Great, thank you. Teagan: Oh.. no, wait. I just now saw an unread email from Mr. Zaccone two hours ago.. Eli: Well, spit it out. What does it say? Teagan: He has to cancel, his son is graduating from Berkeley and he doesn't want to miss it. But he said he'd get back to you and Mr. Oliver when he reconfigures his schedule. Eli: Fucking Californians. The laziness never ends. Teagan: I'll go ahead and cancel the reservation for you. Eli: No. Do you know how hard is it to get a reservation there during this time? That'd be a god awful waste. Teagan: Well, i'm free tonight. Eli: Is that a fucking joke? Eli: Because we've been over this countless times before. Eli: The firm is paying for it, and you aren't a client. Eli: It's inappropriate. It's inappropriate. Again, inappropriate. And lastly, it's fucking inappropriate. Eli: .... Eli: I'll pick you up at 7 sharp. Wear the red dress. ----------- It's one thing to hire some fast talking hollaback girl from South Central as one of our firm's major receptionists (some bullshit concerning more diversity i'm guessing), but it's another to think it's okay to hire a twenty-two year old as my secretary. She's mediocre. Wide eyed at the whole real job thing, still a little lost and confused, still susceptible to simple mistakes even after a year here, I just can't. It's like Gloria on the 25th floor, failing to hide how she uses her being on disability as an excuse to take extra vacation days during the week when she realizes her workload will be heavy. Or when you ask her to give you a FedEx envelope labeled and ready to go with important live bonds to be messengered off to DTC, and she throws them unorganized in a size too small envelope instead and uses interoffice mail, because her fat ass is too lazy to take the elevator up one floor and walk a few feet. Again, mediocre. I can't tell you how many times my blood pressure has been extremely high because Teagan has deleted an original version of a document on "accident" on our system, or ordered beef and chicken for our closing lunch, when I told her 99% of the people attending are vegetarians. She's infuriating, half the time incompetent, too West Coast, and makes me want to go deaf just at the sound of her voice when she goes on a jolly rant. But at the end of the day when i'm exhausted, wondering why I picked this profession, she walks in ready to take my abuse, says something sweet to ease my stress, and then I catch a look at that svelte figure, those perky tits, those full lips and that long blonde hair and beautiful smile... all the frustration seems to go out the window. And despite feeling like a complete asshole, it just seems ridiculous to ever think of actually letting her go. ________________________________________ ________________________________________ Spring Break '07. Our first Spring Break of our freshman year in college required proper celebration. I along with my friends, Tommy, Grant, Pat, Mike, and Rowan decided to leave the East Coast and tear up a new domain for two weeks. Somewhere hot, somewhere with stretches of sand and clear blue waters, the selling of the biggest burgers and cheesiest fries, where fake i.d.'s were simply a small courtesy for a lax bartender or liquor store cashiers who really didn't give a fuck, basically, somewhere when we left, i'd be hard for any cop to really track us down for any destruction we may have caused by the end of it all. And that's when Grant came up with Put In Bay, Ohio. I would have preferred Mexico, or even Ibiza, but our mother's had a leash on us still, and going any father would be like crossing the Amazon River at night during high tides with only a shitty raft. Swallowed up and killed, my friend. So Put In Bay it was. On the second day, after Rowan had nearly broken his leg after crowd surfing, and Pat and Mike had all but poisoned themselves from too much tequila and beer, Tommy spotted three girls out of the crowd during the late afternoon. They were together, it was easy to tell, for though they tried to hold their own, they still stayed in close proximity of each other. It was cute, really. It wasn't long before we charmed them enough to let them stay with us, be pampered by us, and when I caught the brunette's eye, that was it really. Bianca Alexandra Lachay. The sixteen year old from Terre Haute, Indiana. The first two nights we spent together were far more innocent than me now, would have liked to admit to anyone. We traded life stories under the setting sun, getting to know every little thing we could genuinely think of about ourselves and our pasts, and by the third day, we couldn't stop the I love yous. At eighteen I was just starting off my adult life, yet there was no way i'd go into it without Bianca now. The guys weren't extremely impressed, but their comments mattered little to me. To me, what happened next, was a no brainer. I loved her after all. Fast forward a few months, and it was the beginning of summer. Bianca had ditched the hick trailer park that is pretty much 90% of Indiana, and she moved into my new Manhattan apartment with me. It was easy at first, I had a beautiful girl to share my bed with every morning, afternoon and night, and in general, she never strayed too far from me. She was wide eyed at everything the city had to offer, but it wasn't annoying. Not even in the slightest. It just meant I had so many things to show her, teach her and make her fall in love with the city I knew i'd call home for more than half of my adult life. I spent time taking care of her to a point that I didn't even knew I had in me. When she came home, I knew her routine so well, i'd have things set out for her. At one point I even drove hours just to try and find her favorite cheese from back home when she was feeling home sick. She let me shower her in gifts, change up her look, she even cooked for me, and most of all, she depended on me. I was her saving grace, the love of her life, and the thought of being that intimately important to someone, settled well with me. Love's a crazy thing, and I think the more we played house that summer, the more I was convinced i'd be buying her a Lorraine Schwartz's at the end of it. But when my first day back at Columbia began, it was like a switch flicked on, and I entered a new world. College had things that I thought I wouldn't ever care much about, and suddenly in my second year, things just got all the more appealing when I also realized I was wasting away the endless freedom New York City had to offer. Half of my freshman year I was more concerned with her, and now, my friends were beckoning me to come back to reality. To face the fact that having a serious girlfriend at this point in my life was beyond ridiculous. Rules were meant to be broken here, and being tied down seemed more of a burden than anything else. Not to mention my parents were concerned about the mystery girl I had hiding out in my apartment for the entire summer. The disapproving looks ate at me whenever I tried to describe Bianca to them, and after four months, I realized that there would never be an acceptance there. Not completely. It frustrated me, but this was the life I was born into. The life i'd always be in. Bianca was a bottle of Wild Turkey, not a vintage 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam. No amount of training or life changes could completely reverse this, and the sooner I accepted that, the sooner the heart could heal. By the middle of my sophomore year I was thinking law school, and to follow my new game plan, I went out more without Bianca. I combined an old and new lifestyle, and found I liked it far more than having to remember I had a girl back home all the time, and the other tedious tasks that followed, like what to buy her, to feed her, deciding the amount of time to split between her, friends and internships, and to keep her happy so we wouldn't go to bed angry. It seemed like we aged twenty-five years, and to this day, I still don't think there was anything completely wrong with my worries. We were moving too fast and it was time for someone to realize this probably wasn't going to work after all. But coming up with a way to break up with her was harder than I thought. Apart of me didn't want to, because I still had this ridiculous hope that maybe all this would blow over and it'd work out, so I kept her in the dark. But one night at an after-hours party I attended with a few friends, I ended up getting caught by Bianca while in the midst of hooking up with some blessed big tit blonde. In my defense, I was high as fucking kite, and drunk off my ass. And I did feel a bit bad about it, this definitely wasn't the way I wanted to break anything to her. But all thoughts of possibly making up and working through it were thrown out the window when she retaliated with a guy from my International Relations course. When she was fucking sober. Needless to say, I kicked her out, and she spent some time somewhere else. But despite this, I let her back in eventually, and for two years we kept at this back and forth game. Fucking other people, messing with each other's minds. I couldn't trust her, and she couldn't trust me. It wasn't until a month after her eighteenth birthday that she had packed her bags, and when I came home from my last class of the day, she was gone. I won't lie, the moment I lost Bianca this time, I struggled. It was like apart of me went missing, but it also felt like I had just been disobeyed. Disrespected. Slapped in the face. After all I did for her, she was going to run out on me for good? No talking things out, no anything. If she was reading this, she might come back and say she tried to be reasonable with me, tried to talk with me, but I was being cold. I'll admit I was cold sometimes, only because I couldn't get the fucking images of all the guys I wanted to murder for touching her out of my head. But it was hardly all the time. At that point I just had to remind myself that I was better off, and think of my future. My parents were right, and getting rid of her was the whole point. She'd never be the girlfriend or wife I was supposed to have.. But that didn't mean I wasn't going to still keep tabs on her. I knew her, knew her more than anyone. She'd come crawling back to me eventually, for one thing or another. And when she did, i'd be waiting. Because no one gets one over on Elijah Joyce. That's not how this game is played. And it's definitely not how it's going to end. ________________________________________ The day I found out Bianca had been hanging out more with Dasia, which of course led up to the day she decided to move out, I ended up fucking up my left hand. Bruised and fractured a bone or two, and in the hospital I had to explain that I punched partly into my living room wall (which I covered up with a Van Gogh in hopes my mother wouldn't notice). My half sister, the whore everyone and anyone seems to know, the one who still has the ability to show up to galas, even when I give her the wrong address and she first ended up on the other side of the city, the one I disinvite to all birthday or holiday celebrations though she still finds us, or shows up to a family dinner with my father, mother and I, and all the while, thinks she's actually welcome. Welcome. She's far from welcome, and the fact that my father even gives her an allowance, or regards her as part of the family, makes me want to vomit. And take a shotgun to the temple. Her whorish life decisions have inevitably made me a sometimes laughingstock at the office, and for a while, I was concerned I wouldn't even get a job, because her loose fucking vagina has been all over the city. I'd spend countless times hiding the fact that we were related, and sometimes I still fucking wonder how people in some circles know it, but gossip travels fast here, and it wasn't long before people put together our relation. You'd think maybe, just maybe, i'd get rest on the internet too, but that's even worse. And my spam box is constantly filled with jokes upon jokes upon jokes. Or guys asking for her number or what strip joint she's at. The only girl i've ever met who gets a college degree, then throws it away to be prostitute makes her probably, no, most likely, the dumbest fucking person i've ever encountered. I can't wash my hands of her, and now she's got her nails in Bianca's back, and it's enough to make me worried that all i've worked for concerning that relationship, not even a little, will be put back together again. ________________________________________ your name liza play-by garrett member group resident