Sugar: A Novel - Brossura

Slater, Rob

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1440172641 ISBN 13: 9781440172649

Casa editrice: Authorhouse, 2009

Riassunto

Frank Black is a god on Wall Street. He has survived the Great Recession. At home, he has the dream life; lives in a Mansion, has a beach house in the Hamptons, a beautiful wife and two adorable sons. The millions of dollars he makes each year, seem to provide him with everything he could ever want.

When a prized client asks him to spend a month in the Dominican Republic to review the potential acquisition of a sugar plantation, he can't refuse.

On the island, Frank meets a tiny man who has nothing except his daughter. Enslaved by the plantation, this man teaches Frank the difference between wanting and needing. He opens Frank's eyes to the real world, not the one made of Sugar.

One person can change the world, and in this stirring tale, we come to understand how. It wasn't enough for Frank Black to have what most would have longed for in this life: a beautiful, caring wife, handsome, good boys, more money than ninety-eight percent of the world, comfort, luxury, and most of all he was loved. It simply wasn't enough. The drive for more consumed him.

He would be a loser if he didn't win the big one. He needed to get more of what he had to satisfy his insatiable lust for the Sugar in life, the coatings, the superficial wants and desires of a life unfulfilled. His addiction had grown out of control. He needed now, rather than wanted.

Where his wants turned to needs is hard to say, but it is for certain they were no less powerful than the addiction of drugs. He couldn't imagine a life without what he had, not who. He always imagined the who in his life would be there forever.

Until it all changed. His American Dream went awry. He awoke, and that's when Frank Black started living and stopped dreaming.

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Sugar

A NovelBy ROB SLATER

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Rob Slater
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-7264-9

Chapter One

Franklin David Black was only ten in his dream. He was back on grandmother's farm.

Lost in the dark woods, on the west side of his grandmother's home in Connecticut, he recognized the large oak he had carved his name into just last year when his parents had dropped him off for a long weekend away with each other. It was rare they went away together, let alone spoke to each other for more than a few moments without erupting into an argument. Frank had felt something was wrong when they dropped him off; later that weekend he would find out about their plans for divorce.

Inside his dream, Frank was running from something. It was a terrible hungry thing that chased him. He could feel the hot, wet breath upon his bare neck. He ran, and ran. In only his white briefs he dodged the limbs and branches of the scraggly trees, each threatening to cut him as he passed. The woods looked as if it were filled with long arms, bent fingers and hidden dark faces.

As he ran he saw a large cake on the side of the path. It was white with purple trimming all along its edges. It was stacked in three layers like a wedding cake.

He ran up a hill, towards the light streaming in through the canopy of larger trees.

His legs were tired. He remembered having those skinny legs that didn't do much when he was young. They weren't much good for running or hiking or kicking, the things young boys need to do.

He was now on a paved walkway at the rim of the cliff. The walkway spanned the top of the cliff's edge, and below was the roaring ocean. Frank must have been one hundred feet high at the edge of the cliff. Down below were large brown rocks the frothy blue ocean violently thrashed, sending cool sprays of water and mist high enough to reach his flushed face.

As he turned, a large man in an overcoat stood before him. The figure was dark and ominous. His collars turned up shielding his face from view. The he lifted his head. His face appeared now like a rising moon from the black coat.

The dark figure was Frank, himself.

His breathing stopped with an enormous gasp!

If it could, Frank's heart would have fallen right out of his chest, then and there.

Stumbling backwards, his foot slipped off the edge of the cliff and he fell. Faster and faster he went down. Turning he saw the rocks racing towards him.

The sensation of flying through the air to his death was incredible. It was like no other. Suddenly, Frank Black felt alive.

He felt the tiny hairs on his hands. He could smell the clean salt water below and feel the fear drain away. The rocks were coming fast. They were craggy and pocked with holes.

Suddenly, everything went black.

Frank was in a dark place.

He heard water crashing and felt a churning in his stomach.

"Reef the mainsail!"

His father was at the helm of their sailboat. As a busy attorney in Manhattan, his father had little time for Frank, an only child. They lived in a substantial red brick colonial in a neighborhood where there were a few streets with houses and fewer children.

He also was not the most popular kid in his class. He was very intelligent and thought differently than most kids. He was always in the most advanced classes and usually the cool kids and prettier girls he liked were not in these classes. He was a nerd, banished to the nerdy classes with other nerdy kids.

"I can't! The wind is too strong, Dad!" He yelled back to his father, who was covered in yellow foul weather gear from head to toe.

Frank's mother would nag his father until he couldn't take it anymore and then he would relent and take his son sailing. This happened every four weeks or so. The nagging would build to a boiling point, and in order to appease her, his father would take young Frank out on his beloved boat.

"Can you man the helm!?" his father screamed up to him.

Frank stood there holding onto the boom, which was being tossed about as the full mainsail was still up. He couldn't get it down because the pressure of the wind was too great on the sail; it had pulled the sheets or ropes too taut for the little boy to un-cleat. His father would have to do it.

Frank tried to make his way aft, amidst the vicious pitching of the boat in the raging storm. He slipped and fell, sliding off the boat, but his father grabbed his rain jacket. In one swoop of the hand, his father exhibited his powerful strength as he grabbed his son and tossed him to the stern.

Frank stood now, holding on to the large captain's wheel. He watched the heavy mountains of waves rolling into the boat, leaving behind valleys of darkness. As the boat descended, it was launched upward by a rolling mountain, and so on.

His father was now on top of the cabin and struggling with the sail, bending and yanking and pulling to free up the main sheet, which would lower the sail.

The sound of the engine was now more pronounced. Frank heard the propeller lunge out of the water, and grind in the open air, as the bow of the boat nearly dove down to the floor of the ocean, then the stern would fill with water and the engine was nearly underwater as it rocked backwards from the force of the thirty foot waves, as the bow pointed 180 degrees the other way, into the black sky. Up was down and down, up.

He looked to the bow and saw his father still struggling with the sail at the mast. He saw the mast starting to bend from the force of the hurricane winds. Looking up, he saw the mast now was shaped like a bow, bending towards the sea.

He was about to warn his father, when all of a sudden, the mast snapped along with the sail and the boom; all floated away with his father, upwards into the dark, stormy sky.

It was as if his father were riding on top of a giant parachute, sucked up to the heavens.

"Daddy! Daddy!"

He heard an alarm sounding, like a Coast Guard horn, from the distance, out in the black world.

The staccato sound continued in an annoying and continuous interval: ERNDT, ERNDT, ERNDT.

Frank awoke from his dream.

His alarm clock was beeping.

It was time to get up and face another day of work.

Frank Black was still terrified as he blinked open his eyes in his California king-size bed, snuggled underneath the silk-laced duvet, head resting upon the goose down swath of multiple pillows. Comfort engulfed the handsome thirty-something man, as he stretched next to the woman he had married over a decade ago.

His brown eyes were slits underneath his tired eyelids. Turning toward the sound of the radio alarm clock, he saw his usual wake-up time etched in red numerals, 4:45 AM. Turning his alarm off and the radio on, he would ease into wake-up mode.

"Ahh," he groaned to himself, wiping the blur from his eyes.

In the distance he heard three small beeps from his automatic coffee machine downstairs in the palatial kitchen, signaling it was safe to get up; the coffee was made. Automation surrounded him.

It was time for work, again. He was safe here.

There were no storms or people chasing him.

Today was a very important day.

Just a few more seconds. I'll wait until the clock turns to 4:47. Frank thought.

The soft voice of the disc jockey, Mark Thomson, on the public radio station was questioning a guest speaker, "It's WTOP and it's May 21st at 4:45 AM and I am joined by Dr. Fallington. Doc, could you tell us more about the book on modern slavery you've recently published?"

"Sure, Mark. First, 2007 was the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Second, what is a slave? It's derived from the French for Slavic or captured, ecslave."

"Okay, but you note that there are slaves all over the world, even today."

"Of course there are, Mark. Millions of people are enslaved today and we don't do anything about it. Ironically, we stand for freedom in this country, our very Constitution says we will fight for liberty anywhere. It nearly destroyed our country to get rid of slavery. And we now are so prosperous because of it. Strangely, we Americans sit idly by and watch the rest of the world enslave each other. It's like we need our government to go help people in the rest of the world. Kind of like we can't go ourselves and help them, we keep waiting for someone else or something else."

Frank Black rolled over toward the clock-radio and began to think about work today.

Like the coffee maker downstairs the thoughts came in small drips.

Meeting on my year-end bonus today.

Drip, drip.

Meeting with my most important client today.

Drip, drip.

I've got to get my ass out of bed.

Drip.

Frank was a senior vice president of a small, very specialized and successful international investment banking firm in lower Manhattan, the capitol of capital.

He was a power-broker who scraped the cream off the top of large frothy mergers and acquisitions, making millions for his firm and himself. He was a god. His decisions and power could change lives.

Like the Odyssey, these power-brokers conquests were well documented in the Wall Street Journal. Stories of their heroic mergers and enormous acquisitions spread along the streets of Wall and Water. They drifted from person to person, amongst the minions of support for the gods of Wall Street.

Other aspiring heroes worshiped them; hero-wannabees.

THWACK!

Frank reached his muscular, hairy arm across the down comforter and silenced Mark and his guest. The clock read, 4:48, he had given himself another minute, a sign he took as weakness.

He glanced over at his wife, Carolyn, who lay propped up on several pillows, mouth agape. Her nose stuck straight up in the air and her hair tossed about like a salad.

Each breath carried the baritone echo of a snore, interrupted by a snort here and there.

How did she get old? Is this the woman I married?

He turned his gaze outside to the large window revealing the pitch black, first morning of summer. Spring had been damp and cool and Frank was glad it was now summer. Glad the earth was closest to the sun. He longed for its warmth.

The dark Long Island sky revealed few stars and a shadowy cloud cover. The crescent white moon, hung low over the Manhattan suburbs.

Get up. He reprimanded himself.

With one sweep of his long legs, he tossed the comforter off and dropped his feet to the shag-carpeted floor. He hitched his six-foot body into the bathroom. His boxers were contorted on his hairy frame. He limped as if he carried a monkey on his back; one that might be dancing the Cha-Cha at the moment as evidenced by his stumbling gate.

Frank began his morning routine.

Every day was the same. Every morning blurred into the next.

He stared at his half asleep face in the mirror as he scoured his gums with his hundred-dollar automatic toothbrush and his special fifteen-dollar whitening toothpaste that served his vanity. His eyes were only dark cracks. His jet-black hair was frozen in an erotic dance above his skull.

He spat out the toothpaste and rinsed his mouth with the chlorinated, cooled water from his brass-plated facet. It was a fancy faucet, one in which the water flowed not through the arm, but on top, up and over, like a river.

He took one more look in the gilded mirror before he shaved.

I have black hair sticking out from my ears?

Leaning forward he noticed some unsightly hairs growing from his ears.

His voice crackled as he spoke to himself in the mirror.

"Why does hair grow faster out of your ears than your head?" His rhetorical question to the image in the mirror remained unanswered.

"Someone needs to figure that out."

Sighing, he decided today was important and he had to trim his ears.

He grabbed his automatic nose-hair clipper and tried to cut the black hairs, but it wouldn't turn on.

It wasn't charged.

He had forgotten to plug it in the other day. Staring at the useless device with no battery life, he muttered, "Shit!"

He then yanked opened his medicine cabinet and grabbed a small pair of scissors. He wasn't sure why the scissors were there or who used them for what, but they always seemed to be there, perched in the medicine cabinet.

Finally, a use for the stainless steel curved scissors!

"Cuticle scissors?" he asked himself, making sure that was what he was using.

The image in the mirror didn't respond.

He leaned in towards the mirror and turned his head, so as to see his protruding hairs. It took him a few contortions to get the right angle, and then a few twists of the wrist to get the scissors inserted correctly at the edge of the ear cavity.

He clipped one of the long ones, but noticed others.

Like weeding, once you start, there seemed to be no end to the process.

It was difficult maneuvering because everything was backwards in the mirror and he was cutting hairs on the side of his head, so he had to look sideways at the operation, glaring with disdain from his half-open eyes, out of the corner of his head, bed-crease still present. As he adjusted the scissors, he saw the blades were pointed in the wrong direction.

"Mirror, dumb ass. Backwards, duh."

He tried again. Growing impatient at the maneuvering and his ineptitude, he just closed the scissors, snip.

"Ouch!" He cut his ear.

He shook his head staring at himself in the mirror. Just then, he noticed blood running down the side of his face, then trickling down his neck, some dripped into the sink.

Drip, drip.

"Dipshit!" he cursed himself, shaking his head.

Sighing, Frank grabbed a piece of toilet paper and stuck it on his bloody ear. He cut the edge of his ear off, the little pointy part that sticks out, almost like it had been a flap thousands of years ago and now was a little knobby thing that was for the sole purpose of having one's hair grow out of the ear.

Frank stood upon the Italian marble tiled floor that housed a heating element, preventing the floor from ever reaching temperatures below eighty degrees. His air conditioning cooled the air to seventy-two degrees and his floor heated the ground to eighty degrees, working in diametrically opposed ways to assure Frank's comfort. After he finished shaving with the toilet paper hanging off of his ear, he studied his body briefly in the mirror. This was part of the routine.

Turning to the side he examined his profile, sucking in his gut. He patted his hairy stomach as his abdomen retreated inwards yielding a larger thorax and skinnier waist.

This was only temporary he knew, lest he walk around all day without breathing.

He had tried to work out regularly, but with his job, he very rarely had the time. So he had simply quit a few months ago.

He would no longer fool himself that he was going to try. His arms were still toned and a part of his upper stomach, but his waistline was starting to gain mass. A man in his late-thirties goes through some harsh physical changes, not measured by any one drastic change, but by a significant number of small ones every day, until one day, he is old.

He flexed his arms in a body-builder pose, dropping his bent arms down like a giant 'C.'

Stud.

Standing and letting all of the flexing go, he relaxed.

Not as impressive.

Then he stuck out his stomach as if he were pregnant. The large rotund belly was nearly twice his original width. If he weren't so hairy it would look like he was pregnant.

He rubbed his belly like a Buddha.

"That's what you're going to look like if you keep eating those chocolate chip muffins each morning, dumb-ass," he advised himself.

He turned and hopped into the shower. The newly upgraded tiled, rainshower drenched his body with warm water from all directions. It was as if he imported his very own tropical rainforest waterfall to bathe in each day. He closed his eyes as the warm water ran over his head and body. He could fall back asleep standing in the balmy dousing. Relaxation danced at the base of his scalp, coaxing him back to sleep.

No time for this.

He snapped his eyes open and finished his cleaning routine. He started moving much faster now. The shower had helped.

He dressed quickly in his six thousand dollar, Brioni black suit, with a custom-tailored, white shirt and plain, but shiny, turquoise tie. His cufflinks were small, platinum globes of the earth as if he had conquered this prize and wore it vanquished upon his cuffs.

He passed by his sleeping children, Henry and William, peeking into their bedrooms as they slept.

As he glided down the curved eight-foot wide stairs, he thought he wanted to spend more time with these two little boys. Grabbing a travel cup of coffee and his briefcase, with trench coat draped over his arm; he passed through the kitchen and descended to the garage.

He approached his new Mercedes 550 in the three-car garage at almost the same exact moment each morning, 5:20 A.M. As he opened the back door of the sedan to stow his briefcase, he saw that his wife, Carolyn, had left the car seat and some of his oldest son's toys in the back seat.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Sugarby ROB SLATER Copyright © 2009 by Rob Slater. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Authorhouse
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1440172641
• ISBN 13: 9781440172649
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 320
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Germania