Free You Can Say You Knew Me When by K. M. Soehnlein Page B

dispatched pretty quickly. Sure, Dean and Sal make an attempt at a double date, but the girls never show and the guys don’t seem to care. Right there in the first few pages of Kerouac’s most famous book—the one that inspired a billion red-blooded boys, my father among them—an undeniable erotic current pulsed along the surface.
    When I finally looked up from the book, my eyes landed on a guy staring at me from the next table. He was my age, maybe a couple years younger, dressed in an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and a baseball cap. His gaze was strong and direct as I took in his features—brown skin and black eyebrows, eyes a bit close together, big nose. Indian or Arab, perhaps. I looked away and then back. This time, he raised his eyebrows and pressed his lips into a smile. The nod I sent back to him was very cool, but inside, I was already percolating.
    “Kerouac?” A Midwestern accent: care-whack.
    “Yeah. On the Road. Just checking it out.” I heard the hint of apology in my voice, caught reading a book I’d once dismissed.
    “I’ve read all his stuff.” He stood up and moved toward my table, lugging along an enormous backpack, a fleece pullover and the Lonely Planet guide to Nepal. He wore tan cargo pants with zippered pockets staggered down the legs and those newfangled hiking boots, the ones that look like basketball sneakers crossbred with the brown-suede Earth shoes of my childhood. So maybe this wasn’t a cruise. He was just one of those perennial backpackers, happy for the excuse to converse with a stranger.
    He shook my hand firmly, asked my name, told me his. I wrote it down in my journal later, but I couldn’t quite make out my scrawl—it was either Rich or Rick. He asked if he could sit down, and I said yes, not sure it was such a good idea because as soon as he dropped himself into the seat across from me, he launched a monologue about his round-the-world exploits. He’d say, “Then I went to Micronesia. Have you been there? Jamie, you have to make a point to go. It’s unbelievable,” and continue on about a cavern, or a reef, or a ravine that was “the best example of its kind in the whole world.” Personal history came next. He’d been working on an MBA but ditched the program to create a business plan at a dot-com start-up, “installing servers for the B2B segment—that’s business-to-business?” I didn’t understand the specifics. Mention business and my brain shuts down. He said, “I saved a substantial amount of income, and then I said good-bye.”
    “Cashed out your stock options?”
    “No, I didn’t wait that long. The writing is on the wall. All those geeks will live to regret it, working sixty hours a week, waiting around for the big payoff. Get the money now, Jamie, ’cause the Internet honeymoon is quickly drawing to a close.”
    “You sound pretty sure about that,” I said, thinking about Woody’s job at Digitent, a little San Francisco company also funded by venture capital, also providing B2B services I didn’t particularly understand. They were gearing up for their initial public offering. I hated the long hours that Woody spent at their chaotic, cubicle-pocked office, but he was firm in his plan to work hard now and cash in later.
    “Jamie, I’m telling you—do you work for a pre-IPO?” There was something disconcerting about the way Rick kept using my name, all the while keeping his eyes intently locked onto mine. I decided to cast out a lead.
    “No, but my boyfriend does.”
    “Oh.” A pause. Something had registered. “Trust me, Jamie. Tell him don’t wait around. There’ll be a lot of disappointed wannabe millionaires any day now.” Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You guys should just get out there and travel together. It’s better to travel with someone, anyway. It gets lonely. You can imagine.”
    “It’s a lonely planet, right?”
    He smiled at me. “You’re a fun guy.”
    “But I’m not much of a traveler. I’ve