The Other Great Gatsby

For what it’s worth, did not live in East Egg or West Egg, but he liked eggs for breakfast, thank you very much, particularly poached soft and served on lightly buttered toast with a little kosher salt and coarse ground pepper. And he did not much enjoy his first name, Gatsby, which was chosen by a librarian mother. He didn’t think it was very fair, or very funny, and he thought, quite frankly, that his given name was weighted with mawkish American tragedy, too heavy with classism, as set up for bad outcomes as a woman named Ophelia.

Furthermore, he developed a distaste for, in no special order, daisies, swimming pools, optometrists, brash women, and green-tinged lighting. Gatsby had become petulant over the years of carrying around his infamous name, and in any situations that required a can-do attitude, he never suggested that he couldn’t do, but he was certainly one that, when given the choice, wouldn’t do. He patently refused to aspire towards hyperbole. Too much pressure, he said. I hate “great,” he said; I prefer Pretty-Good Gatsby or Not-Bad Gatsby or even Fairly-Ineffectual-But-A-Decent-Sort-Of-Guy Gatsby.

It was with this attitude that he pursued goals planning to fall well short of greatness. It was this that let him warm the bench during high school basketball, and this that let him graduate college barely making cum laude, and it was this that made him take the bar exam a staggering five times, and this that let him grow bald behind a desk, researching copyright law, in the offices of Mickel, Stiverson, and Berry, where he never planned to make partner.

Thus Gatsby’s life coasted along on the flat, boring highway of existence until he hit a major axel-bending pothole at a conference for copyright law in Tucson where he met a woman with a name not related to flowers in any fashion: Stella. And much like her namesake, she was the star of the mediocre convention with its mediocre spinach dip and mediocre name badges.  Star in the sense that the men found her dorky-chic glasses fascinating. It helped, too, that she knew all about the exciting things happening in copyright law, and she had a pretty sweet figure, although her calves were a little thick. And of all the slightly paunched, slightly bald men circling her in an awkward, slo-mo kind of high-school dance, her favor fell on Gatsby, who tried to disappear into the foliage of the faux Ficus trees crowding the mock columns of the banquet hall.

Admittedly, he did radiate an odd sort of tension, something Clark Kent-like in his demeanor. But what could we expect from man whose name marked him for something epic even as he fought to be average? Stella picked up on this energy and picked up on Gatsby after liquoring him up on perquisite cheap wine from a major vendor. Gatsby tried to resist, he really did, but he could feel everything starting to break apart as he drunkenly gazed into her designer frames. It was like the Saran Wrap that held him in all these years was finally starting to give and he felt ready to flex.

And since we don’t want to turn this into a tawdry account of conventional sex, pardon the pun, he told me that afterwards she said, “Wow, I mean Gatsby, that was great,” and the hotel room suddenly seemed posh in his eyes, and after that he sort of exploded into a bouquet of greatness. That’s what he said, “bouquet of greatness.” Not long after that, he made partner and not long after that he bought the hotel. Anyway, that’s the story he told me, by the pool after dark, obviously a few scotches into the night. Me? Who am I? I’m just Nick, the front-desk guy.