Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every week as an exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Today’s Topic: Part One of a short story.

Here is the deal with today’s blog: Whitney and I came up with an idea for a short story and a character for this story.  The basics – his back story, his age, why he’s doing what he’s doing, are the same.  But the details… well, we will see about the details.  We have not discussed where we were taking the details with each other.  This is our first attempt at collective noveling, and I did not spend nearly as much time working out the details as I’d have liked, so I apologize if the following story sucks!  We both have tried to keep this to 2000 words or so, and so without further ado, I present you with the first part of our first collective novel.  Please leave comments, so we can make the next part even better!

To read Whitney’s story, go here.

A Tale of Two Cliffs, and Some Easy Cheese

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help noticing the contents of your shopping cart.  Why do you have 10 cans of Easy Cheese in your cart?”

The question was addressed to a young, good-looking man who seemed rather taken aback by the sound of a human voice.  Cliff Alberts was 27 years old, tall, dark, handsome, and having the strangest week of his relatively short life.

Usually when blond, curvy, confident women he didn’t know approached Cliff in the grocery store, he knew that about an hour after leaving the store he would be on a date with the woman, culminating in leaving her place the next morning.  That was Cliff’s kind of luck.  At least until recently.

Cliff Alberts had spent most of his life living the good life in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC.  His father, the head of the second-largest financial institution in the country, had kept him afloat through college and most of his twenties.  He figured his son simply needed time to “find himself” and get his own feet under him.  But Cliff, an only child who at age fifteen had proclaimed himself to be “The Cliff,” had never made a real effort to stand on his own feet.  He preferred to rely on his father’s financial support while bouncing from meaningless job to meaningless job and from woman to woman.  It never occurred to Cliff that one day he would have to fend for himself, or that his narcissistic ways would eventually catch up with him.

Which was why the events of the previous week had shaken him to his very core, resulting in the shell-shocked way he now responded to women, and the world in general.

A week ago, three things happened to Cliff that turned his life upside down.  First, he had gone to work to find out the company had made some very poor business decisions in the last two years and was being shut down by the federal government.  Cliff was sent home and told he was not going to need to return.  So he immediately called his father to whine for money.  That was when the second thing happened.  His father, tired of Cliff’s inability to hold on to a job or save any of the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had given his son over the years, and fed up with Cliff’s terrible attitude about starting a job search immediately, had informed him he had no more money to give him, and that from now on Cliff was on his own.  So Cliff, rejected from his job and by his father, turned to his girl-du-jour for some physical consolation.  But when he arrived at her condo, where he expected to be welcomed with a warm smile at the very least, he found her in bed with another man… and a woman.  Cliff’s success with woman was one thing he had always been able to count on, and this took him down so many pegs he could barely function for two days.  So when his phone rang on the third day, it took everything he had left in his lazy, now alcohol soaked metrosexual body to walk to the coffee table and flip open his state-of-the-art cell phone to answer it.

“Hello?” he croaked, squinting as sunlight peeked through the closed curtains.  He figured it was his dad, changing his mind about continuing to support his son.  But the voice on the phone sounded far away, and spoke in a clipped, professional tone.

“Clifford Alberts?”

Cliff cringed at the sound of his full name.  Didn’t people know he was The Cliff?  He thought everyone who knew him at all knew he did not even acknowledge his full name to be Clifford.  Despite his alcohol-induced haze, he could sense there was something urgent about the call, though, so he did not correct the caller about his name.  Instead, he confirmed his identity and waited for an explanation for the call.

“Clifford, my name is John Lenox.  I am calling from the law offices of Smith, Lenox, and Hall in Nassau – the Bahamas.  Your grandfather, Robert Alberts III, passed away last week, and you are listed as the sole beneficiary of his estate.  You need to come to Nassau to sign the paperwork and collect your inheritance.  Are you able to do that, Clifford?”

Cliff blinked.  He knew he should try to clear his head and focus on what he was being told, but all he could think about were two things: did this mean he was getting money, and would that make Charlene (the cheating girl with the threesome) regret her decision to play him?  He must have been pondering this possibility for longer than he realized, because Mr. Lenox sounded annoyed when he said, “Clifford?  Are you still there?”

Cliff cleared his throat and replied, “Yes, I am here.  I can be in the Bahamas tomorrow evening.  Where do I have to go?”  He managed to scribble down the information relayed to him before reaching for the last of his gin and tonic, downing it, and then passing out.

So it was that Cliff wound up in Nassau, in a grocery store, feeling a bit shell-shocked by all that had transpired in his life since one week before.  On his flight to the Bahamas, he found himself contemplating the last words he had heard before boarding the plane.  He had called his father, because the more he thought about it, the more bewildered he was to be inheriting anything from his grandfather.  He had not seen or heard from his grandfather since he was eight.  The only explanation his equally baffled father could offer was that his grandfather had always thought Cliff had enough charisma to get through life and make something of himself.  The man had cut himself off from the rest of the family when Cliff’s mother passed away suddenly of a heart attack, taking his life savings to the Caribbean, not to be heard of again.  Until now.  Even Cliff’s father was unsure of what, if anything, Cliff stood to inherit.  His father seemed to think it was all a big joke, and did not try to hide the fact that he doubted Cliff’s ability to even make his way to the islands and participate in the management of an estate without winding up either in jail or dead.  So by the time the flight landed, Cliff had decided he was bound and determined to prove himself – to his father, his grandfather, and everyone else who doubted his abilities as an adult out on his own.  This trip to the Bahamas would be a fresh start for Cliff.

But upon entering the law offices of Smith, Lenox, and Hall, Cliff learned his inheritance was not quite what he was expecting.  There was no money.  In fact, all there was for Cliff to take possession of was a luxury yacht.

“Your grandfather,” explained John Lenox, “Was in debt equal to $112,548.87 at the time of his death.  All his assets were repossessed by his creditors.  The only thing left for you is the yacht.  We would have contacted you sooner, but none of the phone numbers we could track down for you or your employers knew who you were.”

Cliff avoided John Lenox’s gaze.  He did not want to engage in a conversation about why none of the five employers he had been with in the last few years knew who he was.  He was increasingly embarrassed by the state of his life.  He was trying to turn over a new leaf, after all.  After sitting through all the necessary paperwork, Cliff left Lenox’s office with his 150-foot luxury yacht and nothing else.  He still had no job, and no money other than the small amount left in his checking account from his father’s last gift.  Cliff stood outside the office building, surrounded by palm trees and local merchants and tourists in bikinis and flip flops and realized he had never felt so lost and alone in his life.

A large billboard a hundred feet away caught his eye.  It had a picture of a boat on it, and appeared to be an advertisement for a chartering service, catering to tourists looking for a romantic private tour of the smaller Bahamian islands.  If Cliff had been a cartoon, a light bulb would have gone on over his head at that moment.  A charter service! He could learn to sail his yacht and start a charter service like the one advertised!  That is how he would prove himself to everyone, he would start his own, successful business here in Nassau!  A car full of vacationing college-aged girls drove past him and one of them seemed to be incapable of not pointing at him and laughing.  Cliff realized he had started to drool because his mouth had been hanging open for so long while he’d been formulating his plan.  Old Cliff, he told himself, would have been devastated by hot college chicks laughing at him.  But New Cliff was far too serious for something like that to bother him.

Cliff spent the next two days learning to sail his yacht.  He had a natural ability for it, according to the kind elderly sailor who took pity on him trying to hoist the main sail his first morning on the boat.  Cliff was just beginning to feel ready to advertise his new business when he was approached by a middle-aged man in shiny gold aviator-style sunglasses, a black suit, and snakeskin loafers.  The man introduced himself as Vinny Scalzo and asked if Cliff was willing to take passengers on his yacht.

Unable to believe his luck, Cliff informed Vinny that indeed he would take passengers wherever they wanted to go aboard his vessel.  This seemed to be what Vinny wanted to hear.

“I’ll give you ten grand, cash, is you take me to a small island north of here.  But you ask questions or log where we go and we don’t got a deal no more.  You get what I mean?” Vinny looked at Cliff over the top of his sunglasses.

Cliff nodded naively.  “When did you want to leave for this island?”

Vinny looked around before answering.  “Can you be ready to go tomorrow morning?  I’ll bring a lady friend for you if you can.”

Cliff nodded some more.  Vinny handed him a wad of cash.  “That’s half.  I’ll give you the rest when we get to the island, provided nothing… happens.”

That sounded fair to Cliff.  Nothing was going to happen, and cash was fine with him.  Now Vinny put a small piece of paper in his hand.  “You burn that after you use it, got it?”  The paper was a set of coordinates.  Cliff nodded again.  Vinny walked away.

Cliff brought the money and the paper onto the yacht and pulled out his map.  The coordinates were in the middle of an area the map labeled as the Bermuda Triangle.  Cliff looked at the map a bit more closely.  What a cheesy name, he thought, and pocketed the money.  He was already trying to work out what kind of liquor and food he should stock the yacht with for the journey, excited at the prospect of this lady friend Vinny had mentioned.  Cliff, you see, had never heard of the Bermuda Triangle.  But he had heard of Easy Cheese Nachos, and he headed off to the grocery store to buy the ingredients to make what he was sure would be a delicious meal to impress Vinny’s friend.

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