OFF LIMITS GRUMPY CEO

1. A Not so Empire State of Mind （Ryan）

Chapter one

A Not so Empire State of Mind (Ryan)

A remote semblance of self-awareness sickened me for a second. I looked around and the first thought that came to mind was, this is what yuppie heaven looks like.

All of us are sitting in our five-figure suits, holding cigars, vapes, and cigarillos in our hands, not so much smoking them as letting their fumes perfuse the air of my office.

I wasn’t partial to smoking; but at the end of every week, when this band of good-for-nothings I knew as my friends came by the office, I indulged in a Cuban.

To someone looking from outside the glass walls of my office, this scene would resemble that notorious Paul Allen card scene from American Psycho: a room chockful of egos, net worths in the high millions, and insufferable men, sitting vacantly, shooting the shit, sizing each other up, and sharing their latest conquests.

Then that horrible second passed, and I didn’t feel sick anymore.

Yuppies? These were my friends. Besides, of the six people present, only two had actual jobs.

There was me, the CEO of Blue Riff Records, and then there was Charlie, a senior lawyer at Nicholson, Rodham, and West. The other four, in no particular order, were Ronnie, Brady, Vince, and Jeff — all four living off of their substantial generational wealth, trust funds, profitable stocks, and cryptocurrency.

Besides, I was quite certain that the term “yuppies” referred to young urban professionals. In our late thirties, none of us exactly qualified to be called young.

“Ryan, you know we don’t like it when you start ruminating. Come on, man!” Brady was thumping me hard on the back, making me spill my neat whiskey.

“Easy jackass, that’s fifty-year-old McCallan you’re spilling on Brazilian Cherrywood,” I muttered, looking down at the dark brown puddle sloshed on the maroon floor.

“Jeez, when did you become such a prima donna?” Jeff chimed in.

“Excuse me for not wanting to flail around and spill shit like a baboon,” I spat out, throwing a bunch of Kleenex on the floor and watching them soak up all the whiskey.

“Are you saying that Jeff is a freaking baboon?” Ronnie, five whiskies in and positively hammered, roared at the top of his voice and stomped his empty glass on the coffee table, making everything rattle.

Charlie threw his head back laughing, as did Jeff.

Their silhouettes against the Manhattan backdrop reminded me of the opening scene of Mr. Robot — about the top 1% of the top 1% or the secret men who controlled the world from great towers such as this one.

That was just cognitive dissonance on my part.

Rich as these guys were, they were hardly evil in the true sense of the word.

“No, I was implying that Brady was being a baboon. Jeez, Ronnie, you’re going to make your hepatologist a rich man if you keep at it. And the night’s still young,” I suggested, genuinely feeling worried for the man. He drank like a pirate and had the liver spots to show for it.

“Tell you what: I’ll do a backflip from your Romanian Cherrywood desk over there and land on my feet.

Then you’ll owe me a thousand bucks and an apology to Brady for calling him a baboon,” Ronnie said.

The way he said it in a single go without slurring any of his words made me think that he might actually pull off the backflip.

It also made me realize that the reflective part of the night where we all sat, drank, smoked, and talked was over. Now it was time for the inebriated shenanigans that would in some way bring back our Alpha Epsilon memories. As usual, Ronny was initiating.

“Easy there, Ron. Your breakdancing days have been over for well over fifteen years,” I announced, a little worried but mostly amused.

Back in the day, Ronnie would climb the rooftop of the frat house and do a backflip into the pool, causing all the sorority chicks to scream off the top of their lungs and all the frat bros to roar in applause.

Except, this wasn’t a frat house. It was my office, and Ronnie wasn’t nineteen years old anymore. He was nearing forty.

“You’re being a wuss, Ryan,” Charlie said.

From the corner of my eyes, I could see them getting up, taking off their coats and folding their shirts up to their elbows.

I sighed. Why did it have to be my office?

I’d just spent a fortune on the décor so that everything would be just right.

It wasn’t about the money. It was about the cherrywood, the Chesterfield sofas imported straight out of Italy, the reclaimed Amazonian wood that the big conference table in the back was made of… and everything else in between.

Now these Neanderthals were ruining everything.

“Go, Ronnie!” Jeff howled, holding the McCallan whiskey bottle over his head like he was at a roadshow.

I braced myself for the inevitable crash and the subsequent breakage of glass and furniture. I even closed my eyes as Ronnie got up on top of the table. But the moment passed and nothing terrible happened.

Minutes later, Ronnie war standing there on his two feet, swaying gently after nailing the backflip. For a second, pin-drop silence reigned, only for it to be broken into an uproar the very next moment as each guy started howling, whistling, cheering, clapping.

I tipped my glass in Ronnie’s direction. At his age, and given how drunk he was, pulling off a fifteen-foot backflip and landing on his feet was no small feat.

“Now it’s your turn to pay up, Ryan, my boy!” Ronnie challenged, stomping toward me.

I chuckled and took out my wallet to pay him for winning the bet.

Ronnie and Brady both put their hands on my hand and pushed away the wallet. I looked up to see the fire in their eyes, a manic expression dancing on their drunken faces.

“The stakes just went up, son. It’s no longer a thousand bucks,” Brady said, giggling fervently and hiccupping sour breaths wafting of whiskey fumes and cigarette smoke. “Now, you gotta do the dare assigned to you!”

“Gentlemen, it’s been one hell of a night, but I am afraid that I’m going to have to be the adult in the room,” I said, waving my arm around the office. “It’s time to call it a night.”

“The minute you gotta pay up, you’re chickening out?” Jeff growled. “What about Alpha Epsilon for life?”

“Be that as it may, but…come on, help me out here, Charlie?” I looked at the only other man who held a day job, hoping he’d see reason, but Charlie was too far gone. He was climbing the table now, which was already marred with the dirt tracked in on Ronnie’s shoes.

Rather than help him get down, Vince was getting up on the table with him. How on earth these people were still alive without any serious injuries was beyond me. I was certain that if any of them suggested it, they’d rappel down the side of the building, thinking they were Spiderman.

Then, as it always happened, chaos ensued when both Charlie and Vince — neither of them breakdancers or athletes in their heyday — slipped and fell off the table, crashing into the smaller coffee table, breaking all the ornaments and tchotchkes that my secretary had meticulously arranged earlier that day.

I could see it all happening in slow motion: glass flying everywhere, the looks of shock on Jeff’s, Brady’s, and Ronnie’s faces as Vince and Charlie crashed into the furniture, spilling alcohol everywhere, cigar ash flying in every direction.

“Jesus Christ!” Ronnie screamed. “That was fucking amazing!”

“No, it was not!” I shrieked, losing my cool. “Get the fuck up, you idiots.”

“Hey, come on, man. It’s only furniture,” Charlie said, dabbing his forehead with his fingers and wiping the blood dripping from his head. He swayed and fell once more.

“Check if he’s got a concussion,” Ronnie suggested, stooping over Vince and pulling him up.

“Guys, this is beyond pathetic,” I said, looking at the state of disarray my office was in. We were lucky that it was late in the night when most of the employees had gone home; otherwise, half of them would be peeking from the other side of the glass wall.

“Pathetic? You’re being pathetic, Ryan,” Vince remarked, spitting out blood and a tooth on the floor. “We were Vikings back in the day, man. We were heroes. Champions. The world was our oyster, damn it. I know the rest of us still are. What the fuck happened to you?”

“You really wanna go there?” I warned, my blood pressure rising, causing the veins in my temple to throb fiercely.

“How about I go there?” Vince snapped.

“Hold on, gents. We’ve got company,” Charlie said, putting his arm between me and Vince. We all swerved our heads around at the same time to see a young woman walk into the office.

I had never seen her in my office before.

She had jet black hair with red streaks running down the ponytail that hung from the top of her head in the signature Ariana Grande, Bella Poarch way.

Incidentally, neither of those singers were my clients, even though my agents had gone after them with offers that other singers would have had a hard time refusing.

I could see the green glint in her eyes, and it wasn’t the kind one got from contacts.

That was her natural eye color, and it was doing something to my heart.

She wore a black skirt and a plaid shirt.

She was holding files with an iPad under her arm pressed against her chest. I couldn’t help but let my gaze linger for a few seconds.

Needless to say, she was exquisite — a sight for sore eyes if there ever was one. But at the same time, I felt deeply embarrassed by the display of chaos in my office, the sight of the guffawing idiots who were ogling her ostentatiously, and the stench of tobacco and alcohol perfusing the air.

“I’m sorry, were we being too loud?” I asked.

“What are you being sorry about, Ryan? You’re the fucking boss,” Jeff said.

“That doesn’t mean we exclude manners, Jeff,” I snapped, feeling further embarrassed by my friends.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hellerman—” she began but was cut short immediately by Brady.