Always a Groomsman

Chapter 2: Wedding Peeks-1

Chapter 2: Wedding Peeks

Lorraine Banter was a conniving, dangerous, heinous, and stunning b***h who I believed would have carried the title of President of the United States of America had she not enjoyed consulting brides and grooms about their future wedding days. She was thirty-six, tall, blond, and quite the cliché pertaining to her businesswoman looks. Lori, as she liked to be called, was the founding mother of Wedding Peeks, an online website for brides and grooms to use as a tool to create their perfect celebratory weddings.

Lori started her business ten years ago, nine of which I had worked for her as a full-time photographer. She graduated from Brown with a computer science degree, ended up jobless, moneyless, and manless. The beginning of her career occurred by accident some eight months after her last day at Brown. She posted twelve wedding pictures on a popular social network. The wedding was recently attended in the Hamptons and was quite striking, uppity, and wasn’t an eyesore. Numerous cyber followers enjoyed the pictures, which created the idea of Wedding Peeks. She came up with the brilliant concept of walking future brides and grooms through visual arrangements of wedding themes. Wedding-related vendors were encouraged to sell their products on her website to the viewers, which supplied her with a paycheck since she made a percentage of their profits.

Also, Wedding Peeks was the place to be viewed by the elite, and raved about by presumptuous social circles, since it was quite popular with over four million members. Long story short, fathers of brides and mothers of grooms were thrilled to pay Lori a hefty chunk of money to have their loved ones’ weddings showcased on her web site. This prompted Lori’s business to be successful from the very start, careening it into something grand. Lori now had a staff of six professional photographers, including me, eight writers, three gays who worked in marketing and advertising, four salespersons, a financial guru named Tina Grotenburg, and others in what Lori called “the operation and guts” of her business.

I liked my job and thought it rather easy. Never did I believe I could make a career as a wedding photographer, but God had blessed me. My work entailed attending scheduled weddings, which Wedding Peeks staff arranged. I showed up at the events, snapped dozens of photographs, passed the photos via email to a four-person team of picky editors, who then chose certain photos to post on Lori’s website. Following my work, I collected a paycheck every two weeks. I wasn’t wealthy by any means, but I was comfortable and happy.

Occasionally, I did side photography jobs outside Wedding Peeks. People hired me for graduations, birthdays, family reunions, and lakeside picnics. Once, I got paid to take photographs of two male jocks making love, which was quite the sum of money. All three of us were delighted with the results, and I chalked it up as a positive adventure. A cougar once tried to pay me to photograph her giving an eighteen-year-old soccer player a blowjob, which I declined, unable to pull off the pictorial adventure as art instead of smut. A small publishing house who manufactured cookbooks had also hired me to pop a few photographs of food, which was a breeze and another wad of cash. A wife had paid me a sum of money to take pictures of her military husband and military sons. God bless the USA. And two male models in their early twenties paid for my services to add pictures to their professional portfolios, once I had slept with the pair, enjoying their beautiful bodies for my carnal craving.

My meeting that Wednesday morning regarded my next assignment. Lori supplied me with the details that I needed: the Robindock wedding was at five o’clock in the evening on the upcoming weekend. It was being held at The Templeton Aviary. A reception followed the event at The Marilyn Bar in a private room. As usual, I was ready for the engagement. Or so I thought at the time.