Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Chapter 7 Speckled Lady on Crack

By Gary O'Brien

Those days had passed a couple of years now. Could I be that person again after it had taken so much to get out of that mode? That brief period in my life nearly killed me, nearly wrecked my marriage. That person, waiting to crawl out of me was a raving bastard. He was not only cartoonish in his boorish manners, he was a mean son of a bitch. He was a horny fucker, would hump the leg of a barstool to get off.
That person wore a trench coat and a fedora, said things like “that’s livin’, baby.”
It started with me switching from reporting at newspapers to working for an Internet company. I had taken the job for twice my salary to get back at an editor.
What had the editor done? Failed to promote me after three years in trenches and a bit of enterprise work that I thought surely would be nominated for something. It didn’t, and when I look back on it the story was garden-variety stuff but it sure as hell had been fun.
The biggest mistake in my life, to date, is walking away from my job on that newspaper. It was done with anger toward a spineless editor who still draws breath in his corner office, hiding from news and hard decisions. The alternate job came by way of a friend leaving his position as a copywriter for an Internet company, which is where I became a sleaze for a time in a bald attempt to wash myself of all that journalistic sanctimony, by wallowing in the moral ambiguity I had denied myself for so long.
Anyway, my friend wanted back into newsprint in the worst way and was willing to take the lowest wrung a weekly ladder to get it. He was leaving behind a gig that paid good cash and he was doing so on good terms but he wanted to do right by the people who hired him since they were influential in the county. He needed to find a replacement. He said they were willing to pay the next copywriter $50,000 a year, which to my family represented the mother-load.
I interviewed and got an offer of precisely that.
The trouble with living for the day you get to wag your ass in your boss’s face is, that day comes and it goes; and after the ultimatum results in a raspberry, you find yourself whisked into a new career, a world you are completely unfamiliar with.
Great, I’m making $50,000 a year. I have a business card that reads “Copywriter.” What’s my job? I was one of the first five guys hired as idea men for a new division of the company, that would produce a web presence designed to make investors salivate. Then we would sell the division.
Yeah, well, look, I didn’t really understand it at first either and that should have been a problem, had not the ass-wagging been so orgasmic.
What we attempted to do was create a collection of web portals that would provide some information of some kind. A place on the Internet that would become so popular, we would then sell it to large communications giant. Like a hit radio station that specialized in irreverent daytime talk that became so popular Clear Channel just has to eat it.
We would traffic in nothing but electronic impulses shared across the web. Shock web. My bit was inflecting it with the right satiric venom and irreverence.
Our ideas would never result in anything a man could proudly set his hand to and say “I made this.” No, our ideas would reside on a web server, accessible to all, as nonexistent as thought itself. Piles of green cash, catalyzed from vapor. That was the idea.
The job felt like this: you sit in a cubical surrounded by a bunch of other guys in their cubicals and think shit up, tossing the ideas back and forth over email or over the partitions depending on your mood. Then you and the five other idea men close yourselves off in a little room slightly larger than four cubicals stuck together with chart paper and Magic Markers and come up with a plan to generate repeat traffic on the web sites. Doesn’t matter how you do it: Kill someone, film it, then put it on the websites for download. We never did this, but you get the idea.
Sure, you’re paid twice what you made as a newspaper reporter, and you’ve been given two thousand shares in company stock. But the price of the paper is falling by the minute your ass hit your new chair and they hacked your tie in half with a pair of scissors.
What they didn’t tell you was, your budget might dry up in six months if you don’t come up with a concept that sets the world on fire. If the company gets bored with you and your concept, the company might just let you ride another six months as you all slide into doom so they avoid lawsuits and enjoy the tax write off the losses from your warm seat generates. But after that, that’s it. You’re through. Ride over.
It took us about a week to settle on one central idea we could all agree on, which was that living in cubicals verily sucks the bag. The idea and theme has wide acceptance now and the term “blogs” is the entity many of us go to share our misery and intimate thoughts and portraits. Unimaginative templates provide the query fields. Digital download your photos, add a few hyperlinks to your own favorite places on the web and bang; your got own little website going there. Plus e-mail links so you can receive messages from someone out there who might be your heart of hearts. How sad.
“Hi, I’m Trish. I work at ELH Corporate Headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m a marketing rep. I love my cat Snickers. Here’s a picture of she and I hiking up Grandfather Mountain….blabity blabity bla..”
Andy Worhol was right about us all being famous in the future. If he had laid off the coke a little, he might have just gone the next step and invented the Internet.
The newsroom and the Internet company are too different animals. I am laying down the differences here, for the sake of posterity so that, if I am killed by those bent on shutting me up, you can at least see the progression of madness that got me in trouble, and that placed me at that bar, talking to this Marquee writer, who I now thought, must suffer something horrible to balance universal scales of Karma.
The great thing about a newsroom, I learned in retrospect, is there really is a structure to it. At 4:30 p.m. all your “shit” is either “in” or “you’re fucked.” It reminded me of that Star Trek episode “are you of the body?” where Kirk and the others find this world ruled by a computer entity and hologram name Landrew.
You remember it, right? “have you been absorbed?” At a specific time of day the clock chimed everyone went fucking nuts for a while. Then the clock chimed again, people dusted themselves off, pulled up their skirts, picked the hairs and fecal matter out from their teeth, put their hats on and went back to the daily routine.
What I am saying is, as crazy as it got you could depend on that. You knew what you had to do all day long.
Flash-forward to this nebulous thing called the Internet company and what did I see? Upper management types wandering around in floral print polo shirts and khaki, big “hostage” smiles on their faces, stretching credulity so far you could almost see the imaginary guns pointing to their heads, set to fire one year from now. Blue corporate carpet, cubical walls covered in cheep wool and cardboard backing; a network guy touting the virtues of Linux to everyone who will listen; the cool, moist air of a droning air conditioner going full blast. Forty guys in all, a smattering of women - management counted our male Canadian contingent as representative ethnic minorities - everyone sitting around building web pages, building web pages into the future; building web pages for Jesus. All of these busy net ants ripping files off Napster at a mile a minute, downloading gigantic blocks of data to music and movie libraries on their machines and on the company server.
That org is no more than the dusty echoes of a perpetual Foosball game and whispers of a reverse stock split in a dark air-conditioned room ten thousand feet square somewhere in Vero Beach. But whoever thought to walk off with the music files alone, left with a fortune, a catalogue of a time, a monument to the potential of the Internet ripped from the bright Dodge City days of its infancy.
The wide open, balls-to-the-wall days, where you yanked, downloaded, and burned whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it, however many times you wanted to while the fiftyish managers and their moneymen wandered through the room with terrified self-assuring smiles painted on their faces, completely oblivious to what their hard-at-work employees were up to since their expertise in all matters computer and the Internet, ever lagged behind that of their young charges.
To give an example of the mind-fucking waste that went on in the name of “creative development;” among the gazillion things plucked and sucked like berries from the net were sound files from the actor Christopher Walken; little snippets from that peculiar voice of his…in that … DEADPANNED….strangely-emphasized, eight-beat count of his.
Picture it: A known jackass comes over to your desk and asks you a question. Using your mouse and your left click button, and with your speakers turned all the way up you select a file just as he opens his mouth.
“Asshole, moron,” goes the voice of Walken.
The victim goes to speak again and Christopher Walken cuts in, “great …big, fat, stupid HOG!”
If the victim doesn’t get the joke by now he doesn’t deserve to work here because the rest of the room is in tears. Not one to disappoint, the man again opens his gob to speak, and Christopher Walken is already admonishing him “…you look in the mirror and say to y’self, fat stupid hog, I LIKE YOU!”
Yes, those were the days. Amid this band of hearty pirates was an artist named Steve; a true genius. Steve had an unmatched flair for illustration and design that will one day make him famous, I have no doubt.
Actually the guy’s name is Ishtvan, something-something-something- a-vich but the family had changed the name to Ivey when they arrived. It went Ishtvan blabitty-blabity Ivayavich.
The intent of hiring an airbrush artist, who learned his craft blazing stoned works on surfboards, then training him in wed design was to incorporate his gorgeous flair on our web pages. This was before anyone thought to realize that people don’t go to web pages to see art, anymore than they go there to read my columns. Never mind that, we both got paid, and what’s the point in the life of an artist?
See, by this time we had come up with a more defined concept to what we were all about. Our pitiful idea went something like this: we provide hosting for these little villages on the web, a place for each little village, a gathering of web logs from that village. Each village was hosted by totem spirits from pacific island settings.
As a concept it was fun, and completely useless as plastic dog vomit that was going nowhere fast, but we didn’t know it yet. That would all become abundantly clear with the pop of the Internet bubble in April of 2000, fourteen months before Rape Flight was sent to New York City’s crumbling south end.
Did I mention it helps to have just a fucking smattering of luck in your life if you want to be a writer?
Anyway, I am now coming to the point of this obscenely-huge aside. Steve and his buddies in the company; the young guns who ran the creative show in this new division, adopted me as their slightly older, out of tune, mascot. I came to realize that in opting for one day of ass fanning at my former boss I had come to work for a group of juvenile would-be-giants who had not the first fucking clue what they were doing. They covered their mistakes by drinking heavily, which is where and when my alter ego surfaced. I could have quit and started over. But with money at stake: that kind of money, I decided to run with it.
We got amazingly ripped just about every night at Riverside Bar in Vero Beach. These were our idea meetings. Steve and Jay, the concept designer, brought me into their world of run-on hangovers, blazing conversations and ideas, bad haircuts, Foosball, nut cutting dis-fights, and drinking, drinking and more drinking. I got paid to be a frat-boy all over again, and I had never been one on the first go around.
And for some reason that can only be explained away as a function of growing up in Vero Beach, these boys loved to download Frank Sinatra, in addition to the harshest, hardcore, misogynistic rap ever created. They also liked the worst sort of puke mechanized technopop dance shit imaginable. But they didn’t just know the Sinatra standards from all their downloading, they loved the old 1940s, stand there with a fucking smoke in your hand at da casino and watch da broads, classics. They knew all the words to these, knew that “Fly Me to The Moon” was actually called “In Other Words.” I was a generation ahead of these boys; my Dad was in World War II for Christsakes, and yet THEY knew these words like they lived during those times.
Luck be a Lady Tonight….let the downloads commence.
So, some where at some when along the line, between hanging with these guys, Jay, Steve, the artist, and Jason the company’s network administrator, we became the Rat Pack II, in the best of Ocean’s Eleven style.
I began smoking. I had done so briefly in NYC during my actor days, but now in the spring of my 36th year, I took it up with suicidal ferocity. Not any pussy lite cigs either. I’m talking about the real deal, Marlboro reds, cowboy killers. The kind of smoke where the filter actually injects more impurities and nastiness into your system, just be-fuckin-cause, man! I had been a responsible newsman; a family man, a button down nice boy, and these guys were helping me shake all that. Their running side-bet was how fast they could turn Gary into Herb Tarlic from WKRP. How long before Leslie kicked me out and I ended up in a one-bedroom apartment off 20th Street in Vero?
We visited Hooters a lot during those days, drove all the way up US 1 to Melbourne as they didn’t have an outlet for chicken wings served by a pair of fresh tits in stretched cotton in Vero at that time. Then all the way back down again, usually with half the cars left behind like lost soldiers. At some point during these weeks a limousine was rented and we stopped at a roadside Karaoke bar just south of Palm Bay, where I met up with a female problem and I will get to that.
How did we keep up this pace? Glad you asked.
In addition to his duties as an artist, Steve was an amateur pharmacist. Steve haunted the herbal aisle of the health food stores and pharmacies for years, intrigued with the wonders of over-the-counter remedies. What happens if you mix diet pills with bee pollen supplements, or if you take Kava Kava extract and Ginko at the same time? These questions needed to be asked and Steve appointed himself as the world’s guinea pig; the pioneer who would concoct the world’s first herbal speedball.
On an empty stomach, take Motrin, then drink Red Bull, then vodka, then smoke a little weed. What happens? Your psyche goes sideways; you stand beside yourself on line, waiting with a pleasant buzz to get back into the real world of consciousness, but you don’t feel rushed to reach the window for your ticket just yet. Conversations around you become a soothing texture to your ears that is at once crystal clear and meaningless, significant only in terms of the actual sounds. Prodded, you understand what someone is asking you, only, your mind has sized up not only the import of the words but their subtext, and the significance of the speaking peacock’s colorful tribal displays. The shirt patterns, the speaker’s choice in shoes; all of this information is being processed simultaneously. You raise a hand and smile, alerting them that you are analyzing their signals. You will be with them in a moment.
Take a diet pill, then Bee pollen, then a Kava tablet; now what? Calm furious activity, followed by a stop at the Sushi bar for seared tuna meat and a helping of Sake.
“Let’s go man.”
“Where?”
“How the fuck should I know? Is your credit card still working?”
Keep in mind these concoctions could well kill you at an instant. The novice runs the risk of immediate seizures and heart failure. Going back in time, I had discovered early in life that my constitution is relatively drug-strong. Florida college students in the early to mid 1980s were exposed to some of the most potent marijuana every created called “kryptonite.” The shit was purple and we smoked it. Yes, I have delusions about aliens and so forth, so you take that for what it’s worth. But the fact is, over my years of athletic drinking and sobriety, I have found that my body, if not my mind, is resilient to the deadly effects of intoxicants. It rebounds.Now Steve rarely smoked cigarettes. When he did it was only a means good buzz going. I was a smoker during those days. At work I needed to go outside every forty-five minutes to spark one with another pal. We called each other Sparky. The point is, whatever effects Steve was experiencing with these concoctions of his, that I also dabbled in, these were different than what I was realizing. The devil nicotine and whatever Phillip Morris put in those filters was chemical X to me.
Steve’s cure for a hangover was a Bee pollen supplement tablet, a caffeine pill both washed down with a Red Bull. He called this mess, “Speckled Lady on crack” and it worked like a defibrillator.
“Three hundred joules. Clear!”
He theorized that brain cells functioned similar to shark’s teeth and as means of culling the weaker ones and allowing the stronger to reach the front of the mental jaw, all this abuse and go-go-go was actually healthy. It certainly didn’t impact his work in the slightest.
So one fine day, I tried “speckled lady on crack” on top the Kava pills I had been breaking into coffee all day, atop a difficult moral dilemma I was in with regard to a friend of the female persuasion, whom I had been chatting with for weeks now in a dishonest effort not to have carnal relations with her. The idea that I could talk her out of my system was wrong and only slightly less intelligent than shooting smack to cure a cold. It made my situation worse and brought me closer to a state of depravity than I have ever known.
So, on that particular day in question, when the lady’s significant other was watching basketball playoffs at a bar, she and I went out. And atop, “speckled lady on crack” and cigarettes, and a few beers, I added Southern Comfort to the mix, about six shots worth. For some reason our stop at the karaoke bar turned into an all night thing. I don’t remember much other than singing Can’t You See, by Marshall Tucker about fifteen times.
I woke up in a hotel room the next day and the police were looking for me and the woman snoring beside me. Anyway, it was a cop’s asp, rapped on the door of the shitty little hotel across from the Karaoke place that woke me to the horror I had become. I had been “absorbed” by Landrew; I was “of the body.” I had an AIDS test to look forward to, explaining to do; and three weeks of wondering whether or not my “friend” was pregnant.
But on the upside, I found out precisely what made someone of my weight and disposition go Landrew, as it were. My variation “Speckled Lady on crack”, plus cigarettes, plus Southern Comfort, was called Can’t You See? And here I had a decent candidate for the concoction sitting next to me.

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