The Misogynist
A Novel
Steve Jackowski
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, place, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 Steve Jackowski
Cover Art by Heidi K. Rojek
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
ISBN: 978-0-9899729--8-7 (print edition)
ISBN: 978-0-9899729--9-4 (ebook)
DEDICATION
To Richard Hatch
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve dedicated this book to my good friend Richard Hatch. He bears no resemblance to the Richard Hatch character in this novel, aside from his wry wit, intelligence, and committed friendship. He's also read all of my books and for some reason seems to like every one (except he had some understandable reservations about The 15th Juror). I’d also like to thank my first readers – my wife, Karen Noël, and Jo Minola who provide insightful and honest critiques. Last and not least, I’d like to acknowledge Heidi K. Rojek of City Book Review for the cover work she’s done on this book and on The 15th Juror.
Other Novels by Steve Jackowski
The 15th Juror (2018)
L’Ombre de Dieu (2016)
The Shadow of God (2014)
The Silicon Lathe (2013)
Preface
The Whistleblower
I hate people.
People are the reason this world is such a mess. They’re gullible. They believe what they’re told. They’ll follow charismatic leaders into self-destruction and destruction of others. Give them a political or religious cause and they can justify any action no matter how immoral, no matter how many others suffer from their actions. People lie. They cheat at almost any opportunity. They protect themselves at the expense of those around them.
Tell them a lie and bury it in half-truths or truths taken out of context and you can create true-believers. With the advent of the Internet and Social Media, people with crazy ideas have the means to convince others of their righteousness. Say something sensational, get a following, go viral. More and more will believe you. You can be famous. You can have influence. You can be rich.
And the rich. Don’t get me started. I don’t mean people who are well off. I mean the truly rich, people who have more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes. They have walled estates around the world, cars whose cost would feed a hundred families for ten years, clothes that cost more than many people’s homes. And what do they do with this money? They protect it. They get richer. And they get richer at the expense of others. Their money and the power that comes with it allow them to buy politicians who can convince their constituencies to vote for things that are bad for them but that will benefit their wealthy partners.
The rich get richer and richer, the poor get poorer and poorer as they’re promised that there’s a way to have the American Dream. And the middle class, they don’t even see it coming. They’re so damned complacent that they work their jobs, come home and watch television, and repeat. They’re getting poorer too and when they lose their homes to failed economies, they join the poor as the rich get richer.
I can’t fault the poor. There is too much stacked against them. The few that succeed, never look back. Why would they want to return to desperation when they worked so hard to climb out? Those that don’t get out fall into hopelessness, petty crime, drugs, and violence that get propagated to their next generations.
There was a time years ago when the poor had a chance. Stay in school, get an education, go to college, and succeed. Those days are long gone, but the rich keep selling them this ideal and after they give everything they’ve got and fail to succeed multiple times, despair sets in.
Desperate people do desperate things. They want to believe in some salvation, be it religion, drugs, revolution. Crowds become mobs and mobs destroy without thinking. For God’s sake, if people can’t even watch a soccer game without rioting and killing fellow spectators, what hope is there?
I went into high tech thinking I could make a difference. I honestly believed that information would set the world free. If even the most downtrodden had access to knowledge and experience from around the world, they could educate themselves. They could recognize that their situation was not normal. They could rise up and demand change. Information seemed like the great equalizer.
I invented technologies that made the Web real. Other technologies made it accessible in the most remote places on earth. Together, we should have made a difference. We patted ourselves on the back when the Berlin Wall fell. Many thought Reagan’s arm race with the Soviets brought it down, but those of us in tech knew that without the information about the West that so many received through the Internet, it might never have happened. We enabled communication like it had never existed before. Radio Free Europe? Nice idea, but it didn’t have the reach, allure, or the wealth of information we provided via the Web. And it certainly didn’t allow anyone to connect to anyone else anywhere, any time.
Yes, we thought the World-Wide-Web meant World-Wide-Change. But commercialism trumped us. It’s all about advertising and popularity now. Like it, retweet, vote, give a thumbs up. Hire a social media consultant and flood the web. Distract people with sensational products, games, or videos. Hide the substance. Or, if you’re one of the big oppressors out there, capitalize on this propaganda machine that Hitler never dreamed could exist. Think what he did with propaganda. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
We have the rich who feel entitled to get richer, we have the complacent middle class, and we have the poor who are lured into making choices against their own interests. We have mobs, extremists, suicide bombers, amoral leaders. We thought information would change all that.
We gave a gift to mankind and they perverted it. If it sounds like the story from the Garden of Eden. Maybe it is.
I’m tired of seeing our technologies perverted to make the rich richer at the expense of others.
Something needs to be done. No, I need to do something.
____________________________________
The Serial Killer
I hate women.
The ‘fairer sex’ isn’t so fair once you get to know them. They’re jealous of each other and if it helps them look better among their peers, they will stab other people in the back faster than any of the sleazy businessmen I’ve met. They use love and sex to lure men in to get what they want and then move on when they have it. Men are such suckers. We believe from an early age that we will find a kind, caring, loving, supportive woman, a life partner. Advertisements promise sex. Movies and novels promise true love. But women are calculating. The Serpent chose one of his own to destroy Paradise.
Like my wife. We married young. She was beautiful and intelligent with a goal of making a real difference in the world. After law school, she worked in legal aid, helping the poor and unprotected. I believed in her and what she did.
But then I got rich. Not just comfortable, not just well off, RICH.
My wife changed. She quit her practice and became a socialite. I never imagined this was possible. She always seemed so grounded. Suddenly, life became about being seen. People needed to know who we were and how wealthy we were. No, not in dollars, but in what we could afford to do or buy. She needed the biggest house with the best view, expensive clothes, and homes in exotic places. We had to throw regular parties for the elite of the San Francisco Bay Area.
I set up charities so that we could ‘pay-back’, and asked her to manage them, thinking that would bring back some of my ‘make-the-world-a-better-place’ wife, but these too bec
ame vehicles for her social climbing.
When I started giving away our fortune, she filed for divorce. She wanted to make sure she got her half before it became too small to support her new lifestyle. Truth be told, I was glad to see her go.
But I started looking around. Other high tech founders were going through the same fate. Sure, there were many who reveled in their new-found wealth and enthusiastically raced through the social doors their wives opened.
But others, those with a conscience, those true believers, often found themselves in my place – stunned at what their wives had become.
I think it’s even worse for those who haven’t made it yet, who risked it all to be successful in bringing their visions to the world. Their wives hung around for one or two startups, but at some point, they decided that their husbands were losers. And for them too, it was time to move on to greener pastures, leaving in their wakes visionaries who were already suffering after the losses of their technology passions, now emotionally devastated too.
I lost two of these friends to suicide. They could have made a difference but now they’re gone. And their wives moved on, their exes’ deaths just confirming their decisions.
Yes. I hate women. I’m tired of seeing women destroy the vulnerable. Something needs to be done. No, I need to do something.
_____________________________________
Chapter 1
“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much."
- Helen Keller
1
Samantha Louis looked out her second story office window above Haight Street in San Francisco and watched the patient of a lifetime drive away. It was over. They’d just had their last session together. Sam knew it was coming. In her notes and in talking to her collegues about the case, she’d begun to refer to the patient as ‘POL’ – patient of a lifetime. The POL had made fantastic progress and now seemed to be ‘normal’ and by any standard, was cured of mental illness – a condition that had threatened relationships and quite frankly, the lives of others. The POL had been dangerous.
Sam should have been proud of her success. It was rare you could point at a psychiatric patient who was actually cured. Most were ‘managed’ – either through therapy, behavior modification, drugs, or a combination of the three. Far too often it was drugs, but after her years of experience in residency and her work in inpatient facilities, she knew that for many, drugs were the only way to bring some sense of normalcy into their lives.
This wasn’t the case with the POL. Yes, some drugs were involved at the outset, but that was just to help manage behavior. As therapy advanced, the drugs were withdrawn. Now the POL had a solid relationship, a good job, and was actually happy. In Sam’s opinion, there was zero chance the POL would relapse or would present with other issues. The POL was actually cured.
As much as she tried to convince herself to be proud of her success, Sam couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss. This was the case of a lifetime. Her mentor, Dr. Ken Karmere hadn’t seen anything like it in his entire thirty-plus year career. What were the chances Sam would ever see a case like this again?
So here she was, thirty-seven years old, almost two years into her private practice, and not making enough money to quit her part-time job at the inpatient facility of San Francisco Community Hospital. At least that paid well.
Med School, fellowships, a long residency, and treatment of the POL had consumed her life. Like many of her counterparts, she had few really close friends. They were all far too focused on getting through their training so that they could make a difference in the world as psychiatrists.
But aside from the POL, who was now gone, her other patients consisted of a few couples that she counseled and several teens with eating disorders. Nothing exciting and not enough to pay the bills; certainly not enough to repay her student loans.
As for her personal life, Sam didn’t even have a pet. She couldn’t imagine subjecting an animal to the absences demanded by her psychiatric training. And while she’d had a few relationships with men in Med School, none lasted. Maybe it was her intensity. Maybe, like with a pet, it was her unavailability. She was too often doing night shifts or on Call. Or maybe it was the fact that once her psychiatric training began, she couldn’t stop analyzing her dates. It was like the Med-Student Syndrome. Virtually all med students imagine they have every possible illness as they begin studying medicine. She went through it herself in Med School but she got over it. And then, after she entered her psych residency, it seemed like her dates presented with every possible psychiatric disorder. They quickly sensed that she was in analyst mode or she herself would become paranoid about what she thought she saw in them. Certainly, this wasn’t the path towards a successful long term relationship.
But, it was hard to complain about the wonderful apartment she’d found just a few blocks from her office and only a few hundred yards from Golden Gate Park.
Housing was a challenge in San Francisco, but luckily, the elderly owner of the house wasn’t interested in the ridiculous rents others were charging nearby. In exchange for checking in regularly and an occasional dinner together, her landlord made Sam feel more like a granddaughter than a tenant.
Sam stepped into the small shared bathroom outside her office and examined herself in the mirror. She was still attractive. There were a few strands of gray starting to show if you looked closely, but her blond hair concealed them well. Small lines were beginning to show on her face. Worry lines? Still, nothing too bad. And since she’d finished her residency four years ago, her more flexible schedule had permitted her to take yoga classes three days a week and Pilates two days a week, with a couple of jogging sessions in the park added in. She’d dropped most of the weight she’d put on during Med School and residency.
Looking at herself objectively, Sam decided that it was time to work on the personal side of her life. It had been put off far too long. She needed to find some group activities. She could make friends. Maybe she could even meet someone.
Sam returned to her desk to review her notes before her next patients arrived. She couldn’t help seeing the irony that she was providing couples therapy but had never had a long term relationship herself. That would have to change.
2
George Gray printed the two emails, put on his black horn-rimmed glasses, and stood up and stretched his lanky, six foot four inch frame. The eight by eight work spaces were really too small for him. Maybe one day he’d move up to a real office. Sadly, the chances of that happening any time soon were miniscule. Still, he was grateful for the freedom he had in his job. It was a far cry from when he’d started at the New York Sentinel almost two years before. Now he could choose many of his stories and most of them were printed. Back then, he went months before any of his stories were accepted. Now he had credibility, and he was sure that with these two emails, he’d be onto something that would hold his interest and that of the Sentinel readers for some time to come.
George walked past the other cubicles on the 11th floor of 555 Montgomery Street in San Francisco to the corner office occupied by Morris Levinberg, George’s boss at the New York Sentinel. Morris was heads down, reading glasses hanging precariously from the end of his nose, a red marker in his hand.
“No, No, No!” Morris grumbled, clearly not pleased with what he was reading.
Morris was in his mid-fifties, with a sweaty balding pate and wiry gray hairs poking out over his ears. While frumpy wasn’t a term that was generally applied to men, it was the first word that came to mind when George looked at Morris and his middle-aged paunch, five o’clock shadow in the middle of the day, and disheveled clothes. It was amazing what physical appearances could hide and how easy it was for people to judge others by their bodies. But one look at Morris’ face with its oversized beak and eagle-like eyes, and you could sense the keen intelligence that had won him a Pulitzer and made him a bestselling author.
George let Morris finish the page he was reading, then knocked on the open door.
“God, I sure wish I was talented. I work my butt off and most of my work still never sees the light of day.
“But I’m not here to complain. I have a dilemma and need your advice. When I got in this morning, I had two somewhat strange emails in my Inbox. I tried to track down the authors, but the email addresses and the paths the emails took seem to lead nowhere.”
“Learning some tricks from Janey?” Morris asked.
“Yeah. My high-tech guru wife showed me how to follow email paths through multiple servers. I’ve been getting pretty good at tracking down ‘anonymous’ emails. But these two definitely led nowhere.”
“Are they from the same sender?”
“I can’t tell. The sender names are just a scramble of letters. Here. Take a look at the first one.”
Morris took the email and began reading.
______________________________
From: sqprw93uy4nk
Date: September 29, 20XX 05:31 AM PDT
To: George Gray
Subject: Exposing Unethical Zillionaires
George,
I read your article on Michael James, someone I greatly admired, and appreciated your even-handed, honest reporting of the situation he found himself in. It’s tragic that we lose people like Michael while unscrupulous high tech moguls screw people and make millions or billions doing it.
The Misogynist Page 1