by James Greer
Guy was still young, and good-looking, though not, granted, “good-looking” in the way that many young men are good-looking in Los Angeles, but most of these are obsessive about their good looks, which is the only really self-aware or more accurately self-conscious aspect of the general population in Los Angeles. The majority of these “good-looking” men are either a) actors or b) homosexuals or c) both, so in the end Guy’s less-than-perfect kind of looks (six feet tall, one hundred and sixty-five pounds, brown hair, narrow hazel eyes set back in a long oval face, thin, spidery fingers, thick lips) were sufficient, when combined with his disarming manner and insincerely insouciant approach, to provide him with more than his fair share of short-term bedmates. These were almost always procured in bars sometime between the hours of midnight and two a.m., which is closing time in Los Angeles, and the hour of decision in Guyville. Which is not to say that the decision was always or even ever in Guy’s hands, so to speak, nor that the decision, or verdict, if you will, was always favorable.
The reader cannot imagine the distaste with which I share these personal details about the object of my abject hatred, learned bit by bit as I nursed my animosity. I present these details in the spirit of entomology: so that you can see exactly what kind of bug I was prepared to exterminate, and to help understand why.
12. THE NATURE OF BILLY’S DAY JOB REVEALED, AT BILLY’S APARTMENT, FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO
Guy?
-Yeah.
-I gotta head out. Time to walk the dogs.
-Yeah.
-It’s not like I want to walk the dogs. I need the money.
-That’s fine. The issue is, you don’t walk the dogs. You tie them to the bumper of your car and drive very slowly.
-The dogs are walking. I don’t see the problem.
-People hire dog-walkers not just so that their dogs get exercise. It’s an important part of their socialization. They need to interact with other dogs, and with humans. Not to mention the purely excretory function of the walk.
-Hell, they piss and shit all over the place. I have to hose down my bumper every time.
-Thanks for that.
-What?
-That mental image. It goes well with breakfast.
-You don’t eat breakfast.
-Not now I don’t.
-Sorry.
-No need to apologize. I don’t eat breakfast.
-That’s what I just …
-Here’s the thing, Billy: in the future, the not-very-distant future, I believe that the literate rabble, meaning those who regularly read serious books, are going to want shorter and shorter sentences, paragraphs, and pages. No more than a few pithy lines per page. That’s the direction we’re headed. White space, my friend. The future belongs to white space.
-You mean like the phone book?
-Exactly not. We’ve been conditioned by our gigantic computer monitors and even bigger TV screens to acres and acres of canvas, much of which is admittedly cluttered with irrelevancies, but that’s not the audience for whom I’m mixing my metaphors. Especially in a time of recession, or depression, or whatever catastrophe lies in wait around the corner, like a kitten or a tiger, depending on your view of the relative stature of the world—especially now, minimalism will rule the day. In every sense, in every part of everyone’s life. We’re all going to become minimalists.
-You really shouldn’t drink so much coffee, said Billy.
-Coffee is the original smart drug. I believe it actually makes me smarter. For instance: I’ve totally flipped my position on your dog-walking. My caffeine-fueled brain squall has traced a lemniscate around my original repulsion. You, my friend, are a trendsetter. Your dog-walking method is revolutionary in its simplicity. Is it cruel? Is it lazy? Is it not entirely sane? Doesn’t matter. It cuts corners, and that’s what we do, Billy. That’s what Americans do. We cut corners. You don’t achieve minimalism without sacrifice, and if at all possible that sacrifice should be shouldered by other people, or in this case dogs. I salute you, sir! You are a true child of Pandemonium, which even though it doesn’t yet exist except in theory—and I admit it’s possible may never actually exist—is the inevitable result, the culmination, of our ineluctable shift from being to nothingness.
Billy stood for a moment, nonplussed, unsure whether Guy was making fun of him.
-Time to walk the dogs, he said after a few moments.
-Yes it is! replied Guy. -Go forth and subtract!
13. GUY PITCHES THE IDEA OF PANDEMONIUM TO MARCUS IN THE LOBBY OF THE CHATEAU MARMONT, TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO
Marcus took a long sip from his whiskey and soda.
-Still not getting it, Guy. Sorry.
-It’s also a sophisticated data mining system. Advertisers will pay for page views, right, but they’ll pay even more for detailed demographic info that enables them to target consumers with such specificity that everyone will think that the company is speaking to them.
-What makes you think people want companies to speak to them?
-They don’t. But they’d rather see stuff they’re actually interested in—like that machine that holds all your books and newspapers and magazines and displays them just like a paperback book …
-I’ve seen those. Not interested.
-Really? I want one. And Christmas is coming. Hint. Listen, Marcus, what we have in this country is an intel gap, and it’s nothing to do with terrorists. The pace at which technology is changing is too fast for companies to keep tabs on trends in their own businesses. Think of Pandemonium as an enormously customizable Kindle. You want a snapshot of what kind of shoes twenty-three-year-old Asian women who work for one of the Big 12 accounting firms are buying? Or will be buying six months from now? Pandemonium can give you that. So in this sense, yes, Marcus, it’s B2B, but it’s also potentially P2P because a site running Pandemonium could in theory offer users the ability to file-swap freely with both anonymity and legality. Because the evil record company monoliths that will be secretly advertising on the site will be able to direct the consumer’s filesharing preferences, and further, to collect highly specific personal data, or metadata, I’m not really sure what metadata is but I think it sounds better, don’t you? And buried deep down at the bottom of an unreadable EULA will be language giving them the right to do whatever they want with that information. With any information that they gather in any way at any time. But here’s the thing: no one will worry, no one will complain, because they won’t be getting spammed, they won’t be getting If you liked that, you’ll like this recommendations when they visit the site, they won’t be getting Welcome back, User Name! They’ll be getting targeted advertising, but they won’t even know it. We offer the fiction of what everyone always thought the Internet should be—open source, free, unclogged, unmarketed, anonymous, collective: it’s everything the twittering classes want but don’t know they want.
-How do you know it works?
-Irrelevant. Let me put it to you this way: there’s nothing viral about these new forms of communication, of social interaction, Marcus. The kids don’t need better, they need or at least want new. A virus mutates and adapts to survive, but most of these virtual mutations will not survive. Which is not Darwinian, because nobody really understands that you can’t apply the evolution of species to the evolution of ideas. Apples and pomegranates. Did you know there’s a networking site called Spacebook? It’s just for potheads. And Tracebook. That’s for stalkers. These networks will target groups more and more specific until everyone has his own network to which he alone belongs. It’s inevitable.
-I’m not sure …
-Thus, therefore, ergo, the chief virtue of Pandemonium—well, okay, one of its chief virtues—lies in its adaptability. Like any good parasite, we can shift from delivery service—IM, Skype, Twitter, Fluxus, Squeak, Trap Soul Door—to delivery service, ping-ponging all over the 3G spectrum. Undetectable as love, we go where you go. We follow the action. And in so doing, we become the act
ion.
-Exactly how much coke did you do before meeting me?
-This is my brain not on drugs. Scary, right?
Marcus looked at Guy over the rim of his upraised glass. -What a waste of a mind.
-You stole that line from Dad.
-He said that?
-Right, because it doesn’t sound like anything he would say.
-Great minds …
-…come to the same facile and entirely flawed conclusions. Is, I believe, the phrase you’re groping for.
Marcus sighed, shook his head. -I say again: how do you know it works?
-How do you know anything works? I mean, there’s still people, and I’m on the fence about this one, who insist the moon landing was staged on a back lot here in Los Angeles, that there’s no proof. The beauty of any new concept is that proof is in the eye of the beholder. Remember when that electric two-wheeled thingy was supposed to revolutionize urban transportation, solve all our congestion problems, get rid of pollution, etcetera?
-Yes. The Segway.
-Yeah, well, there were a lot of very smart people who bought into that idea in the secret prototype phase. Very smart and very rich people, I might add. And not a single one of them stopped to think, Yes, okay, it works, but won’t anyone on one of these things look incredibly gay?
-How is that applicable to your project?
-It’s like you’re not even listening. You want another one? Guy signaled to a passing waitress.
Marcus nodded yes and tipped back his glass, the halfmelted ice clacking against the rim.
-You’re not going to give me the money, are you?
-No. In the first place, I don’t even understand the name. Why Pandemonium? That’s not a name that says “safe investment” to me.
-Wrong. I mean right, but wrong. The VCs I’ll be talking to don’t want safe. They’re desperately afraid of missing out on the next big boat, and they don’t care if it’s the Titanic, because that was, let’s face it, a historic boat, a boat people will always remember, even before the movie. In any case, the name’s just a come-on. It doesn’t mean anything specific. It just gives a sense to potential investors that something new is going to happen.
-Why would I pay simply for novelty?
-You wouldn’t, Marcus. None of the Marcuses you’ve ever been your whole life would ever pay for that. Just like you’d never pay for sex.
-You don’t know that.
-Have you? Ever?
-Not yet. But just because something hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean …
-Stop playing really-annoying-grad-student for one damn minute.
-I’m not …
-I know. I was making a point. Jesus, it’s like you’ve never heard anyone but yourself talk.
-Sorry.
-There’s a lot of people, an awful lot, who have paid for sex. Who do pay for it. Who will continue to pay for it. It’s a multibillion-dollar business. Bigger than movies and music and every other form of entertainment on earth combined.
-I’m not sure that’s true.
-It doesn’t matter if it’s true. We’re not selling sex. I’m making an analogy. Our pitch is that Pandemonium is better than sex.
-Who’s “us”?
-See this? This is an imaginary stick. You’ve just grabbed hold of one end of the imaginary stick. You know which end? The wrong one.
-What’s the difference? It’s imaginary.
-Everything is imaginary, Marcus. Everything that’s worth anything. Pandemonium is worth more than you can imagine, precisely because it’s imaginary.
-I’m confused.
-Confusion is sex.
-What?
-Nothing. Obscure rock music reference. Couldn’t help myself.
-That’s the trouble with you, Guy. You have no selfdiscipline.
-And the trouble with you, Marcus, is that you have nothing but self-discipline. There’s no goal. No purpose. You keep at it and at it, you’re dogged and determined and all those dreary adjectives, but toward what end?
-Now who sounds like a grad student?
-Touché, asshole. Last chance: you going to lend me the money or not?
-I’m leaning toward not.
-I’m leaning toward the floor. Buy me a drink.
-You have a drink.
-I mean another drink. Obviously. Cocksucker.
13A. MINUTES LATER, MARCUS GOES TO THE BATHROOM, JUST AT THE MOMENT HIS WIFE CONSTANCE, WHO ACCOMPANIED HIM TO LOS ANGELES FOR THE QUANTUM CHROMODYNAMICS CONFERENCE, WALKS INTO THE LOBBY OF THE CHATEAU MARMONT LOOKING FOR HER HUSBAND—AGAIN, ABOUT TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO
Guy’s heart sank at the sight of Constance. Constance’s heart sank at the sight of Guy. He motioned for her to take a seat, which she did reluctantly.
-He’ll be right back, said Guy. -Men’s room.
-Okay. Good.
An awkward silence developed between Guy and Constance, a vacuum that somehow the ambient chatter of the rest of the lobby’s guests could not fill.
-You doing all right? asked Guy, for lack of anything else to say.
-Why bother pretending, Guy?
-Okay. Fine. Look, Constance, I love my brother. I mean, I don’t like him very much, and he doesn’t like me, but that’s cool, that’s fine. By extension, I’m supposed to love you too. Or at least like you. You’re family. I’m told family is important. I don’t know why it’s important, but that’s what I hear. That’s the word on the street.
-You live on a strange street, Guy.
-Is this really just about the teeth-brushing thing?
-I’d call that symptomatic of a deeper problem.
-Because I’m willing to do a lot to satisfy my familial responsibilities. I mean, not really, but I might consider certain changes if they were reasonable. But I’m not going to brush my fucking teeth just because my brother’s wife thinks it’s disgusting.
-I’m not crazy about your haircut either.
-This is the nub of our problem, Constance. I don’t care what you think.
-I’m not sure you want to say nub.
-Yeah, whatever.
Silence once again descended like a grade-school play curtain between the two.
-What the fuck is he doing in there? said Guy after a while.
-Brushing his teeth, replied Constance, with a sarcastic smile.
14. THE NIGHT GUY MET VIOLET MCKNIGHT, FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO
The Smog Cutter doesn’t look like much from the outside. It doesn’t look like much from the inside either, but its grime is its charm, apparently. Grime and karaoke—which at the time Guy met Violet had not yet become the hipster cliché it has since become. In other words, although those who participated in the nightly karaoke sessions at the Smog Cutter did so largely in quotation marks, these quotation marks still had a certain fresh appeal, had not yet worn out their welcome in the smugly insular world of Los Angeles’ bohemian class. It was therefore not unusual to find famous rock musicians, like the bald singer from R.E.M., and famous actors, like the thin blond girl from the Charlie’s Angels remakes, rubbing elbows and too-sharp rib cages with ordinary Beck-a-likes in trucker hats with sideburns and horn-rimmed glasses.
The drinks were cheap, though watered down, and you had to wait forever for your turn at the microphone, which would usually get hijacked by one of the celebrities anyway. Guy found it incredibly annoying to get halfway through the first verse of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” only to be interrupted by an overeager and tone-deaf Rising Starlette wearing a gray satin slip dress that clung to her erect nipples like saran wrap. Who would then spill her rum and Coke on the sleeve of Guy’s only good jacket, laughing at herself in an attempt to prove that she was capable of laughing at herself.
-Why did you go, then? asked Violet, several weeks later, in languid repose on her reposable futon.
-Same reason everybody goes. There was nothing else to do. Why were you there?
-Free drinks. T
he Chinese lady who runs the place likes me. I think she’s a lesbian.
Guy nodded. -Free drinks is a really good excuse.
The night Guy met Violet, she was sitting at the bar in a white dress with a white feather boa around her neck, long before feather boas became either fashionable or ironically fashionable, and on Violet looked unaffectedly sexy. Her hair was dark brown, medium-length and tousled, with shiny turquoise clips placed at seeming random, and her lipstick was red and her fingernails were red and her toenails were red and her eyes—like the two small tattoos on the back of her neck and on her left shoulder, abstract curlicues—were green.
-It’s my birthday, said Guy, pushing his way to the bar through the unruly crowd, into a space next to Violet, who looked him over and smiled mutely. It was, of course, not Guy’s birthday, that was his standard opening line, and he had waited three drinks before summoning the courage to talk to Violet, who had attracted his attention on several earlier nights, and again tonight, the moment Guy pushed through the red plastic strips that hung just inside the front door, outside of which, in the gray Los Angeles night, the doorman knew Guy well enough not to ask to see his ID. The shiver of pleasure you get when a doorman recognizes you, when you have become a regular, when you are no longer entirely anonymous in a city that loves to deliver crushing reminders of your anonymity regularly, right to your face, was one of Guy’s favorite small triumphs.
-Can I buy you a drink to celebrate my happy occasion? Guy continued, noticing that Violet had not stopped smiling or looking at him since he had spoken to her, and taking this as a sign of encouragement.
-What’s your name? asked Violet.
-Guy.
-That’s a funny name. Guy. What’s your last name?
-Forget. My name is Guy Forget. It should be pronounced For-zhay, but no one ever does. Just like my first name should be pronounced Ghee, but no one ever does.
-Why not?
-I don’t know. They just don’t. When I was younger that used to bother me, but it doesn’t now.