by Warren Esby
Now no one could deny that the Legendary Lorenzo, which I found it easier to refer to him as, was a great promoter. The first thing he did was to make a motto for the company. He said HypeTech was a company Of the Fat People, By the Fat People and For the Fat People. And the company was run according to that motto. The first thing he did was to take care of the Of the Fat People part of the motto. He decided to raise the money for the company only in the state with the highest percentage of obese people. That state is Mississippi. He went to Mississippi and had meetings with all the Fat Cats in Mississippi, and they immediately saw the merit in what he was doing, especially when he told them that all their friends and family would be able to participate in the early clinical trials and become thin again before anyone in neighboring states. As usual he was successful in raising all the start-up money he needed.
He solved the By the Fat People part of the motto by deciding only to hire fat people to work at the company. Of course he himself qualified in that regard and he was a good role model for the employees. Now this wasn’t an easy task since San Diego has one of the least obese populations of any city. People there tend to be very fit and exercise a lot outside since the weather is good year round. But Ledgy Lo, as I sometimes think of him, was resourceful. In order to get the talent he needed, he said you could work for him even if you weren’t fat as long as you signed a contract agreeing to gain five pounds a month. And he made it easy by having an enormous amount of free candy bars, cookies, brownies and Twinkies always available along with giant sugary soft drinks in the company cafeteria. And employees were even allowed to have a drink cup larger than sixteen ounces in the laboratory as long as it had a sugary soft drink in it. No diet drinks were allowed, of course. If you didn’t gain the requisite amount of weight during your probationary period that lasted three months, he would sometimes extend you for an additional three months if you were good enough. Otherwise, he would fire you and you would lose all your stock options, and then he would hire you back after two weeks and you could start over again and hopefully do better. I told him I wouldn’t be able to do it since I had developed a violent reaction against sweets and was no longer capable of eating them without throwing up. He said that I would be able to work for three months anyway, and if I was as good as he had been told they would use a special procedure that they only used in special cases. I told him I refused to be injected with fat, but he said it wouldn’t be that drastic. He had designed a special padded lab coat that had inside compartments that you could add weights to periodically to increase your weight and you would be allowed to be weighed with your lab coat on, but you had to wear it all the time you were at HypeTech. I was really impressed. I mean that’s why the guy was so good. He could find a way to overcome any obstacle presented to him and, in this case, obtain the help he needed to fulfill his goal, even if he had to be dishonest and disreputable to do it. And that latter talent was not something all entrepreneurs had, but many of the good ones like Double L did.
Well, they tried to convince me that I should spend half my time working at the Salk Institute and half my time working at HypeTech which was located about twenty miles north of the Salk Institute in the Carlsbad Research Park. I asked if that meant I would be paid partly by each organization and the answer was no. I would continue to be paid completely from the research leader’s National Institutes of Health grant. I asked if that was legal and he said, “Perfectly.” The National Institutes of Health was trying to encourage translational work and that’s all we were doing, translating non-profit making technology into profit making technology and I was helping. It turned out that everyone was to benefit from the relationship. HypeTech would get the animal person it needed, the research leader would get a lot more stock options for providing my talents and paying for it from his research grant and translating his research into a lot of cash for himself, and I would have the satisfaction of working at a great new start-up company simply for the prestige of doing so and because I hadn’t done something like that and it would add to my resume. I would have the additional benefit of getting to see a real entrepreneur at work up close and personal. It was surely an opportunity I couldn’t pass up even though they hadn’t convinced me it was legal. Even though I wasn’t convinced, I knew that I would have to agree and that my research leader would make my life difficult if I didn’t. I asked for a few days to think it over since I always like to do that before making a big decision, especially if that decision isn’t life threatening in which case a split second will be enough time as I later found out.
Two fisted Lorenzo then invited me to go to dinner that weekend at a top restaurant that he liked to take important guests to and less important guests he was trying to talk into doing something nefarious. I was invited so that I could get to know some of the other people in the company and have a chance to see how great he was and how great an experience it would be for me to be associated with HypeTech and him. Double L liked to entertain with the company’s money and did it quite often. He was known for it. Any excuse for a party would be taken including wooing the least lesser light of his cofounder’s research laboratory. He had entertained all the Fat Cat investors from Mississippi and they loved it. He entertained potential Fat Cat investors from elsewhere. He entertained people from the biotech community and venture capitalists and investment bankers who he would eventually need if he wanted to have his company go public. He always brought along members of his own company to set an example of how to show proper respect and admiration to a great entrepreneur. They were well trained and perhaps that was their best talent. And I was to be the guest du jour the following weekend, to be wined and dined and wooed into joining my destiny with HypeTech.
Whenever the Time Teller took a group out to his favorite restaurant, he would spare no expense to wine them and dine them in a manner befitting a successful and knowledgeable California entrepreneur. He would choose the menu carefully and expertly pair each course with a suitable, well known expensive California wine. He had a real talent for choosing the menu and did it as only he could, or would for that matter. Actually, it was usually the same menu, designed to impress the guests with his knowledge of culinary excellence as well as fine wines. It included, as an appetizer, fried calamari in a spicy marinara sauce paired with a Chateau Montelena Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. The main course was sautéed rock shrimp paired with the Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon. The pièce de résistance was the dessert. It was a glorious globule filled tapioca pudding paired with a vintage Jordan Cabernet Sauvignon. Who could resist such an outstanding menu?
During that first dinner meeting I learned a lot about the company and met some important insiders who I would end up working very closely with over the next several months. One of them was the Chief of Clinical Development, and his name was Dr. Hassan El Fatti. Now Dr. Fatti was a drug and vaccine development expert who, in his career, had been responsible for giving names to a lot of different drugs and treatments. He was assigned the important task of naming HypeTech’s new vaccine. Most people don’t know that first you need to give the drug or vaccine a proprietary or manufacturer’s brand name under which the company will market the drug. But you also have to assign a generic name for the drug that others can use once it goes off label because those others can’t sell the drug under the brand name because the proprietary manufacturer is the only one with the rights to use the brand name. Now the brand name Dr. Fatti was originally going to use was brilliant in its simplicity and TT Toro just loved it. He chose FatBeGone, but as it turned out a lot of people used that for a variety of product or procedures so El Fatti came up with a new one: Fatagogo. Everyone thought it would be easily marketable with all sorts of possibilities including having a jingle with a go go beat. The real problem started when El Fatti wanted the generic name to be fatfatwah which could be translated as an edict against fat. It was very clever, but Dr. LT wanted a name that had no meaning and didn’t have any ethnic connotations to it, and I really think he was ri
ght. I mean, what if it didn’t work and someone got sick from it. They could categorize the whole company as a hate crime or a terrorist organization or even as a weapon of mass destruction. Well after that, there was a little dissension in the company and El Fatti could be heard muttering about how the fat bastard had prevented him from using a name he really wanted. He said it with almost religious fervor. And then he came up with a name that satisfied everyone, a name that even Dr. Lelo found acceptable because it meant absolutely nothing to him. As far as he could tell it was a nonsense word. To Dr. El Fatti, it had a lot of meaning. The name he chose was batfastard and although Dr. Legendary Lorenzo Toro, the Two-fisted Time Teller, was happy that it had no meaning, everyone else in the company knew that it did but never dared to say anything, especially after the Food and Drug Administration accepted it immediately as the proper generic version of the product.
Chapter 15
More weeks went by as I acclimated to life in San Diego and divided my time between the Salk Institute and HypeTech. As I went along with my job and tried to become comfortable as a San Diegan after a life on the east coast, I became friendly with the other members of the laboratory I worked in as well as others at the institute. They invariably told me that I could never be considered a true San Diegan until I had done the two things that San Diegans were noted for doing that took a little bravery. Those two things were: first, to ride a surfboard at dawn in the shark infested waters of the Pacific Ocean, and two, to go down to Tijuana or Rosarito Beach and drink a Mexican beer. Rosarito Beach is south of Tijuana and you had to be braver to go there since it is further into Mexico. I got the feeling that if I went to Rosarito Beach then I might not have to actually stand up on the surfboard and could perhaps just kneel on it when I rode it and could earn the same number of points for doing so than if I just went as far as Tijuana but actually managed to stand up on the surfboard.
I decided to do the surfboard thing first, and one weekend I went with a bunch of the people from the institute who liked to surf down to one of their favorite surfing spots just to check it out. I had to get up early, but that was no problem because I hadn’t been with Astrid’s big sister the night before because she was too tired after having a busy week, so Astrid and I watched a movie and went to bed early. The beach they all liked to go to was that same Torrey Pines Beach that I had slept at that first morning I arrived in San Diego. I hadn’t noticed all the surfers that morning because I was so tired that I went directly to sleep and when I had awakened, they had all gone home. Astrid and her big sister came with us. The thought had crossed my mind as to whether Astrid had to buy two different bikinis when she went shopping since the size difference was so large. I went shopping with her once to her favorite bathing suit shop and found out that you could actually buy the tops and bottoms separately so she could buy the top for herself and the bottom for her big sister and she didn’t have to waste money. On the beach I didn’t know which to admire the most. They both looked good as long as you looked at one or the other. It was too disconcerting to try and look at them both together and I tried not to do so. I wondered if others felt the same way I did.
As I gazed out into the Pacific, I did notice that there seemed to be a lot of sharks out there. You could see all the fins above the water, but the brave surfers just seemed to ignore them and go about the business of surfing without a care in the world, and those weren’t little fins that were sticking up out of the water in the middle of them either. I asked one of them if sharks would bite swimmers. Since these seemed so tame, I thought these might a special strain that only inhabited Southern California and had become just as laid back as the human population on shore. But the answer to my question was, “Hell yes. Sharks will bite, but they are unpredictable.” To me that meant that sometimes they would bite and sometimes they wouldn’t bite and somehow I just knew that if there wasn’t anything around to bite, then that would be the time they wouldn’t bite. The rest of the time, your guess was as good as mine. Astrid was also a surfer and had offered to teach me. I told her I just wanted to watch the first day. Astrid looked good as she headed out with her surfboard, at least after she got into waist deep water. She was very good and solid once she stood up because she had a low center of gravity. After watching for a while, I decided that maybe I would give it a try after all since no one had been bitten and the sun was out. Apparently they had decided to cancel the June Gloom event since it was now mid-July. I went out holding on to the surfboard until we were waist deep, and then Astrid told me to get on top of it and lie down and she would get me out beyond the place where the waves were breaking. She did this by holding onto the back of the surfboard and kicking her feet. Her feet had a powerful kick to them and we got out pretty easily. Still holding on to the surf board, she turned it around and pointed it back to shore and told me to get up on my knees which I managed to do. She then told me that when she let go and pushed me into the proper position for the wave to catch the surfboard, I should ride it to shore, which I did pretty successfully. She body surfed into shore after me. We went out again in the same way, and this time she told me to try and stand up when she told me to. Although I could hear her yelling “stand up” all the way into shore, I never tried. I knew then that I would have to go to Rosarito Beach. And I didn’t understand the whole surfing thing. All I remember about it was that my ears filled up with water that I couldn’t shake out, and I was half deaf for a week.
My relationship with Astrid and her big sister started to cool off after that. I think it was also because she was tired of me living there rent free and not making any effort to find my own place. She accused me of being a mooch. How could she say that? My feelings were really hurt. And then she told me, just to be mean, that all those sharks out there that I had been afraid of were really dolphins. That really hurt. She and the others from the laboratory all had a big yuck over that one and I got teased about it quite a bit for a while. Anyway, I did start to look for my own place after that, and we did patch it up a little after I found one and she had her privacy back, but it was never the same as it had been in the beginning. It usually isn’t. She was very nice to me in the laboratory, and we remained good friends and went out once in a while, and she even let me visit her big sister on occasion, but it wasn’t the same.
I found a place to live in Laundromat Town on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway. It was an old single car garage made out of cinder block in which a small bathroom had been installed. It was only twelve feet by twenty five feet and was real cozy. The garage door had been boarded over with siding and it had a door on the right side if you were looking from the front where the garage door had been, and it had two small windows on the other side. It came with a refrigerator and microwave, and a hot water heater was in a corner next to the bathroom which was against the rear wall. It had an extra, larger sink outside the bathroom which looked like it may have been there since before the garage had been turned into an apartment. It had paint stains running down its side. There was no air conditioner, which wasn’t needed along the coast of southern California and only a space heater for when the weather got cooler. It was Spartan but cozy. I went on Craigslist and bought a used bed, two chairs and a small table for practically nothing and a used television, and I had my own place where Astrid’s big sister refused to visit me, but it was cheap.
Chapter 16
Because I didn’t really want to do any more surfing, I decided to go down to Rosarito Beach. I asked Astrid and some of the others, but no one would go. Apparently the drug traffickers had become pretty bad at not being careful to kill only people in other gangs and were killing rather indiscriminately. So if you went down there now, you didn’t just have to worry about the police and the Federales. Going to Mexico apparently had become more dangerous than the faux sharks as I liked to think of the dolphins. Apparently there were a lot of dangerous sharks down there and they all lived on land. What I didn’t know was that by going down to Rosarito Beach I would start a serie
s of events that were related to the death of Ivor ‘fucking’ Federov and the parade of black Buick Regals that I thought I had put behind me. Without my knowledge, events were taking place that would bring me right back into the middle of the situation I thought I had left behind in Flagstaff. And apparently they had counted on me eventually going to Mexico and were just biding their time until I did. I guess they must have realized that sooner or later I would want to become a real San Diegan.
So one weekend afternoon I went to Mexico. It only took me about an hour and a half to go all the way to Rosarito Beach. There was very little traffic. I bought a couple of beers and sat on the beach and looked at the Pacific. It looked the same. Things were quiet. I had taken my shredded sleeping bag to sit on and drank the two beers while just relaxing and almost forgetting to be terrified at being in Baja California. It was very peaceful and quiet, almost like the lull before a storm, but of course, like the well-known song says, it never rains in Baja California, it just pours and it was about to pour. Anyway, it was so peaceful and quiet I was lulled to sleep. I slept for the rest of the afternoon and didn’t wake up until around dinnertime, and I woke up feeling hungry. I found a Mexican restaurant, there seemed to be a lot of them, and ordered my usual dinner, a bean burrito, since it was cheap. It was even cheaper there than in San Diego. And then I headed north along the coast. Pretty soon, as I had been warned to expect, a black Ford Expedition pulled up behind me with a blue light flashing. I was told on good authority by the native San Diegans that they would gauge how prosperous I looked and demand a bribe befitting my appearance and would also ask for whatever jewelry I was wearing as a present. I was told if I didn’t have a good watch to give them, don’t wear any, because if I wore a plastic watch they would just get angry. I hoped I didn’t look more prosperous than a hundred dollars because that was all I could afford to invest in becoming a real San Diegan.