by Helen Dewitt
“Couldn’t he hire someone?” he asked.
Benny said that his father’s life was a ruined landscape of burned-out deals.
Gil would have been happy to crash at this point, but Benny, far from moving gracefully on, seemed to see a roommate as an economical substitute for a therapist.
Once, for instance, Benny elaborated, when Benny had just been accepted for admission at Choate, Jake Rabinowitz, a top entertainment lawyer, had negotiated a movie deal which included the right to two first-class tickets to the premiere.
Total dealbreaker.
Mr. Bergsma: “What is this. What the fuck is this.”
JR: “I got them to agree to first-class tickets to the premiere.”
Mr. Bergsma: “Look. I don’t want this. I never asked for this. I don’t want to clutter up my head with this crap.”
JR: “The contract does not require you to attend the premiere.”
Mr. Bergsma: “I don’t want to get into all this crap about what I want or do not want. I am trying to write a fucking book. You have now used up bargaining space, you piece of shit, you have squandered leverage, for something about which I do not give a fuck. I want this out of the fucking contract. I want a Crap. Free. Deal.”
Given that the whole issue of the premiere had been raised, given that it was not possible just to get on with the fucking book, given that it was necessary to discuss, Mr. Bergsma discussed the sort of thing he would have discussed had he chosen to discuss. But his lawyer, it evolved, would lose face if he went back to the other side with points the client actually cared about, such as fixing up a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh, rather than issues that were recognized as deal points by his industry peers.
Mr. Bergsma: “Look. I’ve managed a bar. I’ve had to fire people. I never do that without giving people a chance. What I say to people is, I didn’t fire you, you fired yourself.”
So that was that deal.
Benny cracked another beer while Gil made friendly Iowan noises to endorse the mild humor of the story.
Mr. Bergsma had hired all kinds of people — lawyers, agents, accountants, assistants, you name it — and they kept willfully firing themselves. To the point where he would explain the value of a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh from the get-go. You can get a house for as little as ten grand, he would explain. The value of it, obviously, is not simply the monetary value of whatever would otherwise have had to be paid for, the value is the amount of crap Mr. Bergsma’s mind would otherwise have had to be clogged up with at a time when he might otherwise have been writing a fucking book.
Somehow, though, instead of picking up the ball and running with it, people began pre-firing themselves. To the point where Mr. Bergsma just had to do everything himself.
Benny went on, for illustrative purposes, for another 15 deals, winding up 10 hours and 30 beers later, at eight a.m. Eastern time (seven a.m. Central), not because more, much more could not be said, but because his audience was semi-comatose. What it all explained was why Benny was forced to sublet space in his loft.
“Not that I’m not glad to have you, dude,” said Benny. “It’s just the principle of the thing.”
“Dude,” said Gil, “I’m wrecked.”
He sprawled on the bed beside the stranded backpack. Darkness claimed him.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it’s interesting that Benny had this wealth of privileged information at his disposal for 27 years, while Gil, when he went into action, had had a mere smattering for little more than a week.
In the morning, or rather late afternoon, of Gil’s second day in New York, he woke to find Benny incensed. A wall of the bathroom had this longstanding moldy seepage from the apartment upstairs. The seepage had now developed into a perceptible flow. It was the kind of thing Gil would have assumed was just normal in New York, but apparently a barrier had been crossed.
He would have liked to go back into Manhattan for pancakes, but an Iowan does not like to leave his fellow man in distress.
“Dude,” he said, “hey, look, I’ll go upstairs and see if I can fix whatever.”
Gil’s father had thought every boy should build his own treehouse; while not typical of Iowa, this is more easily achieved on a five-acre property with several 150-year-old trees than in a Manhattan apartment. Gil and his four brothers had each had a tree, and had, needless to say, engaged in cycles of competitive upgrading over the years, learning skills, as his father pointed out, that would stand them in good stead all their lives.3 As now.
Gil had, obviously, brought his tool kit from home. He took it from the backpack and went upstairs and knocked on the door and a dude within told him to fuck off, which is so New York.
Gil talked on with the candid friendliness of the native Iowan. Presently (and he was too new in town to know how unthinkable this was) the dude opened the door a crack, leaving the chain on.
Gil talked nonjudgmentally on about the seepage escalation and his skills, such as they were, in plumbing and construction. The dude, eventually, did something even more unthinkable and let him in to see the source of the damage.
“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil, looking at the standing pool around the base of the toilet. “Well, I’m pretty sure I can deal with this.”
“We’re going out of our minds is all,” said the dude. “We’re trying to do an IPO. We spend all our time interacting with people. We don’t have interaction skills to spare, is the thing, on something like dealing with building management. And as for plumbers, forget it.”
The dude was wearing a t-shirt that looked like an archaeological dig showing strata of pizza over the eons.
“See, if you decide that a user-friendly program needs an interactive paper clip to befriend a certain type of user,” he said, “it’s ultimately not a problem, because even if it does take more memory it’s just a question of getting more RAM, we’re talking a hundred bucks, max. But if you’re doing software development you can’t just upgrade the memory or processing speed of the human brain. Yet. To introduce spare capacity for dealing with morons. So there’s trade-offs. So, obviously, we thought the IPO would be a done deal a year ago, but see, if we had diverted interaction capability to dealing with plumbers we would probably have alienated investors even more.”
Gil was nodding and opening up his tool kit and turning off the water supply. The dude remembered the importance of names for human interaction and provided his, which was Dave. He outlined the initial business plan and the unexpected obstacles it had encountered.
The initial business plan had been, if we get lots of money we can free up our own time to do inconceivably brilliant things and we can also hire some other really smart people and just free them up to do inconceivably brilliant things, and we can also hire lots of people who are not that smart and pay them to do all the boring things we don’t want to do, freeing up even more of our own time for really interesting stuff. If we have enough people, we can deliver whatever we decide to do really fast4 and it will make humongous amounts of money for people who are interested in money.5
This was a business plan that had worked for Dave’s older brother in 1996, but in the climate of 2007 it had needed fleshing out. Dave had drawn the short straw and been forced to make presentations, and in the midst of a presentation he had commented that actually they were now thinking it might make more sense to just rebuild from scratch using Lisp.
Bad move.
It had then been necessary to make a lot more presentations to new investors, investors who had not heard about the Lisp idea and could still be shielded from the full brilliance of the dudes. Dave had been forced to buy a suit and wear the fucker. But by this time, though Dave had made the ultimate sacrifice, it was 2008, and in the climate of 2008 the amount of aggro involved was making them wonder whether anything could be worth that amount of aggro.
“Uh huh uh huh uh huh,” said Gil, “do you have some kind o
f bucket or something I could use for the sources of blockage?”
“Um. A bucket?” said Dave. “Well, we maybe have some Colonel Sanders Chicken Buckets around, any good?”
“Good to go,” said Gil. A small horde of roaches poured from the pipe like the wolf on the fold, their cohorts gleaming in basic roach black. All very New York, but Dave seemed unhappy with the development.
“Hey,” said Gil. “I really need to replace this gasket anyway. I can pick up some roach stuff at the same time, no problem.”
Not because Gil was exceptionally nice or helpful or friendly, by Iowan standards, but because this was the way everyone talked where he came from. It would not have won him any Brownie points back home, but Dave was charmed, disarmed.
Gil went back into Manhattan for a late late breakfast of pancakes. Harvey Keitel wasn’t there today, but the point is, Gil was having pancakes knowing that at any moment Harvey Keitel might walk in. In some ways this was actually better than having Mr. Keitel physically on the premises. The pancakes were not, truth be told, better than his Mom’s, but his Mom, obviously, could not offer the possibility of Harvey Keitel just walking in off the street.
He bought roach stuff and a gasket at a hardware store that had probably been there since 1847. He bought a bucket, dry plaster, and a trowel. He bought an item of signage indicating that sanitary products should be disposed of in the receptacle provided, and a receptacle.
La dolce vita was on at the Angelika!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He had some time to kill, and while killing time he passed a bookstore, just walking down the street, and in the window was a collection of essays by John Cage!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Which in future he could read over his pancakes in a place where, at any moment, Harvey Keitel might walk in.
After the film he got to talking to some dudes in the lobby, who invited him back to a party in their loft on Canal Street. In no time at all he was doing lines of cocaine with three investment bankers!!!!!!! Which was exactly why it was worth waiting to see La dolce vita in New York. At the age of 12 Gil had decided not to experiment with drugs, he wanted his first cocaine to be special, he wanted to try cocaine for the first time in New York, and it was definitely worth the wait. Because now, see, it was part of this whole experience of dressing like Bret Easton Ellis,6 seeing La dolce vita for the first time and going back to a loft to get high with three dudes from Morgan Stanley.
Gil started talking to a girl called Loopy Margaux, who said her dad had left his old job and gone to work for a hedge fund because it was less stressful.
“What was his old job?” asked Gil.
“Oh, arbitrage,” said Loopy. “What’s in the bag?”
Gil explained about the dudes upstairs and about the treehouse and such. With coke-fueled eloquence he elaborated on the sound system he had installed in his treehouse.
“Oh,” said Loopy. “You know how to install sound systems? I should introduce you to my dad. He had one installed by someone all his friends use, and it’s driving him crazy. If he took the business elsewhere word would get out and he would be ostracized. But if one of my friends came over it would be okay. Not that he wouldn’t pay you for fixing it on a friendly basis.”
“Sure,” said Gil, “no problem,” and meanwhile word percolated out that this was a man who had plumbing skills, electrical skills, construction skills and extermination skills, with none of the correlated obduracy, and in no time at all he had been offered three months’ free accommodation in a loft in TriBeCa in return for fixing stuff its owner was temporarily unable to pay to get fixed. Plus the offer of two tickets to Lohengrin in return for fixing more minor stuff another dude was temporarily unable to pay to get fixed. Plus other prepaid entertainment opportunities too numerous to mention. Such that Gil was able to ask Loopy if she would like to see Lohengrin in two days’ time and she said Yes!
It was nine a.m. Pancake time!
At two p.m., after a brief foray to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was back in Dumbo, back in his work jeans and a clean t-shirt, conferring upstairs with a different dude.
Dude B (Steve) said the dudes were thinking at this point they might be actually better off if they just went open source. If they went open source they would be dealing exclusively with their fellow hackers, and it would be fun.
“Uh huh uh huh,” said Gil, laying out the wherewithal of roach death.
There was friction among the dudes, because Steve was a Perl guru, whereas Dave was a total Pythonista (not that Dave could not grok Perl or Steve Python, it was the philosophical issues underlying white space), but at least it was a relationship of mutual respect.7 Whereas.
Recently Dave had presented the software, which had some powerful mojo under the hood, to investors. The user interface had yet to be finalized, it was just this black-and-white thing. But all the investors could talk about was the UI.
“Uh huh uh huh,” said Gil. “Yeah, funny, UI can totally eat up your time.” He tightened the gasket. “Hey, if you do another presentation maybe you could do a Gantt chart using my Gantt chart app.”
He began sweeping up roach remains.
“See, when I was a kid I had this Entenmann’s cookie empire, where in the early days I would buy a box of Entenmann’s for $1.19 and sell individual cookies for 25 cents at lunch and recess, and I kept growing my business to the point where I needed a web presence, and I had all these other irons in the fire, plus schoolwork. So I started doing Gantt charts in Excel. Which totally sucked, but I got a kick out of the Gantt charts, so I did an app, and yeah, it’s amazing how much time it took doing the UI.”
The dudes checked out Gil’s Gantt chart app online and took in the cool UI. They checked out Gil’s website, and the Mint analytics, similarly cool. A single brilliant idea occurred to the triumvirate.
Look. As things stand, using Dave for presentations, they are losing a minimum of one-third of their brainpower to fundraising crap. Instead of having three geniuses at work on the actual development they have two, and the work of those two is being delayed, in many cases, because they do not have stuff that Dave should have been developing.
But look. Why can’t they just coopt not just the Gantt charts and the cool UI, but the creator of same? Why can’t they just make Gil a partner and have him do the presentations? The company has, at a stroke, 100% of its genius power available for serious work! It means assigning maybe 15% of the stock options to Gil, but the massive gains in productivity will add such colossal value to the end product that they will, in the long term, end up getting more. In the short term they will not have to pay him a salary.
This cool idea was also, needless to say, a hand-me-down from Dave’s older brother.
One with, you might think, little to recommend it at the worst time in history for an internet flotation.
Little to recommend it, at least, to a man with solid treehouse customization skills.
Gil, though, as it happened, had spent his teens fine-tuning his business plan, first just using Excel, then enhancing with a dashboard constructed in MicroCharts,8 and he had also spent countless happy hours playing around with R, an open source statistical graphics package. Then, as a senior at the University of Iowa,9 he had picked up a free academic license for Inference for R, a plug-in for Word and Excel which enables the user to insert R code and graphics directly into Word, or, as it might be, Excel. You set up your dataframe in R, you attach it to your document in Word or Excel, and hey presto! You can generate multivariate plots using Deepayan Sarkar’s Lattice package! Directly in Word! Or, as it might be, Excel!10 Only problem was, it did not work in PowerPoint, which is, obviously, the weapon of choice for presentations. But, just before leaving home Gil had gotten an e-letter announcing an upgrade, such that Inference could now be used with PowerPoint.11 Too late for his Entenmann’s empire.
Now, anyway, here was a chance to actually try out Inference in PowerPoint, with Lattice
plots, in a legitimate business activity! And it was only his third day in New York!
On his fourth day in New York Gil went to B&H just to check the place out, because a tech store, run by Hasidic Jews, recommended by Joel Spolsky on joelonsoftware.com, it’s hard to get more quintessentially New York than that. He talked to some dudes who were studying film at NYU and had just won a prize for a short at Sundance. He went to fourteen galleries on 11th Street, four of which were having vernissages that very night. He met a transvestite who had unresolved plumbing issues. He met a woman who had nearly been electrocuted by her refrigerator and said it was preying on her mind — who knew when it would lash out again?
On his fifth day in New York Gil went to see Lohengrin at the Met with Loopy Margaux. On his sixth day he met Mr. Margaux, who said his sound system had a mind of its own, with an IQ of about 68.
“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil. There seemed to be no tactful way to say that he had better speakers in his treehouse. (His treehouse, admittedly, did not have a triptych by Francis Bacon, a Rauschenberg, a Jackson Pollock, and four flags by Jasper Johns.) He confined himself to the factual, making a number of recommendations which could easily be implemented with modest expenditure at B&H. He mentioned, shyly, the thing uppermost in his mind, the amazing Inference in Powerpoint presentation on which he had been working for the past four days, and Mr. Margaux, as a personal favor, looked at the prez on Gil’s laptop, and was sufficiently charmed to offer, as a further personal favor, to pass the word along to a couple of people who might be interested.
Gil walked back down the island through Central Park. He bought a New York hot dog with New York mustard and a New York pretzel. A troop of men on fixed-wheel bikes sped past. Pedestrians told them to fuck off. New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town!
On his seventh day in New York Loopy Margaux had scary news. She had decided to move to Berlin.
“Berlin?” said Gil.