The internet immediately worked for Dane.
Within weeks, an agency with a windfall of new business offered him a month-long freelance opportunity. His supervisor was a woman with a sense of humor and the projects were interesting. He was so highly motivated that he offered to finish a project over a weekend.
That Saturday, Dane received a call on his cell. It was odd that anyone phoned him on a Saturday evening since he had no social life. He thought it must be his supervisor checking on his progress. She would be so happy when she learned how far along he was that she would offer him a full-time position.
“Good evening, Dane. This is Georgette Giaconda. From The Butcher Block.”
“Oh, hi,” Dane said. He had not heard from The Butcher Block in over a year. No doubt, they remembered his efficiency and wanted him back. What did he know? Suddenly two agencies would compete for his services.
“Dane, I’m sorry to bother you but the agency owners and the client are breathing down my neck. Our client’s promotional materials are on your website and they want you to remove them immediately.”
Dane struggled to understand.
“There’s a lot of stuff on my website. I may have mentioned the work I did for your client. I’m a writer.”
“That product is not on the market yet, so the materials are not in the public domain. Our client hired a consultant to surf the internet looking for mentions of the drug and they found materials on your website. They want you to remove them immediately.”
Dane felt harassed by the urgency and vexation in her tone. When he arrived home that evening, Dane told Becky, “The Butcher Block wants me to remove something I wrote for them from my website.”
“Doesn’t a drug company have more to do than police a copywriter’s website?”
“It should but maybe I’m more important than we think.”
“You couldn’t be more important than I think,” Becky said as she kissed him on the cheek.
Dane smiled. It was one of the nicer things Becky had said to him in awhile. He did not suspect that Becky was giving him a dose of “winner’s therapy” to prevent a relapse of cognitive cacophony.
That night Dane removed the product’s name and packet insert hyperlink from his website. This piece of unreadable prose, over which he had fretted for weeks, contained clinical data and marketing strategy. Key points were highlighted, analyzed and commented upon. The piece reflected his analytical ability and grasp of science…Now he couldn’t use it.
The next day was a cold, blustery Monday. Dane was eating lunch in his car when his cell rang. It was Georgette Giaconda.
“You didn’t take the prescribing information off your website. The agency partners and the client are furious. They want it removed in 48 hours.”
“I deleted it last night,” Dane stammered. “It’s not on my website. The hyperlink is gone.”
Dane sensed that something had gone horribly awry in this new universe.
“It’s still there!” she cried. “I’ll send you the link.”
Dane raced to his cubicle. He was so nervous he believed he would explode. Now this trifle buried on a back page of his website protruded like a tumor from his skull. He was the target of two colossal entities that could crush him—a drug company and an agency.
He clicked on the hyperlink. The troublesome webpage was still listed on the search engine. Dane had removed the hyperlink but the file remained in his document gallery. He called home and talked Becky through the removal of the file. Now when he clicked on the hyperlink, it yielded an error message. Dane believed his troubles were over. He phoned Georgette with the good news.
“It’s still on the cache, Dane. Anybody can read it!” she shouted, “It’s the damned PI. How could you do that?”
Dane googled the drug. His webpage was listed and the PI was in the cache file, faint but legible.
“I’m a writer,” Dane defended himself. “I put samples in my book. This is no different.”
“Everyone puts samples in their book on the down-low,” Georgette growled. “But the internet is open to everyone. You’ve been irresponsible and put us all at risk.”
“How did I know the internet would fling my web content across cyberspace?”
“Well it has and we could be in serious trouble. You violated the non-disclosure contract you signed. You are in breech of contract. It’s like stealing. We want to avoid legal consequences.”
Breech of contract! Stealing! Legal consequences! For the rest of the day, Dane wanted to vomit, tear off his skin and walk out of it—into a new one. He repeatedly typed the drug name on the subject line to make it vanish but it popped up each time to hound him. He paced as if he could out-walk his responsibility, but it had him in its talons. Due to his poor judgment, he could be stripped of all he had worked for and loved; his family would be ruined.
Dane phoned Georgette and contritely reported that he had done all he could. She transferred him to Lorenzo, the IT director, who explained that the cache was not permanent but the normal removal process could take two to six weeks and they had only a day. He sent Dane a link for emergency removals. Dane needed to insert metatags in his website but how to do this surpassed his comprehension.
At 1 AM, Dane lay on top of his covers in his underwear, shivering in the cold, presumably to kill himself from overexposure, when the phone rang. Lorenzo said they had to fix the problem immediately. Dane sat in his shorts at his computer in the cold room as a peculiar penance while Lorenzo talked him through steps that were slow, delicate and treacherous. Dane divulged his website password to Lorenzo, enabling the IT director to enter Dane’s website and insert the metatag that would abort the poisonous page. After an hour operation, Dane’s website code rejected the metatag.
At 3 AM, Lorenzo was at an impasse and said he would resume in the morning. Dane agonized whether a drug company would sue an impecunious writer and he managed only a few hours of sleep.
As he drove to work, The Butcher Block IT director phoned with an update: all efforts to insert the metatag had failed. The problem required another solution.
“Is there anything I can do?” Dane asked.
“You’ve done enough,” The IT director replied. “Just pray.”
Dane took this seriously. All day he mumbled prayers like, “Oh, Lord, free me from the hyperlink! Delete the package insert and deliver me from pharmaceutical affliction!” When Dane was not praying and trembling, he evacuated his bowels or tried to lose himself in work.
However, all of the prayer, work and defecation in the world could not contain the fire of damnation stoking Dane’s paranoia. Copyright infringement, misuse of proprietary information, penalties, litigation and ruin stormed his consciousness like a posse of psychotic burglars, sacking peace of mind and slaughtering hope. In pacing the office, he wished he could walk out of his body and his life.
That evening after work, he went to the pool where he had spent many happy hours, and tried to relax and forget his circumstances. As he swam lap after lap, thoughts of his transgression crept into his mind. He summarized his offense. He posted an old packet insert from a year ago for a product that never launched. It included annotations revealing a sales strategy the client planned against its competitors.
They would make him pay.
Dane switched from a relaxing stroke to a suicide speed. If he swam enough laps with sufficient effort could he end his misery with heart failure? He tried to annihilate thought and devolve into a fish but this was not the ocean and the lifeguard whistled the end of lap swim.
At home Dane saw an email from the IT director. After much hesitation he opened it. Lorenzo had inserted the code. The offending web page and package insert would be gone in 48 hours.
Dane rejoiced at his reprieve. Even so, he clicked on that web page repeatedly for days to see if the offending document was finally gone. It slipped slowly down the list, page by page, but whenever he found it, he could not swallow. What if the pharmaceutical company law
yers saw it? Would they or The Butcher Block sue? He checked his website and found that there had been hundreds of hits. Becky speculated that the client’s lawyers were probably circling over Dane.
Finally, the offending page was gone.
Dane believed his troubles were over until he received a notification from the attorneys of the pharmaceutical company. They threatened him with further legal action.
“I don’t know what to do,” Dane said. He was twisting and writhing from agitation.
“First stop squirming,” Becky said.
“They could take away everything I’ve worked for and care about. They want to kill me.”
“Maybe if you lie low for awhile, they’ll forget about you,” Becky said.
Dane had always believed that running from a problem never solved it but here was an exception. To protect his family, he needed to leave them and disappear. If he had not been so depressed and panicky he could have seen his connection with an Iranian journalist he met, who fled his home ten minutes before the secret police came to arrest him. Dane was eluding a less violent but equally destructive corporate tyrant.
He shut down his website and boarded a bus for Canada. Before he left, he told Becky to tell his pursuers he had disappeared and had not been heard from.
14. FLIGHT AND FIGHT
After two buses and a stop in Niagara Falls, where he considered jumping, Dane arrived in Toronto 24 hours after leaving New York. He played tourist for a day, wandered around the downtown area, loitered at the Eaton Center, went to the university, took a bus to Greektown, and made a pilgrimage to De Grassi Street, the mythical home of the teenage soap opera he used to watch with Iris. He saw Cabbagetown because he liked the name and checked in at a rundown motor hotel near the university, where his room had a broken window and a door that did not lock.
By his second day, the novelty of Toronto had faded. Weary and alone, Dane stopped playing tourist and saw his situation for what it was. He was in hiding in a city that was not his own. Toronto was a cleaner, quieter version of New York where most people were busy and productive and Dane was a vagrant.
Disoriented and depressed, Dane stood on the corner of Dundas and Yonge, at the center of the great city, when he heard a peculiar sound. He turned toward a whiny voice and saw a limbless man on a skateboard—a bust on wheels—twirling his shirt sleeves in circles while he crooned, “Sometimes when we touch, the honesty’s too much…” A small crowd gathered in a semi-circle around the limbless man, who sported a long, thick beard. A coffee can stuffed with currency paid tribute to Canadian generosity and the public’s tolerance for off-key crooning.
Yet the torso singer’s income stream had more than one source.
A man in business attire and Bally slip-ons winced as he passed the limbless beggar, then stopped with a business proposition. “If I give you a dollar will you stop singing for five minutes?”
“Two minutes,” the torso singer said, squinting at the man to measure his resolve. “I’ve got my public to perform for.”
When the dapper pedestrian smiled wryly, the limbless man called his bluff by resuming his song in mid-verse with pitch-putrid effect. The businessman calculated how far from the dreadful voice he would be in two minutes and slipped the money in the can. The torso singer had played a street version of arbitrage, in which he derived his income from both singing and silence.
The torso singer observed a few moments of silence, then resumed his act. By rolling his shoulders, he twirled his pinned up sleeves as he sang. It was like a dance. Within fifteen minutes, ten other pedestrians had dropped money in his can—four in exchange for the man’s silence.
The limbless man was a shocking paradox of disability and competence and Dane watched him intently. Yet morbid fascination was not the sole motivation for Dane’s gaping. Under his beard, which seemed as long and thick as a surrogate limb, the street performer’s face looked familiar to Dane, although he could not place him.
The street singer liked to be listened to but expected to be paid; he took exception to Dane’s freeloading fascination.
“This isn’t a free show, ay,” he said.
“Maybe not but the street is free,” Dane answered.
“A wise guy, ay?” the limbless performer replied.
“I know you’re working and you deserve to be paid. You’re amazing,” Dane put a Canadian and American dollar in the can.
“So you’re from the states, ay?” the limbless song and dance man asked. “What did you do? Sex with a minor? Steal from drug dealers? Kill your mom?”
“I put a drug company’s package insert on my website.”
“Drug company, ya say?”
The skateboard serenader squinted at Dane like he vaguely recognized him, too, and needed just one clue to identify him.
“Puppy Man! Is that you, Dane Bacchus?”
Dane did a double-take of the talented stump man and his mind erased the beard from the face.
“You don’t remember your old door-locking friend, Austin Weebler!”
“Austin? What—!” Dane was too surprised to formulate a question.
“It’s my coffee break. Go and buy us coffee and donuts and we’ll talk!”
Weebler told Dane to take ten dollars from the can and buy refreshments at the Tim Horton’s across the street. The errand done, Dane drank his coffee and helped Austin slurp his.
“What happened to the rest of you, Austin?”
“That’s a strange tale,” Weebler began cheerfully. “You remember I was in the hospital. Well, I got better but I couldn’t handle good health. I turned back into a lab rat. You know, testing side effects. Long story short, I lost circulation in my extremities, got necrosis in my arms and legs and they had to amputate to save my life. Anyway, that’s what they said. I think they did it so I couldn’t pop more pills or inject more injectables.”
“So how did you get here, Austin?”
“The drug companies paid me a settlement but I had to leave the States,” Weebler began. “It was too painful for my family and everybody to see me like this and I got sick of their heartbreak and pity. So I came here to start over. And, hey, it worked! I really am a new man, Dane. I’m bigger through subtraction. In Toronto, I’m Stump, the singing torso on a skateboard. So why are you here?”
Dane explained the website and the threatened lawsuit.
“Screw ‘em, Dane. They’re messing with your head. They’ve got too many problems to go after you. While we’re chatting, that drug company’s probably been sold or merged, or gone bankrupt. What time is it? Shit. Back to work.”
“But Austin, why do you do this? You’ve got enough settlement money to live on, right?”
“The money’s good but I don’t do it for the money, Dane. I always wanted to sing for people and this is the first time I can get away with it. And—you saw—I make people happy… especially when I stop.”
Weebler a.k.a. Stump, invited Dane to watch him work. After an hour, he suggested that the unpaid intern try making some money. Between sets, Austin explained his technique. “It’s like drug advertising, Dane. You have to be bad enough to get paid.” Weebler urged Dane to incite a love-hate reaction. “Dig deep!” he exhorted Dane as the tide of lunchtime street traffic gathered.
“I don’t have to dig deep,” Dane replied. “I have a gift for making people hate me.”
“Yeah, I noticed that at Green,” Weebler said.
“I’ll read my poems,” Dane said. “When I used to read them at work, people begged me to shut up.”
“There you go. My bad songs and your bad verse: what a team!”
“My poetry isn’t bad,” Dane sulked.
“Of course not! But people think all poetry is bad,” Weebler observed.
As casual as a street sign indicating a dead end, Stump Weebler’s statement was an elegant equation for what went wrong in Dane’s life.
“We’ll make a fortune,” Austin said. “They’ll pay anything to make us stop.”
“If the cops don’t stop us first,” Dane remarked.
“I’m too pathetic for the cops to mess with. You’re borderline.”
Out of the briefcase Dane carried to feel like somebody—sort of—he extracted a literary magazine he kept with him to feel creative—sort of. It contained two longer poems, which he proceeded to read in a loud voice and an affected accent, with his head thrown back.
“I am the great white male…love life, give me a nickel…think upon time, lend me a dime…think about eternity…give it to me free.”
Some audience members winced or looked askance, while many others laughed. A few listeners even nodded and gave Dane a thumbs up. A significant number of spectators put money in the cup. Some loitered in a circle around Dane and asked him to read more or to reread a line they didn’t quite get.
“See man? You’re a natural. Look, more people. You’re on, ay?” Stump Weebler said during their next break. “Forget about advertising. Stay here and make an honest Canadian dollar.”
Dane started his next set when a familiar voice was raised above the crowd, “Oh, God, it’s Dane Bacchus…the Grovil man groviling for spare change.”
Dane was reading a short poem and managed to be heard over the heckler’s disruption. When he had finished, he identified the rude audience member as Nigel Hogbine, his former boss from Georgian Shield. Nigel was inebriated.
“So advertising didn’t work out for you, ay? You’ve put out a tin cup in the streets of Toronto, ay? How touching! And you found the perfect Grovil mascot, ay? This is what can happen to you if you don’t use Grovil, ay?” Hogbine asked. People in the crowd laughed and put their hands together for Nigel. They believed he was in the act.
“You know this guy?” Stump Weebler asked.
“Know me?” Hogbine yelled. “This man owes me! He ruined my career! Because of this man’s arrogance we lost Grovil!”
“Maybe the black box warning had more to do with it,” Dane said.
“They should put a black box on you! You lost us the business and they blamed you on me!” Nigel cried.
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