|
 By Rudy Baldacci
The road to overnight riches and glam women aplenty
was literally staring poor Richard right in the face. He need only
insert an idea! Damn the luck. As Richard sat looking at the computer
screen, the Internet Milky Way stared back, mocking him. As Richard
clicked the keys, he saw the behemoths of the cyberworld flash past.
This deepened his petty jealousy he was convinced that all of the young
men who had created these digital and gigabyte titans of the nuclear
bandwidth era were sleeping with the most beautiful of God's creations.
Probably three or four in the same night for these cybermen were well
known for having lusty appetites for power, money, sex; God why
couldn't he be one? And forget First Class or even Upper Class, these
Twenty-first century Vanderbilts were enjoying the Mile-High Club party
favors in the privacy of custom Gulfstreams and Lears, wholly financed
by ubiquitous IPO dollars.
These firms
had marketing caps in the billions, and unlike companies of the past,
the daunting, if silly requirement that a successful business actually
make a profit had been lifted. Now the young entrepreneurs were finally
free to achieve their destiny, rushing madly along on the vapor trail
of OPM (Other People's Money) in their quest to lose as much capital as
possible, while selling out early and investing their staggering, if
newly minted, wealth in the quaint, dinosaur companies that actually
had earnings. The symmetry was delicious.
Yes,
the Age of DotCom had come at the perfect time for Richard, all he had
to do was unlock the power. That was all. But he majored in Elizabethan
poetry, not computer science or business, the rotten luck. It was true
he had minored in Animal Husbandry, but only because of a compelling
blonde named Violet. Damn his guidance counselor and her lack of
vision. Was no one responsible any more?
What
to sell? Books were done, drugs too, at least the legal varieties.
Porn.com? Already taken too, he thought to himself bitterly. If only
Richard's father had purchased his computer and Internet account
earlier, his son could have been sleeping with beautiful porn star-type
women at the same time he was becoming rich. Talk about two birds with
one mouse click. Damn the old man, never thinking of his children. But
there had to be something. Products and services A-to-Z, so long as the
all-important dotcom followed whatever it was he ended up peddling. He
just had to think. Think! Why was this so hard? Was his brain not up to
it? His gene pool must be tainted. Damn his ancestors.
He
finally took the old-fashioned route of pulling out pen and paper to
jot some ideas down. Do-Gooders.com? The Internet was becoming like TV.
Why not stories of inspiration and positive role models? No, no
audience for something so nauseatingly sappy.
How-to-get-rich-in-ten-breathtakingly-moronic-steps.com? No, thoroughly
covered in books, TV, movies, and first-rate colleges. Why was he
sitting here on a perfectly splendid Friday evening making this bloody
list after all? End-of-the-World.com? No, limited sell-through
potential. Few, if any repeat customers.
What
do people love? Richard asked himself. Truly, unfailingly, blindly
love? Children? Hardly. Ring up his divorced,
perpetually-in-therapy-parents, and get a quick lecture on earning
one's own way. Love indeed. Grandparents? Idiotic! Of course they
served an important purpose, and why did death taxes have to be so damn
high anyway? What was so wrong about keeping wealth in the same, grubby
hands century after century? When Bill Gates passed on his children
would be lucky to inherit fifty billion dollars, the rest going to the
greedy, do-nothing government. Where was the justice in that? But
Richard was meandering now. What was it about the Internet that made
one free-associate like that?
Back to
the list. What to love? And then it hit our hero Richard. The divine
inspiration he had been waiting for, and he not even a church-goer,
borderline agnostic really; but he would take a freebie from God. He
was an intelligent college graduate, two year-long unemployment on the
public dole merely being a temporary thing.
ANIMALS.COM!
A website devoted to pets of all kinds and their special needs. Not
merely a website. A portal. No, a network, carrying everything about
our faithful, hairy friends. No, an EMPIRE devoted to the beasts. They
were far better loved than children. Why, it was only ten short years
since Richard's own beloved pet python Stretch had been killed by a
lunatic eighty-year-old woman who had run her car into a telephone pole
merely because Stretch had unexpectedly crawled in her car and
surprised her. The snake had died of mental trauma, the vet had
testified at the civil trial. The old woman had had to pay up, at
least. How else would Richard have gotten to college, what with the
insane tuition?
In his excitement,
Richard stood, danced a little jig. Pets, yes. It was all there,
everything had fallen into place. My God, the women with big eyes and
bigger breasts. He could almost touch them. His dream could come true.
And
it did. A year later, Animals.com was the most eagerly anticipated IPO
on Wall Street. The subscription price was fifteen dollars per share
which soared to two hundred bucks a share seconds after the opening
bell. Today, Richard sits firmly atop his empire of animal excesses
with a worldwide following in the billions. And any decade now, the
company had designs of posting a profit. AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, all bow to
him. Married four times in five years, and he loved them all in his
own, inimitable way, his biographer would later write, King Richard,
the father of three lovely, if ignored children, started his own
charitable foundation to help those less brilliant than himself. The
generous King gives upwards of five thousand dollars a year to charity
from his personal fortune of ten billion. And now he supports death
taxes. Let the little buggers earn it on their own. Just as he did.
© 1998 by David Baldacci; Illustration by Rudy Baldacci
|
