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 Since electronic peekabo is so terribly trendy these cyberdays, (The Truman Show, EdTV, "Compelling if Ordinary Lives on the Internet Extravaganza") let's FADE IN on one particular fellow by the name of Richard. The scene is thus: Richard is a white male, twenty-four years old, and a college graduate, who hasn't the foggiest idea what to do with his life. However, Richard has one burning passion, shared by everyone in his age group: to be rich, to be so filthy, outrageously, out-the-kazoo wealthy that he can accomplish that other overriding ambition of every young male, to-wit, sleeping with beautiful women: the standard issue supermodel with thick, pouty lips, surgically enhanced bosom and shoulder-height legs. In a brunette shade, if possible, blondes being somewhat passé.
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 |
