Then What - Chapters - Chapter 2

A Then What? sampler

 

Chapter 2 - A Real Education Begins

Beware of pain you get used to

"What the freak are you talking about?" I cried. "Ready for what?"

The anger came too easily, lurking just beneath the surface and waiting to attach itself to something. I glanced at my gold watch with the shiny metal flexible wristband that pinched my skin. I had intended to replace the band with a more comfortable one made of leather, but had just grown used to the pain instead. The square green numbers said 6:31. Wall Street, the distant mother ship on the other side of the continent, didn't open for a while, but Banter and Associates Diversified Investors needed me well before then to take the upgraded network out for a test spin to make sure we were prepared to execute the impending leveraged buyout with accuracy and style.

In the meantime, on the docket today was a typical schedule of global financial conquest. badi was in the brains-per-minute business. Move information, not stuff. Easier. More leverage. More turnover. More opportunity to dip the middleman's ladle into the stream of commerce. It was my job to connect the dots in the great pointillistic business plan with satellite connections, telephone lines and wireless pathways that could pass through solid objects, making badi's scheme to bring mouse balls to the masses a reality.

"Mouse balls," I whispered to myself. I began to focus on the trip that thousands of them were about to take around the world. BADI was going to buy mouse balls from Indonesia and sell them to a mouse manufacturer in Singapore, who would then use them in the mouse units that they assembled, which they then sold to badi, who would then sell them to a Taiwanese computer maker, who would package them with fully assembled desktop computer units, which were purchased by badi, who sold them to European retailers. BADI didn't actually buy the mouse balls; they invested in the company that bought them. Actually, they had invested so much in the company that they practically owned it. Owned it, but didn't run it. They didn't want to run it. Too much heavy lifting. Too much real work.

Normally I felt as if I lived on an invisible high-speed conveyor belt with no off-button. Yet today I was stalled, talking to someone I couldn't see. I was disoriented, flustered and about to leave when a shaft of sunlight bounced off something in the darkened doorway and hit me in the eye. As I reared back, an old man stepped forward, a gold-capped tooth sparkling as he grinned warmly, his deep brown eyes inviting me to come closer. He was medium height, medium size, medium build--just plain medium, as though he were daring me to scrutinize him.

I had become so adept at avoiding the legions of street scroungers who swarmed the financial district in search of spare change that in seven years of walking to work I had never looked one directly in the eye. But there I was, transfixed by the visage of a beggarly old man smiling at me. Furrows carved by the wind and the rain of countless seasons on the street crisscrossed his unshaven face, creating a map that went everywhere at once. His body slouched, wrapped in a dark coat with a high collar. Rips above both pockets exposed white lining that dangled like dead skin. His shoes didn't match. One was a brand new red sneaker, the other an expensive penny loafer that looked as if it had spent the winter in a snow bank.

"You can't learn anything when you're afraid," the old man said to me. Those words would underpin everything else he would tell me in the days ahead. "That's rule number one about real education. When you're afraid, all you can do is react. It's a great way to find out who you really are beneath the fancy clothes. But it's no way to learn."

"My clothes aren't fancy and I'm not afraid," I muttered, lying on both counts. My tight shirt and pants suddenly seemed to merge with my skin, leaving me feeling naked. I did a little dance to try to cover myself that must have looked completely idiotic. I tried to relax.

"Then I guess you're just a little nervous. I'm part dog, see, and, well, dogs smell nervousness. It's our job."

I retreated, pulling up my sleeve to check my watch.

"It's 6:33 AM," the old man said. "A wise man always knows what time it is­...or doesn't care. It's the same thing, when you think about it."

"How profound," I practically spit at him. It was, in fact, exactly 6:33.

"And don't bother feeling sorry for me," the old man continued. "I'm doing very well compared to the people who picked the coffee beans that went into your designer cup of coffee this morning. Forgive me; I'm a sentimentalist. I grew up when coffee came in one flavor. You kids drink it with all that garbage in it. It throws me every time I see a cup of coffee with suds. Your coffee looks like it needs a haircut."

"Foam," I told him impatiently. "It's foam, not suds. It's a European thing. Now look, sir, whoever, whatever--"

I was unable to finish my thought, borrowing an unnatural feeling of disdain from my other self, the one who would soon be assaulted by suits hell-bent on world domination. I guzzled the last bit of my latte and announced "download" as I pitched the empty styrofoam coffee cup into a nearby trash can. I reached into my suit coat to pull out my wallet.

"And put your wallet away," the old man said. "Thanks for thinking of me, but it was just your guilt chakra talking. That doesn't count."

"There's no need to be proud," I told him. "I've had hard times, too."

"Really? Name one," the old man demanded.

I stared at my wallet as the moment elongated uncomfortably, waiting for the old man to rescue me.

"Have you ever gone without eating for a day?" he asked.

I set my briefcase on the sidewalk and extracted a few dollars from my wallet. "No, and you shouldn't either. Here, you need this more than I do."

"How would you know what I need?" he asked, shaking his head in disgust as he watched me flap a few dollar bills in front of his face. "You are America, you know that? You assume everyone wants to be just like you. You can't believe anyone would want less than what you think you have. Well, you have to go, William. Work calls."

"Do I know you?" I exclaimed.

"I read your name tag."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, patting myself all over, searching for a name tag from a forgotten conference hiding in the folds of my jacket.

I was so inept at managing the details of personal appearance, that each morning I submitted to inspection by a receptionist who looked for signs of shaving cream, breakfast or excessive hair gel. Ever since I'd pitched the new badi network strategy to the upper suits with a sticky note stuck to my back saying, "Fix the freakin' printer!" I hadn't trusted myself completely in public. I never did find out who did that to me, but I suspected it was someone from Floor 3, suit heaven, where the real players at BADI moved and shook the world.

I'll never forget that printer. Stupid thing. It kept jamming and I kept telling management to throw it out and get a new one. badi had enough money to buy a gazillion new printers, but that didn't seem to matter. Instead, the suits humiliated me into repairing it by hinting that I wasn't the hotshot tech god I thought I was. Sadly, their strategy worked; I spent many unpaid hours pouring over obtuse, inhumane documentation until I found the clue that rescued an aging printer from certain obsolescence. Even though the suits were frantic to have their toys in working order at all times, they loved it when I was wrong. It made them feel good about themselves to know that I wasn't as smart as they hoped I was. My public embarrassment was their way of reasserting themselves--power over knowledge, the talkies triumphing over the techies. The problem with the printer had been an outdated printer driver--just a stupid little piece of software that allowed the computer to talk to the printer that I hadn't thought to check. Stupid printer driver. Stupid printer. Stupid suits.

"So how do you know me?" I asked. "Did I see you at a conference or something?" As I tried to concentrate on speaking to the old man, I instinctively checked my zipper, stuck a finger in each ear and wiped my face with my hands. All clear.

The old man started to laugh, and I could feel my cheeks glow with embarrassment as I realized how absurd the notion was.

"Sure, William," the old man said. "I was at the booth next to yours at that computer convention in Vegas last year selling virtual brownies. Didn't you see me? Look, your homework for tonight is to answer this question: 'What comes after food, clothing and shelter?'"

"Homework?!" I gasped. The word instantly brought back years of bad memories.

"That's right," he replied.

"Homework?!"

"Correctamundo," he said a bit indignantly. "If you like, you can call it an 'extended-learning problem-solving opportunity'--an elpso. Or, if you prefer, an ectbwowah: an exercise in critical thinking bridging the worlds of work and home.' Choose your euphemistic acronym. Makes no never mind to me what you call it. It's all just work that's got to be done. By the way, a word of advice: you can learn a lot about people by studying the euphemisms they use. Euphemisms are like drugs. They enable the overwhelmed to rationalize what they're doing with their lives or, more to the point, what they're not doing with their lives."

"Whatever. I don't do the school thing," I insisted proudly as I crammed the dollar bills the old man had refused back into my wallet. "I made my own way a long time ago. I got an education from life. I left school when I was sixteen and never looked back. Business Life Magazine actually published an article about me called 'Teaching Yourself to Succeed.'"

It was a nice article, actually. I was described as "a testimonial to the death of formal education and the supremacy of the cult of personal initiative; one who enthusiastically retrains himself in a world of work ever roiling with change."

"Glory be, not a whole magazine article!" the old man chided. "There were only a million of those published yesterday. And who said anything about school? We're talking about learning. Don't confuse the two. Do you know who said, 'School interferes with your education?'"

"No," I replied, feeling a bit lost.

"Marshall McLuhan. Do you know who he was?"

My cheeks started to glow again. McLuhan was one of those people I knew I should know about, even if only a few sentences deep. But I didn't. It was a deficit made all the more poignant by the fact that a street scrounger was apparently going to tell me all about him. "Sort of," I sputtered. "I mean, I've heard the name, certainly."

"Certainly," he said, not trying to hide his disappointment. "Of course you've heard the name. We've all heard the name. That's what McLuhan called, 'being well-known for being well-known.' William, William! It's a good thing you came to me. We've got a lot of ground to cover before The Big Day."

"What do you mean, 'came to you?' What big day?"

The old man ignored me, a standard operating procedure I never got used to.

"McLuhan was your great-grandfather, whether you like it or not," the old man said. "See, the way Marshall saw it, thanks to tv there was more information outside the classroom than inside, making school an impediment to learning. I sort of knew the man. I was one of those students who was too afraid of him to actually sign up for his classes. So I sneaked into his classes and just listened to him pontificate. Now, there was a man in love with himself. He was, to put it in the terminology of my grandmother, 'pompous as a horse's ass.' But he was brilliant enough to pull it off. I remember him screaming in class one day that women lacked the sexual presence to become priests. He didn't believe anything half-heartedly, no matter how outrageous it was. That was before the time when women would have told him to kiss-off in public. It wouldn't go unchallenged these days. But he would relish the fight."

I just stared at the old man with a dazed attention--curious, attracted, resistant and unable to move. I would wonder later how someone with no visible means of support knew someone as famous as Marshall McLuhan.

"But," he continued, "McLuhan was one of those loudmouths you loved to disagree with, which I did quite often. I told him that I thought the issue with TV didn't have so much to do with the amount of information as it did with who was in charge of it. There was always a lot of information outside the classroom, but the adults controlled it all. The adults, however, couldn't control TV. For instance, my dad didn't want me going into town to see the ghettos. So, before TV, I didn't. After TV I didn't have to. The ghettos came to me. Are your grandparents still alive?"

"My grandpa is," I replied.

"Well, then, he can tell you," the old man said. "Their primary mission in life was to make sure that nothing changed. Their job was to stoke the cultural inertia machine to make sure that it kept running in place. Funny thing about running in place--at the end of the day you're still tired as heck even though you haven't gone anywhere. Our grandparents were usurped by a box of electrons that undermined everything they said. God, that must have hurt. You know how culture is preserved? Like this: A boy goes to his father and says, 'Dad, I've got a problem.' Dad says, 'Son, I understand, because when I was your age I went to my father and said, 'Dad, I've got a problem,' and my father told me, 'Son I understand, because when I was your age I went to my father and said, 'Dad, I've got a problem...' and so on. Understand?

"Now what happens? Son has a problem, goes into a chat room on the Net and finds a virtual buddy who tells him things that would make his grandfather sit up in his grave. Or maybe he calls the psychic hotline. Or maybe he escapes to TV land and gets another perspective from Oprah, or one of the sex channels, or mtv or espn. Maybe Dad gets involved, maybe he doesn't. Maybe Dad's around, maybe he isn't. Maybe Dad's got a clue, maybe he doesn't."

"You know about the Net?" I asked excitedly. "You?"

"I predicted it," he said flatly.

"No freakin' way!" I laughed, the last five minutes suddenly feeling like a setup for a punch line. "You predicted the Net? That's a good one. Boy, you really had me going, mister."

"Believe what you want," the old man said as his gold tooth twinkled in the sunshine. "But just remember: Whatever you believe, that's who you are."

A pause stretched between us, the moments passing more painfully for me than for him as we studied each other. Suddenly the old man was smiling coyly.

"Hey," he said buoyantly. "Do you know the difference between a venture capitalist and a gargoyle?"

"No," I replied cautiously.

"Me either!" The old man howled, disappearing as he fell back into the shadows of the doorway. It was a howl, usually at my expense, that I would hear many times and which I would never get used to.

"Oh, very funny," I scoffed. I suddenly felt as though I was observing myself as a character in a bad sitcom whose motivation was transparent and predictable. "Did you make that up yourself? I suppose that was a dig at me. Well, I'm not a venture capitalist. All I do is make the networks run. All I do is make sure that people can talk to each other. All I do is keep people from getting real confused and ticked off. Do you have a problem with that?"

I waited for a reply, but the invisible world within the doorway was silent. The sounds of the street behind me began to fill my head--cars screeching, taxis honking, police sirens wailing, people buzzing about like angry hornets. Another scrounger was already on me, asking for change. I could smell bagels somewhere in the distance, taste the last few drops of coffee that lingered in my mouth and feel my shirt collar tighten around my neck. I became aware of the fact that people were eyeing me strangely as they stepped around me on the sidewalk.

I inched timidly toward the doorway. "...Hello?"

I got the nerve to stick my head all the way inside. A cool gust of air sent a shiver down my spine. The old man was gone.

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