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 fast[4] 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 of 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.
4
Dave and his partners had unhappily failed to read Frederick P. Brooks’
5
Dave was, obviously, not explaining the details of the actual project to Gil, because explaining the project to clueless morons who know
6
Gil was wearing a slate gray shirt and slatier gray jacket that he had bought on eBay as looking like an ensemble seen in an author photo of Bret Easton Ellis, when in New York dress like Bret Easton Ellis being the thought; he attributed his ease in blending in, among real New Yorkers, to the infallible dress sense of Mr. Ellis.