Gil went back to the loft in Dumbo. Brooklyn was already starting to feel like exile. At some point he was going to have to break the bad news to Benny, namely that another dude must be found who had not read the Automatika series as a kid.
When he got in there was no sign of Benny. Instead there was a man who had the tormented, windswept look of Andrew Jackson as seen on a $20 bill.
“You must be Gil,” said the dude. “I’m Benny’s father. I had to come into town on business.”
Gil had heard so much about Mr. Bergsma (one night had not been nearly enough to exhaust Benny’s fund of aggrieved reminiscence) that he was surprised by how reasonable the dude sounded. Not a flamethrower in sight.
Gil said something polite. He wanted to try something new for his PowerPoint presentation. What if he used Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 package? He took out the Sony Vaio and was soon deep in thought.
Mr. Bergsma came up behind him.
“What’s that?”
Gil explained the MicroCharts backstory, he explained about R and Bill Cleveland and Deepayan Sarkar and Hadley Wickham, and as he explained he did, in fact, generate a plot in Inference for R using ggplot2.
“When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t even let me touch their Smith Corona,” said Mr. Bergsma.
Gil remembered his chagrin at the belated release of Inference for R with PowerPoint interface. He could totally empathize.
“But yes, yes, yes, there is definitely a certain appeal. If they ever make the movie this kind of thing would be perfect for the Automatika machine.”
“Is there going to be a movie?” asked Gil.
“All I want is a crap-free deal,” said Mr. Bergsma. “It doesn’t seem much to ask. What is there about the concept that is hard to grasp? I’ve been sent a contract which includes clauses about the ice show and theme restaurant rights. They want me to get it notarized. I can’t just snap my fingers and conjure a notary public out of thin air.”
He extended a longfingered, largeknuckled hand and gently stroked the glossy metal. “Sparklines, though. Multivariate plots. I was trying to think of something fun for the new Automatika book. This looks like something kids would get a kick out of. I’ll just download this now, if you don’t mind. Maybe I can do some actual work for a change.” He sighed again. “Is it just me, or is there something sinister about Vista? Have you ever wondered whether the Church of Scientology might be behind it? It would explain so much.”
Gil went back to tinkering with ggplot2.
When he looked up five hours later Mr. Bergsma was at the far end of the loft, typing morosely into an antiquated IBM ThinkPad.
Gil went out to the kitchen for a cold Sam Adams. The contract was in the trash. He took it out.
He started looking through the clauses, and for sure the contract went on a long time.
On Day 8 Gil went back to the Margaux’ to finalize work on the sound system.[13] This time he met Mrs. Margaux, who turned out to be the woman with electrocution issues. Which he was naturally also only too happy to resolve.
“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil, inspecting the rogue appliance, while Mrs. Margaux deplored Loopy’s new plan.
“What if she comes back with a German boy?” said Mrs. Margaux. “I don’t want to think of Hitler every time I sit down to dinner.”
“Eeeeeezy does it,” said Gil, edging the fridge gently forward.
“As if I don’t have enough on my mind. Kooky Fairweather has maneuvered me into resigning from the Board of the Met. Lottie Rosenthal has just asked Dodie Pierpont onto the Board of the Balanchine. I can’t take much more of this.”
“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil. “Yep, I think I see what the problem is.” Three tiny mice slept unsuspectingly in a small nest of shredded paper towel.
Mrs. Margaux explained that meanwhile, in just the last month, eight of her closest personal friends had been coopted onto the boards of eight grant-making foundations for the arts, and she had not even been asked.
“Mmmm,” said Gil. He dropped a chamois on top of the nest and swept it nonchalantly up and into his tool kit. Though extermination, probably, awaited the rest of the family. “Well, what you could do…”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Margaux. (What could a mere Iowan know of the cutthroat world of New York philanthropy?)
“…is outflank. I don’t know if you know this, but J. P. Bergsma has this thing about wanting a fixer-upper in Pittsburgh.”
“Pittsburgh?” said Mrs. Margaux.
“I know,” said Gil. “I know. But see.”
He was about to make a simple, crap-free suggestion, to the effect that Mrs. M could end the 13-year dry spell of this much-loved author and be instrumental in facilitating a much-longed-for film, simply by organizing the unpopular Pittsburgh fixer-upper element which had been a stumbling block so many times in the past. One of his 200 newfound friends was a dude whose brother was a subcontractor in Pittsburgh, a dude facing problems because the developer he was working for had suddenly filed for bankruptcy. How hard could it be?
Fixing things on a case-by-case basis, though, is such an inelegant solution. It lacks scalability. It lacks grandeur. And it doesn’t give you data, that you can analyze. Whereas.
He said, “See, for ten, fifteen, twenty-thousand dollars you can get a house. A residency is normally for a maximum of 8 weeks. A typical grant is for $45,000, $50,000 for a year. So, say you go to these 8 entities, you offer the grant of a fixer-upper, for the people on the shortlist who didn’t make the grade. Among whom Mr. Bergsma is merely one. In return for a percentage of whatever artistic earnings they achieve over, say, 10 years. With some kind of cap? Making it, potentially, self-sustainable? Do a different city every year? Allow swaps? You then compare the achievements of your also-rans with those who got the actual award. And see, you could have a web presence, you could have something like minglebee’s MotoGP dataviz, that lets you drill down to look at individual performance? And Mr. Margaux could potentially even devise an investment vehicle?”
The refrigerator was purring softly. Mrs. Margaux was initially skeptical, but when Gil called up www.minglebee.com, and she was able to see for herself the fun that could be had drilling down, well. Adam got so cross when people kept asking him for checks, but my goodness, this would actually be fun. Gil left her clicking on drivers in the Malaysian Motorcycle Grand Prix, 10/19/2008.
This elegant solution had the drawback of deferring, probably indefinitely, the resolution of Mr. Bergsma’s specific problem. Mr. Bergsma was saved, in this instance, by circumstances beyond his control.
The dudes who had won at Sundance, who thought funding was solid for their first feature, had suddenly found that the money had dried up because the producers wanted something guaranteed bankable and commercial. But the dudes had a soft spot for Automatika, the one commercial project they could even contemplate, unsurprisingly, really, because the kind of dude you would meet in B&H is the kind of dude who would have been that kind of kid as a kid. And, another of Gil’s 200 newfound friends was an entertainment lawyer with extermination issues. So, though it was not really in the spirit of rigorous experiment design, Gil pushed ahead.
13
He was not able to go back on Day 7, which was Saturday, because B&H is closed on Shabbat.