An emaciated bike courier for a dot-com grocer appeared, shouting, “Some dude called Rob ordered a box of sour keys?” A dozen people barged from the bus and a feeding frenzy ensued around the candy, leaving Venn to deal with the stragglers.
A short guy with a long goatee drifted to his cubicle near Tooly. He stared at her. “And you are …?”
“Nobody,” she answered.
“Okay, let me tell you something. You’re standing right by my box, okay? I pay for it, right? And you’re, like, distracting me right now. If you don’t work here, then — with utmost respect — could you get lost?”
Hearing this, Venn squinted across the room at her, shook his head, then approached. “Dear, dear, dear,” he said, causing the man with the goatee to turn hastily. “You don’t talk to her like that. When you deal with Tooly,” he warned, “you’re dealing with me.”
The man swallowed hard. “Sorry, brother. Totally didn’t realize this was your friend.” Blushing, he turned to her. “Apologies. That was out of line. Just, you were—”
Venn interrupted, addressing her. “Ready to move on, duck?”
“Ready!”
With that, he led Tooly gently away, winking at her.
“What the hell?” she whispered. Venn had certainly landed on his feet here — she’d never seen him in an office like this. In Barcelona, he’d spent most of his time at a grim factory on the outskirts, where an associate produced metal hooks to hang jamón. The man employed illegal immigrants from Romania, which had inadvertently involved him with some serious criminals. He was just a small-business man, and Venn was the only person he’d ever met who dealt with tough guys like that, so he’d asked for help. Venn obliged, yet ended up sympathizing more with the factory laborers than with his own associate, so he’d moved on. Next stop, New York.
Glancing around demonstratively, Tooly asked, “But this place isn’t yours, is it?”
“Mine? I never own anything, duck.”
“Well, you seem to be running it.”
“Don’t I always?” He winked.
The property, Venn explained, belonged to a venture capitalist named Marco “Mawky” Di Scugliano, an ex-Bear Stearns guy, brought up in a family-run restaurant in Hammonton, New Jersey, called Spaghett’About It, where he had been shot in the stomach at age eleven for resisting an armed robbery. The bullet, Mawky claimed, had introduced him to Jesus. Also perhaps to the use of profanity, given his motto (printed on the back of every business card): “This is the fucking time.” The school bus had been his idea, a lifelong fantasy that required movers to bust open the roof and lower the vehicle in by crane, costing forty-five thousand dollars, though Mawky told people “almost a hundred grand.” This was to have been his headquarters, but the plan flopped owing to the impossibility of lighting a room with such high ceilings; plus, people were always banging their heads inside the bus, and it proved impossible to get ISDN up here, the only option being dial-up. So he’d dumped the place for a new one on Twenty-sixth Street, overlooking the East River, a space so massive that employees were issued Razor scooter boards just to reach the bathrooms. He had asked Venn to make something of this junker, and that led to the Brain Trust, a cooperative that cost members five thousand dollars to join, plus two thousand a month to rent “a box,” as the cubicles were known.
“Okay,” she said, “but what are they actually doing?”
“It’s a lab. Anything these guys come up with — any idea that turns into something — the creator gets a controlling stake in the resulting company. At the same time, all members of the Brain Trust own a piece, too. If a person is wealthy but unoriginal, they benefit — they just ante up for more shares. If they’re rich in ideas and poor in cash, they can sell their Brain Trust shares to someone else. They bet on themselves, but on the group, too. Unlike in a normal office, everyone here wants their colleagues to succeed. Anyway, that’s the theory.”
He led her to a nearby box of two young women, former junior ad execs who’d quit to apply their wits to personal enrichment. One explained click-through ads to Tooly, rambling about “being first in the space,” “bricks-and-clicks,” and “online play.” Tooly responded with what must have been an absurd question, since the woman asked with dismay, “Wait, are you even on email yet?” (Tooly had tried it a couple of years earlier, but she avoided computers.) The ad women droned on about how a million clicks at six cents each would equal six million dollars in profit. Venn suggested that they check their calculations, and led Tooly to another box.
“This guy is interesting,” he said, tapping on the glass.
A programmer in a T-shirt depicting a Rasta mouse smoking ganja rotated in his desk chair. “Big guy! Wassup?” he said to Venn, indifferent that the monitor behind him was on an AltaVista search for “Maria Bartiromo” and “naked.” His idea was a website called www.totally-annoyed.com, on which anyone could post complaints about companies and receive real-time apologies. Presented as a service for customers, the site was secretly funded by corporations, offering them a way to hive off clients who pestered help lines and drown them in a never-ending blah of automated apology, all generated by an algorithm called A.S. (Artificial Stupidity) that varied the regrets automatically, leading customers down an unctuous road to nowhere.
The next box contained four chubby guys in button-downs, their workstations piled with ravaged pizza slices, Big Gulps, and Mentos wrappers. Theirs was a spot-the-celebrity start-up, in which members of the public would phone in with tips about the location of famous people around New York (and later, Hollywood, London, so on). The info would be fed to subscribers on their pagers or to cellphone update services. The guys had already spoken with an angel investor who’d bandied around the figure of two million dollars. The site, www.spotcha.com, was to go live by year’s end, and was guaranteed to become “the kick-ass brand of the twenty-first century,” they promised, slapping high fives.
Venn led her onward.
“They’re not seriously getting money for that, are they?” she asked him.
“Nearly anyone is getting money who’s not an absolute clown.”
“And they don’t qualify?”
“These VCs sit around plotting how to earn off all the nerds they used to beat up,” he said. “They move these guys into offices, give them free Handsprings, Nerf guns — one geek could equal their yacht.”
“And the cooperative thing? That works well?”
“Not really,” he said, amused. “They’re all at each other’s throats. That’s what they were talking to me about before. This place is a comedy. But it has a view from the roof.” He led her up a narrow staircase.
It was windy up there, with glimpses of City Hall, the distant antennae of the World Trade Center, and water tanks on surrounding high-rises. The roof was covered with tar paper, its low wall overlooking Canal Street six stories down. Venn was a man of a thousand acquaintances and hundreds of lovers, yet she was his only friend. If Tooly had an area of expertise in the world, it was Venn; she had studied him for years.
He was brought up on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, a speck of rocky brushland eight hours from Vancouver via three ferries and an interminable drive through the forest. A hundred people lived on this island year-round, castaways by choice, many on a commune called the Happening, founded by American draft dodgers and a changing cast of artists and loafers. Traditional relationships were forbidden in the Happening — nobody “possessed” anyone in matrimony or otherwise, and parents didn’t exist, just brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, certain women favored certain children, and from this one deduced bloodlines. The boys were banned from owning toy guns and girls were allowed no dolls, though a jolly Swede produced marvelous little vehicles from wood, until a drug dispute forced him off the island. Around the nightly bonfire, the adults held forth about the world with a mixture of logic and lunacy, being at once highly educated and highly stoned. As the kids roasted marshmallows, the adults toked, recited poetry, danced badly, sang full-throatedly to the wilderness. Soon the children were sampling their parents’ stashes and sneaking into the cabins of seasonal residents. The preteens swam to the adjacent island, hopped the ferry to Vancouver Island, hitchhiked down the coast and slept on beaches, rolling tree leaves to see if they might be smoked to any effect.