JPod (30 page)

Tell me about it. But that joke was my life for two years. Not like there was much else going on.

Kaitlin:

Is there a Mrs. Lefkowitz?

Steve:

Once. Briefly. I usually scared women away by date number three—even the hard-core husband chasers. I was hard to be around. In my spare time I'd do things like go into your sock drawer and reorganize it so that it made better use of the space.

Kaitlin:

Yuck.

Steve:

The sock drawer was what usually ended things.

Kaitlin:

Don't you have a kid?

Steve:

He and his mother are back east. We never got married. I was a one-hit wonder in the kid department.

Kaitlin:

Let me get this back to work. Tell me about Toblerone.

Steve:

I'm one of the world's few experts on mini-bars.

Kaitlin:

Tell me something about mini-bars I probably don't know.

Steve:

Here's a good one about hotel rooms in general. Most hotels have an armoire-type thing where they stash the TV set. Next time you go into your hotel room, stand up on a chair and look on top of the armoire.

Kaitlin:

Why?

Steve:

When people are checking out of a room, it's where they dump stuff they don't want to take with them, but which they can't throw away in case the maid finds it. Stuff that could get them arrested or cause them shame.

Kaitlin:

Like what?

Steve:

Really harsh porn. Pot. Pills. Coins. Touristy things that people gave them that they don't really want. It accumulates from one year to the next. In a Portland hotel I once found a pile of Italian lire, three copies of
Screw
and a $200 photography book inscribed
To
Dennis
—
without you I could never have conceived this book, let alone had the
courage to see it to its completion. I owe you everything, Diane.

Kaitlin:

Sounds like Diane needed a reality sandwich.

Steve:

The Dianes of this world usually get hosed, don't they?

Kaitlin:

It's a law of the universe. But back to mini-bars and your Toblerone victory. You took them from near bankruptcy and made them a global victor in the hazelnut—milk chocolate category. I found a picture of you on the cover of
PLUMagazine.

Steve:

Yeah. Everyone expected me to try to coast on my laurels. Maybe I'd go in and revamp the cashew sector. But I wanted a fresh challenge. That's why I decided to go into producing games.

Kaitlin:

You play them?

Steve:

Good God, no. They're as boring as dirt. The little brats who obsess about them make me sick with worry for the future of the species.

Kaitlin:

So
why
—

Steve:

Marketers like to believe that their skills are fully translatable into any other product group. Gaming seemed like a natural challenge.

Kaitlin:

Once you were hired, you took a skateboard game that was happily chugging along and changed it into a skateboard game with a turtle as the star.

Steve:

Shitty idea, huh? I'm not creative, and yet I felt a need to maintain the illusion of being creative. I wrecked your skateboard game. Sorry about that.

Kaitlin:

At least you're honest. But, Steve, the reason for this interview is to ask you about your recent personality change.

Steve:

Pretty freaky, isn't it?

Kaitlin:

To say the least. What happened?

Steve:

Well, I had a crush on a woman, and I think I was a bit of a pest around her.

Kaitlin:

Stalking?

Steve:

Not quite. But I was a real nuisance, and she had to do something to get me out of her hair. So one morning I got in my car to go to work, and a guy got in the passenger side—fake moustache and the works—and he had a gun. He said we had to drive out of the city, so we did. I was actually feeling really good, because at least something interesting was happening in my life. You'd think I'd be scared, but no. So we went into the valley. We stopped, and he told me to get out, and I did, and then he handcuffed me, and there was some other guy there with a panel van. They told me to get in, and then they injected me with something. Heroin, I found out later.

Kaitlin:

Really?

Steve:

Oh, yeah. And it was great. It made being kidnapped seem like an in-flight movie.

Kaitlin:

What next?

Steve:

The van drove for an hour, and then I could smell salt air, and the van drove onto something floating—a dock or a boat—and the heroin made me kind of woozy. I heard a lot of clanking and thumping, and then it became pretty evident that we were sailing somewhere. A freighter.

Kaitlin:

Afraid?

Steve:

No way. They kept shooting me up. I wasn't sure if I was dead or alive, but the whole episode was great.

Kaitlin:

We have to speed this up.

Steve:

A few days later we were in China. They put me in the back of some kind of bus, and I could see everything clearly. Have you ever been to China? No? Well, it's interesting but so polluted and grey and—

Kaitlin:

So I've heard.

Steve:

Before you know it, I was chained to a machine that stamped out the soles of imitation Nikes, 288 in one go. I got room and board and as much smack as I wanted.

Kaitlin:

You weren't freaked out?

Steve:

I wasn't even aware I was alive. It wasn't heaven and it wasn't hell. It was interesting.

Kaitlin:

Did working there teach you anything about human rights violations and the politics of sweat shopping?

Steve:

That's a politically correct kind of question a bit late in the game, Kaitlin.

Kaitlin:

I know, but I had to ask it or they'd probably kick me out of this English class I'm in.

Steve:

Now
that's
thinking like a true executive.

Kaitlin:

Thanks. But, Steve, you still didn't answer the question.

Steve:

I didn't learn anything about human rights, but later I did learn about how much my personality changed on smack. When I got back to Vancouver, I realized I was no longer a prisoner of that part of my brain that made me such a generic corporate suckhole. I found that I no longer cared about much of anything—and that I could say whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. It was great.

Kaitlin:

You're not reverting back to the old Steve, are you?

Steve:

Not as long as I have my daily arm snack.

Kaitlin:

Have you since pestered the woman you had a crush on?

Steve:

I bumped into her once at a party. The magic is gone, but I'm fond of her.

Kaitlin:

And they gave you your old job back, right?

Steve:

When I got back home, I was a news story for the first few days. That gave me a forty-eight- to seventy-two-hour pity window, which I totally milked, and they rehired me.

Kaitlin:

You can't milk a window.

Steve:

?

Kaitlin:

Well, this is an English assignment, and you mixed a metaphor. Back to you—how has this big personality change influenced your work?

Steve:

While I was gone, they came in and killed the turtle game and repurposed it as an uninspired fantasy game. I may not be creative, but the turtle was my idea and they fucked with it.

Kaitlin:

So . . . ?

Steve:

I'm working covertly with a team of talented young people to embed a Trojan horse serial killer into the fantasy game.

Kaitlin:

I forgot to ask—you still act like the old Steve when you're at work, right?

Steve:

Only inasmuch as it allows me to wreck that particular game. It's wonderful pretending to be the old me for nefarious aims.

Kaitlin:

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today, Steve.

Steve:

My pleasure, Kaitlin.

. . .

"Ethan."

"Hey, Dad. What's up?"

'Your mother's new friend is here, and she's driving me up the wall."

Cautiously: "New friend?"

"Christ, she looks like Fred Flintstone's fetus."

freedom.
"Okay. What are they doing?"

"They're down in the basement, talking about fertilizers. She started talking about semen and fertilization and vulva this and vulva that. I had to get out of there."

Best to change the subject. "How's the new dance routine going?"

"I think I may be too old for ballroom dancing."

"Too old?" Dad placed seventh out of sixty in Canteen (an endless night for all of us). He lost points for not having a light enough touch. Kam came in second. I fully expect the first-place winner to vanish some night while walking the dog. I said, "You're never too old to dance, Dad . . . and you're never too old to dream."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?"

"Irony?"

"Don't play dumb. I read the paper like anyone else, Ethan. I've read about Generation K and your need to distance yourself from the world by using irony."

"Okay, I
was
being ironic."

"I knew it. By the way, I hear you blew your chance to get in on the Coupland guy's stock offering."

"I was only gone for forty-five minutes."

"Snooze and lose. Your mother and I are going to be
so
rich because of it. I thought you and he were friends."

"It's more complicated than that. Maybe I should give him a call."

"I hear he doesn't like phones, and never answers them."

"How on earth would you know that?"

"Everyone knows that."

"Do you have his number?"

Pause.

"Dad?"

"You can't tell him I gave it to you."

"Why not?"

"Just don't." Dad gave me the number.

"I'm going to phone him right now."

"You do that." There was another pause. "Jesus, they're coming upstairs. I have to go."

Click.

. . .

I called Doug.

"Hello?"

"Hi—Doug? It's Ethan."

"Ethannnnnnn .........?"

"China
Ethan."

"Oh yeah. Right. How did you get my number?"

'You gave it to me in Shanghai."

"I did not. I never give out my number. And I never answer the phone. The only reason I picked up this time is because I have an interview scheduled with the
Sydney Morning Herald.
Why are you calling?"

"Doug, can I, uh—"

"Can you
what?"

"Can I maybe buy into your business plan?"

"Ethan, are you dim? No. It's not like a lemonade stand where you just come over and put down your nickel. Besides, you had your chance, and you were out at Brentwood Mall, shopping for shoes, of all things. Richly ironic, I have to say."

"Can you at least tell me what your idea is?"

'You want to buy into something, but you don't even know what it is?"

I decided to channel John Doe here: "Is that so wrong?"

"You're a moron. By the way, I've already gotten an advance for the novel I'm going to write based on the contents of your laptop."

'You're a sick fuck."

"I seem to remember a lonely little lamb lost in the remote wastes of industrialized China.
Doug! Doug! Help us! Help us! We have
to get out of here!
Face it, Ethan, if it hadn't been for me, you'd be dead by now, so don't play woe-is-me. A call is coming in right now, and it's Australia. I have to go."

"Could you maybe—"

Click.

. . .

I asked Kaitlin about irony, and it turns out that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony—which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can't imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.