Super Born: Seduction of Being (15 page)

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Chapter 11

Rebecca Dupes the Simple
Fellow

That night I met the next woman on the list,
Rebecca Sans, at the same coffee shop where I had met Jennifer
Lowe. After some initial discomfort, I finally got used to being
there, sitting at exactly the same table as I had with Jennifer, in
fact.

Rebecca was a lively, bright girl, but no
superwoman. She was a graphic designer who wore up-to-date clothes,
her brown hair short, and a pair of rose-colored glasses. Unlike
Jennifer, she was petite all over—I remember how thin and frail her
arms looked. But I also remembered how lively and excited about
life she seemed to be. (I hate people like that.) We did the survey
shtick, drank some coffee, and chatted. After a while, she talked
about the website she was finishing up work on, and it dawned on me
that a lot of web design people call themselves graphic designers.
With my site becoming a cluttered mess as I tried to maintain and
grow it, I spontaneously offered her the job of redoing my B.I.B.
site.

“
What a coincidence I run a web site
that really needs some work. I’ve been doing okay with it, but I’ll
bet someone like you could really help update it. You know,
fine-tune it. How soon are you available?”

“
How cool! What kind of site do you
have?”

“
You ever hear about the
B.I.B.?”

“
The B.I.B.? I love what she’s
doing! What does your site have to do with her?”

I proudly opened my lap tap and used the coffee
shop’s WiFi to bring up my site. I flipped the screen around to
show it to Rebecca, smiling, ready for her to be impressed at my
awesome work, even if I do say so myself.

Instead, I watched her face sour and her head
pull back as she clicked through the site. When her mouth dropped
open I realized that maybe the site needed a little more work than
I thought.

It took a long time for her mouth to close and
be able to form words. “Well…this picture of her is so cool. I love
that. But do you really talk to people on your message boards with
this kind of language?”

“
Well, some of them are true
vulgarians. I’m not someone who sugar coats shit!”

“
Has your webmaster ever heard of
the terms layout, balance, and centering?” When she saw me run my
hand through my hair instead of answering, she continued, “There
are twenty links on this page in twenty different places…” “Five of
the links go to the same article about the health benefits of
drinking beer. That one of yours?…” I gave her a blank stare for
good measure. “Menu, template, navigation bar? Any of those sound
familiar? Okay, is your webmaster a Labrador or a
chimpanzee?”

“
Oh, him. Yeah that guy who runs the
site is a real loser. That’s why I wanna hire you,” I said, hoping
she would not discover that I had created the crappy site
myself.

“
What’s his name? Maybe I know
him.”

“
Oh, his name is Webb.” She gestured
with her hand rotating, asking for more information. “Webb Shite,
his name is Webb Shite…German or something.”

Rebecca laughed and put her hand over her
mouth.

“
Well, that might have been his
company’s name, not him personally…I’m sure I have his card here
somewhere.”

“
Never mind,” she said, smiling.
“I’m sure I can help you…a lot. And I’ll do it cheap, cause I love
the B.I.B. I’d do anything to meet her.”

Me too
, I
thought, thinking of the mountain of things I was doing to try to
accomplish just that.

“
How about three thousand for setup
and then fifteen hundred a month, flat rate? That will cover a new
design, construction, and daily maintenance of the email and
message boards. I’ll monitor the tip line, send out rewards, set up
a searchable tip archive, build you an online store to sell B.I.B.
stuff, and set up a daily blog for your articles, as well as
organize the links and set up some ad space so you can get some
advertising income.”

The size of fees made me blink…twice. That was
telling her. I wasn’t sure where the money would come from but I
knew I needed the help.

“
And I’ll need some
juice.”

“
Juice? I just got you a coffee
refill.”

She laughed again. “You are so funny! You are
just a trip!” I had no idea I was so entertaining. “No, silly! Not
juice, juice. I mean some commission on the merchandising and
advertising sales. That’s going to be a lot of work. I need to do
designs, get suppliers, find people to buy ads…Miner’s Lite comes
to mind immediately. She’s holding a bottle of their beer in that
picture. It’s a natural.”

I blinked one more time; you know, just to be
certain I had covered all my ‘blink’ bases. Then I extended my hand
across the table for a handshake. “Done,” I said.

“
Great! Give me your contact info. I
can start as soon as I finish this other site I’m working
on.”

I scribbled down my name, email, and cell phone
number on a piece of notepaper and handed it to her.

“
Logan?” she asked, looking at the
sheet. “I thought you said your name was Tom.”

“
What gave you that idea? No, it’s
Logan…My boss was Tom. But he died…weird sexual accident. I don’t
like to talk about it. Maybe that’s how you got
confused.”

“
Your name’s not Webb Shite,
either?” She said with a knowing grin.

“
Forget that loser. I already have.
You’re my web designer from now on.”

“
Okay, then we’ll talk soon,”
Rebecca said with a gigantic smile (I hate people who do that too),
then she turned and was gone.

As I packed my Penn State materials in my bag,
I revealed a little hole gouged into the tabletop. I ran my finger
over it, thinking it was an odd shape.

A guy who was cleaning tables next to me saw
what I was doing. “Yeah, that’s weird, huh? I had to dig that out.
Somebody melted a pen, and it left that hole. It was a bitch
getting it out.”

“
Melted a pen? How do you do
that?”

“
Beats me. I saw a little smoke
coming from the table. When I looked over I saw this really stacked
chick blow out some flames and leave. Man, she really looked
pissed, and there was this metal plug in the table. All I know is,
if you look down in the center, you can see part of the clip of the
pen with the brand name on it. I couldn’t get it all out. Somebody
didn’t like that pen!”

I looked in the center and saw what he was
talking about. It was the same expensive brand of chrome pen I had
left with Jennifer Lowe. Maybe somebody didn’t like the survey I
left her, or maybe she didn’t like being left by the guy who gave
her the pen.

That was the first time I even began
to wonder,
could there be more than
one?
Jones’ focus had always been on
finding the strongest one, but number two might not be too shabby.
Through the shop window, I watched Rebecca reach for her mobile
phone as she bounced toward her car with a big smile on her face.
She speed dialed and waited beside her car door for it to answer. I
was glad to see that my job offer had made her so happy, but I
wondered who she was calling. At any rate, I was glad this survey
interview had concluded without incident.

Chapter 12

The Searchlight Event: Another
Magical Night

The buildup for the B.I.B. Searchlight Event
was everything the mayor had promised, and it proved to be a boon
for Dr. Jones and myself, being the only two bona fide B.I.B.
experts available. He and I bounced from radio program to TV
program, offering our opinions and knowledge of the B.I.B,
sometimes even passing each other in the hall en route to one show
or another. Jones was in heaven. From my first conversation with
him at O’Malley’s, I’d suspected that being on TV was more
important to him than winning the Nobel Prize.

Everyone eventually asked me, “So, do you think
she will show up after the searchlight goes on?” I thought the
mayor was an ass and the B.I.B. was calling the shots, so it was
tough for me to answer diplomatically. I finally developed a spiel
about how well the mayor was going about the preparations for the
event, and who would be there, and how much I hoped she would turn
up. I focused on the event and not on answering the question. At
any rate, it it gave me an opportunity to plug the website. Hits on
the site grew. Advertisers came a running; my income
grew.

Rebecca had reworked the site just
in time for the searchlight event She had turned my hodgepodge of
windows, buttons, and text into a sleek, mysterious, and feminine
tribute to the B.I.B. The colors of the backgrounds and headers
were dark and secretive but never black. She used purples and
violets and some neon tones. From somewhere, she got B.I.B.
silhouettes in various positions that appeared and disappeared
around the screen.
I remember thinking at
the time what a genius she was, and what a lucky find for
me.

My favorite part of the site was the three
video games visitors (and website owners) could play for free. With
them, Rebecca definitely outdid herself. I didn’t even ask her to
make them—that I can remember, anyway.

The first game was B.I.B. Rescue. In that one,
your custom-tuned character walked through the realistic,
high-definition streets of Scranton, avoiding speeding beer trucks,
mob drive-bys, road construction, bill collectors, bullies, and did
I mention speeding beer trucks, in the hope of being “saved” by the
B.I.B. Around the next corner could be a twenty-ton diesel or the
rescuing arms of a digital B.I.B., flying you off to add fifty
thousand points to your score.

The second game was B.I.B. Pub Crawler. In that
one, you went from Scranton pub to Scranton pub searching for the
B.I.B. It was also done in fabulously detailed graphics. The
graphics were so good we were able to customize each bar to its
real appearance and sell ads on the game to the bars.

The concept was simple; you only had
so much money to spend buying drinks. The more drinks you bought
friends, the more clues you got as to her whereabouts.
Unfortunately, the more drinks you bought, the more were bought for
you to drink in return. If you found her
drinking a Miner’s Lite before you got drunk or ran out of
money,
you won. The game was adjusted
for body weight and constantly showed a meter of your blood alcohol
level. You could lower your alcohol level with costly coffee stops
and earn or lose points by picking up the right or wrong person in
the bar—adjusted for sexual preference, naturally. A drop-down menu
of pickup lines was available. Funny faces and playing drinking
games could also earn you points and clues.

The third was a real shoot ’em up version of
the Antler Game. The user controlled the rifle and tried to shoot
bar patrons wearing antlers. You got fifty points for each antler
wearer you hit, but lost five hundred points for each person you
hit without antlers. Hit the flying B.I.B. and you lost, for
sure.

With Rebecca’s success and my
lazy-grasshopper nature, I turned more and more of the site over to
her. Now she was the first to receive any email leads, sightings,
or documents sent in
for the reward
program. I let her view just about everything and
decide for me if it was something she should
handle or if I needed
to deal with it. She
ran the site completely remotely. She texted, emailed, and called
me by phone, but never really needed to meet with me. Like an RFD
with an antler helmet on backward, I had handed her a bullet and a
rifle and was hoping all would go well.

Advertisers loved the site, and the
local Miner’s Lite beer distributor not only advertised and linked
to the site, but co-created a B.I.B. Miner’s Lite T-shirt that we
sold on the site, based on the photo with her holding the bottle at
Skelly’s. Owning the copyrights for the terms
B.I.B.
and
We’re Not Afraid Anymore,
we had a
piece of all the T-shirt action as the Miner’s Lite and “Not
Afraid” shirts became the unofficial official attire for the
Searchlight Event.

That led Rebecca to create the B.I.B. online
store for all the B.I.B. products people were coming up with. An
Ohio company sold masks and capes. There were coffee cups, beer
mugs, glasses, letter openers, and stickers, but most of all, there
were T-shirts. Rebecca’s system directly referred all the orders to
a subcontracted screen printer, but I knew they had a hard time
keeping the orders filled. I still hadn’t been able to find the
B.I.B., but she was already turning me into a surprising financial
success. Nevertheless, more than the money and the notoriety, I
hoped she would show up or, better yet, that I would somehow find
her again on my own. The money and the celebrity were turning my
head, but my heart and below were focused on finding
her.

The preparations at the event site were
elaborate, in more ways than one. The event had been timed to
coincide with the release of the latest Batman movie. The mayor had
received the searchlight movie prop he had requested from the movie
studio, and it had been placed on a high balcony outside of the
mayor’s conference room using a helicopter.