Turn of the Century (75 page)

She noticed a memo this week from Doug, copied to about a thousand Mose Media Holdings executives, entitled “Quality Circles 2001: A New MBO at MMH.” MBO, she knows, stands for management by objective, which has always struck her as a tautologous concept. “So,
Doug,” she says, trying again, a few holes later, “you’re head of strategic planning?”

“EVP organizational and management effectiveness, competitive intelligence, and continuous improvement,” he replies. “Most of the strategic support specialists work under me—eight FTEs. You and I will definitely interface.”

“And you report to Harold?”

She notices Randy and Steve smile.

“I report to Arnold,” Doug says, referring to Arnold Vlig, the COO, a dour, sleepy-looking lawyer who very seldom leaves his office on Fifty-nine.

Randy, the one who invited her along, is president of sales and marketing. Steve is a senior vice president, and he explained as they teed off what his job is—she heard the phrases “external reporting,” “demand planning,” and “loss mitigation.” She has no idea what Steve does, or what floor he works on.

“I understand you were responsible for that big microphone dish for the stockholders meeting,” Randy says. He gives a thumbs-up. “Super device. Folks were impressed. It was very impressive.”

“It was,” Steve says. He catches Randy’s glance. “I mean, people
told
me it really was.”

“Did you all hear about that Microsoft analyst presentation yesterday?” Randy asks.

“So-so quarter, I understand,” Doug says.

Randy makes his putt.

“—putt,” Doug tells him. Whenever they compliment each other, Lizzie has noticed, they swallow the adjectives completely. Except when they’re speaking to her,
nice
and
good
are never actually uttered. This must be a piece of boy-golfer protocol her father never told her about.

“No, this wild thing with the phones and pagers,” Randy says. “It sounded hilarious.”

Randy explains that five minutes into one of Microsoft’s end-of-the-fiscal-year Wall Street shows, the phones and pagers of everyone in the room went off at the same time, fifty little devices simultaneously trilling, beeping, dinging, vibrating.

“Five minutes later, they’re in the middle of demonstrating Open Windows, and then it happens
again
. Everything’s beeping. So then,
five minutes after that, everybody’s waiting for it to happen a third time. And nothing happens. People are laughing and talking, and it’s hard for the Microsoft guys to get the thing back on track. But then, ten minutes after that, all the phones and beepers start going off in
sequence
, one after another, every two seconds, around and around in a loop. They finally had to stop the meeting.”

“It was a prank?” Lizzie asks, smiling naturally for the first time this afternoon.

Randy nods. “The
Post
said Gates and Ballmer got e-mails from the practical jokers saying, ‘You have been circle-jerked, jerks. Happy 25th anniversary.’ Sounded
hilarious
.”

“It sure does,” says Steve.

She asks Steve, trying to be friendly, “What losses have you mitigated lately?” He smiles and nods. Now she has run out of small talk. As they prepare to tee off on the fourth hole, a long par three, Randy says, “Is this a great hole, or what?”

“That’s for sure,” Steve replies. “Two hundred fourteen?”

“Two-fourteen on the card,” Randy says. “Pin’s back, so call it two-twenty-five.”

“So,” Doug says to Lizzie, “I hope you’re getting on our creatives about interactivity. Have you seen my Convergence Objectives memo? One of the areas we can really leverage, and
use
MBC show ownership, is getting producers to let the viewers interact with advertising. As a form of entertainment. The advertising becomes an entertainment component. And vice versa. You’re using the five-wood, Rand?”

Randy swings. His ball lands a few yards from the green.

“His ball lands just short,” Doug says, as if he were a TV announcer. “Chip and a putt.”

“We call it
fungibility
,” Randy says to Lizzie. “Fungibility is the way we’re selling the net to advertisers. So when the character on the show is feeding the cat or in the bathroom, the gal at home will be able to push a button on her remote, and automatically receive literature about Tender Vittles or Oil of Olay or what have you. Instant customer.”

“Exactly,” Steve says.

“We need to be out in front to extend the advertising surfaces,” Doug says. “I want us to take a leadership role in product-based programs.”

“Like, what,” Lizzie says, smiling, unable to control herself, “a show about elves that Keebler would sponsor?”

“Is that one of the ones Featherstone’s got in the pipeline?” Randy asks seriously. “I haven’t seen that on the development lists. Very clever.”

“
Very
clever,” Steve says. He swings. His shot is short, and lands in the pond.

“
Fuck
me!” he says. He glances at Lizzie. “Steverino gets kettle-holed,” Doug says.

Lizzie knows kettle holes from rock climbing. They’re ponds formed by glaciers.

“I thought that looked like a kettle hole,” she says. “This whole moraine is, what, twenty thousand years old?”

The men shrug and say nothing.

Randy says to Lizzie as she prepares to swing, “I read in the
News
that on
Real Time
they’re planning to use that same digital video-insert technology that Barry Stengel got canned for. It said they’re going to pretend one of their stars is in California with Charles Manson even though he won’t really be.”

“Sounds cool,” Doug says.

“Not to me it doesn’t,” Steve says. “It sounds
wrong
.”

Lizzie pulls her shot and ends up in the sand trap.

George? Lizzie. The good news is you’ll only have to write one scene into
Real Time
promoting Tender Vittles. The bad news is—and I’m speaking here as an MMH EVP, to whom you may have dotted-line reporting responsibility—I forbid you to use the live video-insert technology
. At least she won’t be obliged to deal with this for another five days, until after the Fourth.

“In the bunker,” Steve says.

“Yup,” Randy says, smirking slightly. “It’s a hard green to hit and hard to hold, this one.”

The next three hours are the longest of Lizzie’s life, a sun-baked, stifling drone of FTEs and postentertainment scenarios, Output Management and extended advertising surfaces.

As they step off the last green and Randy pulls a bizarre pitching wedge from his bag in the back of his cart, he asks, “So, is Gerald joining you out here for the weekend?”

“George. No, he’s stuck in the city, working. On
Real Time
.”

Randy’s special club is not a real club at all. It has a clear acrylic shaft with a screw-off cap. Inside are six half-foot-long cigars laid end to end.

“Lady? Gentlemen? A post-eighteen Fuente Fuente?”

She takes one. Her father started giving her cigars to smoke when she was eleven, as a kind of novelty act to amuse his friends. Lighting up Randy’s Fuente Fuente, she self-consciously tries to look unself-conscious. Before they begin smoking, the rest of her foursome heads for a corner of the clubhouse veranda, where they join five other sweaty men standing at a small circular bar. Above the bar is a circle of Gatorade jugs hanging upside down, each one encased in a fancy silver bracket. Randy, Doug, and Steve grab special double-length drinking straws from a dispenser, plunge a sharpened tip up into a rubber flange in one of the suspended jugs, and begin sucking on the other end. The height of the jugs requires even the tallest men to tip their chins up to drink. Lizzie smokes, watching them. She thinks of Buster Grinspoon’s line about working for big companies,
“I really don’t operate well in hives.”
Randy, smiling and sucking, glances over and gives her a thumbs-up.

At this time of day, you can almost hear the rumble of the approaching battalions. In the primping and strained smiles of the locals you can sense the excitement and dread. Is being ignored preferable to being abused? Will the provisions be sufficient? This time, will the occupiers be kind? The leading edge of the eastbound invasion force—BMWs and Porsches, Lexuses and Infinitis, thousands of spotless, perfectly machined vehicles—is still some miles distant. By the time the main convoy rolls into town, it will have slowed to twenty miles per hour, the speed of a panzer assault column. It is three thirty-five in Bridgehampton on the Friday before the Fourth of July, 2000.

In the tiny gravel parking lot of a bar and restaurant that opened a month ago with the cute, cute name Peggy’s (Formerly Morty’s), Ben Gould’s driver, Melik, stands by the Mercedes S1000, reading. As a red Land Cruiser speeds past on Montauk Highway, driven by a woman still sneering and smacking her lips from the fulsome, acrid aftertaste of a cigar, Melik does not look up from his
Financial Times
.

Inside Peggy’s (Formerly Morty’s), Ben sits in ragged blue jeans and logo-free T-shirt at a table in the front, nursing a club soda, reading. He left the city before the market closed—the traffic, this meeting—but his StarTac 9900 sits on the table, the line open to Dianne and his traders back in the Big Room on lower Broadway. Peter Sutherland
and his boss, Riley Dugger—the two men joining him for a drink—are coming straight from a long lunch, and have called to say they’ll be late.

Ben has finished the Friday research reports from his trading stack, including the half page on Mose Media Holdings. Mose, as he figured, is taking a gigantic charge for Fine Technologies, almost the whole purchase price, just like he’s doing for TK Corporation and MotorMind and all the rest of the
exciting
little companies he’s bought to jack up his stock price. He overpaid, but his stock still went back up, as Ben knew it would, and now he’s overstating the write-down to try to give next quarter’s earnings some artificial pump—win, win, win! The report makes Ben happy all over again that he’s sold his shares over the last two weeks. “Nothing against the company or you, Lizzie,” he told her, “but when the fucking guy pays
a hundred million
, and every analyst from here to San Francisco is calling Mose a ‘strong buy,’ I got to get out. I’m loyal to
you;
I’m not loyal to stock.” She seemed to get it, although civilians never really do. He only wishes he could have started unloading his 49,000 shares of Mose when it was still north of 52, as soon as she called him about her acquisition. But he’s on the Fine Technologies board; that was material, nonpublic information. He was obliged to wait to trade until the news became public a few days later. To sell earlier would have been a violation of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, a stupid as well as felonious insider trade; making the extra two or three dollars a share wasn’t worth a slam-dunk indictment. But when that Friday morning rolled around, Ben sure was prepared to sell, everything in place, Melucci on the wire to his guy on the turret at the Merrill trading desk, ready and aimed the second the news hit the Bloomberg and Reuters and Dow-Jones,
boom!
—a convenient head start, thanks to the material, nonpublic information in Ben’s possession. Now he’s wondering, though, whether he should get back in, go long Mose once more. If their movie-theater swap for the Dugger Broadcasting stations really goes through, and Mose doesn’t get screwed on the price (or even if he does), the market will start loving Mose Media Holdings again. And when Lizzie’s sale is completed in a couple of weeks, Ben’s 25 percent piece of her company will be automatically transformed into a new load of Mose stock. He’s not sure whether he should keep it or dump it. He needs some reliable information, even a good sniff of reliable information.

It’s three thirty-six. Where are goddamn Sutherland and his boss? Ben pulls the
Post
over. It’s a slow news day when
OUR
$9
MIL BILL BILL
fills the front page. (The
Post
says Clinton’s trip by vintage PT boat from Georgica Pond to Manhattan on Tuesday, as part of the huge Op-Sail 2000 spectacle, will cost the city, state, and federal governments an extra nine million dollars.) When Ben spots the
MICROSOFT POOH-POOHS “KILL BILL G” PRANKSTER CALLS
headline in the
Post
, he has an adrenaline rush. He grips the paper and zooms in. “A Microsoft spokesman speculated,” he reads, “that the unusual version of yesterday’s date in the pranksters’ e-mail, ‘29/6/00,’ with the month and day reversed from normal American style, could mean that the elaborate prank call originated in Europe. After predicting the ‘virtual deaths’ of the multibillionaire geek mogul and his bald pit bull #2, ‘like the corporate Tamagotchi Frankensteins they are,’ the wacko practical jokers wished Gates and Ballmer ‘a very happy 25th birthday on 29/11,’ and closed their weird message with the salutation, ‘FUD You!’ A company spokesman said that November 29, 1975, was the date of the first recorded reference by Gates to the name Microsoft. FUD is a well-known Microsoft slang, which stands for the corporate strategy of sowing ‘fear, uncertainty, and doubt’ among business rivals.” Ben’s smile shrinks away. He puts down the paper and takes a sip of his club soda. He looks out at the sunny day, analyzing, calculating, knowing what he knows.