Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  No. Ask Lance.

  I don’t give a fuck how many of the game designers have voted to add invisibility and healing powers to the Dark Ages—I’m not running a democracy, and I don’t care if Boogie is feeling “harshed”—it’s a game about reality, remember?

  Tell them Warps is to Time Commando as The Simpsons is to The Flintstones, or as Men In Black is to Independence Day. More prestigious? Okay, as James Joyce is to Gertrude Stein.

  Say we’ll call back. No. Tell them Madeline will call back.

  Duh.

  How fast? Tell them we’re not interested. Not forever. For now …

  “I’ll take it!” It’s Hank Saddler calling again. “Hello, Hank, I’m just back; it’s kind of nuts here. I haven’t had a chance to finish that memo for Harold yet.”

  “It’s Henry. But take your time, Elizabeth! Not a problem. Harold’s in Brunei until the middle of the week anyway. I’m calling on another matter, concerning one of your products. The Sho ‘Nuff system?”

  “ShowNet,” she says. ShowNet is a Fine Technologies product that she (and George) dreamed up. It’s for movie and television casts and crews to use during production, particularly on location. Dozens of special, dumbed-down laptops are connected into a wireless network, so that script and schedule and budget changes can be transmitted instantly to everyone at once.

  “Right, ShowNet. George probably told you that I’m now executive vice president, corporate communications, synergy, and special projects?”

  “He didn’t. But—”

  “Thank you! Anyway, part of my mandate is liaising with the Department of Defense, sitting on a very special advisory board they have. We and Disney are the media-slash-entertainment participants. It’s really a privilege. Well, one of the colonels down there happened to mention Fine Technologies and your ShowNet software, and how it is exactly the type of thing they’ve been trying to develop for use in certain Rangers and Special Forces applications, as a tool for our war fighters’ needs. She said to me, ‘We’re always shooting on location.’ Very witty, articulate gal, this lady officer. I told Colonel Rodriguez”—he pronounces Rodriguez with an extreme amount of long-vowel emphasizing and r rolling—“that I was a little too far above the line to know much about the nuts and bolts of ShowNet, but that you happened to be part of the Mose Media Holdings extended family. I was sure you’d be happy to help them out pro bono any way you could with software and training, et cetera. Can I give you Colonel Rodriguez’s number and e-mail?”

  “No. I’m afraid not. That’s just not something I want to do. No.” Yes! A serious snap judgment!

  She’s never felt any special antipathy toward the military. The draft ended when she was nine, the U.S. finished with Vietnam when she was ten; Lizzie knew almost nothing about the war until she saw Platoon in college. In the second grade, all the students and teachers at her private school were required to sing “Give Peace a Chance” together every Friday. (At her stepbrother Ronnie’s school they sang “There’s No Business like Show Business.”) She did take part in an anti-Grenada-invasion teach-in organized by the cute graduate student who taught her freshman seminar on Japanese Noh drama, but in 1996 she wanted to vote for Colin Powell for president. And Buddy Ramo was in the Coast Guard reserves when she slept with him. It’s just that she doesn’t feel like helping some death squad management consultant repurpose her software to track the disappearance of Zapatistas, even if the death squad management consultant is a Hispanic woman. And not for free. And certainly not as a favor to Hank Saddler, the patronizing asshole.

  “Super! I’ll have one of my assistants call with all the DOD info. Who’s your go- to guy? Excuse me! Or gal?”

  “No. I don’t want to help the Pentagon use ShowNet, Hank. Henry. I’d be uncomfortable with that.”

  “What?”

  “I just—I’m afraid not. Especially given what’s going on in the news, with Mexico. You know?” She doesn’t think George will mind.

  “But … but Colonel Rodriguez is Hispanic herself! And she’s an African-American!”

  Sorry! Fuck you! Next! Sometimes Lizzie very much likes being the boss. Not, of course, enduring the parent-and-child-like grousing about salaries and window sightlines and the relative square footage of cubicles, or having to fire incompetent salespeople who happen to be single mothers. Not the irreducible third of the job that is stupid, dull, draining, and thankless. Lizzie likes being boss because at last she’s a member of a cool club that she likes, president of the club, a club custom-made by her for her. As a girl, she was just popular enough to harbor high hopes about the redemptive potential of club membership. But club after club failed to satisfy. Campfire Girls, astronomy club (which almost killed her love of science), chess club (which almost killed her incipient interest in boys), ballet, tutoring first graders in East L.A. (fine until one of the tutors was raped by a tutee’s stepfather), and Junior Achievement at Palisades High (the worst; what had she been thinking?), then the Signet Society at Harvard (Junior Achievement for the intelligentsia), a women’s investment group when she first got to New York—each one started the same, with cheerful anticipation, and each one became dutiful or worse. She still believes in the theoretical virtue of clubs, as she does in the theoretical virtues of piety and small towns and solar power. But she has come to accept her particular catch-22, a variation on the Groucho Marx line: the sorts of people who join clubs are not, by and large, the sorts of people with whom Lizzie wants to be clubmates. So now she has reverse-engineered her way to contentment. She has her own fourteen-thousand-square-foot clubhouse in a loft in Chelsea, where she does her best to keep everyone busy and interested, but she gets to decide who joins, who stays, and what the rules and projects are. The vicissitudes of popularity and democracy have been transcended, the thing has a fucking point, she can swear as much as she wants, she can tell Hank Saddler no without asking anyone’s permission, and there aren’t any mothers or faculty sponsors overlooking, clucking, organizing. Except her. And her despotism is benign; Bruce said so last week. Yet every two weeks comes the one unavoidable, vertiginous reminder that this is real life and that she is in charge. Being a boss is stressful always, immersive and harsh in ways underlings cannot appreciate, but when Lance knocks on the doorframe holding the three-page payroll authorization form, her mood turns a little somber. All larkishness goes.

  “Hi,” Lance peeps. Lance Haft is her business manager. (She let him say he was the controller for the first three years. After Bruce admitted to him that the reason he always smiled when Lance called himself the controller was because of the Controllers in Brave New World, she let him change his title to chief administrative officer.) He is always a little bashful with this ritual, like a shy mistress. For part of the tension of the payroll signing is its public acknowledgment that none of them, not Bruce or Alexi or Lance or any of them, not even Karen, work for Fine Technologies for the love of it.

  “It’s $188,500,” she says, looking at the bottom line. “That’s up.”

  “Yes. From $185,300. Annual cost of living kicks in.”

  As she signs her name for the period ending March 10, 2000—seignurially dispensing $188,500, poof, as she will again when Lance tap-taps on the doorframe in another two weeks, and again just two weeks later, on and on. Every time it alarms her a little, like a wallop of g-force. She’s pretty sure she prefers it, however, to the low-grade, chronic, corrosive nausea of being an employee.

  And she has never felt better about the two hundred grand than she does today, since Lance, before the signing ceremony, briefed her on his meetings in Redmond. Moorhead, the oily lawyer with the nineteenth-hole-at-Burning-Tree accent? The one who didn’t approve of Ms. Zimbalist’s … cussing?

  “Did Moorhead wear a bow tie?” Lizzie asked Lance.

  “Uh, yeah,” Lance said uneasily. “Yeah, he did. Both days.” Almost every employee acts nervous around the boss, a caste condition that surprised Lizzie and saddens her, but Lance has always been the
extreme case at Fine Technologies. Her bow-tie guess about the Microsoft negotiator made Lance look as if Lizzie, sorceress of West Eighteenth Street, might teasingly decide to turn him into a flying monkey.

  Moorhead agreed to pay $5.5 million for fifteen percent of her company, which is less than the minimum Lizzie told Lance she would accept, but only a little less. Taking the investment would mean Fine Technologies is worth $36 million. Which would make her 25 percent worth $9 million. Lizzie does not dream of big cash sums, and finds George’s pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming money obsession silly and disingenuous, but fuck! Nine million bucks! Seven something after capital gains! And Microsoft would own only a sixth of the company. She’d be nuts to turn this down. She told Lance she’d think about it overnight and discuss it with George, and told him to tell Microsoft that she has to discuss the offer with her senior advisers (Ben Gould and George), mezzanine-round investors (Ben Gould and her father), and the other members of her board (George, her father, Ben Gould, Bruce). But the moment Lance said five, even before he said point-five, Lizzie decided. No.

  When he’s away from home, drifting along, and especially when he’s in Los Angeles, where the metaphors are as ripe and low hanging as mangoes in spring, George tends to read meaning into almost everything. On the way to dinner last night, after Saddler’s, they stopped at Emily’s office at Paramount so that she could pick up a couple of scripts and so George could see the studio lot, which was the only one he’d never visited. (Emily has a housekeeping deal to develop independent films for Paramount—that is, she said, unable to let an oxymoron pass, “quote, ‘independent films,’ unquote”; that is, she added, screenplays for movies with “no sets, no effects, and no heroes, which the studio will never produce”). What struck George about the Paramount lot, though, was not the famous gate, a cute vestige of prewar Moorish doodadery, but the names. The Lucille Ball Building is bigger than the Marlene Dietrich Building, the Jerry Lewis Building is bigger than the Marx Brothers Building, and among the biggest of all is the building named after Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. Is there some scissors-cut-paper hierarchy involving celebrity, vulgarity, and modernity? Or a simple algorithm—one square foot for every ten thousand dollars of inflation-adjusted lifetime earnings?

  They had dinner at a place off Hollywood Boulevard called Les Deux Cafés. Emily pretended not to be surprised that George had never heard of it. Although she warned him that “it’s very 1997” (self-mockingly, he thought), as soon as he walked in, through a kind of secret passageway at the back of a Hollywood parking lot into a Shangri-la of Hollywood eugenics and pixilated Provençal splendor, George felt the particular, autoerotic yap and buzz of certain L.A. restaurants and parties, where the A-list’s collective pleasure in simply being in its own critical mass is intense, the near hysteria of horses at a show. At places like Les Deux Cafés, or events like the Vanity Fair Oscar party at Mortons restaurant, almost everyone gets in touch with his or her Merry Chatterer side. Les Deux Cafés made George feel young. The secret-door raffishness of the entrance reminded him of being twenty-two and falling in love with Chumley’s, the old speakeasy wedged in a West Village block that was ahead of its time, proto-themed before theming existed to make authentically charming old places seem contemptibly olde and hokey. The proximity of multiple big stars at dinner—not Sinbad but Denzel Washington, eating only vegetables; not some girl from the WB but Michelle Pfeiffer, George’s fantasy spouse; not David Spade but Jim Carrey, close enough for George to hear a slight hum he makes when he chews—had turned George slightly, quietly giddy. Giddiness feels a lot like youth.

  Such a balmy, swirling feast, such a slick, pretty mural of high inconsequence to inhabit for a couple of hours. Except for her story about the recidivist, sex-addicted talent agent, he barely focused on his conversation with Emily. Whatever she said and whatever he said seemed like pretext, the smiling meaningless yabba-yabba-yabba-yabba mouth movements of extras in the background. Extras with lines! George and Emily exchanged gratifying nods and “how-are-you”s with a well-known agent-turned-personal-manager, a well-known lawyer-turned-personal-manager-turned-studio-executive, and Jamie Lee Curtis, who had been their first choice to play Jennie on NARCS. The spectacle required most of his mental energy, particularly after they’d finished a bottle of Napa merlot. Careful, surreptitious staring at one’s fellow diners is always exhausting, as is the acute self-awareness—the irresistible mental crane shot of oneself sitting among the beautiful and powerful.

  George was so insouciant and preening last night, in fact, that he didn’t register Emily’s relentless fretting about Real Time—it will be all-consuming, it could get expensive, we will take so much shit, it’s do-and-die time—as anything but reflexive seller’s remorse, late-night liquored-up Emily schtick. But this morning, in the bright, bright Venutian sunlight of Las Vegas, waiting for his car, he is going through the dailies, mentally playing back last night, pausing at each of Emily’s caveats and doubts and grouses about the new show.

  “Sir, before you sign the blemish waiver I’d like you to spend a few minutes inspecting the body. In detail. Otherwise, you are responsible.”

  “I’ll be responsible,” George says, signing.

  As he floors the Le Baron away from McCarran International, he smiles: Las Vegas. His parents started coming here every spring when he was in junior high, when the city was still uniquely naughty, before big bare breasts and gambling and waitresses in silly costumes were an hour’s drive away from every citizen, before a plurality of hometowns allowed themselves to turn from Bedford Fallses into Pottersvilles. Vegas was Perry and Edith Hope’s Cold War Cuba. (Momentarily, he figures, Cuba will become his own generation’s Cuba.) Their enthusiastic middle-aged embrace of squaresville decadence, back then, embarrassed and slightly shocked him. One day his mother wouldn’t say stink or sweat, the next she’s wearing a sleeveless blouse and baggy shorts on a jet to Vegas. But by the time he was sixteen he had read Hunter Thompson and Robert Venturi, so when his mom and dad asked Alice and him to come along for their annual Nevada pilgrimage in 1972, he couldn’t wait to go—because it would be so trippy and, like, surreal, and because he couldn’t wait to see strippers.

  Right out of the airport, George spots the famous new two-acre billboard, two hundred feet tall and five hundred feet wide, advertising MEGAMILLENNIUM, the yearlong lottery organized by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. The tickets, ten dollars a pop, are only sold here in town, and the holder of the winning numbers, to be drawn at midnight on December 31, will win a jackpot of at least one billion dollars—the biggest jackpot anywhere, ever. Max has written down his 184 numbers in pencil on Beverly Hills Hotel stationery and given George half his life savings, $230, to buy twenty-three MegaMillennium tickets. Lining both sides of the highway into town are thirty-foot-long metallic gold banners formed into graceful swooping pretzels and staked to the ground, printed with big blue letters spelling out the slogan VEGAS 2000®—EVERYBODY WINS. The Vatican has declared 2000 a jubilee year, and so too, evidently, has Las Vegas. The VEGAS 2000s seem to glow; they flash sequentially down the road toward the horizon into infinity, like runway strobes. George realizes after a half mile that it isn’t some trick of fluttering phosphorescence or a desert illusion, but fiber-optic stitching. Electrified golden flags! When George was a boy, the twenty-first century was going to be absolutely sleek and white. Starting when he was an adolescent, in the seventies, the future was going to be rubble, random fires, and highwaymen speaking gibberish—a grimy postindustrial ruin. Now the twenty-first century is here, and it’s rococo. High-production-value, fiber-optic, evanescent rococo, imagineered Albert Speer gilded and baking in the desert sun.

  This past New Year’s Eve, George caught glimpses on a monitor in the NARCS control room of the big, broad streets of Las Vegas absolutely filled with celebrants—three times as many people as local authorities had dared to predict. Las Vegas, maybe more than Times Square, turned out to be America’s millennial g
round zero. Now that the newspapers and magazines and TV news shows and web sites no longer have 2000 to anticipate ad infinitum, and the computer problems to explain and reexplain, they’re doing their best to fill the sudden post–New Year’s void of factoid and zeitgeist infofluff—thus, the putative national sense of millennium anticlimax. This new fog of media chatter about the millennium anticlimax has been mostly “funny” confessions and opinions. But now, inevitably, the tiresome jocularity is turning to tiresome earnestness, from Andy Rooneyism to Bill Moyersism in a matter of weeks. According to a story in this morning’s USA Today (EXPERTS FEAR WE’RE SUFFERING “THIRD MILLENNIUM MALAISE”) this morning, there has been a sudden uptick in suicides, in Blockbuster rentals of certain kinds of videos (early Bergman, middle-period Woody Allen, late Spielberg), and in attendance at “church services of the USA’s more ‘somber’ denominations, such as Presbyterian.” The Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould was on every television channel twenty-four hours a day during the last week of last year, it seemed, trying to induce the national disappointment early by explaining, over and over, that not only is January 1, 2000, not really the beginning of a new century, but that January 1, 2001, will be nothing special either, since Jesus was born in 4 or 5 B.C., and so the third millennium therefore actually started back in 1996 or 1997. Max, of course, has been making these very same points repeatedly for the past year. This bout of millennium madness, Professor Gould kept saying as smugly and chuckly as a huge, bearded nine-year-old, is hype! It’s completely arbitrary! he said, as if Americans have something against hype or arbitrariness. Las Vegas, now that George thinks about it, turning left off the Strip toward the campanile of the Piazza San Marco, is the capital of the arbitrary: giant, arbitrary architectural facsimiles (midtown Manhattan, a pirate ship, Lake Como, Myanmar, a statue of Lenin, the Eiffel Tower, a lion, a space needle, and now, right here—Venice) installed on an arbitrary patch of desert in order to fetishize arbitrary numbers (1, 7, 11, 21) and arbitrary combinations of tiny spinning pictures of arbitrary fruits (lemons, cherries, watermelon) and metal objects (ingots, barbells). Vegas 2000, indeed. He turns left onto the six-lane entrance road and drives under the Ponte Rialto.