Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  Lance is discombobulated by the Brouhaha, but the rest of her employees seem to be getting off on the crisis atmosphere. They’re young; round-the-clock work and the influx of freelancers are exciting. They even enjoy the press depictions of themselves as dupes and peons and victims. As long as morale isn’t souring (and Bruce and Alexi assure her it mostly isn’t), she can laugh off the Voice series (NOT SO FINE TECHNOLOGIES: THE CHRONICLES OF LATE CAPITALISM PART IV) and the second and third Molly Cramer whacks on the op-ed pages of the Post. The best was her use of a quote from a computer magazine, in which Lizzie called Fine Technologies’ approach “militantly agnostic.” This, Cramer wrote in one column, was evidence of “Zimbalist’s liberal antireligion agenda.” After Lizzie finally agreed to appear the other night as a guest on And Another Thing!, the MBC Entertainment newsmaker Q&A show, the host sandbagged Lizzie. He humiliated her over her involvement with Buster Grinspoon (“Still doing that cat ESP work out there in Area Fifty-one, are you?” and “So, that would be pussy-to-pussy communication?”), called her “very attractive for a cyber-Nazi,” and encouraged his studio audience to boo her. As soon as the show ended, he apologized very warmly, and told her that the show had been going nowhere and he needed a villain. Sometime she should remember to tell George she’s sorry she wasn’t more sympathetic when Molly Cramer attacked him and NARCS last fall for “giving aid and comfort to the trendy drug legalizers.” At the time, she made fun of him for finally proving her point about people in the media—that no one’s skin is thinner than journalists’ when they get bopped by other journalists.

  Lizzie’s Brouhaha acquired critical mass the day the second Voice piece and a Teen Nation exposé (UNCOOL!) came out. She had gone a little overboard, and called a staff meeting. She intended to celebrate the removal of the off-gassing carpet, demonstrate that she was unfazed, and answer questions (dissemblingly) about the IPO and takeover rumors, to reassure everybody that everything was fine. When one of the game designers asked about the Vanessa Golliver discrimination suit, Lizzie said, deadpan, “You’re fired. Any other questions?” When people laughed, she launched into an extemporaneous employee-by-employee culling of each person into their respective “protected classes”—people over forty (the receptionist and Lance), women (most of the nontechnical staff), people of color (nineteen), people whose religious holidays (two Sikhs, five Muslims, and a Wiccan) are not on the official company holiday roster; and the disabled (Bruce, for diabetes, and Karen, because of her stutter). Finally, she asked everyone currently taking antidepressants to raise their hands (about a third of the staff), which by her reckoning (“psychiatric disability, like your former colleague Vanessa Golliver”) pushed the last two employees into a protected class. Everybody smiled and went back to work. The following week, both the Voice and the Daily News ran items about this exercise, both neglecting to make clear that it had been a joke.

  Ben Gould told her that she’s a victim of the presidential primary season winding down, that the clucking about Fine Technologies has become a pretext for filling one Manhattan nook of the late-spring void in political chatter. “You’re getting cut up by crossfire,” he said to her, “from a Great Asshole Convergence. In a month, with the conventions coming up, it’ll all be forgotten.” Since the Times ran its front-page story on the Pat Buchananites’ and the Dick Gephardtites’ mutual obsession with reducing the number of foreign high-tech workers, and cited her as the prime New York example (“where roughly half of the programmers are working thanks to H1-B visas”), Lizzie has been turned into a kind of poster girl for the issue: “CEO Elizabeth Zimbalist” and “the little-known Manhattan software company Fine Technologies” have been Nexised from newspaper story to magazine story to TV story, like a contagion.

  Lizzie is bored by the cardboard depictions of herself (what “flair for the politically incorrect”?) and distracted by all the attention, which she figures is consuming a third of her time. The staff, however, seems to bask and glitter in the reflected ignominy. The various causes have all become so muddled that the only part of the Brouhaha remaining in clear focus for her employees is the célèbre, which they enjoy—even Reginald, who burned his company ID card as the centerpiece of an ermine-themed, animal-rights media event on the sidewalk in front of the building yesterday. The murderous work schedule to complete Warps is blamed by the staff on the collapse of the Microsoft deal, not on Bruce’s leaving or on Lizzie’s overoptimistic scheduling. Lizzie has made no effort to disabuse anyone of their grumbled “Microsoft scheisskopfs”s and late-night “motherfucking Gates”s. The company’s new intranet that Fanny Taft set up includes a REASONS MICROSOFT WILL FUCKING IMPLODE page. (The old system consisted of a three-year-old swath of corkboard opposite the elevator, crudely labeled INTRANET in Wite-Out and covered with tacked-up layers of staff memos, clippings, snapshots, single mittens, and felt-tipped SANE M/F ROOMMATE WANTED posters.)

  “New hat?” Lizzie says to Alexi, who has just arrived wearing a yellow beret.

  “You won’t believe. Yesterday as I was leaving? One of the animal assholes at Reginald’s little demonstration insisted that GO HOMOS was about Homo sapiens. I’m serious! She finally called me a ‘humanist,’ grabbed the hat, and ran away. It was very Invasion of the Body Snatchers. At least I didn’t get splashed with the fake blood, like Lance. He told them he was the CFO and controller, and they thought that meant he was the boss. By the way, did you really say to somebody at PC Week that the protests weren’t disrupting the production schedule ‘because we’re all used to working in goat rodeos of various kinds’?”

  “Something like that. Yeah.”

  “Well, my friend at New York Press says the Animal Salvation League was faxing around a communiqué last night saying you’ve ‘admitted to participating in bizarre rodeos involving goats.’ ”

  When she sees a copy of the fax, she gets more upset than she’s been since the beginning. Not only does she purportedly discriminate against employees with animal companions, “Zimbalist has personally sanctioned macabre violence against pigs in order to ‘harvest’ livers for untested, unproved transplantation into humans. And until recently, her company was preparing to hire Buster Grinspoon, ‘the Butcher of Seattle,’ whose gruesome experiments involving painful brain probes in living cats were halted by authorities last winter. On a chilling tape recording obtained by the ASL, Zimbalist can be heard bragging to Grinspoon, ‘To be honest, I really don’t give that much of a fuck about animals being used in research. I don’t use cruelty-free cosmetics … I’m eating steak!’ ” The president of the Animal Salvation League calls her “the new Dr. Mengele of the animal-cruelty establishment.” For further information or interviews, members of the press are invited to contact the group’s media liaison, Iris Randall—George’s Iris.

  The one ethical issue that has given Lizzie real qualms is the neurological game testing in England, measuring the dopamine and serotonin levels in the brains of people playing Warps. She commissioned those tests, in which the brains of a dozen young adults, human brains, were injected with radioactive dye and raclopride. Given the Brouhaha, Katherine, the company’s outside lawyer, advised her two weeks ago to put out a preemptive press release describing the London tests in detail. She did, including the possibility that an excess of dopamine may provoke symptoms of schizophrenia. Not even the Animal Salvation League expressed the slightest interest. The Voice mentioned the “diversionary press release” in one sentence, accusing “the Fine Technologies PR department” of “attempting to change the subject by pumping out positive news.” The Fine Technologies PR department! “Are they still up on the thirty-fourth floor, or do they work out of the midtown building now?” Bruce joked. He had been trying to jolly her out of her rage at Buster Grinspoon, whom she called “your sneaky fucking Linda Tripp partner,” for tape-recording their dinner.

  Alexi tells her the Cordman, Horton limousine is downstairs. It’s kind of like cigarettes, she has decided: if she doesn’t pay for the limo, it
doesn’t count as a sin. Besides, it looks as if it might pour any second. On the way up Sixth Avenue she skims the papers Nancy has faxed over. The Cordman, Horton cover sheet lists “Telecopier” numbers instead of fax numbers, and the exchange for Nancy’s private Telecopier line is rendered as “KNickerbocker 3” instead of 563. Lizzie already looked at the interesting fact—“Near-term median valuation range: $70MM”—but now she looks at it again. When Microsoft was telling her in March that her company was worth $36 million, she was virtually offended. Now that Nancy McNabb is predicting that the world in general—“the market”—might be persuaded to value Fine Technologies at $70 million, she finds herself pleased. But it’s not because of the money. Maybe it’s because the Microsoft bait-and-switch humiliation has turned her into a seller. Maybe it’s Nancy’s draft red herring that makes it more real and thus somehow untroubling. Maybe sentences written by lawyers that drone on unreadably for sixty-five words—“This document contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, the impact of competitive products and pricing, product demand and market acceptance, new product development, reliance on key strategic alliances, the regulatory and media environments, fluctuations in operating results, and other risks to be detailed from time to time in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission”—are boring intentionally, word analgesics to numb anxious buyers and sellers. Maybe it’s the limo, she thinks, as they turn left toward Times Square from Fifty-first Street, swinging down Broadway. For a block, the rows of prices on the looming black Morgan Stanley stock ticker are racing south at exactly the same speed she is.

  CORDMAN, HORTON, MERCHANT BANKERS: brushed metal letters on a granite square, a pretty Scrooge and Marley serif typeface but unmistakably now, exquisitely subtle silver-gray against silver-gray. The sign does not say EST. 1960, of course. But in another twenty years it will.

  The building is new, and looks as if it were built from an Erector set with a few stray Lego and Duplo bits stuck on the roof, but inside, on the thirty-third through thirty-sixth floors, Cordman, Horton’s offices are meant to suggest serious rooms from a century or two ago, Colonial Virginia with desktop computers, the State Department with better acoustics. Freshly milled wood paneling covers every visible perpendicular surface, not dark, stained, wood-colored wood (so 1950s by way of the 1980s, so comically “old”), but painted in one of the twenty-two designated Cordman, Horton shades of cream and gray (the 1780s by way of the 1990s, guaranteed tasteful through 2005). If Andrea Palladio or Thomas Jefferson had designed cubicles for M & A executive assistants, wouldn’t their partitions be trimmed with dentils, and wouldn’t the staff vending area have an oculus?

  Nancy and another managing director have their own reception lounge, the third Lizzie has encountered since she’s entered the building. The young woman sitting inside the wooden half cylinder, (evidently a miniature domeless U.S. Capitol building) is whispering into her phone—no rocket-ship headsets at a merchant bank—and she looks rattled, even a little scared.

  She is one of Nancy’s “kids.”

  “The cobbler guy lost them, that’s what I’m saying.… She won’t care it’s not my fault, it’s a TOT-Q thing, and last time they said she said I wasn’t ‘taking ownership for total quality.’ … Yes, which is why you have to give me your psychic’s beeper number.… How come? If he has the power to visualize what Peter’s doing in California, why couldn’t he visualize where a pair of Manolo Blahniks are? I can give him like an exact description. One sec—Good morning, with whom do you have an appointment?”

  “Nancy McNabb. I’m Lizzie Zimbalist.”

  Another of Nancy’s assistants, not obviously quaking, appears momentarily to bring the visitor nearer to Nancy herself. Lizzie has to admit: she could get used to the hush and the fifty-dollars-per-square-foot-per-year plush, the multiple assistants, the mineral water appearing unbidden, the phased labyrinth of reception areas.

  “Elizabeth!”

  And the effulgent glow! The office is drenched in light, resplendent with light, making Nancy shimmer like a goddess. On a bookshelf behind her, the clusters of solid-geometry investment-banker commemoratives—dozens of Lucite cubes, Lucite pyramids, Lucite obelisks, and Lucite spheres and hemispheres in honor of the M & As and IPOs and follow-ons and convertibles for which Nancy has been responsible or taken credit. Lizzie forgets about the overcast outdoors. She is unaware of the PSP system. On the exterior of the thirty-third through thirty-sixth floors, secreted in soffits above the windows of each corner office, banks of theatrical lights allow the workspace of every managing director to remain awash in perfectly angled rays of rich, dramatic “sunlight” from sunrise to dusk, regardless of the weather. PSP stands for Perpetual Sunlight Parity.

  The women kiss, twice, and for an instant Nancy extends her arms and holds Lizzie by both hands, regarding her a little creepily, just as Mose did at the party.

  “Are you excited? I want you to be excited.”

  “I’m getting there,” Lizzie says, glancing at a young man standing in the doorway.

  “Sit. You met my Grover? Grover is going to take notes, so that you and I can just dream out loud! Now. First off. We want you to be an internet company. That’s valuation maximization. End of story. I mean, you are an internet company—the game, which I understand is truly next-generation, 128-bit, and net playable, yes? Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I think our story is: we’re platform-agnostic, but web-committed. And Y2KRx and ShowNet, that whole piece of the business, here’s our story on that, you’re going to love this, Elizabeth: Y2KRx was a huge e-commerce hit, right, so you have a unique e-commerce core competency, and Fine Technologies is the first company—this is the genius part—to migrate enterprise resource planning software over to the consumer and small-business side. Yes? How much do you adore it?”

  “It sounds … plausible.”

  “The Russell 2000 market cap is running eight times revenues,” Nancy says, by which she means the average high-tech company is deemed to be worth eight times as much money as it takes in in a year. The market values of normal companies, real businesses not contingent on some fantastical future, run to one or two or three times their revenues. But it is not unusual for an internet company to be valued at fifty times its revenues, or a hundred times its revenues, or even, at the maddest moments, a thousand times its revenues. “Eight might put us south of seventy-five mil, but with the internet story, I think we can end up north, nicely north. The KillerWare offering Thursday and the BeMyFriend-dot-com IPO tomorrow will tell us a lot about the weather we’re facing out there, microcap-valuation-wise.” She pauses. “You have earnings, yes?” The question is an afterthought.

  “We cleared a few hundred thousand last year, but it could be wiped out this year because of development costs on Warps.”

  “This year, last year. Lizzie! Silly! We’re selling you based on 2002 earnings, 2003.”

  In 2002 Fine Technologies is supposed to make a profit of $2.7 million. Lizzie regards her earnings projections as realistic, even conservative, but only relatively speaking. How many copies of Warps will she ship in 2001? Not one has been sold. Will ShowNet become standard software in TV and movie production, or moot, replaced the day after tomorrow by some miraculous PalmPilot add-on? She doesn’t know. No one knows. Earnings in 2002 are a fantasy, albeit a fantasy she has constructed scrupulously and in good faith. The numbers may turn out to be accurate, but if they do, it will happen by chance.

  “You know, Nancy, I haven’t definitely decided to do this yet. Everything people tell me about running a public company makes me think I’d hate it. All the outside pressure. Everyone watching you. Everyone knowing everything.”

  “So, twenty, thirty, thirty-five times earnings two years out. Very conservative valuation. I’d love us to file by August one. Shall we go eat?”

  31

  “I took it slow with the actors because
there are so many stage directions,” Gordon tells George. Gordon will direct the Tuesday and Thursday Real Time shows for the summer, while NARCS is on hiatus. Oz Delehanty, who worked with George at ABC News, will codirect Real Time’s Friday hours with Gordon—Oz in charge of the newscast, Gordon directing the acted, behind-the-scenes segments, most of which will be performed live.

  “Gordon,” George says, “the talent. Not ‘the actors.’ Okay? They’re newspeople. I don’t want to have to say this to you every time.”

  “George?” says Davey, one of the writers. “What did you mean before when you said Gore’s not a McGovernite? Is that like McWorld or McJob? Because he is like Mr. McGovernment. You know?”

  Where to begin? George is reminded of the time at Newsweek in 1984, back when it still teemed with fact checkers (and McGovernites), that a fact checker not much younger than George didn’t understand what he meant by the phrase “zany SDS delusions about socialism” in a reference to the twentieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement. “By SDS,” he remembers the fact checker asking earnestly, “do you mean SDS the Norwegian telephone company, Statens Datasentral, or sudden death syndrome, the fungus that kills soybeans?”

  “Gore isn’t a McGovernite,” George tells Davey, and leaves it at that. At least he’s one of the show writers (one of five, who will work Saturday to Thursday inventing the “off-camera” dialogue for Francesca and Jess and the correspondents), rather than a newswriter. Davey is the writer who fought hardest to write George into the show. But George ruled that as the producer of the fictional parts of Real Time as well as of its news hour, it would represent some impermissible blurring or smashing of the fourth wall if he played himself on the Tuesday and Thursday shows. For now, he has agreed to let them refer to an executive producer of the news hour, who will be called George, and exist only as a disembodied voice on phones and intercoms. “You know,” he told them, “like Charlie on Charlie’s Angels.” When he started each of his previous jobs, unsure how to do what he’d been hired to do, he remembers feeling as if he were writing parodies of newspaper stories, then parodies of newsmagazine stories, and finally of TV news stories, deadpan parodies with no jokes. That self-consciousness always withered away after a few months, like training wheels he outgrew. He assumes the same thing will happen with Real Time.