Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  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.

  A black limo pulls up directly in front, and its driver scurries out to open the rear door. A couple of local teenagers on the sidewalk stop and stare. For all the billionaires and famous people out here in the summer, stretch Cadillac limousines (as opposed to $75,000 sedans and sports cars and SUVs) are rather rare. A grinning Peter Sutherland, wearing a blue blazer over yellow pants and a pink polo shirt, immediately lurches out, turns, and offers his hand to another, much bigger, fatter man, wearing pink pants and a yellow polo shirt and carrying a blue blazer. It’s Riley Dugger, the chairman, CEO, and largest shareholder of Dugger Broadcasting. As he huffs and finally yanks himself up out of the backseat, his glasses fall off his face into the gutter. Sutherland retrieves them as the driver helps the big guy toward the front door of Peggy’s (Formerly Morty’s).

  In his Forbes 400 entry this year, Dugger was called “a rough-hewn, plainspoken Coloradan” and “an ebullient self-made man of large appetites.” Ben smiles. It’s three-forty in the afternoon and they’re shitfaced, he thinks. This could be good. Until three months ago, his 351,000 shares made him the fifth-largest holder of Dugger stock. After Sutherland signaled to Ben on the phone that the second quarter looked bad, Bennett Gould Partners liquidated most of that position. But Ben is an investor, and he can easily buy another half million shares of Dugger next year, or next week, so the chairman and his CFO are happy to hook up for a drink since they’re in the neighborhood.

  “Pete! Mr. Dugger! Welcome to the Hamptons, gentlemen.”

  Dugger thunders over to Ben and shakes his hand like a man tearing a drumstick from a turkey. “Great to be with you, Bennett! You know there wasn’t a single goddamn movie star anywhere over in … where the fuck was that?”

  “Southampton,” Peter Sutherland says, grinning continuously.

  “Where the hell is Kate Capshaw?!? Where’s Kim Basinger?!? Where’s Kathleen Turner?!? How long will it take us to get a couple of great big icy-cold Tanqueray gimlets, straight up? You’re a casual little fucker, aren’t you?” he says to Ben, guffawing as he slams down into a chair and fishes a Lucky Strike from his battered pack. “Who do I have to bribe to smoke a cigarette in this fucking place?”

  Ben grabs a matchbox off the bar and lights Dugger.

  Sutherland sits, and continues grinning.

  “Happy FY 2001!” Ben says, lifting his glass of beer. The new fiscal year starts tomorrow.

  “Says who?” Dugger howls. “It’s not fucking happy for my business, I’ll tell you. Not a bit fucking happy.”

  “Come on!” Ben says, jollying him along. “Your top line is exploding, and the bottom line on your stations is still pretty great.”

  “The fucking stations.” A waitress approaches carefully with the two martini glasses filled to the brim with gin. “Thank you, darling. Are you Christie Brinkley? I think you’re Christie Brinkley, aren’t you? Incognito. I tell you, sweetheart—don’t spill!—I’d love to get you for a few minutes in my cognito.” He guffaws again. “Cheers. No, Benjamin, we have had an outstanding fucking ride on the stations, but the train has reached the terminal. Last stop, everybody off. It ain’t 1998 anymore. Dugger Broadcasting has seen $95 a share for the last time. You know that, Ben. That’s why you sold out. Smart fucking move, boy, I’ll tell you. Hell, our goddamn costs remind me of my first wife—I woke up one day and that girl was fat as a hog! (I’m not blaming you, Peter.) And this digital bullshit and ‘convergence’ bullshit is not going to make me a fucking dime in my lifetime, I’ll tell you that. Not one fucking Roosevelt dime. The easy money is all gone.” He’s finished half his gimlet already.

  The market doesn’t close for fifteen minutes. Ben still has time to grab his StarTac and make a bet against Dugger Broadcasting. Or not even grab it. The line’s open. Heffernan, he thinks of yelling toward the phone, buy me 200 August 85 puts on Dugger now!

  “But I thought you were going to unload the station group on Mose? He’s got to have it for the network, or he’s stuck. In my opinion.”

  “The board,” Sutherland says.

  Dugger finishes the rest of his drink in one gulp. “Oh, Harold wants my stations. Harold Mose would pay through his prissy Canadian nose. Big time. But my fucking white-shoe, never-run-a-fucking-entertainment-operation, local-broadcasting-is-your-core-competency board doesn’t want to let go of these fucking third-rate stations. Sure, they minted money for a few years, but that mint is closing, son! That’s what the board won’t see. You don’t have a board, do you, Benjamin? You’re one fortunate SOB, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  Dugger lights another Lucky, leans back, and roars over to the waitress. “Christie? I’d like to pay you five hundred dolla
rs American for another one of those good cocktails—if you’ll join us for one yourself?”

  “So,” Ben says, “your board’s a little risk-averse, are they?”

  “Hell, I’m risk-averse. They’re just pussies, stupid pussies, since they don’t believe me when I tell them we have to do the Mose deal before the whole goddamn world knows that our margins are shooting south like the fucking Special Forces through Mexico.” He does a sloshed little double take. “Benjamin! Why don’t you become a director of Dugger Broadcasting, Benjamin?” He turns to Sutherland. “Why in Sam Hill didn’t we think of this before, Petey?” He leans close to Ben. “I’m five hundred percent serious. I want you to think about it.” He pushes himself up and knocks his chair backward, but catches it before it hits the floor. “Urination break,” he says, stomping off toward the men’s room.

  “Work must be fun for you, Pete,” Ben says.

  “It’s never dull.”

  The waitress brings Dugger’s second drink, and Sutherland and Ben both order sparkling water.

  “So,” Ben says softly to Sutherland, “it sounds like the deal with Mose for the stations is a nonstarter.”

  Sutherland shrugs. “Unless he can get another two votes to go his way on the board.”

  “The kids are good?” Ben asks.

  “Just great. Jasper’s hitting .318.”

  Ben nods. “Fantastic.”

  The Perriers arrive. Each man takes a sip, and then another.

  “I think your boss is setting a new marathon peeing record.”

  “Yeah,” Sutherland says, smiling a little nervously. He heads back to the bathroom.

  Ben has told Lizzie he’ll walk on the beach with her and the kids at four-thirty, and it’s a fifteen-minute drive back to the house. He checks his watch. It’s ten until four. After the holiday, first thing Wednesday morning, he’s going to short Dugger Broadcasting.

  “Help! Emergency! 911! Call 911, somebody! There’s a man dying! Please!” It’s Sutherland screaming from inside the bathroom, where he’s kneeling on the floor, holding the door open with one hand.