We catch up with Steve Fredricks
* * *
Jeremy Stapleton’s got a best-selling book out. “The Next Wave: Adventures in the New Now.” What a load of crap. He made me look like a total loser. I had to think twice about going to the Unicorn Club’s closing party. That’s for later. First let me catch you all up on my life in the new now.
* * *
I mean, he wasn’t wrong. My aggressive style of resource accumulation in the future/past made a number of enemies, many of whom I needed to dodge in my new-now teen years, as I was trying my best to get back on top of the money machine.
* * *
* * *
The worst time was my summer back at Camp Kleebec, where I got pranked most days. Kids I hardly knew in the future/past hated me today. I guessed that their envy had morphed to spite. Remember, these thirteen-year-olds were in their sixties a few years back. And mostly vague about their former lives. I never read the quarterly newsletter. I had no connection with them after camp. They could have been felons, sex offenders, lawyers, politicians: who knows?
I’m pretty sure that Timmy, who seeded my oatmeal with river rocks the size and color of raisins, might have been a guard at Abu Ghraib. And Frank, who swiped the shoelaces from all my shoes, was no eagle scout. They called me “Ritchie Rich.” I could not go swimming without a couple of them pulling off my swimsuit in the water. Then I would spend an hour in the afternoon retrieving this from a tree top. At least the camp was not co-ed.
At first I was weirdly honored by the attention, but by the second week it was just a daily dose of humiliation. Worse, the camp counselors were no better. I caught one of them trying to put my hand in a pail of warm water while I slept, so I’d pee myself in the bed. When the camp director called me “Mister Benefactor,” I figured it all out.
You see, in the future/past, Camp Kleebec got into financial problems. They put out a call for help. I had just taken my third start-up public, so I offered to loan them all the cash they needed to get through this rough patch, and at a really low interest rate. I did ask that they give my start-up accelerator a full-page advertisement on the back cover of their quarterly newsletter, and do a feature on me once a year. My own writers even supplied the copy.
They paid the loan off in 2017. I wrote them a note saying how pleased I was that I could be a benefactor for this great organization.
Now I find out that they expected me to forgive the loan completely at some point early on, just because they’re a non-profit charity. Who knew? Luckily, I am not coming back.
* * *
We moved to Chicago. More like fled. It turns out that, in the future/past, while my dad was off on frequent business trips, my mom got serially frisky with a number of married men in the condo.
All I remember of this was I would get home from school, and Mom would dash out of their bedroom, flustered and flush, mumbling that Tom, or Frank, or whoever it was that day, had dropped by to help her with the sticky bedroom window. That darn window was so hard to open. Then Tom would come out, maybe buttoning his shirt, and Mom would thank him, and say that she was sure my dad would get around to having the window replaced soon.
Early in the new now, the wives in the building started talking with each other, comparing notes and confronting their spouses. Suddenly, we became pariahs. Seriously unwelcome. Dogshit in our mailbox unwelcome. Fortunately, dad got the promotion to run the Chicago office and off we went.
I came to understand that all of my former entrepreneurial opportunities were gone in the new now. I decided to let the tech world go to shit without me. I took economics and accounting courses at Northwestern, and passed my CPA exam, just when regional public banks were being organized.
I moved out of Chicago when I turned eighteen, and landed in San Jose, where I got an entry-level job in the home office of the Santa Clara Public Bank.
I was just twenty, and feeling depressed and lonely when I met Joanna at the self-help aisle of Barnes and Noble. We went for coffee. She was an assistant at an insurance office not far from my job. That conversation led to a lunch, and then a dinner, and then three more dates before she invited me to join her at her church the next Sunday.
Her church. I knew she was different from the start-up groupies I met before. Now I knew why. I’d avoided any kind of religion since I could remember. I couldn’t confess my decades-long atheism and expect to keep seeing her, so I went along. I developed a hidden fantasy about releasing her repressed sexuality.
She was a Methodist. Whatever that means. It turns out that California Methodist churches are fairly open to anybody, and I could go along to events without needing to confess or pledge any fidelity.
I told them I was already a member of a church in my small hometown in Wisconsin, but I had not been active since my move to California. I was willing to contribute financially, without formally joining. They were fine with this, and even let me into their choir, which was perfect, since I love singing in a group. I’m not good enough to do it solo in public. I avoided karaoke completely. And Joanna was in the choir.
The people in the church were worked in a variety of local jobs, and none of them were from the dot-com world. I didn’t have to worry about meeting any of my old cronies there. And I finally convinced Joanna that making out on our dates was just another way of showing how much we love each other. As a timedrifter, I had a fair amount of experience. She was not disappointed.
As much as I grew to love Joanna, I stuck to my story about being killed young in a car accident in the future/past. So I have no memories. Joanna was also a realtimer. She diddone died of chronic heart disease in her 50s. We were, I vowed, both of us, together for each other in this new time.
We got married. I officially joined the Church. I met her parents, and made excuses for mine. I said, with great sadness, that they had joined a fundamentalist evangelical cult that hated Methodism. They were furious about my new devotion to the Church and my Methodist wife. They told me I was dead to them. What could I do?
* * *
* * *
Poivre
Yes, Joanna smelled like the women’s underwear department at a J.C. Penny store. I knew enough not to complain, but the stuff she wore was two-dollars an ounce, and would probably repel raccoons. I admit, I’m spoiled when it comes to scents on a woman.
One of my pick-up lines at a hotel bar in Montecito in the future/past was to sit on the stool next to a pretty woman. After ordering my drink, I would take a handkerchief from my pocket and touch the back of my neck with it. The handkerchief has a large dash of Caron Poivre perfume on it. Then, I’d let it slip from my grasp onto the floor. With a sigh, I would step off the stool, bend and pick it up, making sure it passed between me and a woman sitting next to me. Close enough for the aroma to be obvious.
Watching her expression, I could tell if the woman was curious about the fragrance. If so, I’d apologize while regaining my seat, and say that I hope she is not allergic to perfume. This gave her the opportunity to say something.
“I used to buy this perfume for my ex-girlfriend,” I’d admit, and pass the handkerchief to the woman.
I’d say, “Take a sniff. Caron Poivre. I think it’s the best scent anywhere…”
I’d watch her face. The perfume is amazing, peppery, floral, with sandalwood and oak moss. A dazzling fragrance. More often than not, the woman would shut her eyes and just inhale.
“…Maybe this perfume was more for me than for my girlfriend,” I would admit. “I just adore making love to a beautiful…” Here, I would look into her eyes and smile a bit. “…woman who smells fantastic. This stuff costs a thousand dollars an ounce. It’s worth every dollar.”
I’d reach out and accept the kerchief back from the woman, making sure our hands touched just a little.
“Sorry to bother you,” I would say.
I’d smile at her, turn away, and sip at my drink.
I would then wink at the bartender. He would step up and tell me, “The manager needs to talk with you about the wine cellar.”
“Tell him I am taking the jet to France next week to buy up his entire wish list. All right?”
The bartender would nod and retreat. This was a simple interaction I had made a part of every bartender’s duty. Since I owned the hotel, they tended to listen to me. Well, that, and the expected hundred-dollar tip.
I would sigh then, lean forward on my elbows in contemplation, and grumble to myself, “I’ve got an unopened bottle of Poivre upstairs. I really need to get rid of it. It just reminds me of her.”
A glance in the woman’s direction would confirm the plan for our evening. I would introduce myself, and let the conversation flow.
This worked more times than I can recall now. Curiously, the same woman who would hook up with me in my owner’s penthouse suite, and welcome a “gift” of a two-ounce bottle of Caron Poivre, would be outraged if I just gave her two-thousand dollars to take care of my needs.
I owned hotels in Seattle, Portland, and Berkeley. I guess I’m a West Coast person. Each of these hotels had a bar. So convenient.
Having a fragrance fetish is not a huge problem. I’ve met timedrifter sixteen-year-old willbewho billionaires who worry they will never be able to get any kind of erection, since the last twenty years of their memory is filled with paid sex involving more than one willing, supple, gorgeous, young professional. How can the girl next door hope to compete? They are horrified of the very idea that their parents are doing it.
I kept supplying Joanna with scents on holidays—Guerlain, Channel, and Dior—but she really like her Charlie perfume. Oh well. At least, Johanna whispered obscenities when she climaxed. I knew it!
My bank had employee housing condos, and we bought into a two-bedroom, with a back yard. Joanna pointed out where the swing set would fit. Everything was going great for a couple years. I thought I had fully escaped my former life. I should have moved further away from Silicon Valley.
The Not So New Kids on the Block concert at the Civic Auditorium should have been an easy fun time, and then home again. Joanna and I were in the middle of trying, unsuccessfully, to have a child. When she wasn’t showing flashes of anxious anger, Joanna was stressed and depressed. I thought the concert would give her a chance to laugh and relax.
We had great seats. She was all smiles and jokes. During intermission, we went out to the overcrowded lobby and found a line for drinks and snacks.
“Fredricks!” The shout came from someone on the line to our left. I turned to look, and took hard fist to my cheek, spinning me off balance. I went down to the floor, dazed. He stood over me, his face a mask of rage.
He shouted, “You piece of garbage. I thought I’d never see you again. Which would be too good, and also a shame. I’ve been wanting for decades to stomp the living shit out of you.”
“Who?” I raised up on my elbows, still bleary.
“Just somebody you fucked over. One of many, I guess. I’m a bit surprised you’re still alive.”
Joanna bent down over me, shielding me. “Call security,” she shouted and turned to him. “Who are you? What do you want?”
I sat up, and managed to find my feet. His face came into focus.
“Patrick,” I said. Fuck me, I thought; and he’s been working out.
Patrick Murphy had come to my tech incubator with a great idea, but no chance that his team could get this operational. They failed to convince any of our angel investors, and were dismissed. A few months later, another team showed up with a similar idea, and went through our angel phase with ease. I joined their venture capital pool.
Four years later, when we were bought out by Google for seven billion, Patrick shows up at my house in Montecito, drunk on his ass, and threatens me with bodily harm. He claims I robbed him. He’s out there on the veranda shouting at me through the door. Pounding on it with his fists.
Through the intercom, I told him to get off my property before the cops came. He kicked at the door for a time, like that would work. Then he went out into the front garden, and crashed through my azaleas to a large double-hung window, which he could not open.
He smashed the main window pane with the mostly empty Cuervo bottle he carried. He was working to break the shards clinging to the frame when the sound of sirens made him reconsider.
I had called the cops on him the minute I saw his ugly face on my veranda camera stream. In Montecito, the police response is rapid. Patrick had almost reached his car, when they pulled up and rousted him.
They were kind enough to hold him on DUI, breaking and entering, damage to private property, and battery charges. My lawyer went to the hearing. I instructed him to drop my complaint, with the proviso that Patrick would stay the fuck away from any property I owned. He lost his driver’s license, and was put on probation for a year. Me, I installed a state-of-the-technology armored gate at the entrance to my driveway.
OK, Patrick was correct, from his perspective. I did take his idea. But it was useless to him, and I made bank on it. That’s how things went. You got to go with the flow.
Patrick made a fist and pointed it at me. “How does it feel being poor?” he said.
He turned to Joanna, “Stevie here fucked me out of a fortune. Stole my idea and made billions.”
Patrick gestured broadly to the crowd around us.
He shouted, “People, this creep is an asshole and a thief. I hope to never again set eyes on him.”
Patrick dove quietly into the crowd, away from the small phalanx of security guards arriving from the right side.
That was the beginning of the end of my marriage to Joanna. We were divorced within a year; months of accusations, revelations, and confessions. Mostly on my side. Joanna’s timedrifter cousin showed up and told me that Joanna was sterile in the future past, so why does she expect a child this time? The spring after our divorce, Joanna married an associate minister of our church, where I was no longer welcome.
My job got a lot more interesting with the passage of the maximum income legislation. Public banks, like the one I worked at, were allowed to accept funds from individuals and corporations needing to “exvest” their excess salaries and assets into the civic realm. Santa Clara County and its various cities could tap into these “Community Equity” funds for school programs, a new lower-income housing, a new bike lane, or whatever, by just paying for the ongoing marginal interest return to the “exvestor.” They would repay the fund later with taxes or income from the sale or rent of properties.
My favorite project was to help arrange the funding of a county-wide broadband coop that brought fiber-optic cables to homes and offices. By 1990, my own internet connection was a hundred times faster than my former Montecito one.
My job grew into a fund director position. In the future/past, mutual- and hedge-fund directors made millions in commissions. In this time, I was paid a decent salary. The best thing, I only worked three days a week. This gave me time for my community work at the Interactive Technology Museum, where I served on the board and volunteered every weekend.
The next UnTimeDay was the first time I visited the Unicorn Club. It felt great to reconnect with my own. The national Time Day holiday is that day in August when we all showed up in 1967 with our memories. The Club’s UnTimeDay is the First of September, the final day in 2019 when we were still fabulously wealthy.
The new-now 2019 UnTimeDay event at the Unicorn Club was spectacular, and, as we all know now, futile. The rest of the world was praying that, come tomorrow, time would just continue on. We Unicorns were hoping for the opposite. We wanted to wake up back in 1967: the next new-now, one that we will dominate.
The Club got a permit to block off the building’s side street, and set up a bar and a DJ stand. Still unmarried, and currently unattached, I went alone. Anyhow, this was not a crowd event for plus-one dates. This party was for all the marbles. If it took a human sacrifice to ensure another timequake, I’m sure the Unicorns would have paid someone to do that.
To enter the street party zone, I had to perform a simple, required task. Here’s the background. We will need to regather quickly in the next new now. For this reason, we had been sent the mailing address and phone number of an office in Chicago. We were instructed to memorize them.
Before I could enter the party, I was given a slip of paper and a pen and told to write the address and phone number from memory. It was a test. I passed, but several members had to go off and come back after they had memorized this anew.
The idea here is simple. Tomorrow, when we wake up back in 1967—on that very first day—we will write down our name, and our current address and phone number, and mail this to the Chicago office. Some of us could do that from memory today, but most did not remember their phone number or address from half a century back.
The office will compile a master address list and send this back by return mail. We would rapidly connect with our “tiger teams” and get to work. My tiger team had twelve members. Our job was to disrupt any attempt that Jeremy Stapleton made to restart his technology journal. Just because. The first task was to trademark The Next Wave Journal.
Upstairs in the Club, executive committees met in secret to plan our collective action for when the timequake strikes again. This time around, we would take control of the technologies that had boosted us into the financial stratosphere in the future/past. The next new now would be ours to own.
On a sidewalk inside the street party zone, they had set up three video recording booths. That night, a hundred ex-billionaires each got five minutes to tell their UnTimeDay stories to a camera: tales of wealth and splendor, fortunes and adventures, now lost to the planet in a blink of an eye, fifty-two years ago tomorrow. A video testament to an economy without limits, free from government interference.
The stories never get old, in part because, in the new now, they never happened. They exist only in memory, embellished by imagination and retelling. They are the equivalent of grown-up fairytales. Often X-rated. Squadrons of hookers for all night orgies. Private Thailand sex tours. A-List actors gathering on remote private islands for good times. There were dueling Central Park South penthouse Labor Day parties; one with Ed Sheeran and the other with Beyoncé. Lots of boats too. Cruise-ship-sized yachts parked in San Trope, Capri, Dubai, or Sentosa Cove.
The Burning Man cohort clustered together, like always; they recounted how they had helicoptered in and hunkered down in super luxury camps, their Marathon Prevost conversion coaches pulled into a circle on the Playa. Banquets and sex workers were flown in from across the US.
Most of the Club’s former billionaires willhavedone gone to sleep super late after lavish backyard Labor Day parties at estates in Montecito, Bel Air, Bellevue, Atherton, or wherever. We each woke up in 1967, in small towns and small rooms on small streets across the world. The worst morning of our lives. This was tomorrow, fifty-two years ago.
These stories had been told and retold across the decades of Unicorn Club UnTimeDay celebrations, but this day would be the last time, and we drank ourselves into a collective nostalgic mind meld. The DJ struggled to compete with all the conversations. Remember that the group held a common hope that, in a few hours, we would all be sent back again to 1967.
I stayed pretty quiet through the evening. I meandered about and drank a fair bit. Only a handful of the members here were openly friendly to me. I mean, I belong here, but I was never chummy with any of these guys, before. To be sure, I wasn’t the least-liked person in the room. That might be Larry, or Phil. We had all been fierce competitors. It was business.
Things were done that I’m not proud of, except that some of these made me a lot of money. Things—I’ll just call them that—got me to Davos and Sun Valley. Paid for my Montecito estate. Long ago, I learned to conquer my regrets.
With several hours of heavy drinking behind us, spicy new details emerged of the last days and months of the old future/past. People got bolder about their tales. Jimmy, a hedge-fund billionaire from Manhattan, confessed to paying to have Jeffrey Epstein killed in his jail cell.
“Just in fucking time,” Jimmy said. “Two weeks later, and Jeff would be timedrifter today with enough willbewho, willbewhere, willhavebeen information to blackmail half a dozen people in this very room. As it is, he probably gets a dumptruck load of well-deserved public abuse for his willhavedone malfeasance. Doesn’t matter how many times he changes his name, he’s still got his face. Mind you, Jeffy was not alone, but he was something else.”
A couple years back, I went to a Unicorn Club outing in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Two different dudes separately claimed to have a role in Epstein’s sudden death. One of them had a t-shirt with Epstein’s photo on it and the words, “He Died for Our Sins.” What a putz.
* * *
Just after midnight a former oligarch named Serguei held forth at the street bar. He claimed to willhavehad a copy of the Donald Trump pee-tape.
“I couldn’t look at,” he said. “At least, not after eating.”
This set up a cluster of conversations about willhavedone shenanigans in the Trump White House. Trump was not here. He had not been invited to join the Unicorn Club. Several members had raised doubts about his actual assets. In the new now, Don-boy was a nobody, in part by necessity.
When Donald arrived back in New York City in the new-now Summer of 1967, the twenty-one year old invited the press to an event at the Plaza Hotel, where he proclaimed that, as he was president when the timequake struck, he is still president, and should serve out his term until January of 2021. Fifty-five more years.
Don said that God pushed time back specifically so he, Donald Trump, would have ample opportunities to make America great. He demanded to be reinstated in the White House, together with his, now eight-year-old, vice president.
The public reception to this event was disappointing to Don. The New York Times gave it two paragraphs buried deep in the local news. None of the three networks picked it up for their nightly programs. Realtimers were confused and astonished that Don was ever elected in any future USA, and took this as a message about the collapse of the American empire. Donald was unfazed, and used every opportunity to press for his rightful status.
The story goes that Don was quietly uninvited back for his senior year at the University of Pennsylvania. The official reason was academic underperformance. “He is no ‘super genius’” one professor quipped. Out on his own, Don struggled at the City College of New York, and failed to graduate.
In 1970, Don’s grandiose talk about his glorious career in the future/past pissed off his dad, Fred, to the point that Don was ejected from the family business, and disinherited. Don’s older brother, Fred, Jr., took on the business. With the help of a robotic heart repair surgery in the 1990s and a couple of stents, Junior is still above ground today.
The New York newspapers made a point of following Don’s serial attempts at business. He opened a pizza joint in Brooklyn, Making Pizza Great Again, that lasted almost a year. Then there was his gift shop at Newark Airport that sold Trump branded souvenirs. That one went broke after its first Winter holiday run.
Don ran for election to become the borough president for Queens, but lost to a female Asian insurance broker. That’s when he left Gotham City. The last anyone heard, the willhavebeen ex-president Donald J. Trump was working at a Chevy dealership in Amarillo, Texas.
* * *
An hour before the timequake clock was due to expire, we all retired up to the main Club room. The conversations turned to the next timequake, and how we could leverage our collective experiences to our advantage.
During the discussion, a fistfight broke out by the bar. There were shouts and glass breaking. Across the room, I saw a couple of members, who I didn’t recognize, get themselves ejected from the Club.
We heard from the executive committees. There was a unanimous agreement among us Unicorns that a genuine multi-billionaire should become the US president immediately in the next new now. Nixon was a non-starter. At the top of the list were Warren Buffet and Michael Bloomberg. Strategic priorities were offered, all of them to cheers and applause.
* * *
Here are the ones I remember.
* * *
Just before the UnTimeDay clock got to zero, we heard gunshots fired outside. Nobody left the room to investigate. We were collectively frozen in anticipation, staring at the TV announcer.
Nothing happened.
We waited an extra half hour, just in case the timequake was not precise.
“Well, fuck us all…,” Dave said, announcing our common mood. “I’m so goddam tired of being poor.”
Someone shouted, “And Fuck Stapleton!”
We filed out of the Club, looking like we had gone to the reading of our newly deceased father’s will, where we were told the old bastard left everything to his new twenty-something, large-titted girlfriend.
Outside was a police crime scene. Cars with blue lights, and cop tape around where our party had been. We loitered about, passing information along as this was available.
Here’s what happened. Assuming he would be returned to 1967 within the hour, Alberto, an Italian ex-billionaire, shot and killed the Indian ex-billionaire Mukesh, out in the alleyway. Nobody claimed to know what their beef was.
Waiting for the timequake, Alberto was still standing on the corner when the first San Francisco police car rolled up. While we were all disappointed about the ending of the timedrift, Alberto was probably the most sad, except for, I suppose, Mukesh. We watched Alberto get perp-walked to a police sedan, and shoved into the rear seat.
They could have closed the Club the next week, but the owner decided that it might serve a therapeutic purpose for us to have a place to go and talk. And drink up the rest of his liquor stock.
My light-rail ride up from San Jose dragged on. I slumped into a window seat and pretended to appreciate the passing scenery. I don’t go into the City much, nowadays. It lacks the verve of the old dot-com days, and the start-up software services decades. The streets aren’t choked with twenty-somethings on the verge of an IPO or a buyout bonanza. There is no Transamerica Pyramid or Salesforce Tower.
In the new now, we got ourselves out of Vietnam early, and legalized weed and shrooms, so the dayglo hippy-dippy phase of San Francisco life never jelled. The folks who showed up for the “Summer of Love” were tourists, not anarchists.
Today, the City is more like a west-coast Boston than an edgy technology boom town. A place for sourdough bread and Dungeness crab cocktails.
Today is particularly sad for me, since it’s the last day, and the final UnTimeDay, for the Unicorn Club. After thirty-nine years, the Club is closing. Its owner wants to build residential units in place of the current building, and nobody has offered to open a new clubhouse on the West Coast.
This time, I don’t anticipate an all-night party scene. I certainly don’t expect any murders. Families have been invited. The Club will shut down at eleven PM. We will grab souvenir coasters and glassware, and disperse into our non-billionaire lives.
I’m hoping they don’t do speeches and ceremonies. Just a single toast to us all. I want to say good-bye to the people with whom I once shared a seemingly infinite amount of wealth. These are my people, even without their billions.
We are surviving veterans from a war that never happened. Peace has arrived, and we’ve been shown the exit. All the main economies on the planet have been armored against the likes of us. We are an extinct species, the last of the dodos. One of us will be the final ex-billionaire to live on this planet. Fucking Stapleton won.
I watched the Bay pass by from the train. After today, I can’t think of any reason to visit the City. From San Jose, it’s a quick run through Los Gatos to the Coast and down to Big Sur, an easy hop East to the 5 freeway to get to the Sierras or Nevada. I can grab the Coast Starlight train down to Santa Barbara or LA. Or just hang out in San Jose. Santa Clara County boasts a lot of great restaurants.
Sitting back with my eyes shut, I realize that I’m strangely satisfied with my new life. My work at the bank has helped fund dozens of civic improvements in San Jose. People actually like me. I’m on half a dozen non-profit boards. I never remarried, but I do find partners now and then. I have a dog and a cat. I could retire next year, but I’ll hang around for a few more years. It’s been decades since someone’s accosted me on the street. Life is good.
The Transbay Transit Center is a few blocks away from the Club. September is predictably the best month for Bay Area weather. I enjoyed the sunset walk.
I entered the code at the street door. Inside, I could hear music as I climbed the stairs. At the top, the club door was ajar. I opened it. Several members stopped their conversation and watched me enter. I heard a voice call out, “It’s just Stevie.” The crowd’s attention shifted back into conversation mode.
“Are we expecting royalty?” I asked the bartender who was mixing my Manhattan.
“Sort of,” he replied. “Bill and Melinda are coming up from Paso Robles.”
I hadn’t seen Bill and Melinda since the future/past, when we met in Sun Valley. They had avoided the Club for decades. In the new now, they moved down to Central California, bought some land, planted grapes, and opened a small winery.
As a family-owned farm, they paid low taxes, and had no limit to their income. Farm income was always insecure, and fat years needed to pay for lean ones. Given Bill’s fame, I’m not sure there were many lean years.
I glanced about. A lot of new faces. The usuals were here too, I noticed Jeff, Marc, Reed, and Larry. I wandered a bit, catching eye contact and nodding. When I meet someone new, I’d say I’m in finance. They don’t need to know that I’m an assistant manager at the Downtown Branch of the Santa Clara Bank.
I took my Manhattan cocktail over to an empty table near the window. Jeff and Phil were having an animated conversation at the next table.
“I’ve got fifty million exvested into a public bank in Seattle,” Jeff said. “I get a shitty two-percent a year back as spendable income. The County owns the bank, and takes out loans for infrastructure upgrades and new programs. They are my construction company’s biggest customer. So, I’m getting paid out of my own money…”
Phil nodded. “But now it’s their money, and the excess profits you make…”
“… I need to exvest back to the bank, or to some non-profit. I mean, what’s the point?” Jeff leaned back in his chair and outstretched his arms, exasperated.
I considered speaking up, but, neither of them has even glanced over at me.
Was I wanted to say was, “The point is, all the money in the regional public bank get spent locally, so it circulates several times before arriving back at the bank. This one feature reduces the need for additional local taxes by more than a third. These resources fund durable civic improvements and needed services, like child and elderly care.”
I had a momentary panic. My body felt like a lead weight in the chair. I stared down at my Manhattan, my hand quivering. I struggled with a sudden, blinding realization: I had joined the ranks of the anti-billionaires. I didn’t belong here.
I paid closer attention to other conversations happening around me, a murmuration of gripes and anger.
A fellow at a table on my left was incredulous. “They are paying mothers for the time spent breast-feeding their own babies. What the fuck is that even about?”
His friend relived the timequake moment. “I don’t see why I wasn’t allowed to instantly claim all the technology my company invented the last time. It was ours then. Should be ours now.”
“Fuck Stapleton,” the fellow said and raised his glass. His friend did likewise. ‘Fuck Stapleton’ was the house drinking toast here.
I saw the room with new eyes, actually relieved that this Club, with its, bitter, hateful members, was at its end. Rich folks being self congratulatory is annoying enough. This whole crowd had never been rich in this time-line, and were still congratulating themselves.
My existential moment was cut short when the door opened and Bill walked in with Melinda and another guy, who looked kind of familiar.
A rumor raced across the room trailing an undercurrent of disbelief and astonishment, and a name: David Goldin.
My mind flashed back to the photo on the book cover of everyone’s least favorite best-seller: The Taming of the Shrewd. What the fuck was he doing here?
Of course, it was Larry who walked over and spoke loudly the sentiment of many in the room.
“Do I look tame?” he said, frowning.
David grinned and glanced around the room. “I haven’t seen this much congealed chagrin in one place since the launch of the Segway.”
Bill stepped in between them. “Larry, we went to Dave’s talk at Stanford on the way here, and figured this was an event he would not want to miss. What he has to say may astonish you.”
Someone cut off the music.
David took this as a cue. “If somebody would kindly get me a beer, I’ll be glad to do the five-minute version of my Stanford talk, and then get the hell out of Dodge.”
* * *
David did a slow take on the room and its occupants. He figured there were about four dozen folks in the crowd, including spouses. The space was rather low-rent for this group. Plain white stucco walls, a serviceable bar on this end with a dozen stools, premium liquor stacked up on the wall behind it. The room had high-top tables and chairs arraigned around the perimeter. Windows on the far end, and a door leading to a deck. High-end fake wood floors.
On the two side walls were boards listing names. He scanned the left side. Charles, Paul, David, Steve… OK, billionaires who died before the timequake. With no memory of their future/past wealth, they endure a lifetime supply of unasked-for regret. He scanned the right side names. Elon, Sergey, Mark… billionaire afterkinder. Social media meganerds born after TimeDay Zero. Web 2.0 wunderkind. Now lost to time.
A woman came over and handed him a pint.
“Meg?” he asked. “Looking good. I bet you miss HP.”
She nodded. He returned it. He took a long swallow and stepped into the middle of the floor.
“Here’s to the shrewd,” he said. He lifted his glass and took another deep drink.
“I feel really privileged to be here and express the thanks of a healthy thriving planet,” David started.
I looked around me. We were all waiting for the hyper-critical punch line. Instead, we got this.
David went into lecture mode, walking back and forth and making eye contact.
“The bottom line is…,” he said, and took another drink. “The glaring inequalities of the future/past were necessary for the economy we built today. Without all of you, we would not be in the place we are right now.”
I don’t think that statement had the effect David was looking for. Most of the people in the room are angry and depressed to be “in the place we are right now.”
David continued, “You guys are the Disney cartoon villains that power the story of our success in the new now. We all learned to do the right thing because what you did was so monstrously wrong. You are our Cruella, our Captain Hook, our Maleficent. You pushed us into a dark corner and made us fight our way out. Unbridled greed was an addiction, a disease, if you will, and the obscenity of your lifesstyles provided the vaccine. You made our current limitarian policy inevitable.”
He finished his beer, set the glass on a nearby table top, and spoke.
“During the future/past, your publicity managers kept the lumpenproletariate on your side, defending your right to acquire more wealth in one hour than they did in their whole life. Then the timequake struck. Suddenly, all your bloated excessive lifestyle stories became repellant. I’ve watched hours of the videos you guys recorded a year ago. I played selections to my classes. My students were…”
“Amazed?” Larry said to the crowd.
David let the laughter settle down.
“…shocked and disgusted,” he continued. “It’s easy to explain why. You’all woke up in 1967 as school kids. Neighbors. Nobodies. Just like the rest of us. Nothing about you foreshadowed a pathway to a future financial empire.”
He held up his hands. “Well, you are all white, mostly male. English is your first language, and you grew up in a 1970s US economy primed to flourish. But so did millions of others: all your neighborhood buddies.”
“In the new now, these buddies resent the very fact that you, well, that anyone could grab, or steal, as much of the economy as you once did. A lottery winner has more right to their winnings than you did to the fortunes you once stole.”
“You mean earned,” Larry said.
“Oh, right,” David said, nodding. “You still believe in the meritocracy legend, instead of the enormous good fortune you fell into—almost all of that at the expense of others.”
Jeff stepped forward with his hand raised in front of him, “Hey, we got there first, and we opened up a lot of doors for others to follow.”
“You shut a lot more doors behind you. You took your great initial ideas and squeezed them into monopoly money machines. Yes, you defined a new market ethos for capitalism. The excremental marketplace. It was quite a shitshow. But then, after decades of rampaging success, you drove your late-capitalist convertible at high speed, right over the cliff.”
“Tell them about the national net worth today,” Melinda said.
“Right.” David gave her a nod. “In the future/past, the national net worth of the US in 2019—the total amount of money and other assets—was about a hundred and twenty trillion dollars.”
He went back to lecture mode, and walked over to a part of the room he had not visited. The crowd all mute, in a collective sallow funk. The jist of his talk was sinking in. I suppressed a grin.
David continued. “Take away the government share, and you’all, the zero-point-one-percent…” He gestured across the crowd. “…and the companies you controlled, and their holdings—had soaked up about a third of the rest of everything, more than the entire bottom seventy-percent of the population. It was quite an accomplishment.”
“Damn straight,” Jeff said to collective nods.
“Funny thing is…” David waited.
He did a glance around the whole room, and then continued. “Today, the US national net worth is almost a hundred and fifty trillion dollars, and the bottom half of the economy owns more than a third of the non-governmental part. As a society, we are richer and happier than ever before.”
“Then tell me,” Larry said, “why none of us here is smiling?”
David said, “You should be. Back then, in 2019, you guys were designing doomsday bunkers on remote islands. You knew you had broken the economy, and you planned escape routes far away from the rest of us. Today, you might have business-class tickets to a really fun destination resort on Maui. And you don’t wake up every morning terrified of losing your mountain of wealth. Doesn’t that sound like an improvement?”
To a wall of silence, David stepped backwards toward the door. “I think it’s time I moved on,” he said. “I have a red-eye flight to DC to catch.
David turned to Bill and Melinda, “Thanks for bringing me here. It was a perfect cap to my day.”
Bill touched David on the shoulder. “You’ve given us a lot to consider,” he said. “I can report that my life now has more minutes and hours of happiness and joy each day than did my days in the old times.
I stepped forward and found the courage to speak. “Mine too. I really do love my life today.”
I shrank back, those around me gave me sideways stares.
David put his hands together in a yoga greeting. “For those of you who lament the end of billionaires on the planet, do not despair. My great fear is that the vaccine effect you provided against greed will not last. When the next generation comes of age, they could become disenchanted, bored with their cosy lives and the guarantees of income, housing, and education. In another fifty-two years, we could be right back where we were before. Your great-grandchildren might be planning their own doomsday bunkers.”
He turned and, with a nod to Bill and Melinda, walked through the door, shutting this behind him.
Jeff went up to Bill, “You might as well have invited Stapleton,” I said.
“The Stapletons?” Bill said. “I could call them up, they could BART over to join us. You know, Jeremy has an electric bike shop on Solano Avenue.”
Larry walked by me on the way to the bar. He stopped and turned. “Well, if it isn’t mister happy.”
Anger flashed in me. I stepped up to him and poked him in the chest. In a loud voice I said, “I’m doing work that helps thousands of people in my community. I’ve got four days off every week to get out and enjoy. I’m not ripping off people and claiming they deserved it. Yeah, I’m happier. So, go fuck yourself. I’m out of here.”
I turned toward the door. This time, the people around me were nodding, some of them smiling. I saw Bill ahead. He laughed and slapped his leg. I walked by him.
“Just perfect, Steve,” he said. “Visit us in Paso some time.”
I nodded and was out the door.
The train back to San Jose seemed to take twice as long. At night, the Bay is just blackness engirdled by industrial lighting. My mind raced like a cassette tape on fast-forward. I guess I was having a “near-life” experience. Until today, I was a walking zombie of my ex-billionaire self.
Something in David’s talk had awakened me to how much I had been chained to a past that never happened. Like an actor who has just played the part of his life, I felt that nothing would be worth my efforts if I could not repeat my future/past glory. Having once had so much, my life was drowning in a sea of loss. Fortunately, half-a-century of new memories, and lessons well learned, and friendship found, rebuilt my sense of self, and without me noticing. Until today.
At last, I can drop the dead weight of the future/past and spend the remainder of my days content, and maybe, some day, authentically happy. After Joanna, I was wary of love. Real love. Long-term wake up in her arms love. I’ve had a dozen girlfriends serially across the decades, but I was always the one to break it off when a shared future came into play. How could I explain the Unicorn Club? A thought made me smile. When someone asks about my future/past life, I’ll just tell them I peaked early, and made a lot of mistakes, but I’m over with that. I am sixty-years young, and ready to rock.
The End
Sharon Tate
Not Sarah. But close. This is Sharon Tate, who lived to be eighty-six in the new now.