Context: Hell

OK, scratch that, and all those: I'm going to start over with this blog and try to give a little background & context from which to view the rest of my ramblings. I tend, I know, to veer into the pretentious & self-conscious pose of a hipster with a vocabulary, and it infuriates & embarasses me. So, quick, before I know what I'm actually doing, I'm going to try and explain how I ended up here and now (here is Fucked Up, Brooklyn, NY, and now is Summer of Ought-Five).

What happened was I took a temp job back in 1998 for a crazy start-up consultancy called Scient, one of those Internet-builder firms that were all the rage back before the Millenium. I had been working for Deloitte & Touche in SF, and it was killing me. I would literally come home and fling myself onto my bed, sobbing in the fetal position & wrinkling my nice Armani suit. Why was I so miserable? Bullshit, s'why. I'll spare you the banal details, but basically I was beholden equally to two Partners at D&T, and these two Partners loathed each other and spent the better part of each day conspiring to fuck the other one over. Because of my position they both used and manipulated me, pumping me for information and basically using me in any way they could to fuck the other. I understand now that this sort of thing is not uncommon in the consulting field, but I was not (and am not) constitutionally up to the burden that daily mindfucking & no-holds-barred business bloodsport brings. One day I was riding in the elevator up to my floor and this guy, obviously some senior partner looked down at me with his steely eyes and perfect suit, what have you, and actually said, out loud, "You're weak." Never seen the guy before, wasn't bugging him or anybody, and he just blurts this out in my face. Everyone on the elevator car was shocked, and silent. I received sympathetic comments from the other admins and and lowlies on the car after he departed, but fact is he was right: in that context (business consulting) I am weak, and I cling to that with an ironic sense of pride. This guy was a professional asshole, and obviously very good at his job, but one got the feeling that he couldn't turn it on or off: this guy was an asshole, a mean asshole 24/7, whereas I would leave the building at six o'clock and loosen my tie and return to my real personality of a mild, funny, sensitive stoner.

So. My girlfriend at the time witnessed my torment, and after about a week could stand it no longer. She ordered me to march right in the next morning and announce my intention of quitting. "You mean I should give my one month notice and begin the exit process, all sorts of interviews and HR bullshit that they required in order to extricate oneself.

"No!," she said, "You just go in tomorrow and tell them to fuck themselves and just walk out the door. If you get a bad reference, big fucking deal. Nothing is worth what they're putting you through, not the inflated salary or favorable Infiniti lease: just fuck 'em."

Which is what I did, and how two days later I ended up walking through the door of a company that was still unpacking boxes and setting up desks and water coolers. Scient was just under a year old that day, and had just moved to their new headquarters. Anyone who's been there knows the vibe: adrenaline, excitement, barely controlled chaos, stress, yes, but fun stress. We were building a company from the ground up, and what was valued was an ability to get in up to one's elbows, just do what needeto be done without asking questions or freaking out. There were no processes, precedents, and improvisation and humility were key. One had to be prepared to deliver a coherent pitch to a Fortune 100 company, fix a fax machine, and configure a Sparc server all in the same day. I liked it, and they liked me, and after two days as a temp they offered me full time employment in their Knowledge Management department. The salary they offered was quite a bit lower than that I had received at D&T, and when I pointed this out to the HR lady who was making the offer she disappeared for about a minute. When she returned she said she couldn't offer me more money, but if I would agree to sign on they'd double my stock options. This meant absoutely nothing to me at the time, but it sounded good, and I signed on the dotted line.

My dad later said, "Well, son, you really stepped in shit this time," by which he meant good shit, and through no skill or foresight of my own. Pure unadulterated luck. Because, as you may have guessed, the company went public a year later, and the stock price went apeshit, climbing and climbing for the better part of another year as I approached my "cliff" as they call it, so that options I had purchased at 80 cents a piece were trading at $135 per the day I vested. I sold all I could, 1/4 of my holdings, and did so every month after as I vested. I took some shit from colleagues and bosses, "What? You don't believe in the company and where we're headed? You're gonna kick yourself later when they're trading at 200..." Yeah, right. Soon we had one of those situations, not uncommon at the time, where receptionists and building maintenance people who had been with the firm for two years had a net worth hundreds if not thousands of times larger than recent Vice President hires, and the best part was they knew it. We'd kowtow and make the necessary obesiances during the day, but couldn't resist honking our Porsche horns at 'em as we drove past them in their Ford Tauruses or whatever. Good times.

So, yeah: I made a shitload. Worked like bastard, 12, 14 hour days, weekends, whatever: it was exciting and bizarre, and in retrospect I was lucky to have had a ringside seat to that whole orgy of delusion the Internet years turned out to be. I was employee number 106, and by the time I was laid off in 2000 I think they had over 5000 employees in 13 offices worldwide. I remember sitting at Arby's, scarfing down a just-edible roast beef when my dad phoned with the news that, at least on paper, I was a millionaire. Still doesn't make any sense to me.

Now, I mention all this not to brag (because, seriously, I had very little to do with any of my success- it was as close to pure luck as one can get), but to give context to what was to follow. As these things happen I was in my later months with the firm assigned to the role of Chief Morale Officer. It was sort of an honorary position, I still had to do my regular Knowledge Management job & received no extra pay, but I did have $38 a month per employee to see that everyne was as happy as could be in the admittedly stressful & time-consuming environment that Scient had become. $38 a month may not sound like a lot, but if you multiply it by 2000, say, it adds up rather quickly, and my main problem was finding new and innovative ways to spend the money. We rented out whole bars and discos, of course, billiard parlors, bowling alleys, of course, and I instituted the popular "beer wagon" that would trolley around the company's floors at 4pm on Fridays, and then there were the big theme weekends, we had a sailboat regatta, ski trips, oh, and then there were the quarterly "rallies" thay called them, big Roman style orgies of excess with a few encouraging words from the CEO: you get the picture.

Well, it came to pass that certain of the senior management team let it be known in subtle ways that, while beer & hard alcohol were fine, they might prefer something a bit more, ah, illicit, and in this way I was led to disburse funds from the Morale budget on a certain, ever-growing amount of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, you name it. It started of mildly enough, just a core group of hardcore partiers from every level of the company who would meet in specially provisioned "party rooms" booked for that occasion at most of our general events, but it wasn't long before the number of partiers, and their appetites, expanded geometrically. My new hired assistant, a recent Harvard grad, worked out all the accounting details (and even incidentally set up a complicated kickback scheme from one of the local liquor distributors), and really, in the scheme of things not that much money was spent. Just so you don't get the idea that the company was snorted up the CEO's nose, which, I know, is not that uncommon. The compnay was doing very well, and the market cap was mushrooming, and nobody ever noticed or noticing cared that such-and-such a percentage of the Morale money was going toward illegal drugs.

So, I soon learned that if one deals with the type of drug dealer who arrives with a steel brief case (that is thrown in as part of the deal) one is entitled to a certain amount of kickback and samples and what have you. I smoked pot, sure, and once in a while might take some shrooms or ecstasy, but never really like cocaine (though I'd do it), but it didn't take long for one of the dealers to introduce me to the wonders ond joys of the big H, that's right: heroin. So, yeah, insert a thrumming, ominous bass chord here.

And that's part one...