WEEK FORTY-FIVE
Chuck had been a computer programmer in the days of the glorious tech bubble. “Yeah,” he told me at a location so secret I had to be blindfolded and driven around for three hours before we reached it (but that I immediately recognized as an abandoned elbow macaroni processing plant – damn Chinese pasta makers taking jobs away from decent, hard-working American chefs!), “that was when men were men and untried software that had no realistic way of making a profit back was king!”
Chuck had made a fortune from a small start-up that developed the first online butt-sniffer for dogs. (As they get older, dogs’ sense of smell decreases; the Butt for the Grace of Dog programme would allow them to recognize their friends despite this.) He married Mona, a blond booth bunny he poached from Microsoft at a consumer electronics show, and they had six children.
Chuck thought it would last forever; like most people in the industry, he didn’t count on the fact that, sooner or later, corporate investors would want their money back. And, more. He may also have been naïve: his partners were advising him that this was just a minor pothole on the information superhighway to vast wealth and that he should hold on to his company stock, even as they were dumping theirs. He lost everything: his paper fortune, his wife, his children, his mansion, his jet that he didn’t even know was his until he was served with the repossession papers – everything.
Chuck had difficulty adjusting to his straightened circumstances. He started drinking. More than he had been. He got into fistfights with other coders over whether Cobol was a better programming language than C++. He drifted into the Macho Movement – a bunch of men who drank and fought and blamed women for the sad patheticness of their lives. “The Macho Movement really opened up my eyes to the injustice of the world,” Chuck told me. “And, they make great steak tartare at the monthly barbecues!”
Chuck wore the restraining order his wife had taken out on him after members of the Macho Movement had convinced him to watch her apartment for signs that she was having orgies involving half a dozen OfftheWalMart greeters and a giant squid (“It’s the tentacles, man – chicks dig the tentacles!”), which would prove that she was an unfit mother and allow him to at least see his children, with pride. At least he was fighting back against the lesbi-Communi-femiNazi poison that various members of the Macho movement assured him was the real reason his wife had left him.
Chuck explained all of this to me while he was showing me how to construct a fertilizer bomb. Well, he didn’t explain it to me so much as drop clues that I had to carefully piece together.
Chuck said: “The important thing is for the fertilizer to be densely packed, both in its bags and in the vehicle. Nothing pisses me off more than sloppy work. Except for the women’s libbers who have turned my ex-wife into a man-hating whore, of course. But, sloppy work is high up there!”
Chuck waved me off when I asked what the detonation device would be. “You’ll find that out at the appropriate time,” he stated. “I’m kind of curious now, though,” I gently insisted. Chuck nodded his head knowingly and replied: “Curiosity is an overrated quality. Curiosity killed the Katz, you know.” I thought about that for a second, and not quite as gently said, “Umm, okay. Still, I think it would be a good idea for me to know what the detonation device is…”
Chuck frowned. “Do you know what the bible says about how to deal with errant children?” Before I could respond, Chuck told me a tale of death and dismemberment that would have made Eli Roth blush. I was pretty sure that Chuck’s story wasn’t in the bible, but that just made me less enthusiastic about challenging him on it. “O…h, umm, okay,” I softly agreed. “So, umm, what do we do next?”
Chuck told me to start filling sacks with fertilizer. When I made a face, he cheerfully said: “Hey! You wanna have a revolution, you gotta get your hands dirty!”
SOURCE: Harpo’s
[http://harpos.org/archive/2012/11/11/dd-9000045]
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