Our own Rennie Mulcahy is hard at work preparing the annual report and financial statement for 2002, but here we are, a few months into 2003, and I want to share with you, even if belatedly, a brief summary of what’s been accomplished here at DHI in the last exciting 12 months of research and development—and what remains to be done.
No kidding about the lifespan of your typical small business. By that metric, DHI had beat the odds and no blame could be laid at the doorstep, so to speak, of Carson Yampolsky. And what about 9/11? That hurt in so many ways. The psychic wounds, for godsake, and the economic crash, and the political repercussions. Emine Albaz—no security clearance, no more funding from DOE. Maria’s funding had always been iffy. He’d only taken her on as a favor to someone who owed a favor to someone, etc., you get the idea.
Here he was, Carson Y., brave entrepreneur, looking for investors and working the phones like this was some boiler room operation. Tang was going. Petey Koh had given notice, too, so on top of all this shit, he sat shuffling CV’s from people who wanted to be hired and who might be fucking geniuses but when it came to the practical realities of keeping a startup afloat they were fucking clueless.
The annual report? Anything he could say would be bullshit.
Better to say nothing. JB Singh kept phoning. Other investors, too. Rennie screened their calls and made sure Carsky was never available. He’d already let Emine go. Her DOE contracts all canceled so how was he supposed to keep her on? While Maria and Petey Koh sat there playing video games.
“This isn’t an arcade,” said Carsky.
“We aren’t fucking around,” said Petey Koh. “We’re folding proteins and ray-tracing seismic ray path. And cloning tigers.”
Why couldn’t his staff have sex with inappropriate human beings like he did? Instead, they got smitten: Emine with rocks, Maria with snakes, Rennie? who knew what, Petey Koh with a Siberian tiger. He’d given Maria a bit of fluff from the Exotic Feline place. You can get DNA from hair. The latest thing: Frozen zoos. Cultured IPS cells that could be induced into forming sperm and egg cells.
“We’re a long long way from being able to clone,” said Maria.
“Right,” Carsky said. “That’s my point. You’re supposed to be coming up with new pharmaceuticals.”
“I could give you a new drug tomorrow—”
“Yes?” He was suddenly hopeful.
“Hypothetically, Director. We’d still have to interest Big Pharma and the clinical trials would take years.”
“You have to think long term,” said Petey Koh. “Not quarterly reports.”
“Annual,” said Carsky.
No wonder research was migrating same as manufacturing jobs. No wonder Dr. Tang was muttering about returning to China, especially since the seismologists at Caltech and his collaborators at the Jet Propulsion Lab found out they were barred from communicating—much less collaborating—with him. It turned out running a research institute was much like managing a band. They were underfinanced, over-extended, over-scrutinized by petty critics, ignored by the people who counted, seriously in danger of shutting down.
“The tigers can’t go into the report. You people have to grow up.” He sounded like his father. You’re not a teenager anymore. There’s a reason it’s called playing music, not working music. “It’s great to love what you do, but you need to get serious.”
Why is that? he wondered.
What a bunch of ficken freaks they’d been, his first band, the Fick-Qs, a bunch of NYU graduates and dropouts. He was ingenious when it came to making money. Carson Yampolsky could always find an angle, some unconventional way of getting ahead. Why couldn’t he figure a way ahead for DHI? Once upon a time, he was quick to improvise. Like when they left New York. Stefan bought a used van and almost on a whim they headed for California where the Fick-Qs promptly went LA on him. Rechristened themselves Blackwelder after a street in Culver City. Their guitars still served up feedback but now it was laid over a background of LA street sounds, the thwack of helicopters—news and traffic and police, curses and shouts in a dozen different languages, some invented. Then there was their marketing concept: Blackwelder played one-night stands in abandoned storefronts. There were a lot of free or low-cost venues in those days, before all the urban renewal, community reinvestment, Hollywood renaissance, whatever they call gentrification these days, made success a prerequisite to success.
They publicized their gigs through mysterious xeroxed invitations and soon had people lined up hours in advance hoping to get in. Through old friends and former classmates, Carsky got them mentioned in the New York Times, for godsake, and GQ. They got booked at Madame Wong’s, the Starwood Cafe, but still, no record company executives came to call. They never made money, but they were known, with entrée to any nightspot in town and groupies and hangers-on always there to offer drugs.
He used to be a fine one for great ideas.
They hired Eva, a mediocre vocalist who would sew her lips together with coarse black thread if the audience didn’t cheer and demand an encore. For their big break, Whisky A Go Go, Carsky joined the bouncer checking IDs so he could memorize the name of a babe. Later, to the background thwack of a ghetto-bird, he turned the searchlight on the audience and Richie spoke into the mike. Gloria Kim! We have you surrounded. Come out and get down on the ground with your hands on your head. Rat a tat tat from the drum. She went home with Carson that night and then, from the sadistic to the sublime, she asked if he could help out her friends. Flowstone Drapery.
The Drapes came from Eugene, Oregon and lived together in a clothing-optional house in Topanga. A singer with a high pure voice reminiscent of the young Joan Baez. A flute. Bolivian sampoña. Claves. Singing bowls from Nepal. Chimes. And a huge gong supposedly blessed by the Dalai Lama. They could have played trance music at raves but instead Carsky booked them into street fairs and festivals of world and sacred music and city and county-sponsored cultural events and fell in love so unexpectedly with their sound. He helped Leo of the Tibetan gong go solo—spiritual retreats and yoga studios. And Leo introduced him to the joys of opium. Coke and ecstasy and most of all meth had shot him full of energy, the hyperactivity he had confused with his personality. Through sweet opium smoke he became acquainted with another Carson Yampolsky, quiet, meditative, one who was himself a gong. Touch him and he vibrated. Sound the gong and he shattered, not like glass, but gently like a piece of sugar candy.
He was still adept with a mission statement and a business plan though now he couldn’t even fake an annual report. Back when he sold shared in the Drapes, investors listened to him. He listened to Leo.
Leo told him that Paiste, the company that made the gong, had started out fabricating military drums and cymbals. And now, they brought to the world these instruments promoting mindfulness and peace. Paiste, Carson thought. Proof that transformation was possible.
He quit drugs. He went to grad school, nonprofit administration and public policy. He changed his life. But now he wondered if he’d changed anything for the better.
They needed work, any work. Had he been too quick to dismiss projects, too abrupt with Rennie?
“Do we get involved?” Rennie had asked. “Do we report this? To where?”
Three times now she’d received hair samples from Mardan Keller and forwarded the results, as requested to Deborah Horne. Each time, the Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry analysis showed heavy metals: arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium. The arsenic you might find in agricultural workers. So she tested, too, for pesticides. Sure enough: N-diethyltoluamine and diazinon and probably others.
“Is this a public health emergency?” she asked. She’d heard nothing back from either of them, Keller or Horne. “Are we supposed to do something?”
“How should I know?” said Carsky.
Then there’d been those confounding conflicts of interest. “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Carsky told Rennie back in October when she came to him about the vigilantes with their soil samples. They were looking for telltale chemicals they could take to the sheriff for probable cause. He had to give her some cockamamie doubletalk about professional ethics. He couldn’t very well be more specific, like, for instance, bringing up the matter of meth production by Tara’s kin. As much as he’d changed, he still had needs. Wherever he went, weakness dragged him down.
And kin? Well yes, OK, and he’d developed a taste for country music, too. He liked the puns and wordplay. Trailer-trash Cole Porter, he called it. When he managed Blackwelder, it’s not like they had anything even resembling a lyric. And before that, back in New York, when they were still the Fick-Qs, at the hardcore matinees back home at CB’s, if they shrieked anything more than You Suck! You Suck! it just got lost in the feedback. Now he thought Leann Rimes nailed his life with Tara: the right kind of wrong. Country-fried Gershwin. Once upon a time he’d made a name for himself being wrong. He’d stood out, standing in the back on the Bowery, the Bowery, at 315, dressed in suit and horn rims, narrow tie, not a single tattoo or piercing. Completely out of place. Just shtick. Now it was his life. And now there was nothing so therapeutic as a maudlin country song to get him to laugh at himself when what he really wanted was a good wallow in self-pity.
Rennie had shrugged. She was such a secretary. Where do the girls learn this shit? She stood there, talking about vigilantes while holding a pumpkin in her arms. What office etiquette manual teaches them that an office must have seasonal decor? Happy Halloween: extreme seasonality.
This was exactly the life he’d tried his best to avoid.
Rennie wasn’t as dumb as she looked. He’d overheard her:
“Let’s face it. We don’t have the capacity to do any of the work you all say you’re doing.”
“Discoveries happen in unexpected places,” Maria said.
“Not in a rinky-dink place like this.”
“Rinky-dink,” repeated Maria.
“Mickey Mouse. Inconsequential, pathetic, bullshit,” said Rennie.
“Well, we’re a startup,” said Petey Koh. “We’re just beginning.”
“Beginning of the end,” said Rennie.
Yes, it was crunch time. “The least you can do,” Carsky said. “Try to maintain the clients we’ve already got, and are losing. Visit Deborah Horne.”