Joel and the Venture Capital Subsidized Hot Dogs

by Tyler Carey

Son of a bitch, it was Joel. He still had the bald spot and gray pony tail, and he was wearing jeans, a batiked t-shirt and a fanny pack, just like the last time I'd seen him. I shook his hand heartily as quick recollections of us working together at a dot.com on Second Avenue flashed into my head. He'd done data entry on a temp basis. Mostly, he formatted data that we got from companies we acquired. "How are you doing, Joel?" I asked.

"Fine, fine," he said. "Ruthie and I just moved into a new apartment over an Indian restaurant on Greenwich Ave. She's still teaching, and I'm still bumming around from gig to gig." He wolfed another dog down, ketchup and mustard collecting at the corners of his mouth. "How're you and Amanda?"

"Oh," I mumbled. "She actually moved out shortly after I got laid off. I guess…I guess I was pretty nuts there for a while."

He nodded distractedly and said, "That's too bad. She was a sweet girl."

"Girl? She was ten years older than me."

"That's still a good twenty younger than me," he said, and chuckled. "Come on, let's get some more dogs."

"Don't you think you've had enough?" I asked.

"Not at all. I'm not eating them because I enjoy them. You see those wackos out there?" He pointed out the window at a group of guys dressed in Ali Baba robes, quoting from small religious books. You've seen them around the city. Most of us just tune them out. If you listen, you just get frustrated.

"What about them?"

"They're anti-semites! That's what. I was coming over here to have a few dogs, and they start going on about Jews being bloodsuckers and stuff...really pissed me off."

"So, that made you decide to stuff your face," I said, inquisitively.

"No! I'm gonna throw up on them," Joel explained. He was back at the counter getting another eight dogs.

"You're what?!?"

"I'm gonna eat hot dogs until I'm ready to puke, and then just let go on 'em."

"Will that really accomplish anything?"

"No, but neither will writing my congressman, and y'know, if I lay a finger on them, I'll be the one arrested for a hate crime."

"This is insane," I said.

"Nah, it's not. Here," he offered, "have some dogs. You can help."

"I don't even want to watch."

"Don't worry," he said, his mouth full of sausage and bread, "It'll be over in a...whoa...it'll be...hold on, I think we're operating ahead of...schedule..." Joel went dashing out the door towards the unsuspecting hatemongers, as I finished his remaining hot dogs.

We sat in Washington Square Park afterwards. Joel couldn't stop laughing. He was very proud of himself. "Did you see the tall guy? The one with the scimitar on his belt. Sonofabitch! I thought he was gonna yak, too!" Joel's hands were occupied with rolling a ridiculously large joint. He licked it, sealed it, lit it, hit it and offered it to me, but I politely declined. I didn't want to touch anything that had been near his mouth after what he had just done.

"So," Joel asked, smoke exhaling as he spoke, "what have you been up to, over the past two years?"

"I've been doing marketing for a communications company in Midtown." I shrugged my shoulders against the cold of the September night. "How 'bout you?"

"Ohhh," he said, "I've just been temping here and there. Nothing big. Data entry here, reports there." He laughed to himself. "I even did video editing at one point."

"Never gonna settle down, huh?"

Joel laughed a little more. "Nah. I've always had itchy feet. Gives me lots of time to think, though." Joel palmed the joint as somebody walked by.

"I'll bite," I said. "What do you think about?"

"Lots about that whole dot.com thing."

I chuckled. "Really? I would have thought you'd seen it all."

"I have. I hung out with the Diggers in San Francisco in the Sixties, worked at clubs in L.A. during the Seventies..." Joel clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Did you know that I worked doing office administration crap on Wall Street during the junk bonds swindle?"

"You were on Wall Street? You look like Allen Ginsberg."

"Always have, too." Joel took another hit. "I met him once, ya know… Anyway, after seeing all that shit go down with the dot.coms...man...what a fucking waste."

"Where'd we go wrong?" I asked.

"That's what I think about every day. Geez. What a cesspool of greed and corruption."

"Did you get stock options?"

"No. Not that I'd have wanted 'em. Why?"

"I used to get daily email updates from our CFO about the value of my options."

"That crook named Karl?"

"Yeah. I just found it ridiculous. He was basically giving me a daily update about the value of a nonexistent piece of paper that I couldn't sell until a year after I gave the company cash for it."

"Yeah," Joel said, "the logic was amazing. Making us all stay in the office until eleven o'clock every night, just waiting for somebody else to finish their part of a project so you could get cracking on fixing their mistakes..."

"At least you had a task to do. I was hired to market a product that never existed."

"What?"

"Despite all the html tagging and data entry they had you do, the company never actually launched their product. A demo site was available to play with, but we never had it set up to process credit cards or anything. We never actually launched it…we folded before we launched our product."

Joel belly laughed. "Wow. If I'd known that, it would have made my past two years of navel gazing all the more stupendous. So, we never actually finished the fucker?"

"Nope."

"What happened? Did they run out of money?"

"Yup."

"How do you think that is? I mean, was there embezzling and such afoot?"

"I don't think so. I just think…I think no one knew what the hell they were doing. They were paying you guys an hourly wage, and making you work fourteen hour and fifteen hour shifts. They expensed their bar tabs. They would only buy the finest items available."

"Yeah, I remember the ten grand photocopier debacle."

"Bingo."

We sat silently for another few minutes. Every time someone walked by, Joel suspiciously palmed the joint and looked around, as if he, too, wondered where that scent of marijuana was coming from. At length, I asked, "So, you've obviously been studying the situation for two years. What was your conclusion?"

"Huh?" he asked. His eyes were becoming heavier, and I had a feeling that I was losing him. Great. I was asking Tommy Chong for the answer to the worst thing that had gone wrong in my young life. "Oh, right," he said, his mind clearing a little, or at least I'd hoped. "It was just really an extension of an Oedipal complex."

Yup. Waste of time. "Thanks, Joel," I said. I started to get up to go. I've never had much patience for the self-lobotomized.

"No, no, wait, man. Hear me out." He held up his hand and gestured towards the bench. It was a few good moments before he spoke, and I heard a few NYU guys playing guitars over by the fountain. I think they were playing the Grateful Dead's "Attics of My Life". "You see," Joel said, slowly, "The basic approach to business that was used in the dot.coms wasn't based on any research or developments in the field, it was based on spite. That kind of rampant oneupsmanship that we saw."

"Like what?" I interrupted.

"Did your dad work in an office in the city?" Joel asked.

"Yeah."

"Did you ever see it?"

"Sure, when I was a kid he took me into the city for a day at work with him, and then we went and saw the circus at the Garden."

"Did your dad's office have pinball tables in it?"

"No," I said, recalling that we had four set up in the center of our old office, in a big cross.

"Do you think," Joel continued, a moment of focus obviously hitting him, "that there was a corporate study done that suggested that the presence of pinball machines in an office would increase productivity?"

Following his example through, I shook my head and mouthed, "No."

"The dot.coms were basically kids in the candy shop, foxes in the hen house..." Joel turned to face me. "The dot.coms disasters were basically the trust fund kids giving their parents further undeserved grief. They did everything wrong intentionally, just to see what would really happen. Y'know, like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan." Joel sighed. "Well, we sure saw what happened, huh?"

I nodded glumly, and started fixing my attention on getting myself a frosty beverage at McSorley's.

"Hey," Joel said. He slapped me on the shoulder and stood up. "Ruthie probably figures that I'm dead by now. I was originally just popping out to get a snack, and then, y'know, that whole thing with the hatemongers, and then our reminiscences..." He smiled to himself and looked up at me. "I'm glad we got to hang out though, Frank."

We shook hands and agreed that we'd get together again, soon. We both knew that we wouldn't, but it served as a comfortable promise, as we walked off - he to his woman, and me to my booze. As I sucked down the dark ale at McSorley's, I pondered Joel's words. He'd hit the nail on the head. None of what we had done in the dot.com world was about trying to succeed, it was about trying to be different from our parents. That in turn got me to wondering if my parents weren't really as dumb as I'd thought for all these years. Ah, that was just another question to pose to Joel in another few years, I suppose.