Humans Inspired – Chapter 4: The Millennial Dilemma
After unpacking and settling in with my Grandfather and Mom in Austin, I met up the next day with Jordan who was also back from our trip to Thailand. I was hoping for some new ideas and direction for my life, but all Jordan wanted to do was travel. We went out to an unpleasantly familiar bar on 6th street where our friend John was a DJ and the three of us started talking about taking a trip together. Traveling had been my life since I finished college, and any traveling I did somehow led me to exponentially more traveling. I felt like I was at the end of my rope with all of that but these guys liked what I was doing. They thought it was infinitely cool and besides, John had never been outside the US. He asked me to see if I could find some cheap tickets to Cuba. The sense of social power I had inadvertently created by traveling had largely become my identity among those who knew me and I was starting to wonder if I could even stop if I tried. It had become an addiction, and despite wanting to quit I really didn’t know what else to do with myself at the time anyway. A couple weeks later I found myself on a plane to Mexico with the two of them.
We had to fly to Havana via Cancun. We knew we couldn’t get money out of the banks in Cuba so we were all traveling with about $1000 cash in our pockets. The Cuban jet from Cancun to Havana had wires coming out of the overhead compartment and the windy take off nearly gave me a panic attack. The intense turbulence on my last long haul flight from Tokyo to Dallas coupled with the knowledge that I had been on so many airplanes had my mind believing I was long overdue for a plane crash. For the first time in my life I was irrationally afraid of flying, and these guys were taking the piss, happily mocking me as I popped a Xanax I had gotten from someone at the bar back in Austin. When we landed we took an old Russian taxi to a “casa de particular,” someone’s house that doubles as a government owned hotel business, in central Havana. The streets were dilapidated but the colorful high ceiling buildings were magnificent. The casa was hosted by some Cuban guys who loved to drink Havana club rum and smoke Cuban cigarettes inside all day long. None of us were clean cut at this point so we settled right in.
Jordan and John were both hungry to explore the city so that night we went out to a club near the iconic Malecón sea wall. Classic pre-trade embargo American and Russian cars rumbled past people sitting on the sea wall drinking bottles of Havana Club rum, smoking cigars and playing music. I was in love with Cuba’s intoxicating environment. As we walked underground into the club, John was loud and immature, indiscriminately wielding one insecure outburst after another about Mojitos and Fidel Castro. He was young and excited to be out of the US for the first time, and it drew attention to the now painfully obvious fact that we were American tourists. A young Afro Cuban girl within earshot of his remarks said in perfect English “Oh my god, what an idiot!” Her name was Patricia and she was shaking her hips with one of her girlfriends, holding a Mojito, confident in her condescendence toward my increasingly obnoxious friend John.
We connected immediately and I couldn’t believe that she spoke such perfect English, or that she could understand the ridiculousness of what my friend was going on about. She was about 5’4’’ with curves and black lips. She wore her intelligence on her sleeve and because she had spoken the words that I was already thinking in my head about my friend John, I felt attracted to her. As we chatted I noticed that she was holding a pen, flipping it up and down between her fingers like I remembered doing back in college while nervously cramming for tests. Only she wasn’t nervous at all. She was blowing my mind with her exotic, sassy intelligence. And she seemed to know more about the US than anyone in the room, including the three American tourists she was now mocking. She told me she had gone to the Vladimir Lenin School in Havana, a government-owned high school for students with accelerated academic ability. She said everyone who goes to the Lenin School flips their pen the way she was doing, showing me a glimpse of the subtle cultural nuances that I soon came to love about Cuba. Despite being cut out of the global economy for half a century by the US, Cuba may very well be the only place on earth where socialism is actually working. Although they’re all stuck on an island where the government controls everything, Patricia gave me the sense of how people create subtle forms of individualism as a means of coexisting alongside an institutionalized way of life. They all have their own tribe, and Patricia was part of the smart one. She made me feel less alone, showing me how disconnected I actually was from the direction John was now taking us.
We all woke up the following afternoon with a blurry recollection of 4am rum shots on the sea wall. John sat smoking in the living room talking about finding skateboarding spots outside central Havana and how he wanted to get a tattoo of Fidel Castro on his arm. Later that day we made our way to Vedado, a regular Cuban neighborhood. There we met a skater named Tony amongst a group of skateboarders in one of the spots John had found out about. We were all in our mid to late 20’s and after watching him and John skate for a couple hours, it began to appear that we just added a fourth wheel to our trio. I was never much for skateboarding. But when Tony invited us to stay at his house in Vedado, I could see the value of John being part of a worldwide network of other skaters. In the evening we all went out to a club that was having a “Wifi party.” It was almost exclusively for Cubans and while people were dancing to music, everyone appeared to be communicating silently through a shared Wifi network on their technologically outdated phones. At one point a young devilish girl started grinding her ass up against me in a very trashy way. She told Tony she wanted to go home with me and he relayed the message. Tony told me she was “working” so I knew if I went home with her that it wouldn’t be for free. Jordan and John were thrilled to egg me on and after enough rum I eventually succumbed to the peer pressure.
In the taxi on the way back to central Havana she nervously looked, presumably, for cops out the back window as if we were being followed. When we got back to the casa de particular she immediately took her clothes off. I followed suit thinking we were about to get into bed together, but when I took off my pants she rushed into the bathroom to pee. She left the door open and her behavior changed dramatically as she intentionally made herself less and less attractive. While we got into bed I noticed the iPhone 4s that Amy had given me back in China was missing. I began to realize that this girl must have stolen it so I jumped out of bed, locked the door to the room and told her to empty her bag. I knew I had the phone on me when I came home because I remembered reading 3am before putting it back in my pocket, but there was no iPhone 4s to be found. Where else could it have gone? I searched all over the room and was happy to see that I still had my wallet, but the phone was long gone. After a couple hours of her playing dumb I eventually opened the door for her to leave, knowing she was somehow getting away with my phone. In the morning when I told my friends about what happened they relayed the story to our new Cuban friend Tony over the phone. Tony knew exactly what had happened. It was the last and only thing I hadn’t thought of. While she was in the bathroom, she had hidden the phone in her vagina! I had officially been robbed by a Cuban hooker and I felt sick to my stomach.
The next day we all moved in with Tony at his Mom’s house as John’s skateboarder connections became our ticket to see another side of Havana. Apparently Tony’s Mom had already immigrated to the US and he was living alone in her apartment waiting to do the same thing. He was happy to have company. Despite living in a building that didn’t have hot water and was often without water at all, Tony had created as many ways as he could to connect with the outside world. He had a dial up internet modem from the 90s that he was using to get on Facebook messenger and he was always downloading bittorrent files that took weeks to finish on his old PC laptop. Despite knowing I could easily afford to stay in a nice hotel, I was happy for each of us to have a couch to crash on at Tony’s.
Patricia and I had been messaging about finding a time to meet up on Facebook so the next day I took a taxi to a hotel down the road from her Mom’s where she told me to find her. When she met me in the lobby she was dressed to impress, complete with a nice Caribbean green dress and lipstick. We took a taxi down to central Havana and walked with the tourists around town, eventually stumbling into a nice restaurant near Plaza Viejo. As we talked over a typical Cuban chicken dish served with beans and rice, she told me about how bored she was in Cuba. At the Lenin School she had developed an educated sense of the world that I had never seen in anyone from the US. As I told her my stories from the Middle East, she responded with her own well thought out personal theory about a two state solution in Palestine. I had traveled through over a dozen countries over the past year and Patricia seemed to know more about all of them than I did.
When I showed her pictures on my phone and told her about my experience in China, she seemed to know right away how difficult staying in a relationship with someone as wealthy as Amy would actually be. I told her I planned to write a book about my travels but I didn’t know how to get started and she inspired me with her thoughts on all of it. She had somehow developed a collective sense of maturity and the world without ever having left Cuba. By the end of our long afternoon and evening together, she wanted to make a pact that if neither of us don’t end up married in 10 years that we would find each other later in life. I was hooked, but despite our strong connection, I was still in a place of emotional confusion, unable to fully receive the gift of meeting someone like her. I couldn’t believe she was only 19 years old.
Back at Tony’s, my friends from Austin were well into a bottle of Havana Club rum. After my night out with Patricia, I took a taxi to meet up with them. When I showed up, the decision to find more hookers had already been made. After my initial experience with a “working” girl in Cuba, I was highly disinterested, but staying home alone at Tony’s Mom’s apartment didn’t sound like something I wanted to do either. The four of us took a taxi to a club on the outskirts of Havana and soon found ourselves dancing alongside three beautiful women and a sailboat captain from Norway. Tony asked the girls if they wanted to come home with us and they promptly accepted his invitation. Another taxi later and we were all back at Tony’s dancing to loud music, trying to figure out which girl we wanted to go upstairs with. Jordan was highly reserved as usual, completely resisting the opportunity to pay for sex for the first time. He opted to just sit on Tony’s Mom’s couch downstairs instead. John was all about it, quickly disappearing into one of the upstairs bedrooms with one of the girls. He re-emerged 20 minutes later after what appeared to have been a really awkward experience at which point Tony swooped in and took two of the girls into his bedroom for a threesome. I had somehow been left with who I thought to be the prettiest of the three, and for me this was now a social experiment. When we got behind closed doors I told her she could take $40, the going rate for sex in Cuba, and be on her way without having sex with me. She wasn’t like the last girl. She actually seemed sweet. She told me about her father and how he makes shoes and that she herself just wanted to make a little extra money. When I gave her the opportunity to walk away she insisted on sex, assuring me that it wasn’t just about the money. This time there was no shame, no guilt, and no plan to steal my phone. She was beautiful and despite just having an opportunity for love with Patricia, this time I chose lust.
When it was all said and done we all felt pretty unsettled about our experience in Cuba. For me it was a harsh reminder of how lost I was emotionally and how willing I was to sell out my better self for the sake of going along with whatever my friends wanted to do. A few days later on the plane to Mexico I remember John saying “good riddance” as we watched the Havana airport fade away out the window. He now had a tattoo of Fidel Castro on his arm that read “Donde Esta Fidel?” I knew it would be the last time I made the choice not to travel alone.
When I got back to Austin I was lost again. My liver was taking a beating from all of the alcohol I was drinking, and the only remedy was the hair of the dog that bit me. While I fell into familiar boredom coping patterns, I knew the least thing I wanted was to get stuck in “the velvet rut.” I knew I needed to take back the dynamism I had created when I chose to cut myself loose in the first place. A few days later I was on a Skype call with Ben in London and he told me he had an extra ticket to the summer 2012 Olympic basketball games. I would have said yes to anything at that point, but the summer Olympics in London was a no brainer. Why the hell not?
By now I had made myself an online portfolio of all of the multimedia content I’d created in my travels over the last year. I was determined to get some kind of professional job with it and London seemed like the perfect place to shop my version of a resume around. After making it across the pond, Ben picked me up from Heathrow. When I told him I wanted to see if I could find a job in London he told me I should talk to his sister, the one who was a producer for Al Jazeera. We were on our way to Salisbury where Ben’s family had been given a 2000 hectare farm through their political connections. When we arrived at the historic farm house, their in-house chef from South Africa served us farm-raised chicken and roasted vegetables with endless bottles of wine. I was finally back in the familiar setting of luxury in a rural English mansion, and though I couldn’t see it at the time, I radiated a sense of entitlement about it.
Ben’s family raised English longhorn cattle on their farm and I had arranged for a Texas longhorn skull to be shipped to the UK as a gift to his family. Embarrassingly the god damned thing wound up stuck in customs incurring large storage fines. After experiencing a rags to riches story in Shanghai, I suppose I figured showing up in a Western country like England with fancy gifts for friends in high places would yield me a similar outcome. When Ben’s TV producer sister showed up in the farmhouse kitchen later that day, I showed her my video footage from Egypt in hopes of finding some direction. As she watched raw footage of the protests in Cairo on my laptop, I could see she was impressed with my content but when she asked me what exactly it was that I wanted to do with it my mind went completely blank. I guess I had hoped she would know better than I what my next move was. She suggested I go and talk with her friend who works on documentaries for Al Jazeera in central London, so that became my latest plan for action in my career search.
After a few days of rural living in the English countryside, Ben and I drove to Fulham, an upper class part of London where his family owned a nice flat. That evening we met up with some of his friends from childhood at a neighborhood pub. One of Ben’s friends was a rather famous young comedian named Jack Whitehall. Jack always had an entourage of people around him that were happy to receive the free drinks he was passing out. As the night became blurry we ended up in a basement club near Piccadilly Circus with lines of high quality cocaine splayed out on the posh bathroom counter. The energy I was experiencing in London reminded me a lot of what I felt around all of those famous people in LA back in December. It was all hard to say no to. I had come to London to try cashing in the work I had done in Cairo, but in trying to keep up with the veneer of the privileged crowd I had fallen into, I was now consuming more mind altering substances than ever.
The next day Ben and I took the underground to the olympic basketball arena to meet our friend Seb. Back in college while Ben and Seb were studying abroad in the US at UNC Chapel Hill, they took a road trip together to Austin to come visit me. The three of us were all well acquainted and everyone was in a similar pursuit of post college success. Seb was driven to work on sustainability projects in Africa and when I heard his stories about the long hours he was putting in, I realized both of them were doing a lot more in terms of a career than I was. As we sat and watched Australia vs. USA, then Spain vs. France, I thought about the life I was living compared to the guys sitting next to me. While they worked in startups in London I was traveling all over Asia on Amy’s tab and had already ended up with more money than the two of them put together had come anywhere close to. Despite Seb’s astounded reaction to hearing about all of it, I knew the life I had fallen into was pure luck and would have to come to an end soon, one way or another. I was becoming aware of how terrified I was of that. That my life could easily turn out to be one of ordinary mediocrity because I had already made the kind of mistakes that would put me there. I was still wearing a $4000 dior outfit, and by the end of the day I was black out drunk, numbing the insecurity I was now experiencing.
The following morning Ben had to go back to his family’s farm in Salisbury. Before he took off he gave me a key to the flat and a month-long gym pass to a nice gym in central London. He was very generous with his resources and connections but I knew whatever I was looking for in London would have to come into fruition from my own direction, and the truth was I didn’t have one. I had an appointment to meet with Ben’s sister’s documentary friend from Al Jazeera in central London and when I sat down with him in a cafe I didn’t really know what to say. He had watched some of my footage and when he asked me what I wanted to do I wound up pitching a new idea about going back to the Middle East and shooting more videos. In my naivety I hoped that I might be offered some kind of journalistic job based on what he had seen and the reference that had gotten me there. He was very encouraging but ultimately the job I was looking for, the one that every baby boomer I ever met told me would come after getting a college degree and some experience, simply didn’t exist. People who ended up in positions like the ones Ben’s sister and her coworker journalist were for people who had indeed followed a conventional path and despite how much I wanted that to be me, it wasn’t.
In my dead ends and confusion, Ben suggested I take a train to Edinburgh. The Fringe festival was going on at the time and Ben’s childhood friend Sam was representing a handful of rather famous comedians and actors as a talent agent. Sam was a mutual friend who became inspired by the connection I had with my dog Bailey when he visited me in Austin a few years ago, so much so that he got a dog of his own when he got back to England. He was my favorite one of Ben’s friends and he was happy to host me on the couch at his flat in the middle of Edinburgh. When I arrived the girl who opened the door was on her way off to Richard Branson’s island in the caribbean. The place was buzzing with dynamic well connected people.
That evening we went out to dinner with one of Sam’s clients and her entourage. It was a younger actress that I recognized from the movie Harry Potter, apparently in Edinburgh doing a comedy show at The Fringe. Tonight was her birthday and Sam had brought her a small gift, a thoughtful and logical thing to do for your client on their birthday. I was starving so I ordered a burger and kept to myself, observing the intimate circle of semi famous people one table over. I felt awkward and clueless, an outsider looking in on a lively scene of people my age who were actually doing things with their talents. They all seemed nice and I kept getting curious glances, but when it came time to connect I felt like I couldn’t. The whole situation was making me increasingly aware of how I had no direction in my life. I needed to find something to move toward, and The Fringe was showing me the life that I now felt I was missing out on.
After a few weeks of watching Sam’s clients’ comedy shows and feeling close to the creative buzz of my generation in Scotland, I took the train back to London. Ben had left me a key at his family’s empty flat. He told me if I got bored to go chat with his cousin Brian who lived in his parents’ house on the other side of the park in Fulham. But I wasn’t bored, I was lost. I had been in the UK for nearly 2 months and despite showing up with the intention of finding a path to stay there, one hadn’t opened up. Now Ben was pawning me off on his stoner cousin who I had never met before and I knew it was time to leave England. After booking a flight back to Austin for the following week, I walked across the park to meet up with Brian. His family’s massive house was a relic, like something out of an old English movie. The entranceway and hallways were lined with elegant wood panels and there seemed to be glass brandy sets in every room. It was the middle of the day and it also smelled like weed. 10 or so of Brian’s friends sat in the main living room drinking brandy in front of a beautiful antique piano. The whole scene reminded me of the parties I used to know back in high school only more posh and sophisticated. One fella was a young journalist who was talking about the year he had just spent writing stories in Ethiopia. Before I could grab onto my percolating thoughts about getting back to pursuing a career in media, I made my way over to the piano.
After getting out of my political science classes in college, I would often stop by the adjacent music building and play the upright pianos in the practice rooms. It had been a couple years since I had played one but after a few generous sips of brandy, it was time to give it a go. I set the crystal brandy glass next to the keys and a rich emotional melody seemed to come through effortlessly. As the music became louder I forgot all about my existential career crisis. A half hour must have gone by as I lost myself in what I was playing. By the time I looked up, the small crowd of young English socialites were sitting wide-eyed in silence, contently watching the accidental performance I was now playing for them. When I realized how they were looking at me I stopped. I nearly asked them what the hell they were all looking at but before I could one of the girls asked with longing eyes who are you? I was completely caught off guard. Music was a gift that I had completely forgotten about, and after 2 months in the UK wandering aimlessly on the fading idea of a career in media, I was now being seen in a way that I sometimes found myself envying others for being seen. Watching all those clever folks at The Fringe actually utilizing their talents over the past few weeks seemed to amplify how good it felt. But I hadn’t played piano in years, and I wasn’t performing for these people. I was venting my frustration through playing music, and I was just as surprised as they were about what was coming out of that old piano.
I spent the rest of the week riding the underground to the gym in central London that Ben had given me a pass to. After a few days sweating out the toxins my body had taken on over the past couple months in the sauna, the negative thoughts I was processing about my life on the treadmill seemed to turn positive. The only thing that felt like a fit over the course of my time in the UK showed up while I was playing the piano a few days ago. I knew that when I got back to Austin I was going to buy one for myself, but where the hell would I put it? I had no credit, no legitimate rent history, no job, no direction. Just a bank account full of cash that Amy wouldn’t let me give back to her. Following some hasty goodbyes in London I began sending out messages via Whatsapp looking for a place to rent in Austin.
Another trip across the pond and I was back in the velvet rut. I soon found myself in the alley behind the same familiar 6th street bar. On weekends they always had this arrogant photographer that would take pictures of everyone and post them online before they could deny any of what may have happened the night before. There he was snapping photos of me smoking with John the DJ at 2am. As vaguely familiar blurry faces passed by I heard him say something about the downtown studio garage apartment above his coming up for rent. I had been there a few times before after the bar and I knew his place was cool so I intentionally put myself in the afterhours crowd that night to find out more. When I got there I saw a freshly pitched sign in the yard that read “For Rent” with a phone number. At $700 cash per month, it was the perfect place to put a piano on the top floor and drive my only neighbor completely insane.
The garage apartment was small but had lots of windows and I loved that I could see the Texas capitol building through the primordial oak trees surrounding the old house. After getting a couch and a bed in place, I moved in the most essential thing I could think of: my dog Bailey. I was still lost but at least I felt home. I immediately bought an old cafe style Honda motorcycle and the exact same 99’ Toyota 4Runner that I had sold 2 years ago to get me around the world. When I found a 100-year-old upright piano on craigslist for $100 I hired some landscapers working in the yard across the street to help me move it up the stairs. As I admired my piano from my new couch, I watched the number in my bank account gradually decline. I knew I needed to get a job.
With my electronic media degree now up on the wall I was now fully invested in the millennial job hunt. I tried to imagine how I could fit all of the experience I had gained abroad into my Linkedin profile. How could I make traveling the world, chasing a revolution with a camera, teaching English in China, and eventually ending up in a relationship with a billionaire in China yield me a job? All I knew is I wanted to be creative, but pretty quickly I began to see how all of the “creative” jobs I thought I wanted with media and marketing companies like GSD&M had very little to do with actually being creative. After repeatedly submitting my multimedia resume for job descriptions outlining company roles that I knew I could learn quickly if given the chance, I eventually knew it wasn’t my path. Even when I got an interview I was never who they were looking for. I would have loved to have told them all about the last 2 years I spent working 9-5 at some other relatable company but it just wasn’t who I was. I was good enough with my words to get into someone’s office, but in person I was always too honest about my life and life in general to close the deal. Regardless of my inability to fit into a cubicle with lunch breaks, the number in my bank account was still decreasing.
After spending months writing hundreds of cover letters for job postings in Austin via Craiglist and Linkedin, I eventually got a response from a Craigslist ad that I responded to. The ad read “Looking for a full-time freelance writer. Must be comfortable writing about controversial topics.” I received an email asking me to set up contributor profiles for a few technology websites that I had never heard of. I was surprised how easy it was to become a writer on these websites like Technorati.com, Techsling.com, and Zorpia.com. They told me they had a client that needed to be included in an article about cyber security, so I did a little research and submitted one that related back to the client they had mentioned. I was amazed that they published it the same day that I wrote it, no questions asked. Pretty quickly I found myself in front of two guys in an expensive, mostly empty apartment in central Austin discussing a rather generous hiring pay rate. Who the hell were these guys?
One of them was young and skinny, calling himself the chief operations officer, and the other was older and balding, calling himself the CEO of what they both believed was the beginning of a big name Public Relations company. Kyle, the young skinny guy was the younger brother of the real CEO, a Wolf of Wall Street type guy. I hadn’t met him yet, but I was learning that he had succeeded in branding a company that advertised a service for professionally editing Wikipedia pages. Apparently after Wikipedia’s lawyers had sent him a cease and desist letter, he took the company from California to Austin to operate under the radar. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but that company and all of its employees were still operating in full swing in a newly rented office space on the other side of town.
As for the stocky balding guy? His name was Larry and he was a former Whitehouse speech writer who had originally hired these millennials to curate a Wikipedia page for him. Now they were paying him six figures to build out their PR company as CEO, only I could tell immediately he had no idea what he was doing. How did I know? Because now he was hiring me, someone with absolutely no PR experience to get it all going. It certainly wasn’t the job I was looking for but when I found out Larry actually wrote many of George Bush’s presidential speeches, it all became way too interesting to say no to. Who the hell was I kidding? I needed a job, any job, and this one included health care. I had already received a crash course in journalism in The Middle East and now I was receiving one in public relations back home.
When I showed up the next day for work I thought I would be writing more articles, but instead Larry had me mining a highly inconsistent list of clients, many of whom were already paying us a $1000+ monthly retainer. They were all under the impression that these guys were legitimately working on getting them into the news. How the hell did two guys in an apartment already have a bunch of paying clients without actually having a company? It turned out Kyle’s CEO brother Jack discovered a remarkable demand for people who want their own Wikipedia pages when he made a website that advertised for a professional service that publishes them. It attracted all kinds of people, many of whom were already well known or even famous. Even more so, it attracted loads of insecure people who were often close to someone famous enough to already have their own page on Wikipedia. The market was endless. When a person or business would approach the company through their slick website, they would simply tell them that they don’t have enough online media citations to support the content of the page. At that point they would refer whoever it was to their PR company about getting them into the online news. It was all pretty hard to believe at the time, but in Larry’s mind what I had done with getting that cyber security article published was the missing link.
After an uninspiring few months working in “business development,” I started to become aware that Larry and Kyle’s CEO brother Jack were in some kind of power struggle. Both of the guys in the apartment described him as a big bad wolf that ought to be avoided, so when Jack burst through the door of the apartment one day I wasn’t surprised that he was there to fire Larry. All in about 15 minutes the PR startup I thought I was working for was over, or so I thought. All the drama had me happily preparing myself to simply move on with my life so I was shocked when Jack, who I was just now meeting for the first time, asked me to take Larry’s place. I knew they were paying Larry 6 figures for what he was supposed to be doing, so for me this was incomprehensible. Jack knew I didn’t have a background working at the White House like Larry did so he offered me a $1000 per month raise to stick around. Who was I to say no to that?
The next day when I went to work it was to a new address, a modern office space that housed the rest of the company which up until now I barely knew existed. When I walked in, the overwhelming smell of coffee failed to distract me from the hint of jealousy I was now feeling as I walked by people working on their laptops. They had heard how I had somehow impressed their CEO enough to be taking on a new position in their company, and the whites of their eyes showed me how many would have been happy to fill that role as well. I had simply set out to a job, any job, and now after a very pointless 3 months of mining that client list, I was in charge. This is fucking crazy.
Now it was just me and Kyle, kid brother of Jack (the real CEO) attempting to build this thing. Jack said I would need someone new to assist me in managing the client list because my job would be making more connections with journalists who could profile our clients in online media. I couldn’t believe I was now able to hire whoever I wanted as my assistant. Most of the clients on that list that needed managing would call us once a week to check in on what we were doing for them. Sometimes we actually had something to show them, but most of the time it was a matter of just letting them talk and allowing them to feel seen and heard. I used to hear Larry praise their ideas and stroke their ego on the phone to create the perception we were doing lots of things based on their ideas. In that sense, I quickly learned that ego is what the PR industry is really about. Many people are so self absorbed that they actually want to spend money on broadcasting their ego’s image of how the public ought to see them. When I thought about who I knew that might be talented at boosting the ego’s of the insecure men on our client list, I knew just the person. The only girl who could make me feel great about myself throughout all of my own insecurities: Silvia. She was perfect.
Jack told me to get other writers to do whatever I had done to get that cyber security article up on the internet, the one that got me in the apartment with these guys in the first place. I was suddenly in a position where I needed to prove myself. As I repeated the process of posting ads for part time freelance writing jobs on craigslist, whenever I saw an application with online publications or contributor profiles, I would pitch that person something newsworthy to write about. Then I would ask them what kind of money they might want to receive for the article. They never asked for an amount over the budget I had been given and it was always on the writer to get themselves published. We would simply offer to pay for the published work, if it included a profile of one of our clients of course. Despite that scenario never being what they expected when they applied for the job, it often gave them a sense of importance about writing the article more than a sense of resistance. I had experienced the same thing as a freelance writing applicant when Larry asked me to get that cyber security article published. I knew it would work.
In my mind I was just repeating a process that I had learned from Larry before Jack fired him. At the time I just thought it was the right way to do my job, but when it was all said and done, all of this was highly manipulative. I couldn’t believe Sylvia was now my assistant helping with all of it, but then again, yes I could. Jack was using the capital we were already making to gain access to tools like PR newswire and Meltwater and now that Sylvia was on the phone making all of our clients feel fabulous about themselves, it really seemed like this was all going to work out. Jack knew the whole business was borderline illegal so he was always somewhere between paranoia and tyranny. Despite his mood swings and inconsistent leadership, he was actually rather clever at making real connections in the PR industry. He introduced us to a high profile woman out in LA with a much shorter client list who basically writes articles for the journalists she has connections with on behalf of her clients. I couldn’t believe it. A whole industry of tainting information for profit? After gaining a Bachelor’s in sensationalist Journalism in The Middle East, the shallow bottom feeding Master’s I was now receiving in Public Relations came as no surprise.
In my pursuit of some (any) form of careerism, I had sold my soul to some millennial entrepreneurs who had absolutely no sense of anything apart from their own projections of monetary success. Jack never talked to me about anything other than work and the future of how much money we could all make together, but at one point he invited me via his brother Kyle to a movie party. They were all watching the newly released film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and at the time the characters in that film were exactly how they wanted to see themselves. I declined the invitation. I wasn’t like that at all. I was just doing the next most intelligent thing I could to keep my job, and I began to realize that the majority of the people working for these guys were doing the same thing. Huh, so this is capitalism?
As I let my talents compensate for the sense of disconnection I had to my job, I kept coming home from work to play my piano for a couple hours, relentlessly venting the stress of it all everyday. At one point I noticed the piano didn’t sound quite right. Hell, it was 100 years old and I was sure it could use some work, so I decided to hire someone to tune it. I had never had a piano before, much less had one tuned, so I Googled it. A few websites and business listings for piano tuning services came up in the Austin Area, so I clicked one of them. It was an older man with a beard whose website had a picture of him and his family standing in front of a cross at their church on the home page. When I thought about how many churches there are in Texas, and that all of them have at least one piano, I knew he was an expert. When he picked up the phone he was surprisingly flexible about his schedule. He told me he was happy to come on a Saturday to help me out. His name was Paul Brown, and when he showed up at my house, he personified the antithesis of a job I was now truly hating.
As I watched Paul tune my piano, I asked him if there was anything I could get for him. “Just tap water,” he said. As he sat taking sips of water over the hour or so that it took him to tune my 100-year-old upright piano, I realized what he was doing was something I could absolutely do myself. As far as I could tell, all he was using was a tool called a tuning hammer, a rubber wedge mute, and a small analogue device to measure the middle pitch of the piano. After he was done tuning it I sat down to play it. I was amazed at how much better it sounded, so much so that I felt great about paying him the $120 he was charging me in cash. I thought to myself: “$120 cash for an hour’s work? What a great deal for both of us.” When I told him that I thought I could probably tune pianos for a living myself, he was very encouraging. “Then go do it,” he said. He even offered me some tools to do it with, free of charge. After playing some tunes and a brief conversation about how I have no education in music, he seemed convinced that I would make an ideal piano technician. I wasn’t excited about the idea of tuning pianos so much as I was the autonomy that a job like that could give me, anything to get out of the PR industry.
Working for these PR guys taught me that if you want to start a business, you just make a website and start doing whatever it is. I watched some Youtube videos about using WordPress, bought a domain name, and started thinking about how I found Paul the piano tuner. His website was very much marketed towards churches but that wasn’t why I called him. I called him because he was one of the first things that came up in the Google search results and it was easy. After watching a few more Youtube videos that explained how to optimize your website and business listing based on a common concept called search engine optimization (SEO), I decided to name my business Greater Austin Piano Tuning. With service based businesses, people are always searching for the service and the location. When I found Paul, I typed in “piano tuning service Austin,” so I made sure to include the words “Austin,” “piano,” and “tuning” in the name. After researching the basic needs of a piano through some other piano tuner’s websites, I wrote up some webpage content that was laden with the same key words. After uploading a few photos of myself sitting in front of my piano with the tools Paul had given me, my website was looking slick. A few days later I received the Google business listing postcard I sent off for, and Greater Austin Piano Tuning was now an available service in the Austin area. I knew it would take a while to actually get a call about tuning a piano so I began practicing on my own piano when I got home from the office.
After a few more months of refining my ability to manipulate other people into aiding the growth of a highly unethical business, I found myself smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and drinking more than ever. Hitting the office coffee every morning curbed my appetite for the rest of the day, and as I watched myself lose about 20 pounds, I eventually started calling up ex-girlfriends to go out for drinks. Anything to show off the misplaced sense of success my new job had given me. One night I went out on my motorcycle and proceeded to drink what I thought was a pretty average amount of beer on an empty stomach. When I woke up in the hospital the next morning I was handcuffed to the hospital bed with a cop sitting in a chair next to me. Fuck. Apparently I had tried to ride home black-out-drunk from a honky tonk bar. I must have already been back at home asleep in my mind because I only made it a block before simply falling over without a helmet. I knocked myself out immediately in the 10mph crash, and I knew I was lucky to be alive. The cop must have either found something better to do or felt bad enough for me to let me off because in between moments of consciousness, the handcuffs disappeared and so did he. Now that I was being released with no serious injuries and miraculously no jail time, it became obvious that it was time to rethink the trajectory of my life. A few days later, some of that was done for me because Jack had his overweight “human resources” minion fired me for whatever reason. It was honestly one of the most relieving moments of my life.
Now that I was officially unemployed again I knew I needed to get back on the job hunt, only this time I was going to try barking up the family tree. My grandfather used to own a printing company that doubled as an advertising agency as they created the ads for the newspapers they printed. Having employed so many people over the years, people used to call him “The Big Cheese.” I thought for sure he would know someone out there in a hiring position. My mom told me about a charismatic guy named Morgan who used to work for him. It had been decades since Morgan had worked for my grandfather and he now ran his own software company. I didn’t know much about software but I knew I’d be happy to learn if given the chance. After reaching out to him via email he invited me to meet him for lunch at a vegan macrobiotic restaurant called Casa De Luz to talk about a job.
I had been to Casa De Luz a couple times back in high school. I remembered they served really good veggie tacos that always came with pickled beets. I had never taken the time to understand why the food was so different there, but it was actually pretty good despite being vegetarian. As I walked down the sunny plant laden path leading back to the entryway of the restaurant, I started to look for what I pictured Morgan to look like. He had implied being there on time in his email so I made sure I was. I spotted a healthy looking older guy sitting by himself at one of the large round communal tables in the dining room and I was sure it was him. At the time I saw him as an entrepreneur that I could probably learn a lot from about business, but when I presented to him the resume that I had stayed up all night editing, he didn’t even look at it. After about 2 minutes of laying eyes on me he simply told me that he wouldn’t hire me because I was “way too imbalanced.” He said that he would only consider giving me a job if I learned how to use food as medicine and healed my body first. I had no idea what he was talking about, but if it would get me a job, I was in.
