The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 5: The Lunch
“Benjamin Abbott?”
I was sorting the mail the next day desperately preparing for my pre-lunchtime mail run when a boy called my name. He had red rosy cheeks and was dressed in an outrageously expensive suit from Lora Piana. He must be one of Humphrey’s new hires, I thought to myself. The new hires, the ones straight from business school, always dressed in the most obscenely ostentatiously expensive suits. The veterans like Humphrey dressed in obscenely normally expensive suits. The difference in obscenity between the two displays was like the difference between the obscenity of the old softcore sex films they used to show on Cinemax late at night and the hardest of hardcore European depravity pornography. You were only mildly embarrassed by one, the other reminded you in explicit detail of man’s most basic urge to dominate.
“Could you please come with me?” The boy with the MBA asked.
“No?” I still had a lot of mail to get through if I wanted to be able to go to lunch on time.
“Mr. Humphrey requests your presence for lunch.”
“I’ll have to check with my boss,” I said rudely.
“I’ve already told him.” The boy said more rudely. “Come with me.”
I apparently didn’t have a choice, so I followed the young man to the elevators. He had a special key card I hadn’t seen before. He pressed it to the pad in the elevator and we lifted up past the 177th floor, past the 178th floor, to the 179th floor, which until that moment I didn’t know existed. I’m pretty sure if you count the floors of the Landmark Building from the outside you will only count 178 floors, so I don’t know where the 179th floor came from, maybe they had it flown in each day, but no matter how it got there I was now about to have lunch on it.
The elevator doors opened and we were greeted by a maitre d’ who was behind a stand and looking down at a reservation list. His head raised to greet us in the snobbishly polite way of maître d’s the world over, hedging his bets because he didn’t know who we were and what guests we would be dining with. Once the boy said Humphrey’s name, the snobbish part of the snobbish politeness went away and it was just politeness as he showed us to the dining room and Humphrey’s table.
Humphrey’s table was located along the windows in the back. He was looking pensively at the Los Angeles skyline when we found him. I think he was posing again. There was a team of five executives in the appropriately normally obscenely expensive suits sitting at a table next to him in silence. It looked like they wanted to talk, that they didn’t want to sit in silence and look expectantly at Humphrey as he looked pensively out the window, but I think they were under orders to stay silent, or maybe it was like the rule for those of us in the mailroom, that they could only speak when spoken to first. They were waiting for Humphrey to speak so they could laugh at his jokes or say repeated ‘yes’s’ as they nodded along in agreement, but Humphrey wasn’t going to speak to them during this lunch, he would only have eyes for me.
He saw me as I disengaged from my two chaperones and bounced up from his seat and came charging over. “I thought you’d like lunch in the executive dining room today. It’s the best restaurant in the city.” He slapped me on the back again. Another filling came loose. “I hired the chef from a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris. He’s going to have his own reality show on our network next year. That was part of the deal. But it’s worth it. It’s definitely worth it. Who knows? Maybe the show will be good, too.” Humphrey smiled winsomely.
I could feel the eyes of the 5 VPs on me as we sat down at Humphrey’s table. Humphrey’s eyes were still on me, too. The winsome look was gone and now that we were seated he looked more rapacious (maybe it was the way the light from the window hit his eyes), he was looking at me with the look of a sexual predator, or how I assume a sexual predator looks at whoever they are about to take advantage of. There was a menace mixed with tenderness mixed with unadulterated desire. (Again, maybe it was just the lighting.) I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with all of the attention.
An older gentleman in white tails came by with a gleaming silver cart that had three gleaming silver dishes on top of it. He lifted the lids one at a time and told me the name of each dish in horribly mispronounced French. At least I think it was French. It might have been French-Canadian. I chose the one in the middle. It was the fish.
“I hope you enjoy your Sole Meuniere,” Humphrey said when they brought my fish, trying to impress with his impeccable French-Canadian pronunciation.
“It’s better than the vending machines downstairs.”
Humphrey laughed. I wasn’t joking.
We ate and Humphrey talked. I listened or looked out the window, trying not to pay attention to the jealous executives at the table next to us. I think one of them was ready to shiv me with his lobster fork.
“So we just bought the BBC, but that’s not the big one. The big one is the national channel of India. That’s a billion eyeballs we’ll be programming for across all platforms. It’s a great opportunity for our mobile division and for our electronics division. In a few years we hope the entire nation of India will spend their entire day on Landmark products or Landmark affiliated products. The affiliation is important because we’ve found if we give the products diverse brand names so the consumers don’t know that everything comes from the same company they feel better about purchasing products from us.
“Don’t worry, the Landmark name is still prominent, it’s just not on everything we do. It creates the illusion of diversity. This illusion is important because our ultimate goal is a fully integrated experience that is siloed completely within the Landmark universe. People can visit different planets in that universe. They can engage in all of the experiences that life has to offer, it’s just that we own all the planets. It’s like the giant casinos in Vegas, where once you’re inside it’s impossible to find an exit, it’s impossible to tell what time of day it is, the casino becomes your life, your room is there, the pool is there, all of the gambling and shows are there and there’s no reason to ever leave. And even when you think you are leaving the casino, you’re really only entering a different part of the casino. That’s what we want Landmark to be to the world.
“We know that a large part of this is the new ‘social media’…” He used air quotes the way one of my old (actually young and female) professors used to use them in my Politics of Latin America class whenever she referred to the United States as a ‘hegemon,’ which she roughly did every third sentence.
“We’re exploring ways to make it profitable. My son, Ryan, the other son, the one that didn’t pass away, God rest his soul, that’s his life, so I’ve tasked every single person I know in my organization…” (except the mailroom employees apparently) “…to find a way to monetize this. Some of them…”
He gestured dismissively to the 5 VPs next door who were growing ever more restless, the one next to Lobster Fork had resorted to building elaborate napkin sculptures (swans, peacocks, a bust of Steven Tyler of Aerosmith) in an attempt to draw Humphrey’s attention away from our talk. “…think it can’t be done, but I know it can. The beauty is we don’t need to create the content, the consumer does it for us, they consume our product and then they consume their own products that they created from our products and that act of consumption is the making of our content, which is the product. How beautiful is that?” I think we were going in circles. “We call it the sharing economy. This is the future. I feel it. Deeply. In my gut.”
He looked like he was feeling it in his gut. He also looked like his Filet de Maigre Parfume au Ras-el-Hanout Fenouil et Riz Rouge de Camargue didn’t agree with him. But he didn’t feel it in his gut because no one feels anything in their gut, except for the indigestion Humphrey may or may not have been feeling at that moment. We don’t feel love with our hearts either. We have created these terms because they make us think we are something more than our brains. But everything about us is the brain. All of our feelings, emotions, instincts, come from the brain. We could just as easily say I love you with all my spleen, or it was an instinct, a reaction from my big left toe, and it would make as much sense as how we refer to the heart and gut.
You may say such talk is harmless, but there’s a pernicious side effect to the way we use these words. It makes people believe that if they are thinking, that if they are actively using their brains, they are then necessarily being rational. This is of course not true. Some of the most batshit crazy insane ideas have come from people thinking really hard for a really long time. Using one’s brain doesn’t equal thought or intelligent thought, it just means you are using your brain, which is what we do when we pretty much do anything, deliberative thought, instinctive reaction or deep emotional feelings. And this is what I was using my brain to think about as Humphrey continued to talk about stock prices and market capitalizations and mergers.
Soon, I had finished my fish and potatoes and the hour was over. The maitre d’ informed Humphrey that his receptionist had called to let him know his first afternoon appointment was downstairs, some people by the name of Bayer, Strong and Pimple, who were either from a law firm, a hedge fund or a European Football Club.
As we said our goodbyes at the elevator, Humphrey’s right arm moved towards me and I flinched because I didn’t want to lose another filling, but he didn’t pat me on the back this time, he knew how to vary his physical manifestations of bonding, and lightly touched me on the arm. “I’m worried you’re working too hard down there in the mailroom. You’re an artist, and it’s important for an artist to have time to collect his thoughts so I’ve decided to give you an assistant.”
“I don’t really need an assistant, Mr. Humphrey.”
“Please, call me Dave. I think you need an assistant and I am the one running this company, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are, Dave.”
“Good. I’m glad you’re not going to fight me on this. I’ll have someone report to you this afternoon.”