The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott- Alternative Chapter 1: The New Introduction
“They were trying to kill me.”
“Who was trying to kill you?”
“The people at work.”
“The people at work were trying to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Why were they trying to kill you?”
“They were trying to kill everybody there.”
“How were they trying to kill everybody there?
“By making them work there.”
“What kind of work was it?”
“Office work.”
“They were trying to kill you by making you do office work?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of office work was it?”
“It was a debt collection agency called Thatcher and Friends. I was one of the friends.”
“They were trying to kill you by making you collect debts?”
“They were trying to kill everybody by making them collect debts.”
“That was their jobs, Ben, they weren’t trying to kill anybody.”
“Well, they were trying to kill me.”
“How, how exactly did they try to kill you?”
“They forced me to start smoking.”
“How did they force you to smoke?”
“I could get 4 or 5 extra breaks a day if I smoked. They couldn’t stop us because we were addicted, right? We would all sneak out together. I met tons of people, made more friends than I knew what to do with as we huddled outside during the cold winter months. After a few weeks, people who hadn’t even bothered to acknowledge me in the hallway were telling me their innermost secrets. It was like joining a secret club.”
Angel just shook her head.
“But it only delayed the inevitable.”
“The inevitable?”
“It starts with a light cough or bleeding from the eyeballs. You don’t die quickly, you linger. For years. For decades. For centuries in some cases. You’re not healthy during this time even if you think you are. The disease is spreading, slowly. It might make your foot green or your hearing worse. It might turn your hair grey or make it fall out. It might cause you to resent other people, especially those with sunny dispositions. It can take many forms, but in the end it will always kill you. And it killed me.”
“You’re not dead.”
Angel shook her head again.
“I would watch city council meetings for entertainment.”
“Okay, maybe a little.”
“I would go days without shaving. I stopped coordinating my clothes, even my socks. I spoke in an outrageous Italian accent for a month and no one noticed. So I started speaking Latin. Then Pig Latin. I would build Lego castles in my cubicle and real castles in my backyard and air castles in the air. I stopped obeying traffic signals and the laws of gravity. All of the life had been sucked out of my soul, all of my fight had been extinguished, I was no longer a person, I was a pod, a plant, watering myself every day, trying to stave off the effects of my disease, but the water wasn’t absorbed, my soul had withered, my leaves had turned a disturbing color of brown. I had given up. I was beginning to get worried that I’d never find my place in this life. I realized I needed something new, a purpose, a goal, something that would give this little journey of mine significance.
“And that’s when I hatched my plan to take over the world.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“So I moved out to Los Angeles[1] to become a screenwriter.”
“That’s even more ridiculous.”
“Screenwriters or screenwriter types are often the heroes of these types of stories.”
“That’s because they’re written by screenwriters.”
Angel sat up in the bed and propped herself up on her elbow. I stayed in the chair across from her. She looked at me like I was the most pathetic little snail in the world.
“Can I give you a little advice?”
“I don’t think I need any.”
“Go back home to Michigan.”
“It’s Minnesota.”
“This place isn’t for you.”
“Give up? That’s your advice. That’s the worst advice I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m definitely not going to give up. I mean, my story is just starting, right. I can’t give up at the very start of the story, can I?”
Angel’s eyes said that, yes, I could give up at the very start of the story. That it was actually the intelligent thing to do.
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The year was 2004. We had met in a back alley. It wasn’t a chance meeting. I had hired her services. If it was today, we might call Angel a sex worker. Back then she was a prostitute or a hooker or maybe a streetwalker or an escort. There have been many names for Angel’s profession over the centuries. Sometimes it’s even called the world’s oldest profession, which may or may not be true, although it’s hard to imagine hunter gatherer tribes bartering and trading berries for sexual favors. Okay, it’s probably not that hard to imagine members of hunter gatherer tribes exchanging flavored berries of one kind of another for sexual favors, however, we generally blame agriculture and the founding of cities for these kinds of things.
Or we could blame the Industrial Revolution. It probably makes more sense to blame the Industrial Revolution. And during Victorian times in England at the very start of the Industrial Revolution prostitution did indeed flourish (which might be ironic) reaching as many as 80,000 working prostitutes in the greater metropolitan area of London by the mid 19th century. I don’t really know what the overall population of London was at the time (hopefully, more than 80,000), but that certainly seems like a lot of prostitutes, so, sure, let’s blame the Industrial Revolution because it was this grand experiment with our external world, our social structures and nature. It eventually led to a lot of wonderful things and provided for the comfort you are probably experiencing right now as you read this and raised the living conditions of billions of people.
Of course to get that point we had to get through horrible labor conditions in factories and mines, child labor in those same factories and mines, a couple of world wars, famines, a great depression, a number of less than savory ideological beliefs, including genocidal authoritarian regimes from the right (fascism) and the left (communism), exploitation of large numbers of people, direct environmental pollution that scarred our skies and rivers making it difficult to breathe the air or drink the water, an even greater pollution that altered our planet’s environment which no one even contemplated when we first started building factories and mining mines and generally industrializing.
But I suppose that’s all in our past now because we’re at the start of a newer, better, faster technological revolution. If the Industrial Revolution was an experiment with our external world, this technological revolution is an experiment with our internal world, our brains and our bodies. And just as the Industrial Revolution changed the very landscape of nature and society at a significant cost, I suppose it would be naïve to think that the technological revolution isn’t going to take us through a similar number of unhappy eventful events like I described above.
At the very least, the technological revolution is changing the way we communicate, the way we think, the way we are able to think, if we are able to think, changing our actual neurological connections in our brains to the point that someone born today, right now, will experience these very words differently than humans have understood them for centuries, if not longer. These changes are happening so fast that even though the events of this story happened less than a quarter century ago, many of the terms and attitudes and people will seem like they are from a very distant medieval past or perhaps some exotic far away land.
Eventually, this story will come full circle back to this technological revolution business. Believe it or not, there is a reason I’m telling you this, but before we can get there we have to start in a very cheap second floor motel room with a suspicious looking red stain the size of a bleeding organ in the middle of the carpet and a broken fan with only two blades hanging from the ceiling where you pay by the hour (sometimes quarter hour) that happens to be located somewhere in Hollywood just a couple of blocks east of one of the most depressing strip malls west of the Mississippi and a conversation I was having and that you were already eavesdropping on.
Unlike nearly every other customer Angel has had in her life I didn’t pay for sexual favors of any kind nor did I trade berries for them. I was paying for her time, for her conversation, for human contact of the verbal kind. I didn’t have health insurance and I figured she would be cheaper to talk to than a shrink, and although she was a little reluctant at first, eventually she warmed to it and started listening as I talked and then I started listening as she talked and we kept talking about life, late into the evening, until the clock radio on the tilted fake wood outcropping on the wall next to the bed said we had been in that room for nearly three hours and Angel realized she needed to do some real work.
We walked to my car and stood there like we were at the end of a first date. We gave each other an awkward hug and I climbed into my red ’96 Mercury Tracer and I looked up at Angel who was in my car window for the second time that night, this time on the driver’s side, bending down to look back at me.
“Hopefully, we’ll run into each other again someday.”
“You know where to find me.”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
[1] Technically, Glendale.