Sucker, p.17
Sucker, page 17
17
This was not the first time I had to reckon with the evil ways of someone close to me. My wavering and avoidance were the results of years of conditioning starting with my preadolescent awakening to the fact that my dad wasn’t exactly Superman and actually had much more in common with Lex Luthor. It’s no coincidence that this was around the same time as my first, failed attempt to prune myself from my family tree.
One night, when I was eleven or so, I typed my own name into the bar of the search engine. This was just a year or two after most of America had gone online, and soon I would be toggling between seven or eight different accounts and identities in my harmless deceptions, a tiny fry that would soon grow into a hefty catfish. But at that point I mostly used our primitive computer for games, dipping my toe into the internet only occasionally, checking message boards for bands I liked (this was my short-lived, humiliating nu metal period) and timidly searching for porn. Dumbass that I was, I thought the search engine would be something magical, that I’d be able to trawl the megahertz for the very Truth itself. Naturally, I started with me.
My name being the same as my father’s, the results for the more renowned Charles Grossheart filled the screen of my Acer. I learned he was famous, for terrible reasons. I’d always known he was above average as a person. Grossheart superiority, not our nominal, lukewarm Methodism, was the family religion, along with Reaganomics (for Dad, the Laffer curve is sacred geometry). But my last name was my baseline, and as a given, I had no context for it. I assumed everyone’s dad was a remote billionaire running a multinational empire. But now I could see the exact areas in which he particularly excelled: evil, mostly, by way of pollution and eroding our already shaky democracy.
I saw his many subsidiaries listed among the most noxious polluters of land, air, and sea. I read a long, accurate, and devastating profile of him by the journalist who would eventually make her career with books about my dad and uncles. The Washington Post had obtained a secretly taped speech of him addressing his fellow oil industry insiders, urging his co-emitters to wage an “endless war” against environmental lobbyists and labor unions through “exploiting emotions like fear.” The only evidence I have of his emotional intelligence to date. While he was nowhere near as notorious as he is now, he was already the major foe of climate science, laying the elaborate network of lobbyists and hollow foundations to overturn even the most minute effort to cut emissions or curb our nation’s reliance on the fossil fuels he happened to refine.
I even searched for charles grossheart good, but nothing turned up to scrub his name.
It was clear. The world thought him despicable, a molester of humanity, an exploiter, a scoundrel. A world historical motherfucking son of a bitch (sorry, Grandma).
For another week I kept typing his/my name into the search bar. I’d wake up with the resolve to run away and live my life as someone else. By lunch I’d decide on loyalty and unconditional love. Then, at night, just as I was sweeping the shards of evidence under my mental rug, they’d blow back out.
There was a farm nearby, only a mile from the family compound. There were only farms, really. A mix of Cargill estates and smaller family tracts. The family that lived on this one had had a boy my brother’s age who’d died a year before. He’d been fucking around in a grain elevator with his friends at night and stepped into the nothingness of the shaft. His name was Trent or Travis—I don’t remember, though the image of him falling down the shaft was enough to keep me away from grain elevators even as I grew into a demonic teen.
They had two barns: one was functional and relatively new, the other had been built during the lifetime of John Brown. I liked to sneak out of our family compound (this was before Dad paranoically bulked up the security to UN levels) and walk over there. I usually just read magazines and devoured whole bags of Cheetos. More than once I cut the fingers off my gloves and pretended I was an orphan hobo. The man and woman who ran the farm had wide, flat faces and an unpronounceable Czech last name. I like to think they, having lost a boy, enjoyed my presence on their property, but it could just as easily have been that they knew I was a Grossheart and had no choice but to allow me to squat in their historic barn the way serfs had no choice but to offer their scant food and drink to a lord out on the hunt.
This was where I went to contemplate my paternal theodicy, the camel-through-needle’s-eye odds he was even a halfway decent person. After a week spent on the computer, I took my moping over there. I’d wander over to the barn in the mornings and hide out until dinnertime. Given that I was often described by both parents as “obnoxious” (a word I reclaimed with my label, as a fuck you), I think my parents enjoyed the silence my absence allowed.
While in that bleached and dissolving barn, I discovered a box containing a run of archaeological Playboys, a rusty pocketknife, and a smashed pack of Beaconsfield cigarettes. These, I believed, were the effects of my fellow mischievous predecessor, the one who’d fallen down the dark shaft. I diligently read the old Playboys cover to cover without distinguishing the ads from the articles, then returned the box to its corner. This I remember clearly and have since looked up to confirm the details. July 1992: a Michael Keaton interview, “20 Questions with Nicole Kidman,” “Super Mario! A revealing look at Mr. Cuomo.” But even “a pictorial tribute to nurses” was not enough to distract me from the sins of my father.
I decided it would be best to take my information to Mom.
“Is Dad evil?”
Mom had developed the necessary dissociative skills to survive a twenty-year marriage to a tyrant. In seconds, she could vanish into her own haut little monde, then be right back when the notes of cognitive dissonance had been absorbed into the walls and floorboards. But she didn’t have the self-awareness to impart this crucial gift directly. Mom answered my question with a long list of the charitable foundations he’d started or supported. She told me he was one of the biggest patrons of the arts in the country, and that “millions” of people depended on him for their livelihoods. I should have left it there, but now his goodness was my obsession, so I followed up with some research and found articles explaining how most of the charities were lobbying arms—Americans for Pollution, Citizens for Corporate Greed—and schooled myself in the tax code regarding donations. When I came back with my findings, she whacked me with one of the statuettes she’d carted out as evidence of my father’s charitable nature.
I ran off to my barn to lick my trophy-induced wounds. This time I brought with me a cigarette lighter (my mom hadn’t dropped her European habit just yet) and forced some of the Beaconsfield’s smoke down my throat, as my dad, despite being an antiregulatory bedfellow with Big Tobacco, hated smoking.
The next night he called me into his study. On the wall hung various trowels and scissors from their respective groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings, plaques acknowledging his philanthropy, loose change from the empires of Darius and Alexander, along with a collection of honorary degrees given in return for his money (with enough strings attached to knit a cardigan for the moon). Oh, and also a letter from Calvin Coolidge to his boat repairman.
My father, I already knew, was a human abyss. Talking to him was like shouting down the grain elevator the neighbor boy had died in. It was this very emptiness, something I’d feel my whole life, that convinced me there was truth to what I’d read on the baby internet.
“Your mother says you’ve been on the computer and now you’re interrogating her. You think I’m evil?”
“Are you?”
“That’s a fucking stupid question. No one thinks they’re evil. But everyone is evil. Except your mother. You like ribs? Pepperoni pizza? Where do you think that comes from? We can’t waste our time fussing over what we have to do to survive. You can bet your ass a pepperoni would eat you if it had half the chance.”
He pulled back a little, then spouted what would gradually harden into his stock answer, as the question of evil became more frequent in his interviews.
“I’m not perfect. But I want everyone to be free from oppressive government. I want to give everyone a job. To change the world, you have to break a few eggs or legs or whatever it is.”
He let me go.
The next day I went to the barn again and began my first attempt at cutting myself off from my family. I had a bag of clothes and snacks packed, some matches, and one of the ceremonial shovels from Dad’s wall, for self-defense. I’d also worn my fingerless gloves, even though it was at least eighty degrees. I pictured myself warming my exposed fingertips on garbage fires, using them to nimbly hoist myself into railcars and guide a harmonica across my shivering lips as I slouched among the straw and cargo. That was how I imagined homeless life.
To truly start anew, I needed to burn any identifying documents. At the time, I carried with me a vinyl Ren & Stimpy wallet containing a library card, a D.A.R.E. ribbon signifying my pledge to be drug-free (lol), and a miniature, laminated copy of my birth certificate I had Brad, our estate manager, make me when I got the wallet.
I crumpled up two or three pages of a Playboy around the rest of the pack of cigarettes. After a couple weak strikes with the matches, I got the fire going and threw my mini-birth-certificate and library card on it. I practiced warming my hands hobo-style above the flames, and then, seized by the spirit of pyromania, I tossed in the whole wallet.
The vinyl melted into a burning puddle, and now the dry planks of the floor were catching. I tried to smother the growing fire with the clothes I’d packed, but the child wallet was incredibly flammable, and the windbreaker I threw on there was a combustible blend of nylon and polyester.
I grabbed the ceremonial shovel and got the fuck out of there but hid in the tall grass nearby to see what would happen.
Not only did the fire consume the historically significant barn—it spread to the new one. The flat-faced man and woman stepped out of their house and began to scream, and not long after that the fire department showed up.
One of the firemen spotted me huddled in the grass with my shovel. It didn’t take long for them to put it all together.
“Who are your parents?” the fireman asked.
Gone was the despondent kid who’d burned his wallet and pledged to make his own way in the world. I had to own up to my parentage then. My old life looked much better than a new one in the juvenile detention system. Brad picked me up ten minutes later, and my dad handled everything and settled the issue privately, presumably with a big check. Now that I had my own fate to worry about, my fixation on my dad’s terribleness was gone.
It was a problem I didn’t have to solve. A problem that solved me. The best thing I could do was not think about it at all. Dad was like Dante’s God in the Paradiso, and I let him stay just shy of my contemplative range. Years later, I found some relief in the nihilist strains of punk and hardcore, which imbued me with the beautiful notion that nothing fucking matters. In the end, I came full circle: my coping mechanism, cynicism, made me even more like the man with whom I had to cope. I know Freud would have plenty to say about all this, but fuck him. I always preferred Lucian to Sigmund anyway.
As for those tragic farmers, my fuckup was their ticket out. I think they moved to Florida with the money from the settlement. For a long time, I avoided driving past their sad plot if I could, and then years ago, once all guilt had exited me, I went looking for it, setting out on foot the way I had as a kid. I’m not sure if I got to their property or not. Their land had been absorbed by the vast industrial fields abutting it. I couldn’t find the old farmhouse, or any trace of their small, unlucky lives. The sun was starting to go down, and far away I could see one of the grain elevators against the pink-and-purple sky, a castle on Venus.
18
Tim had the CD and promised he’d compile something for me soon that I could take to my dad.
In the meantime, I locked myself away in my Kenosis office and basked in my SAD lamp. The relief offered by traditional employment was gone, and the hole it’d covered over had only grown deeper with the realization of Olivia’s deceit. Her scamming of investors, pharmaceutical companies, and the U.S. armed forces didn’t bother me that much. That was the game, as far as I could tell. And I already knew I was being used to some degree and tolerated that under the premise that we were a pair of old friends helping each other out. But seeing the look on Olivia’s face as she ignored my call had made clear something I’d already suspected. I wasn’t her friend, really. I was only a prop. I’d been manipulated in ways that triggered my deepest fears and insecurities, seen as a mere extension of my dad and his money, a gilded drone who couldn’t think or act on his own.
This insight let me reexamine all that I’d shoved aside over the past weeks: the mumblings of her disgruntled employees at the cloister party, the blood floor, the deformed monkey, Tim’s monologues. I was done with my half-assed Hardy Boy meddling. I decided I was going to help Tim stop Olivia. I wanted the pure ethical rush of saving lives, sure, but I also wanted to get back at her for leaving me out of her scheme. And I needed to make sure I wasn’t humiliated in front of my family. I’d rat her out to my parents (which would help me do a little damage control for my standing with Dad), and word would spread to the other investors from there.
The next night, Tim met me back at Nezhmetdinov Hardware and handed over two copies of a Bible-thick packet detailing Kenosis’s malfeasance.
“I’ve been able to go over everything, and it’s worse than I thought. It’s better if you go through it in order, piece by piece. Look closely at the part about the ones that host living tissue and call me when you get there so I can field your questions. I’ve also uncovered some stuff that I think might allude to some human testing already underway, too, but I can’t say for sure. This is terrifying.”
“I think Clif and Olivia are fucking.”
“That’s news to me. Investors should know about a conflict of interest like that. If we get more evidence, I’ll make an addendum. Can’t say I find the mental images that conjures too appealing.”
I was instructed to store the second copy in a safe place, should Olivia and Clif find us out and employ their dubious methods. I took it up to the third floor of the warehouse and hid it inside the largest of the furnaces. I spent the next day poring over the contents of the packet.
Tim was no dummy. He’d laid everything out perfectly, artfully arranging memos, photographs, and emails so they showed obvious lies. He’d annotated the dull spreadsheets, which were footnoted with citations to the emails whose claims they disproved. There was even an abstract! And an index! But what really surprised me was the cover. In a move of unexpected irony and wit from the dour Aussie, he’d lifted the cover from a biography of Johannes Gutenberg.
The dossier was packed with his own notes, which often served as illuminating prefaces to the cryptic data and inscrutable reports that followed. It was, I’d discover, sequenced in such a way that you could track his own discovery of Kenosis’s shady dealings, peeking over his shoulder as he made sense of things.
In one daring raid of the specialist borough, he’d managed to photocopy a bundle of bizarre documents about a rare cancer among Tasmanian devils. Here’s a bit of his exegesis:
Loads of research on transmissible cancer among Sarcophilus harrisii—tazzy devils. In 22a you’ll see K. has paid consultants from the University of Tasmania who specialize in this tazzy cancer. I can confirm this myself—I overheard an Australian accent in the lobby and made conversation with a professor from Hobart, though they did not disclose their purpose or specialization. [Tim was careful about concealing his identity throughout the text, but a scrupulous reader would pick up on this clue. I was sure Tim, with all his resistance and difficulty, already topped the list of suspected leakers anyway.] While much of the K. mission is ostensibly to detect cancer, why so much on a disease irrelevant to human health?
This explained the Looney Tunes merch, but little else. I looked up this weird cancer on my phone and discovered a batch of pictures of miniature bears with growths resembling pizza cheese on their sad faces.
Tim’s estimation of Clif made for the most entertaining reading in the whole thing. I admired Tim’s healthy application of shade:
He expects Kenosis employees to be at his beck and call at all hours, day or night, on weekends and holidays. Every morning he checks the security logs obsessively to see when employees badge in and out, and every evening, around 8:00, he makes a flyby of the labs and engineering department to make sure people are still at their desks. But he lacks the discipline and intelligence he demands from others. His knowledge of science is on the high-school level, perhaps less; during a meeting with the engineering team, he wrote the atomic symbol for potassium as P (not K). On more than one occasion he has claimed his IQ to be nearly 200, “second-highest in the company” only to Watts. A more reasonable estimate would place it squarely in the average range.
Tim clearly hated Clif and had no reason to downplay his wrongdoing. While Clif was the source of most of the toxicity in the company culture, he wasn’t the mastermind I’d thought he was.
Though Tim had trouble understanding just why Olivia would lie about Kenosis’s operations, the introduction laid out the corporate malfeasance pretty cleanly. There was no denying it any longer. Olivia had crossed the thin line between tech CEO and scammer. I might have been proud had I not remembered just how much of my family’s money (and my standing with my folks) was tied up in Kenosis.
Still, I had trouble believing she was out simply to con people. Was she faking it till she made it? Or just faking it? It didn’t matter either way, money-wise, but it meant something to me, as someone who once considered her a friend.
