Fisher was pretty excited too. “We have so nailed it. This will work ... it will really work. Man, we’re going to be rich!” He held up his hand for a round of high fives, and Stan eagerly obliged. As for me, I saw this scary look of pure power lust on Fisher’s face–a look I would become only too familiar with (strictly behind closed doors, of course) in the years to come–and I desperately began searching for some dark cloud to spread over Fisher’s sparkling silver lining.
“Something like that is going to cost a fortune to do right,” I objected. “There’s only so much we can do by ourselves in our spare time.” Yes, I did say “we” because somewhere in the course of the weekend Fisher had sucked me in too, despite my constant harping over the details. Or maybe it was just the smell of greed in the air.
“You’re absolutely right,” Fisher said, “but I for one am willing to put every cent I’ve got into it, and we’ll beg, steal, or borrow the rest somehow. This is just too big an opportunity to let go by.” He eyed us both with a look that would make a viper pale. “How much money can you guys put together?”
Stan and I exchanged sheepish looks. After all, we didn’t make nearly the kind of coin Fisher did, and it’s not cheap living (and living it up) in Manhattan. “I can scrape together a grand, maybe two,” Stan said, and you could just see how he hated to let Fisher down.
I pulled out my wallet and looked inside. “I’ve got about sixty bucks.” Okay, so I was being a bit of a wise ass, but I basically lived from paycheck to paycheck, and that was the point I was trying to make.
Fisher, however, barely blinked. He was eyeing my credit cards. “What kind of a limit do you have on your cards?” he asked. I guess he could read my reluctance, or more likely he had only been trying to make a point of his own, because he reached for the legal pad where we’d been jotting down ideas over the weekend, turned to a fresh page, and began to scribble down numbers. “I’ve got about 75K in GICs, and another fifty in stocks. I’ll liquidate those tomorrow. I can probably net fifteen after I trade in my Porsche for some shitbox in the next day or so. It’ll take longer to arrange a second mortgage on my condo, but I figure I’ll be able to borrow 200K or more on it.”
He paused and fixed us with this flint-eyed look, and it didn’t take a genius to understand how deadly serious he was. I wish I could tell you I wanted to opt out, but the truth is, there was this crazy tingling feeling running throughout my body, wholly discernible even through the residual haze of cannabis and ethanol, and I felt like the hottest chick in the bar had just walked right up to me and asked to screw me.
Stan was obviously feeling it too. “I can borrow 15K on my credit cards,” he jumped in, “and I bet I can hit my parents up for 30K easy.” With my meagre pledges added (I felt like I should be signing something in blood), we soon had almost $400,000 tallied on the pad, and spent the rest of the day, until it was time to return home, figuring out how to spend it.
Now, you’re probably noticing two things. One is that I confess openly to having materially contributed to the Phasmatian genesis—I won’t call it the “conspiracy” because, at the time, it was just a tiny, helpless fetus compared to the evil beast it eventually became. The second thing is that Stan and I combined only bankrolled a tiny percentage of the initial venture. But though Fisher was by far the major stockholder, he never held it over us, at least in the beginning, and treated us as equals, even if he did have a natural tendency to boss us around.
Article updated Saturday 1 November 14:48
Pardon the interruption. I’ve just returned to writing this after a bit of a scare. I heard a sound outside and (oh, aren’t I the brave one) went to investigate, a shovel in hand as my only weapon. There was a rustling in the bush nearby, and for a fleeting instant I was convinced they had found me. I was contemplating jumping back on the bike and making a run for it, when out walks this deer, a big eight-point buck, cocky as hell. It just stood there eyeing me for a minute until the sound of distant gunfire reminded us both it was deer season, and the buck bolted. Poor critter. I know just how he feels. God, I wish I had a rifle.
So, I was talking about how we three pooled together our money and got to work building the web site. Well, Stan got to work on the physical site, while Fisher and I started fleshing out the idea. Hold on, I’m skipping details. I should mention (and this just proves how driven he was) that upon returning to work on Monday morning, Fisher immediately quit his job. He hadn’t told me he planned to do it, but word spread around Warren & McCaul like wildfire. Of course, the scuttlebutt was that he had jumped to another agency, and apparently old man McCaul himself had Fisher up in his office for two hours trying to bribe and cajole him to stay, before calling security to escort him to the door.
Although the three of us had just pledged to mortgage ourselves to the hilt for our communal scheme, I had assumed we were only going to work on it in our spare time. Fisher’s resignation surprised and unnerved me. It’s not that I didn’t have some degree of deep-rooted greedy hope concerning our idea, like you do when you buy a lottery ticket, it’s just that I lacked any real faith it was actually going to pay off. In that regard I felt I was only being realistic.
Sure, I was ready to go into hock for the project, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had already projected the whole affair into an interesting barroom yarn I’d be telling in a year or two (always, in my fantasy version, with a rapt audience of secretarial hotties hanging on my every word) about how I had been a partner in this bold but quixotic scheme with Fisher that almost made us rich. However, after a recuperative period of belt tightening, I fully expected to be back in the black (or as close to it as a habitual spendthrift like me could expect to be), and leading the same old merry life as an advertising wage slave. I hadn’t pledged my full-time, undivided commitment to the plan. Or had I?
Around lunch time, I went looking for Stan to see where he stood on things. Frankly, I was looking forward to the opportunity to get him alone—I had already noticed how he behaved quite differently whenever Fisher was around. In the old days, before Fisher joined our little twosome, I had considered myself to be the de facto leader, through a combination of my writer’s gift of the gab and Stan’s pliant, introverted nature.
I was relieved to see Stan was in his office, hammering away at the keyboard. I closed the door behind me, and sat down on the edge of his desk.
Excitement was written all over his face. “Did you hear about Lou?” he asked right away (even in those days he was the only person I knew who called Fisher by his real first name). “Man, this is really going to happen.”
“Did Fisher tell you he was going to quit his job?”
Stan hesitated for a second, and appeared to be considering his words carefully. “Um, no ... ” His face turned beet red, and I instantly knew he was lying—a first in our relationship—although with Stan it wasn’t a hard read.
“What the fuck, Stan?” I protested. “I thought we were all in this together.”
That did it, and he relented. “Sorry, dude, but Lou said not to tell anyone. He didn’t exactly say he was going to quit, but he phoned me first thing this morning and told me the powers-that-be were going to be asking the system administrator for copies of all his recent emails, and wanted to know if I could erase any trace of messages between the three of us ... you know, when we were emailing back and forth last week about ‘our private web site project’ and ‘nailing down that idea that’ll make us all rich.’ So, I kind of knew he was going. It’s standard practice around here to audit emails when someone leaves the company ... they want to make sure someone’s not trying to poach clients.”
I was speechless, as much from the revelation that my emails might be monitored (even though that should not come as a surprise to anyone who works for a big company) as from the idea that Fisher and Stan were keeping things from me.
“Were you able to do it?” I asked. “I mean, did you delete our messages?” My real motivation