Excerpt from "Warhol Me" (Novel)

PART ONE: CHAD
Chapter 1

“I’ve always wondered what the hell happened to you”.

This was perhaps the most memorable opening line from a secret blog Mort convinced me to keep in rehab, before I lost my computer privileges. The line was a quote from a fan’s email. “You should warhol what happened so everyone will know.”

“When I get emails like this,” I blogged in response, “I look for a coy way to explain that I was never interested in warholing stories myself. I find the confessional mode tedious. But what I loved was categorizing other people’s warhols. I was the master inventor of subgenres, the expert of distinction. And eventually, if not for the intervention of, shall we say, “market pressures”, my arbitrary category decisions would have completely replaced the default templates. My “non-template categories”, however arbitrary, at the end of day were far more honest. After five minutes of watching warhols that were made using the default templates, I instantly noticed the difference between, say, a young girl’s warhol set in the clean side of Paris, co-starring a handsome French boy with rock-hard abs and a smile that melts butter, from the same one her mother might post, using the same Young-Girl-Coming-of-Age [insert country, culture and decade] template. Young girls using that template had the tendency to douse the scenery with too much affectation, impossibly blue flowers, cloud colors synching too tightly with the character’s mood. But a middle-aged woman knew how to warhol a story like that to its essence: a girl, a boy, sexual desire and blind trust.”

Warholing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require copy-editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling. You can assist by editing it. (November 2052)

Founded 2045
Headquarters Wichita, Kansas
Key People Chad Friend: Chairman, CEO and Creative Director
(from 2045-2049, owned by Sunshine Subsidiaries, Inc. as of December 8, 2050)
Last updated by: bfarnsworth101@yahoo.com on March 18, 2053

Warholing ™is a service, available through the social networking website warholyou.com, that enables its users to write, edit, develop and broadcast original pieces of cinemagraphic text known as warhols. Warhols are short or full-length films, television series or mini-series created from a list of generic templates, which allow users to customize content based on the specific narrative patterns and character arcs traditionally associated with any film or television genre of their choosing that has been established in western culture since the 1900s. Warholyou.com’s creator and original CEO Chad Friend coined the term “warholing” in reference to late-twentieth century pop artist Andy Warhol[1], who was famously quoted as saying “in the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” In a 2046 interview with The New Yorker, Friend said he developed the website as “a way to give the everyday person a chance to tell their personal stories using the electronic languages we all grew up with: overly contrived TV sitcoms and cheesy movies.”

After users authenticate their identity and promise not to attempt to sell what they create, warholyou.com allows them, for a monthly fee, to create cinematic content by specifying story elements (plot, setting,character arc, theme, etc.) using pre-formatted templates from drop-down menus, which also dictate the visual look and feel of what they will broadcast. As founder and CEO, Chad Friend obtains full control and ownership over all content placed on warholyou.com. Friend reserves the right to remove any content that he feels is not in any way consistent with the biographical information the warhol creator submitted to authenticate his or her identity. (In addition to the normal authentication process (username, password, et al.), potential warholyou.com broadcasters must submit a 300-question personality test, each one true and false. The Email addresses associated with the questionnaire of any warholyou.com applicant deemed to have the intent of creating gratuitously salacious content are forwarded immediately to the FBI for a full and painful investigation. (Warholyou.com has been and will remain a porn free zone.) The authentication process results not in a numerical score but a color palette that resembles on the screen an oddly shaped acorn. The palette is merely a cosmetic shield protecting those who complete the questionnaire from the voluminous and twisted back-end data. Questionnaires by children and old people trend to a palette overpopulated with pastels; more vivid in colors are palettes of the rich or nearly dead.

“What warholing delivers to people is the same thing democracy delivered over three hundred years ago: the transfer of authority from the despots to the everyday person, to allow anyone the power to think and feel as they choose, and to express those thoughts and feelings however they wish. Put simply, Chad Friend is the Thomas Jefferson of cinematic arts.”

—Barack Obama

Chapter 2

Today is Tuesday, a bright spring morning in our nation’s heartland. Yoga before breakfast and Scream Therapy, with Self Help after lunch. “Hello. My name is Benjamin Augustus Farnsworth, direct descendant of Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the world’s first television tube, and I’m an addict. I’m 29 from Wichita, Kansas. My dee-o-seas are kratom and cold-hearted women.”

The Tuesday therapist Lori is a short, blond woman with a mole by her left thumb. She wears dark-pastel jump suits and tries not to look disappointed. Just before I sit down for group Lori catches me looking out the room’s only window, down the cheerless neighborhood that hides this rehab, at a man picking up the clothes his ex-lover is dropping from a second-story window. The man jumps from pile to pile like a puzzled frog, stuffing socks, shirts and underwear in boxes and boxes into the trunk of an apple-green Avalon, while his ex, a fiery redhead, hangs out the window flipping him the fuck-you with all her might.

Today Lori picks Calvin the sad, chronic masturbating phlebotomist to read aloud “How it Works”. Calvin has been here almost as long as me; we were suitemates for nearly a week before I successfully negotiated my escape. It was only after that did Calvin pull the wool over their eyes and, inexplicably, ascend to Homeowner. Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. This day’s Self Help group delivers painful confessions, half-expressed thoughts going nowhere slowly, from every speaker in the circle but the cutters, who, of course, never confess but sit silently, crocheting watermelon-colored hats. “I never told my wife I loved her,” says Joe the accountant, who, sans the masturbating, could be the lead starring as Calvin in the masturbator’s warholyou.com biopic. They share the same sandy hair, the same pock-marked faces of doom. “Not even on our wedding night.” By now Lori has shut the blinds. I sit with my hands folded thinking about the woman I saw earlier hanging out that window, burning the bridge, finally and absolutely, to her ex-lover.

“What I’ve learned,” I said, when the Self Help circle finally came around to me, “is that you can’t commodify forgiveness.” Joe steals a quick look to Calvin then scribbles frantically in his Resentment Notebook (the red one) which he slaps loudly on one knee and slides under his Feelings Journal (the blue one). “From my Resentment list I’ve identified nearly a dozen people to whom I needed to make amends. I’ve contacted all of them in a myriad of ways. And when I say ‘myriad of ways’, well, let’s just say I’m using the bleeding edge of communication technology for that.” Calvin yawns. Lori almost rolls her eyes. “The first one to whom I tried to make amends was Laura, my first wife. Naturally.”

My first attempt to make amends with my first ex-wife Laura failed, but it made for an interesting warhol, a little something I call “Save and Quit”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Much to my surprise, it won Best Warhol at the Andys that year. (Next day the tabloidarazzipapagensia reported that Ben Farnsworth, a talented and yet undiscovered warholer from St. Louis, shocked the world by not showing up to the ceremony and donating all proceeds to the battered women shelters of Greater Wichita.) For the look and feel template, I originally chose “star-crossed lovers in a time of war” although Mort told me he thought that was a bit much. I took his suggestion and used the “two young lovers hot with passion despite starving through a Russian winter” template, replete with breadlines and trembling, coughing babushkas. For plot and character arc, I chose without hesitation from one of the several 1980s templates dedicated to the late filmmaker and genius John Wilden Hughes, Jr. and the oeuvre that spawned toot sweet from his literary loins. I named the hauntingly beautiful but shy heroine Aura, forever stripping my first bride of the big “L” (or so I thought).

Warhol© Title: Save and Quit
Created by: bfarnsworth101@yahoo.com
Last Updated: September 12, 2046
Genre: Romantic Dramedy
Total Number of Fans: 44,687,843

Click here to view this warhol
Summary
Aura, a young girl with stunning brown eyes and a talent for dressmaking, sees her true love for the second time, the tweedy but dashing community college professor Chad, while standing in the back of a line for food stamps. Chad was handing out the food stamps, dressed in a jacket with suede elbows, as part of a community partnership between the Welfare Department and his college. It is the harshest winter in recent Russian history. Much to her delight, Chad doesn’t notice Aura or her hair with bangs like John Denver and a ragged skirt reeking of cocktail waitress. The first time she saw him was from afar, at Czar Face, a west-side nightclub where she worked that was frequented by academics and the shockingly poor. Aura falls immediately in love with Chad, helplessly. At the back of the food stamp line, Aura feels shameful and devises a plot to forever hide her poverty and arrange a chance meeting with Chad at Czar Face. But Aura must first befriend Little Bucky, the Czar Face kitchen worker, a coarse but lovable peasant boy, who instantly falls for Aura. During their smoke breaks in the alley, Little Bucky transforms back and forth from the boy she thought he was to a creature with the face of a grotesquely cartoonish donkey. A stolen Camel Light dangling from his lips, Little Bucky loosens down and tightens back up. Eventually Aura catches the eye of the bar’s owner and lawyer Mortishyloci (known to his friends as “Morty”), who, it is later discovered, is Chad’s mentor and financier. Mort aggressively pursues Aura but when she rejects his advances the barrister becomes enraged and embarks upon a campaign to destroy Aura’s reputation and banish her forever from Czar Face. Despite Mort’s vicious attempts to abolish her, Aura’s presence at Czar Face continues, and she pulls double shifts on Saturdays. In due time, Aura forgets why she needed Little Bucky’s help in the first place and tells him so in the alley. “Hee ha ha,” says Little Bucky, and processes his resentments on the right corner of Aura’s chin.

After all the drama, Aura and Chad finally meet one day, laughing together instantly in the public library. Each next “chance” encounter builds upon this initial attraction until a graduate student hand delivers Aura an invitation to Chad’s seminar on the Iconography of Walt Disney and its Impact on the Social De-Construction of Adolescence. In the days leading up to the seminar, the evil barrister Mortishyloci increases the venom of his attacks on Aura and convinces Chad that Aura is behind the recent thefts of dresses within the community college’s Fashion Merchandising department. (It’s later discovered that Mort bribed a local tailor to hide the clothes and claim they were stolen). At first Chad refuses to believe that Aura is guilty, but he begins to have doubts when he sees her in a dress Aura says is handmade but looks similar to a dress believed to be stolen. These creeping doubts within Chad fuel his colossal insecurities, and after the seminar when Aura approaches him he pretends to ignore her. A heartbroken Aura runs down a dark alley where Little Bucky waits in a hot air balloon, his teeth hanging, his fuzzy ears perked. Little Bucky says, “Give me that ba-donk-a-donk. I’m here to save you.” “You can’t save me,” says Aura. “Save yourself. I quit.”

Today is my three-month anniversary as resident of Hope Glimmers Adult Rehabilitation Center of Greater Wichita. I’m closing in on my first overnight pass, the chance to spend an entire night at my mother’s house, in a real bed, with no lights shining in his face. “If,” Imad, my primary counselor says, in his cadenced, student-of-the- revolution accent, “you earn your Homeowner in time.”

To obtain the most desired privileges and a successful discharge, clients at Hope Glimmers progress through a continuum of levels starting with Drifter. Drifters are allowed to have shoes but they can’t go outside unless there’s a fire or other natural disaster. They wash dishes and serve other clients their food. Drifters speak when spoken to and sleep in the hallway on cots, like something straight out of a Johnny Cash song. The next level is Renter; Renters are allowed to speak freely and have approved guests visit two hours per week. Renters go outside for Recreation group and only have to serve dinner and wash dishes when the Drifters are in group. Level three is Duplex. That’s me, I’m a Duppie. Part of the name comes from the notion of “duplicitous”, which means most of the time Duppies are “faking it to make it”, as they say, but can manage themselves in the sober world good enough to pass for honest people. Duppies lead group by reading from The Big Book and facilitate Resentment sessions. We get up to eight hours of visiting plus shopping at the mall and swimming at the Y. But the most important privilege is three hours per week on computers! (Thank Gates!) During dinner they supervise Drifters and Renters. In the kitchen Duppies act like they’re hot shit and they are. The fourth and final level is Homeowner. Homeowners are the floor supervisors of the unit. They wield about as much power as staff and will bust your balls at the slightest opportunity. Every night at bedtime I kneel down and pray.

Oh, Gates, Higher Power, or whatever the hell your name is, if you could only arrange, in your infinite wisdom, for this unit’s Homeowners Joe and Calvin to get demoted the same day I get my Homeowner! I have so many axes to grind, Gates. My Resentment notebook overfloweth.

Before a Duppie can graduate to Homeowner, he has to finish a series of learning units and score a 5 or above (on a scale of 6) on each Dimension of Wellness, which is a crappy spreadsheet Imad stores on his even crappier retro PC. Yesterday Mort paid me a visit confirming he had hacked Imad’s machine and had already emailed me Imad’s therapist notes for the week. He said it took him ten minutes to steal.

March 21, 2053. Clinical notes for Chad Friend, client ID 0U81438
Consistently scoring 4s and 5s in Personal Responsibility and Respect for Others. Demonstrates appropriate behavior although his true communication style is still highly passive-aggressive. Still functioning at a 2 or 3, however, in Letting Go of Resentments, which is all the more troubling considering his extremely low scores in Emotional Honesty. Client continues to pursue grandiosity of the self; at times this pursuit is immense (Client is still, at times, clinging to the delusion that staff and fellow patients believe him to me a character of his own imagination “Benjamin Augustus Farnsworth”). It is the opinion of this therapist that the client’s episodes of grandiosity are not in themselves the root cause of deviant behavior but instead a symptom of a larger identity crisis, an unwillingness to accept the self in light of the various seductive technologies he’s historically had at his disposal to express dishonesty. Still highly misanthropic. Chance for relapse at this time: medium. Long-term prognosis: guarded. Several room searches during his first month indicated client had been hoarding energy bars and oatmeal raisin cookies. During the most recent room search staff found a tiny cell phone attached to the underside of the client’s bed (presumably given to him during visiting hours). Plans are in place to recommend extension of treatment from the scheduled four months to six. Seriously considering the complete removal of computer privileges.

I called Mort as soon as I could after his email.

“What the hell am I going to do now?”

“What do you mean, Chad?” Mort asked. “We agreed whatever happened in rehab stayed on the new website. If you get demoted, it’s just one more chapter.”

“If I get demoted, I’m breaking out of here and kicking your ass.”

“Who exactly is in fear of getting demoted here, Chad Friend or Benjamin Augustus Farnsworth?”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m not the one with fake sisters and a dad I’ve never met on my Wikipedia page.”

“Fuck you, Mort. Fuck you very much.”

Chapter 3

The walls in Imad’s office are the color of baba ghanoush. The Middle-Eastern art, oil abstract imitations, show dancing women fully clothed in dark pastel saris, dancing with bulls that buck and sway.

“Before I can officially sign off on your overnight visit, Chad, we have to finish the paperwork. Think for a moment and tell me.” Imad sits back in his chair and wipes an invisible tear from his cheek. “What needs of yours were met through using drugs?”

. . . wait for it . . . How long, I thought, should I pause here?

“Authenticity.”

I believe Gates reveals His grace not through order but through randomness. And it’s up to us as humans, through our use of pharmaceuticals, to control that randomness. At my zenith as a junkie the best part of my day was locked in our office building, a handful of kratom pills down my throat, pouring through an inbox of fresh warhols like I was being chased. In those salad days (circa 2047/early 2048), post-template destruction, I controlled it all: swiftly deciding the warhols I liked best were the new “official” warhol categories: models, gold standards. I posted them as editor’s favorites and challenged users to match. Originally my plan was to slowly and carefully wean users off the original templates, but one day I snapped and poof. No more templates. Dwight David Eisenhower had his military-industrial complex; I had my templates.

Templates are man-made constructions, but do they also exist in the mind? I say yes. I say they existed before the mind. Cockroaches, Keith Richards and templates. I predict that in the Year of Our Lord 2104, his 80^th year on planet Earth, sociologists studying warholyou.com will write endless theses from what I did and the rationale behind my choices, remarking upon, as I’m sure they will, The Tools of Social Construction and the Commodification of Difference in the Days of Chad Friend. Their analyses will undoubtedly include examples like the mini-series that appeared on warholyou.com just a few weeks after I removed the templates. The mini-series was posted by a dentist from Guatemala and concerned a dysfunctional circus family, which I converted into the “family dysfunction mitigated through public duty” template; there was a gritty-gutty dramedy warholed by an Israeli housepainter starring a bankrupted rocket scientist and his dog forced to live in the house the bigamist father left to his secret family (before they were killed by the Taliban) that I deemed “sins of the father visited upon the son”; and, from a fishthrower in Tokyo, a behind-the-scenes mockumentary of a fake game show where the contestants try to guess exactly whose lips are wrapped around their little toes became the template category forever known in the blogosphere as “exploration of man’s historically limited understanding that sex and money are not about sex and money at all but are a manifestation, in different ways, of the need to control”.

***

Mort and I hadn’t spoken for months before I phoned him out of the blue and told him The Man had finally won. It was as if the past five years between us had never happened, as if he had been expecting my phone call any day now. I told him this time it was either rehab or jail, and I had to report to the rehab center within a week. I knew Mort wanted me to wear the wire, I didn’t even have to ask. We were getting the band back together.

“The rehab you bolted from in Tulsa,” said Mort. “The car you set on fire in Miami. The sex worker in Brussels who claimed you stuck her with non-payment, we can make that stuff go away. That’s not an issue,” I told Chad. “But pissing off that portico in Vatican City. That was not a good choice. That’ll hurt us in the PR department.”

“Cut the shit,” I said. “They’ve asked you to offer me a job when I get out of rehab, haven’t they?”

“Who?”

“The new assholes in charge. What are the called, Satan’s Sunshine?”

“Sunshine Subsidiaries.”

“Yes.”

“Congratulations, Sherlock,” said Mort. “As always, you’re the Online Snooper Extraordinaire. They want you to be Creative Director in Charge of New Development.”

“Aha!” I said. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and Americans love a comeback story.”

“Whatever you say, Chad.”

“Fuck you, Mort.”

***

Later that day I stopped by Mort’s house and he showed me the latest in hidden camera technology, with opaque, fiber-optic sensors (embedded with tiny but powerful microphones) specifically designed to match the contours of the human ribcage. (These “fiber optic cameras” are all the rage these days. There are more and more celebrity handlers and personal assistants becoming UViHes[2] every time I turn around. The cameras harvest content for all of those “celebrity self-exposé websites” and such, and do so by considerably reducing overhead costs).
I took to the anesthesia right away. The surgical procedure Mort has taped together over the years would perhaps be most accurately described as laparotomic celiodeostomy: a laparostomy (new hole in the abdomen) followed by a celiodesisitic fusing of the camera to a space behind the ribcage, in the two-inch part of lean around the fat, just a shade below where the ribcage meets the abdomen. Mort coined the procedure laparotomic celiodesotomy because the suffix “ostomy” from the Greek translates literally to “surgically creating a new hole, a new mouth”. Mort may be a lot of things, but he’s certainly nobody’s poet. But in the poetic sense the two holes Mort cuts into a UViHe stacked behind one another, one in the abdomen and another in the soul, are like the expanding arm of a child’s telescope. The soul simply transmits what the camera will always try to obscure.

Chapter 4

There was a time when I could draw beautifully authentic warhols out of the average person with my laptop and a fistful of good questions. Within thirty seconds I could sort the people who had a real story burning within them from the ones who in their minds were already counting the money they thought was due to them from Dreamworks. The best stories came from those who said nothing interesting had ever happened to them, that nothing ever would. One of the first Chad ever got from the streets was from an old, black ironworker named Earl Woods. I found Earl in a coffee shop laughing with his buddies whom he met every Tuesday after they all retired from the same plant outside Wichita. Chad took a chance when he saw Earl lingering, staring too long at a dirty spoon. Earl had a deep laugh and gentle smile for a man his size, and wide, blistered arms like loaves of rye bread. Before the two had finished their first coffee Earl had revealed to Chad his favorite hobby (restoring 1960s sports cars), greatest wish (to one day deep sea dive) and greatest fear: that he wouldn’t live long enough for his infant great-granddaughter, Alice, to remember him. “Earl,” I said, “Let’s make a movie.”

The basic technology I used then they still use today at Sunshine Subsidiaries: a solid foundation of Flash code with some much fancier shit I “borrowed” from Mort and his friends. (They were a small group of socially inept high school student developers for whom I bought beer. In retrospect, it was an even trade). Although they first tried television series, with Earl as a wisecracking, unlucky-at-love/unlucky-at-cards sailor and Alice as his street-smart, orphaned niece who runs a tight ship and keeps everything real, Earl’s warhol eventually took the form of full-length feature.

We landed on an early 1970s, grainy-Steve McQueenesque action template, with a young Earl Woods as the deep sea diver faithfully on duty at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 8, 1941. Earl Woods dove the deepest of all divers that day and found the most relics. He found one of the “As” and the “I” of The Arizona; he found the black bill of the hat worn by its captain. Earl Woods found cracked pictures of war heroes past and present still mildewing in their frames. He found laminated lunch menus, flathead screwdrivers and soaked itineraries. It was believed just before the Japanese attacked, a baby girl named Alice had boarded the ship with her mother to visit her great-grandfather, the aforementioned captain. Despite all the objects Earl was able to surface that day, he felt like crying himself to sleep at the thought of not finding one stitch of baby Alice. A distraught Earl takes off on a journey, deep into the dirty parts of Honolulu. He gives a man standing outside a nightclub fifty dollars who understands with a nod. He steals a car. He falls in love with a plucky, red-headed con-artist named Trudy, seventeen years his junior. Just as he’s being brought to justice, as the crowd led by the white sheriff makes gestures to publicly hang him, he catches a glimpse of a once baby girl named Alice, now old enough to walk. The young child kisses Earl sweetly on the cheek and gives him a look that says she’ll never forget his face. Violin music dances through. The governor pardons Earl. Roll the fake credits.

Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. If you have decided that you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Warholyou.com: Early Years
Chad Friend first got the idea for warholyou.com while a student at Wichita State University double majoring in English Literature and Computer Science. He quickly ascertained that the two subcultures in which his double major forced him to dwell and transverse were not diametrically opposed as the traditional thinking goes (i.e., rigid engineers vs. dreamy-headed poets) but were instead two sides of the same coin. Friend reasoned that although they expressed and pursued it in different ways, both subcultures were essentially interested in the same things: 1) deconstruction and 2) re-presentation of reality. One pursued this aim through code, the other through story. But what if code could help tell stories? And what if story, in the hands of the uneducated, could finally be mastered and manipulated to artful ends?

With the help of his friend and business partner Morton (aka Mort) Allengory, the two college students maxed out their credit cards and established The Story Factory in a drab, working-class section of Wichita. For six months the duo worked tirelessly on their investment, and Friend eventually dropped out of college to devote himself full-time. The two converted the building that housed The Story Factory from an ancient laundry mat to a makeshift computer lab, with servers, laptops and other devices replacingwashing machines and giant circular televisions where dryers used to be. A sign on the front door read “Wanted: Coders and Storytellers for a Very Important Project”. Within a year, the basic infrastructure that would support warholyou.com was built and operational, along with the templates constructed by intellectuals (mostly PhDs) of every literate country. The templates were intended to represent and make actionable for the layperson genres from all over the world, to enable (through computer algorithms calibrated to match the genre-specific narrative patterns and character arcs) an amateur storyteller in Afghanistan, for example, to broadcast a movie with a plot fortified by the literary traditions of his country, to lovers of stories in countries unaware of such traditions. Storytellers, code monkeys and academics of every stripe and color ate meals together and communed at The Story Factory. They traveled near and far to visit Friend and Allengory’s retreat, many of them remaining for a time to work and share their expertise. Friend himself was often spotted in the Wichita community, at diners and bowling alleys, soliciting warhols from The Average Joe. (It’s believed that on such an excursion he met his first wife Laura Chicone, a cocktail waitress. The couple married in late 2044 and divorced three years later. Friend was 20 years old, Chicone was 35). On April 1, 2045, on Chad Friend’s 21^st birthday, warholyou.com went live and broadcasted its very first text, titled, appropriately enough, “Andy Warhol Killed the YouTube Star.”

Warholyou.com: The Glory Years
By the end of 2046, warholyou.com was a national and international phenomena. Presidents, kings and movie stars of every kind were using the service to create personal stories of triumph, betrayal and hope. Opera singers posted epics, grandiose and disturbing. Underground comedians sharpened their blades. For several weeks in a row, warholyou.com satellite offices and support centers mushroomed overnight all over the world, from Cincinnati to Kabul, to nourish and troubleshoot the code that made warholyou.com run.

By the end of 2048, movie theatres, traditional movie downloads, DVD sales, movies transmitted by satellite or cable television and all other distribution methods by the traditional Hollywood studios, and, more importantly, new production on the films those studios produced, virtually came to a halt. Television networks discontinued the purchase of new programming from their traditional studio partners and sought new alliances with warholyou.com. Seemingly overnight, the two college chums Friend and Allengory now found themselves presiding over a monopoly of the moving picture industry and a global empire worth well over $500 billion.

***

After the meeting with Imad I went to the dining room to finish my afternoon chore. Joe the Accountant was there. He sat at the furthest table and stared at me.

“Word on the street, ‘Ben’.” Joe made finger quotes around my name. “Is that you’re extended.” He stands up, starts walking away then turns around. “Three more months. Beaaauch.”

“The proposed extension to which you refer has not, in fact, been proposed or legitimized . . . Beaaauch.”

He grabbed my hair; I grabbed his crotch. Before I could squeeze, the orderlies had us in full nelsons and strapped to chairs. Our punishment was two days in solitary confinement, like two dogs at a no-kill shelter.

March 25, 2053. Consequence Justification Report for Chad Friend, client ID 0U81438
On March 24, 2054, the legally hidden cameras and audio equipment at Hope Glimmers Adult Rehabilitation Center (HGARC) captured client ID 0U81438 (heretofore referred to in this report as “Client 0U8”) engaged in a physical altercation with a fellow client. Client 0U8 chose to strike his fellow peer in the genitals after a verbal altercation with his peer concerning whether or not Client 0U8’s treatment would be extended. After initially striking the peer’s genitals, Client 0U8 then chose to resume his grip and then commenced to squeezing them. When the peer of Client 0U8 screamed in pain, Client 0U8 did not release his grip. Staff intervened physically and removed Client 0U8’s hands from his peer’s genitals. For this choice, Client 0U8 received the consequence of two days in solitary confinement. On the same day of this occurrence, Client 0U8’s primary counselor received an anonymous phone message from someone referring to them self as a “concerned citizen with an expertise in cybercrime technology”. The caller said he had reason to believe Client 0U8 had been deliberately tampering with HGARC data and had illegally obtained reports previously written by Client 0U8’s primary counselor about Client 0U8. The caller then followed up the phone call by sending a series of emails to HGARC that were intended to provide physical evidence of Client 0U8’s data tampering. As is customary, HGARC investigated the forwarded emails (including emails with links to Client 0U8’s blog and an apparently fictitious Wikipedia page about himself that Client 0U8 had been updating throughout his treatment stay) using its investigative software and found them to be authentic. For all of these violations of HGARC policy, management has decided to extend Client 0U8’s treatment stay from the previously planned four months to six. When he returns from solitary confinement, Client 0U8 will begin at the Drifter level, as if he were starting his first day at treatment.

PART TWO: MORT

Chapter 1

Who was it that said “the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”?

Mary Andrews, the love of my life, the sweltering buxom blonde of my bed and my secret bank accounts, swears it to be the words of Pascal (the 17^th century French mathematician), but I have my doubts.

“Can’t you see it, Morty?” Mary said to me the other night, after her voluptuous tongue had traveled up and down the length of me, and back. “It’s as clear as the nose on your big, fat face!”

“What’s that, darling?”

Mary Andrews flipped herself over and in her exasperation actually spooned with me for a moment (even the highest class of whore gets weary). “Obviously, a man who spent all of his grey matter clarifying the concept of pressure for the world doesn’t have enough left to understand romantic love.”

“Pressure?

“Yes, Morty. Pressure.”

“You mean the force per unit area applied in a direction perpendicular to the surface of an object?” To demonstrate, I slapped her naked ass.

“No,” Mary said. Despite the chains, she found a way to twist her torso away from me just enough to make her lovely bottom unslappable (The meter was no longer running). “I mean the force of my foot up your ass if I ever hear you mention the word love again.” We laughed together. I unlocked the chains from her ankles.

“Yes, dear.”

“Shut up.”

“Five hundred?”

“Seven fifty.”

“Now that’s pressure.”

Chapter 2

Like a lot of men I’m most comfortable in a space designed only for me, what my grandfather would’ve called a “man cave”. My cave is a study room across the hall from the master bedroom. I have fifteen flat screens in here, nearly one television for every three cameras I’ve stuck in someone’s ribcage. (This is also where I perform the surgeries, on the marble slab that folds into that closet like the “Murphy Beds” I remember my great-grandfather had installed in all of his apartment buildings). At night when I can’t sleep (which is often), I come in here to watch and listen to the live feed, with all the screens turned on. At that time of night most of the UViHes are asleep, but the stimulation from their heavy breathing still calms me. Occasionally I’ll get lucky and someone like my desperate single neighbor Lisa will be out and about in the middle of the night, dancing in a club with a (mostly) homosexual man half her age. (This is just the kind of raw material feed that makes me salivate. A camera swaying around in a bar from the point-of-a-view of a drunk deep in denial, growing more impulsive as the night goes on, is cinematic gold and money in the bank. Usually the parts from a video like that, in the hands of skilled illegal immigrants working under the table, can be combined with other, seemingly unrelated UViHe material to make three or four brand new warhols. Sunshine and their rival companies pay top dollar for these warhols, stories that come out of the gate looking and feeling as authentic as the one actual warholyou.com subscribers would make but at a fraction of the cost, because no one has to pay the godforsaken WOIYW[3] fee.)

As a matter of fact, my date with Lisa and its aftermath would make a greate warhol. Even more than most of my “dates”, it had all of the elements of a good romantic comedy: a large dose of sexual chemistry followed by an argument or other obstacle created (artificially and unnecessarily exasperated by the delusional female mind) and finally, of course, narcissism. On our first and only excursion I took her to Guido X, my favorite Italian restaurant. Predictably, Lisa wore “the little black dress”, desperate for anything to accentuate her bland, Presbyterian frame. I ordered for us and we made small talk waiting for the drinks to arrive.

“So Mr. Allengory, is this where you take all your girls on the first date?” Lisa smiled, trying as best she could to arouse a dimple from her pasty, rubbery cheeks. Staring at the subtle patches of adult acne on her cheeks, I wondered how long she had spent behind the mirror applying makeup. What does one do when the “less is more” principle can’t even be applied ironically?

“Only the pretty ones!”

Mercifully, I spotted the waitress just before she started heading our way with the drinks, and the homeless person I paid to emergency text Lisa’s phone came through like a trooper. (Thank you, Gates, for locking down Skid Row and making these people more readily available to me!).

“Oh my goodness, I better get this!”

After she scurried away in her twenty-dollar pumps I reached into my pocket and realized I had intended to bring three vials of Rohypnol but had left one at home. I had to pray Lisa weighed less than I thought, which was a hopeful prayer indeed, considering the girdle lines I’d noticed under the dress. But as fate would have it, twowas more than enough and she was completely incapacitated before the second course arrived (Can a man of science, or anyone for that matter, please tell me when we can expect an improvement to the pitiful inexactitude of Benzodiazepines?).

“Oh, honey not again!” The waitress and I stared at Lisa’s heavy cheeks suffocating the life out of that fifty dollar plate of linguini. I paid the check. “Can you help me put her in the car?”

“How many different ways can you tell someone, Prozac is not caviar!”

***

As Chad and I learned back in college when we built the templates, a romantic comedy, regardless of culture, has three basic elements: 1) initial attraction between two people, 2) a seemingly insurmountable conflict or obstacle and 3) resolution of said conflict, a resolution that bonds the couple and usually takes the form of marriage. Although it was one-sided, Lisa and I had an abundance of initial attraction. I watched her check me out for weeks, smiling at me through her window as I walked my Boxer Richard Rheem before breakfast. Suddenly there were contrived reasons for us to have physical contact, like her coming to the door in tight red slutty pants asking me if my electricity was out today too? Or pretending to organize a neighborhood yard sale and helping me with my donation boxes as an excuse to search the walls for girlfriend pictures. Although Lisa nauseates me physically, I must admit there was a sexual tension. She has a laugh about her that’s captivating, a silly little girl laugh. And potentially attractive green eyes under all that makeup. All of this made our date more than bearable until we started talking, before the Rohypnol took effect, about politics. I should’ve known she would be a Secessionist.

“Really Mort, you can’t be serious,” she said, attacking her salad with the fork like a cannibal tearing into a puppy. “Less than twenty years ago, Southern California was literally floating away from us. I don’t think you take that kind of sudden isolation too lightly if it’s happening to you.”

“I don’t take it lightly, Lisa,” I said. “But since when has a natural disaster been grounds for secession? At least the Confederacy during the Civil War believed they were fighting for principles. Why did Southern California secede? To save the surfers?”

“To save their God.”

And there it was. Insurmountable conflict.

“What? You can’t be serious?”

“Call me old fashioned, Mort, but maybe it’s possible the Almighty isn’t a rich guy with a guilt complex.”

“Gates saved millions of us in his lifetime. Maybe billions. And his money to the banks in the thirties is only reason you have a mortgage. That’s what savior means.”

“All right, Morty, don’t get all upset. I’m just saying if you suddenly found yourself floating away, pointlessly adrift in the sea, not knowing where you’ll be tomorrow, you might think differently. You might want a whole new system when you reach land.”

“How about a system that doesn’t make people quitters? Makes people stick together when times are tough. Makes people remember where they’re from.”

And then, mercilessly, her head fell onto the plate. I parked in the back of my house, and it was dark enough in the alley that no one saw me carry her in through the garage. I knew I had a window of about thirty minutes before the Rohypnol wore off and the anesthetic kicked in, but still, gazing at Lisa lying there naked on the surgical table, I wanted to pause for a moment. At one time she truly had been beautiful. Even at her advanced age (my guess was 34), her breasts had not yet sagged. The lips still had some life; the onset of calcium deficiency had not yet completely robbed her cheek bones of definition. Her skin took to the blade like hot bread to butter. Maybe it was her sudden collapse at the dinner table, or perhaps it was the debate about SC, but for some reason I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking through this particular surgery. What can a man in the midst of laparotomic celiodesotomy do to calm his nerves and steady his hand?

“A new hole, a new mouth”.

Chapter 3

The best part of these surgeries is the next morning --- the look on the person’s face upon awakening is priceless, especially when they wake up in my bed.

“Good morning, Sunshine!” I said. “You like wheat toast, right?” I sat the tray of eggs and sausage next to her, ran my hand along her face and softly kissed her hair.

“My God, you are beautiful in the morning.”

At the word “God” I thought she might faint again. She looked around the room smiling weakly, trying not to look surprised.

“Mort?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Mort, I don’t know what to sa--”

“Shh,” I said. “Relax, everything’s ok.” And then I kissed her, for the first time.

“You’re beautiful, Lisa. Do you know that?”

“You’re so damn beautiful.”

And starting from that day the third and final plank of the “Romantic Comedy” template had arrived: resolution. We slept together every day for three weeks straight, sometimes her place, sometimes mine. Despite the aggressiveness of her argument that night at the restaurant, Lisa proved to be quite passive. This true aspect of her nature intrigued me, and it kept me in her bed quite longer than I anticipated. This post-tiff bliss was fun and true to form but from a UViHe perspective, completely useless. Market research at work during that time suggested raw video material of a single woman scorned, home alone drowning her sorrows, was going for top dollar on the black market (a close second in value to a married woman on the prowl who caught her husband in act of screwing a much younger woman). The challenge before me was Lisa’s lack of female friends who were both attractive and broken (usually a natural combination). After another tortuous week of playing house, I decided to go with an oldie but a goodie.

“Well, what if I choose not to believe it?” Lisa said in final exasperation when I sat her down in my kitchen. Her words came after the first wave of tears.

“You can choose not to believe it if you want,” I said. “But you don’t strike me as one of those pathetic women who thinks she can --”

“Can what?

“Please, Lisa, don’t make me say it.”

“No, I want to hear you say it, you son of a bitch!”

“I don’t want to say it.”

“You think I’m the kind of woman you thinks she can do what?”

“Lisa please.”

She ran to my kitchen and I followed. She picked up a knife.

“Say it or I will cut you in two.”

“Okay, okay,” I leaned against the wall. “You don’t seem like the kind of woman who is delusional as to think she can persuade . . .” I started to walk out the backdoor of my own house.

“Say it!” Lisa screamed, “Say it or I swear to your precious fucking Gates I will throw this knife in your back! Persuade what?”

Standing there in my kitchen, trembling with her make up smeared and a knife in her hand, Lisa had never looked more in character.

“Persuade nature.”

***

And so the final chapter with Lisa began. The money making chapter. As a UViHe, Lisa more than compensated me for the fifty-dollar dinner plate and the weeks I spent with her instead of looking for new harvest. The plot arcs of the video feeds began predictably enough, starting with the inevitable crying call to mother (“How can I have been so stupid? All the signs were there!”), followed quickly by the drunken dance around the living room with stuffed animals in her underwear. Cha ching! Within three weeks there was the purchase of a puppy, the early days of disastrous potty training and hysterical crying fits before the carpet upholsters arrived (cha ching!); the oh so tacky and blatant flirting with the sadistic married men at the office (double cha ching!); and, the grand finale, the overuse of Prozac at a weekend ranch and spa, replete with falling off a horse and the passing out in the Jacuzzi in a pool of one’s own urine. (Boat payment!).

Chapter 4

The corporate headquarters of Sunshine Subsidiaries Inc. was built along one of Wichita’s several abandoned airstrips once owned by the long defunct Mohawk Airlines. From a distance the flat, L-shaped complex, fifteen acres wide, does in fact resemble a small airport, with quaint, translucent ponds catching sunlight on its south and east side, dotted with ducks, geese and more exotic wild fowl. The building’s north side houses Sunshine’s entertainment division, led by its Vice President Wilmot H. Fillmore. The “H” stands for Hungerford, the last name of the man for whom our 13^th U.S. President of the same last name was an apprentice in the cloth-making trade and whom Millard Fillmore defeated to become New York State Comptroller in 1848. The paternal grandparents of Wilmot, or “Willie” as he prefers his direct reports to call him, claimed the family to be direct descendants.

By the looks of things, Willie’s grandparents were successful in convincing him of his regal pedigree. He is rarely seen not wearing a cape of chartreuse or taupe, and an ascot around his neck of matching color (usually teal or apricot). Willie instantly gained favor with his employees when he assumed his role last spring by extending the “bring pets to the office only on Friday” rule to any day of the week. On sunny days it’s easy to spot Sharped-Dressed Willie out and about, walking his miniature pincher Henry Wilson around the pond.

Fillmore has three AVPs under him in the Entertainment division, in charge of Marketing, Operations, and New Development respectively. John Neely Johnson, AVP of New Development and Major League Asshole Supreme, is my boss.

“Mort, profit report.” Johnson said. “You’re up.” There was no else in the room but Johnson and I, and his two bulldogs, MacArthur and Patton.

“Yes, sir.”

“Profits are up.”

Johnson has a mole on his right check, almost directly in the middle of his long, wrinkled face. “Really? By how much?”

“22%”

“No shit? How’d we do that?”

“Well, sir. As this pie chart shows the majority of growth came from leveraging the non-subscriber market for new content. Raw feeds are coming in from new sources.”

“New sources, huh?” Johnson re-positioned himself in his chair and stroked Patton’s head. “And what would those be?”

“To put it frankly, sir, sources that don’t require us to pay the WOIYW fee. Our biggest video contributor last month, scoring over $5000 in under the table cash, was actually from right here in Wichita. A young man by the name of Benjamin Augustus Farnsworth. ”

“Farnsworth?’ said Johnson. “What do you know! Never heard of the prick! I assume we have him on surveillance.”

“You could say that, yes.”

“Well that’s great, Mort. That’s really fantastic!” Johnson stood up. MacArthur licked his balls. “You are one magnificent bastard, Mort.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Hey by the way, Mort.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you take Patton out? I think she has to take a leak.”

***

There was only thirty minutes until the AVP meeting that followed my meeting with Johnson, so I decided to keep Patton the bulldog with me until then. Much to my surprise, when the dog and I walked into the conference room, old Sharp-Dressed Willie himself was there, sans his little doggie and the ascot.

“Mr. Fillmore, it’s a sincere pleasure to see you.”

“Well hello there, Morton,” Willie said, shaking my hand. “Who’s your little friend?”

“This is Patton, Johnson’s bitch.”

Willie bent down to kiss the dog’s face. “Well aren’t you just the cutest thing ever?”

Johnson came in the room soon after, followed by Pierce (Marketing) and Jones (Operations). Upon seeing Willie in the room Pierce motioned him to the corner. The two whispered quietly, Pierce raising his arms flamboyantly and Willie nodding calmly. Soon after Willie left the room.

Pierce shut the door behind Willie. After checking the room for cameras and microphones, he began.

“Okay here’s the deal, shitheads. Last quarter’s sales figures came in yesterday and the good news is manufacturing is up, especially in North Korea.”

“Well that’s good to know,” said Jones. “We just built five more goddamned factories there!”

“The bad news is almost every other division is flat. Flat as your dick, Morton.”

[Laughs all around].

“But seriously, Mort,” Pierce continued. “Entertainment, especially online entertainment was very sluggish last quarter.”

“Now wait just a minute, Pierce,” said Johnson. “I’ve got a report right that says the warholyou.com business is up 22%.”

“I know about the report, Johnson,” Pierce said. “I wrote the damn thing. Up 22 doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot when last quarter you were down 49, now does it?”

Pierce turned to me. “Look, it’s simple. Every jackass with a laptop these days is offering the chance for people to make movies about themselves on a website. We need to show movies on our site that people can’t see anywhere else.”

“You mean like North Korea?” Jones asked.

“No,” said Pierce. “I mean Southern California.”

“Oh bloody hell!” screamed Johnson. “How are we supposed to do that? It’s a fucking island! With no Internet!”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Pierce. “Video cameras work there just fine. And my intelligence sources tell me they’ve built a bridge to their island from Arizona. We need to get someone across there who’s wearing a wire.”

The three men sat silent for a moment. Macarthur growled quietly, looked plaintively at Patton, as if he wished to suddenly hump her.

“Give me two weeks,” I said. “I might be able to make that happen.”

Copyright ©2011 Mark Farnsworth

[1] Although Andy Warhol died nearly 60 years too early to use the cross-genre technology named for him, the pop artist himself has been featured as a character in over 50,000 warhols, and the number keeps growing daily. Among the most notable are Andy Warhol in a mystery on the China Seas, as a soul-devouring monster with tentacles and a hatred for sexual deviance, and the pasty-skinned Pittsburgher as a kilt-wearing, time traveling bagpiper.

[2] UViHe = Uninformed Video Harvester

[3] WOIYW = What’s Ours is Yours, World