We came for the coffee maker. It was now safe in the trunk of my car, but we lingered—like rubberneckers at the scene of an accident.

The place stunk with decay, the rotting carcass of a dead business. Opportunistic locals picked at the remains, looking for good deals. But the bones were nearly bare and only a few fetid hunks of flesh remained. Our desks were barren, our chairs empty. All the machines were switched off. The $5 wall clock had stopped ticking and was laying in a pile of dust on what had been Alex’s desk.

Even we weren’t immune to the situation. I found myself rifling through a box of computer cables. Alex’s wandering hands had found some kind of ancient measuring device. It was a collection of seven or maybe eight rulers stacked on top of one another and riveted together at the ends. The thing unfurled into a yardstick at the flick of a wrist and could be folded into something that fit in your pocket. He nervously fiddled with it, bending it into odd geometric shapes.

Henri approached, his turgid watermelon belly bulging above a pair of brown Levis. His feet were shod in a pair of pointy cowboy boots. He ran his chubby fingers across his beard and stared at us through a pair of aviator-style reading glasses. “Careful with that,” he said, eyeing the thing in Alex’s hands. His voice was condescending and disturbingly high when compared to his massive stature. “It belongs to Maria. It’s been in her family for years.”

He launched into a detailed account of what the thing was used for, but I wasn’t paying attention. We’d spent too much time listening to his dribble for the past four months. He’s a know-it-all, a self-proclaimed master of pretty much everything business and computers. He’s a member of MENSA and after only a year of being in business, he’s a complete failure. The man lives in a prefab house (read trailer) and sunk $80,000 of his own money into equipment, advertising and employees that didn’t work. He also managed to take close to $150,000 from a guy who fell out of a chair and hit his head. Now the guy, “Cliff,” does nothing but make model trains.

I shook my head. How did we get here? I looked at the fat Frenchman before us. It was his fault. This huge caricature of the Dot Com boom, this Izzy sketch of the success that touched everyone in the Bay Area during the late ‘90s. Before all the rich guys went crazy for the Internet and started writing checks, Henri was a self-employed computer repairman. He sold shitty systems to stupid clients who perpetually needed his help. He was making a good living, enough to keep his wife (Maria) in nice duds and his belly nice and round. Then he got a whiff of what was going on. He smelled the cash, the success. Half-cocked ideas must’ve piled up in his head like dead lemmings at the bottom of a cliff. Finally he settled for just one, the mother of all ideas—a huge, quivering worm of an idea that was primed to shit out cash from now until the end of civilization.

Upon having his revolution, he leapt to action and promptly went about business as usual. The man moved like a glacier in a world that zipped along at a hummingbird’s pace. He only managed to put the idea down on paper, make it sound really profitable and nice. We met him through Alex’s godfather, Bob. Godfather Bob is another large white man, only with a lot of cash to burn. He’s a deadly intoxicating cocktail of charm, humor and quick wit. He’s a corporate consultant who makes his nut by making other rich guys feel better about themselves.

Alex was a runner for Godfather Bob, his go-to guy. The Don needs copies of a legal document? Alex is there. Bob wants some new toys? Alex is on it. He was one of Godfather Bob’s moons, orbiting the big Englishman along with half a dozen other close go-to people. Bob’s the kind of guy who will always have satellites—people to do his bidding without much complaint.

At one point Alex reached out and put us in orbit around Godfather Bob with all the other cronies. We happily accepted. I was a nobody, a failed journalist looking for easy money. Jay, the third member of our triple threat, was brimming with ideas and rearing to go, a brilliant designer. Bob dangled fortune and success in front of us like a fake rabbit at the dog races. He put us on a meager retainer and drew up work orders for three or four websites. We became his personal web design team, a necessary piece of any rich guy’s entourage.

“Hey, you find anything worth takin’?” Andre, our accountant, sidled up next to me. He looked like some kind of bizarre retired Italian prizefighter. His circa ‘83 salmon-colored cargo shirt was unbuttoned to his nipples, revealing a tangle of curly black chest hair. A gold chain hung around his neck and a huge pinkie ring was perched on his left hand. His bald head glistened in the mid-day sun that streamed through the office’s plate glass windows. He jammed his hands into his pockets and grinned. “Not much left in this place, ahh?” The guy sounded like he was selling hot dogs in Times Square.

“I already got what I came for,” I said. “Your coffee maker.”

“Oh?” One of his thick eyebrows rose on his forehead like a caterpillar in death throes. “You want that old thing?”

“Yeah, we’re starting our own business. People need coffee.” I picked up a piece of networking equipment.

He barked a laugh and slapped me on the back. “Ha! You won’t need the coffee anymore.”  

 “Oh we always need coffee,” said Alex. He was still playing around with the measuring stick. He had it folded up into an intergalactic fighter.

 “Whazzat?” asked Andre. His hands were back in his pockets and he squinted dubiously down at Alex’s creation.

 “It’s the Last Starfighter,” he replied. He pushed it through the air in an arch and made thruster noises.

 “Ahh,” replied Andre. The little Italian didn’t quite know how to respond. He grasped for a subject he knew all too well: money. “You guys got work lined up?”

The question hit me like a punch. No, we did not. I had a few hundred dollars in the bank and the pink slip for my old work computer. I could sell that; it’d be good for maybe two month’s rent, but not much more. Alex, I’d been told, was worse off. He had virtually no money in the bank and owed the IRS big time. Any day now they were going to send out an army of winged monkeys to collect.

Alex shrugged and stared down at the starship in his hands. I shook my head and smiled. “Nothin’.”

 “Well, you’ll find something. You’re a bunch of talented guys, right?” He spied Henri emerging from the rear of the office and sauntered off.

Indeed. Alex had twisted the ruler thing into something out of an M.C. Escher illustration and I could see him struggling to come up with another design. “You’re going to break that thing,” I said. “It’s been in Maria’s family for years.”

 “Yeah, yeah. I know.” He turned and headed toward the small kitchen at the rear of the office, still fussing with it. 

I wandered toward Mark’s old desk. I’m not really sure how he got involved in all this, but he went down in flames just like everybody else. Mark was our IT guy, a huge, dandruff spewing, bespectacled monster of a computer genius. He had a horrible temper and, at one point, marched out of the office and hurled our server into the street. He never picked it up. The guy was probably the smartest person we’d ever met. He knew something about everything—if you asked him—and could keep up with the best of them, even the MENSA genius Henri. In fact, he made Henri look like a complete idiot most of the time, which is why we loved him so much. Mark must’ve smelled death coming long before we did. He was booking passage out of that office months before Henri gave us the official notice. Mark was a sailor, a computer tech who worked on oil tankers. It was in his blood. He never really looked comfortable on land and we weren’t surprised when he and his computer turned up missing a few days before Henri called us into his office.

 “Let’s go.” Alex was nudging me in the ribs, his face pale green like the walls in a psycho ward.

 “What’s the rush?” I said. “We haven’t really said bye to Henri, the bastard.”

 “Yeah, well, I think we should go.” He was holding the ruler thing in his right hand. It was collapsed into its portable form, a thick stack of wood about six inches long. It had a purple Velcro strap wrapped around it.

 “What’s that?” I pointed to the strap. “Isn’t that for holding bundles of wires together?”

 “Uh huh. . .” he set the thing down on his old desk, behind a shoebox filled with old Ethernet cards.

Henri ambled up. “Leaving so soon, boys?”

I wanted to slap him. “Yeah, we’ve got to go.”

“Uh huh. . .” said Alex, wearing discomfort like a coat.

 “Well, keep in touch,” said the Frenchman. I could see the defeat in his eyes. He was going back to his trailer, back to defragging hard drives and installing printer drivers. It was sad, really. But fuck um.

I shut the door to my car and peered over at Alex, who was chewing on a few nubs of fingernail. “What the hell is your problem?”

 “I broke that thing,” he began. Then his mouth opened and a confession sluiced out all over my dashboard. “I was bending it into a triangle and it just snapped. . . I didn’t know it was that delicate. . .” He buried his face in his hands, then shot up. “GO! Let’s get out of here!”

I laughed all the way to my apartment.

© 2008 Dustin Driver