Paged the CEO of Monkeys at home. No response.
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ME minus one. No monkeys. Held a brainstorming session, considered hiring small, hairy children to swing around on the ropes, but am concerned about contracts.
Can't believe Cobalt is going to be monkey-free. I really pooched it.
#
"The End is Now!!!" According to the hand-lettered sign on the guy's chest, this was because "Y2K = 666!!!"
ME minus zero. Millennium Eve. Cobalt in full swing, and I was sharing a street corner with an exclamation point fetishist. I clutched my half-caff latte for comfort.
It was 10:52 when Nora arrived. But she wore a Dior dress, dark hair up, and my chest tightened like I was swimming at the bottom of the pool. She smiled, I offered my arm, and she took it.
So I started thinking maybe things would be okay after all.
We met two blocks away, but even from here, you could see Cobalt was attracting a lot of attention. Traffic had slowed to a crawl as drivers stared at the lingerie models swinging in the big factory windows. Our Designer had hit them with a red spotlight from behind, so all you could see were shapely silhouettes penduluming back and forth, quite an effect. The cabs were going crazy, everybody honking. High visibility: good, good, good.
We strolled up the stairs past the pro wrestlers hired as bouncers, goosebumpy in their Spandex outfits, and I let Nora into the new world. Unfortunately, the first thing you were supposed to see were the monkeys, but the habitat was dark, so we hustled through to the main room, a cavernous open space with not one but two DJs, who perhaps would have worked better on different floors. One played the electronic thumpa-thumpa music you expect at an industry party, but the other blared what sounded like Icelandic folk songs. Of course, though the room was packed, no one danced. Get enough visionaries in one room and it's all about talk; marketing plans and IPO's and funding, always funding, the conversation rising with the curling weather pattern of cigarette smoke. In a casual survey I spotted analysts for three of the city's hottest V.C. shops, a producer who destroyed the Earth in his last film, four entrepreneurs with stock options valued over twenty million apiece, and the Lieutenant Governor of New York.
Nora seemed unmoved.
Okay. Just warming up. We fought through the crowd to the bar, a huge rectangle of carved ice. It was spectacularly backlit and glowing, though the lights seemed to be melting it swiftly, and the servers looked sort of surly standing in the puddles, but whatever. I got us Cosmopolitans and took her upstairs to the Activity Floor. Skee-Ball didn't seem quite apropos, and the Moonwalk had become a makeout room, so I led her to the Arena.
The Trivial Pursuit match was in full swing. It was a tough competition. The Women's Volleyball team sported maybe a hint of a lead on the Curlers. However, the audience seemed unaware of the tension, gathered as they were in corners, exchanging small tablets that looked like mints but probably weren't. That made for plenty of space on the bleachers, but a glance at Nora told me this wouldn't do it either.
Fine. The main attraction. I escorted her to the Pod Village.
True explorers, our Pod People, frontiersmen and women. For the past thirty days, they'd been living on camera twenty-four hours a day, the first time a community of people had made so bold a statement about the nature of entertainment in the future, a future in which we won't just watch the shows, we'll be the shows. A visionary future brought to you by Jerry.
Nora couldn't have cared less. "Can we find a place to talk without," gesturing in a circle and grimacing, "all this?"
To be one-hundred-percent truthful, the Pod People weren't much to see. Several slept, one did a Times crossword. In the Pod Kitchen, a pioneer of the new era scrambled eggs. It had been like this the whole time. While the ToiletCam had a dedicated following, overall the project hadn't met expectations.
It irked me that Nora was so dismissive. But frankly, I felt a little tired myself. So I unlocked the door to the habitat. It was dark, only a red glow filtering up from the lobby. We found spots halfway along the thin balcony and dangled our legs.
"No show here?" Nora smiled. "Shouldn't there be, I don't know, a juggling nun? A snowball fight with the Swedish Bikini Team?"
"This is the monkey habitat. Or it was supposed to be."
"Monkey habitat?"
"See the vines?"
"Ahh. Where are the monkeys?"
I shook my head. Nothing had worked out as planned. Attendance-wise, Cobalt was a success—the lobby thronged with people trying to make it by midnight—but I found I didn't care.
"You look beat, hon."
I nodded.
"It's a great party. A little weird, but a great party."