This New Internet Thing, Chapter 24

The TV Star

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

In Chapter 23 (notes), Len and Dan are in a street brawl with Harry Redding, the elderly man who’s upset that they fooled him and caused his wife to be kicked out of her church. The police take Harry off to jail, Janet and Walt come up to the mountains in a panic, and Gretchen, the retired police dog, basks in the glory of her take-down of Harry. A reporter gets wind of it, and writes the story in a, let’s say, less than comprehensive way. Not that journalists ever do that. In this chapter, the TV world comes calling.

We also explore the father-daughter relationship here, and look at what people really want to do with their lives.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

=================== The TV Star ==========================

When Len went into town for lunch and sat at an outside table with the dogs, people in the restaurant all looked out the window at him. Jeez, he should have just made a sandwich and gone out into the woods somewhere. Oh well. No one interrupted his lunch, at least.

When he got home, there were 23 messages on his machine. He ignored them and called Janet.

She was relieved. “My God, your phone was busy all morning! How are you handling it?”

“Well, it’s a new experience being famous, honey. I’m not sure what to think about it.”

“Yeah, I’ve had people asking me about you all morning, too. But you probably have it much worse.”

Len gathered his thoughts.

“How long is this ‘fame’ thing going to last, do you think?”

“I have no idea, Dad. You could live with us for a while to get away from it.”

“Hmm. I might do that. We’ll see.”

“Dad, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“What do you really want to do in your retirement? We thought fishing was it, but I guess we were wrong.”

Len was used to asking her questions like that. They never had that conversation about him.

“You know, I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately!”

She laughed. “And…?”

“And, I guess I still want to use my brain for something. And I don’t mean crossword puzzles.”

“Something that doesn’t land you in the ER, I hope!”

“Right. And doesn’t feature reporters calling me!”

Janet didn’t know what else to say. Len went on,

“You know, honey, I feel so envious of you sometimes. I always had to worry about keeping a roof over our heads and putting you through school. But we did it, and now you kids are doing exactly what you want and keeping up with all the latest technology. I just think I was born too early.”

She had tears in her eyes. “Oh, Dad. What would you want to do? I’ll help you!”

“Thank you, sweetheart.” Len had tears in his eyes, too, but then he collected himself.

“Well, I better start returning these phone messages. I don’t want to be one of those temperamental celebrities!”

She called Walt, but he was out on a job, so she left a message and tried to go back to work.

* * *

Len called back the reporters, and ignored all the hate messages on his machine. Most of them were just like the first reporter, asking if he had any comment and looking for some angle the others hadn’t covered yet.

One of them was kind of intriguing, though. It was an invitation from a public television show called Computers This Week in the Bay Area to come on and talk about how he and Dan had really cracked the case. Dan was invited, too. They were going to devote the whole show to him, so it wasn’t going to be just some generic questions and then a commercial break.

He called Janet to ask her about it, since he’d never seen the show. Janet was horrified at first, but then she remembered the conversation about his retirement. “Well, if this is what he wants to do with his life, I’m going to support him.” So she just told him it was a good show and they’d probably be straight with him. He could stay with her and Walt when he came down to do the show, of course.

A couple hours later Dan called to tell her he was going on TV with her dad! He was so excited. They didn’t know yet when it was going to be taped, let alone when it would air.

The show’s producers really wanted to talk with Len, but his phone was always busy, so Dan got to be the one to find out what they wanted. It turned out to be the Internet angle, and mainly what this case portended for the future. The producer, Molly, asked him whether there would be new kinds of fraud coming along. Perfect! Molly knew about Dan’s involvement in the Internet Engineering Task Force, and he told her all about that.

She didn’t really know much about the case except what was in the press, so Dan filled her in. He sensed that when he got to the “bingo” and “elderly” parts, she started losing interest, and when he told her what he’d actually done to find the perps, she was really tuning out. He had to think fast: this was Len’s big chance! If they played this right, he’d have himself a prime job in Silicon Valley, which Dan sensed was what he really wanted, even if he didn’t know it himself yet.

Molly said, “Thank you so much, Dan. Is there anything more you want to tell me about this?”

Dan had one of those moments of inspiration he could tell his grandchildren about (if he just had some kids first):

“Well, just that Len has a long background in ferreting out embezzlement, but he was used to doing it with pencil and paper in his accounting days. He put some guys in prison a long time ago.”

This intrigued Molly a little.

“Can you tell me about that, if you know any more?”

“Well, I don’t know too much about it, but on this one, he figured out how to use the computer and the Internet to find the guilty parties. I never would have thought of that.”

“OK, but how much did the Internet really do for you?.”

“I was able to confirm the identity of that guy who attacked us. That would have been pretty hard without the Internet.”

Quickly pivoting, Dan added,

“Len’s also been spending a lot of time on Usenet investing groups, talking about how to make money in the coming Internet boom. He has some theories that are pretty unconventional.”

Dan wasn’t too sure what ideas Len had, but he’d get plenty of time to think of some before the show.

“Really? I’ll have to ask him about those, if I ever manage to talk to him.”

Just for good measure, he threw in one more.

“I’ve had a couple talks with a guy who’s planning to do pornography on the Internet. Pretty wild. He came to the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting back in 1991, even!”

“Pornography on the Internet! What TV producer can resist that?” Dan congratulated himself for that one, and as a bonus, it was even true!

Dan realized that he and Cassie had, let’s say, skirted a few laws in getting information, and he told them they couldn’t talk about that. Also, any talk about his work at Oracle was out of bounds. Amazingly, Molly was fine with all that. 

When they hung up, Dan called Janet and told her all about it.

* * *

Janet told Walt about Len and Dan going on TV. He laughed.

“My father-in-law is going to be a TV star! When is it on? We’ll set the VCR.”

She didn’t know. She told him what Dan had done to sell Len as an Internet expert and an embezzlement specialist.

“Your dad did all that stuff in his youth? You never told me this!”

“Probably because it was a long, long time ago. Now I’m worried they’ll ask him a question about it and he’ll just plead forgetfulness.”

“We better tell him to do his homework, then!”

She thought she’d better talk to Len before the producers got to him, so she called. He grumbled, but she reminded him of what he’d said about still wanting to use his mind. This was his big chance!

* * *

After he and Janet hung up, Len thought about it the rest of the week. This living up in the mountains was getting a little old. It seemed like half the people here had worked in Silicon Valley and then retired to the mountains. No one ever went in the other direction! They came here to get away from the rat race.

But hey, Janet had done something nobody expected, either — she crashed through the glass ceiling in the other direction! People just assumed that once you got on the management track, you stayed on it until retirement. Not Janet. Maybe she was showing him how to listen to yourself and not to everyone else.

This whole “embezzling” thing: he didn’t need to take that on. He could have just put off the Reverend and told him that when he got a concrete idea how much money was missing, Len would look into it. After all, why should he take on some ill-defined task like this? “I just feel like the money’s going out too fast!” the Rev had said. Why didn’t Len just smile and move on? Dan wouldn’t have a bandage on his forehead that way.

It was fun, though. It was like being a detective instead of watching them on TV. He was actually helping someone in a way that no one else could have done. And having Dan to help him do it — that part was terrific! The two of them weren’t just going fishing and hanging out; they were accomplishing something together.

He hadn’t thought for a long time about his months in New York trying to find out what happened to his brother. Len just smiled, thinking of himself as a 17-year-old alone in a big city. How did he sleep? How did he eat? He could barely remember any of it anymore. There were some very kind strangers who took him in and fed him, but often they’d try to send him back to Detroit and he’d have to move again. 

He sold newspapers some of the time. Besides that, he had no trouble finding employment, with the war on and all the men off fighting. Usually all he had to do was show up and be willing to get his hands dirty, and they’d hire him and pay him in cash. He was used to working after school anyway, so anyone could tell he was reliable. All that time, though, his real goal was to figure out where Jack had gone. He used to tell everyone he met about his brother, and a few people thought Jack might have enlisted in the British or Canadian armed forces. Chasing those ideas down took up weeks and led nowhere.

Finally, he thought about why Jack had left home: he was obsessed with the battle of Stalingrad destroying the factory he’d spent so much time building. Maybe he remembered all the Russian people he’d known there, and thought about how much they were suffering. What he imagined he could do about it, Len had no idea, but anyway: how would he try to get to Russia? There was a war on. You couldn’t just buy a ticket on an ocean liner!

In a bar he met a guy named Bart who worked in the Merchant Marine, and Bart had been on a ship carrying trucks to Murmansk. Len had never heard of the Merchant Marine, and didn’t even know where Murmansk was, but Bart told him all about the U-boats in the North Atlantic, and how a couple ships in his convoy had been sunk. Suddenly Len realized that must be what Jack did. He started going down to the Merchant Marine office, and finally he found out the real story. When he got home and told his parents how Jack had died, they kept insisting that he shouldn’t have gone off to New York on a wild goose chase like that and left them in the dark. But he just kept telling them it wasn’t a chase; he caught the goose! He knew his Dad was secretly proud of him although he’d never admit it.

Fortunately for his parents, his war job was Stateside, so he wasn’t being shot at. He didn’t tell them about the shady jeep parts manufacturer who was inflating his costs and hinted that Len would be a lot safer if he just accepted the occasional $20 bill to look the other way.

After he got out of college and started doing those fraud audits, he had some of that same feeling of having a mission, not just doing a job. People think accountants are dull, but Len always used to tell Janet, “The bad guys always slip up and leave some trace somewhere, unless they’re Mafia or something. When you find that trace and know you’ve got ‘em, that’s the best feeling in the world.” He would have been thrilled if that made her want to be an accountant, but oh, well. She was doing pretty well as she was.

All those years at Chrysler, he put that stuff out of his mind as something kids fantasized about. He’d never thought about it much until now, when he’d actually caught a criminal. “Even if it was just a couple of old ladies!” he chuckled.

He and Dan did use a computer and (sort of) the Internet to solve the crime. Len was on the Internet himself, which made him unique for someone his age. Most people in their 60’s didn’t even know how to use a computer. But that might not be enough for the TV show. How about the future? What did he expect the investment landscape to be like once the Internet took off? And how was the Internet going to change the world of crime and law enforcement?

Len had to laugh: who was he to parade around as The Expert on this stuff? He was just a retired financial analyst who happened to piss off some old people and get in the news. He called Dan to chat about all this.

Dan was encouraging. He said it didn’t matter if they deserved to be on TV getting interviewed as “experts.” The TV show didn’t care. They gave Len and Dan this opportunity, so what did Len want to do with it?

Len had a hard time accepting this. It seemed so cynical.  “Why me?” kept going through his head.

He and his investing buddies on AOL and Usenet had, in fact, been musing about the coming boom in the Internet and how to play it. He decided to really get serious about this now. Maybe he wouldn’t get a chance to say it on TV, but it wouldn’t hurt to be ready.