“I couldn’t bear to leave my babies. Although, if you wanted to take one of them home with you in exchange for an obscene sum of money, that would be perfectly fine. Are you in the mood for buying today, Marc? Or are you just here for a looky-lou?”
“To be honest, Troye, I’m here to relive a memory.”
“You’ve had bad news?”
I nodded.
“You need a Roy moment?”
I nodded again. I hadn’t gone there with any realistic intention of buying a painting, that day. What I needed was to revisit the scene of my greatest life-affirming moment to date. Because the TL is the place where—after ten years of aspiring and getting by with poster-store copies—I’d bought myself a genuine Lichtenstein. It’s only a small one. It’s not the most critically acclaimed. But it’s the most valuable thing I’ve ever owned. And I don’t just mean in terms of the price tag.
“You and Roy, you’re still soul mates?” Troye asked.
“Always will be.”
I never had the chance to meet Roy Lichtenstein while he was alive. I’m not related to him. But somehow I feel closer to him than to almost any other human. I felt that way the very first time I saw one of his paintings—or at least paid any attention to one—which wasn’t until I was thirty-two years old. I was on a business trip to Chicago and a client took me to a product launch he was hosting one evening at the Art Institute. The presentations were boring so I slipped into the store—the galleries were all closed—and came face-to-face with an enormous cartoonish print of a distraught woman talking on the phone. The image totally captivated me. But it wasn’t the bright colors that drew me in. Or the bold shapes. Or the woman’s words, spelled out in a speech-bubble above her head. It was the way Lichtenstein painted. How he took an intangible concept and made it visible through dots and lines. Because it struck me, that’s exactly what I did. Only in my case, the dots and lines weren’t stenciled in. They were the ones and zeros I harvested from my clients’ computer records.
“Your bad news—is it serious? Is anyone sick?”
“No. It’s just a project I was working on. It got canned. The guy I was running it for? He’s the head of AmeriTel. I was halfway to saving his company, and the asshole pulled the plug on me.”
“AmeriTel? Sounds familiar. Is that where your wife used to work?”
“It’s where she still works. We were there together, for a while. And now I’m not.”
“Ouch. That has to hurt.”
It did hurt. But nowhere near as much as Lichtenstein must have been hurt back in 1963, when a newspaper published an article reviewing his work. The critic’s verdict? That Lichtenstein was the worst artist in America. And this wasn’t a small-time regional rag the guy was writing in. It was the New York Times.
“Other people have had worse to deal with,” I replied. “Don’t worry about me. It’s water off a duck’s back.”
It was the way Lichtenstein responded to the setback—to the reality of what happens when people don’t understand what you’re doing—that really cemented my connection with the guy. And appropriately—given my utter lack of talent when it comes to painting—it had nothing to do with his art. It was his attitude. Because Lichtenstein didn’t fold. He didn’t hide under a rock. He just kept on swimming against the tide, letting the vitriol and abuse wash over him until his critics began to take him seriously. Until they were forced to recognize his genius. To concede that he brought something new and unique to the table. And that’s exactly what I did, when I showed my then-boss my first attempt at an analysis tool and got laughed out of his company for my trouble. I dug deep, and when I got the product right, I sold it to his biggest competitor.
I thought Troye was about to ask me something else, when I heard the door scrape open behind me and instead he excused himself, no doubt anxious to greet the new customers. I wandered farther into the gallery, glancing at the exhibits on the walls and weaving my way through a cluster of waist-high sculptures until I came to a painting that caught my eye. It was a view of a city at night through the rain-swept windshield of a car. But it wasn’t the main part of the image—the other vehicles and buildings and pedestrians and streetlights blurring together into a rushing mass of streaking lines—that intrigued me. It was one tiny detail. The car’s instrument panel. It grabbed me because that first product I designed—the one that was initially ridiculed, but eventually set me on the path to my own Lichtenstein—was based on the concept of a car dashboard. I’d chosen it because I wanted something that anyone could intuitively understand. Something that made visual sense, not a forest of numbers and charts you’d need a degree in statistics to decipher.
I’ve done more complex stuff since then, but I was still proud of that original system. Under the hood it used some hard-core algorithms—it had to, given the way it boiled a whole business down to just five key pieces of information—but on the surface it looked like a bank of round, retro-style dials, freshly ripped out of a hunk of Detroit’s finest heavy metal. The dials had numbers around the edges. Needles that moved. And the best part? Backgrounds that changed color depending on how things were going. Green meant you were OK. Red, it was time to worry. Amber, there could be a problem, so take a second look, if you’ve got the time.
“Are you having a moment?” Troye had snuck up behind me. “I can see your reflection. You stand in the corner grinning to yourself, you look like an insane person. What’s the matter with you?”
“Oh, nothing. I just like this picture, is all.”
“Like it enough to buy it?”
“Well, no, but …”
“I knew it. You are turning into a car guy.”
“No, I’m not.” I was distracted for a moment, thinking about the racing car Lichtenstein had been hired to paint in the seventies, when he wasn’t a geek anymore. “It’s just that this picture—it reminded me that the future’s going to be pretty damn bright, after all.”
“It did? How? Tell me. Then I can enlighten my other customers. And then lighten their wallets …”
I tried to find the words to explain what I was thinking, but I was actually a little embarrassed. The truth was, I’d been imagining what my life would look like if it were broken down across those original five dials. My key indicators would be, what? My relationship with my wife? That would be green, definitely. Carolyn was smart and beautiful, and—having put a couple of garden-variety bumps in the marital road behind us—we were as solid as a rock. My friends? Green, again. I’d always had my fair share. Family? Amber, I guess. But there was nothing I could do about that—we didn’t have kids, my parents were dead, and I had no brothers or sisters. Finances? Green. Leaving AmeriTel early was going to hurt me a little, but the long-term damage would be minimal. And finally, my career. On the face of it you’d think, red. I’d just been fired, after all. But over the weekend, I’d had an idea. My biggest one yet. So big that when I was finished with it, I wouldn’t be looking back at buying my first Lichtenstein. I’d be looking forward to my second. Maybe even my third.
Cash wasn’t an issue, the way it had been when I quit my job to perfect my first product. Now, there were only two things I’d need. Time to develop the idea, which I suddenly had in spades, thanks to Roger LeBrock. And raw materials to experiment with, which in my line of work meant data. Huge volumes of data. And I had that, too. On a pair of rubber-coated memory sticks. They were in my pocket. I’d clipped them to my key chain the previous night, on my way out of AmeriTel’s office. There hadn’t been any particular reason to keep them, at the time. The data was a by-product of another project I’d been working on. I’d just thought it was too good to waste, the way a carpenter might feel about a hefty off cut of oak or mahogany. But now, taking the memory sticks seemed like a stroke of genius. They were going to change my life. I could feel it.