Clancy takes the elevator to the third floor, walks down the hall and then up the stairs to my door. The elevator no longer goes to the fourth floor. Another of my custom jobs.
“Open up!” Clancy shouts.
“It’s not locked,” I shout back, my voice echoing off the exposed brick walls of my enormous apartment.
“Come on. O-pen up,” Clancy whines. She can’t figure out how to work the crossbar handle mechanism on my giant, industrial steel front door. Or she’s afraid of getting her hands dirty while trying. Either way, she continues to stand in the hallway, banging on the door, while I deliberate just letting her bang-away until she tires out and goes home. Clancy making a scene in my hallway bothers me so much less than Clancy making a scene from the street. But I’m fooling myself. She’s not going anywhere. Eventually I open the door.
Like a Japanese anime character, Clancy’s face is a hyperbole of joy when she sees me, but her wide-eyed look quickly collapses into a hyperbole of misery when she looks past me, into my apartment. And like any hyperbolic cartoon, I’m pretty sure neither of her looks reflects any deep feelings going on inside of her. I mean, cartoons don’t have deep feelings, right?
Chapter Two
I’m going to digress here to give you some back story…
My name is Dan Johnson. Some people call me Daniel, which is fine. Just don’t call me Danny, because I’m not a six-year-old.
If you work in the app development space, you’ve probably heard of me. If you work in any other field, probably not. And even in the app development space, you haven’t heard of me for over a year. But if you want to go back to the archives, you can read about me in Fast Company or Wired or one of the other tech rags.
I bought this five-story Jersey City brownstone about eighteen months ago, right after I sold my app development company to private equity, outright, for a solid nine-figure sum. Nine figures for a half-assed app, a cloud-based platform, and over half-a-billion users. Hint: the half-billion users is what did it. A ridiculous world we live in, right?
Don’t get me wrong. My tech solved a problem, and I’m proud of what I created. But between you and me, what I designed and built should have been worth maybe a million dollars. Maybe two. Definitely not nine figures. But, luckily for me, the problem that my app originally solved tripped over three additional problems. This happens sometimes. And when I adjusted the functionality to address these new problems, the app went viral and the user community shot into the stratosphere. And what do you do when a tech giant offers you hundreds of millions for a fortunate accident? Duh.
But to be honest, the whole thing was more surreal than real and I was in a kind of befuddled daze after finalizing the sale. Not necessarily a bad daze, but not necessarily a good daze either. A daze is a daze.
So, back then I’m twenty-eight years old and I’m engaged to Clancy, who happens to be everyone’s ideal in terms of marriage. And all of a sudden, I’m filthy rich and retired and in this post-windfall daze. Sometimes, when everything you ever thought you wanted comes way too early, all the other stuff you ever thought you wanted can get a little blurry. And going through the same old motions can suddenly feel like you’re trying to dance with no music.
So, anyway. This brownstone was my first big purchase after the windfall. I’d assumed it would be a tear-down and rebuild scenario, but structurally it was a type of solid that you could only get in mid-twentieth-century buildings, so it ended up being a strip-and-gut job instead. And, most inconveniently, Clancy’s former college roommate and lifetime bestie, Gwen, had recently joined one of the hottest new architectural firms in Manhattan.
I’m going to digress from my digression and back up a little more here…
The first school that probably pops into your head when someone says Ivy League, that’s where Clancy and Gwen went to college. Roommates, freshman year through graduation. Both graduated with highest honors. Both were virgins until their sophomore year.
And both were cheerleaders!!! In case you missed it, that’s sarcastic enthusiasm!!!
I’ve always considered it oxymoronic for Ivy League colleges to even have cheerleading squads, considering the intelligence bar for acceptance at these schools. You’d think they’d screen out people who’d voluntarily join a team of miniskirt high-kickers that jiggle and jump in front of a live crowd of drunk collegiate sports fans. Objectify much?
Furthering the oxymoron, cheerleading co-captain Clancy graduated with a 4.0 average in Women’s Studies. Women’s Studies! So, tell me how that makes sense? Sorry, I’m off on a tangent. From my last digression.
And it’s only fair to say that I didn’t always feel this way, exactly. I mean, I dated Clancy for four years, was engaged to her for about eight months. I spent so much of my life thinking she and I would get married that I really don’t know how to feel about her. A part of me still wishes that I was missing the same part of my brain that she’s missing so I could be happy about the same stuff that makes her happy. Even though all that stuff that makes Clancy happy is now the same stuff makes me want to vomit.
And even though I broke up with her, my relationship with Clancy… it’s still pretty complicated.
Anyway, Gwen is cut from the same cloth as Clancy, but she’s more of a sidekick version. Like, Clancy is the brand name aspirin and Gwen is the generic store label, but the ingredients are essentially the same. Like, if they ever had pharmaceutical rep beauty contests, Gwen would always be first runner-up to Clancy’s crown. Not that either of them is a pharma rep… they both just look the part. The only real difference between them, as far as I can see, is just that everyone perceives Clancy to be a little bit better than Gwen in every way imaginable. The only advantage for Gwen is that, like Avis Rental Cars, she tries harder. And this has made her an animal in the workplace.
So, designing my brownstone somehow turned into a fast track career builder for Gwen, while it represented absolutely no discount or other advantage for me because I had more than enough money anyway, according to Clancy. As such, my befuddled windfall daze wasn’t so much replaced but distracted by the Gwen and Clancy brownstone project. The goal was to create the most ultramodern daily-tech enabled living environment outside of science fiction. And I went along with it because… why not? I didn’t really have anything else to do, and I was shelling out mid-seven-figures for the building, anyway. It was, at the very least, a distraction from the blur that was then my life.