Pills, Notebooks, Marketing Schemes, Genius!
"The Boy Himself" by Frederic Goupil
He was happier then, in a way, taking the anti-depressants the psychiatrist had prescribed, though he took them begrudgingly, irritated at having to mask his true genius, his true discontent with and, yes, sometimes even hatred of, the world. But the world was so big, and world was such an all-encompassing word, and after a while of taking those small yellow pills, he began to wonder, some days, if he had ever really known the world, or if he, or anyone, ever really could. Of course not! It came as an epiphany, slamming the ideas from his hyper mind to fall, cooling, to the pavement.
He sipped coffee on a bench, watching foot traffic go by. He was watching girls, sometimes, but more than that, he was watching all kinds of people go through their days, through their own idiosyncratic routines. He didn’t understand how they coped with it all: day after day, doing the same or similar things. For him, such a routine would be classified under drudgery, and if he couldn’t get up and get out at any point in time that his ADHD mind prescribed to him as the time to get up and change the subject, well, life just wasn’t simply being lived to its fullest. He drank the coffee down.
After a while, less than a year was all it took, his notebooks grew unwieldy. He had designated a specific room in the plastic trailer assemblage that was his family’s home for his philosophical musings, filing them away with no particular system. He hadn’t really developed a philosophy, after all; that was too much of a category, too much a word coined by the man to keep children from free associating and engaging with the world that surrounded them, the world that imbued them with vitality, and food, and food for thought. In his more inspired passions, he denounced the philosophers at the dinner table, in an attempt to shock his father, but the fits of verbal rage rolled off his dad’s back and under the table, where the dog pawed and licked at them, as if they were tasty treats, which Henry supposed that they could be. Perhaps he would market them. The thought was deliciously absurd, and he thought that it might work.
So during the month of April in 1992, Henry made and distributed hand-drawn stickers, the first ones free, to his acquaintances. He imagined himself as a pusher of aesthetics, of ideals long lost in the ridiculous, rushing tide of material progress, and he was sure that someone among all his acquaintances would bite, would be intrigued, and would have five dollars or more to spend on custom-made stickers. Because he could do it, he told himself, he could even make a living this way. This could be it! He could be the art director and staff of his very own graphic design playhouse—not business, mind you, it was too horrid of a word. This was how such things were started, he told himself: small, with a loyal base of acquaintances. He would not let himself label them as customers or even consumers, but they would always stay acquaintances; he didn’t dare entertain any of them as friends, because to do that would ultimately be distracting and humbling in a way that would crush his aspirations towards greatness. After all, Henry told himself on a deeply subconscious level that he couldn’t even be aware of, it was so hard-wired into him as a product of western corporate 20th century culture, greatness was what made life worth living. It was the secret goal, the ultimate apex of existence, to become that lone, solitary genius of an individual, sailing a flag that no one had ever seen before, planting that rocket of his own particular creativity and originality and development on the moon, and then from there, reaching out beyond the moon.
The moon was passé. Today’s entrepreneur aimed beyond the stars in their entirety, for the multiverse. The universe was not enough, and Henry supposed that he had quantum physics to thank for that. And thank quantum physics he did, at least once, in something resembling a prayer in a library, with mounds of books piled around him, his chewed-cap pen working overtime in his battery of notebooks, scrawling down the avant-garde formulae of shifting multiversal truth in laymen’s terms that only he could understand. He even got three or four poems out of it; really, it could have been three, or it could have been four; two of the poems were so close together in content and Ashburian imagery that they really could have fused themselves into part one and part two of the same poem, if they would agree to share a title. Henry worked with them for several hours on different days, but never could come to a conclusion, and so it stood that he had crafted four of his idiosyncratic poems about quantum physics, except that they weren’t about that at all. He had obscured the subject, coded it in layers of post-absurdist imagery so as to completely baffle the reader. He counted it among his greatest achievements of the first half of 1992, and daydreamed about the day when it would be sent to the printing press of some literary poetic magazine publisher.
That day, not surprisingly, never came, but he did receive, on the third of May, 1992, a request from a fellow sophomore named Don Robbins, for a series of stickers depicting a pink elephant, sitting on a tall stool, pounding away at a typewriter, with the simple caption, “Genius” emblazoned in a thought balloon over the elephant’s head. It was a great concept, thought Henry, and he got started on hand-drawing the twenty requested stickers right away. Up front, he told Don that the cost would be forty dollars for the set, two dollars a sticker. Don didn’t try to talk him down at all. He agreed it was reasonable, and Henry’s first playhouse relationship was formed.
The stickers were a success and spawned buttons. On receiving his forty dollars, Henry also received one of his products smacked onto his locker, a permanent fixture for the rest of the year, courtesy of Don. Don’s bardic clown troupe, Genius, benefited from the exposure that the stickers brought them. They were passed out at lunch time to select individuals as promotional material for Genius’s up-and-coming performance at The Backburner, a café downtown. The buttons were sold at the performance, with the proceeds split between Henry and Genius, and the playhouse relationship was solidified.
