The Billionaire: A Man with Skills from Another Era Is Needed Now in a Broken Digital World

By Pete Damianakis

WHAT HAPPENS
WHEN MOTHER NATURE
ASKS YOU TO TIE THE
ROPE THAT HUMANITY
IS HANGING ITSELF ON?

A man with skills from an older time is needed now, in a broken digital world. His life is filled with nostalgia. His possessions are old. He is the curator of ‘old’ things that he collects and when they break, he fixes them.

He is not connected to the world wide web. The only phone he uses is a 1966 red payphone. To operate, insert a ten-cent coin or shilling. He is an analogue man in a digital world.

The winds of change are in the air. Something odd has happened to his universe. There is a new collection for Xavier to curate. He is about to save a life.

In fact, one billion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664102163

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Peter Dennis.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-6641-0215-6

                  eBook             978-1-6641-0216-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/30/2021

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Paperback Writer

(1966, The Beatles)

The Jungle Book

(1967, Kenny Ball And His Jazzmen)

Child In Time

(1970, Deep Purple)

Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)

(1967, The Monkees)

Catch A Falling Star

(1957, Perry Como)

Cars

(1979, Garry Numan)

Message In A Bottle

(1979, The Police)

‘Forever’

Proud Mary

(1969, Creedence Clear Water Revival)

Daydream Believer

(1967, The Monkees)

Beyond The Sea

(1967, Bobby Darren)

Leave Me Lonely

(2018, Hilltop Hoods)

Hi De Ho

(1947, Cab Calloway)

Atomic

(1979, Blondie)

Sunshine Day

(1975, Osibisa)

Drive

(1984, The Cars)

Wired For Sound

(1981, Cliff Richards)

Venus

(1969, Shocking Blue)

Desiderata

(1920, Max Ehrmann)

When You Wish Upon A Star

(1940, Jiminy Cricket)

La Cucaracha

(1935, Louis Armstrong)

Little Deuce Coupe

(1963, Beach Boys)

King Of The Road

(1964, Roger Miller)

Signs

(1971, Five Man Electric Band)

Big Yellow Taxi

(1970, Jonie Mitchell)

Speed King

(1970, Deep Purple)

Brimful Of Asha

(1997, Cornershop, When I Was Born For The 7Th Time)

Julius Robert Oppenheimer

Easy Rider/Born To Be Wild

(1969, Steppenwolf)

Black Magik Woman

(1968, Fleetwood Mac)

You Do Something To Me

(1929, Cole Porter)

Take 5

(1959, Dave Brubeck)

Seasons In The Sun

(1974, Terry Jacks)

Wavelength

(1978, Van Morrison)

Mother

Jungle Boogie

(1973, Kool & The Gang)

Everyday I Write The Book

(1983, Elvis Costello)

Saturday Night At The Movies

(1965, The Drifters)

History Repeating

(1997, The Propellerheads With Shirley Bassey)

Break On Through (To The Other Side)

(1967, The Doors)

Blue Moon

(1962, Frank Sinatra Rendition)

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

(1973, Bob Dylan)

Addendum

The Beat Goes On (1967, Sonny And Cher)

About The Author

For

Eleni and Nikolas,

my eyes will always look for your colours.

PROLOGUE

Xavier is a man in his mid 40’s. His life is filled with nostalgia. His possessions are old. Some need to be repaired. He doesn’t want to replace his belongings; he is the curator of ‘old’ things and when they break, he fixes them – Xavier is a fixer.

Xavier doesn’t have Facebook. Nor does he have a Twitter account. There isn’t an Instagram account attached to his name; and the only phone he will use is a red rotor dial payphone manufactured in 1966. To operate, simply insert a ten-cent coin or shilling.

The payphone is tethered to the inside lounge wall of a museum that Xavier calls his home. The archaic communications device is nestled amongst a collection of vintage telephones that Xavier has assembled on a bench eclectically.

In another time he was an Adman for a multinational advertising agency in the city but now Xavier collects. Xavier is a relic. He is a collection of several ‘other times.’

You see, Xavier is an analogue man in a digital world and something ‘different’ has just happened to his universe.

Brightness permeates through the atmosphere like a Moka coffee pot turned upside down. The light lubricates the sky with violent visual viscosity. The glossy lustre percolates towards the river and Xavier is about to discover that just over the river’s horizon is a new collection for him to curate. Xavier is about to find out the reason why he has never been needed more in his entire analogue life.

To be precise, there are one billion reasons that Xavier will be needed.

935.png

The End

PAPERBACK WRITER

(1966, THE BEATLES)

Paperback writer, paperback writer

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

It’s dusk, the gloaming. A man sitting in a Sun Yellow, 1978 2-door Datsun 120Y Hatchback with a black louvered rear window is parked on the crest of a hill. Corralling the yellow Datsun 120Y are state-of-the-art Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, BMW and all manner of SUV’s that glide past; they represent bragging rights to a ‘new age’ technocracy. The man inside the Datsun 120Y refers to them as Peacock symbols or ‘cars that are ‘with-it, man’ and are driven by sheeple. *

(DID YOU KNOW: ‘Sheeple’; People compared to sheep in being docile, foolish, or easily led. ‘by the time the sheeple wake up and try to change things, it will be too late’) *

Occasional an older vehicle makes its journey on the very busy freeway – it’s just as fast as the ‘with-it, man’ cars. Albeit, there is a little bit more noise attached to the vehicles and probably a little less environmentally friendly. As the vehicles promenade by they create the acoustics of the Doppler effect traveling as they travel along the motorway. Adjacent to the freeway is a wide and open car park. A jetty annexes the end and offers entry for boats to a river. The cars, trucks and motorbikes drive rapidly past the silhouette of the man parked on the crest of the hill in the Sun Yellow Datsun. They do not notice him apart from the occasional vintage car aficionado’s – who without failure, will slow down to pay homage to this remarkably well-restored vintage vehicle. It is ‘new age’ renaissance. A statement from a bygone era.

The drivers of the avant-garde automobiles conduct their daily regimented ‘goings-on’ prosaically. They will stop. Slow. Start. Stop. Stop. Slow. Start. Slow. Stop. Slow. Start. Slow. Stop. Start.

It’s the repetition. The repetition. The repetition.

Hypnotically, the beat of the tires on their deluxe cars that rapidly rotate drives the driver viscerally. They drive in time to the beat of their driving heart. The vehicles move balletic-ally on their sojourn along a 6-lane motorway.

Xavier reflects, ‘I smell burning rubber’ …I like it.

‘The smell of burning rubber is music to my ears’. Xavier exclaims, ‘yeah, I do dig it!’

Xavier sits in the 1978 model Sun Yellow 2-door Datsun 120Y. Hunched over the steering wheel, He composes a litany of words. He writes with frenzy. He writes in a saddle-stitched, faintly ruled 64-page exercise book. The kind used by students in high school – before iPads and tablets were introduced into the school curriculum, before 2006.

The driver’s door is open. Xaviers leg is draped in well-worn, frayed denim. A vintage blue Converse shoe compliments the fabric. Inserted in that very shoe is Xaviers size 11 foot. It taps to the beat of an unplugged version of ‘PAPERBACK WRITER - circa 1966, written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, B side ‘Rain’. The Beatles are performing the acoustic version. The Datsun’s factory 1978 AM radio receives the broadcast and the music leaves the vehicles speakers, in monophonic amplitude modulated tones. The broadcast punctuated by an audio patina of periodical electric AM static pops.

As Xavier writes in his 64-page faintly ruled exercise book he also recites his missives maniacally:

Time does not exist if there is no memory.

You know you were saying that, we’re seeing that time and psychology are connected. You know. You know memory is what produced the concept of time. Meaning, because you remember the moment before, you have a concept of some kind of linear progression of time...the main ingredient of time or the main ingredient of memory is space because time is keeping track of information in the space we call memory. It’s like recording on a hard drive or a CD or DVD or, YES, yes, more like the recording on a vinyl record.

Yes! That’s it! Time is like a vinyl record with all the tracks representing different periods and in one fell swoop interconnected by the stylus.

927.png

THE JUNGLE BOOK

(1967, KENNY BALL AND HIS JAZZMEN)

Ooh-bi-doo, I wan’na be like you

I want to walk like you, talk like you, too

You see it’s true, an ape like me

Can learn to be like you, too

A moist, dark African grove nestles in the shade of the canopy of a tall collection of rainforest trees. Enigmatically, a film production set amongst the ferns sits conspicuously. A dark square backdrop suspended by tripods, boss clamps and tungsten lights, powered by a row of batteries eclipse the majestic location. Organic scents filter the air as if one thousand beasts simultaneously, in one of nature’s basilicas sprayed one thousand atomised cans of the fragrance ‘the smell of the earth and the sea’.

A gorilla sits imposingly, silently in front of a backdrop that creates an out of place environment to the otherwise pristine, visceral jungle. The gorilla’s name is Koko.

Koko is a 114-kilogram Central African Lowland Gorilla and Koko can speak English. Fluently. She has an extensive vocabulary of over 2,000 words, voiced in American Sign Language and Koko is in the jungle to speak on behalf of the 2015 Paris Symposium on Climate Change. Koko ‘signed’ the camera, instructing the film crew to ‘commence’.

Koko’s hands begin to dance with breath-taking choreography. The hands create shapes. The hands assemble words. The hands craft a language that Koko has learned and that Homo Sapiens Sapiens can understand. Koko ‘speak’. Her hands were a proxy to her proclamations. She was the voice from nature and she said with urgent precision the following:

‘I am Gorilla.

I am flowers.

I am animals.

I am nature.

Man Koko love but man stupid.

Stupid.

Koko cry.

Time hurry!

Fix Earth!

Help Earth!

Hurry.

Protect Earth.

Nature see you’.

KOKO,

2015 PARIS CLIMATE SYMPOSIUM

918.png

CHILD IN TIME

(1970, DEEP PURPLE)

Sweet child in time

You’ll see the line

The line that’s drawn between

Good and bad

Xavier sat in his Datsun completely immersed in his fragmented missives. Esoteric and metaphysical words liberated from both his chewed up 2B graphite pencil nib and leaping from an organic portal others would refer to as his mouth. He recited his ideas with extreme velocity. The words adopt the character of a trauma doctor’s triage. He writes his abstract notions. Pausing for just a moment, he listens to a song on the radio. ‘CHILD IN TIME’, sweet, sweet child in time.

Xavier was overwhelmed by an amazing epiphany – a light bulb had just popped on. He could see. He gathered his collection of 2B, very well chewed pencils from the front passenger seat and began to write, and write, and write. Stopping only to sharpen the instrument of his social intercourse.

In a saddle stitched, dog eared, 64-page, faintly ruled exercise book he continued to write: ‘You’re actually leaving a trail in the structure of space and whatever defines coordinates in space will be a set of information in the structure of space and time.

You can get, just from realising, from memory if it’s inherent to us, then it’s enamored to the universe. That means, yes, yes, of course that you should be able to use the universe as a network and transfer information from this side of the universe to the other side of the universe without having to go through all the other ‘bits’.

Yes. Yes! This is good. This is really good. This is supernatural. This is metaphysical. Yes, definitely metaphysical. Spirituality is magic and it’s merely the physics we haven’t understood yet. Spiritual concepts are the precursor to the dynamics of the universe. We don’t really have a choice in the matter. We just need to find the stylus…and choose whatever track from time that we want.

909.png

LOOK OUT (HERE COMES TOMORROW)

(1967, THE MONKEES)

I see all kinds of sorrow

Look out, here comes tomorrow

Oh, how I wish tomorrow would never come

The production companies’ producer had placed a turntable and also a collection of records next to the catering wagon for entertainment in the tropical forest. Like all gorillas, Koko’s toes and fingers were opposable. *

(DID YOU KNOW: The thumb and big toe of a gorilla opposes the other digits of its fingers and toes. This means a gorilla can grasp and manipulate objects with their feet as well as their hands because of this opposable big toe) *

On this day, the very same day Koko filmed her monologue for the Paris Climate Symposium in the jungle, for no particular reason Koko selected a vinyl record from the record collection. She selected this record with her toes. Perhaps it was because it was titled ‘The Monkees’ and of course, Koko can read.

With her toes, she carefully places the record onto the turntable. Executing the action with the nimble dexterity of a micro surgeon, with her index and thumb Koko then picked up the record players stylus attentively selecting track seven of the now spinning vinyl record.

Koko’s fingers slid away and the stylus, now sitting on the rotating groove. The stylus needle navigated its way along the encrypted message. A song played, recorded in 1967. A nostalgic lyrical time capsule echoed through the moist, saturated mist laden air of the African lowlands valley. The words soak into the humus rich soil that buffer words and vibrations, filled with sweet lament and sad empathy setting the birds a singing not cheerfully and with hope. They moved their wings less boldly.

They are words that none-the-less resonated with Koko.

Look out, here comes tomorrow

That’s when I’ll have to choose

How I wish I could borrow

Someone else’s shoes

Koko’s eyes welled with tears and she motioned in sign language the symbol for ‘crying’ as she looked towards the valley. A six-lane motorway ran through the valley. To the side of the road, parked on a hill next to a car park was a 1978 yellow Datsun 120Y with a louvered rear window. It was now dusk. The gloaming. Beautiful hues of orange and varying shades of mandarin permeated the slivers of silver clouds jostling for position in the gloaming. Wiping a tear Koko could see a man in the 1978 yellow Datsun 120Y. He wrote frantically in the 64-page, dog-eared faintly ruled exercise book as he listened to the song on the Datsun’s factory fitted AM radio.

He tapped his blue converse wearing foot to the beat of lyrics that had traveled to his radio from 1967. The musicians, bards from the past performed a sad song with lyrics of regret.

I see all kinds of sorrow

Look out, here comes tomorrow

Oh, oh how I wish tomorrow would never come

From his front windscreen the man paused to admire the beautiful hues of orange and varying shades of mandarin that permeated the slivers of silver clouds jostling for a position in the gloaming.

3685.png

CATCH A FALLING STAR

(1957, PERRY COMO)

Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket

Never let it fade away

Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket

Save it for a rainy day

Brightness saturates the atmosphere like a Moka coffee pot turned upside down. The light lubricates the sky with violent visual visceral viscosity. The glossy lustre percolates towards the river and Xavier is about to discover that just over the rivers’ Now unfamiliar horizon is a new collection for him to curate…

...and Xavier is about to find out

the reason why he has never been needed more in his entire analogue life...

01001111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101100 01101100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110110 01100101 01110011 00101110

…to be precise, there are one billion reasons

that he will be needed

The melancholic crooning of Perry Como broadcast on the Datsun’s AM radio is interrupted by a cacophony of staccato, static white noise that saturates the cabin of the sun yellow car.

Xavier, drowned in missives of chronology failed to notice the winds of change for ‘the times, they are a changin’…

… until just about now.

The sky, infiltrated with an infinite array of pastels that hustle and scramble to see which opulent tint would flirt, tease and tantalise the atmosphere more than the other to get the sky’s attention.

The landscape, tickled with a brush. Stroked from a palette of azure, varying shades of verdi and warm smelling eucalyptus hues.

Parrots soar on a paisley printed breeze, caressing the flowing eddies with their oil painted painterly plumage that speckle the vista with an elegant aerodynamic composition that some other’s would call a symphony.

The AM radio’s disruptive audio prompts Xavier to look up. He sighs and exclaims…

…‘I see’.

… and what Xavier ‘sees’ is a world that he once knew is now a world that is not what he knows now. It is different. Vastly. And the world, ‘she is a changin’.

The opulent colourful tapestry of his ‘other house’ has now disappeared.

His world – the ‘other house’ is now a hastily assembled compilation of monochromatic, mezzotinted tones. Xavier breathes deeply and exclaims, ‘It’s so hollow now.’

He exhaled the words ‘sense, less.’ Offered with remorse. Recited with beat and melancholia:

‘The hollow core

hollowed out some more.

By hollow thoughts of

a hollow mind.

A hollow being, a hollow find.

The hollow life.

Lives through hollow strife.

Hoarding close hollow joys.

This hollow whole.

A hollow being, with hollow goals.

All that’s deployed.

Pours into the void.

Of this hollowed out life.

Hollow fills heavy soul, sits heavier still’.

In a monochromatic world strangely, the interior of Xavier’s Sun Yellow 2-door Datsun 120Y still had colour. The wood-grained four-speed gear stick knob is walnut brown. The dashboard illuminates in a forest green and the key bunch sitting in the ignition hosts a daffodil yellow 1960’s smiley face key chain. Xavier exclaims with wry disposition, ‘weird man’!

Reaching towards the ignition he turns the key and with analogue mechanical precision the 1172 cc motor activates. The engine hums on its very first rotation. The well-oiled motor idly idles lazily at seven hundred and fifty revolutions per minute breathing the now very different troposphere.

The 2-door Sun Yellow Datsun meandered along a motorway with the other, less colourful cars. The road was now littered with stationary vehicles. The vehicles were state-of-the-art Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, BMW and all manner of SUV’s and these vehicles were occupied by distraught drivers and passengers. The occupants had coiffed hair, surgery enhanced eyes, nose jobs and a chin tuck here and an implant there. All of their procedures camouflage a distraught demeanor.

Occasionally vehicles drove past the stationary cars and their agitated drivers and passengers. The very few vehicle’s that moved were old. Moving at a modest velocity. There was a 1968 Amber VW Beetle, a 1973 Cobalt Firmament Toyota Celica ST, a 1965 Bolero Red Holden EH wagon, a 1977 Olympic Blue Ford Escort, a 1968 Sage Green Chrysler Valiant R series, a 1972 Sunset Coral Fiat 850, a 1974 Cashmere Beige Renault 10S, a 1977 Metallic Pearl Beige Peugeot 504 and also, a 1978 Sun Yellow 2-door Datsun 120Y.

They and their drivers are colourful in an otherwise monotone world. And, like the Sun Yellow 2-door Datsun 120Y with the black louvered external rear window that was driven by Xavier, had all been manufactured on or before 1978. They moved, the other cars didn’t.

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CARS

(1979, GARRY NUMAN)

Here in my car

I feel safest of all

I can lock all my doors

It’s the only way to live

In cars

The motorway was devoid of any vehicular activity apart from the moving flotilla of fluro vintage vehicles. Winding the window winder clockwise Xavier raised his arm outside and gestured to the other drivers to follow him. The cars assembled in single file and traversed the motorway led by Xavier’s Sun Yellow Datsun 120Y hatchback. They drove towards a brand new horizon cautiously navigating around the debris of modern,