EPISODE 6

I arrived at the booth SlipNot had prepared for me and was immediately confronted by a highly agitated Bosco Ignatz.

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.  Before I had a chance to answer, he tripped over the power cord to the laptop, pulling it off the booth table and onto the floor.

“Bosco, get outa here!” I said. 

“You’re late,” he responded in a somewhat subdued manner, realizing that he might very well have broken the key component to my display.  He muttered something that I couldn’t understand and then knelt on the floor, cradling the laptop in his hands.  He brought it back up to the table and began fiddling with it.  The screen was still lit, but try as he could; Bosco wasn’t able to get the Web site to come up.

“Is the Internet connection live?” I asked him.

He showed me that he was able to connect to Yahoo and to SlipNot’s Web site, but he couldn’t get the micro camera’s site to come up. 

“It’s that fucking CGI script!” he said through gritting teeth.

I started to laugh.  Bosco always blamed Web Snafus on CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script.  He’d picked up the phrase listening to Allan or someone else who knew how to write code and had applied it to any unexplained behavior he experienced on the Internet.  He used it so often that every once in a while, when there really was a problem with how we were able to retrieve information from the company’s database over the Web, his diagnosis would be accurate and he’d beam with satisfaction.  This time though, it turned out that in his haste to gain access to the micro camera’s site, he’d typed in a comma instead of a period before “com” in the URL.  I pushed him aside, made the correction and the site sprang up on the screen.

Bosco was still very nervous and he kept looking over my shoulder as I tested the micro camera and the site.  He made suggestions and offered his opinions on how I should present it.  I tried to block out what he was saying and managed not to bite his head off.  He was irritating the living hell out of me, but I also knew that he personally had a lot riding on the success of this new product. 

I opened one of the pages on the site to make sure that I could take pictures with the camera and then upload them to the site.  I placed the camera on the top of my head and clicked the mouse attached to the laptop.  Suddenly and image of my scalp appeared on the screen.  It was in sharp focus and you could clearly see the old dead follicles as well as the healthy ones that still had hair growing out of them.

I uploaded the picture to the Web site, where it stood in stark contrast to the sample picture there of a healthy scalp.  The sample picture showed a dense concentration of black hair.  The control scalp itself (what little of it you could see) was a pale white.  Not a hell of a lot of sunlight penetrated there.  In fact, given how Allan had taken that sample picture, it was unlikely any scalp I photographed at this conference was going to look all that good by comparison.

Allan told me that he’d been fooling around with the camera one night at home when he decided it might be fun to take a picture of his dog’s stomach.  Dupree was a very furry Australian Shepard and so when magnified 200 times, his hide looked like an overgrown forest of black hair.  Allan took several more pictures of Dupree with the camera and then photographed his own scalp in several places before burning a CD of all the pictures.   The following day, he’d handed the disc off to Bosco.

Of course, Bosco had loved the pictures of Dupree.  Allan decided not to mention that those shots were of an animal’s hide.  He just figured that no one would ever notice.  Bosco marveled at how lustrous the hair was and how healthy the scalp looked.   He often remarked that he’d never seen anything like it, even on the best fashion and TV models he’d ever worked with.  Allan figured that if Bosco was happy, knowing where that sample came from could only make him unhappy.  Allan could be very considerate that way.

When I did a side-by-side comparison of my scalp with Dupree’s, Bosco clapped me on the back.

“Incredible!” he exclaimed.  He took a closer look at the screen and then looked at my head.

“Forget it, Bosco,” I said, not looking away from the screen as I clicked the mouse and watched as a new sample picture came up, this time a shot from Allan’s head.

“I think you’re beginning to really show on top, Michael.”

“I’m good with that.”

***********************

The next installment will be posted on October 13.

If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO HERE.