Love and Zika: Badboy Gay Mafia, #1

One

Jack folded his legs onto the base of the Aeron chair, tossed his Donald Pliner slippers down to the ground, and gazed contemplatively at the monitor screaming Viagra, work-at-home, and desperate Nigerian princes. They were some of his proudest triumphs. He looked around and linked each email to what it had bought him.  Herbal Oxycontin cheap? The Tesla parked in the driveway, membership in the Silicon Valley club of those who’d made it. Moroccan lottery winner congratulations? Kind of a flop, only the Krell amp and speakers in the work room, and maybe also the Pliner slippers. Handheld solar energy generator that can power your house? That had been his hundred-thousand-dollar masterstroke; that’s what had bought him the house, or at least provided the down payment on the house. Bay Area, three bedrooms, half an acre, accomplished by one man sending one email, and to be occupied by that one man, and perhaps his electronics, and nobody else.

The only problem was, business was down. It wasn’t like the old days where every housewife would be happy to be introduced to a billionaire Nigerian oil baron who’s going to sweep her off her feet if she just sends over her grocery money. It wasn’t like the old days where he could call up any corporate receptionist, claim there was a problem with their company Visa card, and get the card number for verification. Joe and Jane Average had gotten wise, and that meant Jack was in a bit of a rut. It wasn’t a bust, but a rut. Or maybe a rut about to become a bust.

The calls had been going on for six months now, always from changing phone numbers, sometimes with spoofed numbers, pretending to be FedEx or Kaiser Permanente: the mortgage company, the same mortgage company that had been skeezy enough to lend him seven hundred thousand dollars without income verification was now being skeezy enough to want to be paid back, and aggressively so. Foreclosure had already started. Jack’s house would be poof, gone, and he’d be either living in his Tesla or desperately trying to reconcile with his knee-jerk homophobic parents. Other than his wits, his house, his car, his phone, his laptops, Jack Stern didn’t have anybody. He was categorically, intentionally, willfully alone.

Alone, because fuck the relationship canon, fuck the screed, the bullshit metanarrative, that says everybody needs somebody, and especially fuck the pretentious sissy-boys who were his fellow passengers on the gay ship. Jack hadn’t followed anyone’s script. He spent high school, after what he’d diplomatically described as becoming estranged from his parents, learning math by running a NCAA bookmaking operation through AOL Instant Messenger, doing well enough on exams and SATs to get into Stanford—where he paid his own way, parent-free, and was always gravitating toward the psychology, sociology, and network security courses, idly hoping no one would notice the combination.

He’d grown up a writer, dabbling with creative writing, history, and computer science at Stanford before getting in early and good on the SARS mania and quitting school to run game full-time. Back in 2003, all he’d needed was a Geocities website, PayPal account, a Palo Alto PO box to make his first million. Those and a stack of expired pregnancy test kits he’d gotten on Ebay, that he started selling as SARS detection kits, at first shipping them out from his Stanford dorm room, then when the money started coming in and the residential advisors started asking intrusive questions about the stacks of boxes in his room, he quit school to become a salesman full time.

People weren’t much different from ATM machines. Give them the right inputs and they’ll spit out cash. Push their buttons and they’ll give you what you need. He’d been crafting pitches that would cause people to hand over the cash ever since those salad days in the Stanford dorms. His writing skills had propelled him from a dorm room to a seven-figure junior mansion, but 2016 wasn’t 2003, and he needed more than Geocities and a PO box for his latest adventure.

Zika Cure Now

Easy Zika Cure Doctors Don’t Want You To Know About

Only One Pill Prevents Zika

Get This Zika Remedy Before Big Pharma Stops Us

He went through the possible headlines in his text editor window. This was the big leagues, and the pitch needed to be perfect. At least the pitch needed to be perfect if he wanted to keep his house. The mugs were getting wise, and it was no longer shooting fish in a barrel to social-engineer a few thousand dollars from a mark. Jack was behind on the mortgage payments, way behind. The house was already in foreclosure, and every time he came home, he half-expected the utilities to be off and the door locks to be changed. The Zika thing though—the Zika thing was genius.

Jack’s bedroom closet was stacked with the hundreds of bottles of nearly expired Kirkland-brand B vitamins that he’d bought on Ebay, to later sell as Zika cures. He already had the mini-size new bottles too, and he’d relax himself some evening by methodically pouring ten tablets into each new bottle, then sticking on a label he’d lovingly designed.

The tangible goods were the easy part. This wasn’t like some Breaking Bad shit where you had to hustle to get the product. But then, unlike a meth dealer, Jack didn’t have a world of desperate addicts ready to hand him money. He had to create that demand, make them want it, and then his job was done. He was a writer at heart, and he thought of himself as a writer, not a con man; his writing, persuasion in the written form, whether on a webpage or in an email, was how he’d closed his biggest scores. He thought himself an heir of the famous newspaper ad hucksters of the previous century, the ones who’d sold piano courses and etiquette books by the wagon loads, pushing people’s buttons just the right ways. That’s what Jack did, although admittedly, he did it a bit more aggressively, a bit into the scam realm.

On the Zika cure, as with any of his ventures, coming up with the ideal sales pitch would be the difficult part. Once the sales pitch was honed in, he’d just have to get the advertising, ordering, and payment all in a row. Aligned just right, and he’d easily pay off all the back due payments on the mortgage, maybe even pay it off a few months ahead of time, maybe even buy out the house. The media was going crazy about Zika, and when people were scared, anything was possible.

But talking about it wouldn’t do it. Only getting all the angles perfectly coordinated would do it. And he didn’t trust partners in his business life, not any more than he did in his romantic life.

His phone—OnePlusOne, custom hacked, because he didn’t trust whatever back doors Apple was certainly secretly hiding on its phones—rang.

Jack Stern, how can I help you?

Can I speak to Jack Stern please?

Yes, speaking.

This is Margie at Verisign, we’re calling about your merchant account application.

Yeah?

This is a courtesy call, before you receive the official notification in the mail. The voice was human, but took on a robotic tone. This was a woman in the business of making long-distance rejections, he knew. We’re calling to let you know your application for a merchant account has been denied.

Why?

We can decline applications for any reason, Sir, and we do not disclose that reason, Sir. He sensed a slight Indian accent, smoothed over by years of making such rejection calls to foreign lands perhaps.

Ok.

This wasn’t 2003, before PayPal and Geocities, like the housewives and college students on the ultimate receiving end of his targeted emails, had gotten wise to his scams. In 2016, scarred by two decades of Viagra spammers and scammers, any big company ran far away from anyone wanting their help to pitch a miracle cure for anything. The smaller deals he’d run through fake PayPal accounts, laundered Western Union chains, and various gift certificate scams—but this was going to be way too big for those. The back-end, the infrastructure itself, would also have to be a game: find some sucker trusting enough, naive enough, desperate enough for business, to give him website hosting, payment processing, outgoing email, maybe even a full shopping cart and ordering setup. He might have to make use