Lightning Rods (27 page)

Joe worked closely with Walter on introducing lightning rods to the public sector, and he could see for himself that in many cases it made all the difference to someone who, albeit sexually indiscreet, was in other respects the better candidate. One timely installation had worked wonders for a candidate whose two previous campaigns had been marred by mud-slinging of the worst kind. The candidate had pledged to clean up three dead rivers, a project Joe felt strongly about, and for once he was able to keep his campaign focused on the issues rather than on unsavory personal details. When it came to the issues it was no contest, and he won hands down. So that was something to feel good about.

Also, Joe was able to go major league on height-friendly facilities in a way he wouldn’t have been able to, on his own, for
years
. If ever. He had installations in forty-nine state capitals, not to mention DC and NYC. The important thing was not just the actual number of buildings involved; it was what it symbolized. Something like this sent a message to people. An elected government should represent
all
its citizens. If it forgets about the little guy, something has gone badly wrong.

So Joe tried not to think about what the FBI might be up to, and just focus on the positive. The way he saw it was, what you do when you grow up isn’t always what you imagined as a kid. When you’re a kid you always think you’re going to be an astronaut, or a quarterback, or something like that; you can’t understand why so many grown-ups spend their lives doing boring things like selling vacuum cleaners. When you grow up there are some financial facts you have to face. Sure. But you also recognize that there are different ways of making a contribution. Nobody ever dreams of growing up and going into sewage disposal—and yet we would all be dying of horrible diseases if someone didn’t make a career of doing just that. Well, Joe had found a way of cleaning up the world in an area that was
just
as important. And in the process he had
also
found a way of making the world a more welcoming place for people who had happened to be born short through no fault of their own.

Sometimes, when he was feeling uneasy, he would think of Ian, still back in KC (as the natives call it) reading about John Foster Dulles. Unless some new hero had supplanted JFD. The thing Joe would think was that he had come across Ian for the briefest of encounters and then gone on his way. But Ian just went on being short, day in, day out; it was something the guy had to live with on a daily basis. And the main thing the guy had to live with was people going around stereotyping him as short. Which, if you think about it, is pretty stupid. Joe was 5 feet 10 inches tall. When he was feeling lonely, did he go around looking for other people the same height because they’d be sure to have a lot in common? No, he did not. And it wasn’t just some little idiosyncratic eccentricity of Joe’s, either.
Nobody
goes around looking for someone their height to make friends with. Because having the same height in common with somebody else is about the
least
interesting thing you can have in common. Well, if how tall you are kicks in as a significant fact below a certain height, and if it gives you something in common with other people that height, it doesn’t take a genius to see that
height
is not the operative factor. It’s other people’s perception of that height.

The way Joe saw it was, you can’t do much about people’s perceptions. But at least other disadvantaged groups get some perks to go with it. Well, when was the last time you heard of someone being hired as the token dwarf? Never, that’s when.

Joe could only stand by while Walter did his best to promote rapport between the Bureau and candidates for political office. But when it came to installing appropriate facilities it was another matter. In fact, as soon as Walter had outlined the new opportunities that would arise, Joe had thought through the nature of the facilities from scratch. This was a chance to make an impact that would not come again.

If you’re an ideas man you don’t just stop having ideas because cash flow is not a problem. You go right on having new ideas, and when you have an idea you want to see that idea in action. One of Joe’s ideas was an idea for height-friendly ATMs. You could have a screen and keypad that could slide up and down the wall according to preference, and not one but
two
potential slots for the card and the cash. You could have some kind of gadget that would automatically adjust the screen depending on which slot you put the card in, though it would probably take some pretty fancy programming. Or you could just have some kind of manual device, a button or a handle of something, and the user could select the appropriate cash slot from a menu. Unfortunately he hadn’t been able to think of a way to justify it to the client.

What Joe now decided was that he was going to just put his foot down. He wasn’t even going to
argue
with people. He was going to just go right ahead and let the chips fall where they may. If you have height-friendly ATMs and toilets in government buildings that sends a message to the business community. They may choose to ignore that message. But at least they can’t say you didn’t send up the smoke signals.

That was how Joe made the best of things. He was getting involved in politics, after all, and people who get mixed up in politics soon discover they can’t have everything exactly the way they want it. All they can do is try to achieve some good in the areas where their hands aren’t tied—because they sure can’t do a heck of a lot where their hands
are
tied. And they’re bound to be tied some of the time. That was what Joe discovered working with Walter. An uncomfortable discovery in many ways, but he had to make the best of it.

Walter, on the other hand, felt pretty damn good about the way things were going. In the first place, he was serving his country to the best of his ability. In the second place, the new development was doing his career no harm at all. And in the third place he had the satisfaction of seeing the FBI strike a definitive blow against one of its oldest and deadliest enemies.

When Walter had joined the FBI its energies had been divided. Communism was still a threat to national security, and taken seriously as such. Also, the war on drugs took its toll. Not to mention organized crime. There simply wasn’t the
manpower
to take on the CIA, and the FBI was to pay the price for that understaffing. While the FBI’s attention was otherwise engaged the Agency’s sphere of influence grew by leaps and bounds. Of course, in some ways the CIA was its own worst enemy—even just reading the papers you could tell it was just one balls-up after another, and the papers didn’t report
half
of what those clowns got up to. You might well think it was only a matter of time before operations were handed over to an organization that knew what it was doing. Unfortunately it didn’t work that way.

Well, what comes around goes around. If the lightning rod level of surveillance, with the level of control it implied, became a reality, the FBI would at last be able to control one of the greatest existing threats to national security.

COMPETITION

Joe’s synergy with the FBI was a major factor in extending the operations of Lightning Rods. Ironically, however, the thing that kicked Lightning Rods into a whole different ball park was that Joe suddenly started facing competition.

In the early days Joe had gone out of his way to underline the difference between a lightning rod installation and prostitution. Because the concept was so new prostitution was the first thing people thought of, and a lot of groundwork had to be done to enable people to understand the distinction between the two categories.

In fact, of course, as it turned out, some of the most effective lightning rods had had careers in the more traditional branches of commercial sex. For some reason it was easier for someone with that kind of background to pick up a few office skills and move over to lightning rod work, than for someone with an office background to expand her repertoire the other way.

In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t so surprising. Women who made the move across from, say, secretarial work were making a lot more money than they were used to, but they also had to get used to working conditions that presented a whole new range of challenges. Women who came the other way tended to see things differently. In some cases, they might actually see their take-home pay go
down
. Others might find they’d only achieved parity. And they might well find they were working longer hours to
achieve
that parity. What they were looking for, in other words, was not primarily a big financial pay-off. What they were looking for tended to be closer to all the things Joe had initially outlined as the main attractions of the job.

As one woman later explained, she had originally started out with an escort agency because the money was good; then she had built up her own clientele and the money was even better. But there’s something about that whole lifestyle that gets you into the habit of spending everything as soon as it comes in, or even before—at one point she had owed something like $30,000 on her credit cards. You keep meaning to save, but you never do, and every once in a while you wake up and look in the mirror and you look like shit and you realize the money is going to keep going out but sooner or later it’s going to stop coming in. Trouble is, it can be quite hard to find some other line of work that pays enough to make it even conceivable.

So from her point of view, lightning rods was ideal as a second career. At 17 she had hated the idea of a nine-to-five job, but at 27 she was able to see the attraction of a job that came with a healthcare plan and a pension plan and a reasonable guarantee of employment when she was 37 or even 47 or 57. There would obviously come a point when the lightning rod element of the job would be removed on grounds of seniority, but by that stage she would be qualified for a responsible mainstream position. Besides, the high earnings of the lightning rod segment of her working life would be reflected in her pension.

And besides. Quite apart from the long-term financial implications, in many ways lightning rod work was a lot less stressful than what she was used to. One of the things that gets on your nerves after a while is having to interact socially with people you wouldn’t choose to mix with if you had a choice. Not to mention having to watch physically unattractive people get undressed—that gets old
real
soon. Lightning Rods removed that whole factor of the equation. It was really only after it was gone that you realized how much of your life you’d spent with a big fake smile plastered across your face.

In the early stages, when nobody had heard of Lightning Rods, women who might have been interested in this kind of career move didn’t know it existed. Recruitment, as a result, was
hugely
labor-intensive, and even after the recruits had signed on they required a level of through-care which was not really in the spirit in which they had been invited to join in. Later, as word started to get around, things improved considerably. Lighting Rods started to attract a type of applicant who had already resolved whatever conflicts she might experience relating to providing a service with a sexual component. The numbers on the register continued to grow steadily but counseling costs leveled off. The ratio of recruitment time to successful applications fell dramatically. In many ways, the new development was a welcome one.

As is the way of these things, however, every silver lining has a cloud. As word spread through the mainstream sex industry of the opportunities available for women who were concerned about the future, it reached others with a different agenda.

People were not slow to see that there had to be openings for more than one operator in the new field. Naturally enough, however, they brought their own preconceptions with them, preconceptions formed in an industry with its own scale of values. Coming from that background, they were not always able to appreciate just what it was that Joe had been trying to achieve. They tended, as a rule, to focus on the economics of it, and, in many cases, to misunderstand what they saw, overlooking the value built into the system which was made possible by the economics.

Joe’s first challenger was a man who had started out in the escort agency business. Ray had escort agencies in ten major cities, and it was in that light that he automatically interpreted the lightning rod concept.

His first thought, before he had time to go into the concept in any detail, was just that this could offer a solution to a problem that sooner or later anyone who runs an escort agency is going to have to confront. The problem, essentially, is that you are dealing with a highly time-sensitive commodity. Every girl has a sell-by date, and unfortunately individuals may not necessarily have the degree of self-awareness which would enable them to recognize the arrival of that date and take appropriate action without input from a third party. Nobody wants to hurt anybody’s feelings, but if you have an agency with a reputation to uphold sooner or later you’re going to have to spend some time getting people to face facts.

That can be a difficult process, especially if someone is going to have to go through a period of financial readjustment as a result. You don’t like to see someone walk out the door knowing she is going to have to make some compromises. You don’t like to see someone walk
in
the door when it’s all ahead of her, knowing the kind of choices she is potentially going to have to make a few years down the line. There are, obviously, individuals who take the kind of financial precautions that mean they don’t have to make those choices when the time comes, but those individuals do tend to be in a minority, and unfortunately there is little you can do.