Poles Apart (13 page)

Before leaving, she leaned down and gave Dad a big hug and kissed his cheek. He was caught a little off-guard, but recovered to hug her back. I got the same treatment and she was out the door.

“Well, what the goddamn hell was that?” Dad asked when she had gone.

“That was your ex-wife coming to check in on her ex-husband. It’s what families do, Dad,” I replied.

“She looks amazing. Doesn’t she look amazing?” he asked.

“She does, Dad. She really does.”

“Shit, I’m late,” Dad said, checking his watch.

“Late for what?”

“Late for scoring a few more points for Ford against that evil upstart Chevrolet.”

I watched from just inside the doors. Dad parked his walker off to the side, next to the wheelchair of Kenny Jenkins. They nodded to one another in grudging acceptance of their mutual existence. Kenny lifted his good hand to signal he was ready to go. Then Dad, gripping the handles of the wheelchair, started pushing Kenny down the path. I took in the strange scene for a while. They were both talking and gesturing. Well, Kenny was gesticulating wildly, undoubtedly extolling the virtues of General Motors products. Whenever Dad took his right hand off the handgrip to return fire on Ford’s behalf, the wheelchair drifted to the right and threatened to collide with one of the benches stationed along the path. Dad almost always got it back under control before hitting the bench. I felt someone standing next to me. It was Yolanda.

“He’s done a good thing, your father,” she said. “Kenny hasn’t moved from that spot out there or said boo to anyone since he arrived. Now look at them out there talking up a storm.”

“Let’s hope the storm isn’t too violent,” I replied.

She smiled and patted my back.

I headed back to my apartment. Three burly workers seemed to be putting the final touches on the front door. It was a little hard to see, but they seemed to be buffing the door handles with some fluffy cloths. Another guy was working very hard at sweeping the sidewalk, as if he planned to eat his dinner off the concrete. There were plenty of cars parked around the building but two new Valet Parking signs ensured an open space right in front of the doors. Something was up. When I made it upstairs, I surveyed the scene in the alley below my kitchen. Three trucks were lined up waiting their turn while a team of muscle-bound guys was hand-bombing boxes from a fourth truck backed up to the loading dock. Something was definitely up.

I sat down at my kitchen table to see what activity there might have been on the blog in my absence and then to start drafting my next post. I planned to write about the steady growth in women enrolled in medical school and law school, to the extent that they now equalled, and sometimes surpassed, the number of men students. But the news was not all good. The number of women enrolled in university engineering programs still lagged. Two steps forward, one step back. But progress nevertheless. I was eager to get to work on another post. I had to feed the beast, as they say.

I turned on my laptop and first checked my personal email account. There was another email from my cosmetic mag client
asking about my profile piece and when she could see it. I ignored it and was about to check the blog when my cellphone rang.

“Hello?”

“Thank Christ you picked up!” snapped the youngish man’s voice. “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last hour. Don’t you answer your phone?”

“Calm down. I’ve been at a hospital and they like us to switch to airplane mode when we’re there. Who is this, anyway?” I asked.

“First things, first. Do you manage the, what the hell’s it called again, oh yeah, the
Eve of Equality
blog?”

Uh-oh. That didn’t sound good.

“Well, um, maybe. Why? What’s going on? Who is this?”

“It’s Aaron from your
ISP
. We’re hosting your blog.”

“Well, I wouldn’t necessarily call it
my
blog. I’m just, um, peripherally involved, you know, in the back-end technical stuff.”

“What you do with your back end is totally up to you, but when your fucking blog crashes our system, that’s when I get upset. So what the hell is up with your blog?”

“What are you talking about? My fucking blog, er, I mean
the
fucking blog is fine, I think. At least it was fine this morning when I last checked it. What’s going on?”

“Well, exactly sixty-seven minutes ago, your blog’s big-ass traffic crashed our servers and knocked us completely offline!”

In an instant, I clicked the shortcut on my desktop to take me to
Eve of Equality
. Error. Grey screen. Nothing.

“Hey, no site,” I said.

“Hey, no shit,” he said.

“That makes no sense! I only have about two readers and I’m one of them. What do you mean, my blog crashed your servers? I don’t get it.”

“I promise you, you’ve got more than two readers, now. Never seen a spike in hits like that in such a short time. I don’t know what triggered it, but at 2:56 this afternoon, the tsunami started. We crashed out at 3:39. No one noticed around here until we went dark.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. There must be some mistake. It must be someone else’s blog. I just went live yesterday. I don’t have traffic. I have a trickle.”

“Look, you’re not listening. It’s your fucking blog, all right,” he snapped. “I’m looking at the analytics right now. They’re off the charts. At 2:56, you hit the big time. Shit, I would never have agreed to host you if I’d known you were going to pull this many clicks. You said you expected light to moderate traffic at best. You were wrong by a pretty fucking big margin and we were down for twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes is a lifetime when you’re a hosting service.”

“I’ve got nothing for you. I’m stumped. I have no idea what happened. Must be some kind of coding error,” I said. “Hey, if you were only down for twenty minutes, why isn’t my blog back up?”

“If I’d put you back up, we’d have crashed out again. I’ve put everyone else back up except you. And I’m done with you. You’re
way too much for my shop. I don’t have near the capacity to carry you. You’re out.”

“So what do I have to do get back up?”

“I’ll have to migrate you to a big-boy hosting service. The sooner the better. Like right now.”

At that stage, I still didn’t know what the hell had happened, but I focused on getting the blog back up as it might hold the answer. It took two hours on a three-way call with my disgruntled mom-and-pop-shop
ISP
and the largest web-hosting operation in the southern U.S. I took great pains to preserve my anonymity. That was critical. I never once gave my name, and I constantly referred to my specific role as just an intermediary between the
ISP
and the actual blogger. Had it been possible, I would have done the call from a pay phone. But even if I could have found an aging and forgotten phone booth somewhere in Orlando, it certainly would not have provided Wi-Fi or even a flat surface on which to rest my laptop, and both were necessary as we managed the migration of the blog from one hosting service to another. So I used my cellphone for the lengthy three-way call. I had no other option.

Just after eleven that night,
Eve of Equality
flickered to life again on my laptop, supported by a much more robust network of servers. Five minutes later, I knew what had happened. I could hardly believe it, but I could see the entire chronology playing out online before my eyes, as I surfed among Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, several other social media platforms, and
my own blog. Holy shit. Holy shit. And thrice times, holy shit. My hand was trembling as it worked my mouse.

I don’t know where or how to begin to explain it. I’d been so certain the guy hosting my blog had been wrong. He had to have been wrong. I was convinced there was another explanation. There had to be. What he’d claimed had happened that afternoon seemed utterly impossible. But he was right. He’d been right all along. It had unfolded just as he had reported. It took me a while to restore normal respiration and manage the nausea.

So here goes. Looking back, it all started with one of my many innocent clicks earlier that morning. I had hit my mouse button to follow the Twitter feeds of the big three network daytime
TV
talk shows hosted by Candace Sharpe, Oprah Winfrey, and Ellen DeGeneres. I hoped that they might automatically follow the EofE Twitter stream in return. Following Candace was my undoing. Had I not followed her that morning, everything probably would have been fine. I’d still have fewer than twenty Twitter followers, and at most, a handful of people would have read my humble blog posts. But some higher authority clearly had other plans.

Candace Sharpe was quite a story all on her own. I think she’s very good and I love her meteoric rise to stardom. She is one of the very few to successfully make the jump from big-time digital/social media star to network
TV
talk show icon, and all in two years flat. Her wild ride started in Vancouver. She was just another
nameless producer at a popular radio station when she started a weekly podcast about current events and pop culture. She recorded it after-hours at the station so the sound quality was perfect. She released the podcast through iTunes, and a few of her
DJ
friends plugged it now and then on their shows. Young, hip, liberal, and smart, she offered a thoughtful, newsy, funny half-hour take on what she saw happening in the world that week. She always had a guest to play off when tackling a hot topic. Sometimes they agreed. Sometimes they didn’t. And it worked. It worked better than she or anyone else ever dreamed.

Word-of-mouth, and then the media coverage her show somehow earned drove up subscriptions to the free online podcast at a remarkable rate. It all happened so fast. One day she had a few hundred listeners, then a few thousand. Within eight weeks, she had hundreds of thousands of listeners around the world. The Internet’s great pyramid scheme flexed its muscles, and she went viral. By this stage, I was already a devoted listener.

Knowing a good thing when they saw it, major mainstream radio stations called offering her buckets of money and primetime slots if she would just bring her podcast to the traditional airwaves. She was about to sign a big syndication deal with a New York–based radio network when cable
TV
came calling. No wonder. She had never been accused of having a face for radio. Candace Sharpe looked like a ready-made
TV
star. So she bypassed radio all together and went straight to the bright lights of a leading cable station in
LA
.
Candace Conversations
started in a
late-night time slot and was an instant success. Within two months she was moved to the lucrative afternoon market to compete directly with
Oprah
and
Ellen
.

Many critics predicted she would fall on her face trying to make the move from the looser, “anything goes” world of podcasting to the more restrictive, heavily formatted and formulaic demands of mainstream television. They were wrong. She defied the odds mainly on the strength of her intelligence, personality, seemingly boundless knowledge, and voice. I think she succeeded because she truly understands and has mastered the lost art of conversation, a staple of the social media world.

Most talk shows are conversation-free zones powered by a strict Q&A format. For Candace Sharpe, talk shows are never about “interviewing” celebrities and experts. Rather, it’s all about “conversation.” And she does conversation very, very well. She is so smart, knowledgable, and engaging that it never feels like an interview, but a true conversation where she is an active participant rather than a passive moderator. She just strikes that rare and elusive perfect tone that has attracted a huge slice of the talk show television audience. In case it’s not yet clear, I’m kind of a Candace Sharpe fanboy.

Six months after
Candace Conversations
debuted on cable, she made the jump to network television with a show simply called
Candace
. You know you’ve made it when your first name is all you need. Ever since, she’s been swapping top spot in the afternoon Nielsen ratings with
Ellen
and
Oprah
. Candace Sharpe
was big. And now, somehow, I was on her radar. As far as I can tell, here’s how it all went down.