Chapters

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Eamon Smith, CEO of the Smith and Bellar marketing agency, has taken an afternoon on the small dock behind his Hutchinson Island home to talk with us about his experience as a young man in the New American Republic during the Transition. One of the kitchen staff occasionally comes by to deliver or take away dishes and refresh our drinks.

I was 10 when the President made his announcement. I didn't quite know what it meant. All I knew was that we kept getting phone calls from our family in California telling us we should pack up everything and move as soon as possible. "They're gonna turn ya'll back into slaves!" That was my aunt Lisa. Crazy woman. Can you believe people were talking like that? And it wasn't just the black folks, it was a lot of people. I don't know if they were trying to get us riled up so they could win the new elections or if they genuinely believed all the, if you'll excuse my language, bullshit they were saying. Well, my dad wasn't about to skip town just because a bunch of fools on TV hadn't seen the south but in movies. He spent his whole life building his company, now my company, making a place for my mom, my brother and me. He told us to hold tight, stay calm and try to act like nothing important was any different than it had ever been.

Truth was, nothing important was all that different. I still had to get up every day to go to school, still had to stop Johnny from sneaking into my room to look at the girlie mag I kept hidden in the vent. The biggest thing to change was the TV. I was pissed off that I couldn't watch a lot of the shows I liked just because the Transition made getting broadcast rights a bitch. Sure, I could just get whatever I wanted to watch on the Internet, but I had to be quiet about it. My dad, he'd read me the riot act every time he caught me downloading something. "That's somebody's hard-earned dollar you're taking," he'd say. A real man of principles. Made my life that much harder. Of course, if he hadn't been such a security guard for the corporate interests of America, whatever that was anymore, I'd never have learned the most important lessons of my life.

Care to enlighten us?

Sure. See, I still downloaded my shows, I just had to be careful about it. At school we had one of those candy-selling fundraisers to put in a new baseball diamond or something. First prize was a new netbook. You remember those things? Nah, you're too young for that. Anyway, I worked my little butt to the bone selling those cut-rate chocolate bars. I'll tell you, I learned more about marketing that spring than in four whole years of business school. Well, I got my prize. I'd pop over to the cafe down the street, hop on that firehose of free wi-fi and download everything. And that's the way you've gotta do everything you're "not supposed to do" in the New. You just gotta have the resources and the know-how.

Computers and TV shows, perhaps. But does this translate to more serious things? Marijuana? Abortion? Gay marriage?

Shit, I hear this stuff all the time, like you can't get whatever you want in this country, sometimes easier than up north. Go watch some news footage of that mess in Vermont and tell me the RNE is more civilized than us. Anything you wanna get can be got in the NAR. Like I said, resources and know-how. No papers to fill out, no records to keep, no government doctors making you say "ahh" every time you wanna have some fun or take care of something that isn't anybody's business but your own. And another thing, if things were so bad down here for the gays, why do you suppose my senior accounts executive Phil and his partner Harvey just bought that house in Madison Square? Those two have more rights and pay less in taxes every year than me and Martha. Wanna know why? Well, to start, Harvey's a lawyer.

Is it really that easy?

Of course not, but is anything worth doing ever easy? So there's a lot of stuff you have to do to get what you want and no instruction manual. There also aren't a bunch of roaming morality police on the streets, contrary to what some chowder-eating individuals might say. Life here is good, provided you know how to make it good. I've got no complaints.