2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [3]
As Brad headed home with Lola in the front seat and two of his real friends, Herb Fine and Jack Eller, in the back, his mind started to wander. He missed his wife, who had died seven years earlier, but he felt great physically, certainly for his age, and he had no real material wants. He owned his condo outright, and with Social Security, plus his retirement from the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, he could pay his bills. The hair transplants that had cost him a fortune in his thirties turned out to be his best investment. Fifty years later he still had something to comb. And his posture was still that of a younger man; the older-age stoop he had always been afraid of had never come.
He did desire a girlfriend and felt something might be wrong with him when he occasionally looked at Lola the wrong way, but other than that, he was doing as well as could be expected. Sometimes, though, he cursed the memory drugs that were making Alzheimer’s a thing of the past. It was funny how people could get nostalgic for anything, even a disease. “Remembering the bad things,” Brad would say, “is not such a plus.”
“Hey, schmuck!” Herb said. “You’re going past my complex, wake up!”
Brad pulled over to a gated apartment building. Almost everything was gated where the older folks lived. Some places had a human inside a guard shack; other complexes, like the one Herb lived in, had gates and cameras and sometimes a robot figure, but no live person.
Brad drove up to the camera. Herb rolled down the window and looked straight into the lens, and after a second the gate opened. “I swear to God,” Herb said, “these eye things give me the worst headache. They can’t be good for you.”
“They don’t do any harm,” Jack told him. “If you’ve got a headache, you’re not peeing enough.”
“I’m peeing fine! What are you, the Internet?” Herb got out of the car. “Happy birthday, Brad.”
“Thanks, Herb. Are you going to play golf tomorrow?”
“Seven o’clock.”
“Meet you at seven.” And Brad drove off, leaving Herb to go through one more eye check to get in the door.
“You’re going to give me a tumor!” he yelled at the machine.
Jack Eller didn’t live in a gated anything. He was the poorest of Brad’s friends and still lived in a retirement home with no protection and no real services to speak of. Eller had never married. He’d lived with a woman for twelve years and helped raise her son, but when that relationship broke up he never met anyone else. It didn’t bother him that much—he was one of those people who were okay being alone—but Jack made a fatal mistake moneywise. He did not diversify. He put all his retirement back into the company he worked for, a successful energy business based out of Houston, Texas. When its stock went from 190 to 3, Jack was wiped out. And when the company was sold for nothing, that was exactly what he was left with.
He found other employment, but it never compared to the good years, and now he waited each month for his Social Security check. It was his lifeline.
One day, years earlier, when Jack Eller was turning sixty, he ran into the boy he’d helped raise. The boy, now seventeen, didn’t recognize him at first, but even when he did he showed no interest. Jack couldn’t get over how angry the kid was and he had no idea that the boy had joined the “resentment gangs”—the same gangs Kathy Bernard hung out with. By 2023 you could find them in every city in America.
* * *
Kathy Bernard would be considered pretty by almost any standard, but she certainly didn’t feel that way herself. At nineteen years old she looked twenty-four, stood almost five foot eight, and weighed 118 pounds. She had beautiful black hair that she wore long, and with pale skin and light green eyes, she looked almost European. Kathy seemed to go out of