A conference room doubles as a tomb for public offerings. You'd think there'd be an altar where the victim-initiate-corporate counsel-or-principal stockholder would have his commodious member pierced with the quill of a porcupine, his blood to flow down a groove in a pink granite trough to pool into an inkwell for the final signing, the fainting victim ushered on a stretcher to recuperate in the finest of hospitals, assuming trauma from excessive blood loss didn't kick in, impairing the faculties of the man-god. No fear: before the ceremony he was well-feted, wined and dined.
His bold decisions and thoughts-outside-the-box were advertised in several self-help books, and in paler imitations and one-offs that are the highest kind of flattery. His name had been attached to a weight-loss and exercise book, and a cookbook for quick but healthy nouveau cuisine. The Aspen Institute had contracted him to utter platitudes about saving the African poor via market innovation; Charlie Rose had stared across the roundtable like the maitre'd he was.
Yet nothing had prepared him for this ultimate challenge. Now he lay in his hospital bed, blanched and withered violet, such an unsuitable end to this executive-cum-corporate raider-cum mountain climber-sky diver-daredevil-philanthropist. In the semi-retirement he'd thought he'd been entitled to enjoy, he'd opened a chain of gyms and a discount furniture store.
Where was the mystique now? his member swaddled in cotton gauze changed all too seldomly by the male nurse practitioners chosen to preclude any life-threatening tumescence. Here he was, Prometheus without a liver to peck. Then yes: idea, light in brain! A personal memoir about his crawl to recovery, although some details, the more embarassing ones at least, would need to be suppressed quietly.
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