Invincible 5: A New Product
This is part five in a seven-part serial that will run every Tuesday and Thursday for the remainder of March. This piece was included in full in our recent collection of spiritual writing, Spiritus Oppidum, Vol. 1. Past and future online installments can be found here.
Shortly after, I hit the jackpot.
The company I worked for had, years earlier, come up with a form of painkiller that, with its time-release formulation, provided pain relief for twelve full hours. It was a big deal, the first of its kind, a product of massive import, and it was very profitable. Thing was, its patent was scheduled to run out, which meant generic competition and lower profits were just over the horizon.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, I was put to work developing a new product, another opiate-based painkiller with a time-release formulation, to take its place as our flagship (i.e. patent-protected and thus incredibly profitable) product. I succeeded at my task on a grand scale. The head honchos were again blown away not only with my single-mindedness and quality of work, but now my “unparalleled dedication to the company’s vision” (and no doubt their unparalleled profits, too). It was approved and went to market back in the mid-1990s. I was given another monster raise, doubling my already embarrassing salary. Your friend and humble narrator, Maurice McBride, was again upwardly mobile.
After the first-year revenues from my creation were tallied up, life began to move at breakneck speed. In a mere five years, eighty percent (yes, eighty) of my employer’s profits came solely from my brainchild. I was in high cotton, living large and loving every minute of it. I replaced Suzy with another exotic car even more beautiful and expensive than she had been, a feat I previously wouldn’t have thought possible. The manufacturers even flew me out to their assembly plant in a helicopter so I could watch the workers put the last few pieces on. Most days, though, I could still be found in the lab – my home away from home – working my ass off like it was going out of style. At that time I could still look in the mirror and see an honest man.
It was not long after I purchased Jenny that I caught myself feeling the first phantoms, the first…actually, I’m not sure what word would best describe them. The first twinges? The first pangs? The first (and false) somethings of privilege, thoughts that had managed to sneak up on me out of the blue, like a home invader who has gained access to a house through a forgotten – and thus, unlocked – door. And why not? Wasn't I the hotshot chemist who had just set the medical industry on its ear? I mean, c’mon…I drove a fancy car that cost what well-paid people make in ten years; I had my own tables at any high-end restaurant you could think of; the CEO and I were on a first-name basis; if I needed to know what time it was, a Rolex told me. I was Maurice McBride, inventor of the world’s most-prescribed painkiller. Maurice McBride, the guy who busted his ass since day one and made his bones the old-fashioned way: with his wits. Maurice McBride, sometime TV personality and medical journal columnist.
Maurice McBride. Invincible.
The years rolled by. Money rolled in. I found myself in the laboratory --the place where, be it in my parents’ shed or my employers’ swanky corporate headquarters, I had essentially spent my life – less and less often. Instead, there were meetings. Meetings with accountants, lawyers, and advertising firms. Oh, and lunches. Lunches with insurance company reps, lunches with innumerable CEOs from innumerable hospitals and other organizations. Speaking engagements at resorts from the Caribbean to Paris to Macau and back again. At first I felt strange, having always been such a hands-on kind of guy. But this much is the truth: it doesn’t take too many expense-account “business trips”, free 18-hole games of golf on world-class courses, and private jet flights to make a man forget such things. Now and then my father’s words about money and the curious way it had of transforming a person would briefly, like an errant billiard ball, skitter across the felt of my mind. Briefly.
Part of me, the Moe who had once put bleach in a cat’s dish to see what would happen, the Moe who had all but forsaken wine, women, and song in favor of an education so I could prevent the next person from suffering like my grandfather did, cried out. That Moe knew there was something wrong. Example? I had more money and personal time now than ever before, and I still wasn’t spending much of it with my parents or my siblings and their families. As time went on, not even my nieces and nephews bothered to call me. I meant to see them, to stay in touch– always meant to – but things… things just always seemed to come up. There were too many fast cars, too much jet-setting, too many three-martini surf-and-turf lunches.
Too much goddamned money.
Having struggled my whole life up to that point, coming from my no-frills working-class background, I never would have dreamed those four words could exist together in a sentence in that particular order. Much less that I would utter them. I loved it, though.
God forgive me, I really did.