Ring of Fire

Chapter 2

Wally Gibbs was an idea man.

Sometimes the ideas would come from out of nowhere, plucked from the heavens and arriving fully formed. Often they would come from people, people who frequently thought the ideas were their own, but Wally recognized half-baked notions for what they were. And if he subsequently spent the time and energy to transform someone else's half-baked notion into his own fully-baked bundt cake, complete with a vanilla glaze, then the idea was rightfully Wally's. His brain was brimming with intellectual ingredients carelessly tossed aside by their original owners and into Wally's mixing bowl. After all, one man's discards could form the basis of another man's career.

Wally's career, at least the quarter-century of it spent at Food Barn, Chicago's third-largest grocery chain, had abruptly ended after upper management had gotten wind of his latest endeavor.

He had tried to sell the database for Food Barn's customer loyalty program (the Price Watchdog Network, or "PAWN" for short) under the table to Quail-on-a-Stick, a frozen, boneless, seasoned quail meat product sold on a skewer, eight to a box. By cross-referencing weight and age, Wally had produced a list of 500,000 overweight seniors who would appreciate the product's low sodium content. Cleverly, this same list could also be sold to a snack cake company.

Bouncing back was just a matter of reinventing himself. Wally had heard somewhere that those who can't do--or are legally prohibited from doing so for a one-year period--teach.

Wally had built a career on bullshit, and could sling it with the best of them, but teaching perplexed him. He was not prepared for the staggering amount of information he was expected to impart to one hundred Journalism 170 students twice weekly. Wally functioned better in sound bites. To a man coming from the world of the thirty-second commercial, seventy-five minutes was an eternity.

Deliverance arrived in late September in the form of Anjali Sawhney, a journalism grad student and also his assigned teacher's assistant. Anjali was to be his Girl Friday while she completed her master's work. Not only had Anjali taken J170, and fairly recently, she had completed a veritable laundry list of other courses beginning with "J" that Wally thought would come in handy.

She had a tendency to look down when she spoke, which was infrequently. Of Indian descent, Anjali was light-skinned and petite with a thick black braid that hung down her back like a gym class rope. Wally didn't peg her for an athlete, but her attire usually consisted of sweatpants and a hoodie bearing the school's logo. Most of Wally's female students were spilling out of their tops and looked as if they had used corn oil and a vacuum pump to squeeze into their tourniquet-like shorts, but Anjali was essentially amorphous.

Wally was unsure of how to make the best use of her. Certainly she could get him coffee, intercept calls from Dean Hodges and such, but how could she further his own ambitions? After a few weeks of cautiously dancing around each other, Anjali proved her worth. When Wally returned to class from an unplanned bathroom break, his initial indignation quickly surrendered to relief.

Anjali was teaching the class.

"What's this?" he asked, scratching his straw-colored goatee.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said, "but someone had an interesting question. We were just kicking it around until you got back."

"Well. Please continue." Anjali led the students in a boisterous dialogue of whether advertising influenced popular culture or merely reflected it. Wally learned quite a bit.

She apologized afterward. "That wasn't supposed to happen, Dr. Gibbs; I'm just your assistant." He smiled at the sound of his new, self-appointed title. Though Wally held no advanced degrees, he was appalled at the thought of earning the respect of a bunch of snot-nosed XBox junkies and had therefore exaggerated his academic credentials a tad.