Michael McCollum - Gift

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GIFT

McCollum, Michael

If you think nuclear power is a dangerous way to generate electricity, then you obviously have not

considered the drawbacks of solar energy!

It was a cold, blustery Wednesday that first time he came into the El Dorado. It was going on midnight

and the place was deserted. Even Lucy and Suellen, our two "working girls" had given up for the night

and gone home. I recognized him immediately, of course. Even without my photographic memory, I

would have known R. J. Cowen.

"Hi," I said, "what'll it be?" I tried to be a study in friendly aloofness. I have always heard that Cowen

does not like people fawning all over him. That and the fact that he has been known to leave a

thousand-dollar bill for a tip made me keep my distance.

"You know who I am?" he asked. His voice was a low croak and his eyes were bloodshot. I

recognized the symptoms. He had the air of a man in the middle of a weeklong bender. His breath

confirmed my suspicions.

"You're R. J. Cowen, the sunscreen tycoon," I said. "Care for a drink, Mr. Cowen?"

"Yah," he said. "Uh, a scotch-and-water."

The beverage dispenser served up the scotch with its usual assortment of noises. I retired to the other

end of the bar and went back to polishing glasses. He did not taste the scotch at all. He just sat there

and stared into its dark translucence as though hypnotized. I watched him in the mirror for ten minutes,

then put the glass down and sidled back to where he was sitting. He did not take notice of me until I was

standing across from him.

"Pardon me, Mr. Cowen," I said. "It's none of my business, of course, but you look like you need a

friend. Anything I can do to help?"

He looked up with those red-rimmed eyes and sighed. "You say you know who I am."

"Yes, sir."

"Who am I?"

"Some people around this burg say you're the richest man in the world."

He nodded. "Yeah, I've heard that nasty rumor myself. The funny part of it is that it is true. I am the

richest man in the world. Not only that, I am richer than the next ten candidates combined. What do you

think of that?"

I whistled long and low. Not because it was news to me, you understand. Rather because he seemed to

expect it.

"Do you know how I got that way?" he asked, before finally taking a sip from his drink.

"Talent?" I asked.

"Like hell! It was luck. That's right. Pure, unadorned, undeserved, and unexpected dumb luck. You

want to hear the story?"

"If you want to tell it," I said. Of course, I did not know then what I was letting myself in for.

Cowen drained the glass dry and asked for another. Fizz, whirrr, plop and I had it in front of him.

Remember the Vietnam War? No, me neither. Well, it was one of those brush fire things that went on

about forty years ago. Cowen was in college at the time and dropped out to protest US involvement.

To hear him tell it, those were the best days of his life. He and a bunch of others traveled around the

country in a battered Volkswagen van. They organized demonstrations, burned draft cards, and just

generally raised hell.

Then a terrible thing happened. The war ended and Cowen was adrift. He had been one of the

hard-core protesters, a real agitator. Suddenly the cause to which he had given six years of his life was

gone. His side had won. There was nothing left to fight for. He felt like a knight who trips over the Holy

Grail on his way to saddle up his horse. (I hope you realize I am condensing this. By the time Cowen

finally got to war's end, it was almost 2:00 a.m.)

After peace broke out, Cowen just drifted. Bringing down a government had been a heady narcotic.

Nothing afterwards had been the same. He tried consumerism, environmentalism, and even Eastern

religions. Nothing gave him that same feeling of excitement he'd found in the peace movement.

"Have you ever belonged to something?" he asked me while nursing his third drink. "I don't mean the

Boy Scouts or the PTA. I mean really belonged, like everyone around you was part of your family.

That was the feeling that I had lost. It was what I was searching for. "

"Must be a great feeling," I said.

"The best," he agreed.

Eventually his search took him to Los Angeles where he met an old girl friend from the peace movement.

She had found a new cause of her own and invited him to attend a lecture on the dangers of nuclear

power.

"You have heard of nuclear power, haven't you?" Cowen asked me. He slurred the name, of course, but

it came out understandable enough.

"Sure," I said. "Used to be what they propelled submarines with, didn't it?"

He nodded. "They still use it on some of the real old boats, the ones they can't retrofit with cryogenic

storage modules. Other than that, nuclear energy has no use. Know why?'

"Sunscreens are cheaper and safer," I said.

He slammed his fist down on the bar. "Damned right they are. Now, stop interrupting, I've a story to

tell..."

That night at the lecture, Cowen had found another crusade he could give himself over to. For the next

several years that is what he had done, heart and soul. He had crisscrossed the country in that same

beat-up old Volkswagen, again organizing demonstrations and sit-ins. By 1980, they had the nukes (As

God is my witness, that's what he called them) on the run. In the fall of 1982, Cowen was on the way to

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Michael McCollum - Gift

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