POINT

“You don’t even know what freedom is.” The words crashed their way through smoke and air, landing with a resounding thump at the center of my eardrum. Kevin and I had we’re sitting out on the porch, toasting the fading September sunlight with a case of beer and cigarettes. I could hear the ember burning away, each drag giving breath to the small fire encased in a dry paper tube of smoldering tobacco leaves. I gazed out at the wavering tree line, separating the maples, birches, and oak trees into individuals and pairs, the way my slight case of OCD had taught me to do many years back. Everything is neat and orderly and makes rational and logistical sense, although in retrospect that was the oldest line of bullshit I’d snort to keep my despondency at bay. It happened less and less frequent the older I got, but some days even getting out of bed I would consider a victory.

“You know what freedom is man? Freedom is being able to wake up when you want, go to the job you own, do what you love, and have fun doing it, while making money as you’re doing work. Tom, I gotta say, you’re always so self-conscious about making money, yet you’re basically slaving away for long hours at a hard job to barely make bills to pay rent and buy food so you can’t say you don’t want to make money.” I took a heavy drink and choked back another smoke. “Can you tell me honestly, that you feel free?”

I stared at him, shifting through the immediate answers I knew to be only defensive comebacks, digging my way toward the truth and begrudgingly pulling it out. He was right in a way, I guess in the only way my ego would allow him to be while maintaining its frailly plausible Nephilim complex. Fucking money. Why does it always come down to this?

I never quite figured out why the concept of making money, and a lot of it, terrified and angered me. Part of me thinks that a large amount of money would change me, change my moral outlook, and I didn’t want to corrupt myself by working for a goal of making money so I kept to labor jobs, blue-collar city worker jobs, office hands, or pizza delivery boy where the money I made was earned through work and services. I tried the salesperson gig once back in the end of college but as it turned out, the very essence of being a salesperson is based on deception, false promises, smooth talking, and saying anything necessary so long as you made that sale. Frankly, I was never any good at lying and I’m not the kind of person to sacrifice their moral conduct for a paycheck.

As it is, I work full time as a server, bringing expensively tiny dishes to old rich folks who don’t care enough to move their cellphones and empty glasses out of the way so another dish can be properly placed on their table. Taking shit from managers, chefs, and the expo on a daily basis for things that are not in my control or responsibility is just a part of the job. Hard labor for ill efficient pay has a way of breaking down even the strongest of people, no matter for what point or purpose they have in working under such conditions. I’m not free, I’m not happy, and I know it.

“You have the ability to change the situation you are in. You can still wake up, put on your boots, and kick the world in the ass. Think about all the people struggling from physical injury or traumatic events, people who make getting up in the morning a project rather than the first steps toward the shower. How great would it be for these people to add creating music to their recovery?”

I hadn’t thought of that before but upon hearing the question, I started to see how creating music through therapy could be useful. The healing power of music was already prevalent in helping Alzheimers patients become more cognitively active, so it was not so far off to see that music could help people in many different states of therapy. Kevin continued.

“I have a cousin who’s paralyzed from the waist down and just finding the energy and motivation to get moving in the morning is hard for him. He is confined to a prison on two wheels and will never know freedom again and it hurts me to see him like that, a guy who used to be so full of life confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life and I know he’s not the only injured person who’s struggling with coping and recovery. I want to give people struggling in therapy and personal strife an outlet they can go to and use, whether it’s to create music through motion and dance, or calm themselves down during difficult exercises when each stretch creates a different groove and sound and each time they work through their pain, Puppet Master will help make their recovery process that much better.”

Helping people in pain have an easier life, now that’s a cause I could get behind. With all the difficulty we face as human beings, I’ve always gone out of my way to help people, and working for a company that wants to do just that makes me want to play as big of a role as I can. Help people, help each other, and we might just make the world a better place. 

        I’m still not entirely sure what I’ve gotten myself into. It was a hot summer day on the outskirts of Boston and I was laying hungover on the couch staring at the rotating ceiling fan, trying to find something else to occupy my time with apart from the usual habit of smoking spliffs and watching TV. The table was cluttered with beer bottles, ash trays, half smoked doobies, and an assortment of trash and leftover food from the previous night’s charades. It was about half past noon when I received a call from a college buddy of mine. “Yo Brotha! What’s good man yo, you need to come check out my new office!” I sat up curious, trying to shake the hangover out of my head; at my age, the only people who have their own office are the higher-ups, people with experience, the "real" adults, not some recently graduated kid I used to flip nug to back when times were tough. So I took down the address, rolled off my couch and headed for the door.

            As I stepped from the darkness of my cave into the outside world, the brightness nearly blinded me. The sun was blistering, beating down on the pale faces of drunks and bums lolling about the sidewalks and stoops with no better purpose than to add to the rancid smell of cigarettes, deli sandwiches, sweat, Chinese food and gutter cocktail stench of the rarely cleaned boulevard. Halfway down the street I came upon a large glass building located conveniently across from my favorite bar. It had large glass doors and a multichannel intercom. I pressed the button labeled “Golden Wish LLC” suite 202, which I had been told was the company my friend had started. Staring up at the building waiting to enter a world the likes of which I’ve not been a part of before, I wondered how in the hell someone I graduated with several months back could accomplish all of this, especially with being a full-time musician like me, who’re expected to be poor until their big break or give up music to survive. Not me; I wasn’t about to throw away a whole life’s effort for to score bigger but I’ve had days where the only sustenance that sustained me was the grimy city water pouring from my sink.

        A few seconds passed before the door buzzed and I let myself in, up the stairs down a long corridor to the end of the hall where a large wooden frame labeled “Suite 202” was located. As I reached for the handle, the door swung wide open, revealing a tall Brazilian man with long curly hair and a strangely voluptuous smile standing in the doorway. “My Brotha! What’s good?” He extended his hand and we exchanged our own urban handshake, complete with snaps and a fist bump. This is Kevin, the mastermind behind the company. Kevin pursued music and rap his whole life being told consistently by so many different haters that he can’t do what he wants because of his skin color or his heritage, only to end up graduating from Berklee College of Music and starting a company with enough invested to afford a real office space, while you can bet all his haters still live at home back in the town they grew up in. When it comes to business, Kevin doesn’t fuck around.

           He led me into a large corner office painted a pale shade of white. In the middle, a large wooden desk with four of the biggest MacBooks I’ve ever seen occupied the center of the room. There were two side spaces; one a studio stocked with monitors, a mixing board, and various keyboards and instruments, and the second, an extension of the main room off to the side with a white leather couch positioned across from a guitar and corresponding amp, and a new Xbox beside a T.V. His desk was seated at the back corner amidst two walls of windows allowing the afternoon sunlight to cascade into the room filling it with a warm natural lighting. I was stunned; this was more than legit, this was professional as all hell. There was even a fridge and liquor table next to the couch. I immediately wanted to be a part of whatever was going on.

           “So what do you think man?” Kevin grinned, leaning back in his recliner chair, putting his feet up on the dark wooden desk to rest beside his black and gold desk name tag labeled “Kevin ANA Clark - Golden Wish, CEO” while elegantly pouring himself a tall Jack Daniels, neat, and offering one to me. He directs his attention toward a small white pyramid shaped object in the middle of his desk. It was made of an odd shiny plastic and had a camera protrouting out from on one side. “This is Point, a prototype camera I’ve been developing for my motion controlled operating system. Basically what it does is it tracks your every body motion and relays them into the musical aspect of the program, Puppet Master, which then takes the corresponding motions and converts them into music, instruments, beats, drums, whatever you can think of and program it to do. Whether you’re dancing, doing yoga, exercising, therapy, painting, making pots or purely in need of entertainment, any one of any age can use Point to be the Puppet Master of their music. What do you think man? Do you want to be a part of this?”

           I looked back at Kevin trying to sensify the incredible creativity behind his pitch; what he was essentially making was a way for anyone to be able to create music, and not just for commercial sale but personal benefit as well as healing and constructive entertainment. I thought about how difficult it must be to keep that kind of structure and balance and realized this is a program that would require the users to bring out their own creative sense and rhythm in order to better the music their bodies could create as well as themselves. The fact that he wanted me to be a part of it as well was all a bit much. I took a gulp of whiskey and thought about it for a while; it wasn’t the glamorous, limo-infested, shorting cocaine off hookers rockstar life I’d been secretly hoping for, but Kevin has his own company, product, app, office space, and liquor table, and he was offering a part of it to me; how many people can say they have that right out of college?

          Here’s me though, a struggling artist with minimal marketing experience wondering how I could possibly be of help to a company that already has foreign investors calling my friend and scheduling meetings in other countries, their travel plans on visiting his company, and the precarious amount of local and foreign investments. I was still wrapping my head around the idea of motion controlled music when my eyes returned to the fancy “CEO” name tag on the desk. The letters ANA were positioned between his first and last name, which puzzled me. “It stands for Andrew Nada Anatta,” Kevin picked up the label and turned it over in his hand. “One is the name my parents gave to me and the other is the name my soul gave to me.”

          He took a swig of whiskey before recalling his trip to India, how he had stayed with monks and visited Buddhist holy sites, eating and living off the land and learning the movements of the earth and himself., “Nada Anatta came to be on a mountain top. I was visiting a site I had been researching called Vulture’s Peak. I woke up at 4 in the morning and climbed to the top of the mountain to meditate, reading a book of Buddhist teachings.” He took another sip and looked at me. “The truth is, after some time of pure tranquility and peace, I started hallucinating. I couldn’t tell if it was the altitude or dehydration or an acid flash back, but I was tripping at the top of a mountain and I kept hearing this voice calling out from the mountain and in the air, from inside me and the pages in my book: Nada Anatta, Nada Anatta. Nada Anatta. The voice,” He made swirling gestures with his hands, “It was like when you hear your mother calling your name. The particulars in her pitch and tone identify it as specifically her voice and it is very familiar to you. Well this one came from within me and for a while I didn’t even know what it was.” He stood up, his eyes leveling with mine. “But what I took away from it all is that this great self discovery didn’t come from India, but from inside me. My journey there helped point me in the direction I needed to go, but ultimately it was me and my own vision that created the man who came back. I am Nada Anatta, a selfless vibration, humming at every atom to collide with my existence and there is not a soul who can tell me that I can’t do this, that I can’t do what I want or that I won’t get very far. I have already overcome them before they’ll ever arrive. All I need is to want to do it, and I can.”