After his father’s funeral a year ago, Stanley decided that he had had enough. He’d quit his latest job, which he must have had for at least a month, and ceremoniously closed the garage doors of his inheritance to the broken down cars of the world, and moved in. He considered it to be a pretty hip move, the first hip move he’d made in his life. Other people in downtown New York lived in trendy lofts that had formerly been warehouses. What’s wrong with a gas station?

The question that hung in the petrol-smelling air was, Now what? What do I do with the rest of my life? Stanley asked himself over and over. He had enough money to get by, but he still felt he hadn’t made his mark on the world. He was certainly right about that.

Stanley discovered something that up till now had been totally unfamiliar to him. Ambition. It awakened in his soul when he finally discovered his true calling.

At night he’d lay his portly body on the slipcovered couch and aim his remote control at the television that he’d rigged to the lift that formerly raised sickly cars into the air. But no matter what was on, he’d always find himself switching back to the shows on Free-Speech television. It was a cable station that by law had to be made available to anyone who wanted access. As a result, many programs made their way onto the air that were astonishingly bad, with their poor production values, lame content, and wacky hosts. So bad they made you stop and look, like the scene of an accident.

Stanley found them entertaining.

“I can do better than that,” he finally cried. “I must go on the air!”

Armed with a video camera, he had hit the streets of New York. People took to him, just as his coworkers had. Everyone he interviewed told him their hard luck stories. I should have been a shrink, he often thought. Before long he had a segment called “Gripe du jour” that became very popular. There was no end to the number of people willing to stand in front of the camera and vent.

“The idiot at the deli handed me my coffee in a soggy brown bag and to make matters worse, the lid wasn’t on properly. The bag broke and the coffee went all over my coat,” someone screamed to him the other day. “I hate that!”

Finally, even Stanley had had enough. He thought of starting a show on healing but soon realized there were too many of those already. Then, walking home last week with a camera full of taped gripes, including those of a bunch of tourists in Times Square who did nothing but complain about the subways, Stanley was truly dispirited. He reached his front door, unlocked it, and gratefully walked inside.