At First Sight

Chapter 8

Seconds later I was back on the street, sleet washing my head, running down my back.

I still had options. The Brooklyn Bridge was only a few miles away. I could give these Wall Street assholes a great headline. I should've cabbed over there and jumped. If I had, I'd be way ahead of where I am now. But that isn't what I did. Instead, I did something much worse.

Somehow, I found my way to the Hertz Rent a Car in downtown Manhattan. Somehow, I managed to rent a blue Ford Taurus. Somehow, I got out of New York City. I didn't really know where I was going. The windshield wipers clicked and clacked. I was out of options. My tortured thoughts circled the edge of this new business dilemma like a hungry wolf at the edge of a campfire. I drove for hours and hours, not even knowing where I was going… not caring. I vaguely remember Arlington, then Myrtle Beach. I drove without stopping, except for gas. My mind was chewing on all the terrible consequences of my life, starting with my father's death…

Okay. As long as I brought it up, let's get on that broken-down mule for a minute. When I was a child, my father always seemed to me like somebody who had all the answers. He wasn't some big-time show-biz powerhouse, I admit, but he was funny and smart. He could make you laugh, make you believe. An agent.

He loved Hollywood Park… loved the ponies.

He was always taking me to the track. Money was power, he told me. And he bet heavily, trying to become more powerful. He let me pick horses and taught me how to read the racing sheet. I learned to handicap by going to the track with him at dawn, studying workout times and injury reports just like all the other six-thirty railbirds. Once, when I was ten, I got a four-horse parlay, won three hundred dollars. I started carrying wads of money around. I was only in fifth grade, but I learned that my father was right. Money was power, even in elementary school.

Mom didn't get it. She was always bitching about Dad losing the egg money, because lots of times he did. She didn't understand that money won was twice as valuable as money earned.

But Dad understood that, and so did I.

Ever since childhood, I've been a regular at the Jockey Club. When I was in the chips a few years back, a lot of my dot-corn bonus cash went right through the pari-mutuel window. Call it a learned behavior, a conditioned response. Dad was Chick Sr. I was Chick Jr. We lived in a parallel universe. The rest of the world ran in the next lane over. He got to drink and screw the B-girls at the Paddock Bar. I went to elementary school and flashed my track cash. Got my first piece of ass in eighth grade when I bought the girl a fifty-dollar ring and got laid in return. I was fourteen. Talk about a defining moment.

Then came the night when dear old Dad ruined it. The night he got drunk and put the silver Jag into the bridge abutment. They had to cut him out of the car. He came out in four pieces.

Since I didn't get my mother's vibe at all, I had focused everything on Dad. I wanted to be like him even though I'm not sure I even knew who he was. He was a big, happy guy in a checkered coat who taught me that people will respect you if you've got cash in your wallet and bullshit on your lips. Mostly what I liked about him was he paid attention to me. I thought it was about me back then, but as I grew older and gained insight into what motivates people, I realized it wasn't about me at all. It was about him. I was the only person in his life who gave a shit what he thought.

We buried him at Forest Lawn and I remember thinking back then that it was pretty much over the day they closed his casket. You see, my one goal in life had been to please him, to one day make him proud of me. And then, before I could do it, he took off for the big paddock in the sky. I was only fifteen when he died.

I was left to be raised by women-my mother and grandmother. What a hen party that was. They clucked and prodded, complained and bitched. My grades were never good enough, my hair never short enough, my girlfriends never refined enough. Then, under all this criticism, I sort of started to veer toward drugs and sleazy women, just like Dad. I went into the army, where I heroically defended my post on Wilshire Boulevard, winning the war of one-liners. Afterward, it was a decade-long party that ended with six months in the Hawaii State Prison.

Through all of this, I slowly began to form a different opinion of my father. More and more, I've come to realize that Dad was just a loser with a great line of b. S. A guy who nobody listened to except sleazy women and a son who had nobody else. So, the hero of my youth slowly became an emotional stone around my neck. As an adult, I came to hate what he stood for and prayed I wouldn't end up the same way. I actually threw away my two checkered sport coats the day this realization finally dawned.

I grew up with no real male role models-nobody to try to be like. So whom did I eventually choose? Pop culture assholes. The celebrities in People magazine. First, it was drug-culture rock bands, then investment sleaze balls like Ivan Boesky and John Delorean. I lusted after all the things that the product machines on Madison Avenue told me were cool. I didn't like who I was, so I bought everything these false prophets and culture hucksters told me would validate me. I blew money on exotic cars, dressed out of GQ, put almost a quarter of a million dollars into the sound system in an office so large you could use it to play half-court basketball. I married a woman other people wanted to fuck. She gave great blow jobs but had thoughts so thin they disappeared completely in a flurry of demands, complaints, and recriminations.

The age-old loser questions started waking me up at night. How did I get here?

What do I really want?

Why am I so damn unhappy?

And then the big, scary ones: Am I turning into my father? Is that why nobody takes me seriously?

These were the things I was thinking as I pushed the little blue Taurus south out of the sleet of New York City, onto the cracked, dry roads of Virginia, heading nowhere special, not knowing where I was going until I got there.

I drove all afternoon, into the night, my mind elsewhere, yearning for something I was unable to even describe.

You'll never guess where I ended up. Or, maybe you already have. I ended up in front of Paige Ellis's house on a residential street in Charlotte, North Carolina.

It was 10 P. M. on the night my whole life changed.