Los Angeles, California
Fuck me, man. What is Cleto talking about? I can’t understand a word. He’s just barking all mad dog at me, spit flying from his mouth, sweat dripping from his big shaved head. He’s pissed. I can tell. His shirt is off and he’s pounding his chest with his fists, slapping the tattoo of the two skeletons buttfucking over his heart. He keeps saying stuff, but I don’t know what it means. He knows I don’t speak Spanish.
Naldo and Ramón. Those fuckers. They just rolled up on me and next thing I know my nose is broken, my bottom teeth are sticking through my lip, and I’m clotheslined by the driveway. Seeing stars. Really. Little bursts of light, like flashbulbs.
Amigos, what the fuck?
There must be some mistake. It’s me. Russell.
I want to say something but I can’t get any air. I think my jaw is broken too.
Cleto yelled some more and they stopped kicking me. Fucking Naldo and his cowboy boots. He kicked me so hard it feels like I have exit wounds. I’m pretty sure I broke a rib. Maybe two. And my shirt. Shit. My tofu festival T-shirt. What are they thinking? It’s collectible, man. The tofu festival only comes once a year.
I’m trying to tell them this as they pick me up off the ground. But they can’t hear me. It was a mistake only taking one year of Spanish in high school. If I could habla, I’m sure we could work this all out.
Naldo is holding me up, but I can’t see much. Something’s wrong with one of my eyes, like it’s dislocated. No, it’s my neck. I can’t hold my head up; it just bounces around like those stupid bobblehead dolls you get at Dodger Stadium. I can’t control the bobbling. It bobbles left, then right, then back. Bobble, bobble. I see the ground, the street. There are bright dark blotches on the pavement. My blood. Naldo’s boots. Bobble, bobble. The wheels of the car.
Why can’t I control my head?
Cleto helps me out. He grabs my hair and lifts my head up so I can see him. I start talking, but it just sounds like gargling. There’s too much blood in my mouth. That can’t be good.
Cleto looks me in the eye.
“You are gonna fuckin’ die, hijo de puta.”
I try to explain. Doesn’t he understand that it’s just a little correction? The market does this all the time. In another month everything will be back where it was, maybe higher. It’s certainly no reason to do anything drastic. Everyone, KLD Research and Analytics, Price Target, the Jaywalk Consensus, they all said hold Not sell. Hold.
Hold on tight, everything will be all right.
I try to explain this to Cleto, but my mouth won’t work. I sound like a cow. I’m mooing. Cleto looks at me and shakes his head.
“Throw this piece of shit in the trunk and let’s go.”
Now he speaks English?
Naldo and Ramon pick me up and throw me in the trunk of Cleto’s car. If I wasn’t already numb from the beating, that would’ve hurt. Naldo leans in and smiles at me. I try to talk again. Weren’t we friends? Didn’t I tell you to invest in Genentech (NYSE: DNA)? Didn’t you double your money when Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) split?
Naldo whispers some advice in my ear: “Don’t bleed on
Cleto’s car, ese.”
Then he shut the lid.
It’s dark in the trunk. I go fetal. I can’t help it. There is no other way to get comfortable. I suppose that’s the point. They’re trying to teach me a lesson. I shouldn’t have hesitated. I should’ve made the trade, taken a small loss, protected the nut. Okay. I get that. But it’s not like it’s a washout. Not like that stupid computer stock I had. Cleto’s money is safe — well, as safe as it can be.
I wish I could explain it to him. It’s not like I had him in volatile stocks. I didn’t put his money in junk bonds. I mean, c’mon man, Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), Eastman Kodak (NYSE: EK), these are not dogs we’re talking about. They may not be blue chip, but they’re blue chipish Right? They took a dive. Okay. I see that. But it’s not like they’re over. He’s got seventy grand in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), for fuck’s sake. It’ll all bounce back; he just has to be patient. Stocks go up, stocks go down. It’s what they do. Cleto needs to relax and enjoy the journey, think of it as an “E” ticket experience — the Cyclone at Coney Island, the Colossus at Magic Mountain, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — it’s supposed to be fun.
I feel the car shake to life. The big V-8 under the hood rumbles awake and the steel body trembles like it’s actually afraid of all that power. I’m not really a fan of muscle cars; the gas mileage is terrible, the cost of insurance is ridiculous, but they do look cool and it’s fun to cruise around with the top down at night.
I’m also not really a fan of the monster bass tube sub-woofer he had installed in the trunk. My back was pressed up against it when it kicked in and it felt like Naldo’s boots had somehow reached through the trunk to paste my kidneys a few more times. The fucking rivets are buzzing and popping, trying to escape the metal with each thump of the kick drum and snap of the bass. It sounds like a beehive of pissed-off steel. What the fuck is Cleto listening to? Oh shit. I know this song. It’s “Frijolero” by Molotov.
No me digas beaner,
Mr. Puñetero
Te sacaré un susto
por racista y culero.
No me llames frijolero,
Pinche gringo puñetero.
Naldo once translated this song for me. It’s roughly, “Don’t call me beaner, you fucking racist asshole.”
Is he playing the song for my benefit? I think he is, and this kind of hurts my feelings. I don’t deserve that. I’m not a racist and I never called him a beaner or anything else like that.
I thought Cleto was my friend.
I didn’t start out as a day trader. I didn’t even know what a day trader was. I came to Los Angeles to be a screenwriter. Well, honestly, I came to Los Angeles to be a director. But the easiest way to becoming a director is to be a screenwriter first. That’s the way it works. You write a couple of hit movies that someone else directs — some guy with a ponytail who wears jeans and drives a Porsche — and then it’s your turn. Pretty soon you don’t have to write the scripts, you sit in your Hollywood Hills home and give the writer notes over the phone while some aspiring actress gives you a blowjob, then you hike up your jeans and get in your Porsche.
Of course, now that I say it, now that I know better, it sounds hopelessly naïve. But what did I know? Nothing. I was fresh off the bus. Now I understand how it works. I’ve wised up. I have learned the one important truth, the most absolute vodka-clear truth about Hollywood. I’ll share this with you, but honestly, I hate to sound like one of them, you know, the wannabes that never quite made it. So try not to think of me as bitter. I’m not.
The big stinking truth with a capital T is that no one in this town — and I mean not one single living person — gives a flying fuckadoodle-do about you, your script, and whatever talent you think you might have. They don’t. Deal with it.
But I didn’t know that when I came to town. I figured it might take a few years, but one day I’d have the jeans, the ponytail, the Porsche, and a three-picture deal. I was clueless and hopeful and staked with a small inheritance I got when my grandpa died.
I didn’t really know my grandpa that well. When I was little he used to take me fishing for catfish. You know, where you glob that bait on the hook — the bait that looks and smells exactly like fresh dog poo — and throw the line in the river with a big sinker on it. Then you wait for the catfish to swim up to your big stinky piece of shit in the murky bottom of the river and eat it. Then you just reel ’em in. It’s about as exciting as taking out the trash.
My grandpa would fry the catfish when we got home, but I couldn’t eat anything that liked to eat shit. Sorry. Just not for me.
After I went to high school I kinda lost touch with him, and after college I didn’t even get a Christmas card. But then he was dead and he gave me over a hundred thousand dollars in his will. That cash was my screenwriting fund. I could stay in my apartment and just work. Like a real writer. No day job to distract me.
In fact, the only real distraction I found was this website by Mandy LaFrance. She was a Tulane University co-ed who liked to cruise the French Quarter for guys to blow. Mandy was awesome. She didn’t even take the guys into the bathroom. She’d just drop to her knees in a crowd and go to it, then she’d post the pictures and a kind of play-by-play description of these fellatio sorties on her website. I was in love with her. Not like really “in love.” She had a boyfriend; he was the guy who took all the photos of her sucking cock. When I say I was in love with her, it’s more that I admired and respected her audacity, her gumption, her take-no-prisoners attitude. She was like the opposite of a catfish. A barracuda, maybe. Plus, I liked to look at the pictures and beat off.
There. I said it.
But who could blame me? As a busy screenwriter, I didn’t have time to go out on dates or maintain girlfriends — there would be time for that after I was famous, then I’d be out at the Tropicana or the Skybar, all those kinds of places. But in the beginning I needed to stay in and work.
I did this for about a year, hardly spending any of my money, but eventually I realized that it was dwindling, it might actually run out before I got an agent and a six-figure paycheck. So I took a weekend workshop called the “Millionaire’s Club.” It was supposed to teach me how to make my money work for me. Like it was an employee.
I don’t think I got much out of the seminar. Really. I didn’t want to get all tied up in real estate and evicting old people and bidding on probate cases. That had bad karma written all over it. But I was intrigued by this day trading idea. You know what I mean? Like, how hard could it be? You buy a stock at a certain price, wait for it to go up, and then sell it. Buy low, sell high. A monkey could do it.
I didn’t know much about investing. I still don’t. I know nothing about the market capitalization of companies, their enterprise value, or the P&E trailing. I mean, really? What the fuck is P&E trailing? I can’t read a five-year historical EPS growth rate. I don’t even know if you’re supposed to. But it didn’t matter. I was making money. Lots of it. And I didn’t have to shave, get dressed, or leave the apartment. It was a lot like screenwriting.
Cleto stopped the car. Thank God he stopped the music; my fucking ears were bleeding. I don’t know how long we’ve been driving. I think I kind of blacked out for a minute or two
I can feel the bruises on my legs and ribs and back and face and arms. They’re big and hot and fuck do they hurt. I need to pack my body in ice, man.
I can hear them talking outside. I hope they know that I’ve learned my lesson. I have. Totally. It’s ingrained. I will never take my eye off the market again. Ever. That’s the lesson I learned. You look away for a heartbeat — Mandy had met some guys from a fraternity at the University of Texas and she was flashing the “hook ’em horns!” sign while she serviced them — and the market will fuck you right up the
It occurs to me that I still have my cell phone. I can call Cleto. Maybe that’s the best way to do this. Not face-to-face where tempers flare and misunderstandings turn to violence, but detached — calm and cool — like businessmen. I dig it out of my pocket, thank God I got one of those flip phones and it didn’t get smashed, and open it up. I’ve got Cleto on speed dial.
It’s ringing.
I get his voice mail.
I’m still having trouble talking, my lips have ballooned up like the Michelin Man, I try very hard to enunciate.
“Dude, it’s Russell. Look. Sorry, man. Let’s talk. Okay? I’ll make it up to you, man. C’mon. I need to go to the hospital. Let me outta the trunk.”
I could call 911. But what would I say? I don’t know where I am, I don’t know the license plate number of Cleto’s car; how could they find me? And I don’t really want to confess to laundering money for a drug smuggler. Then Cleto would be really mad.
Those “Millionaire Club” guys were right. Having your money work for you is exciting. Totally. At first, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I’d start the morning with a buy — you know, five thousand shares of Millennium Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MLNM) or something, watch it go up a dollar a share, then sell. Bam Five thousand bucks. Get a couple different stocks going, and I’m like a juggler, keeping all the balls in the air until it’s time to strike. It’s totally cool. And for some reason I have a knack for it. I just know when to sell. Sure, some of it is luck. I know that. Though sometimes it’s instinct. Luck and instinct. That’s my formula for success.
But after a while I realized that I was paying too much attention to the market; all day my eyes glued to the computer screen, watching those stocks go up and down. Making trades, taking profit. It was turning into a job.
To help me get back on track with my writing, I took a class at UCLA extension. The teacher was some kind of action-movie hotshot who checked his BlackBerry every ten minutes, but he was very encouraging. He really liked one script I wrote, an alien-invasion romantic comedy — think Sleepless in Seattle meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers — and said he thought it had a lot of potential. He encouraged us to start a writers group. You know, like a support group.
So me and these guys Dave and Victor from the class joined Wendy and Pasha from another class and started
It’s not difficult to start a writers group. You buy a six-pack of beer, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and one of those raw vegetable and dip platters from the supermarket, hide your dirty clothes, and you’re ready to host a literary salon. You don’t need to be Dorothy Parker or Gertrude Stein. I wasn’t. And Dave, he hardly even picked up his dirty gym shorts off the floor when we had “group” at his house — that’s what we called it, “group” — and there was always a funny smell in the air, kinda like cheese.
The meetings were fun. We’d talk about our work and our struggles trying to break into Hollywood. We’d help each other with ideas and talk about agents we’d heard about and stuff like that. This was when I was optimistic. When I thought success in Hollywood was just a screenplay away. This was before I learned the big stinking truth.
One night it was my turn to host and I decided to go all out. I’d had a particularly good day trading. I managed to jump on an IPO and ride it like it was a wild bull. It was crazy. A couple of times I thought about jumping out, taking a solid profit, and calling it a day. But something told me to hang in — that sixth sense I told you about — and despite various ups and downs I managed to triple my money, turning twenty grand into sixty grand and then getting out seconds before the closing bell rang.
You fucking know I was feeling good. I bought some white wine from this little shop on Colorado Boulevard and a large shrimp and crab claw platter from this Japanese fish market in Glendale. I went to a Cuban bakery and got empanadas stuffed with spicy chicken and pastries filled with guava and cream cheese. In other words, I went out of my way to be a great host.
I was the only one in the group who didn’t have a regular day job. Dave and Wendy both worked as assistants, Victor worked at Book Soup, and Pasha was some kind of textile designer. Everyone was talking about their various jobs, the humiliations that they suffered on a daily basis, and finally Wendy asked me what I did.
I told them it was hard to explain. When they pressed me, I turned on my computer and show them my portfolio, trading strategies, how the software worked, things like that. They were more impressed by my day trading than by the first fifteen pages of a Spanish Civil War epic — imagine Tom Hanks as a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln brigades captured and befriended by Javier Bardem as Franco — and that’s all they could talk about. Pasha even stayed after group to help me clean up, and for the first time in over a year I didn’t end my night looking at pictures of Mandy LaFrance blowing Bourbon Street; I spent it in bed with a slightly pudgy Indian girl with beautiful eyes.
That’s how I met Cleto. Not by banging Pasha — that turned out to be the best part of the whole day trading thing: It got me a girlfriend. You know day trading, it’s sexy, kind of dangerous, but it’s also responsible. You’re investing money. It’s like a very grownup thing to do. That impressed Pasha, and once she spread her legs, that was it, we were an item.
It was Victor who caused the problem. Cleto was Victor’s cousin and Victor couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Cleto had a bunch of cash he wanted to invest, but he couldn’t exactly put it in a bank because he’d earned it “under the table.” I guess I was naïve, but when I met him he just seemed like a nice, hardworking Mexican man who was trying to make a better life for himself just like everybody else who comes to this country. Later I learned that he’d earned his money selling drugs. What can I tell you? I’m a moron.
Anyway, at first I said no. I didn’t want the responsibility. What if I lost Cleto’s nest egg? Then what? He goes back to Oaxaca peso-less? But when Cleto opened that gym bag stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills, well, I couldn’t resist. I mean, he was giving me ten percent of the profit.
I thought they were going to leave me in here to slowly roast to death. But now Cleto’s started up the car and we’re moving. Air is circulating. I can breathe again. He’s popped another CD in and now it’s some kind of salsa — no, wait, I know it. It’s Ozomatli.
Ozomatli is blasting in the trunk.
I like this much better. It’s happier, bouncy, and has a horn section. Maybe Cleto’s mood has improved.
I take out my cell phone and try again. Still no answer; maybe he can’t hear it ringing over the music. It’s too loud in the trunk to leave a message so I hang up.
I guess you could say I got greedy. I could’ve stuck Cleto’s cash into a couple of über-safe stocks and called it a day. All he wanted was for me to let them ride for a year or two, then sell them, pay the taxes on the gains, and give him a nice clean cashier’s check. But I thought about that and realized, you know, what’s in it for me? Ten percent of the profits if the profits are small is like hardly worth my time. I’m not risking my neck to make a couple hundred bucks when I could make thousands, right? Doesn’t make sense. So I gambled a little. I suppose, in retrospect, I should’ve diversified... took some conservative positions. That’s what they call it.
But you know what I thought? I thought, I don’t take conservative positions in bed with Pasha, why should I take ’em with Cleto’s money?
You know? You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet. I wonder if I can explain it to Cleto that way. Do they have omelets in Mexico?
Finally the car’s stopped. We’ve been driving for hours. I tried to call Pasha but I’m not getting any reception. Where are we?
The trunk lid opens and it’s bright. I feel like the Moleman or something. If the Moleman had the living shit kicked out of him. The sun is searing my eyeballs and I can’t seem to blink. Naldo and Ramón pull me out of the trunk. Fuck. That hurts I can hardly stand up. My body’s stiff like I’m filled with concrete. My legs don’t work at all and my pants are wet.
“You pissed your pants, Cleto’s not gonna be happy about that.”
What do they expect? How long was I in there?
I try to talk. “Where are we?”
I look around. We’re up in the mountains. Out in the woods. I think I’ve been here before. Cleto used to come up here and practice shooting. There’s an outdoor gun range. It was fun. They taught me how to shoot. I look around for Cleto, but I don’t see him. I see my car parked next to the road. Maybe that’s it. Beat me up. Leave me in the woods to drive myself home.
“C’mon, ese let’s go for a drive.”
I nod. But I don’t know if I can drive. I’m not feeling too good.
Naldo and Ramón put me in my car and start it for me. That’s nice. But I can’t put my seatbelt on because I think my arm’s broken. I try to tell them this, but they’re not listening.
“Drive safe.”
They put the car in gear for me and now I’m moving. I guess this is better than being in the trunk. I’ll drive to the hospital. I’ll call Pasha. She’ll visit me. She loves me.
As the car goes over the lip of the cliff, takes a hard bounce, and nosedives toward the canyon floor, I close my eyes. I don’t want to see it. I feel weightless, floating, like when the roller coaster comes up from a big dip and just crests the rise before it starts to go down again. It’s that little gap of suspense, the dead air between songs on the radio, the frozen moment between exhaling and inhaling, the nervous pause between the order and the execution.
Lethe, South Dakota
Lethe, South Dakota. Not much to it. Not much more than a wide place at the end of an off-ramp — a frozen, flinty afterthought to the interstate, just right for gassing up, taking a leak, and heading out again. Not much to see besides the filling station and the quick-mart, the Sunset Motor Inn, the plow barn for the county road crews, and the Lethe Lounge next door. No reason to hang around.
“Not unless you’re lost or out of luck,” the desk clerk had said. She was maybe twenty, and her pimpled face was round and sort of vacant, but she’d got it exactly right. I made up a name and paid cash for the room.
There was no particular reason I stopped in Lethe — no particular draw it had over any of the hundred other shitholes I’d driven through in the past week, and nothing about the peeling paint and blistered plywood of the Sunset that was especially tempting when I pulled off the highway that first night. I hadn’t planned on anything more than a few hours sleep and maybe a shower, but when morning came I couldn’t get out of bed.
I don’t know how long I lay there, listening to the wind in the light poles, fingering the thin sheets, and smelling the mildew and my own sour breath. There was a constellation of brown stains on the ceiling, and if I squinted they looked like the outlines of the states I’d passed through. Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois. Blind panic, fear, anger, and, as I crossed the Mississippi, a floaty, detached kind of feeling. It was a funny buzz — like a contact high but more fragile. It vanished like smoke whenever I thought of Mia.
The sun had crawled right to left across the window shade by the time I managed to reach for the remote. I channel-surfed until I found CNN, and watched what passed for news until someone knocked at the door. It was the pimply girl, wearing a coat like a sleeping bag and carrying a can of Lysol and an armful of dingy towels. I pulled on some clothes and let her in. Then I went to the Lethe Lounge.
It was a cinder-block bunker with a satellite dish on the roof and chicken wire on the windows. Inside was nighttime, and the smell of beer, cigarettes, fried potatoes, and piss. There was a jukebox near the door, and a pool table and pin-ball machine in back. I hadn’t seen the cruiser in the parking lot, and I almost bolted when I noticed the state trooper at the bar. Sweat pricked on my forehead when he turned to look, and my knees went soft, but then he turned away, no more interested in me than the bartender was.
I took a deep breath and slid onto a stool and ordered a Coke. I looked at the TV mounted on the wall, and — miracle of miracles — it was tuned to CNBC. I sipped my Coke and watched, and after an hour a piece about the bank came on. It was nothing new, a summary of the story so far — Rumors of Trading Irregularities at Ketchum Leeds; Ketchum Stock Plunges as Management Confirms Derivatives Losses; Widely Held Ketchum Shares Imperil Pension Funds; Fed Considers Bailout Plan for Ketchum. A parade of talking heads came next, predicting doom and disaster all around — for Ketchum management, for shareholders, for anyone who’d ever used a piggybank. And then there was Carter Strickland.
It was a night shot. A square-faced, forty-something frat-boy climbs from a black Town Car in front of a green office tower — the Ketchum Leeds headquarters. Snow falls around him and camera flash flares off his forehead and gelled blond hair. A chorus of questions rises, and Strickland — somber and determined — pledges to get to the bottom of things. I smiled and wondered when the last time was he’d worked past dark.
Then the final headline — Ketchum Derivatives Guru Sought — and a grainy photo on the screen and my stomach clenched. Without thinking I touched my chin. I’d lost the mustache and the little beard outside of Chicago, and I still felt naked without them. Derivatives guru. I shook my head.
I watched CNBC until the bartender changed the channel to bull riding, and after that I watched the place fill up with highway department guys and cowboy truckers and a parade of assorted shitkickers. I switched from Coke to Scotch, and sat motionless on my stool until a rangy guy with a three-day beard staggered against me. He wore a red baseball cap with Reno printed on it, and he squinted and looked me up and down. His eyes caught on my L.L.Bean boots, my corduroys, and my North Face parka, and he bared a row of yellow teeth.
“You from the coast or from back east?” he asked. His voice was deeper than I expected. I made a noncommittal noise, and the guy squinted harder. Something knowing came into the yellow smile. “Well which is it? San Fag-cisco, or Jew York City?” I looked at the narrow, knobby face and the tobacco-stained lips, and felt my throat close. The rangy guy put a finger against his pitted nose and pushed it to one side. “Don’t bullshit me,” he whispered. “I kin always sniff it out.” Before I could answer, or even swallow hard, the bartender rapped heavy knuckles on the counter.
“You buying, Ross, or just standing around?” he said to the rangy guy. His voice was flat and rumbling, and he reminded me of the football coach at my high school. Maybe he reminded Ross of something, too, because he ordered a Bud and walked away as soon as he got it.
“Asshole,” the bartender muttered, and shook his big bald head. “You want a refill?”
I told him no, and left. The air was like a knife in my chest on the way back to the Sunset, but I stopped in the parking lot anyway, and looked up at the night. There were no stars, just low gray clouds, like a pot lid pressing down.
On my second day in Lethe, I went looking for a newspaper. What I found at the quick-mart barely qualified: two-day-old copies of USA Today, week-old copies of something called the Eagle Recorder, and a stupefying array of gun and tit mags. I bought a muddy coffee and a USA Today and went back to the Sunset, where I leafed through the business section. I stopped when I got to the story about me.
The article was brief: authorities expanding their search for Paul Dillon, managing director at Ketchum Leeds and head of its lucrative hybrid derivatives trading desk, in an ongoing probe of falsified profits at the venerable bank. Blah, blah, blah. The picture was the same blurred headshot they’d been showing on television, and below it was a photo of the place I was last seen — my apartment building. There was a slim woman out front, with long dark hair, who for a wobbly instant I thought was Mia, but wasn’t.
There was a knock on the door, and the pimply girl was there again. I added the business section to the stack of papers I’d collected since New York, and left.
The Lethe Lounge was empty, and CNBC was on the box again. The bartender was loading beer bottles into a cooler and looked up when I came in. His forehead wrinkled in recognition.
“Coke?” he asked.
I shook my head. “A Bud.”
He pulled one from the cooler. “If you want lunch, you’re early.”
I took a long drink. “I can wait.”
He shrugged and tossed a thumb at the television. “You want to watch something else?”
“This is fine,” I said.
A lacquered blonde was interviewing an edgy-looking guy in a dealing room somewhere. The edgy man was talking about another broad sell-off in equities — led again by financial stocks — but I wasn’t listening. My attention was on the background: the long, crowded rows of desks, the well-dressed bodies hunched over keyboards, the dense mosaic of glowing monitors, the chirping telephones, the muted rumble of a thousand urgent conversations — all the low-gear chaos and white noise of money made and lost.
It hauled me back to my first day on the Ketchum Leeds trading floor, on the interest rate swaps desk. Eight years ago, and it still made my face hot. I could barely figure out how to work the telephones that morning, much less make sense of what the traders were talking about on the calls. Everything I learned in b-school seemed to blur and slide and wash away, until all I heard was meaningless sound and I was covered in sweat. When the senior trader who’d been saddled with me asked if I had questions, I choked on my embarrassment and shook my head no. He pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow, and we both knew I was lying.
I deciphered the phones eventually, and the vocabulary, too, but I’d never escaped the feeling of that day — of being two steps behind everyone else, of never being the first, or even the second, to see the bud of an opportunity or the tip of an iceberg. Of being in over my head. Two mortifying months later, the senior trader took pity on me, and put me down in front of something that sat still when I looked at it — something that made sense to me — a spreadsheet.
It was a pricing model — a collection of formulas that determined the value of the instruments we were trading, and let us mark our positions to market every day, and calculate our profits and losses. At least that’s what it was supposed to do. The trader was convinced it was fucked-up somehow, and low-balling his P&L.
“Some dick from accounting came by last week with an IT guy who didn’t know a discounted cash flow from his asshole. They swear up and down they were just tweaking it, but now I don’t believe the numbers.”
I pored over the spreadsheet for two hours, and every time I glanced up the senior trader was looking at me. The problem, when I found it, was a subtle one — a change in how the yield curves were being built — and it wasn’t so much a glitch as a more conservative approach to valuing our swaps. I explained it all to the trader, who listened without expression and smiled when I was done.
“They think I’m a little too aggressive,” he chuckled. “Now change it back.” And I did, without pause or question. It added 108 grand to that month’s profit, and the senior trader grinned wider. It was Carter Strickland’s test, and I had passed.
“You want some?” the bartender asked, and brought me back with a jolt.
It was the lunch special — brown and lumpy. It was a long way from the Four Seasons, but the beer and coffee needed something to hold them down. I nodded and he dropped a ladleful into a bowl and set it on the bar and picked up the remote.
“Enough of this,” he said, and changed the channel to ESPN. They were covering the trade of a reliable closer and two journeymen right-handers for a big-hitting catcher and an aging first-baseman whose wife was a country singer. The bartender shook his head.
“Fucking Cubbies,” he sighed. “Every year the same thing — always a master plan.”
“You know what they say about plans.”
“What’s that?”
“That everybody has one — until you hit ’em in the face.”
“Mike Tyson, the great philosopher, right?”
I nodded and looked up. I saw the bumper sticker over the cash register — Bleed Cubbie Blue — and the Sammy Sosa bobblehead with the chipped nose next to it. The bartender followed my eyes.
“Never missed a home opener,” he said.
“You have a lot of patience.”
“What else can you do? Eventually they’ll get it right.”
“Optimistic too.”
He shrugged. “You do what you can with the cards you’re dealt, and you hope for something better on the next go round. The important thing is to stay in the game, right?”
“That’s the plan.”
He put the remote on the bar and went in back. I pushed my food around and flicked the channels. There was a cop show rerun on TBS, with world-weary detectives and an arrogant prick of a suspect who’d be a pathetic wreck by the end. I kept surfing.
I stopped at the fashion channel. It was something about making perfume, and I wasn’t sure where the show left off and the commercials started, but I watched anyway. I was looking for Mia. I knew there was little chance of seeing her — she’d only been on that once, and it was months ago — a documentary about aspiring fashion designers. Still, I looked. I remembered how nervous she’d been the night before it first aired, her over-caffeinated engine amped higher than usual.
“They’re going to make me look like an asshole, I know it. That’s what they do on these things. Either that or I’ll come off as a babbling idiot. Or maybe both. And they probably won’t even show the clothes. That cocktail dress is one of my best things, and I bet they cut it out.” She got nine minutes and fifty-one seconds of screen time, total — more than anyone else — and no one looked better.
Strickland had introduced us a year and a half ago, at Milk & Honey. She was raising money, and glad to see anyone who would pick up a check. I was looking for the usual — a model to fuck — and though she’d never made it on the runway, Mia looked the part: tall and pale, with a glossy wing of hair across a naughty, sulky face. I’d fronted the cash for her fall line, and for the spring one afterwards, and six months back she’d given up her apartment and moved into mine. I wondered how long it would be before someone asked her to move out again. Probably around the time my monthly maintenance check didn’t show.
A knot rolled through my gut and I pushed the bowl away. The perfume show ended and another one, about eyeliner, began. I called into the kitchen for the check.
I was crossing the lot at the Lethe Lounge when a rust-scabbed pickup turned too fast off the road. It churned up stones and a cloud of icy dust, and its rear end slewed wildly. I jumped out of the way. A big guy in a blue parka with an American flag patch on the sleeve fell out of the passenger side and stumbled into the bar. The driver paused by the door and looked back at me. He took off his red cap and waved.
On the third day I bought maps. The quick-mart had more of these than it did newspapers, and I got ones for points north, south, and west. I bought a twelve-pack of tallboys and a bag of pork rinds, too, and carried it all to my room. I turned on the TV and spread the maps on the bed and opened a beer.
I’d had no plan when I left New York — nothing besides getting as far as I could from the office and from the questions that’d been growing like barnacles on my trading desk ever since that fucking auditor, DiMarco, had come around. But now I was running out of country. A couple of days driving and I’d hit water, and then what? South to Mexico? North to Canada? Or maybe straight on through, into the Pacific.
I opened another beer and stared at the roads and dotted borders. Lines and colors braided into impossible knots, and the place names began to squirm like bugs. I rubbed my eyes and jabbed at the remote. The channels flew by like towns through a train window, and after a while it made me dizzy. I grabbed my coat and the pork rinds and went to the Lethe Lounge.
There was a dented gray van in the lot, and a blue parka with a flag patch on the sleeve hanging on a barstool inside. A big guy was working the pinball machine and drinking a beer. The bartender was leafing through the sports section of a newspaper. I slid onto a stool and he eyed the pork rinds.
“There a problem with these?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Not if you finish them fast. You want a Bud?” I nodded, and he opened the cooler. I looked at his newspaper. The Chicago Tribune.
“Where’d that come from?” I asked, and dug into the chips.
“They have it at the store sometimes. I read it online, but the real thing’s good when you can get it.”
I offered him the bag. “Any more trades?”
“Just rumors,” he said. He reached in and ate a chip.
I pointed to the paper. “Mind if I look?”
He slid the paper over and went into the kitchen. It the local news, sports, and arts sections — no business. I folded it and pushed it aside, and the big guy from the pinball machine knocked an empty beer bottle on the bar.
“Hey, Mickey,” he called, “lemme get another.”
“In a sec,” the bartender answered, and the big guy looked at me. His face was lined and freckled, with scars around the eyes. His teeth were gray, and the smell of cigarettes and asphalt rolled off him. He looked at the newspaper and back at me and frowned.
“You a Chicago boy, like ol’ Mick?” he asked. I shook my head. “No? But you from the city somewhere. What the hell you doin’ out here?”
Mickey came out and pushed a beer in front of the big guy. “What else do you need, Len — more quarters for the machine?”
“Sure,” Len said, “quarters.” He put two bills on the bar, but kept staring at me. Mickey gave him change and he went away
“Friendly,” I said.
Mickey frowned. “You want to keep away from him. From his buddy Ross, too.” I thought back to the guy in the red cap, waving in the parking lot.
“Why? They don’t like strangers?”
“Something like that,” he said, and looked up as the door opened. A girl came in, awkward in a coat like a sleeping bag. The pimply girl from the Sunset. She unzipped the coat and went behind the bar.
“Sorry I’m late, Pops,” she said. Mickey nodded and she went into the kitchen.
“Your daughter?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“You run the motel too?”
“I own it, like I own this place.”
I ate a pork rind. “How’d you end up out here?”
He shrugged. “Company early-retired me, and I always wanted to buy property out west. I didn’t necessarily have this in mind, but the 401k didn’t go as far as I planned.”
“You like it?”
He took my empty beer bottle and replaced it with a full one. “Keeps me in the game. What about you?”
“Me? I’m headed west.”
He nodded and produced the remote from under the bar and turned on the tube. He started surfing through the channels and stopped when his daughter called from the kitchen. He left the remote by the chips.
The box was tuned to Court TV, a grimy video — the interrogation of a scrawny teenage boy by two big cops in a bleak white room. I took a long pull on my beer. The cops were shouting and pacing, and the kid had his head in his hands. He was saying something about a girlfriend. I picked up the remote, but my thumb froze above the button as the kid’s voice broke.
I knew it was only a matter of time for me. I’d tossed my cell phone in a trashcan in Altoona, but eventually I’d run out of cash and have to use a credit card or an ATM, and that would be it. Then it would be me in a room somewhere, with my head in my hands. How did you do it? How long was it going on? Was anyone else involved?
How long wasn’t easy to nail down. When, precisely, did panic become a plan? When did I pass through the gray zones of deniability — the honest mistake, the error in judgment, the pardonable miscalculation — and into the pitch black? Hard to say, but fixing that spreadsheet for Strickland was the first step. He’d shined that too-wide smile on me, dropped a big hand on my shoulder, and promised he’d square everything with the accountants. Then he’d christened me with a nickname, and made me what he called his go-to guy for numbers.
“You’ve got a feel for the models, P-Man, and before we put up any new ones, I want you to check them out — make sure everything is copasetic.”
I was stunned. Relieved, of course, that he wasn’t canning my ass, and wildly flattered — but stunned. I’d protested — that I didn’t have the experience, that I knew the math but not the markets — but Strickland didn’t care. He winked and spoke in a stage whisper. “Don’t worry about it, P, nobody else around here knows what this stuff is worth either. Anybody asks questions, you throw some math at ’em. If that doesn’t scare ’em off, you send ’em my way.”
He took me out for drinks after that, a blurry bar crawl that ended nine hours and a dozen lap-dances later at the Platinum Playpen. Everyone knew him there, and I can still see the colored lights shining on his teeth, and the glitter and sweat on that stripper’s tits. He took me back to the Playpen four months later, when he was starting up the hybrids desk.
“It’ll be a different gig — more of a boutique business. The guys we’re trading with need customized stuff — derivatives to hedge against ice in Orlando, or too much rain in Napa, or pipeline problems in Kazakhstan. It’s exotic shit, each time a one-off, and we can charge big premiums and still have them lining up. Assuming, of course, we can price things right. That’s where you come in, P-Man. And who knows — if the business takes hold, maybe we can get you back to trading. It’s more cerebral than what we’re doing now — more up your alley.”
I’d been handed my first bonus check by then, and though it was hefty for a numbers guy — enough for a new Beemer and a down payment on a Tribeca loft — it was nothing like the monsters the traders took home. I wasn’t inclined to argue.
After that, things went according to Strickland’s plan: We built it and they came. And they paid. They bitched about it, but in the end they paid. Actually, there was bitching all around at first — from customers about our pricing, and from our own accountants, who were antsy about our mark-to-market calculations. Too aggressive, they said. Overly optimistic. But whenever anyone came around with questions, I followed Strickland’s advice and dazzled them with bullshit. The complexity of the models intimidated eighty percent of the worriers off the bat, and they went away nodding wisely, as if they had a clue about what I’d said. Anyone more persistent I referred to Strickland, who worked his hale-fellow mojo and somehow turned their doubts into soap bubbles. Maybe he took them to the Playpen.
As profits mounted, less and less mojo was required, and the questions all but vanished amidst high praise and promotions. In two years’ time, riding an ever-growing wave of revenue, Carter Strickland became head of the entire dealing room. Two years later he became president of Ketchum Leeds.
And me, I held tight to his coattails. Strickland hadn’t been jerking me off about trading again, and a few months after we opened for business I had a book of my own to run. This time I knew how to work the phones. I made managing director at the end of our first year, and when he moved up to take over the dealing room, I took over the hybrids desk.
It was a steep climb, and not without its bumps. There were months when the P&L slipped, but never two in a row — Strickland wouldn’t allow it. When trouble loomed, he’d saunter over to my desk, drop a hand on my shoulder, and invite me to his glassed-in office. We’d prop our feet, drink espressos, and shoot the shit about his latest vacation, his latest car, or his latest wife, and when we’d exhausted the chat and the coffee, he’d sigh and say the same thing.
“Numbers looking a little hinky, don’t you think, P-Man? Maybe you oughta check the models — see if something needs goosing.” After which we’d stroll back to the dealing room and I’d take up my keyboard.
There was never any talk of my leaving the desk — not when Strickland took over the trading floor, and not when he stepped up to run the whole bank either. Somebody had to do the goosing, after all. And besides paying for a bigger loft, the house in East Hampton, and Mia and her line of clothes, the seven-figure bonus checks made staying behind easy to take. At least until DiMarco.
I took another drink and gagged on the warm beer. On TV, one of the cops pounded the table. His partner shook his head and asked more questions, and the kid slumped lower in his chair. I thought about the maps on the motel bed and my car, icing over in the parking lot, and about throwing my stuff in the back and driving off. Mexico, or maybe Canada. I tried to remember where I’d put my car keys. In my coat pocket, maybe. Inches away, but too far to reach.
I slept late on the fourth day — past noon, and through the pimply girl’s knock on the door. I awoke in my clothes, on top of maps and surrounded by beer cans. There was a car chase playing silently on TV — a minivan rolling down an empty highway, five cop cars and the shadow of a helicopter in pursuit. My head was full of road salt and pieces of a dream. DiMarco standing over my desk, holding a report and tapping it with a boney finger. There was a smug, triumphant look on his librarian’s face, and a noise like static whenever he opened his mouth. Mia at the beach house, making blender drinks and laughing. Her hair was up, and her long neck was pale and damp. Her hands were bandaged, and there were red streaks in my margarita. Mia and Carter Strickland at the Playpen, bite marks on her breasts and colored lights shining on his big teeth.
My bones were like lead, and it was all I could do to lever myself up and into the shower. I stayed there until the dry heaves subsided and my skin was a savage red, and it was night by the time I set out for the quick-mart. I picked up a Snickers, some beef jerky, and another six of beer, and I was looking at the magazines when the state trooper came in. He bought coffee and a sandwich that he heated in the microwave, but he didn’t even glance down the aisle while it cooked. Still, I waited until he’d pulled out of the lot to pay for my stuff. My hands were shaking when I paid the clerk, and he gave me the eye when he handed back change.
“What are you looking at?” I said. He frowned and shook his head.
Even with every light on, a brown twilight was the most I could manage in my room. I turned on the radio and found the one station that wasn’t static. An angry guy was talking to an angrier guy about weakness and depravity on both coasts. It was drivel, but I wanted voices.
I opened a beer and turned on the TV. It was tuned to the game show channel — a show from the ’70s, with puffy-haired people in bad clothes. The contestants were paired with celebrities, though I wasn’t sure who was who. The point of the thing was one player guessing a secret word from clues given by his partner. Condiment; spicy; hotdog... mustard! Much applause followed.
I downed my beer in one swallow, and eyed the host. Something about him — the unlikely tan, the wide forehead, maybe the teeth — reminded me of Carter Strickland. I pictured Strickland in an ugly plaid jacket and too-wide tie, smiling, nodding, directing the game. I worked a strip of jerky in my back teeth, and thought about our last meeting.
It was in his vast office at the top of the tower. The shades were up and the river was bright and hard-looking in the morning light. The trading day hadn’t started in New York, but the big monitors on his wall showed the action in London. Strickland was scanning his e-mail, and I closed the door.
“Don’t give me more of that relax crap,” I said. “It’s all I’ve heard for weeks, and this guy still hasn’t gone away.”
He ran a palm over his slick hair and smiled indulgently. “He has questions, that’s all. Give him some answers, and this thing will run its course.”
Run its course? He has questions about the models, Carter — the fucking pricing models. And this guy is no lightweight — he’s half a dissertation away from being Doctor DiMarco. The formulas don’t faze him. He’s down in the guts of things, and he’s looking at P&L going back Christ knows how long.”
He kept smiling. “Is he?”
“Fucking right he is. So get him promoted, get him fired — take him out and get him laid for all I care — just get rid of him.”
The tanned brow crinkled. “Come on, Paul, you know how the game is played. The man has a job to do, and it wouldn’t look good if people thought I was trying to stop him from doing it. It wouldn’t look appropriate.”
Appropriate? What the fuck does that mean?”
Strickland smiled wide and shook his head like I was an idiot nephew. “It’s the optics of the thing, Paul, just the optics. Let it work itself out. It’ll be fine.”
I don’t how long I stood there with my mouth open. Long enough for Strickland’s secretary to come in and remind him of a conference call and usher me into his waiting room. She disappeared back into his office and shut the door behind her. I ran my hands through my hair.
Optics? Work itself out? And what’s with Paul — what happened to P-Man
I looked down at his secretary’s desk, and at his appointment book, open on it. I flipped the pages back, week after week — and there they were. Early breakfasts, late lunches, drinks and dinners — DiMarco, DiMarco, DiMarco. Since before the audit started. I went to the street from there, and didn’t even stop at my desk.
What’s the secret word, Carter? Scapegoat, maybe? Fallguy? How about fucked? Yeah — that’s it — definitely fucked.
More clapping on TV. A woman with heavy eye makeup was showing a flair for the game. Antlers, slipcover, clandestine — she got them all with just a hint or two. I couldn’t recall her name but I recognized her from a sitcom that ran when I was a kid, and I was pretty sure she was dead. Her hair was dark and wavy, and it reminded me of Mia’s.
I’d almost told her a hundred times, but always managed to convince myself the timing wasn’t right. This weekend maybe, at the beach — or next month, when she’s finished with her show. Maybe on the trip to Bali, or maybe after. Maybe over dinner. There would always be another, better moment.
The truth was, I was looking for a sure thing and Mia wasn’t it. Her moods were too volatile, and could whip from elated to dismal three times while her coffee cooled — and she traveled way too light. A bag of clothes, another of shoes, and she could leave on a whim. Sometimes, when I woke up next to her, I was surprised to find she hadn’t left already. Then I’d remember the dump she’d been living in and the firetrap that used to be her workshop, and I’d think of her shiny new studio and her plans for her next line. Who knew what she’d do if I told her they were built on sand?
Still, there were times I’d nearly risked it. In the cab, coming back from some club in Brooklyn, when she put her fingers in my hair and whispered in my mouth. In bed, when she looked at me like she was reading tea leaves. Walking home from dinner, when she took my hand and put it in her pocket. Each time I told myself, Don’t lose this, and, Hold on Each time I told myself to speak, but never said a word.
The last time was on the day I left. The car was running and I punched her number on my cell. I was going to tell her everything, and ask her to pack a bag, but when I heard her voice, I saw her and Strickland at Milk & Honey on the night we met. They were talking and smiling, and suddenly there was something conspiratorial in their laughter. She knew it was me on the line, and she said my name again and again. I switched the phone off and drove away. What’s your secret word, Mia? I couldn’t begin to guess. The woman on TV scored again. Mystery; riddle; puzzle — enigma! Much applause. I drank my last beer and picked up my coat.
There were trucks in the lot of the Lethe Lounge, and the smell of exhaust on the cold air. Inside, a layer of cigarette smoke was gathering at the ceiling. There were customers in back, playing pinball and pool, and a stock car race on TV. I took a stool and ordered a double Scotch. Mickey poured it and put it down in front of me.
“How’re you doing?” he asked. “Still in the game?”
“Sure,” I said, and he went away.
I drank my drink and watched the cars become a loud blur around the bright track. The sun and flags and noise reminded me of absolutely nothing, and it was very restful. When Mickey came back, my head was on the bar and he looked worried. I sat up and waved my glass at him. He just stood there. I waggled my glass again.
“I thought this was the international sign for give me another fucking drink.
Mickey shook his head. “Not for you.”
I wiped my chin with my sleeve. “What — I have to listen to some bullshit bartender wisdom first?”
His eyes narrowed. “The only wisdom I have is: Go back to your room and sleep it off.”
I slammed my glass down, loud enough to turn heads. “What happened — you all of a sudden run out of advice? A couple of days ago you were chockful — crap about plans and staying in the game and who I should keep away from.”
Mickey’s face darkened. “Keep your voice down,” he rumbled. “Anyway, you’re not looking for advice.”
“The fuck you know — nobody needs advice more than I do.”
“You need it, but drunks don’t listen.”
“Try me.”
“Fine,” he sighed. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but it’s slow right now. What do you want advice about?”
“About staying in the game. I want to know what the point of it is.”
“Staying in the game? It’s an expression, that’s all — like hanging in there. It means sometimes things get hard, but you keep trying. You tough it out.”
“I know what it means, for chrissakes — my question is: Why bother?”
He rolled his eyes. “What’s the alternative — whining about life all day? Laying down and dying? I don’t think so. I think you stay in the game.”
“And if the game is rigged? If you just can’t win — then what do you do?”
Mickey sighed. “This is what I get for talking to a drunk. I should know better by now.”
“I’m serious — what do you do?”
“What else can you do except keep trying?”
I laughed. “That’s sucker thinking — it’s what gets people spending their welfare checks on lottery tickets. I’m talking about when the serious fix is in — when it’s a stacked deck.
I’m asking what if you know there’s just no way to win?”
He squinted at me, and took his time rubbing a cloth over the bar. “Then maybe I’d try to change the game — try to get a little something back. See if I couldn’t get even, and then get out.”
I leaned over the bar and took hold of Mickey’s arm and whispered to him, “Getting even — I like that. But how Mickey — how do you do it?”
He jerked his arm loose and shook his head. “You need to lie down.” The door opened and a crowd came in and Mickey moved off. The cigarette smoke grew thicker and bodies jammed the bar, and I was pushed sideways and then away. I ended up at a table in a corner, thinking about getting even and about getting another drink. I wasn’t there long when a wiry hand gripped my shoulder. I looked up at a knobby face, a row of yellow teeth, and a red cap.
“I owe you a drink from the other night — for being a prick. What’re you havin’?” I looked at his hand on my shoulder, and at the twin lightning bolts tattooed across his knuckles. He squeezed harder. “What’s the matter, pard — you don’t want to drink with me?”
“Scotch,” I said.
He brought back two doubles, two beers for himself, and one for his pal Len, who brought along three other guys whose names I never got. They stood around the small table and blocked out the light. They let Ross do all the talking, and they took their eyes off me only to glance at one another and exchange narrow smiles. I knew I should be scared, and a part of me was, but another part was thirsty. And the rest of me — the biggest part by far — could barely pay attention to any of it.
Two doubles became two more, and two after that, and the room was now a smear of noise and smoke and sweat. The circle of bodies around the table grew tighter and darker and like a cave, and only Ross’s questions made it through the gloom. He kept repeating them — again and again — and they stuck like splinters in my head. Where’re you from? Where’re you headed? Why’d you stop here? Who’s expecting you? His voice was raspy and intimate, and his face was close to mine. His breath was like a barnyard and the questions kept coming, and all of a sudden it seemed important to have the answers. I worked up a sweat trying, but every time I reached for one, it wriggled away.
“Who’s expecting you?” he asked again, and Mia’s pale, fretting face rose up and I started to cry. There was laughter in the cave, and someone dropped a hand on my shoulder and put another shot glass in front of me. I downed it and choked, and the world began to slide. I was covered in sweat, and I knotted up inside, from the chest down.
“Jesus, Ross,” someone said, “he’s gonna boot.” Then there were arms under mine.
“Come on, pard, you need air.”
Hands pushed me along, and the cave became a tunnel. I stumbled to the end of it, out into the frozen night. I staggered against a dumpster and emptied myself in a bellowing retch. I kneeled against the dumpster, shaking, and when I looked up there were stars in the sky.
“Holy shit,” a voice said, “the fucking guy gave birth.” There was laughter and a hand on my collar and Ross’s voice. “Come on, pard, a little ride will fix you.”
I didn’t want to move, but the hand pulled me up. I tried to hold onto the dumpster, but the hand pried my fingers loose and pulled me across the parking lot to a dented gray van. A door slid open and someone took my arm. I looked up at the stars.
“Climb in, pard,” Ross said, but I didn’t want to. I yanked my arm away and pushed backward.
“I have to make a call,” I said. My voice sounded hollow. “I have to call Mia.”
“Sure,” Ross said, “I got a phone in here.”
Hands grabbed at my coat, but I spun away and stumbled. “I want to talk to Mia.”
“Who the fuck is Mia?” someone said.
“Maybe it’s his mother — like Mama Mia.”
There was laughter, and another voice shouted: “He don’t look Italian!”
More laughter, and still another voice. “She can’t come to the phone anyway — she’s in the can, giving head to Lenny.” Louder laughter, and someone had my arm.
“I want to talk to her,” I said, and I threw my elbow back. It hit something soft, and for a moment everything went quiet. And then the walls came down.
Rocks, stones, big boulders — in my face, my gut, my balls. I was on my knees, on my stomach, curled up with my arms around my head. There was blood in my mouth and in my eyes, and nothing but ringing in my ears.
Then there was a sudden boom like thunder and the sound of breaking glass, and it all stopped.
“Jesus Christ, Mickey — what the fuck’s with you? That’s my goddamn windshield.” It was Len’s voice.
There was another sound — a mechanical slide and click — and Ross’s voice, nervous.
“For chrissake, Mickey, put that thing down.”
“Just as soon as you drive away, you and your pals.”
“C’mon, man, we’re having a little fun is all.”
“Have it somewhere else, and with somebody else.”
“Christ, Mick, he’s just a drunk.”
“He’s my drunk, Ross.”
I heard shuffling and someone spit on me, and then the space around me cleared. I saw the sky, and Mickey and his daughter standing over me.
“Can you walk?” Mickey asked.
“Sure,” I said, and I passed out.
I woke in my room on the fifth day, surprised to be anywhere at all. In the mirror, my face was cut and skewed, like a shredded document glued back together but with pieces gone. And the rest of me, from what I could see, was no better. Someone had gotten my clothes off, but I still smelled like smoke and vomit and burnt garbage. I hobbled to the bathroom to piss, and when I did, it was dark and felt like a wire going through me. I stood at the sink and ran water on my hands. It stung in the cuts, but it was nothing compared to the pain in my throat, which felt like lye, and the pain in my head, which felt fatal.
I climbed into the shower and let the water boil me. After a while, heat overcame pain and I washed myself three times. Then I boiled myself some more, while memories of Strickland and our last meeting rose from the steam — the smiling face, those teeth, you know how the game is played His face and voice mixed with scraps of the night before — the circle of men, Ross’s questions, and Mickey’s words. Get even and get out. After a longer while, I smiled. I was still a shambles — brittle, scrambled, full of broken glass — but my mind felt clearer than it had in weeks, in years maybe. I finally had a plan.
There was nothing complicated about it: good lawyers, a plea bargain, whatever testimony they wanted, and then a book deal. It wouldn’t be easy, and it would cost me every cent I had and more, but I knew I could make it work. The very first step, even before the lawyers, was to call Mia. I needed to talk to her — to hear her voice and tell her everything. And then I needed to get the hell out of this dump and back to civilization.
I turned off the water and wrapped a towel around me. I hobbled from the bathroom, and that’s when I noticed that my clothes were gone. Not just the stuff I’d worn the night before, but everything — underwear, socks, shoes, all of it. And not just my clothes. My bags were gone, too, and my wallet — even my stack of newspapers. I went to the window. No car.
“Motherfuckers.” I picked up the phone and was listening to silence in the receiver when the door opened. Mickey came in, followed by his daughter and an icy wind. I shivered and put the receiver down.
“They robbed me, those bastards. They took everything.”
Mickey sat in the only chair. His daughter closed the door and leaned against it. I tied my towel more tightly.
“Plus, the fucking phone’s not working,” I said. Mickey nodded and I took a deep breath. “You saved my ass last night, and I owe you big time. But I need your help again. I’ve got to get out of here — and in a hurry — but those fuckers cleaned me out.” Mickey nodded some more and looked around the room. “I’ll pay you back for everything,” I added.
“Sure you will,” he said, and smiled. “But it wasn’t Ross that cleaned you out.” His daughter opened her big coat and produced a newspaper. It was the Philadelphia Inquirer the business section, one of the papers off my stack. I sat on the bed. My face was throbbing, and when I touched it, my fingers were dotted with blood.
“You don’t look much like your picture,” she said.
I peered at Mickey. “What the hell is this?”
He shrugged. “It’s getting something back.”
My throat was tight, and I had to force the words out. “Getting what?”
Mickey smiled. “Two weeks ago, I had four hundred thousand in my retirement account. Not as much as I thought I’d have at this point — not as much as I would’ve if my old company hadn’t messed with our pension fund — but with the income from this place and the bar, it was enough to keep body and soul together. At least until you came along.”
“What did I—”
“The money was in a fund that bet big on bank stocks. Stupid of them probably, and probably stupid of me to invest, but it was doing fine until you. Now it’s all but gone.”
My head was spinning, and I couldn’t seem to get any air in my lungs. I looked in the mirror and for an instant I thought I saw Mia behind me. “And what do you want from me — money?”
The pimply girl took her hand from the pocket of her big coat. There was an ugly black gun in it, and an ugly smile on her face. Mickey shook his head sadly. “For starters,” he said.
110 W. 139th Street
Her mother taught her there could be something lovely in the way a rainbow would arc through a tub of soapy water, even as the smell pinched her nose and her hands cracked red from the bleach, from a hundred splinters off the cracking wood of the mop handle. A thousand rainbows could span that tub now and she wouldn’t bat an eye.
And there he was, how many paychecks for that almond-green felt derby of his, telling her once more that he would soon be covering her broken hands in rose milk and fine perfumes, a bauble for every bleach-brined finger.
“Say it all you want, my man. But that won’t make it so,” she said, looking out the browned window, the fading orange light streaking the building tops.
He laughed. He always laughed and it was charming once, that gentle burr, the lilt of the islands twisting through it like a stick of peppermint.
He had taken his hat off and unfastened the very top button on his coat. The room was hot and she herself, laid up all day with an awful pain, had settled on the bed so he might have the chair in the corner that came with the faintest breeze. Wearily, she opened two buttons on her dress, buttons tacky to the touch with the awful thick in the air, and reached for her hand fan, the one he bought her at the curio shop on Pell Street.
“I’ve walked this road before, my man,” she said to him. “I won’t walk it again without something more than a honey promise.”
Over the past year, she’d said it to him ten, twenty times or more. And he’d always nod, even laugh, and never press the point. And that ease, the kindness in it — sometimes it brought heat under her eyes when she thought about it and she hated him for it. How dare he do that to her, bring that out in her when he’d yet to make money enough to put more than a paper fan from Chinatown in her cracked hand.
He could hardly wait to get to her apartment that night. He ran the last seven blocks, crosstown. They had a date and he’d told her to wear her good dress, the one she called “Alice blue,” because they were going to celebrate something and he was taking her dancing. He wanted to see her twirl in that dress. He wanted to see her smile when she looked at him, which hadn’t happened in some time.
But she wasn’t wearing the dress and didn’t want to go out. She felt sickly and had missed work and was worried she’d be dismissed. Her hip had started up again, a relentless throb. Four months back she’d been burned, the cook accidentally spattering hot sugar on her. When they tried to brush it off, the skin came with it. She missed two days of work and had been lucky to keep the job. But the hurt kept starting up again, twitching under her skin and then blazing by the end of a long day scrubbing, knees to the floor.
He knew she must be feeling very poorly. Before, she’d never reclined on the bed in his presence, never even let him three steps past the doorway.
Looking at her arranged there like a wilted flower, petals spread forlorn, he knew it would be an uphill battle, but he had much to tell her, much to make her understand. Everything had changed for him, for both of them, since the day before. He needed to make her see because it would mean he’d finally be worth her time, her closed-off heart.
There was a brightness in his eye that night, but she’d seen it before, on him, on other men. She’d long ago stopped letting the brightness spark off her. There was no dividend.
“I want you to see it,” he was telling her. “I want you to see it like I did. Like seeing the face of God himself. You realize it’s been there all along. You just didn’t know how to look.”
She turned away from him and remembered. Something long ago was visiting her, something from before he started calling, before any men started calling. She was standing, a long-limbed, long-necked eleven-year-old, before a large window display at Blumstein’s on 125th Street, a rippling row of summer dresses in every color — peacock blue, canary yellow, the deep orange of summer tea on a windowsill. It was as if they were moving in the June breeze, drifting on some clothesline, and if she reached out she could touch the soft linen.
Finding herself struck by the memory of it, she forced herself back. “It’s just another policy game,” she said, shaking her head back and forth on the pillow. “That’s all you’re talking. There’s ten policy bankers in ten Harlem blocks and none of them making a slim dime anymore.”
“This is different,” he said. “Let me show you how.” His voice like sugar on a spoon, crackling in her ear. “Let me show you.”
He’d been working at No. 37 Wall Street for almost a year, evening to sunrise, and had yet to see more than a handful of souls. All those gray-hatted, gray-faced men in their Arrow collars and polished brogues had long dispersed by the time he arrived, all off to some elegant drawing rooms in tall brownstones or Fifth Avenue apartments, in stately buildings dripping with white trim like wedding cakes, or to dinner at Sherry’s, Lobster Newberg, sweet bread in terrapin, jelly rubanée, and cigars, or train rides to homes on Long Island with stretches of lawn that seemed to end somewhere across the ocean.
And there he’d be, in the empty husk they left behind each day, boot to bucket. But he never minded any of it.
Nights, 2, 3 o’clock, he’d sit at one of the brokers’ desks, each night a different one, slippery walnut top, elbows on green felt, fingers spread on the ledgers. He’d sit there in his bleach-specked trousers, his worn work shirt. He’d sit there and he’d read. He’d read the newspapers, one by one, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, the Evening Journal, the Herald the World, the American, everything he could find. And he’d think. He’d wonder about the broker who sat there all day, probably ten or fifteen years younger, a seersucker-suited youth, lazy from summers in Newport, a winter’s month in St. Augustine. Did that man, that mere boy, know the hard majesty of numbers? Or did he stare dreamily out the window and ponder gossamer, the winsome heiress with whom he danced at the previous night’s Mayflower Ball?
Well he, he wouldn’t waste a minute at that desk. And hell if he was going to do his reading in the janitor’s closet. He had a right to be at that desk. He knew none of those brokers saw the numbers float miraculous. Sometimes the digits felt so alive they were shimmering things he could roll across his knuckles like his granddad with his lucky gold piece.
He never doubted his purpose, his reason for being there, for making the long way down to the tip of the island five days a week. After all, he’d been waiting a long time, since coming out of Boys High School in Brooklyn twenty years before. He’d worked as a bellhop, a short-order cook, four years in the Navy, near seven more as a hotel porter, and he could certainly push a mop on those fine marble floors a little while longer. To him, it was like a running leap. And if he ever felt a flicker of uncertainty, he’d pull a worn piece of paper from his pocket. Copied from a periodical, it read:
Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
Because he had a plan he was working on and he could, with a pure heart, promise her that, if she would just wait a little longer, they’d both be gliding across their own marble floors by New Year’s and wouldn’t she like to be a June bride anyway?
That night with her, the plan was no longer shimmering on the horizon. It was trapped in his belly and he could feel it when he laid his hand there, when he rested his hat over it.
When she heard his news, he assured her, she would feel the pain soften and dissolve and she would want to put on her Alice-blue dress and tie a ribbon in her hair and be ready to dance all night, because everything had changed and he would tell her why.
She almost didn’t want him to tell her. She knew how he could talk, first like butterflies flitting softly against her ear, and then, as the story, the idea, the promise would build, a music so lovely, so deep and bone-stirring, and then she’d have to work so hard to keep that hardness inside her. That tightness that had protected her for a year or more with this man, protected her from yet another disappointment — one man forgot to say he had a wife and newborn baby down in Baltimore, one man forgot to tell her he’d just signed up for a hitch in the Merchant Marines, one man forgot to say his mother wouldn’t like to see him with a colored woman on a public street. Or, worst of all, the ones who wanted to stay around but couldn’t — couldn’t hold a job, or got so beaten down by hard labor it was all they could do to keep from jumping off the Willis Avenue Bridge.
Please don’t, she wanted to tell him now. But telling him even that would be showing him something, and she was determined to show him nothing.
So she listened.
He wouldn’t rush. He knew he had to take her through it step by step so she could experience it as he had.
My girl, he said, it was just last night at old No. 37. Finished with floors five through fifteen. Every long corridor swept and mopped, every waste basket emptied, the candle-stick telephones polished, the standing ashtrays shaken out and filled with fresh sand. The smell of Dazzle bleach and carnauba wax heavy in the air.
He was standing in the closet, pouring bleach down the sink drain.
It came in a flash, his whole destiny flickering before his eyes, like a newsreel unspooling. A jittery image of himself, a Borsalino bowler on his head, Malacca walking stick in his hand, a topcoat of finest Italian wool, standing in an elegant drawing room with tall curtains and chandeliers. And pieces of gold, they were funneling down from the top edge of the screen, the ceiling, the sky, twirling like long sparkling ribbons in front of him and through his hands, his fingers, and to the carpet beneath him where it massed in enormous piles, a pirate’s booty out of a child’s picture book.
It came to him like that.
It was like St. Paul, wasn’t it, a mop standing in for a horse hoof. And standing there, he laughed like a drunken fool, teetering and spinning like a top because it was all there, waiting for him. He just had to take it.
It was all the clearing house totals, you see. Published each day in the financial press.
He’d kept the pages with each day’s totals in stacks tied with string. They sat in the corner of the basement next to the bags of salt. He’d kept them because he liked to watch the turn, the tilt, the romance of the rising and falling totals. He’d kept them for reasons he hadn’t known before but knew now.
Carrying those papers, strings slipped over his fingers, he walked to the mahogany-walled warren of the floor’s head broker, Mr. Thornton, the one who proudly displayed a photograph of himself astride a powerful horse, polo mallet in hand.
He sat at Mr. Thornton’s desk, pulled out a scratch pad and pencil, and went to work.
He sat there, a pile of ginger nuts, a few stray cigarettes to fire his mind, paper and grease pencil in hand. He knew it would work, had known it back in that closet. But he wasn’t taking any chances. He would play with those numbers all night, making sure...
“I sat at that desk,” he told her now, “and time passed like two beats of my heart and then it was dawn. My hands covered with ink, dear lady, and I felt drunk as a preacher, and just like a preacher, kissed by God, because I knew. I knew.”
When he told her this, she felt like she was fighting him off, heel of hand to chest, knees tucked high, and it was hard, because he looked lit from within, a Midas in a felt fedora with the voice of a soft-tongued minister with a pure, pure heart.
Even as she fought, however, she felt the something tight inside her, the thing she kept fitted tight and compact inside her all day every day, start to loosen, the hard bolts that held it together giving way slowly and falling. And she hated this feeling because she knew the tightness and it kept her and it was all she had.
When he talked, he used his hands, which were graceful, lithe, delicate, didn’t fit with his round face, his big barrel chest, his heavy lidded eyes. When he talked, he created pictures for her, with his hands, with his silver-toned voice, the way he kept his eyes on her and at the same time some imagined place over her left shoulder where, he assured them both, a shimmering future lay. A future beckoning them, artlessly.
Once it was...
Then it was...
Now it would be...
She looked at him, at his eager eyes flickering, daring her to come and join his dream like it wasn’t a dream at all but a thing you could lay your hands on and feel under each finger like the ropy filaments on a mop.
The only thing that’s real, she kept telling herself, is the pain in my curved back. No, she wouldn’t join that dream. He hadn’t earned the right. Didn’t he know all that was real to her was her five dollars a week plus bus fare? Didn’t he see he’d have to put her hands on something more than a fancy man’s story to make it matter for her now? She was twenty-eight years old, twenty-eight years too old for the soft-tongued promises of handsome men leaning over her tired bed.
It’s not enough anymore, she told him. It was once but not anymore. I have to be able to lay my hands on it. Can you do that for me? Can you make it real?
I can, he said. My dear, I can.
“So what did you figure out down there in that closet? A way to beat the bankers?” she said, forcing a toughness in her voice. “You think you’re going to make a fat pot on the stock market with your handful of dollars a week?”
He shook his head. “I’m not playing the market, my girl. I’m makin a market.”
“And what’s for sale in your market, my man? What are we buying?”
“Same as Wall Street. A glimmer down the road.”
She shook her head. “Don’t tell me you’re just talking about another numbers racket.” When she met him, he was a runner for a policy game, taking bets from hotel customers. “I don’t make time with racketeers.”
He smiled and rose from his chair, walking to the edge of the bed. “It’s no racket. It’s honest as your furrowed brow, m’lady. It’s a true thing.”
“Sounds to me like you’re just talking another numbers game, fat chances and day wages down. Bolita all over again,” she said, still shaking her head. She told him how her auntie had played every day for years, a penny down each morning and hit five dollars once in a blue moon. They drew the numbers at the cigar store, pulling numbered ball bearings from a sack behind the counter. Sometimes Auntie took her for the drawing and sometimes she was the one chosen to pluck the ball bearings from the soft muslin pouch that made her fingertips smell like sweet tobacco.
When Auntie needed that operation on her neck to take out the swollen tumor the size of a large lemon, she had no money to pay for it. The charity hospital took her instead. Everyone said the doctor who removed it smelled like apple jack. She died the next morning, her face gray and frozen. She could picture her auntie’s face now, the awful way the skin pearled along the bones, like wax.
Not three months later, word spread that the smiling cigar store owner had been rigging the numbers for years, palming duplicate ball bearings on days when it suited him. Before anything could happen, the store was shuttered up and he was long gone. Someone thought they spotted him on the platform at Pennsylvania Station, getting on a train to parts south.
A lot of the bolita bankers closed up shop after that, one after another. “When I played the game, that lady was a virgin,” one of them said. “Now she is a whore.”
He smiled when she told him this. He’d been hoping she would take him to just this point. It was what it was all about.
He recalled his favorite teacher at Brooklyn Boys High School, dark-eyed, timid Mrs. Koplon, who stayed after school with him, who filled the blackboard with glorious clouds of numbers, the chalk dust swirling around their heads.
And now he began talking softly, gently, just like Mrs. Koplon. Numbers aren’t just what you have or you don’t have in your pocket, bus fare or shoe-leathering it, steak on a fine plate or canned hash, he told her. Do you want to see what they can do? Because they have a power, my dear, if you let them work their witchery. Do you want to see what we can make them do?
Of course she did. Of course. But she said nothing.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handfull of coins gathered from his second job, porter at the Hotel Walcott four days a week.
He let them slip through his fingers onto the bedspread beside her. A penny, a nickel, a dime.
The coins resting there, shimmering a little with each breath, each faint twist of her body as she raised it to see them better, to see his hands fluttering over them.
He sat down on the bed beside her. She let him. This was something.
“What are the odds, my girl? Tell me now. What are the odds you draw that shiny liberty-head?”
“One in three,” she said, barely a whisper. “One in three.”
“So you’d play?”
“I’d play. Sure. I’d play.”
“So in a three-digit number game, what are the odds of picking the right three numbers?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know that,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
“You pick a four first. How many ways can you go wrong?” he asked, tender like the man at post office when she was small, the one with the whiskers who never made her wait in line, and together they counted. She lifted one finger to his, raised hands, fingers spread, and they counted.
“Nine,” she said. “Nine,” she said again.
“So pick your three numbers. What are your odds?” he repeated. Taking her hand in his, in the soft center of his palm, he spread three of her fingers over three coins.
She let her fingertips graze the coins. Turning her body, she could feel the crisp edges of the sugar burns beneath the cool.
“One in 999?” she ventured.
He nodded, so pleased with her, this girl, pulled from school by her mother at age thirteen to go to work at the Loth Fair & Square Ribbon factory before it shut down.
Reaching down, he lifted the newspaper that stood like a flag in his coat pocket. He held it folded in front of her and pointed to smudgy columns:
Exchanges: $823,411,011
Balances: $ 97,425,366
With his grease pencil, he’d circled the 2 and 3 in the first figure and the 7 in the second figure.
“The rules will be simple,” he said. “They’ll never change. The numbers in those three columns make up the number that pays that day. So today, it’d be 237. You play 237 and you hit it. The big time.”
Pointing to the columns again, he said, “The totals create a random number each day, my girl. And it’s published in the daily papers everyday for all to see. Do you see how that changes everything?”
“Because the game can’t be fixed,” she said, even as she tried to imagine a way it could. Tried to imagine a way to make him wrong. “You can’t rig the numbers.”
My, was she fast. He knew she would be. It was why he’d waited so long for her.
“That’s why this is different,” he said, but they both recognized what he was really saying: That’s why I’m different. “No drawing of numbers, no silky hands slipping favorites behind the counter. And you don’t need to spread the word about the winning number. You don’t need any operation at all except to collect and, when someone hits, pay out. I’ll pay 600-to-1 to those dear souls who hit.”
“Not 999-to-1?”
“No,” he said with a loose grin that made her eyes unfocus, her feet arch. He was very close to her on the bed and she could smell tobacco and ginger, and she could feel his weight shifting her, sinking her toward him.
“It’s all so simple,” he added, almost a whisper, as if to himself. “And yet someone needed to think of it. And now they have.”
“I’d never play those odds,” she said, her breath slightly fast.
“You wouldn’t,” he smiled. “Not you. Nor me, my girl.”
He flicked one of the coins with the tip of his finger. It flipped over on her belly, sending a wave of soft heat all the way up to her nostrils. He flicked another, and then one more.
“But lots of fine, warm, striving folks would,” he said. “For a promise.”
He set his hand down on her torso, each coin pushing into her. His hands on her, his warm palms pressing the coins cool onto her skin.
We all want a promise, she thought.
“And here’s why,” he said, and they both looked at the coins on her skin. “And here’s why.”
But it wasn’t just that. She knew that it was the same for them as it was for every cleaning lady, line worker, porter, janitor, seamstress, who would put coins down for the clearinghouse racket; it wasn’t these thin scales of copper, bronze, silver, gold. It was the promise. It was grander than that, and they were smarter. It had to mean more, didn’t it? Yes, she told herself. It was the promise. And what could be hard and mean about a promise?
And she could feel it and she rested her hands on his and they interlaced and, in the pockets between their braided fingers, she could still see that liberty-head glint.
And she smiled and kept her eyes fixed down on that flash of mercury because it was the most real thing she’d ever known, this hard-struck illusion. It would be real for them.
Legend has it that Casper Alexander Holstein, Harlem’s “King of Policy,” invented the clearinghouse totals racket while sitting in a janitor’s closet amid mops and brooms. J. Saunders Redding wrote in 1934 that Holstein “combined the prosaic traits of a financier with the dizzy imaginative flights of a fingerless Midas,” recounting how he was studying the clearinghouse totals late one night when the idea “struck him between the eyes [and] he let out an uproarious laugh and in general acted like a drunken man.” Within a year he owned “three of the finest apartment buildings in Harlem, a fleet of expensive cars, a home on Long Island, and several thousand acres of farmland in Virginia.” A generous philanthropist, Holstein became one of the foremost patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. His luck, however, would run out. By the late 1920s, Dutch Schultz had wiped out all of Harlem’s policy bankers and seized control of the numbers racket. As Claude McKay wrote, “And the ’clat in the atmosphere, which formerly made Harlem hum like a beehive, went out of the game forever.”
When Holstein died in 1944, the headline read: Former Policy King in Harlem Dies Broke
Hoboken, New Jersey
Before 9/11 and after the millennium, when most of the dotcoms became dot-bombs, I got fired from my job as a Java programmer. To say I left Delivero.com on bad terms would be an understatement. It took two security guards to get me out of the office in Jersey City, and if the goons hadn’t shown up I probably would’ve killed Alan Silver, the CEO. Although Silver was too much of a coward to admit it, he fired me for one reason and one reason only — because his wife had a thing for me. He saw her hitting on me at the holiday party, and after that he used every excuse he could think of to get rid of me — lack of motivation, poor interpersonal skills, not a team player, tardiness. Yeah, right. It was because his slutty trophy wife wanted my body. That was it. End of story.
The job market was tight back then, with so many Net companies folding left and right, and it didn’t help that I’d left Delivero on bad terms and couldn’t get a recommendation. I’d made some money on stock options, but Silver, that cocksucker, had canned me right before annual bonuses were given out, costing me about fifty grand. I explored a lawsuit, but the lawyers I talked to either told me I didn’t have a case or wanted to charge me up the wazoo. After several months out of work, I was starting to go through my money and needed a source of income, so I became a full-time day trader.
I knew I could make big money in the stock market. Yeah, I know, who didn’t feel that way in the ’90s, right? To hell with baseball; trading stocks had become the new national pastime. But for me, it wasn’t a fad. I had a knack for picking winners, spotting trends, and timing the market, and I felt like I could clean up if I put my mind to it. I wanted to take this thing seriously. I converted the bedroom of my condo in Hoboken into a home office and moved my bed out into the living room. I opened a few online trading accounts, bought all the state-of-the-art software and an Aeron chair to sit my ass down on, and I got to work.
At first I had good days and bad, mostly bad. My instincts were good, but sometimes I got too cute, tried to hold onto positions to make big scores, when I knew I should’ve been conservative and gotten out. Though I never held positions overnight, so I didn’t get burned after 9/11. Actually, the market volatility after the attacks worked out great for me and I made big money on the swings up and down. I made more money going short than going long, and seemed to have a knack for spotting the stocks that were in deep shit. One day I decided to stop going long altogether and only sell short. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’d ever made.
I was a natural short seller. It fit my personality, I guess — I was good at spotting the bad in things. I knew when a stock was going to tank before any jackass analyst did, and I knew how to profit from the situation. And with all the Internet crapola out there, spotting trouble wasn’t exactly a chore. Net stocks were still trading at astronomical prices and I rode the suckers all the way down to bankruptcy. Some of the companies were such obvious losers that I broke my rules about not holding positions overnight and went short long-term. I wasn’t an idiot — I covered with options so I couldn’t get burned on the upside, but that rarely happened. It seemed like there were an endless number of dotcraps going belly-up and an endless number of opportunities to cash in.
In early 2002, when Bush and his boys were bombing the shit out of Afghanistan, I made my first million. But at that point I didn’t really care about the money. It was all about the action, about being right. Although I could’ve afforded some-place bigger, I stayed in my one-bedroom in Hoboken. I almost never went out; what was the point? The things I gave a shit about were the stock market and making money. I saw my friends less and less and I’d never been much of a family guy. I used to have girlfriends. Nothing long-term or serious, but I was a good-looking guy and when I went out to a bar or a club I had no trouble meeting women. Like Silver’s wife. Sometimes I thought about calling her up and taking her out and trying to nail her just for the hell of it. I could’ve, but the truth was I wasn’t interested. Sex just didn’t do it for me anymore.
I spent more and more time online and less time sleeping. It got to the point where I was spending eighteen to twenty hours a day staring at my computer screen. If I wasn’t making trades or doing research I was posting on stock message boards. My comments were always negative, always designed to inflict maximum damage on the companies I was shorting. I attacked management, put negative spins on positive news, and even wrote outright lies — anything I could do to help crush stock prices. I posted under multiple names — partly because the board monitors on sites like Yahoo and Motley Fool kept kicking me off, and partly because I wanted to create the impression for newbies following stocks that there was massive negativity about the companies. Still, everyone eventually knew who I was. I guess my posts had a style to them or whatever, because I became one of the most well-known stock bashers on the Internet.
My favorite stock to bash, without a doubt, was Delivero. Part of it was personal. I wanted revenge. I wanted to take Silver down, for him to feel some of the pain I’d felt when he fired my ass. But I also truly believed that the company had despicable business practices and was a perfect example of everything that was wrong with Wall Street. Somehow the piece of shit had managed to stay in business through the height of the Internet bloodbath, though its stock had plummeted from a high of eighty-four to around six bucks a share. Even when I was working for them, I knew their business plan was smoke and mirrors.
They wanted to be a competitor of Kozmo.com, that other brilliant company that thought delivering Ben & Jerry’s and VHS movies by bicycle was the wave of the future. The problem was that Delivero had no real growth plan and they were burning cash. They’d had a few awful quarters where their numbers didn’t come close to analyst estimates. But every time the company was in dire straits they’d raise more money in a new stock offering or announce a new “partnership,” and somehow the shares managed to tread water, even go up. I’d post like crazy on those days, about how Silver and his cronies were criminals and deserved jail time, but the idiot longs would circle jerk themselves, going on about how Delivero’s stock was going to a hundred a share and how I was the world’s biggest moron.
It got to the point where I felt like I was the most hated man on the Internet, and the disgust toward me was probably the most glaring on the Delivero message boards. There was a lot of bad blood on those boards from suckers who had got-ten in when Delivero was in the stratosphere and were desperately waiting for the stock to go back up. Yeah, like that would ever happen. They ganged up on me, called me a loser, a retard, the village idiot — every name imaginable that could get through the web filters. A lot of the idiots started calling me a “paid basher” and claimed I’d been hired by hedge funds to bad-mouth stocks all day. One nutcase claimed he knew for a fact that I received five cents for every negative post I wrote. It amazed me how angry I could get these guys, but I liked it too. I knew that in order for me to make money as a short, I needed jackass longs on the other side of my trades, and I thanked God there was no shortage of fools among Delivero’s investors.
As the months went by, and it seemed like another Net stock/ex high flyer from the ’90s went under every day, Delivero somehow stayed in business. The company was like a cockroach that you stamp on ten times but still won’t die. It had to be a combination of luck and pure stupidity from the delusional longs living in fantasyland who continued to buy the company’s worthless shares — there was no other explanation. It was so obvious to me that Delivero wasn’t in the business to make money — they were in the business to deceive stockholders. The company expanded to other cities, made new partnerships, floated more stock, and issued other bullshit PR releases to make the stock price go up. Then insiders, especially Silver, sold at every possible opportunity. Dipshit longs claimed that the sales were planned, part of the execs’ normal retirement plans — yeah, right. They believed that, there was a bridge I would’ve liked to sell them. Every three months I listened to the webcast of Delivero’s quarterly results and got nauseous as Silver, in his pompous, know-it-all voice, fed his crap to gullible analysts. Some dork from Morgan Stanley or Citigroup would ask Silver why he was lowering estimates for the next fiscal year and he’d go on about “new strategies going forward” and “adapting to the current landscape,” never answering the question, of course. Did the analysts give a shit? No sirree. They had their own agendas, pumping up garbage stocks like Delivero with their Buy and Strong Buy ratings to keep their clients happy.
When the WorldCom scandal hit, I thought Delivero would go down the toilet too. I was so positive that the company was history that I got out of all of my other positions and shorted the shit out of the stock. It had been trading in a recent range of four to six dollars a share. I profited on the short-term moves downward and covered on options when the stock ticked up. And everything I made, I plowed back into my long-term short position. Every morning when I woke up, I went online and checked for news on Delivero. I knew that one day the Chapter Eleven announcement would appear. It was only a matter of time.
Meanwhile, since I had no other stocks in my portfolio, I was able to focus full-time on my bashing of Delivero. I tarted posting at least five hundred times a day on various message boards. I attacked the business model of the company and its deceitful accounting, but my messages also became more personal, more focused on Silver. I wrote about how incompetent he was and about how he had an alcohol and drug problem. I posted that he was into child porn, that he had ties to Al-Qaeda, that his trophy wife was a transvestite. I knew my posts came off as bizarre and irrational — that was the point. I wanted to incite rage, to stir the pot — and it worked like a charm. There was no end to the number of longs who got sucked in and started arguing with me. Their posts were even nuttier than mine. Wannabe investors would visit the Delivero message boards and see all of the wacky posts from the longs and get the impression that a bunch of lunatics were investing in the stock.
I knew Silver read the message boards, or had employees who did, and would find out about my posts. I also knew that when I started focusing on his trophy wife, he’d know it was me posting. This was my intention. I wanted him to know who his enemy was, that it was me who was out to get him. It would make my ultimate victory even more satisfying.
Some longs — including Silver himself, for all I knew — now responded to my attacks by saying that I had a hidden agenda, that I had to be an irate former employee or have some other vendetta against the company. People put me on “ignore” and tried to block my messages, but I had multiple IDs and was unstoppable. I knew that my posts were having an effect, that I was influencing the stock price. On days when I wrote my most scathing attacks, the stock almost always dropped and I profited. I felt like I could manipulate the buying and selling on a whim. It was just a matter of how often I posted and how effective my bashings were. But there was no doubt that I was in total control of the company’s fate. If I wanted to change my position and go long I could’ve driven the stock up to twenty dollars a share in one month.
My new goal was to demolish the stock with my most furious attacks yet, to go for the kill. And I got some huge help one morning when Delivero issued a major earnings warning before the market open. The same analysts who had been cheerleading the stock for years finally woke up out of their fucking cocoons and reduced their ratings to “hold” and “sell,” and the stock opened down over two points. I cashed in big time on a day trade but I didn’t put the moolah in the bank, into money heaven; instead, I shoved it into my margin account and upped my short position even more. Armageddon for Delivero was on the horizon and I stood to make millions.
I increased the frequency of my postings. Sometimes I stayed up all night to influence foreign investors, and one day I set a personal record of one thousand posts in a day. Delivero’s stock was continuing to tank, sinking to under two dollars a share, and I knew it was all because of me.
Then a registered letter arrived at my apartment. It was from Delivero’s lawyers, threatening a lawsuit if I didn’t stop bashing the company. Silver was just trying to intimidate me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that happen.
A week later, as the stock price continued to drop, I tarted getting threatening e-mails. They were from anonymous addresses, but I knew Silver was sending them. All of the notes basically said the same thing — that I’d better stop bashing or else. Some got more explicit, warning me that I’d lose limbs or die in pain.
I considered calling the police, but I was afraid of what might happen if I did. There were detailed records of me bashing Silver’s stock and I began to fear that I could go to jail for libel for some of the things I’d written.
I didn’t respond to any of the notes and stopped my onslaught, hoping the thing would die down on its own. Then, one morning while I was sitting at my PC, a brick shattered my window and almost hit me in the head. I looked outside and saw a black car speeding away, but I couldn’t catch the license plate. I didn’t bother calling the cops, figuring that Silver would just deny responsibility, try to make me look like the bad guy.
Then I left my apartment that Sunday afternoon to get a haircut and returned to discover a message spray painted on my bedroom wall:
DIE MOTHERFUCKING BASHER DIE
I decided enough was enough. I was surprised that Silver had gone this far, but I remembered that he’d always had a temper, screaming at employees and firing them on a whim — hell, he’d fired me for no legitimate reason — and maybe the stress of his company going under was getting to him and he was snapping. How the hell did I know what was going on with him? All I knew was that he was starting to threaten my personal safety and I had to take some action.
Years ago, after an attempted break-in at my building, I’d bought a gun for protection. I decided I’d go talk to Silver face-to-face and try to get him to back off. If he caused trouble, started threatening me again, I’d show the gun, just to scare him and make him think I was more psycho than he was. I knew that beneath all of the tough talk, Silver was a big pussy and I could intimidate him easily.
The next day, Monday, I drove to Silver’s house in Bernardsville. They should’ve called it Snootyville. When I was working at Delivero I went to a company picnic in Silver’s backyard. It was one of the biggest, most expensive houses on a block of big, expensive houses. He probably blew three million bucks of stockholders’ money on it.
I waited in my car in a spot near his driveway. I figured he’d leave the office at around 6 or 7 and the drive from Jersey City to Bernardsville would take about an hour — an hour and a half with traffic. But at 9 o’clock there was still no sign of him. I knew he wasn’t out of town because I’d called his office earlier from a pay phone and his security said he was busy in a meeting. He was probably out with a client, making one of his bullshit deals.
Sure enough, at a little after 10 o’clock, his red Porsche pulled into the drive. The garage door opened and the car went in. I got out of my car and walked fast toward the garage. Silver got out of the Porsche. He looked like crap, like he’d aged ten years, but he still had that pompous, my-shit-doesn’t-stink quality he’d had when he fired me, and I remembered how gleeful he’d seemed that day, as if showing me the door was giving him a big fat boner.
When Silver saw me I knew he recognized me, even though he pretended not to. I told him I knew what he was doing, trying to terrorize me, and it wouldn’t work. Then he squinted, acting like it was all starting to click for him, and then he fake smiled, pretending he wasn’t scared shitless, but it was obvious he was. It was great watching him squirm.
He claimed he had no idea what I wanted from him and said a lot of other shit, trying to calm me down so he could have a chance to escape into the house and call the cops. I told him I wasn’t playing games and I took out the Glock. I have no idea why he grabbed at the gun, what he was trying to do. Maybe he didn’t know what he was trying to do either; maybe he just panicked. Who the fuck knows? We struggled for a few seconds, at least it seemed like seconds. Inches away from the man whose company I’d been bashing for years, I hated him right then the same way I had when he called me into his office and told me I was being let go. Let go, like I was a fucking fish he was tossing back to sea. I remembered how I could’ve killed him that day, and how I’d always wished I had, and then the gun went off. He fell onto the concrete next to the Porsche, blood spilling out of his chest.
I ran like hell. When I got into my car, I heard a woman screaming — maybe his slut wife — but I was pretty sure I got away before she saw me or the car.
The drive back to Hoboken was a blur. I still don’t know how I made it without getting pulled over, because I must’ve been speeding my ass off.
The rest of the night I was in a state of total panic. Even if no one could identify me, I knew I was going to be an obvious suspect. I’d been bashing Silver for years and all of my posts were online for the world to see. Toward dawn, I started packing. My only chance was to leave the country.
I went online to see if there was any news about the murder; it was all over the Internet already. Because of fear and uncertainty about the future, Delivero’s stock was tanking in the pre-market, down below a dollar a share. It was like a dream come true — it had become a penny stock. I put in an order to cover my short position at the market open. I stood to make about four million dollars. I just hoped the authorities didn’t freeze my accounts before I could have the money wired to me in Mexico.
Then I checked my e-mail and almost passed out. There was a new message from one of the e-mail addresses that I’d suspected Silver had been using. The note read:
DIE IN PAIN ALONE YOU COCKSUCKING BASHING ASSHOLE
I stared at the screen for a few minutes, realizing the huge mistake I’d made. It wasn’t Silver who’d been harassing me. The real scumbag was probably one of the hundreds of people I’d pissed off with my bashings.
I was a mess for a while, then I got even. I went to the Yahoo Delivero message board and rubbed it in to the dumbasses who were giving me all their money. I was in the middle of one of my best posts ever when the cops started banging on my front door.