There was quite a commotion down on the street this morning, here on Wall Street where I work.  Of course, I get to the office before the sun comes up, so whatever it was it came along after I was already at my desk, comfortable, with a nice hot cup of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.  Coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia back in the 9^th century by a goat herder named Kaldi.  Kaldi fed the berries to his goats because he liked watching them dance.

My name is Bentley Weston Perry, and for as long as I can remember I’ve always wanted to make a killing in the market.  In the stock market.  In the commodities market.  Hell, in the supermarket if I had to.  It didn’t really matter which market, so long as I made my killing.

It all started when I was just twelve.  That’s when I first saw the movie Wall Street, and it changed my life forever.  I must have watched that movie a million times.

The first time I saw Bud Fox at work I thought, now this is my kind of guy.  “There’s no nobility in poverty.”  Right on.  This guy knows exactly what he wants and he isn’t going to let anything get in his way, not even with those two gadflies James Karen and Hal Holbrook constantly buzzing in his ear.  Bud Fox?  Yeah, I could do that, minus all the cold calling of course.

But then I saw Gordon Gekko.  Trying to watch Bud Fox after seeing Gordon Gekko in action would be like going back to the old horse and buggy days.  On top of that, by the end of that movie Bud Fox was crying like a little girl.  It’s amazing what a pair of handcuffs will do to a man.  What is it about a set of stainless steel bracelets that can turn a perfectly upright human being into a weeping willow?

But Gordon Gekko, now there was a real man.  All the way down.  And that speech, the Greed speech.  Still the best movie speech ever, hands down, even after all these years.

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.  Greed is right.  Greed works.  Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

That speech was so good that almost fifteen years later they were repeating it verbatim in the movie Boiler Room, another great film.

I liked Gioninni Ravioli in the beginning, “Either you’re slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.  Honor is in the dollar.”  But yet again, slap a pair of handcuffs on what appears to be a man and watch as he deteriorates into the crying game right before your very eyes.

Ben Affleck, on the other hand, now he did a good job with his Alec Baldwin impersonation from Glengarry Glen Ross.

“ABC: Always Be Closing.”

That Baldwin speech, the mother of all motivational speeches.

 “Put that coffee down.  Coffee is for closers.”

“The good news is, you’re fired.

What was Baldwyn’s name in that movie, anyway?  They never really said.  When asked, all he said was, “What’s my name?  Fuck you, that’s my name.”

“You know what it takes to sell?  It takes brass balls.” 

They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

But the thing I liked most about those guys, about Gekko, about Baldwin, about Ben Affleck even: they all had killer instinct.  Just like me.  They were all killers.

So I got a job on Wall Street, and now I’m a vice-president at Price Porterhouse, one of the oldest firms in town.

Price is one of those companies most people don’t even know exists, not unless they’re in the business.  They don’t advertise, they don’t put their name on football stadiums, and most of all they don’t get into trouble.  In fact, the fine folks at Price Porterhouse rarely even stick their heads above ground at all, if ever.

And what is it I do there exactly, you may wonder?  Well, I do the same things all vice-presidents do, which is mulling over business problems, examining opportunities, exchanging rumors, spreading gossip, taking long lunches, ringing my secretary for coffee, and roaming the halls like a vulture.  In other words, doing absolutely nothing at all, and looking damn good doing it.  It’s a vice-president’s job to get to work before anyone else, to dress the part, show up to meetings, look like he knows every detail of every deal, sign stacks of papers, and accomplish the grand feat of working very hard at doing no real work at all.  Being a vice-president is all about living the Life of Riley, while at the same time looking like Don Draper.

Remember back at the turn of the century?  The 21^st Century, I mean.  Remember all the scandals that started popping up just after the dot com bubble burst?  The beginning of the 21^st Century was rife with fraud.  Funny how so many schemes tend to turn up in bunches like that.

There was Adelphia and Merryl Lynch.  There was Rite Aid and WMI, Arthur Anderson and Sunbeam.  But the big ones, the ones you might remember still, were WorldCom, Tyco, and of course Enron, the smartest guys in the room.  They still play that movie every once in a while, just so you never forget.

Remember those guys?  I bet you do.  I was still in high school when all that went down, but I remember it just like it was yesterday.  Some people follow sports, others like their soap operas.  Me, I like television that has the word Billions in it.

Most people, I‘m sure, found all of it despicable.  Politicians and the media were all over it.  What hypocrites.  Those same politicians raked in millions in donations from these companies, and the advertising revenues generated from them, well, only God knows those numbers.

But while everyone was busy burning these guys to the stake, while that little pencil-neck geek Eliot Spitzer was all over tv spewing his righteousness by day, and dressing up in a leather teddy and doggy collar by night, I had quite a different take on it all.

Pencil-neck geek, by the way, is a term invented by a man named Classy Freddy Blassie.  Classy Freddy was a professional wrestler.  The term refers to a carnival performer known as “The Geek,” who had a neck that looked like a stack of dimes and was famous for biting off the heads of chickens and snakes.

What most people don’t understand is that the money these guys stole was not really money at all.  What I mean to say is that it wasn’t real money.  It was all just paper promises and speculation.  Stealing numbers from the sky shouldn’t be a crime.  It’s not the same as breaking into someone’s house or mugging them on the street.

And like any scandal on Wall Street, you have to understand that imputing the traders holds about as much water as blaming a school of piranha.  Down in the trenches, there’s no time for morality.  There’s no time to stop and wonder if that last sell ticket is grandma’s life savings.  That would be like being in a foxhole and trying to figure out not only exactly which individual it was taking which shots at you, but where exactly did those bullets land, and who was the manufacturer of each and every bullet.  Down in the pit, everything happens at the speed of light.  There’s no time to think.  The second you do, you’re dead.

Bernie Ebbers.  Remember him?  Maybe not.  Nonetheless, Uncle Bernie was the CEO of WorldCom.  I remember the first time I saw this guy, thinking, this guy looks just like Vice-principal Dunzlowski.  Dunzlowski was a vice-principle at my high school.  Vice-principals rank just below vice-presidents on the food chain, right above fire watchers and dog walkers.

Vice-principle Duncelowski was famous for hitting on all the women teachers, even the old maids, and locking himself out of his office.  But most of all Duncelowski will be remembered as the dumbass who hid under Jimmy Fallow’s car trying to catch kids skipping school one day.  It wasn’t a bad idea, but Duncelowski, who actually subbed as a science teacher sometimes, somehow forgot all about the theory of the expanding Universe.  He didn’t think twice about wolfing down a dozen donuts while lying there in wait, and how it can cause your stomach to rise.  This and the four cans of soda he drank caused his entire mid-section to expand, and he wound up getting stuck under the car.  They had to call a tow to get him out and by then every kid in school was outside watching.  I don’t know how he found the nerve to ever show his face again, but then again, he was a vice-principal.

Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom however, it’s pretty easy to see exactly what he did.  What he did was to make $11 billion just disappear, like magic, something Duncelowski couldn’t have done even by accident.  Uncle Bernie wound up driving his company’s stock down from 64 dollars to 21 cents.  Now that’s what I call a businessman.  It’s not everyone who can get that kind of movement in a stock.  Maybe he should have been a vice-principal after all.  I mean come on, his whole defense was “I don’t recall.  I had no idea what was going on.”  Really, all that time planning his scam, all that money coming his way and the best he could do was pull the old Ronald Reagan defense?  Gimme a break.

But it wasn’t all on the downside for good ole Uncle Bernie.  Ebbers’ cut from the whole scam was around $400 million.  Not too bad for a would-be high-school vice-principal.

If you don’t remember WorldCom, maybe you remember Tyco.  That was the one with the $6000 shower curtain and the $2 million Roman Orgy.  You’re gonna find this kind of funny, but I swear to God, the CEO of Tyco, Dennis Kozlowski, he looked exactly like the head of my school district, Superintendent Baldman.  I’m not kidding.  He could have been his twin.  Kozlowski might have looked like Baldman, but he sure didn’t live like a school superintendent.

Kozlowski pilfered over $600 million from his company.  This included a $30 million apartment in Manhattan.  You know what his defense was?  “Nothing was hidden.”  Well, maybe not.  One thing’s for sure, though: the guy didn’t have any hair, but he sure had some balls, Big Brass ones.

And then of course who will ever forget Enron, the smartest guys in the room?  These guys were a bunch of geeks all dressed up in cowboy hats riding around on their dune buggies and dirt bikes trying to prove to everyone that they weren’t just a bunch of dweebs.  Well guess what?  They were.

Enron.  The biggest bankruptcy of its time.  It even took down Arthur Anderson with it, one of the oldest and largest accounting firms in the country.  Enron stock went from over 90 dollars to just 61 cents, and shareholders lost $74 billion in all.  Not a sound investment, to say the least.  But before that ship went down, those three geniuses, Ken Lay, Jeffery Skilling, and Andrew Fastow, they made off with a king’s ransom.  How much?  It’s hard to say, really.  In the end, the Enron books were so convoluted no one could really make sense of them.  But it’s estimated that Enron insiders sold over $1.1 billion in stock alone in the time leading up to the crash.  They may not have been the smartest guys in the room, but they sure as hell were the crookedest, that’s for sure.  Still again, not a bad payday.

Between just these three companies, these five guys, that’s over $2 Billion.  Not too shabby.

Now these were all great scandals.  Lots of dough and lots of corporate jets, parties, mansions, penthouses, playmates, Jacuzzis; but still my favorite is Superintendent Baldman and his $2 million Roman Orgy.  Now that’s living.

There is one drawback to all this though, and it’s not exactly something that can be overlooked.  Sure, they made a lot of money.  Even after Kozlowski had to give back his share of the $134 million, and pay a fine of $70 million, I’m sure there was still plenty left over.  They all had to make restitution, pay fines, but still after it was all said and done I’m sure they were left with a nice chunk of change.  The drawback?  Prison time, and lots of it.

Kozlowski got 25 years.  So did Bernie Ebbers.  Kozlowksi was 58 years old when he was sentenced, Ebbers 63.  At best, those two are going to be slurping their soup through a straw by the time they get out.  They’re going to be more worried about crapping their pants than spending their millions.  One thing’s for sure, there won’t be any more Roman orgies.  And if there are, well now that’s just downright gross.

As for the smartest guys in the room, Jeffrey Skilling got 24 years and Ken Lay, well, Howdy Doody dropped dead only three months before he was to be sentenced.  Some people just have all the luck.

The only one who came out virtually unscaved was Andrew Fastow.  Fastow, who after all was the mastermind behind the whole Enron scandal, got just six years, and he was the youngest of the whole bunch. At least he’s going to get to enjoy his windfall.  Fastow is said to have turned over more than $30 million in cash and property, but the total amount he stole will never really be known.  His schemes were way too intricate and involved hundreds of dummy corporations, most of them based offshore.  Now that’s a smart guy.  I bet you anything he walked away with at least 200, maybe 300 million dollars.  Why?  Because he was clever, that’s why, just like the old days when men used to put real effort into their schemes, and would walk away with most all the cash, maybe get slapped with seven years at Club Fed, tops.  Hell, sometimes no jail time at all, and in the old days, in some cases, they even got promoted, and put in charge.  So there.

Now I know what you‘re probably thinking: what about Bernie Madoff?  I mean after all, it was the biggest rip off of all time, over $68 billion.  But come on.  It was just a Ponzi scheme, and really, there’s nothing very interesting about a Ponzi scheme.  If I was going to go on about that I might as well talk for hours about Social Security, too.   I mean after all, money isn’t everything, you know.

So as you might have guessed, I decided from the very beginning I was going to be on Wall Street; and I’m not talking about some general descriptive term.  I mean on the Street itself, right there between Broadway and William, right there between Exchange Place and Pine.   Right there in the middle of the action.  Right there at the source of all life on the planet.  Right there at the Goddamn center of the Universe.

One thing I knew for certain: if I was going to get in with the Masters of the Universe, I was going to have to get it right from the very beginning.  One wrong move and I’d be peddling annuities in Omaha.  So of course I went to Harvard, then Harvard Business.

I wasn’t going to be doing any cold calling like some immigrant telemarketer, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be on the trading floor either.  They weren’t going to get me into one of those tacky red blazers with a name tag popping Rolaids like breath mints.  No sir, not me.  I had a much grander picture of how my life was going to be.

You may not know it by looking at it, but Wall Street has been around ever since 1792.  I was a little late arriving to the party, a couple hundred years past getting in on the ground floor, so I did the next best thing: I got a job at Price Porterhouse, located at 1 Wall Street in the BNY Mellon Building.  Founded in 1784 by none other than Alexander Hamilton himself, BNY, or the Bank of New York, was the first company ever traded on the New York Stock Exchange.  And it was only fitting.  Banks have one of the best and longest running scams of all time.

Their scam is of course that they take everybody’s money, then charge them a fee to borrow it back.  But the best part, and this is when you know you’ve reached the pinnacle as a con artist, is that they’ve convinced everyone that this sort of thing is acceptable behavior.  Even more, it’s the established way of doing business.  There’s only one racket better than banks, and that of course is taxes.

1 Wall Street is right there at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, only a block away from the New York Stock Exchange and just around the corner from Federal Hall, the original Capitol building for the United States and the site of George Washington’s first inauguration.  I figured, if I couldn’t be there right at the every beginning, at least I could go to the place where it all began.

I couldn’t have been any closer to the action.  The way I saw it, I had just rocketed to the center of the Universe.  The whole damn galaxy was now in orbit around me.  So there.

Not that the job itself really mattered, it was just a beard anyway.  But Price Porterhouse was an old company, a small but well-established firm that had been there ever since the very beginning.  They were so old in fact that it’s said they were even involved with the purchase of Manhattan Island itself.  Now that’s old.

The purchase of Manhattan is one of the greatest real estate swindles of all time.  It was perpetrated by a Dutchman named Peter Minuit.

Minuit was a Walloon from Wesel.

One way of saying it is that Minuit stole the land.  A nicer way of saying it is that he got the land for a steal.  Getting things for a steal would become the way of doing business in the New World.

In 1626 Minuit paid the natives there just 60 guilders worth of fabric and trinkets for the whole island.  60 guilders today would be worth no more than a thousand dollars.  Funny thing is though, there’s no evidence that the natives thought for a minute they’d been taken.  On the contrary, it was the natives who thought they got the better of the deal.  After all, how could any man own the Earth?  These odd-looking white men offered them beads and axes and hatchets and the natives were more than happy to take them.  Shoot, they would have sold them the sun and the moon too, if only they would have made them an offer.

These particular natives had once upon a time been called Indians, all because a man named Christopher Columbus parked his sailboats on the wrong side of the world while out looking for a cup of tea one day.  Indians were people who were famous for getting duped when it came to land deals.  Indians, or Native Americans as they are known today, are also notoriously bad at the board game Monopoly.

Anyhoo, not only was Price Porterhouse one of the oldest firms on Wall Street, it was one of the most close-knit and secretive, perhaps even to the point of being paranoid.  What I mean to say is, the good people at Price trusted no one from the outside whatsoever.  They were all Harvard men, every last one of them.  Even their secretaries, whose official titles were Executive Business Liaisons, went to Harvard.  They were the highest paid secretaries on Wall Street.  And the janitors too, all Harvard men.  Of course they were called Custodial Technicians.

Now I know what you must be thinking: Harvard men as janitors?  Come on.  I’ve got to be pulling your leg.  But in all seriousness, I’m telling you the truth, even the janitors went to Harvard.  And just how exactly do you get a Harvard-educated man to become a janitor?  You don’t.  The thing is, even though the janitors were Harvard men, they had never received a Harvard education.  They had been at Harvard, like they were here at Price, janitors as well.  They had once swept and mopped the halls of Harvard University, and now they were waxing the floors of Price Porterhouse.

To qualify for a position at Price, a janitor had to have been employed at Harvard for no less than 20 years.  He also had to undergo an extensive background check.  Had he ever worked at another major university?  Had his father or his father before him?  Were any of those colleges in the Ivy League, and more importantly, were they Princeton or Yale?  If he could pass the rigorous background check, he was in.  He was now a custodial technician at the low-profile but prestigious firm of Price Porterhouse.  He was now the highest paid janitor in America, and his children would never want for anything ever again.

What being a member of the Price Porterhouse family also meant for a custodial technician was that from now on the good people at Price would pay for any and all his kids’ education, all the way through college and anywhere beyond.  Of course, they would be going to Harvard, but that was more or less understood.

There really weren’t any requirements other than that.  There were no mandatory company picnics, no family day at the zoo or conventions at the beach.  There was no Christmas Party, no New Year’s celebration, and as for Thanksgiving, well, you only got that Thursday off.  You were expected to be at work bright and early the next day.  As long as you followed the Crimson during football season, as long as you wore Harvard sweaters in winter, as long as your underwear was black, white, and crimson, as long as you lived and breathed Big Red, and were there vehemently foaming at the mouth for the annual Harvard/Yale football game, you were one of the family.  Other than that, it was a pretty easy-going place to work.  Oh yes, and it didn’t hurt your bonus at Christmastime if you were heard from time to time making wisecracks about Princeton or telling a joke or two about Yale.

Like I said, all the secretaries, I mean Executive Business Liaisons, they were all Harvard grads, business majors to be exact.  They didn’t have their MBAs, but they were sharp as a tack all the same.  The fine people at Price Porterhouse weren’t going to let a little thing like paranoia affect their bottomline, either.  These were all top-notch broads, all extremely good at what they did.  They took scheduling, organization, information management, even the art of brewing and serving coffee, all to a whole new level.

And speaking of coffee, at Price Porterhouse they served only the very best: Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, Panamanian Lerida, Yemeni Mocha, Colombian Velvet, Jamaican Blue Mountain (the same kind the Queen of England drinks), and even that one they feed to a weasel and pick it up out of its shit that sells for $50 a cup.  Only the best for the good people at Price Porterhouse.  Not only had the analysts at Price never recommended anyone to buy even one share of Starbucks stock, ever, but having just a cup of coffee there was seriously frowned upon.  It was a waste of time anyway, and a real step down.

But the most important thing, even more than the quality of the coffee, was that they only bought their beans from this distributor in Boston by the name of Hansen Brothers, Importers.  Why Hansen Brothers?  Because George Hansen, and his brother Bob, they were both Harvard men.  Their father, Abe Hansen, also a Harvard man, as well as their grandfather, Dutch Hansen, Harvard.  You see, Dutch Hansen, an immigrant, had spent 25 years waxing the halls of Harvard University before coming to Price Porterhouse.  He spent another 20 at Price.  So there.

Everyone and everything that passed through the doors of Price Porterhouse, they all had to have the handprint of Harvard on them in one way or another.  If they didn’t, well, then quite simply they were not allowed inside.

The courier service Price used, owned by a man who had gone to Harvard.  The IT specialist, a Harvard man.  Every telephone, intercom, and computer bought from, and serviced by, you got it, someone who went to Harvard.  Light bulbs, wallpaper, lamps, desks, every piece of furniture in the whole office, from a distributor who graduated from, that’s right, Harvard.

Even the window cleaners, Harvard.  And how do you get a Harvard graduate to clean windows?  You don’t.  But the company was owned by a Harvard man.  Every last person who ever walked through the doors of Price Porterhouse had either gone to Harvard, or they worked for a Harvard man.  If a client was not a Harvard man, he was met on the 3^rd floor in the NYB Mellon conference room, or outside the building entirely.  Price Porterhouse was not interested in impressing anybody, not even the President of the United States.  If he wasn’t a Harvard man, he wasn’t allowed inside.  Even when Price did business with President Bush, the father, all meetings were held at the White House.

“No o-ffense, Mr. President,” that was how Bill Bass used to always tell the story, “no disrespect, but you know…”  Bass had been in charge of the Bush account back in the 80’s and the 90’s.  Bass was in his nineties now, but he loved telling stories of his days on the old #41 account.  At Price Porterhouse, old partners never retire, they just fade away.

What President Bush knew, what he understood, was that because he was a Yale man, no matter that he was President of the United Sates, there was no way he was getting through the doors of Price Porterhouse.  Not in a million years.

But Bass had some really great stories.  My favorite was the one that ended with President Bush saying, “You know Bass, my number at Yale was 41 too.  How do you like them apples?”  Then President Bush jumped up on his desk, football clenched under one arm on his way to hurdling the sofa toward the portrait of George Washington on the far side of the Oval Office.  Bass would go on to remind everyone how he had played linebacker for the Crimson back in the 40’s, and how he had been selected all-conference, Ivy League, 3 years running.  Bass was a nice guy, but he was fading fast.

I love the stock market.  I love the whole rollercoaster ride.  One minute you’re pricing corporate jets, the next, boom, you’re riding the subway to work.  Every moment is like that game-winning play at the Super Bowl, over and over and over again.  It’s the Big Casino.  It’s the world’s largest ATM.  It’s a Cash Grab Machine for Giants.  There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be.

So there I was, exactly where I’d always dreamed I’d be, gazing out the window down on all the cockroaches wandering the streets, wondering how, how was I going to make my first killing in the market?

Maybe I could gut some dinky airline, corner the frozen orange juice market, or buy out some Main St. company and toss Mom & Pop out on their sorry asses.  Maybe I could invent the smokeless cigarette.  These were always good for a laugh, but they were old hat.  I needed something new.  Something now.  Something 21^st century.

Then one day I was playing tennis with an old childhood friend of mine, Jeremy Finkelstein.  Jeremy works for the Pillars of Hercules Life Insurance Company: The Herc.  Jeremy and I go way back.  He’s one of my oldest friends, but a horrible tennis player.

I’d known Jeremy ever since the second grade, ever since that day I saved him from Freddy Fordeloon.  Even the best families produce bullies like Freddy, and they produce wimps like Jeremy, too.  But Jeremy wasn’t just your garden variety mousedrip.  Jeremy Finkelstein was the last of the great of hypochondriacs.  I remember back when we were in college, he was absolutely convinced his heart was going to suddenly stop beating.  Just stop, for no reason at all.

But there was a perfectly good reason as far as Jeremy was concerned.  The reason he thought his heart was just going to stop was that he couldn’t fathom how it ever got started in the first place.  How the human heart, how the whole body and the brain worked at all, his own brain told him it was just impossible.  It was just all too complicated to have any chance of working at all.  The odds on all these things coming together the way they did were just too inconceivable, so to Jeremy it was logical that it would all just suddenly shut down, all just stop working one day.

He got over that.  Time got him over that, as it does all hypochondriacs, but now Jeremy was on to something new.  He had been watching these documentaries on how the Universe was born, the Big Bang theory and how the Earth was created.  If the Earth was not in the exact place that it was, at the exact distance from a star the exact size that the sun was, if it was not tilted at approximately 24 degrees, if it did not have an iron core to create the magnetic field that protects it from radiation and the solar winds, if the planet Theia had not collided with the Earth four billion years ago and knocked that chunk out of it that became the moon, if the moon had not become the exact right size and been the exact right distance from the Earth and had not begun pulling the oceans just the right amount so they would wash back and pull the chemically-rich soil back into their waters, thus creating the very beginnings of life on Earth as we know it, if all these things had never happened exactly the way they did, then none of us would be here today.  It was just impossible for Jeremy to get his head around all this, to conceive how all these things could have ever come together just the way they did.  So logically to him, something was bound to go wrong, terribly wrong.  It was impossible that all these things could have ever come together in the first place, but somehow they did.  The difference between hypochondriacs and the rest of us, you see, is not that they know these things and we don’t, it’s that they make themselves sick over them, the things they can’t control, or understand.

And nowadays, what about all the pollution?  What about all the toxic chemicals being pumped into the rivers and the oceans?  What about all the garbage being dumped into landfills that’s going to take a million years to biodegrade?  What about the ozone layer, had everyone forgotten about that huge hole in the sky?  And what about greenhouse gases?  What if it was true?  What if all the icebergs melted and sent the oceans spilling out over the land?  What if the CO2 levels in the atmosphere get so high that they choke the very life out of us?  What if?

But you know what?  Fuck all that.  That’s just kids’ stuff.  What if all the volcanoes on the Earth happened to all go off at the same time?  What if the crust of the Earth happened to shift and slide and the whole world was shaken to its very core?  What if an asteroid the size of Texas decided to one day just smash into the Earth?  What if the Sun went into a fit of solar flares and fried the Earth to a crisp?  If all or even just one of these things were to happen, life as we know it would end suddenly, violently, and real estate prices would go the way of the planet Mars.

With the end of the world coming, Jeremy was presently questioning why he’d even bothered showing up to work today at all.  But why show up anywhere?  Why do anything?  I guess because that’s just what we as humans do.  We all know the end is coming, so we try and keep ourselves busy, and somehow this keeps us happy, or at least preoccupied.

Today Jeremy was talking about old movies, how they were the only thing that soothed his nerves, how simple everything used to be.  He told me how he loved those old movies, especially the ones from the 30’s, the Golden Era of Hollywood.  Jeremy said he loved seeing how not everyone was in the midst of the Depression, how life still moved on, no matter what they may have you think today.  He said he loved those gay, old times.  It made him think of the Great Gatsby: everyone drinking, parties for days, all summer-long at the Cape.  What a glorious time. The only problem, he said, was that invariably at some point during the film he would always remember that he wasn’t living in that old movie, that it was going to end, that those days were gone forever.  He had just watched Gone with the Wind, and even though he was a Yankee from New York, and he couldn’t even stand the sight of all those dirt eaters, it made him sad.

After a few Vodka Gimlets Jeremy snapped out of it, as he always did, and he started telling me all about how the Herc was making a killing holding back life insurance payouts to the survivors of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Ply Jeremy with a few drinks and you can get him to tell you just about anything.  Here’s how the scam went.

You see, the Herc handles most all the life insurance policies for the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Instead of paying out the benefits in full, they issue a checkbook that the beneficiary can draw on.  While the Herc is making upwards of 5 percent on the money, they’re paying out to the beneficiary as low as ½ a percent.  And the kicker is, these aren’t really even checkbooks, they’re IOUs.  If you were to go to Wal-mart or Target and tried writing one of these checks, you’d find out they weren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.  On top of that, they’re doing all this on the government’s dime, which is why a lot of people don’t ever complain, I guess.  Beautiful.

It was sweet all right, but I wasn’t in the insurance racket, and it wasn’t my idea.  Anyway, I doubt Jeremy even saw one red cent of that money.  Jeremy seemed to be happy enough just knowing someone else was making a killing.  Another thing, I would never go into business with someone like Jeremy.  Jeremy was a Peppermint Patty.  He’d meltdown the minute the cops put him under the lights.

I was starting to get a little depressed, I must confess, when I thought: what if I just off my parents and fast track my inheritance.  Lazy?  Yes.  Unoriginal?  I know.  But I needed something, anything just to get me going.  So I began walking myself through the whole scenario.  There were some good parts, and while it all sounded delightfully mischievous, if I was going to do it I should have done it back in 2010 when there was a suspension of the death tax.  Just the thought of all that opportunity forgone was enough to make me sick to my stomach.  After such losses, how could I ever look my friends in the eyes again?  No, killing the folks was out.  It just wasn’t sound financial policy.

And then one day I was sitting in my office spraying Raid on the window looking down when suddenly it came to me, how I was going to make my first killing in the market.  I was reading this article in the “Your Money” section of Senior Citizens Quarterly about these corporate bonds, like in General Electric and Bank of America, and how seniors could benefit from a new provision designed specifically to help lessen their risk.  It’s called the Survivor’s Option.  You see, this particular provision allows for seniors to buy these bonds at a discounted rate, as co-owners, just as long as they qualify.  And what’s the qualification?  Nothing much, really.  One of them just has to be terminally ill, that’s all.

But if they do qualify, when the sick one dies, the other, the co-owner of the bond, can immediately redeem the bond at its full value, even if it’s not set to mature for years to come.  This whole provision was added to give comfort to seniors.  Of course, I had something completely different in mind.

This particular article focused on dried-up old wrinkly people, of course, but it got me to thinking, and it wasn’t long until I had it all laid out.  You didn’t have to be some old fogy to qualify for these discounted bonds, and you didn’t have to be married to the poor dying bastard to be the co-owner.  There was one and just one qualification: one of the co-owners had to be terminally ill.  That’s it.

So I found this poor schmuck in some rat-infested V. A. Hospital who didn’t have a prayer.  He had a daughter, but no wife.  No one was looking out for him.  I gave this dried-up old prune $2000 if he’d just sign some papers.  What’d he care?  What he didn’t know was that he was about to become the proud owner of $116,000 worth of GMAC bonds that I was going to purchase for just $47,000.

The old fart died 10 days later.  I made $69,000 in just 10 days.  How’s that for popping your cherry?

Now I know what you must be thinking.  $69,000?  That’s not that much.  But it’s the percentage gain over just those 10 days that’s important here: almost 150%.  150% in just 10 days.  If that doesn’t make your little soldier stand up and salute, I don’t know what will.

Next time all I had to do was up the ante.  And if you’re one of those smart-asses right now who’s thinking, “Yeah, you forgot about your $2000 initial investment.”  No, I didn’t.  That old breathing corpse trusted me so much that he gave me his daughter’s address and asked if I wouldn’t please make sure she got the $2000.  He said they hadn’t spoken for years, and this was all he had to leave her.  That dipshit actually thanked me, told me I was a good man.  So there.

It takes all kinds, I guess, although I must confess, for just a split second there I actually did consider mailing the money to her.  And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Lake Havasu to sell you.

In no time I was making money hand over fist.  If the old buggers didn’t kick fast enough, I just nudged them along: a plug pulled here, and oxygen tube kinked there.  It didn’t really matter, they were all terminal anyway.  Hell, the way I saw it I was doing them all a favor.

I had this one old guy in Florida, he was my favorite of all.  Together we opened at least a hundred accounts.  In no time he was singing with the angels and I was doing cartwheels all the way to the bank.  The initial $8 million I invested in his account yielded a profit of $3 million in just three weeks.  I was at the top of my game, and I had dozens of these little deals going on everywhere.  How many I had in the final days, I really don’t remember.  Two, maybe three hundred.  All I know for sure is that when the proverbial house of cards came crashing down, when all the lawsuits started rolling in, there were over $80 billion in these types of bonds floating around out there, almost all of them with that wonderful survivor’s option, and I had a nice chunk of that.

Was it all worth it?  Wasn’t I worried about all these lawsuits?  Hell no.  I was sleeping like a baby in my new $8 million dollar hideaway in the Hamptons.  Why?  Because I’m fucking smart, that’s why.  The only problem I saw was how I was going to spend all that dough.

Why was I so smart?  Well, from the very beginning I had this nitwit, some estate planner in Rhode Island, put his John Hancock on everything.  All transactions were made from some island accounts, somewhere that moved to the moon the moment he was arrested.  Hell, this guy wouldn’t know me if I were sitting next to him on a plane.

Of course he denied it all, but he had a record of all kinds of scams going back decades, and no one believed a word he said.  I remember seeing him in handcuffs one night on the evening news.  I was in stitches.  Literally.  I laughed so hard I think I tore the lining in my stomach.

But in that moment, when the laughter died down, I realized, this moment, this was a perfect moment.  I took a deep breath and thought: Life is a cash grab, you gotta take hold of it with both hands.  So there.

So anyway, getting back to the events of this morning.  There I was, sitting at my desk, looking very vice-presidential in my Giorgio Armani wool voile blazer with dual rear slits and silk-lined interior, made in Italy of course by hungry immigrants with gum disease and bad breath, there I was sitting at my desk when I first heard this sound, like a fly buzzing in my ear.  I looked all around, but mainly it sounded like it was coming from over by the window.  Impossible, I thought.  These windows are hermetically sealed.  So I went back to what I was doing, but that noise just wouldn’t go away.

Then I thought, it must be coming from the tv.  But every time I hit the mute button, there it was still.  It just kept getting louder and louder, louder, louder, until finally I was forced to get up out of my chair and go look out the window.  Only then, did I see.

Down on the street there were maybe 50, 60, a hundred people.  I couldn’t tell who they were, they all looked like cockroaches from way up here anyway.  Maybe someone was giving a speech.  It happens sometimes.  You get these stray preachers, evangelicals without even so much as a tent.  Or maybe it was one of those Nigerians selling counterfeit purses.  Have you ever seen those guys in action?  It’s amazing.  The first time I ever saw one on the street he had all these fake purses lined up: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci.  If it was an expensive brand name, he had it.

And they looked good.  I mean, you put any one of these up against the real thing and you really can’t tell the difference.  I’m not sure however if that’s because they really are that good, or that the real ones nowadays are just that bad.  My fiancée Gwendolyn says the fake ones are even better than the real ones, and she encourages me to buy as many of them as I can, whenever I can.

Gwen really has it in for the designer brands, especially Louis Vuitton, ever since her $4000 Louis Vuitton Ixia MM tore at the handle one day while she was at Bloomingdale’s, leaving her standing there, exposed, humiliated, all those suspicious eyes closing in.  Ever since then, she’s been doing everything she can to put Luis Vuitton right out of business.  Whenever she sees one of those Nigerians she goes running at him as fast as she can, and if she doesn’t scare him off, crossing the street yelling and flailing her arms about, she buys the whole lot, then hands them out to all the homeless, street hookers, and bag ladies she can find.  It doesn’t even matter to her that they are made in China by little children with only 8 fingers who work for just two dollars a day, even though Gwen is on the board of Feed the Children and the Children’s Defense Fund.  Once you piss off Gwendolyn Roth Childs, there’s just no turning back.

But like I said, only if she doesn’t scare him off first.  And again I ask you, have you ever seen one of these Nigerians on the street in action?  I don’t mean in the action of selling their wares, I mean in the action of folding-up shop and making a run for it.

The first time I ever saw one of those guys I was at this payphone.  I didn’t even know they still had payphones anymore.  Maybe they’d forgotten all about it, maybe it had been left behind when all the other dinosaurs moved on.  Anyway, there I was at this payphone with a micro-cassette recorder trying this thing I saw in a movie.  I dropped the money into the slot and recorded the sound, then got my money back and tried to make a call for free by the playing back the recorder into the receiver.  It was an ingenious idea, but it didn’t work.  Thing is, I don’t remember which movie I saw it in, and when that movie was even made.  Didn’t matter.  Like I said, it didn’t work anyway.

So while I’m standing there, here is this Nigerian haggling over a purse with this old hag, this big Nigerian with a thick African accent, so much so you could barely understand a word he was saying.  He and this old bat were really going at it.  The Nigerians thought they were quite the negotiators, that is until they came across little old Jewish ladies from New York.  She didn’t have her teeth in and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying either.  But somehow the two seemed to be in synch.  I guess when it comes to shopping there is an unspoken language, a sort of shopper’s lingo.

By the way, the movie I saw that phone trick in was called Hackers, and it was made way back in 1995.  I doubt it really worked back then, either.  Just another example of Hollywood treachery.  So there.

Anyway, all of a sudden there was this loud shrill from down the street.  In a flash, and I mean that literally, in like 3 seconds, this guy had those bags folded up in some kind of tarp over his shoulder and he was gone.  Disappeared.  Swallowed up by the masses, just like that.  It was like some kind of fucking magic trick.  The thing he had his bags sitting on, that tarp or blanket, I hadn’t even noticed before.  Then there was this whistle, their signal I guess, and in just a few seconds he had that tarp, or whatever it was, deployed and he was on the move.  It was kind of like a parachute, only in reverse.  It was the damndest thing I ever saw.  The guy had real talent.

Anyway, maybe that’s what was going on down on the street below.  Or maybe someone was selling ice cream.  I sure could go for a Nutty Buddy or an Atomic Bomb Blaster about now.

But that noise kept getting louder and louder.  I kept turning the tv up until I just couldn’t take it anymore.  I had to go down and see what all the commotion was about.

When I got downstairs, out on the street, I couldn’t believe what I saw.  I thought I had been transported back to the year 1968, to the Vietnam era and the anti-war protests.  I suddenly found myself surrounded by all these long hairs.  They were all chanting something, I couldn’t quite make it out, and carrying signs. One of the signs said I am a Revolting Citizen.  And there was another one pointed right up at my office.  It said Jump, You Fucker.

One thing’s for sure, these kids needed a shower something awful.

Where did all these river rats come from, anyway?  It had been raining a lot.  There was a reporter asking one of the protestors about the demonstration, and I could hear the kid telling him how natural the whole thing was, I believe the word he used was Organic, and how it had all come together so spontaneously.  Spontaneously?  How could you gather this many people together, make all these signs, all these t-shirts, and have them shouting basically the same epithets, how could you do all this spontaneously?  And if had all been spontaneous, how did they all know to bring their raincoats?

Someone else said how it reminded them of Woodstock.  The only part about Woodstock that was spontaneous was when everybody decided they weren’t going to pay and made a run for the fences.  Now that part, that was spontaneous.

It all reminded me of something a great man once said.  “The only truly spontaneous protest is, a riot.”

I tapped one of these stinkbags on the shoulder and asked him what the hell was going on.  What are we protesting?  He just screamed, “Follow me, man.  We’re going to take the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Take the Brooklyn Bridge?  Why would anyone want to take the Brooklyn Bridge?  Take it where?  Lake Havasu?  Maybe this crowd was just some riff-raff from Queens.  Maybe these were Mets fans, or even displaced, deranged old Brooklyn Dodger fans on their way back to the Promised Land.  If so, maybe someone should have told them:  Ebbots Field isn’t there anymore.

But the more I looked at these signs, as misspelled and incoherent as they were, the more I realized: these locusts were protesting against Wall Street.  My street.  They were here picketing capitalism itself.  Geez, they were here in mass against, Me.  Suddenly I felt surrounded, even in danger.  I thought, what would George S. Patton do?  But I was outgunned.  Outmanned.  I was completely surrounded.

Instead of panicking though, or trying to fight my way out, I just let the tide take me.  Luckily, none of these piranhas seemed to have noticed I was wearing a suit, at least not yet.  But it was only a matter of time till one of them realized the enemy was amongst them.  Once just one of them got a taste of royal blood, there was going to be a feeding frenzy.  I had to act, and fast.

And then I remembered something my attorney Wags Wagglestein once told me.

We were watching the news one day, sitting at some bar, and all these kids were protesting in London, or some old place.  It was all college students, and they were demonstrating against the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund, or something like that.  Quite simply, they were protesting against money, and authority, that’s the only thing that was clear.  I asked Wags about it.  “How do these long hairs know anything about the world financial system, or money at all?”

“They don’t,” he said, “they don’t know nothing about nothing.  They’re all high on dope, that’s all.”

“So what were they doing there?” I asked.

“Looking for a hamburger,” said Wags.  “Someone told them there was the world’s largest hamburger, all they have to do to get a bite is carry a sign, and scream incoherently.”

“Really?” I said.

“No,” he said, “I’m just jerking your chain.”

I laughed.

“But not really,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Well, the thing is, they’ve been paid to protest.”

“Paid?”

“Yes, they’ve been paid to protest,” he repeated, “they’re hired guns.”

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

“You see,” he said, “I know this guy who has this company, Marching for Dollars.  It’s a play on the March of Dimes.  Well, that’s not the real name of the company.  I think the actual name is something like Tom Mato & Associates.  Anyway, what he does is rent out protestors.”

“Rent out protestors?”

“Yeah, is there some kind of echo in here?” he said.

No echo.

“Yeah, he rents out protestors.  It’s a protestors for hire kind of deal.  If you have someone or something you want to protest, picket, rail against, then he’s your man.  You can hire him to assemble his team, and within just hours he can have a full-fledged mob ready and mobilized, willing to shut down any enterprise you want, clog any streets.”

Fascinating, I thought.

“Here’s how it works.  This guy got his start back when he was in college himself, back in the 60’s.  He was a dope-smoking hippie just like the rest of ‘em.  But back then you could be a long-hair and still have ambition, even a brain.  This guy used to go to the demonstrations not because he gave two shits about the war, but because it was a great place to pick up chicks.  But while he was there, he came up with this idea.  It wasn’t until the 80’s that he actually implemented it.  He had to wait until young people got dumb enough, until they didn’t really know or care what they were fighting for.  This type business model, back in the 60’s and the 70’s, as good as it was, it just wouldn’t work.  Kids back then still had the ability to think.  The dope wasn’t as strong, and they actually believed in what they were fighting for.  So he waited in the weeds, until the 80’s when there really wasn’t any real threat, nothing you could protest against, anyway.  You couldn’t go to Eastern Europe or Russia to protest.  The Ruskies didn’t put up with that shit.

“But back in the 80’s, the market was ripe and the time was right.

“So, you have an agenda, maybe it’s politics, maybe it’s business, whatever the reason, you hire this guy and next thing somebody knows they got two to three hundred screaming, frothing at the mouth demonstrators at their door.  But before you can do anything, you gotta find this guy.  I mean, this is not the sort of business you find in the Yellow Pages.”

“So how do you do that?” I asked. “How do you find him?”

“Word of mouth.  He only works on referrals.  But if you’re clever enough, maybe you can infiltrate the crowd.  People talk, you know, and these kinds of people have big mouths.  Hell, they’re all just low-life college students.  They can probably be bought off with just a joint and a hot dog.

“But for the most part,” said Wags, “referrals only.

“So, when you hire this guy he has an assortment of packages.  It’s a real business, you see.  You can hire protestors individually, or you can get a group rate.  It’s cheaper of course, like with any business, to deal in bulk.  But if you want to protest an abortion clinic, a small business, even a taco stand, and you don’t really need the big numbers, then it’s better to just pay per protestor.  Packages start at a minimum 100 protestors.

“Signs of course are extra.  You pay per sign, and it’s up to the protestor himself, or herself, to fill it in.

“As a matter of fact, all additions are extra.  If you want the protestors to be more aggressive, extra.  If you want them to throw rocks, extra.  If you want them to engage the enemy, throw a punch, spit in somebody’s face, extra.  Frothing at the mouth and general epithets, that’s included.  If a protestor draws blood, that’s really extra.  Red turns to green, that’s their motto, although I think they stole that from professional wrestling.

“Like I said, bulk rates start at the one-hundred protestors package.  Then there’s the two hundred, the three, you can do it by the hundred or go even higher to the five hundred, the thousand-man plan, any number you want.  If you get what he calls the Maximum, then it’s as many protestors as he can gather, virtually unlimited.  But the Maximum is ungodly expensive, and out of most people’s price range.  That’s the kind of package usually only countries can afford, or revolutions.  But when you get any of the package deals, you have a choice of the standard package, that’s the no-frills option where you can tack on just the additions you deem necessary.  Or you can get the Premium Package.  That includes a set amount of additions of your choice.  Or you can get the Platinum Package.  The Platinum Package includes everything, even blood-letting.  The one thing of course that’s not included in any package is Death.  Death is expensive, very expensive.  Broken bones, cuts, bruises, even trips to the hospital, all included in the Platinum Package.  But Death, Death costs extra, a lot extra.

“I remember seeing these protests in South America one time and it made me think,” said Wags.  “I wonder if this is my friend putting on the show.  If it was, then he sure had moved on up to the big time.  There must have been tens of thousands of protestors there, and the news said 12 people died.  Man, if that really was him, he must have made out like a bandit.”

“But why students?” I asked Wags.  “Why always college students?”

“Who else?” he said.  “You can’t get working people, they have jobs.  You can’t get old people, they move too slow and they’re prone to dying on you.  You can’t get factory or auto workers, the unions already have that racket all sewn up.  Who else but college students?  They don’t have jobs.  They don’t have anywhere else they have to be, not really.  And they come cheap.  All you have to do is blow a joint in their face, throw in one hot chick and the promises of a pizza, and they’re all yours.  Keep ‘em fed, high, and horny, and they’re yours for as long as you want them.  When you think about it, the business model is a real gem.  Low labor costs, no advertising budget, and it’s all under the table.  All payments are cash, so taxes are virtually non-existent.  The workforce is all contract labor, so no health insurance or workman’s comp is required.  Beautiful.”

I never looked at protestors the same way again.

And now there I was, right in the thick of it.  Remembering what Wags said, I thought maybe I could buy my way out, but these kids looked hungry, really hungry, and I just didn’t have enough cash on hand to supply them all with pizza.  So I did the next best thing.  I untucked my shirt, messed up my hair, grabbed a sign and started shouting at the top of my lungs.

There was a virtual sea of homemade signs.  They were everywhere, like flags on parade.  One of them said You See, We See.  Another one said True Consciousness.  And yet another Honk If Your Angry.  But there wasn’t a car anywhere, not a one.  Back in my day, we used to honk if we were horny.

These kids had to be on dope.

And then there was this old guy.  He had a sign that said Make Love, Not War.

Man, was that guy lost.

There was this one kid, he had a sign that said God Loves the 99%.

The 99%?  What the fuck did that mean, anyway?  Was he talking about Crystal Clear?  Everclear?  I always thought God was a Jack Daniel’s man.

And there was this kid selling t-shirts that said “Down with Capitolism.”  No doubt, these were examples of the best and brightest, everything America had to offer.

I asked this other kid what he was doing here.  He said he wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe the Mets had won the World Series again.  All he really knew was that he followed a girl here.

In between epithets I made a call to my doorman, Nikolay.  Nick was a classic-style doorman, a real throwback to the old days.  That not only meant he was dressed up like a Russian Admiral, but also that he was the kind of guy who could get you things, anything.

So Nick made a call to his nephew, and it didn’t take the kid even 30 minutes to get here.  He apologized for taking so long, a traffic jam, he said.  But I didn’t care, not as long as he brought the good stuff.  He had.

It was about two hours later, looking down from my window, that the crowd started really going out of their heads.  The police had finally arrived and they were busy now cracking skulls.  It must have been real hell for the protestors, and it was going to cost the client, whoever he was, plenty.

And what had Nick’s nephew brought to me?  What was so important that I had to have it delivered in 30 minutes or less, like so many pizzas?  Why, five sheets of blotter acid, that’s all.  Five big white sheets of LSD, each tab embossed with three letters in the psychedelic font, Magical Mystery Tour.  And what did it say?  It said, YES.  YES, we can.  And YES,

YES I did.  Those mangy college kids gobbled them up like candy.  What a horrible trip

these poor, misguided souls were about to take.  It wasn’t long until there was blood everywhere and they were running for their lives.  It was a real laugh riot.

But it wasn’t long for me either, until I got bored with it all, that is.  There was Golf on Channel 546, the Reynosa 100, Seniors Cup Challenge, Pre-Qualifying Round.  I love watching golf at work; it’s one of my favorite things in the whole world.

END

© Philip Loyd

 

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