Like me, George had inherited his livelihood from his parents, in his case a couple of long-established dry-cleaning stores in Kissena Park, Queens, but he'd done a thorough job of running them into the ground, not to mention ignoring the new competition from all the Korean and Chinese owners coming in. The truth of the matter, as he told me the day before, was he'd been planning to sell the businesses and get into some other line (what that was going to be he didn't say), because he was out of equity and cash and was carrying a hefty debt on his ranch house and the cleaners, and was just about to step into the crosshairs of the collection agencies and banks, which is exactly the appropriate time in our good culture to throw away your last few bucks on a 20-million-to-1 shot.
There was a short segment about the Guggenheimers on the Eyewitness News, George and Janine looking sweaty and stunned as they held either end of a big cardboard check, the amount for which I noticed wasn't a number but a question mark followed by a lot of zeroes, the point being the sky was the limit. Right away they sold the dry-cleaning stores (to Koreans, of course) and did the smart thing and paid off their most pressing debts, consolidating the others through one of those sketchy New Jersey mortgage outfits, and then setting about to fix the sinkhole in their backyard. But soon enough the spending geared up. They hired Battle Brothers to bulldoze and clear-cut the property and plant and lay everything in totally fresh.
George traded in his old cars for a couple of brand-new Mercedes convertibles, his (silver) and hers (red), and when they went out as a family they had to take both cars and jam the kids in each.
Janine it turned out was very much into modern art and design and began buying a lot of stuff from local galleries, sculp-tures of figures either really skinny or really fat as well as Cubist-style and Abstract-ed paintings featuring the same kind of figures, and furniture from Maurice Villency and Roche-Bobois that was sleek in form and always cold and uncomfortable, the program in fact not so dissimilar to what Eunice has done over at Château Battle. The house itself was completely razed and done over and in the end not so strangely it was almost an exact replica of the Guggenheim Museum, 1/5 scale, with a big circular parking garage — inspired turret dominating the massing and hardly any windows. The concurrences didn't in the least occur to Janine or George, as neither had been to the museum, nor by extension any surname irony, the facts of which made you pull for them all the more, as they were simply enjoying the found fruits of their good luck.
And maybe it would have all gone swimmingly, had George not been involved in a frightening little car accident just before another year had passed. While driving on the Southern State Parkway he was rear-ended, the front of his convertible accor-dioned in, too, when he was thrust into the car in front. George was banged up pretty badly and got forty stitches in his face and hands and spent a night at the hospital for observation of his concussion. After a few days he was fine but I suppose he got to thinking about his brush with death and what that would mean for his Salary for Life, and pretty soon you hardly saw him driving and then even walking in the neighborhood. He called me up one day and asked if Battle Brothers could put up an eight-foot chain-link fence around the entire property, which we did, and he had house alarms and cameras rigged up, and before long he was hardly ever outside in his own yard, fearing that he'd catch some deadly virus like AIDS, which was just coming into the news then and was still mysterious enough to keep you wondering. George even began to stay airlocked in his private bedroom suite (he'd moved out of the master because Janine was naturally venturing out to shop and ferry the kids around and see friends, and was thus a ready importer of contagion), and grew more and more distrusting and fearful of anything having to do with the outside world. So it came as no surprise that after a year of this Janine divorced him, taking the kids to what I hear is a nice gated golf community in North Carolina, where Janine looks after the central clubhouse. George still owns the house, I believe, though he moved out long ago, to where nobody knows.
Of course, I'm thinking about George at the present moment not because I had so much feeling for him (which I did, aplenty, in a knowing, down-the-street neighborly way that had to do with our shared existence of familial and realty responsibilities), but because I, perhaps like George Guggenheimer, am beginning to see this sprawly little realm as laden with situations not simply dangerous and baleful; it's the fact that no matter how fast or high you might keep moving, the full array of those potentialities are constantly targeting your exact coordinates, and with extreme prejudice. And while this is self-absorption in the classical mode, I must admit Rita was right, I did think I'd banked a life's worth of slings and arrows after Daisy, maybe even enough to safeguard the next generation, maybe to wash back, too, on the one previous. But Theresa's illness and now my father's almost magical disappearance are new instructions from above (or below or beyond), telling me in no uncertain terms that I cannot stay at altitude much longer, even though I have fuel to burn, that I cannot keep marking this middle distance.
I am not even mentioning the latest turns in Jack's financial totterings, which compared to these other potential calamities would seem downright welcome if they were the only things we had to consider and deal with, but, to be honest, something about his trouble pushes me right up to the very limits of my tolerances for what life can sometimes unsparingly orchestrate.
With Jack it has to do certainly with the issue of legacy, namely the fucking-up of said thing, which if we come right down to it is what we secretly find most compelling about legacies (yes, even our own), not the pleasures of bestowal or some rite cycle of being, but rather the surprise diminution that in the not-so-fetching opera of our lives comes in the inglorious rushed finale, the wondrous aria by a brash new tenor, who can hit every soaring note except the one that counts. For there's nothing as deeply stirring as familial failure, cast across time.
And the skinny of that failure is this: Jack has sunk the ship.
If I may be business-channel-like about it, let me say that he is accomplishing it with a highly effective one-pronged strategy of capital overinvestment. Namely, everything he has been buying for the company, from the new cube vans to the five-ton haulers to the mini-backhoes (equipment we always leased per job or week or perhaps for the season at most), he has been buying outright with the idea that Battle Brothers would be sub-leasing to itself (in the form of paper subsidiaries) in a complicated (and no doubt sernilegal) cash flow optimization/
accelerated depreciation scheme that he did not bother to vet with crusty old Sal, dealing directly instead with an offshore banking firm registered in the Caymans or Nigeria or Uzbek-istan or some other such "republic" where generally accepted accounting principles are held in an esteem equal to whatever national constitution was drawn up for them by do-gooding wonks at the IMF. Not that I understand exactly what's happened, but the result is that with the long-anticipated slow-down in work (due to the sluggish economy, plus the intense competition of late, as every hammerhead and his ADD-afflicted, Dremel-wielding brother have gotten into the home improvement business in the last ten years), he's no longer able to pay off the debt service on the machines and getting no real or even "accounting" profit back, meaning he's sinking in shit both ways. This would not be so big a problem if he could sell the rigs anywhere near cost but everybody demands a huge discount these days and it's almost not worth bothering, except that there's a whole bunch of office equipment and technology and software and other high-priced gizmos that become obsolete a few seconds after you plug them in, which it turns out nobody wants at any price, and that Battle Brothers seems to own enough of to open our very own Staples store.