"Now you know," said the old man, smiling gently. He tossed him the foil packet. Swindell caught it. "Keep it. You paid for it. And I think you're gonna keep paying for it."
That had been in 1990. The year Connors Swindell got his first inkling he was in for a rough decade.
But he was a fighter. And a schemer. He wasn't about to go down the tubes with the others. He would find a way to come back.
And he was doing just that. Sure, the road was rocky. But he was starting a comeback. Step one was to go back to basics. Real houses. Prices were already falling. They'd fall some more. Like stocks. He'd just have to buy cheap and hang on until real estate bounced back.
Meanwhile, Connors Swindell looked around for the cheapest land he could find. He found it practically in his own backyard. The California desert.
He traded an entire condo park for a hundred square miles of Indian-reservation desert less than five miles from his Palm Springs office. Arid, endless, and commercially worthless. The Indians who had consummated the deal must have thought they were getting payback for the Manhattan deal.
What they didn't know was that Swindell's condos had been built from substandard materials over a toxic-waste landfill.
One day Connors Swindell took a young loan officer out to his desert in a rented jeep. The Little San Bernardino Mountains reared up over the desert-penetrating Colorado River Aqueduct.
"Nobody builds in the desert," the loan officer was saying. He was a green, wet-behind-the-ears kid. Probably a trainee. That was how little the banks thought of Swindell Properties in 1990.
"I remember a young realtor once saying that no one would pay good money for an apartment," Swindell pointed out. "Want a drink?" he added, offering a thermos capped by a clear plastic cup.
"What is it?" the loan officer asked suspiciously.
"Gatorade. It'll replace the minerals you're sweating away."
The loan officer accepted the thermos, and uncapping it, poured green liquid into the clear cup. He drank it down greedily.
"Don't lose the cap. It's important," Swindell said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Trust me."
The Gatorade was nearly gone when they reached the spot.
"Here it is," Swindell said proudly.
"How can you tell?" asked the loan officer, looking around unhappily. "There's nothing but sand in all directions."
"My patch has scorpions. Watch your feet."
Connors Swindell led the young loan officer in his banker's gray to a gently undulating expanse of sand. Swindell carried the thermos with the plastic lid.
"You are standing on the exact site of the world's first Condome," he announced suddenly, stamping the ground.
"Did you say condom?" the loan officer said, vaguely offended.
"Dome. Condome," Swindell repeated, experiencing a momentary flash of deja vu. "Get it right. Condome. I'm gonna sink the first one right where we're standing."
The loan officer dug a cordovan toe into the sand. He frowned as the loose grains gave way like gritty water.
"You can't build on sand," he protested. "It won't take the weight of a high-rise."
"You gotta adjust your thinking if you're gonna do business with me, my friend," Swindell said unctuously. "We're not talking high-rise here. We're talking low-rise."
"Huh?"
"Get down on God's beige earth with me, son, and I'll reveal to you the future of real-estate development."
Connors Swindell sank his knees into the sand.
"See this here thermos jug?" he asked.
The banker followed suit, first giving his trouser legs a hitch so the knees wouldn't bag. "Yes."
"Imagine it's a high-rise tower, like the Capitol Records Building back in L.A. But with a penthouse on top. Under a glass shield kinda shaped like a dome. That's this here cap. Are you with me so far, boy? Are you imagining along?"
"I believe I can visualize what you're suggesting," the loan officer said without enthusiasm.
"Now, you watch."
Pawing away a shallow depression in the sand, Connors Swindell thrust the thermos into it. He pushed it down with both hands, rotating it back and forth. The sand hissed in gritty protest. Slowly the thermos sank into the sand until only the clear plastic cup-lid showed.
With careful fingers Connors Swindell smoothed the sand around the upside-down lip of the cup until only the clear plastic showed.
Swindell flashed him an Ipana grin. "Got the picture now?"
The young loan officer blinked. "I really can't quite grasp what you're trying to convey, Mr. Swindell. "
"Almost forgot," said Swindell. He reached into a coat pocket and yanked out two HO-scale human figures. He lifted the cup-lid and placed them inside. Then he reclosed the lid.
The loan officer stared at this for a long time.
"You gettin' it now?" Swindell prompted.
"Condome?" His voice was a parched croak.
"The dome is the penthouse part," Swindell said excitedly. "The guy who lives in the dome pays a premium for all the good healthy sunshine he's gonna have the benefit of. The other ones live down below, where it's nice and cool."
"And dark."
"They got new kinda lights now that simulate daylight. I hear they're good for the old biorhythms. People who work nights use 'em to stay happy." Swindell climbed to his feet to toe sand over a scuttling scorpion, burying it. "For windows, we'll give 'em sand paintings."
The loan officer found his feet, saying, "There is no water in the desert, or electricity."
"We truck in generators. Self-sufficient. And yuppies don't drink common everyday tap water. Everybody knows that."
"But it's out in the middle of nowhere."
"So was Palm Springs. And Las Vegas. They started as dusty villages. But they grew. You know what one of my low-rise Condome towers would be worth planted back in Palm Springs? On dirt-cheap sand?"
The loan officer understood then. But he had one final reservation.
"Mr. Swindell, I think your scheme-I mean, idea-has a certain merit, but you're already in arrears to our bank for over seven million dollars. And that does not include principal."
"Which I ain't never gonna get current on if the condo end of my business goes belly-up," Swindell pointed out firmly.
"I know that. But to lend a man so deeply in debt even more money-"
"So he can climb out of debt and pay you back," Swindell prompted.
"I don't know. The board of directors will be hesitant to extend you additional assistance."
"Then you remind them of a little proverb I heard recently."
"And that is?"
"When a man owes a bank a little money, he's in hot water. But if a man owes the same bank a pile of money-"
"You don't have to finish it, sir."
Swindell did anyway. "The bank's in hot water. Wouldn't you rather be in sand?"
"I'll take it up with the board of directors in the morning," the young loan officer said glumly.
Swindell started back to the jeep. "You do that. But I already know what the answer's gonna be. I'm too fucking big to go down."
And he was. Swindell Properties got an immediate line of credit, and construction began that week. The prefab tower went down in one section. It didn't go down as easily as the thermos, but then, it was over two hundred feet long.
It looked to be a sure thing. Then they started losing construction workers to sunstroke and the scorpions. Insurance premiums went through the roof. The Indians sued him not only over the substandard condos but also to recover the now-valuable Condome land, protesting that its true worth had been concealed.
Then the worst blow came.
An engineer brought the bad news to Connors Swindell as he was trying to sink a putt into a tipped wineglass.
"We have a problem, sir," the engineer said gravely.
"Throw a lawyer at it," Swindell had growled. "I'm busy."
"A lawyer won't solve this problem, Mr. Swindell. "