Bo loved possibility. He was a hopeless romantic who saw limitless potential in every new thing he acquired. He couldn’t help imagining his life transformed by the addition of new things—and so it had been, over and over again, each accumulation an adjustment. Just never enough. Boredom, that rarefied boredom known only to those who managed to achieve exactly what they’d set out to do, persisted. Make no bones, a charmed life is a dull life.
Bo slid the vinyl from its paper sheath and executed a gyroscopic flip, side one sunny-side up, spidered his hand beneath, checked the pitch sensor, checked the amp volume, gave it some gas, and with something like a giggle slotted the hole onto the spindle and released. For a moment before the velvet surface caught, the record hung there while the table executed glissade, and he got a quick thrill on the order of seeing a Mustang doing a burnout, the self-annihilating explosion of laying a good hit on a running back, a hard fuck in the daylight. Fuck, yeah! he screamed and dropped the needle and the crackle came and a deep breath later the kick drum started thumping, cymbal clanging, the bass joined up alongside at the same pitch, the guitar picking up the rhythm, and on and on for thirty bars, seventy seconds of setup, the band lathering up and rinsing off like they’re all drunk and aren’t sure they even want to play, but that rhythm keeps pumping along irresistibly, a swinging tetrameter built on a kick drum floor tom Morse code, and they can’t leave it alone, they have to join in.
What could Bo know about the song except that he loved its dance-hall jungle beat, that he loved Iggy Pop for being a profane presence in the world? What more did he need to know? Did he need to know that Pop and David Bowie wrote and recorded the song at Hansa Studios, a stone’s throw from Checkpoint Charlie? That Pop and Bowie, thrown together in Berlin, settled in to watch Starsky & Hutch every Thursday night on the Armed Forces Network, whose station identifier was a pleasant rhythm of dits and das, a rhythm that Pop and Bowie passed along to drummer Hunt Sales, who immediately recognized it as the beat from the Supremes’ “Can’t Hurry Love,” and cooked up a version that sounded like a big-bore V8 running wide open on a cold, deserted Indiana highway?
If he’d known any of this, would he have been somehow more rabid for the song? Would the rest of the party, who had, incidentally, reacted exactly as Bo had known they would, collectively trampolining, sloshing their drinks all over the Afghan rugs and the calfskin sofas—would they have felt any different? Probably not.
It didn’t matter to my father, either, who mentioned none of it in his book. But it matters to me, that military brat of a song, conceived at AFN, delivered wet and squirmy on the front lines of the Cold War, its birth certificate stamped in a country whose chief arms supplier during both world wars, Krupp AG, had just sold a stake in its operations to the government of Iran.
At their first meeting, in a booth at Studio 54, bubbles pumping out of tubes hidden in the ceiling, the music so loud it actually made champagne glasses shimmy across the tables, Shahin had yelled at Bo: I’ll tell you a secret!
Bo opened his eyes, mouth, tipped back his head in a pose of open acceptance.
Pipeline management! Shahin yelled.
Bo flashed the thumbs-up, though he’d passed the threshold of aural paralysis about an hour back, when someone had fired an honest-to-god cast-iron naval cannon from the mezzanine at the twelve-foot Godzilla piñata gliding across the dance floor on urethane wheels, spooky as hell, Boom, smoke, paper everywhere, pharmaceutical-grade guts spilled all over the floor. Mob scene. Bo’s ears had flatlined.
Three days later, they met again, this time at Neil’s apartment on Park, in a living room with textured wallpaper and golden tassels on the brocade sofa pillows. If Shahin under the strobes had come off as a prick, Bo accepted that under normal light it was nothing more than standard Oxbridge snottery. Okay, so he’d eaten caviar out of some whore’s cunt in Paris and he’d boxed up at university and beat off under his subfusc with the rest of them, let’s get down to brass tacks, whaddyagot?
Shahin: The problem is not that the Shah will be deposed. He’s an interchangeable part manufactured by your government. He failed to keep his own greed in check and he’ll be overthrown. So be it. What will go with him, unfortunately, are the engineers managing the oil fields. The new regime will replace them with inexperienced engineers whose only qualifications are that they pray five times a day, and then we’ll start to see real problems. Problems with extraction, problems with transport.
Okay, Bo said.
The oil won’t dry up, but it will choke. My suggestion is to look away from Iran for profit. Look domestic. Look for profit in the expansion of the West Texas fields.
I appreciate the advice, but I can buy into the WTI market without you, Bo said.
Shahin shrugged and frowned in the French manner that said, Obviously, asshole.
All right, then, what? Bo said.
I have excellent connections in West Texas.
So do I, Bo said.
Excellent connections.
Bo laughed. Okay.
I know a man who knows everyone in West Texas and beyond.
Ah, Bo said, gears beginning to turn. Saudi?
He is Saudi, yes, Shahin said.
Aha.
He is currently partner in thirty-two ventures in West Texas.
Only thirty-two?
Thirty-two under the family name. There are more, you’re correct.
How many?
Shahin shrugged again, looked at the ceiling. Fifty? he said. Seventy-five?
It was as though a stream of warm, fragrant oil had been poured over Bo’s naked body. He struggled to control the muscles in his face, which were conspiring to set off a smile that would introduce the corners of his lips to his fucking eyebrows.
A partner of yours? Bo said.
Of sorts. We were up at Millfield together. And it is his opinion that American domestic production is set to rise. But I only tell you this as thanks for your time. I’m in shipping, what would I know about oil?
Right, Bo said. You’re in shipping. He knew what was coming next, and he sat back and waited.
Shahin obliged, of course, cuing the origin story. My father, he said, was born into a feudal system and orphaned when he was ten. What happens to an orphan in Iran in 1920? He becomes a beggar. But my father was taken in by the caretaker at a mosque, a man named Parizad. He learned to read, he studied the Quran. He became a porter. By the time he was twenty, he had an army of porters working for him. After the British and Russians left in ’46, his operations expanded, and after years of humble hard work he was in a position to take over some shipping routes in the Caspian. As you know, we now control three companies. Two overland, the other covering international waterways. To be frank, I’m having difficulty liquidating the companies, and every day my country moves a little closer to its inevitable fate. My family’s money is staked in accounts outside the country—and that money is not money I can risk, you understand? That is money for unborn generations.
I understand.
I am an honest businessman, as my father was. My father cared for Parizad until the day he died. We are loyal. Until I am able to liquidate my companies, I need a partner who will—for lack of a better term—front me some cash. And for his risk, I’ll pay back at a more-than-fair rate.