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.