Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  None of that compared to the money Dmitry managed to make while he was still an MBA student. He came through the States on his way to a job in Asia, itching to tell the tale of his brief inglorious career as a graduate student, to display the new Machiavellian notches in his belt, and all Frank could wonder was — why? Maybe Frank was where he parked his conscience. Maybe he wanted someone to tell him to be less of an asshole. But does telling someone to stop being a narcissist ever work? That would make counseling the easiest profession in the world.

  Frank picked him up at the airport in Hartford in a vicious Connecticut thunderstorm, and as they drove under a sky black at four in the afternoon, tree branches snapping off in the gale winds, electrical lines down, he couldn’t pay close attention to what Dmitry was saying. The gist was that he was a star in his MBA program until the scandal broke, the scandal that got him expelled in disgrace weeks from being awarded a degree. At that point he had already been recruited by HSBC, the immense multinational investment bank, had signed a contract with them to start as a trader in their Hong Kong headquarters once he graduated, and, quite surprisingly, Frank thought, that offer had not been withdrawn post-scandal. He was to start in June, and being suddenly free from any further school work, he had come to take another ride on the Green Tortoise rolling free brothel and then fly from San Francisco directly to his new life. He was moving with a single duffle bag. “Franky, you don’t bring suits to Hong Kong,” he explained.

  Even as an undergraduate, Dmitry had been concentrating entirely on Asian markets, and at LSE he put together a newsletter, a compilation of data on equities, commodities, and real estate futures, that he began to sell to people in the financial industry. The newsletter and its market information were not cheap — a ten-thousand-pound a month subscription — but he managed to sell it to quite a few people, at least in part because some early adopters made piles of money following his advice and word got around, but also because it was printed on London School of Economics letterhead, which he had stolen from an office on campus. “I didn’t actually perpetrate fraud, Franky, I didn’t sign the offer Dmitry Heald, Professor of International Marketing, London School of Economics, or anything like that. I didn’t claim any affiliation with LSE, I merely let people assume, because of the letterhead, that I was head of something called the London School of Economics’ Asian Markets Study Group, which of course didn’t exist. When I signed the letter Dmitry Heald, Director, Asian Markets Study Group, I was telling the truth, since that was the name of my balefully short-lived company, AMSG. Or should that be banefully, Franky? I can never keep them straight. I think it’s balefully.”

  A frantic longhaired mutt streaked across the road and Frank braked too hard and slid. Every driver seemed distracted — some people lose one hundred percent of their common sense in a storm — and Frank was glad to finally pull into his neighborhood.

  “Undone by success! My newsletter was so brilliant, Franky, that the Financial Times decided to do a story on it and sent a reporter to the London School of Economics looking for the aforementioned Professor Heald, head of the school’s Asian Markets Study Group, only to find, without much effort, that no such person or position existed.” Frank couldn’t take his eyes off the road to see if it was sadness or pride he was hearing in Dmitry’s voice. He pulled into his drive, punched the automatic garage door opener, and sailed in.

  “Wow, Franky, top flight! American ingenuity foils Thor’s hammers! The Automatic Garage Door, Number One in Customer Satisfaction! Nice.” They parked and got out. “So anyways, I was, as one might assume, hauled before the Dean, forced to sign an agreement to pay back almost all of the four million dollars I’d made, and then instantly expelled. Tell me if I’m wrong, Franky, but one or the other, don’t you think? Make me sign your paper, give back the money, and then give me their precious degree, or kick me out and I keep the money. But both? Am I wrong?”

  They got inside and Frank threw Dmitry’s bag in the spare room and took a piss. When he came back Dmitry was looking in the refrigerator.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Thanks, Franky! How about these steaks? Should we fry them up?”

  It figured. Frank went out on the fairly well covered and yet still devastated side porch and checked the gas grill. It lit.

  “So you had to pay back almost all the money?” he asked as Dmitry followed him out.

  “This is a big country, isn’t it, Franky, with big weather.” The wind would once in a while take a thin swath of rain and slap them with it. Frank turned the gas up as high as it would go and waves of rain sizzled and evaporated against the side of the grill. “Yes,” Dmitry went on, sadly. “My first millions. It seemed incredibly unfair.” He took an uncharacteristic pause. Frank threw the steaks on, salted and peppered them. “It was really good data, Franky, and a lot of people made a lot of money using it. The idea that I should now give them each back their piddly hundred or so thousand dollars US — it really rankled me. I wouldn’t mind compensating LSE a fee for the use of their logo, something reasonable, but to give it all back — well, all of it they could trace, about three quarters of it — seemed exceedingly unjust. The fraud was an advertising fraud. The data was good. Believe me, there are quite a few fraudulent businesses out there doing this kind of work, with an enormous amount of fraudulent data, but that’s not what this was! It was merely a quasi-deceptive marketing device. It was advertising! Advertising is more or less deceptive always, isn’t it?”

  He looked appropriately chastened for three seconds, and then physically brushed off the front of his shirt and smiled. “Half my customers re-subscribed after they took their money back — AMSG now with its own letterhead, as a subsidiary of LSE: London School Economics, Ltd, yes, you guessed it, sole proprietor, D. Heald. They bought in again, at an even higher subscription rate — proof positive that there was no fraud, right?”

  Frank flipped the steaks.

  “You can answer, you know, Franky — yes, such questions are at least partially rhetorical, and I know you have a policy of not encouraging me — despite the fact that you do, of course, in all sorts of ways, don’t you? A few supplementary conversational uh-huh’s and hm’s and the like would really be perfectly normal and would make the whole thing seem like more of a conversation, don’t you think? Did I see a beer in there?” He started back into the kitchen saying, over his shoulder, “You can pull my steak any time, Franky. It looks good and raw.”

  Frank spent the rest of the night, after a few glasses of wine, sarcastically uh-huhhing and mm-hmming every remark Dmitry made. He thought it was funny and knew it probably wasn’t. As they ate, Frank found himself wondering whether, accustomed to making and losing millions as he was, Dmitry might have managed to buy a bottle of wine. Maybe that’s why he was cranky.

  “So did anyone ever steal Asian Markets Study Group’s stationary and sell their products with it?” Frank asked.

  “Ah, I see what you are doing here, Franky, trying to teach me morality by putting me in the other guy’s shoes — perhaps not even aware that Dean Giddens of the London School of Economics wears nothing but Tanino Crisci or John Lobbs at a thousand US dollars or even two thousand a pair. Very Savile Row, Mr. Giddens is. But point taken. I will say that I would hope, in that case, yes, to be compensated, but I would have no interest in humiliating the culprits or destroying them — unless they were very direct competitors — and I am certainly not a competitor to LSE, the school.” He paused to look at Frank. “What is it, Franky? — you have on that stern, Jehovan look.”

  “I’m wondering whether you are just putting on a stiff-upper-lip show, or if you really have no remorse whatsoever.”

  “Remorse is an interesting emotion, isn’t it, Franky? Do you feel remorse, ever?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Of course.”

  “When?”

  He failed to come up with something, but then again, he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t feel some vague regret.

&
nbsp; “I’m not sure exactly when, but I’m sure I have.”

  “Precisely,” he said, as if Frank had admitted the opposite. “It’s interesting because there can’t be any evolutionary benefit, can there? Fear, hate, anger — the brain-stem, primitive leftovers of our amphibian forebears, old self-defense mechanisms, all so understandable. And love, good for all our mammalian and herding duties. Disgust keeps us out of gastronomic and other danger. But remorse? What is it good for?”

  “It’s good for making people decent to each other! Jesus, Dmitry, what do you want, a world of self-interested sociopaths?”

  “Isn’t that what we have?”

  “So Gandhi was a self-interested sociopath,” he said. “Martin Luther King.”

  “That is a very interesting idea, Franky. And, yes, at some level they both were.”

  “You think Gandhi and Martin Luther King were as amoral as you.”

  “Who can say? How could one possibly measure relative levels of amorality? The fundamental goal of philosophy, Franky, is to teach us to see beyond our socially constructed blindness, to pierce the veil of bourgeois ideology — at least this is what I learned at the knee of my teacher as a young grasshopper in our famous Civil War tent, and I believe that is very close to a direct quote from you, the aforementioned teacher, and it is also exactly why Messieurs Gandhi and King are so revered. They showed us how immoral our notions of morality always become.”

  Frank sat there like an idiot, instead of saying what he should have, that to compare Dmitry’s duplicitous marketing to Gandhi’s empowerment of a subcontinent and King’s of a people was more obscene than ludicrous. Instead, he sat there like the wine-sodden philosophical dunce he was, wondering if there was some truth to it.

  “I’ll let you mull that one over, Franky, while admitting that, still, when all is said and done, I did learn one invaluable lesson from the whole affair.”

  He waited for a prompt from Frank, who was foggy with wine, a little slow on the uptake.

  “Uh-huh?” he managed.

  “Never, ever, ever, ever,” he stretched out a preposterous dramatic pause, “ever get caught.”

  Oh, brother. The rain continued its thousands of little wallops on the street.

  “I’m surprised that your new employer isn’t upset.”

  “I’m sure they aren’t thrilled.”

  “So they know, but they’re going to hire you despite it all?”

  He smiled.

  “Egads, yes!”

  He looked at Frank as if for the first time seeing their roles permanently reversed: Dmitry the man of affairs humoring Frank the dewy naïf; Frank bluffing, Dmitry judging but holding back slightly with a kindly, corrupt mien, wondering whether the truth were too brutal for the likes of his former teacher.

  “You have to understand, Franky,” he said. “It was very good data.”

  2007

  A year later, Dmitry was rich, and they met in Los Angeles.

  “Well, not rich, really, Franky,” he said, when he was accused of it. “But I have been having some success, yes.”

  Frank had come to California following a journalist he met at a party in one of the houses he had built. Patricia was a theater critic for the Wall Street Journal, and she was in town to review something or other. He had fallen in love. He wasn’t sure how or why, but he fell hard. She was a little wisecracking firecracker and had been hired away from the Journal by the Los Angeles Times to be their chief drama critic. He found her endlessly impressive, someone actually involved in the world of writing and culture he had admired from afar. Maybe because the deadline of her move to LA loomed, and that made her seem safe, or maybe because she made merciless fun of his bad haircut, or maybe because she wouldn’t sleep with him, even after a few dates, him running down to Manhattan — he wasn’t sure why, but he knew he was a goner. He was far from alone in admiring her; she wore her skirts short and her tights black and had a wicked sense of humor, could handle more shots of vodka than most guys, and although she wasn’t a classic beauty and she didn’t really flaunt her body — those black-sheathed legs aside — there was something about her. Men were always a little surprised, after a few minutes, to find themselves intrigued. They wouldn’t have noticed her as she entered the room — she wasn’t loud or showy, she was small, a couple inches over five feet and trim, didn’t turn that many heads, but she had a way with an outrageous one-liner, and she would lob them in, lots of them, tossing them over the boundaries of polite conversation, and then step back and enjoy, like a connoisseur, the successive dropping of jaws. If they had a brain in their head, the women wanted her as a friend and the men lusted for her. Or vice versa if they were gay. When Frank finally did have sex with her, a month or so later, just before she left, it was hot and fun and sweet, and he was desperately hooked.

  A few weeks after she left New York for the job in LA, Frank decided it was a good time to visit his friend Dwayne. They had been best friends in high school, but Dwayne had become a devotee of one of the Maharaji guys — he could never keep them straight, but he thought it was the teenage one — and had moved to California to be the guru’s musical director. Dwayne had been in the band and orchestra in high school and in the rock bands that played their dances, and now he recorded New Age CDs and lived in a little house in Culver City with his wife, also a follower of the Maharaji, and their two kids. He was a beautiful guy, really decent and warm and thoughtful, and although Frank was usually allergic to religion, Dwayne was a walking advertisement for his. He was happy, kind, fun, didn’t proselytize, and for some reason, except for a couple flecks of grey in his hair, looked exactly like his high school yearbook picture.

  Frank didn’t want Patricia to feel like he was stalking her, or presume too much, so he stayed at a motel near Dwayne’s house, and then, the next day, arranged to meet her for dinner downtown. Much later, he realized that her surprised laughter when he said he might move to Los Angeles was not the jubilant endorsement he took it for — and maybe if she hadn’t left right away the next day to cover some play in Seattle, they would have had enough time — Frank might have had enough time — to learn, before it was too late, that she wasn’t, as they say, that into him.

  Dmitry, in a pure coincidence, had called him from New York, and when he found Frank was in LA had added a stop there on his way home. He took a room in a cheap motel in the dead zone of Olympic Boulevard near the 405, presumably because he liked the seediness of it. They met that night at a ramen place on Sawtelle. Dmitry, off on his usual monologue, said he was making bales of money — “not the little rectangular bales, Franky, the great big round ones.” He had an Australian girlfriend who worked as a trader at Credit Lyonnais, a Chinese girlfriend who worked as an executive at Bank of China, another “local girl,” as he called her, a secretary, that he had set up in an apartment, and there were “establishments” where he regularly brought clients and thus got “exquisite service.” All of that took care of his weekdays. He spent most of his weekends in Bangkok, Manila, or Ho Chi Minh City, playing golf during the day and whoring at night.

  “And yes, I know what you’re thinking, Franky, all this must take quite a bit of effort and planning, especially when you throw into the mix the fact that the maids can sometimes get a tad demanding and the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who gets in my car on Thursday afternoons so I can go down on her. All in all, a very full, logistically complicated life, and one that took many, many months to cobble together.”

  Frank, queasy, knowing Dmitry would mock anything he said and up the ante, said nothing.

  For some reason that Frank could never pinpoint and came to extravagantly regret, he wanted Dmitry to meet Dwayne. He told himself it was because Dwayne lived right around the corner, and was such a perfect exemplar of a conscious, conscientious existence, that it would do Dmitry good to see what an ethical life looked like. Dwayne would be good for Dmitry. Then again, he may have wanted Dwayne to see the interesting people he knew, how worldly he had beco
me, that he knew people from England and Asia — well, one person from England and Asia.