“I was side by side with Mr. Jackson during this entire process. And I know it seems…”
“Catastrophic?” He deadpans.
“No.” I chuckle. “I don’t think I’d go that far. Not yet. Difficult. I was going to say difficult.” I square off with the man in front of me, look him in the eye, and tell him the best version of the truth I can. “But everyone’s making change for the change that’s coming. This company is growing at a rate much faster than anyone anticipated. And these are just our growing pains.”
A smile slides across my face when I see the defeat in his eyes just before he glances down at the table. “Jesse? You are growing, are you not? How much has your salary increased with the stress of this shit? Huh? No one likes firing people. No one.” I tell the defeated man before me, point blankly.
He must be lost in thought for a second because it takes him three to finally answer. “Well, I mean everyone’s salary has. And yes, my district is growing. That does make sense. I guess.” He dawdles a bit and his hesitation causes my anger to spike.
There is nothing worse than a man being afraid to fucking speak. Nothing.
In an effort to hide my gritting teeth, I yawn, looking down at my watch. And even though it’s nowhere near ten, I decide I can’t endure any more of my new business acquaintance’s company and call it quits as he weakly blabbers on about some shit I cannot stomach further.
“Damn, that time already. Well,” I stand to make my excuses.
And it doesn’t take half the explanation it would have to excuse myself, had Mr. Brighton really come to this meeting prepared for battle, and even that pisses me off just a little more than his ho hum attitude.
This is the shit that I do not like about my job.
The meetings, I can handle. The pathetic men I’m forced to associate with, no big deal.
But it’s the meetings with the pathetic men, who are still holding the higher positions, when they’re the ones whose bones need swept out.
After my half-hearted goodbye, I make my way from the table and the tension in my muscles knot, getting tighter with every step I take towards the curb. Before I’m at the limo, I feel the beginnings of a migraine fraying the edges of my consciousness.
And at some point when I’m sliding into the back of the car, or maybe when I was informing Drake of our next stop, I decide I don’t care for New Orleans. I don’t like the smells, or the music, or the bloody river trash who resides here.
Damn, I shouldn’t have asked Lexy to come. Why did I?
As soon as the thought crosses my mind for a second time, I resolve a solution—
We’ll leave. Simple as that.
I’ll pick up Travis’s friend, get him settled into his hotel, and drive back to the Ritz. I’ll inform Lexy there’s been a change in my business plans, and we’ll be leaving first thing tomorrow morning.
Done. Perfect.
See?
That’s how a real man takes care of something. You handle it, head on.
Decide. Then act.
I’m thirty and I’m more of a man than the pathetic motherfucker I just meet with. I’ve been in this business for a quarter of the time Mr. Brighton has, and in one seventeen minute meeting, I might as well have been the grim reaper sinking his scythe into his withering stock firm tonight, and he knew it. He knew it coming in. He knew it sitting before me. And he knew it as I stalked from the table.
And not once did he put forth an effort to save it.
Not once did he fight.
His loss. My gain.
Or gains, whichever.
The last poignant visual of the past seven years I’ve lived can be reflected in what I saw on my last night within the gates of Bill Clements.
What landed me in that little facility called a maximum security prison in Amarillo, Texas? Don’t worry. We’ll get to that.
I’d worked in a program called PAMIO, or Program for Aggressive Mentally Ill Offenders. I still don’t know exactly what my job description entailed—all I knew was they called me an SSI. And no, I don’t know what that shit stands for either.
I was just there to serve my time, not make friends or call the place home.
Anyway—I'd just finished my shift where it was my job to clean up behind all the crazy as fuck people who were locked up in West Texas. And I was headed from what us inmates called the shoo. In reality, the shoo is just an old SSI closet where they let the trustees from ad seg, or general population, change clothes or take a piss during our shifts.
However, it was the only place in the maximum security prison I could call home. Mainly, because it provided privacy.
I went there to unwind. And breathe.
I went there just to get out of my own head sometimes.
The last night I was there, which just so happened to be last night, I'd wrapped up last call, straightened up the shoo, and locked up the last ward of Texas's criminally and mentally insane. After I clocked out, I stepped outside into the frigid Amarillo night air and lit up my last cigarette when something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention.
I only had seventeen more hours to serve. Seven-fucking-teen.
This guy’s name was Robby.
I stood, stuck in place and watched him from the grounds outside his cell, and I couldn’t help it. I could not turn away.
Morbid curiosity is a bitch, but it’s human, too. Keep that in mind.
Robby was mentally insane, of course, they were all fucking mentally insane. And criminals. But of all the other inmates I worked around or with, I’d felt a connection with Robby.
Every time our eyes locked, it felt like I was seeing an old friend again.
Needless to say, I blamed that connection on my being stuck last night.
I blame that connection for doing nothing, while witnessing another man die.
Over the last months, hell—it’d almost been a year since he was transferred here—I’d basically watched Robby starve himself to death. The guy probably weighed two-ten when he shuffled into Bill Clements gates shackled at his hands and feet eleven months ago. But the same man who stood in front of me last night at six-feet-two, couldn’t have fucking weighed a hundred pounds.
And as I stood, stuck, on the perfectly manicured grounds outside his cell, I watched as he slit his wrists with a razor and an eerie calm settled over me the further up his arms he cut.
Then, he took his smock—yes, I said smock. And no, I’m not kidding. They didn’t trust the PAMIO inmates with anything.
Shoestrings. Sheets. Clothes.
Nothing.
Because this guy had been diagnosed with suicide tendencies, related to self-deprivation of food or starvation, he was sentenced to spend time in PAMIO, a 390-bed facility located at the William P. Clements, Jr. Facility in Amarillo, Texas where he was given a paper smock. The kind you wear at the dentist when they’re cleaning your teeth—and nothing else.
Let me say this a little clearer, he was given nothing else to wear.
Now I, like everyone else in this god-forsaken place, knew that you could purchase a razor blade for the bargain price of seven stamps. Hell, you could probably purchase a fucking kidney for the right amount of stamps.
So this kid, this Robby, he probably got the razor with some stamps, and the smock when he was processed in at BC-PAMIO for seventy-two hours to seven days.
The smock was the trust he didn’t possess.
Either way, between the smock he shoved down his throat and the razor blade he slit his arms with from wrist to armpit, Robby, or PAMIO inmate number 12567, did get the job done.
And as the other SSI trustees had attempted to resuscitate, called the time of death, and hosed his cell clean…I finished my last cigarette and headed back to my cell.
It’s fucked up, Idn’t?
But on a fundamental level, we’re all beasts. Mind fucked. You either live or die. Especially when you’re in places like Bill fucking Clements. And when you’re ready to die? The fucking chances ar
e you will.
And that’s all I’m taking from my time there. That knowledge.
Then, seventeen hours later...this world was mine. Again.
My oyster. Mine. And I’ll do with it what I will.
Why?
Because, I've paid my fucking time.
Listen closely.
I have paid my goddamn time.
And now that I have, it's time Travis fucking Jackson paid his.
Travis was a sophomore when I was a senior. And I’m not sure how he even found his way into that New Year’s eve party my twelfth grade year, but he did. And he was loaded down with any and every party favor and cocktail you could imagine.
Bam.
He was a regular, a fixture, at every party from then on.
It honestly took me a while to warm up to the cocky little bastard, but after one night I stopped some punks who were kicking his ass, I loaded him in my car and took him home. And I don’t know, he sort of started looking up to me, I guess. Because everywhere I went from that night on, and I mean everywhere, there he was.
The kid reminded me of a puppy.
And no one can be shitty to a puppy.
So I let the fucker tag along, and we were friends.
Close friends. Hell, more than best friends, we became brothers.
Then I found out about Ma.
I had to leave New York when I was in my early twenties because my mom fell ill.
Fucking breast cancer.
See, the summer between my eighth and ninth grade year, mom and dad decided they wanted my high school diploma to have a little more merit than a public school diploma from Pittsburg would, so I moved from my mom’s to New York with my pops on my fourteenth birthday.
My father, Michael Bennett the third, was pretty well off before he married ma and they had me. He liked money, and he loved to spend it. He also was raised to believe in pre-numps. And ma…well, ma believed no one should live in excess.
“If you have it, good for you. But don’t flaunt it,” she’d say when I was little.
That didn’t work so well with my ostentatious father, however, it worked out perfectly for his pre-nump happy parents. And because of my mother’s impeccable ability to live easily within her means, she never had to work a day in her life. Both as Mrs. Bennett and after, my father made sure of it. He never let me or my little sister, Scarlett go without.
My mother also, obviously, loved the movie Gone With the Wind. Hence, mine and my sister’s name.
Anyway, the point is: Life at Dad’s was extravagant, life at Ma’s was not. It was very simple.
I’d been dating Summer Jackson since right around the time Trav and I’d started hanging out.
Sweet girl. Fucking great tits.
But too prissy. And way too needy.
She just wasn’t for me, okay?
I kept her around for the same reasons I kept her puppy brother around, because neither of them knew when it was time to go home and they were always fucking there.
But that’s neither here nor there. My apologies—back to the story.
By the time I moved back to Ma’s, we, Travis, Summer, and I—we were damn near family. I saw Summer almost as a sister at that point, and I’d been seeing Trav as my younger, irritating as fuck, brother.
Mr. Jackson had always liked me. He liked that I was the starting quarterback for the varsity team, he liked that my GPA never dropped below a four-point-0, and he liked that I abided the curfew he had set for his daughter when she was with me. But I think what he liked most about me, was that I worked my ass off for him from the time I was fifteen till I had to move back to Pittsburg at twenty-two.
From secretarial bullshit, to hanging walls and piecing together cubicles, to pitching and landing some of his firm’s, still to this day, biggest clients. I helped build Jackson’s first little office off Wall Street.
Fuck, before I tutored for my series seven, I was landing some of New York’s biggest recorded clients for the Jackson firm.
And I put my right hand to the Lord as soon as that damn plane landed in Pittsburg and I stepped off of it, all of that fucking died. Everything that I’d done for that family, all the blood, all the sweat, and all the tears, fell on silent witnesses and the entire family tree that had sprouted up from simple insistency, consisting of Trav, Summer, and Henry Jackson, wilted to shit.
I’d left my fingerprints on everything. Fucking emails, documents, accounts—both bank and client accounts.
The amount of money exchanged and the frequency of those transactions taking place under that building’s roof on any given day, was utterly absurd.
It was bull market and I had my PA, I knew money.
I also knew Mr. Jackson knew money. Now how much and from how many different businesses and private buyers he dealt with on a day-to-day basis, I didn’t know.
So when he told me to deposit or make a transaction, I did.
On paper, everything always checked out.
Everything. Always. Checked out.
I was a fucking kid, and these people were my fucking family. I didn’t think trust was an issue with someone I’d spent almost every day of the last seven years of my life with.
Now? Now, I know just how little time seven years really is in a lifetime.
And my little seven years between fifteen and twenty-two years old, didn’t mean shit to a fifty year old man who was finally on his way to the top.
So I landed in Pittsburg, finished my masters and successfully completed my series seven, while caring for my dying mother, and around the time I was able to finally say I was a legal stock exchange broker, I regretfully had to lay her to rest.
I’d just started sending my resumes to a few firms I had my eye on and made the appropriate connections to guarantee an interview when my life went to hell and time stopped.
On the day I had my first interview, I was in Dallas when I got a text from Scarlett telling me that Travis had called and told her the authorities had taken his father in.
One year later, with Henry Jackson’s army of attorney’s on one side of the court room, and my father’s on the other, the judge ruled.
And it was not in my favor.
Because of my lack of knowledge and young age, the insider tracking that was found to being practiced at Jackson’s Agency-NY, was placed on me.
Either the old man was that bad at insider stock exchange, or that good at covering it up by using a kid as his scapegoat. And with Travis and Summer standing side by side with their father, I was the only odd man out.
And I paid the price.
Not only for my stupidity, but because I trusted someone. A friend.
Fucking youth.
A fucking wasted youth, to be precise.
Wasted for many reasons, but the one that will haunt me the longest, even more, now that I’m out, is my sister.
I’d hardly made it into seg, much less out of New York, when I got a cryptic message on JayPay from Travis with nothing but five cryptic words written.
‘A sister for a sister.’—T.
And I had no idea what the fuck his words meant. Not for the longest. And when I finally did, God did I hope that I was wrong.
But I wasn’t, and all I could do was watch from afar as my old life unraveled and fell apart. I bitched at my father, demanding him to make them to stop seeing each other, and he tried. He did.
Just not enough. Because, it didn’t work.
No one could do enough, though. Not with Mom gone.
And not with me stuck in Texas in a maximum security prison where every other inmate besides myself was serving twenty-five or more to life.
Travis was about to marry Scarlett. They’d been together for a little over a year when he decided to move out to LA and help head up his father’s new firm.
Only my sister wasn’t welcomed. In fact, Travis told her it was over. That he didn’t love her anymore, and he didn’t know why, but that that was that. And then he left.
All I kno
w about whatever life my sister had between the time Travis left for LA and a year later when I received the phone call from my father, informing me she passed away, is that it was spent chasing something. Drugs. Alcohol. Men, and more drugs.
A month after she was buried, my father sent me a letter my sister had written before committing suicide.
It was the hardest fucking letter I ever had to read.
I hated that letter the first time I read it, and I’ll hate it the last time I read it, but don’t expect me to stop reading it. It was the last thing my sister did before taking her own life because of my sins.
My sins.
Even when my eyes aren’t tracing the actual dips and divots she made on the paper with the pen, I can still see her perfect penmanship in black scrolled across the bright white paper.
I can see it like it’s right in front of me.
I read her words behind my closed eyelids as if they were seared into the frontal lobe of my brain.
Dearest Rhett, please… don’t blame yourself for this. This is not your fault. This is my fault. I wish I was strong enough to go and see you one last time. I have so many things to say, but I’m afraid they’ll sadly go unsaid.
You were right. I should have listened to you, but I didn’t. And I’m so sorry. For everything, Rhett, I’m sorry.
Mom dying was harder on me than I realized, and you went off and were doing your own thing. I don’t know what exactly happened when you lived with Dad in New York, I don’t know the details because I wasn’t privy to that part of your life.
I wish you had told me…
I wish when you came back to Pittsburg, you would’ve opened up and told me. I wish you would’ve come back the brother I remembered. But you didn’t, you were all business. Working fulltime and going to school at night. And that was when you weren’t tutoring for your series seven. You were so busy all the time, and then when mom died, you were just gone.
I’m sorry I went to New York after she died. I did get your letter. I know you wanted me to stay in Pittsburg, and I know now I should have listened to you. I know that now, Rhett.
I know you’re innocent, too. And it’s not because I’m a good sister that I know that, or because I always had faith in you.
Mind F*ck Page 8