I did this for about a year, hardly spending any of my money, but eventually I realized that it was dwindling, it might actually run out before I got an agent and a six-figure paycheck. So I took a weekend workshop called the “Millionaire’s Club.” It was supposed to teach me how to make my money work for me. Like it was an employee.
I don’t think I got much out of the seminar. Really. I didn’t want to get all tied up in real estate and evicting old people and bidding on probate cases. That had bad karma written all over it. But I was intrigued by this day trading idea. You know what I mean? Like, how hard could it be? You buy a stock at a certain price, wait for it to go up, and then sell it. Buy low, sell high. A monkey could do it.
I didn’t know much about investing. I still don’t. I know nothing about the market capitalization of companies, their enterprise value, or the P&E trailing. I mean, really? What the fuck is P&E trailing? I can’t read a five-year historical EPS growth rate. I don’t even know if you’re supposed to. But it didn’t matter. I was making money. Lots of it. And I didn’t have to shave, get dressed, or leave the apartment. It was a lot like screenwriting.
Cleto stopped the car. Thank God he stopped the music; my fucking ears were bleeding. I don’t know how long we’ve been driving. I think I kind of blacked out for a minute or two
I can feel the bruises on my legs and ribs and back and face and arms. They’re big and hot and fuck do they hurt. I need to pack my body in ice, man.
I can hear them talking outside. I hope they know that I’ve learned my lesson. I have. Totally. It’s ingrained. I will never take my eye off the market again. Ever. That’s the lesson I learned. You look away for a heartbeat—Mandy had met some guys from a fraternity at the University of Texas and she was flashing the “hook ’em horns!” sign while she serviced them—and the market will fuck you right up the
It occurs to me that I still have my cell phone. I can call Cleto. Maybe that’s the best way to do this. Not face-to-face where tempers flare and misunderstandings turn to violence, but detached—calm and cool—like businessmen. I dig it out of my pocket, thank God I got one of those flip phones and it didn’t get smashed, and open it up. I’ve got Cleto on speed dial.
It’s ringing.
I get his voice mail.
I’m still having trouble talking, my lips have ballooned up like the Michelin Man, I try very hard to enunciate.
“Dude, it’s Russell. Look. Sorry, man. Let’s talk. Okay? I’ll make it up to you, man. C’mon. I need to go to the hospital. Let me outta the trunk.”
I could call 911. But what would I say? I don’t know where I am, I don’t know the license plate number of Cleto’s car; how could they find me? And I don’t really want to confess to laundering money for a drug smuggler. Then Cleto would be really mad.
Those “Millionaire Club” guys were right. Having your money work for you is exciting. Totally. At first, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I’d start the morning with a buy—you know, five thousand shares of Millennium Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MLNM) or something, watch it go up a dollar a share, then sell. Bam Five thousand bucks. Get a couple different stocks going, and I’m like a juggler, keeping all the balls in the air until it’s time to strike. It’s totally cool. And for some reason I have a knack for it. I just know when to sell. Sure, some of it is luck. I know that. Though sometimes it’s instinct. Luck and instinct. That’s my formula for success.
But after a while I realized that I was paying too much attention to the market; all day my eyes glued to the computer screen, watching those stocks go up and down. Making trades, taking profit. It was turning into a job.
To help me get back on track with my writing, I took a class at UCLA extension. The teacher was some kind of action-movie hotshot who checked his BlackBerry every ten minutes, but he was very encouraging. He really liked one script I wrote, an alien-invasion romantic comedy—think Sleepless in Seattle meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers—and said he thought it had a lot of potential. He encouraged us to start a writers group. You know, like a support group.
So me and these guys Dave and Victor from the class joined Wendy and Pasha from another class and started
It’s not difficult to start a writers group. You buy a sixpack of beer, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and one of those raw vegetable and dip platters from the supermarket, hide your dirty clothes, and you’re ready to host a literary salon. You don’t need to be Dorothy Parker or Gertrude Stein. I wasn’t. And Dave, he hardly even picked up his dirty gym shorts off the floor when we had “group” at his house—that’s what we called it, “group”—and there was always a funny smell in the air, kinda like cheese.
The meetings were fun. We’d talk about our work and our struggles trying to break into Hollywood. We’d help each other with ideas and talk about agents we’d heard about and stuff like that. This was when I was optimistic. When I thought success in Hollywood was just a screenplay away. This was before I learned the big stinking truth.
One night it was my turn to host and I decided to go all out. I’d had a particularly good day trading. I managed to jump on an IPO and ride it like it was a wild bull. It was crazy. A couple of times I thought about jumping out, taking a solid profit, and calling it a day. But something told me to hang in—that sixth sense I told you about—and despite various ups and downs I managed to triple my money, turning twenty grand into sixty grand and then getting out seconds before the closing bell rang.
You fucking know I was feeling good. I bought some white wine from this little shop on Colorado Boulevard and a large shrimp and crab claw platter from this Japanese fish market in Glendale. I went to a Cuban bakery and got empanadas stuffed with spicy chicken and pastries filled with guava and cream cheese. In other words, I went out of my way to be a great host.
I was the only one in the group who didn’t have a regular day job. Dave and Wendy both worked as assistants, Victor worked at Book Soup, and Pasha was some kind of textile designer. Everyone was talking about their various jobs, the humiliations that they suffered on a daily basis, and finally Wendy asked me what I did.
I told them it was hard to explain. When they pressed me, I turned on my computer and show them my portfolio, trading strategies, how the software worked, things like that. They were more impressed by my day trading than by the first fifteen pages of a Spanish Civil War epic—imagine Tom Hanks as a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln brigades captured and befriended by Javier Bardem as Franco—and that’s all they could talk about. Pasha even stayed after group to help me clean up, and for the first time in over a year I didn’t end my night looking at pictures of Mandy LaFrance blowing Bourbon Street; I spent it in bed with a slightly pudgy Indian girl with beautiful eyes.
That’s how I met Cleto. Not by banging Pasha—that turned out to be the best part of the whole day trading thing: It got me a girlfriend. You know day trading, it’s sexy, kind of dangerous, but it’s also responsible. You’re investing money. It’s like a very grownup thing to do. That impressed Pasha, and once she spread her legs, that was it, we were an item.
It was Victor who caused the problem. Cleto was Victor’s cousin and Victor couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Cleto had a bunch of cash he wanted to invest, but he couldn’t exactly put it in a bank because he’d earned it “under the table.” I guess I was naïve, but when I met him he just seemed like a nice, hardworking Mexican man who was trying to make a better life for himself just like everybody else who comes to this country. Later I learned that he’d earned his money selling drugs. What can I tell you? I’m a moron.
Anyway, at first I said no. I didn’t want the responsibility. What if I lost Cleto’s nest egg? Then what? He goes back to Oaxaca peso-less? But when Cleto opened that gym bag stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills, well, I couldn’t resist. I mean, he was giving me ten percent of the profit.
I thought they were going to leave me in here to slowly roast to death. But now Cleto’s started up the car and we’re moving. Air is circulating. I ca
n breathe again. He’s popped another CD in and now it’s some kind of salsa—no, wait, I know it. It’s Ozomatli.
Ozomatli is blasting in the trunk.
I like this much better. It’s happier, bouncy, and has a horn section. Maybe Cleto’s mood has improved.
I take out my cell phone and try again. Still no answer; maybe he can’t hear it ringing over the music. It’s too loud in the trunk to leave a message so I hang up.
I guess you could say I got greedy. I could’ve stuck Cleto’s cash into a couple of über-safe stocks and called it a day. All he wanted was for me to let them ride for a year or two, then sell them, pay the taxes on the gains, and give him a nice clean cashier’s check. But I thought about that and realized, you know, what’s in it for me? Ten percent of the profits if the profits are small is like hardly worth my time. I’m not risking my neck to make a couple hundred bucks when I could make thousands, right? Doesn’t make sense. So I gambled a little. I suppose, in retrospect, I should’ve diversified … took some conservative positions. That’s what they call it.
But you know what I thought? I thought, I don’t take conservative positions in bed with Pasha, why should I take ’em with Cleto’s money?
You know? You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet. I wonder if I can explain it to Cleto that way. Do they have omelets in Mexico?
Finally the car’s stopped. We’ve been driving for hours. I tried to call Pasha but I’m not getting any reception. Where are we?
The trunk lid opens and it’s bright. I feel like the Moleman or something. If the Moleman had the living shit kicked out of him. The sun is searing my eyeballs and I can’t seem to blink. Naldo and Ramón pull me out of the trunk. Fuck. That hurts I can hardly stand up. My body’s stiff like I’m filled with concrete. My legs don’t work at all and my pants are wet.
“You pissed your pants, Cleto’s not gonna be happy about that.”
What do they expect? How long was I in there?
I try to talk. “Where are we?”
I look around. We’re up in the mountains. Out in the woods. I think I’ve been here before. Cleto used to come up here and practice shooting. There’s an outdoor gun range. It was fun. They taught me how to shoot. I look around for Cleto, but I don’t see him. I see my car parked next to the road. Maybe that’s it. Beat me up. Leave me in the woods to drive myself home.
“C’mon, ese let’s go for a drive.”
I nod. But I don’t know if I can drive. I’m not feeling too good.
Naldo and Ramón put me in my car and start it for me. That’s nice. But I can’t put my seatbelt on because I think my arm’s broken. I try to tell them this, but they’re not listening.
“Drive safe.”
They put the car in gear for me and now I’m moving. I guess this is better than being in the trunk. I’ll drive to the hospital. I’ll call Pasha. She’ll visit me. She loves me.
As the car goes over the lip of the cliff, takes a hard bounce, and nosedives toward the canyon floor, I close my eyes. I don’t want to see it. I feel weightless, floating, like when the roller coaster comes up from a big dip and just crests the rise before it starts to go down again. It’s that little gap of suspense, the dead air between songs on the radio, the frozen moment between exhaling and inhaling, the nervous pause between the order and the execution.
FIVE DAYS AT THE SUNSET
BY PETER SPIEGELMAN
Lethe, South Dakota
Lethe, South Dakota. Not much to it. Not much more than a wide place at the end of an off-ramp—a frozen, flinty afterthought to the interstate, just right for gassing up, taking a leak, and heading out again. Not much to see besides the filling station and the quick-mart, the Sunset Motor Inn, the plow barn for the county road crews, and the Lethe Lounge next door. No reason to hang around.
“Not unless you’re lost or out of luck,” the desk clerk had said. She was maybe twenty, and her pimpled face was round and sort of vacant, but she’d got it exactly right. I made up a name and paid cash for the room.
There was no particular reason I stopped in Lethe—no particular draw it had over any of the hundred other shitholes I’d driven through in the past week, and nothing about the peeling paint and blistered plywood of the Sunset that was especially tempting when I pulled off the highway that first night. I hadn’t planned on anything more than a few hours sleep and maybe a shower, but when morning came I couldn’t get out of bed.
I don’t know how long I lay there, listening to the wind in the light poles, fingering the thin sheets, and smelling the mildew and my own sour breath. There was a constellation of brown stains on the ceiling, and if I squinted they looked like the outlines of the states I’d passed through. Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois. Blind panic, fear, anger, and, as I crossed the Mississippi, a floaty, detached kind of feeling. It was a funny buzz—like a contact high but more fragile. It vanished like smoke whenever I thought of Mia.
The sun had crawled right to left across the window shade by the time I managed to reach for the remote. I channel-surfed until I found CNN, and watched what passed for news until someone knocked at the door. It was the pimply girl, wearing a coat like a sleeping bag and carrying a can of Lysol and an armful of dingy towels. I pulled on some clothes and let her in. Then I went to the Lethe Lounge.
It was a cinder-block bunker with a satellite dish on the roof and chicken wire on the windows. Inside was nighttime, and the smell of beer, cigarettes, fried potatoes, and piss. There was a jukebox near the door, and a pool table and pin-ball machine in back. I hadn’t seen the cruiser in the parking lot, and I almost bolted when I noticed the state trooper at the bar. Sweat pricked on my forehead when he turned to look, and my knees went soft, but then he turned away, no more interested in me than the bartender was.
I took a deep breath and slid onto a stool and ordered a Coke. I looked at the TV mounted on the wall, and—miracle of miracles—it was tuned to CNBC. I sipped my Coke and watched, and after an hour a piece about the bank came on. It was nothing new, a summary of the story so far—Rumors of Trading Irregularities at Ketchum Leeds; Ketchum Stock Plunges as Management Confirms Derivatives Losses; Widely Held Ketchum Shares Imperil Pension Funds; Fed Considers Bailout Plan for Ketchum. A parade of talking heads came next, predicting doom and disaster all around—for Ketchum management, for shareholders, for anyone who’d ever used a piggybank. And then there was Carter Strickland.
It was a night shot. A square-faced, forty-something frat-boy climbs from a black Town Car in front of a green office tower—the Ketchum Leeds headquarters. Snow falls around him and camera flash flares off his forehead and gelled blond hair. A chorus of questions rises, and Strickland—somber and determined—pledges to get to the bottom of things. I smiled and wondered when the last time was he’d worked past dark.
Then the final headline—Ketchum Derivatives Guru Sought—and a grainy photo on the screen and my stomach clenched. Without thinking I touched my chin. I’d lost the mustache and the little beard outside of Chicago, and I still felt naked without them. Derivatives guru. I shook my head.
I watched CNBC until the bartender changed the channel to bull riding, and after that I watched the place fill up with highway department guys and cowboy truckers and a parade of assorted shitkickers. I switched from Coke to Scotch, and sat motionless on my stool until a rangy guy with a three-day beard staggered against me. He wore a red baseball cap with Reno printed on it, and he squinted and looked me up and down. His eyes caught on my L.L.Bean boots, my corduroys, and my North Face parka, and he bared a row of yellow teeth.
“You from the coast or from back east?” he asked. His voice was deeper than I expected. I made a noncommittal noise, and the guy squinted harder. Something knowing came into the yellow smile. “Well which is it? San Fag-cisco, or Jew York City?” I looked at the narrow, knobby face and the tobacco-stained lips, and felt my throat close. The rangy guy put a finger against his pitted nose and pushed it to one side. “Don’t bullshit me,” he w
hispered. “I kin always sniff it out.” Before I could answer, or even swallow hard, the bartender rapped heavy knuckles on the counter.
“You buying, Ross, or just standing around?” he said to the rangy guy. His voice was flat and rumbling, and he reminded me of the football coach at my high school. Maybe he reminded Ross of something, too, because he ordered a Bud and walked away as soon as he got it.
“Asshole,” the bartender muttered, and shook his big bald head. “You want a refill?”
I told him no, and left. The air was like a knife in my chest on the way back to the Sunset, but I stopped in the parking lot anyway, and looked up at the night. There were no stars, just low gray clouds, like a pot lid pressing down.
On my second day in Lethe, I went looking for a newspaper. What I found at the quick-mart barely qualified: two-day-old copies of USA Today, week-old copies of something called the Eagle Recorder, and a stupefying array of gun and tit mags. I bought a muddy coffee and a USA Today and went back to the Sunset, where I leafed through the business section. I stopped when I got to the story about me.
The article was brief: authorities expanding their search for Paul Dillon, managing director at Ketchum Leeds and head of its lucrative hybrid derivatives trading desk, in an ongoing probe of falsified profits at the venerable bank. Blah, blah, blah. The picture was the same blurred headshot they’d been showing on television, and below it was a photo of the place I was last seen—my apartment building. There was a slim woman out front, with long dark hair, who for a wobbly instant I thought was Mia, but wasn’t.
There was a knock on the door, and the pimply girl was there again. I added the business section to the stack of papers I’d collected since New York, and left.
The Lethe Lounge was empty, and CNBC was on the box again. The bartender was loading beer bottles into a cooler and looked up when I came in. His forehead wrinkled in recognition.
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