There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  Manufacture the Momentum: Always convince others that something big is happening, even if nothing at all has happened yet.

  The Illusion of Inclusion: Make everyone feel like they are helping to decide things, even if you have already decided, which should be the case.

  Shame and Fame: These are the leader’s most important tools of coercion, absent money or guns.

  I had discovered no obvious reasons why these were not principles by which to live and lead. I had used the first and second to great effect in the early months of the Union. I was eager to test the third, but needed something grander than a meeting or a charity drive. A spectacle, that’s what I needed. So as with our alma mater, we stole the best thing our rivals to the north had done and made it our own, at the inaugural (we always used this word instead of first) Tribute to Black Women.

  The Tribute was much more than a way to coerce my members, I promise—though I will admit that I stumbled on the right and noble impulse without trying. When I read a statement such as: For generations men have come into the world, either instinctively knowing or believing or being taught that since they were men they in one way or another had to be responsible for the women and children, which means the universe. I did not shout Patriarchy! (had never heard the word) nor did I rush to a feminist text (had not read any) or a black feminist text (did not know there was a difference). I just said to myself the same thing Audre Lorde said, in essence, to James Baldwin when he threw this claim at her: Bullshit.

  My life had been so often saved by women and so often disturbed or at least made uncomfortable by men that I had never been convinced that men should be in charge of anything, let alone the universe or a woman or a child, especially if the child was me. So I believed in the Tribute for much the same reason I believed I should not disappoint Coach Reno when he said We really need you, Case.

  My personal particulars were also helpful: Since I had no romantic ties to the women at Yale (nor the men, for that matter), I was able to see the relations of black women and black men on campus with a pretty objective eye—enough to see that such relations were not good.

  It was not only that so many of the boys did not seem to desire these girls as partners, though that was a real issue that I don’t take any blame for and don’t want to wade into. It was also that, in the four-hundred-year saga of black people in America, the main storyline has been the Crisis of the Black Man—which made all of us the stars of the drama, made us few who had reached a place like Yale a precious commodity, and made our peers of the other sex, far too often, invisible. And because my only friends outside the football team those first two years had been three girls from three very different corners of the diaspora, I had enough data to know that even if 97 percent of these women graduated, at least that percentage of them had an awful hard time—quite often because of my members. The Tribute would be a small remedy.

  But beyond (or beneath) all these motives, I pushed for the Tribute to Black Women for the same reason most people host events: to give awards to people I liked.

  The chief financial officer at Yale, our Woman of the Year, had offered me and Daniel solid advice, wrote sizable checks, and possessed a smile that still makes me happy when I picture it. Elizabeth Alexander, our Distinguished Alumna, was Riley’s mentor as well as his employer, since he babysat her children. The three Rising Trailblazers—young women from the senior class—were friends of Daniel’s, which explains, in part, why he got the tap for Skull and Bones instead of me; we will get to that shortly. And these three were, for me, placeholders for the three girls who had been my friends and had gone on to be three brilliant, accomplished young women on campus.

  This is how, or why, the sausage of an event is made. You want an event to put your institution on the minds of the people, to convey your values and reflect on them at least for one night, to get luminaries you admire to have a meal with you, and to make your friends feel good. You also, in the spirit of Shame and Fame, want to reward your members for the work that they have done and, in the case of college students, perhaps get them some tail.

  Elijah, hardest-working of them all, spoke first. I can’t tell you what he said because I don’t remember it and I did not write it down. And if it had not been for the Yale Daily News, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what anybody said, not even Elizabeth Alexander, who spoke that night as she would in less than a year’s time at the most important inauguration of the young twenty-first century—spoke like a butterfly who still remembers what happened in the cocoon and can tell it to you, wing-voice a-flutter, so that you feel what it was like in there, too.

  Black love is a powerful thing, she said, according to the student reporter who covered the Tribute.

  And on this night, love—or whatever the feeling was in the room—indeed seemed powerful, powerful enough to put genuine smiles on the boys and girls, even those who had not won an award; powerful enough to make them speak to each other, hug each other, stand up a little straighter around each other and alone; powerful enough to satisfy another mantra we adopted in that first year of the Union: We measure success by the lives that we change.

  But love, of course, can’t pay for living—so I was eager to give something else a try, like money.

  chapter SEVENTEEN

  There are years that ask questions and years that answer, and other years that throw their hands up and say You figure it out. 2008 was that kind of year, at least on Wall Street.

  I wasn’t actually on Wall Street, to tell the truth. Hardly anybody was. Of the ten major firms crippling the world at that time, only one operated from the place on everybody’s lips: the US headquarters of Deutsche Bank, at 60 Wall Street. Germans.

  As for the rest: Goldman Sachs was close to Wall Street: at 85 Broad Street in the financial district, though the firm had already decided to move. Credit Suisse was one hour (by foot) due north of Wall Street, on Madison Avenue just west of Madison Square Park, which is almost a mile east of the Garden. Even farther away was Morgan Stanley, nestled in the theater district at 1585 Broadway.

  There was Citigroup, at 399 Park Avenue, which no one likely noticed because the firm did not put its name on this building; instead, the Citigroup Center towered across the street, seemingly designed to keep the attention of passersby away from the real action. There was Merrill Lynch, with three offices still open in the city, none of them on Wall Street. There was the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS), which claimed to have an office on Sixth Avenue, in Midtown. But everyone I knew who had the misfortune of working for UBS traveled every morning to Stamford, Connecticut—nearly forty miles from Wall Street. Most elusive of all was Lazard, hidden on the upper floors of Rockefeller Center somewhere between The Tonight Show and the observation deck that overlooked the rink where children came to skate at Christmastime.

  JPMorgan Chase—which built the most famous house of American finance at 23 Wall Street in 1914, now abandoned—had its headquarters at 270 Park Avenue. One block west, at 383 Madison Avenue, Bear Stearns sat like your neighbor’s newspaper, swiped by JPMorgan in March 2008 for 2 dollars per share, down from 150 dollars per share the year before.

  That left Lehman Brothers, still alive if not well, at 745 Seventh Avenue, between Forty-Seventh and Forty-Eighth Streets, nearly in the heart of Times Square, figuratively at the heart of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and right next door to the Lace Gentlemen’s Club, where a friend took me one night to receive my first and last lap dance, from a kind young woman. This felt much worse than the Crisis, to me.

  And while it may seem that these varied addresses are just minor details, if not wholly irrelevant, I have little doubt that the world would have been much better off if it had truly known where everybody was, not to mention the who and what of the matter. But the only thing I know for sure about that time is that nobody seemed to know anything. So we all became like those adults I knew as a ch
ild who, instead of saying Texas Electric cut my lights off, protested The devil is busy. Disaster never strikes in such abstract terms as the devil or Wall Street, unfortunately. It comes from places we fail to look, from things we fail to name, from people we fail to admit look much like us—are us. Me, at least.

  In my defense, none of this was my idea at first, either. Let’s go back to South Oak Cliff for a moment.

  Not long after the tall pale sunken-eyed man from Yale came to watch me run on film, another tall pale man, this one in a suit, came to ask me questions. He was a lawyer, and had been sent by the Dallas Bar Association to find out whether there were any kids at my high school who wanted to practice law when they grew up. You should know that this was a program in spirit and in form just like the Mayor for a Day setup, except for a whole summer and with pay: one student from every public school would be chosen, sent downtown for a special experience and a write-up in the paper, and the city would otherwise continue with its regular programming of letting the children in its public schools waste away.

  I sat in that same small conference room next to the principal’s office and spoke clearly and laughed whenever the tall pale man laughed, and said something about wanting to help people—Perry Mason and Johnnie Cochran were the only lawyers I knew, though neither personally—and a few days later, I was informed that I would be the envoy from South Oak Cliff.

  I was placed at one of the top law firms in the state, Vinson & Elkins, a firm that had been legal counsel to the company Fortune magazine had named “America’s Most Innovative Company” six years in a row, until it was revealed that this company, Enron, had achieved its historic success through a system of historic fraud. So, months after its final Fortune honor, Enron made history yet again as the largest bankruptcy of all time—a record it held until it was surpassed by Lehman Brothers in 2008.

  But that summer I knew nothing about Enron and nothing about Lehman Brothers and only slightly more about the law, since the only people who spoke to me were a few legal secretaries and the mail clerk and the two lawyers whose job it was to supervise me. And although one of them let me tag along on the case she was litigating that summer—representing one of the big accounting firms, which had allegedly cheated somebody out of money—I can’t tell you much about the particulars. It’s not because I signed anything, it’s just that I have never been more bored in my life than the few weeks I worked on that case. Aside from the brief spells I left the building to pick up sandwiches for everybody, I spent a good chunk of the trial itself asleep, my head resting against the comfortable walls of the federal courtroom.

  I woke up from one of these naps on a late-summer afternoon just as the judge announced the verdict: not guilty, which was fine with me, although it never was clear to my untrained legal mind how all that money could have disappeared and nobody was guilty. I didn’t ask any questions, though. My days in court were over and I was free to continue my summer internship in peace—left alone all day to browse the internet, to sort file folders in a long cold conference room, to take an hour and a half lunch, which all the lawyers did, too. Because of this stellar performance, they invited me back for the following summer, after I graduated from high school.

  But something happened in the short time between the summer of my seventeenth year and that of my eighteenth year. I still looked the same. Still sounded the same. Still wore the same loud clothes—Auntie O worked at Haggar and gave me a nice gold shirt and cuff links. But now, instead of being left alone to browse the internet, instead of sitting alone in that freezing conference room with those manila folders, instead of wandering the tunnels below downtown Dallas en route to Subway, I started receiving an offer that I had no obvious reason to decline: Hey, Casey, why don’t you let me take you to lunch?

  These were not just any old fogies asking, but partners of the firm. All men, all white, all monied, all kindly extending invitations to lunch. And they did not want to join me in the tunnels for a foot-long sandwich. They wanted to take me to Stephan Pyles and Al Biernat’s and Mi Cocina. Get a salad, get an appetizer, get a steak, get some foie gras while you’re at it. Have you had foie gras before? No, sir. Well try it! Dessert? Sure. I’m not complaining, just trying to tell you what it was like to be a whore for the first time. Well, this kind of whore for the first time.

  Those men were so nice to me, that food was so delicious, those lunches were so long—these were real blessings being poured down on me, you see? Nothing about me had changed on the outside, so there had to have been some inner change, some light turned on in my soul that these men could see. Or, as was the case, I had just been accepted to Yale.

  And they did not want anything in return. The only request these men made of me, typically when joined by a colleague or a wife, was that I tell my story.

  Casey, why don’t you tell Laura your story. Laura, you’ve gotta hear this.

  There I was, nineteen years old, trying to keep the foie gras goo down, unsure at first what these men meant. But if I took too long to tell it, my host would relieve me of the duty—It must be hard to talk about; mind if I tell Laura?—and do it himself.

  So Casey is from South Dallas—Oak Cliff, right, Casey? (Yes, sir)—really poor neighborhood, as you know. Had a terrible, rough childhood. Both parents—both parents, right, Casey? (Mmhmm)—gone at an early age. Drugs. His grandmother—which grandmother helped raise you, Casey, was it both? (Yes, sir)—both grandmothers took care of him, and I think a sister. And then Casey finishes from South Oak Cliff and is headed off to Yale in the fall. He’s even gonna play football for them, for Yale. Can you believe that?

  Whether they could believe it or not, audiences seemed to enjoy it a great deal—and the men asked for more lunches and a few coffees (which I still did not drink) and the summer after my freshman year invited me back to Vinson & Elkins for another round of story and lunch and introductions, which, of course, I accepted without hesitation. But the finest lunch in the world could not last all day, so I still spent hours in a little cubicle browsing the internet, waiting for the next invitation. This was not what I had in mind for my halcyon days.

  I went back to Yale my sophomore year, clueless as to what I wanted to do with my life. So I asked a senior boy from the football team (the same who’d taken me to Bridgeport and would soon take me to Lace) for advice.

  Case, I say you should really try to get into investment banking, man.

  What’s that, Kev?

  Listen . . . it doesn’t even matter. Just let me tell you—bankers make like $60,000 right out of school. You should look into it.

  I had always dreamed of being rich. Whenever someone offered me that Money can’t buy happiness crap, I responded, if only in my head, You clearly have no idea what money is for. Money may not buy happiness, but it sure as hell can buy you food and some clothes and a ride somewhere—can buy you all those things that, when you don’t have them, make you very unhappy and mean. So I decided that I should be an investment banker simply because I did not have any money and none of my people had any money and I wanted to acquire some for them but mostly for myself.

  And wouldn’t you know it, one of those Vinson & Elkins partners had a dear friend who was an investment banker at the Dallas office of Lehman Brothers, and they arranged for me to spend a summer there in 2007, where I heard an incredible, if prescient, piece of wisdom from my boss’s supreme boss, who was beamed into a conference room via a combination of television and the internet: In the land of the blind, he said at the end of one morning meeting, the one-eyed man is king.

  The bankers in Dallas had a vast store of these proverbs, but they did not have $60,000 salaries for twenty-year-olds. Only the bankers at Lehman Brothers headquarters made that kind of money, so at the end of that 2007 summer I realized that if I was going to be rich, I had to make my way to New York City. This, too, was easy enough—a former Yale football player ran recruiting for Lehman’s New York office
, set up my interviews, and offered me a job for the summer of 2008. A job that, sure enough, came with a $60,000 salary, adjusted for my eight-week stint.

  I say all that to say: The American Dream is real. Not that foolishness you hear from politicians—If you work hard and play by the rules you can do anything, be anybody, in this country. I’m talking about the real American Dream, the way the country actually works: If you know the right people, they can help you do anything, be anybody, rules and hard work be damned—as long as they like you. They do have to like you, and that takes a good deal of work.

  This dream, of course, cannot be extended to three hundred million people and, therefore, cannot be confessed to any. So despite the fact that America is designed from rooter to tooter for most of its citizens—especially those in places like Oak Cliff—to have nothing and achieve nothing, the political version of the American Dream is essential, kids like me are essential: something and/or someone has to keep the steam down. Perhaps that’s why this crazy thing happened that I wasn’t going to tell you about, since I think I’ve made my point—but it’s one of those stories that will make you want to die all over again if you die without telling, so I’ll just tell it real quick.

  * * *

  —

  One summer evening not too long ago, as I stood near the end of a long buffet line in Dallas, I felt a hand rest on my shoulder. I rarely like to be touched without notice so I just stood there a second or two, hoping it might be a phantom sensation, before I glanced back. I saw, then, that the hand belonged to George W. Bush.