by Casey Gerald
For some reason, the 43rd president of the United States had to stand in line for dinner just like normal people, and also like normal people (but unlike me) he did not want to loiter there fondling lint in his pocket and pretending to appreciate the art on the walls, which was his. The president wanted to talk. Fine. So we talked as we moved along the line and put a few rolls and potatoes and, if I remember correctly, a slice of salmon apiece on our plates. The Secret Service or somebody took the president’s plate once it was full. They did not take mine, so I held it between myself and the president, who squared up with me before we went to our seats.
Lemme ask you somethin’, he said. Scrunched his mouth. Was your dad around?
This felt as out of the blue to me then as it may feel to you now. For six or seven minutes, the president and I had run a pretty good gamut of gab—talked about his paintings and his schooldays and his brother Jeb, who was at that time campaigning, poorly, to be the 45th president. Yet after all that, Mr. Bush needed to know—or wanted to know, I’m trying not to speculate—whether I had grown up with a father. And since I had mastered the art of giving people exactly what I thought they wanted (which got me into a lot of trouble, not all of it bad), I replied, without even thinking much:
No, sir. Both of my parents were gone by the time I was twelve.
Which, as we know, was not quite true but not entirely untrue, either.
I don’t remember what he said right after that but I do know, because there’s video evidence, that two years passed and I remained on the president’s mind. He was sitting on a stage in Beverly Hills, being interviewed by a gentleman who had also been famous for a long time—first for his success in finance, then for the felonies which had, in part, made the success possible, and, finally, as is the American way, for his good deeds. The man wanted to hear about the president’s latest good deed: a program that he and the 42nd president had launched around the time we met. Mr. Bush seized the opportunity to share, with a check this out flick of his hand, a case study:
So I’m sitting next to a young African-American kid . . . so, uh, I said, What do you do, man? He said, uh—he skips ahead—I said where you from? He said, Dallas. Where? South Oak Cliff. The president lowers his voice as he tells this part—South Oak Cliff’s, you know, on the other side of the Trinity River—then resumes: I said, Wow, did you go to college? He said, Yeah, I went to Yale—he does an aw-shucks shrug, voice low again: That’s where I happened to go. Then he looks down, continues. And I said, Uh, interesting, you know you musta had parents who drove you—then looks up and out at the audience. He said, Not at all. My dad died early, my mother’s in prison . . . but I had an aunt that focused me, plus I was a pretty good football player. Shrugs again, smirks—I said, I didn’t know Yale cared about football—then smothers the laugh line: Anyway, so he goes to Harvard Business School and he applies [to the program].
Now, when I first heard the president’s story, I thought, Wow that kid is impressive! Then I realized that the president was talking about me and so I felt a bit confused and a little dirty, too. But I was not upset at all. Couldn’t be. In our buffet line tete-a-tete I had offered Mr. Bush a vague, compelling story, the kind of story I’d learned to tell at my lunches years before, though shorter and more to the heartbreaking point. And he, being the world-class politician that he is, took that raw material and fashioned an even more pointed and compelling version, so inaccurate that it became a new delicious story of its own, the kind of story a man needs if he’s going to keep his subjects from despair or mass unrest or, most of all, from the truth about their society. I imagine that is one reason he became president, and I reckon it is also why so many of the lunch-men and their wives said nice things to me like, Casey, you are the embodiment of the American Dream! But it took me many years to realize that, instead of smiling and saying thank you, I should have wept.
Anyway, there would be plenty of time for tears. The summer of 2008 was a time for money, though not for all.
On 16 May 2008, three days before I arrived at Lehman, the New York Times announced:
People on Wall Street seem to be vanishing overnight.
Perhaps it seemed that way because there was no one on Wall Street to begin with. But aside from the wrong location, this journalist used the wrong word to describe what happened overnight. When I showed up on May 19, there were surely some people missing: over a thousand gone in the past month. But these people had not vanished. They had been fired—again, not an act of God but of women and of men. Mostly men. Men like Skip McGee.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Lehman Brothers.
There were a hundred some-odd summer apprentices planted in the polished cushioned wooden seats of the Lehman Brothers auditorium that first day, all silent, listening to Skip McGee. Someone told me he was the head of the investment banking division, which sounded important. Even better, he sounded like he was from Texas and he looked rich. He was both.
I know there’s been a lotta noise—he waved his hands at us as if to sprinkle pixie dust—out there. But lemme tell ya. The fundamentals of this firm . . . are strong. I been here a long long time, and this i’nt the first time we been knocked down. I promise you it won’t be the last time we get back up. I do believe y’all are gonna have a great summer here at the firm.
And, you know, on the whole, I did have a great summer at the firm, if only because I was paid great wads of US dollars just to sit at a desk from seven in the morning to eight or nine or ten at night and do what almost everybody else does at work for much less money: try to avoid actual work, and try to keep your boss from figuring out you don’t know what you’re doing.
The first objective was hard, sometimes. I was the only intern in our little group; there was always lunch to order or copies to make. Besides, it is impossible to convincingly twiddle your thumbs for thirteen hours. Toward the end of my time at the firm, a new policy was instituted: we now had to work until nine to get a free ride home in a black town car. So I had to keep up my act for an extra hour from then on.
The second objective was much easier, since nothing I was asked to do seemed too difficult. Consider my first task, assigned by my immediate boss, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-four years old:
All right, Casey, so there should be a file on your computer that I’ve already downloaded. Think the name is CDO Rate Table. You know what a CDO is?
I shook my head.
Got it. Yeah, I didn’t know at first, either. It stands for “collateralized debt obligation.” Pretty simple. Say you’ve got one thousand mortgages. They all generate different cash flows with different degrees of risk, right? If you pool all those mortgages together—collateralize them—you can then sell pieces of the pool—we call it an instrument—to investors at different rates, based on the risk of the underlying debt. Make sense?
Ah yep. That sounds cool. (I still don’t know exactly how these things worked.)
Great. So every week, I need you to go in this file and follow the instructions to pull fresh data. We’ve got to keep the table updated for the whole group. Shouldn’t take much time.
That day, or thereabout, Lehman Brothers was worth roughly $680 billion, more valuable than all the goods and services produced that year by all the nations of the former Soviet Union, save Russia. $269 billion of those billions were produced by financial instruments. Within four months, Lehman Brothers would be dead: purchased by a British bank for $1.35 billion, most of which was paid for the building at 745 Seventh Avenue. But I did not know that then.
I also did not know that, by the end of 2008, thanks in part to those CDOs, 861,644 families would lose their homes to foreclosure; that every American household would lose, on average, $5,800 in income; that the federal monies spent to keep the financial system from collapse—at least to keep my bosses from collapse—would cost each of those households, on average, $2,050; that five and one half
million jobs would be lost, or vanish. The folks at Pew said all this.
But there was pain that Pew did not record that year, further away from Main Street—another term used to describe this crisis without actually understanding it—yet no one pitied the victims.
One morning at 745 Seventh Avenue, my boss’s boss, and his boss, and their overlords all the way up to the executive suite, were called to meet with the Lehman chief, Dick Fuld. (This is all second- or third-hand, close to gossip, but from a good source: Theodore Roosevelt’s great-grandson was a higher-up; his speechwriter sat behind me.) Fuld had an announcement: the firm’s senior leaders would now be compensated more with Lehman Brothers stock than with hard cash.
What are we supposed to do with this shit?!
That’s all I heard before my boss’s boss slammed his office door. He was inside, commiserating with a colleague. I figure it was just setting in that his money, his homes, his retirement, his children’s—or his great-grandchildren’s—college funds were soon to vanish. But again, I did not know this then. And if I had known, I am not sure I would have cared. I had my own concerns, very far from 745 Seventh Avenue. It’s only now that I realize how those concerns, which seemed so alien to world events, in fact furnished the most important lesson from my days at Lehman Brothers, the last days of a certain world.
You see, 2008 was a wonderful year in the gay clubs of New York.
Let me follow my own rules. It was a wonderful year at Secret Lounge, over by the West Side Highway; and at Mars 2112 which was just a pop-up party that summer, held in a cavernous basement at Fiftieth Street and Broadway; and at Escuelita, the first club I ever went to and almost the last, since it was vogue night and I had never seen a drag queen, so my fear obscured their magic; and at the G Lounge—at least, I hear it was a good year there. I was not then (and am not now) a Chelsea kind of boy.
Nearly all these places are now closed. That’s New York for you. But 2008 was perhaps the only time in American history when poor black and brown queers were more respected than rich white men. So in the midst of this great fun—and since I had more monies and less free time than ever—I agreed, one Saturday night, to do something I never did: go to Brooklyn. To Langston’s, which I despised, if only because West Indians terrified me.
My routine that night was the same as always: Get dressed in my remaining pre-Yale clothes. Find one of my fitted caps and my sunglasses. Go to the nearest bodega for chewing gum. Wait for my then-friend to pick me up. Arrive at our destination and wait for him to buy me a drink. Stand on the wall, preferably in a corner. Drink the drink. Stand, drunk. Demur. Refuse all proposals to dance. Refuse most proposals to exchange numbers. Refuse some proposals to lock eyes, thus the sunglasses in the nighttime. Wait for a good song. When it comes, make a lap—more like a figure eight—through the club, to see who is there. See them. Make sure they don’t really see me. At Langston’s, I tried not to see anybody; somewhere deep down I worried that many West Indians carried pocket machetes.
I definitely did not want to see Victor. Was that him? It was dark. He was dark. The club was crowded. I’m drunk. Jesus. My then-friend thought I was ill. I was not ill. I was dead. Oklahoma-storm dead. Where’s-the-money dead. I cupped my then-friend’s ear to tell him I would be outside. I stood outside the door. I paced around the block. I came back for his keys. I sat in the car and cried.
Victor was much more dangerous than a machete-wielding West Indian. He was, for lack of a better phrase (and I don’t mean this as an insult), Yale’s most prominent queen. Sometimes he was a butch queen, but that distinction made no difference to me. Like most cute queens from Harlem—some of them my friends now—he talked a lot. About everybody’s business, especially. Though he talked, he did not lie. And this gave Victor tremendous power, as did the fact that he was incredibly smart and helped a lot of people.
He had only gotten a glimpse of me, sauntering, then scurrying by him in the club. But that was all he needed, all that was required for him to go back to Harlem, back to his friends, back to Yale, and inform the whole world that I was not some black and shining prince, but a faggot. I had not yet realized that these things were often one and the same. It had also never crossed my mind that any boy from Yale would be at Langston’s, since I assumed they would frequent a place like the G Lounge instead—and since hardly any of them crossed my mind, in that way, in general.
Don’t worry . . . I got you, Victor texted.
I did worry. I sat in the car and waited for my then-friend to exit Langston’s and drive me home or throw me in the Hudson River or park his car in a garage somewhere and leave me in it, engine running.
You aight, man?
Yeah. I’m cool.
I said nothing else on that long ride back to my friend’s house, shades on, the sun beginning to rise, showing its light but not its face as if to say What more do you want from me?
It required the best of my eyelids to bar the door against all those tears in that New York dawn doom. I waved goodbye and went to sit in the driver’s seat of my own car, parked a block away. I dug in my jacket pocket for my cell phone and dialed the only number I knew to dial.
Um . . . Casey? . . . Hellooo?
Micah . . . Mi—I could not speak. Tried to reach through the phone with sobs.
Micah was twenty-six at the time, five years my senior. But he was my elder in many other ways as well, and also my best friend. Some of his elder stature likely came down to him through his grandfather, a pastor in the AME Church, and his father, a pastor in the AME Church, and his father, also a pastor in the AME Church, back when the AME Church was the finest if not the only institution that black people had established on this continent, or at least in North Carolina. The stature was fortified by the fact that Micah looked like an elder. Not that he looked old, which he did not. It’s just that some people—with deep obsidian skin, stern voices, rail-thin frames, and narrow fingers that, when they pop you, seem filled with adamantium—make you believe the claim that there were, not long after Adam and Eve, black people: carrying the curse of Ham, perhaps, but carrying the wisdom of the world for sure. And for nearly two decades, going back to his late teens in Atlanta’s heyday—where he trained at Morehouse and as a classical violinist before going off to get a PhD—Micah had been shepherding lost confused boys like me into the light of day and of themselves. That is why I called him.
Whoa . . . what is going on??
I coughed out the start of the story. He cut me off. Guess I was crying too much.
Uh-uh. Casey. I can’t. That was all he said. I knew he meant it. Micah had the rare ability to refuse any inconvenience, even if it might save your life.
Bye, Micah.
Thus betrayed, I pulled myself together for the long drive from the depths of Brooklyn where my then-friend lived, across one of the majestic New York bridges that inspire you to dream or jump, up the West Side Highway to the low Nineties, where I was renting a room big enough for a tiny desk and a twin bed, which touched three of the walls. I lay on that bed on my back, staring at the ceiling, then at my phone. It was five a.m. or so. In the time it took to get from Bay Ridge to Ninetieth and Broadway, I had decided it made sense to call River for help.
He was probably as upset to hear from me as I had been at Micah for hanging up, but I figured he could relate and find a morsel of concern, or at least pretend. Besides, he had called me a few months earlier with a crisis of his own, which I don’t remember now because I had not been listening closely, had just been glad to hear from him. I bet he also got some pleasure from hearing me cry and talking to me like he was my daddy.
Why did you go to the club, anyway?
I don’t know, man. Just something to do. I don’t know.
Hmph. Well. Listen. I bet you’re gonna be okay. Just get some sleep, aight?
And for the first time since I’d known them, River and Micah agreed on something,
and were right. My life was not over, at least in the way I feared. Victor and I became good friends; he never said anything or forced my hand. Neither he nor Micah (I didn’t speak to River again for a long time) shamed me for being so invested in a lie, so distraught when it seemed that lie had run its course. Maybe they knew that sometimes a lie is all that holds a life together. All it takes to tear one down, too. For in the end, there is an extraordinary cost for fraud—personal and otherwise. It may be paid this evening, this lifetime, or the next and next, but it must be paid, with dollars or with blood. We don’t need evil to destroy the world, after all. A simple lie will do.
As far as I can tell, the Crisis was not much more than this, the end of a well-told and profitable lie; a bill come due. There’s no big scandal in that. America was born and raised on much more-inhumane lies, much greater crimes. In fact, of all the things that do pay in this country, crime seems to be near the very top of the list. Would rank much higher if we called the things that should be crimes by their rightful name.
No, the scandal, if there is one, of the Crisis and the country, is that some folks ate up all the grub of lies and skipped out on the check. Including me. Once Lehman Brothers was sold in September, I was offered a job at the acquiring firm. A job that came with, of course, a $60,000 salary. I didn’t take it, though not for guilt or morals. Just plain common sense: I knew that not a single person who went to work on Wall Street at that time would ever be president of the United States. So the money had to wait.
An Interlude for Me
I had a dream that somebody was trying to kill me.
It was a dream I’d had for a while, first when I was twenty-one, back in that summer of 2008. I’d hoped that was the last time, just as I’d hoped all the times after that were the last, just as I hoped this time was, too.
The dream begins in a house, I think. I know that I keep going to the same house, a large wooden house with many windows and wide doors. Each time I go to the house, the doors are open. Somebody has broken in, looking for something, looking for me. I go to the house three or four times in this dream. Each time, I am more frustrated with the house, or with the situation. I can’t tell. Each time I go back to the house, it is empty, then someone runs through the door or jumps through a window or drives across the lawn, coming after me. Each time I go back to the house, I feel more afraid.