There were four of them, three men and a woman, and to a person, they were daunted by the presence of D’Angelo Maxwell. Dag welcomed them to the house and told them that some friendly tussling had gotten out of hand and an excitable guest had overreacted, a version of events Trey was happy to corroborate. The police conducted private interviews with Dag, Brittany, Trey, and the guests, including the man who had called them (he reported a donnybrook had occurred and Moochie Collins grievously injured). But since the alleged victim had left the premises and did not appear to be interested in pressing charges, the quartet of cops departed, all of them shaking Dag’s hand on the way out.
Dag kissed his sleeping children, said goodbye to Little Dag, who was still awake, and told him he would return as soon as the season ended. Then he and Trey drove to Van Nuys Airport for the flight back to New Jersey.
Stretched out in his seat with a bag of ice on his hand, Dag reflected on what had occurred. Months earlier Brittany made it clear that she was ending their marriage so why did he react with such passion if he already knew it was over? As the plane cruised eastward over the Rocky Mountains, Dag began to understand that the only reason he had flown to California was to avoid looking like a fool.
THE ACE, W.A.C.E. AM
NEW YORK SPORTS TALK RADIO
WITH SAL D’AMICO AND THE SPORTSCHICK
SAL: What possesses a man like Dag Maxwell to charter a private jet, fly to Los Angeles, and kick the crap out of Moochie Collins?
SPORTSCHICK: Doesn’t he know his team’s in a dogfight, trying to make the playoffs?
SAL: Apparently, it doesn’t matter to him.
SPORTSCHICK: Yeah, it matters. I mean, come on, he’s a professional.
SAL: This was unprofessional.
SPORTSCHICK: Not to mention what he’s done to his brand. He’s always talking about his brand. You ever notice that?
SAL: Honestly, I don’t know how much brand damage he inflicted. I don’t need to remind you that Kobe Bryant survived a rape trial.
SPORTSCHICK: Then don’t remind me.
SAL: What I want to know is this: How does he expect ownership to say, ‘Hey, you’re our guy, you’re the face of the franchise,’ if he acts like a knucklehead?
SPORTSCHICK: Total knucklehead.
SAL: But here’s the thing—he’s not a knucklehead.
SPORTSCHICK: Come on, Sal. How is he not a knucklehead?
SAL: Guy’s never done anything like this in his life. Ever. He’s a solid citizen.
SPORTSCHICK: Hey, Lee Harvey Oswald never shot anyone before he killed Kennedy.
SAL: You’re comparing D’Angelo Maxwell to the guy who killed the president?
SPORTSCHICK: To make a point, Sal. Say a guy does one dumb thing, but that thing is so freaking stupid that it defines him. Oswald didn’t have to shoot anyone else, did he?
SAL: Not as far as we know.
SPORTSCHICK: One act.
SAL: A single act.
SPORTSCHICK: And he was defined by that single act.
SAL: Your analogy is bananas.
SPORTSCHICK: What if Dag injured himself?
SAL: What if he can’t play?
SPORTSCHICK: Disaster.
SAL: Epic failure. But no one’s saying he injured himself. The media’s not reporting that and the story’s all over the media. No one’s reporting he went to the hospital.
SPORTSCHICK: They can keep that stuff under the radar.
SAL: But what if he did? Say he can’t play? The team misses out on the playoffs because Dag flew to LA so he could lay a beat-down on Moochie Collins?
SPORTSCHICK: You think Moochie regrets hooking up with Dag’s wife?
SAL: You seen Hoop Ladies? She’s smokin’ hot. She’s jalapeno hot. She’s hot like magma.
SPORTSCHICK: I get it, Sal. You find her mysteriously attractive. That’s not what I’m asking.
SAL: Is he regretting it? Yeah, jeez, would you want to be on the receiving end of a Dag punch? Guy’s biceps look like bricks.
SPORTSCHICK: Gladstone and Church Scott, what do they do?
SAL: Suspend him for a couple of games, at the very least.
SPORTSCHICK: And the league?
SAL: You know he’s gonna get fined. The commissioner’s gonna stick his hand in Dag’s wallet and pull out a few hundred grand.
SPORTSCHICK: He can afford it.
SAL: But he’s a superstar, so maybe they do nothing.
SPORTSCHICK: Those guys have their own rules.
SAL: Here’s my question: Dag wants to be LeBron, but does he have the goods to get there? I say no.
SPORTSCHICK: Then he’d better win a couple of championships.
SAL: Does he stay with the team? Does he take a pay cut and join a contender?
SPORTSCHICK: Let’s go to the phones.
SAL: Caller one, you’re on the air.
CALLER #1: Yeah, Brad from Livingston. Love the show.
SPORTSCHICK: What do you think about Dag?
CALLER #1: Trade him, he’s a bum. Guy’s three times the size of Moochie Collins. He’s never won anything, he’ll never win anything, he’s a loser.
SAL: So, Brad, you’re a big Dag Maxwell fan?
CALLER #1: Hahaha, yeah.
SPORTSCHICK: Here’s the thing, Brad. His value’s never been lower. No one knows if he’s injured or not. Wrong time to trade him.
CALLER #1: Guy’s over the hill.
SAL: What do you do for a living, Brad?
BRAD: I manage a fast food franchise.
SAL: Lotta pressure, right? Lunch, dinner, cars lined up at the drive-thru.
BRAD: I handle it pretty well.
SAL: Let me tell you something, Brad. Dag Maxwell is carrying an entire professional sports franchise.
CALLER #1: For more than twenty million a year.
SAL: Don’t take this the wrong way—he’s not supervising pimply-faced kids making French fries. Point is, he was brought to New Jersey to be the savior of a business valued at nearly a billion dollars. The franchise was not able to surround him with the best talent, but every night he goes out there in front of eighteen thousand people with all of their expectations and what does he do? He does his job.
CALLER #1: He’s lazy.
SAL: He’s not lazy, Brad! You don’t average nearly nine rebounds a game if you’re lazy. So he puts up his twenty-three points and grabs his nine rebounds nightly. The fans are on his back; the press is on his back. You know what that kind of pressure is like, Brad? It’s a hell of a lot worse than when the drive-thru window gets backed up during the dinner rush, and you’re running low on ketchup. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a professional athlete in the New York media market? So maybe he’s a little frustrated, and maybe he takes that frustration out on Moochie Collins’s chin. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But when guys like you call and tell me D’Angelo Maxwell is a bum, I’m gonna tell you—you need your head examined.
CALLER #1: It’s his job!
SAL: I get that it’s his job, but these guys are human beings.
SPORTSCHICK: You’re a very sensitive flower today, Sal. Brad, you brought out something new in Sal.
SAL: Hey, I’m not saying they shouldn’t trade him. Let’s just make an effort to understand.
CALLER #1: I do, Sal. He’s still a lazy bum. Gladstone should run him out of town.
SAL: Here’s the problem with that, Brad. Gladstone can’t run Dag out of town. No one pays to see Jay Gladstone play basketball. They pay to see the Dag Maxwells of the world, okay?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Turn that crap off,” Jay said to Boris.
They were listening to Sal and the Sportschick on the car radio and Jay couldn’t take it anymore. Boris tuned the dial to an oldies station.
It was just after
nine in the morning as they turned on to the 138th Street Bridge. In a couple of hours, Jay was scheduled to make a presentation to the Planning Commission on behalf of the Sapphire, and the last thing he needed was the distraction D’Angelo Maxwell was providing while the team tried to claw its way into the playoffs. Boris informed him the story was blowing up the Internet. Sal and the Sportschick had discussed nothing else for the past half hour.
Church Scott had called Jay early that morning to notify him of their star player’s problems.
“Praise God, there’s no tape,” Church said.
“Praise God,” Jay repeated. He found his coach’s religiosity oddly comforting.
Church told Jay he would speak to Dag as soon as he could and loop the owner in at the appropriate time. This was the reason Jay had bestowed the responsibilities of both general manager and head coach on Church. He knew how to deal with the modern athlete.
As the car rounded off the bridge and into Harlem, Boris asked Jay what he intended to do about the D’Angelo Maxwell situation.
“This is why I pay Church,” Jay said.
“You’re not going to talk to Dag?”
“Guys like me don’t tell guys like Dag what to do.”
“You’re the owner!”
“Boris, it’s 2012. He slugged a guy who was sleeping with his wife. To tell you the truth, I don’t blame him.”
The building housing the New York City Department of City Planning was a squat, neo-Classical pile in Lower Manhattan, around the corner from City Hall. That morning, the Planning Commission was scheduled to render a decision on the purchase of the city-owned land at 1 Taft Plaza where the Gladstone Company intended to build the Sapphire. Today was the last day testimony, for and against, would be allowed. Rather than attend with a kingly retinue, a display Jay knew would not work in his favor, only Boris accompanied him. When they arrived, he said hello to the four members of the Gladstone team who would be addressing the committee: the president and CEO of the Brooklyn Public Library, an associate of the architect Renzo Piano, a representative from the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and an environmental lawyer retained by the Gladstone Group. After exchanging brief pleasantries, Jay and Boris took seats in the back.
The room was bland and functional. Windowless. A curved desk of blond wood extended along two walls. Behind it sat the ten members of the planning commission, two Latinos, an African-American, and seven whites of varying ethnicity. To their backs were a pair of decorative Corinthian columns in the middle of which were an American flag and the orange, blue, and white flag of New York City. Facing the commission members, an African-American female clerk sat at a table with a microphone. Behind her was a podium. Audience members filled five rows of seats.
Jay glanced at the others in attendance. The people who were not there in support of the project—everyone other than Jay and his band of allies—looked to be a cross-section of middle-class, educated Brooklyn of both sexes, varying in age from twenties to sixties, united in their disdain, he believed, for the free market. Jay knew they regarded him as if he were the rich guy with the top hat and monocle on the Monopoly board.
The chairman, a bow-tied white man of about sixty with graying hair and a hangdog mien, called the room to order. The clerk, who the chair addressed as Madame Secretary, summarized what was on the schedule for the day, a litany of properties in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn whose status the Commission would review in this session. Jay had been previously alerted that the discussion of the site he hoped to purchase would take up the majority of the meeting. The other business was processed in fifteen minutes, most of which Jay spent pondering his basketball team, how much he was willing to invest in the new arena, and what tax concessions he might be able to wring out of Mayor House, his guest at the recent Celtics game.
When Madame Secretary leaned into her microphone and Jay heard, “the matter of the disposition of city-owned property and acquisition of property concerning 1 Taft Plaza,” he perked up. The chairman informed the room that the members of the acquisition team—Jay’s allies—were now going to speak, each for an allotted three minutes. The president of the Brooklyn Public Library stepped to the podium.
Patiently, Jay listened to the presentation. An articulate woman in her fifties, with salt and pepper hair that fell to her fitted jacket, she elucidated the dire economic straits of the public library system—the branch currently at 1 Taft Plaza had ten million dollars in immediate maintenance needs—and how the sale of the air rights to the Gladstone Group would benefit all of the citizens that use it. When she finished, a representative of the architect Renzo Piano, a man in his thirties, Swiss, with Germanic features Jay tried to not hold against him, discussed the design of the public spaces in and around the proposed building. The woman from the Economic Development Corporation spoke about the potential of public/private partnerships. After the environmental lawyer addressed the impact of the project on the neighborhood (he claimed it would be negligible), it was Jay’s turn.
He stepped to the podium, gratified to see smiles of recognition on several faces of the committee members. “My name is Jay Gladstone,” he began, without notes. “I’m the co-chairman of the Gladstone Group, the grandson of a plumber, and a lifelong New Yorker.” To Jay, who enjoyed speaking to groups under almost any circumstance, this was as easy as floating on his back in a placid lake. He added a hint of trombone to his voice, “Our family business has been around for almost sixty years,” and its tenor notes filled the room. “We’ve developed over twelve thousand apartments across the city in all market segments from affordable housing to middle income to market rate. I’m proud of our history of public/private partnership, and the Sapphire will be the jewel in the crown.” He paused to let this reverberate, the idea that the building he proposed would be the culmination of a decades-long Gladstone family effort to make the metropolis gleam for all of its citizens.
“This proposal—it contains a brand-new state-of-the-art library that we are selling back to the city for the grand sum of one dollar—includes one hundred and fourteen units of affordable housing in Sunset Park, which we will build without government subsidies, and the city will own outright. The affordable housing will be divided into two sites. We’ve closed on one already, and we expect to close on the other by this summer. The residential part of the Sapphire will consist of one hundred and forty-nine condominiums ranging from one to four bedroom apartments. The ground floor will contain two micro-retail spaces of four hundred square feet each that will generate dynamism at street level.
“We want to maintain strict transparency, so there’s a website, Gladstonesapphire.com. Finally, we’re following the HireNYC plan, and to that end over half the workers on the job will be from Brooklyn, and assured up to three years of union employment. Those are the facts.” He paused here as if the facts as stated by Jay Gladstone should be sufficient.
“But there’s something else . . . ”
Were the committee members leaning forward in their seats or had he imagined that? The room waited for him to continue.
The closer: “I love Brooklyn. My mother was born and raised in Bensonhurst, graduated from New Utrecht High School, class of 1948. I’ve watched with growing excitement as the borough, neighborhood by vibrant neighborhood, is being returned to its former glory. The Gladstone Group wants to bring the inspiring New York architectural tradition that includes the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center to the great borough of Brooklyn.
“Today, I think of native son Walt Whitman who in his poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry wrote of ‘glories strung like beads’ and see the Sapphire as a modern glory. I think of the poet Hart Crane who wrote of the Brooklyn Bridge that it would ‘lend a myth to God.’ These men were dreamers who have inspired me to be more than a builder.”
Jay paused to gauge the effect his words were having on the committee. They appeared capti
vated. He dared not steal a glance at his adversaries. He could establish scholarships, donate liberally to charities, and still these enemies of progress would find him abhorrent.
“I may not share their eloquence, but I share their aspirations. The Sapphire will be in the tradition of the great New York City landmarks and a beacon for tomorrow’s dreamers.”
Jay knew he was spreading the cream cheese a bit thick on the bagel, employing the beacon-for-dreamers construct to shill for a condominium, however architecturally stunning it might be. He also understood that people responded positively when their better angels were engaged. Should one of the dreamers Jay envisioned want to purchase a condo in the Sapphire, she would need verifiable liquid assets well into seven figures but imparting that information at this time would destroy the beauty of the moment he had just conjured.
While there was no ovation because who applauds a speech, however impressive, in front of the City Planning Commission, he believed he earned one. Jay graciously thanked the committee then blessed the memory of Professor Morris Markowitz, with whom he studied American Lit his sophomore year at Penn, and, rather than sweep out of the room—no one should think he was too grand—returned to his seat.
For the next hour, he listened with an expression that toggled from bemusement to dismay, before finally settling on sanguinity, as a parade of librarians, teachers, community organizers, and ordinary citizens excoriated the proposed building as if it were a portal to the Underworld and Harold Jay Gladstone Beelzebub. The Sapphire was “a blemish,” “a monstrosity,” and “a symptom of everything that’s gone wrong with New York since Reagan was president.” Jay—looking right at them, speaker after anguished speaker—was “high handed,” “arrogant,” and, of course, a “greedy developer.” The words “for-profit” were invoked like curses. He sat in his chair and took the abuse. Did they not hear when he mentioned his grandfather the plumber? Why, he wondered, did these people see the world in such binary terms? This was enlightened capitalism working cheek by jowl with the government in a manner to benefit everyone. The tone of the speakers ranged from pique to trembling rage. He wondered if he should have brought a security person with him, some muscle to keep the inflamed public at bay should someone’s emotions get out of hand (Boris was no bruiser). It was only a fleeting worry because these weedy utopians pelting him with their words would never pose a physical threat.
The Hazards of Good Fortune Page 16