The Ego Makers

by Donald Everett Axinn

  Because of Jake’s features and dark hair, he was sometimes taken to be Joe’s Italian partner, an impression strengthened by his ability to mimic a Sicilian accent. Blond, blue-eyed Joe often sprinkled Yiddish expressions into his conversations, further compounding the confusion. The two friends loved confusing crusty bankers, unenlightened prospects, and even longtime clients and subcontractors. They often left stuffy meetings where they had pulled off their ethnic ploy in a state of near hysteria, roaring with laughter like two bad schoolboys.

  But that bond suddenly deteriorated when Joe’s sister Barbara made the mistake of falling in love with Jake Martin. Working together was one thing; marrying — if that was the outcome — quite another. Slumbering prejudices slowly began to turn the families against each other. Martin Sabatini, which had been a rising star on Long Island, seemed jeopardized by the turn of events.

  Sal Sabatini, Joe’s father, had brought his family to America in 1915, but was still unsure of himself in his new country. He had just enough education to read and write, but he was still uncomfortable in English, which he spoke haltingly with a heavy Sicilian accent. Sal’s work as a mason was physically demanding, but he put in long days without complaint, happy after the Depression to have a steady job. At five-nine, he didn’t appear as strong as he was. His coloring was dark, his hair jet black. A two-inch scar over one eyebrow, the result of a fight, never healed properly; Sal had disdained a doctor’s stitches, which gave him the look of an ex-boxer. In his family, though, he was the archetype of the Old World’ patrone: he held strong opinions and was anything but progressive. In America, new ideas, especially about behavior, were rejected out of hand.

  One early morning over breakfast, Salvatore turned to his daughter. “I watch you last night. The boy who belongs to the car you getta out of in front of Colettis house, he was Jake, right?’

  Barbara looked at her father without expression and didn’t respond. Angela, her mother, stopped eating, and Joe suddenly pushed his chair noisily back from the white porcelain-topped table. He remained seated, his hands gripping the edge of the table.

  “I tell you he’s notta come here again!” Sal roared. “He’s a nice-a boy, un bel’ giovane, he’s Joey’s partner. Ma no Jew!” Sal looked over at his wife.

  “What the hell are you doing, Barbara?” Joe shouted, standing now, his face red, his fists balled. “You’re still seeing Jake? You promised!”

  Barbara looked helplessly from her brother to her father. “Igot nothing against Jake, “Joe continued, calming slightly, “but in our family, you marry an Italian. “

  Barbara stood up and stared hard at her brother across the table. “We’re

  in America, Joe, not Sicily!” she said icily, and strode out of the kitchen. In

  the doorway, she paused and turned. “Jake is the sweetest, most wonderful

  man I’ve ever met. “ She ran upstairs and slammed her bedroom door. Sal

  followed her to the bottom of the stairs.

  “No Jew, in mi famiglia!' Sal bellowed up after her. You hear me!” He glanced over to Angela, who nodded in agreement. But her face revealed pain.

  Joe pulled open the kitchen door, ran down the sidewalk to his car, jumped in and roared ojf tires squealing. He guessed Jake would be at the construction site. Their company was building on Fourth Street in Mineola. Yes, there he was. Bastard!

  “Hey, Jake. Get in! I want to talk to you, “Joe yelled through the window of his ‘36 Oldsmobile coupe, his voice controlled but his hands still trembling. He drove six blocks to Willis Avenue near the train station, pulled the car sharply over to the curb, and turned off the motor. The August heat was unbearable. Today it was supposed to top a hundred degrees.

  “Apparently the whole fucking world knew you were seeing Barbara. “ He nervously lit a cigarette. ‘You out to wreck our company?”

  Joe, I never had a brother,” Jake replied. “Or even a friend like you. Barbara and I never expected it'd go this far. We all know the problems. Not to mention for the kids we might have.” Jake pulled a pack of Chesterfields from his pocket and tapped out a cigarette.

  “Who said anything about getting married? Barbara won’t never get my father s permission. Mine neither, for that matter. In Italian families, that’s the rule. “ He inhaled deeply. “And you damn well know it. “

  Jake ignored Joe’s remark. “The thing is, we are finally starting to make it in business, Joe. But down at the Reserves the brass’re starting to speed up our training. Tougher drills. New equipment and weapons. “

  You’re probably right. Jesus, Jake, just think of it, me going off to fight against Italians! Screwy world. So, you see it’s no time to get married. “

  A portly policeman sauntered over to them, twirling a billy club menacingly. ‘You boyos waiting for someone?” he asked with strong traces of an Irish accent.

  “No law against conversing, is there, Officer?” Jake asked.

  “Don’t use fancy words with me, bucko. We’ve had a couple of break-ins around here. You guys look like you could be from the city. “He waited for an answer.

  Joe started to respond but Jake, sensing Joe’s temperature rising, grabbed his arm and cut in. “We’re putting up a building a couple of blocks from here. Over on Fourth Street. Have to talk over some business. “

  Apparently reassured, the policeman nodded. Joe started the car and pulled away from the curb. “Where does that dumb palooka get off?” He shook his head. “Give ‘em a blue uniform and they think they own the goddamn place. “

  He parked across the street from the site.

  “So” —Jake glanced over at his partner — “where does that leave us?.

  “So smarten up” Joe said. “We got enough problems. Whynt you both cool off?” Without waiting for an answer, Joe got out and strode onto the building site.

  3

  I DECIDED the taxi wouldn’t make the corner light for at least two more red-green cycles, so I thrust ten dollars at the driver, opened the door on the traffic side, heard the driver screaming at my back, “Hey! You tryin’ to get yourself killed?” and dashed the three blocks to Standard General’s headquarters building on Park and Fifty-fourth.

  Originally a family-owned enterprise dealing mostly in tobacco and food products, Standard General had been taken over in one of the early leveraged buyouts, in 1979, by the aggressive but highly respected Wall Street investment banking firm of Leo A. Guthart Partners. Standard General’s highly touted management, headed by John Calbraith Phelan, Jr., had been recruited and installed by its new owners.

  Under Phelan’s brilliant leadership, S.G. had proceeded to buy up Rogers 8c Straus Boat Corporation, a successful, cash-rich shipping company, the Bradford Group, an old-line financial services firm, and then more recently Nelson Computer. When the leveraged buyout originally took place, Standard General’s stock backed off, but quickly rebounded after their later acquisitions. Before the move by Singer, it had traded between $12 and $16, but currently was at a new high of $38. Some brokers, Tallulah & Zimroth, for one, reclassified it as a hold, because it was selling at a P/E ratio of twenty-four. Others, such as Dolman and DeVbre, continued to recommend it as a buy.

  The Standard General building was sheathed in gray glass that alternated with layers of black granite — sleekly modern yet solidly institutional. Like old wealth in Tiffany garb. The structure had been deemed one of the best examples of post-Second World War architecture, not only because it rose elegantly through several nondescript structures in the surrounding landscape, but also because its designer had endowed it with graceful horizontals offset by circles both on the top and bottom portions of the structure. The balance between the two motifs was aestheticaly pleasing, enough so that the judges Morgan and Zahra awarded it the 1976 First Prize for Design. They wrote that the building represented “in its immediate environment, a sensitivity to postmodern simplicity that imparts aesthetic responsibility while encompassing the utilization of natural forms,’ And somet
hing about spatial relationships and controlled motions.

  I waved to one of the security women, who, I was pleased to see, recognized me, dashed to the bank of elevators, and pressed the button for EXECUTIVE OFFICES. There the receptionist informed me my brother was waiting in conference room F.

  I strode down the hall and glimpsed Steve through the glass windows. Louis XVI chairs were positioned around a highly polished cherry conference table, which stood on a handsome, dark-red Persian rug. The setting always reminded me of an elegant home in the Hyde Park section of London. At one end of the room was a sideboard upon which were two thermoses, black for regular coffee, white for decaf. A red thermos contained hot water for tea. On the opposite wall hung a large-scale map of North and South America, on which the company’s operational sites were indicated by colored pins. A remote-operated movie screen was concealed in the ceiling.

  A young secretary, immaculately dressed in a navy blue suit and white blouse, came over and, with a practiced smile, asked if I would like some coffee. “Regular, please.” After she had filled an elegant china cup and left, I shut the door.

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Steve? I couldn’t get through to you from the taxi on my cell phone.”

  “I haven’t a clue,” he replied, shaking his head. “Maybe you can figure it out.” He sat back in his chair and rubbed his chin that same way he always had since we were kids. “Something’s fishy. I can’t get a straight answer from anyone. Everybody’s as tight-lipped as a bull’s ass in fly-time.” He looked at me knowingly. “Time for Henry Martin to perform his magic. Charm them into changing their minds.”

  I shot a glance at Steve. “I want you to tell me exactly who said what. Or, more accurately, who didn’t say what.” I began pacing the room.

  “Well, both Phelan and Jordan. In meetings and couldn’t be disturbed.’ That bullshit. Even the secretaries couldn’t hide their smiles.” He turned, and said in a tone that was sincere, “I guess it’s up to you, Hen.”

  I stopped pacing and looked at Steve. I could never recognize the “striking” similarity people always talked about. To me we looked entirely different. He had inherited the Sabatini build; I, the Martins’. Steve, no more than five-nine, weighed almost as much as I did at six-one. He had never been athletic, so his stockiness was not the healthy kind. What was left of his hair hung long in the back, which I thought looked silly, as did his mustache. Steve suffered from a serious lack of self-esteem. When he was uncomfortable, he had a terrible habit of coughing and asking you to repeat what you had just said. Drove me nuts. Still, Steve dressed with great care. I gave him good marks for that. At college — Duke —- he did well in the sciences but poorly in arts and literature. Mother insisted it was due to the rugged courses he took, but there was a tacit acceptance in the family that Steve never had the all-round smarts I did. Barbara and Jake Martin had always been careful to make any comparisons between us as subtle as they could while Steve and I were growing up. But we both knew how they felt. The point was, we had very little in common. I didn’t blame Steve for being Mom’s pet. Probably because I was happy to be Father’s. I did respect Steve’s attention to the details of our business, and his sharp abilities in math. He brought in our first computers and streamlined a number of our methods and practices.

  “Before I sit down with Phelan,” I said, “who may turn me over to Jordan, I want to be damn sure of our numbers, so we’d better review them. Carefully, because this may be our last shot.” I was almost tempted to bum a cigarette, but remembered the vow made years ago that after Vietnam I would be done with butts of any kind. I pulled out the princely chair across from Steve and sat down.

  “Spread sheets. The last projections we made,’ I said as I opened my briefcase and pulled out one of the several folders that Dianne had marked “Standard General — 355 Park Avenue,’ A second line said “COST SHEETS/REVISIONS.” I had underlined the last word in red. “Have yours? Okay, site first,’ I said as he found the page.

  “Before we begin, Steve, remember this is still a spec building, so we don’t have to renovate, just the tenant fit-up. Comes out of the mortgage, not our pockets.”

  “You said that the last time, Henry. The bank limited us because the tenant fit-up was too fancy. We had to finance the balance ourselves. Why the hell do you always have this habit of trying to make everything come out the way you want?”

  I didn’t respond. We had to focus on this situation.

  “And before you mention it, we can’t reduce the cost of the site. Don’t even suggest it,” Steve snapped. “You paid a couple of million bucks too much, Henry. You just had to have it, didn’t you?”

  “I’m not going to debate this with you again,” I said. “I admit it was at the top of the market, but you know damn well that the cardinal rule is not the price paid for a site but what can be done with it. Also, three hundred thousand square feet — a larger building than we expected, and I might say, hoped for. I did a helluva job with the planning board. Our cost put us in line with Mark Hamer’s outfit and the others. They bought their sites years before we did, at much lower prices.” I stared at Steve and smiled — smugly, I suspected. “But those clowns had to carry their sites for years, which made their costs end up the same as ours.”

  ‘You’re whitewashing reality,” he said. “The market’s gone shitty. Nobody’s doing spec buildings these days. Land has dropped in value and price.”

  “Negative, Steve. No one could have predicted the market. And you know that. Federated’s appraisers gave the site a higher value than the purchase price, so what are you bitching about?”

  He shook his head. “You just go on your merry way. Get in a jam, and charm your way out. Well, I don’t like situations where I have to depend on your luck!”

  I bristled. “This isn’t the time or place for a fight,’ I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we have a crisis on our hands.”

  “You know why, little brother? Because I can never get your goddamn attention. And if I do, you don’t listen.” He paused, as if making up his mind about pursuing the fight, then gave a major sigh, like a balloon losing air. “Oh hell, we’d better get back to the cost sheets.”

  “Okay, so we can’t reduce the cost of the site. But,” I added, “maybe we can reduce some of its carrying costs.”

  “You’re wrong. You know that interest has to be capitalized. They stopped letting developers write it off years ago.”

  “Well, if I can get the bank to reduce the interest rate, that’ll lower our cost a little. Then we can reduce the rent, right?” I looked across the table.

  “C’mon, Henry, you haven’t gotten the bank to do that.”

  “No, but I’m sure I can. Then we can pass it on as a reduction in the rent,” I said.

  “Not until you get it firmed up with the bank,” he countered.

  I stood up and began to pace. “We can also find savings in construction and overhead.”

  “Show me, kid,” Steve cut in. “Flash cards, hyperbole, the whole bit. Your specialty. No one in New York is any better at it than you.” His sarcasm nipped like ice flakes flung in your face by a winter blizzard. It stung, but I was used to it.

  “You’re too cynical, Steve. I’m trying to create a solution here, and all you seem to care about is shooting holes in everything I come up with.”

  “Because that’s your typical defense,” he shot back. “You rationalize when you fabricate revisions. If I don’t watch you, you’ll cut the rent from fifty dollars a square foot. No way,” he added decisively.

  “I actually quoted them forty-six-fifty.”

  “You what? Henry! You never told me that. Hey, Henry, I’m your partner, remember?”

  “Sorry, there wasn’t time. Hollick got hold of me last night and said the deal was ours at forty-six dollars. We still have room.

  “The hell we do,’

  ‘We’d be further apart at fifty dollars,” I said. “Anyway, it’s academic because we’re still too high
, even for a new building. By the way, how do we know he’s not bullshitting us? Remember the Nucci and Forte deal? The brokers tried to set us up with those phony quotes.”

  “Maybe we should hang tough,” Steve said as he rose from his chair.

  “We can’t. Jordan and Phelan wouldn’t be avoiding us. I’d have gotten the word that if we reduced the rent down to Yedid’s, they’d sign with us. Except,” I added, “my instinct tells me someone in that law firm is pulling big strings.”

  “I thought Phelan was your buddy.”

  “He is. Hey, where the hell’s Hollick? Probably grabbed some cute secretary and is screwing her brains out. The guy’s insatiable.” I loosened my tie. “Ill call him after my meeting, try to find out what the hell he knows. Damn brokers. All some of them want to do is introduce you to a prospect. If the lease gets signed, they’re right there with that big commission invoice.” I stared at the rug. “Trouble is, Hollick represents other developers as well as us. The information he provides isn’t always accurate.”

  “Anyway,” Steve said.

  “Anyway,” I echoed, “let’s look at construction.”

  “Wait a minute,” he sputtered. “We disagree about how to handle the carrying charges.”

  “No, you made your point,” I said.

  He nodded. “But don’t try to take the depreciation on the building as a way to reduce costs. For Christ’s sake, Henry, that would be playing games.” He was fuming. “Kid someone else, not me.”