If I am to confess all that happened between John and me, then I must begin by admitting to myself as much as to anyone else that the decisions I made in New York in the fall of 2001 – the decisions that led to my fleeing town the following January – were decisions that came as a consequence of events and facts that stretch all the way back twenty years.
I was not born in New York, as I’ve already more or less admitted. I grew up in a Great Lakes town known for paper mill factories and Checker cab plants and craftsmen who built Gibson guitars; sounds quaint, right? Except by the time I was a teenager, all those businesses had moved on, and the town was just another place on the map where huge chain stores and restaurants could stick the pin for a franchise.
My parents were pleasant, patient people who had an average number of friends and who kept normal office hours. As a family we vacationed for ten days each year in a cottage near Beaver Lake, a two-bedroom place my uncle Horace owned and rented to us each season at a reduced rate, two weeks for the price of one. Don’t misconstrue the fact that he charged my mother money for the use of his cottage. Midwesterners as a rule are pragmatic with their money, cost is cost is cost; and showy people who give things away are more suspicious than spend thrifts.
In those rather banal surroundings, my uncle was the most fascinating person that I knew. He was the enormous star whose gravitational pull affected the orbits of everyone else in the family, like it or not. The first son of my maternal grandfather, he’d inherited the role of patriarch as well as the ownership of an enormous celery farm. Unlike all the heads of the family before him, Horace did not work on the farm himself, nor did he enlist young nephews like me to work on it. He ran the farm like a modern business, and by shaking the hands of every soil tiller in a 200 mile radius, he’d created a loose conglomerate of farms that shared profits and expenses in a way that allowed him to make a comfortable living without doing more than cleaning the soil from the bottom of his boots once a day.
The summer after I turned fifteen, my family stayed for two full weeks at the Beaver Lake cottage, and for the last few days Horace bunked with us. My mother referred to her brother as “husky,” which was to say that he was built like a Labrador Retriever, all chest and shoulders with an afterthought of skinny legs; he stood 6’4”, and when he approached a hammock, the trees would appear to tremble before he even sat down. Although he was in his 50s, he retained the vigor of his youth. Each day he convinced me to swim in the lake with him, which really meant endless freestyle races from the boat launch to a diving raft that floated some distance from shore.
On the last day of our stay, Horace kept me racing for nearly half an hour before we broke for a rest. I was winning for once – up 5 to 3 in heats, if memory serves – but I needed to pause and use the inhaler that I carried with me (as a boy I struggled regularly against the invisible dragons of asthma). Horace was in a contemplative mood, perhaps because I was ahead in our contest.
“What are you going to do after you finish high school, Ace?”
I shook my inhaler and smiled. “Won’t work for you,” I said, “that’s for sure.”
This was all part of a call-and-response pattern that we both knew by heart. As usual, as I tried to regain my breath, Horace told me how big of a mistake it was for kids to skip college in this day and age. I should mention that Horace himself never even finished high school, and this somehow gave him more credence than if he’d had a B.A. For some reason, however, his speech was more urgent than usual on this day. I’ll never forget because he actually looked angry with me, although it may have been because he was squinting against the brightness of the sun reflecting off the water. “Whatever you do,” he said, “make sure that you don’t forget where you came from.”
I wasn’t sure at the time what he meant – perhaps he meant how hard he had to work to buy this cottage and the parcel of land on the lake; or maybe he meant all the work that was done to bring up the celery farm over the generations. I nodded vigorously, though, as all young boys will do when they are being lectured by the men whom they admire. He was a wildly successful adult with a collection of vacation cottages like the one at Beaver Lake; he drove a different new car off the Chrysler lot downtown every other year; and most importantly, he had the respect of all the people who learned his name. I had been named for Horace years earlier and by the time I was a teenager that appellation seemed like a kind of fate because I wanted to be just like him someday.
I wasn’t entirely true to my word, although I kept to the spirit of what I promised. Two years later I graduated from high school and went to work for Horace as a temporary employee. In a matter of months I would be headed East to one of New York’s upstate schools, and while I had a small stipend awaiting me as part of a scholarship, I needed to salt away some cash. I wanted my undergrad tenure to resemble the middle class lifestyle I’d enjoyed till then. I also, quite frankly, wanted to spend more time around my uncle before leaving home.
Horace employed me as a filing clerk in his office, which was a three-room space he rented downtown across the street from the post office. I was nervous about the job at first, but after the first week I began to realize that Horace had created a sinecure out of thin air for me. On a daily basis I did little except copy numbers from one book to another, and even that was sporadic; another disappointment came when I realized Horace showed up in the office rarely more than once a week.
One morning the office manager approached me and asked if I’d mind running an errand out to the farm, which was located outside town. Horace’s signature was needed on a document that had to be filed with the court before noon. A tax abatement had expired and needed renewal. My aunt had said Horace was at the farm, but no one was answering the phone there; as this was the era before cell phones, someone had to drive out there and find him personally. I eagerly accepted the task – anything to escape the tedium of a job with no responsibilities.
At the farm I found the office empty, and in the main barn a crowd of field hands were playing soccer while music rattled out of a small boom box. I had seen these men many times before, migrant workers who made a seasonal trek up from the south each year, sometimes with families in tow. I never questioned whether they were legal workers; I guess I assumed most of them weren’t. Some of them recognized me and using my paltry Spanish skills I asked if they were excited about the upcoming World Cup. I was standing behind the large crating machine in the middle of the barn when Uncle Horace came in. Or, as I should say, when the room erupted.
Horace was furious to see the laborers relaxing rather than working. One man, slightly taller than average, tried to explain: the fields were flooded, and they were waiting till the sun was a little higher in the sky before starting. Undeterred, Horace hurled insults in both English and Spanish with such fury that I sank down into a squatting position behind the crating machine, hopeful that I would not be seen. I was watching when he turned and struck one of the workers on the cheek with an open fist – this was the man who’d tried to reason with Horace moments earlier. The man stumbled and fell to one knee but said nothing; instead, he turned aside, scooped up the soccer ball, and hustled outside.
I remained behind the crating machine while Horace picked up the pieces of the boom box – he’d kicked it to pieces somewhere in his tantrum. He had the peaceful look of a blissful angel on his face. I was old enough to realize that the world doesn’t always turn on a fulcrum of kindness, and I also knew that there are many aspects to a given person, but this furious side of my uncle had left me stunned. Later, when I snuck out the back and came into the barn office to tell him the message, he smiled at me, slapped my back, and laughed. He said the trip was all for naught – he’d already spoken to the city assessor, and he’d gotten the tax issue bumped till next year. I stared at him with a slack look on my face, and I think he assumed that I was surprised by the way he’d dealt so firmly with the city assessor.
“You have to deal with people,” he told me, “on their level, Ace. You can’t be afraid of getting in their face. You have to remember that not everyone’s equal in life. There’s no point in being squeamish about that fact. Some people are on top. Some people are on the bottom. That’s how things work.”
This seemed like a continuation of the advice he’d given me years earlier – a latter portion which I was only now mature enough to handle. I knew there was unquestionably some truth in what he was saying now, but despite that I was deeply disappointed by the new cynicism that I detected in his face. He was not, I realized, entirely the person that I’d always wanted him to be.
Outside in the parking lot, I encountered the worker that my uncle had hit. He was folding himself up into a tiny brown Datsun. The other workers were on a truck rattling across the field and leaving a long flowing scarf of dust in the sky. Out of something that I now recognize as guilt – but which at the time just felt like a raw impulse – I walked over to the man and tried to speak with him. He would not look at me, though.
“Please don’t talk to me,” he said, “Mister Horace says I can come back next week if I don’t cause no more trouble. I can’t afford to lose this job, you get what I’m saying? So I got to go now. Adios, OK?”
He drove off slowly down the dirt road and rather than return to the office I followed at a distance. He took the highway south, headed for a part of town that was known for its seedy houses and late-night violence. I watched from my car as the worker parked outside a rundown Victorian. He had barely shut his door when a black-haired woman came out – she held a child at her hip and another one behind her holding her knees. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but I could hear that she was yelling. I remember most of all the look on the face of the child clutching the woman’s knees. He looked overwhelmed, fearful, at a loss for what would happen next.
I hated my uncle in that moment. I hated him for not being here as a witness, for insulating himself so easily from the effect of his actions. His little speech to me on the deck of our swim raft two years earlier, his injunction that I not forget where I came from, seemed like something he was deeply unqualified to recommend. And I vowed in that moment – with one of those rash vows that overly sensitive young men specialize in – that after leaving home for school I would find a way to become a better man than him: I would be the kind of man that I had once believed he was.
Of course these vows were mostly just youthful noise. I drove back to the office and resumed the task of copying numbers and watching the clock hands move toward quitting time. The next day I came back and did the same thing. I worked the rest of the summer in the downtown office, and I saw my uncle often, even attended his birthday party on his boat in August; and although I was truly ashamed of him, although I really meant what I’d vowed, no one was able to tell. I was too terrified to tell anyone. I was still young, and just beginning to find my footing, and it would be some time before I’d have the confidence that’s needed to throw out what’s easy or inherited, especially when so much of life is so pleasingly easy, and what you’ve inherited is so effortlessly comfortable.
▪ ▪ ▪
In the spring of 1990 I graduated from college and joined the ranks of McGrath & Swinburne, a boutique firm for equities research located near Wall Street. Everyone in my family was surprised to hear that I’d found a job in finance; no one had expected such ambition. I had studied journalism in school, but I had also audited a few economics courses out of a sense of idle curiosity. As it turned out, that brief background gave me the finger hold needed to grab a bottom-rung job as a low-level copywriter.
Each morning at McGrath & Swinburne I stepped off the express elevator eager to face the daily hustle and charge of the office. Located on the fifty-third floor of the World Trade Center, our firm had a cabalistic feel: our goal was to report on small-fin stocks that the big Wall Street sharks skipped over. We were upstarts who cared about facts and telling a straight story.
This was well before the current era, when Wall Street brainiacs brought down the entire economy. It was still possible back then to believe that we were part of a system that ran the world – and was running it well, as the economy steered through a recession and began a slow upward climb. Even the events of the larger world seemed to conform to this ascending narrative: the U.S. and its allies rolled back aggression in the Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union broke apart like a brittle glass bottle, and everyone, everywhere, all at once began to clamor with praise for the power of the market.
At McGrath & Swinburne, making money was important, but it wasn’t our sole credo. We did what we did to help out the proverbial little fighter, the middle-class stock-picker who wanted his portfolio to rise in value so that he could buy a decent starter home for himself and his pregnant wife and his pooch, Rex or Fido or Bullet.
In those first heady days I had the bulletproof self-worth that one finds only in fresh college graduates and borderline sociopaths (sociopaths, to their credit, can blame their delusions on bad wiring). I believed that through my own efforts, hundreds and maybe thousands of people with a tight budget were making smarter choices about their financial investments. I was taking everything I’d learned and seen, and what I’d witnessed, bad and good, from people like my uncle Horace, and putting that knowledge to use out in the larger world.
This belief kept me steaming through late nights for the first two years of corporate drudgery. This had consequences on my personal life, as you’d expect. I had moved to New York with a small cohort of college friends, and at first I would make special efforts to visit them at their places in Astoria or Park Slope for a drink or for a late dinner. But in time trips to outer boroughs were just too far when compared to the short jaunt of a few blocks for a drink with someone from the office. Looking back now, I can see how my belief in my own work motivated me to let slip the people and ties that had once mattered. This desertion was not personal; it was not premeditated; it was a simple and inevitable byproduct of ambition, like the ash and cinders that gather in a burning hearth.
I was promoted before the second anniversary of my hiring: our firm was small enough that our president had learned my name, and he called me into his office one evening to deliver the good news in person.
Smoky wore red suspenders and horn-rim glasses and liked to smoke cigars after six o’clock (no-smoking signs be damned). You never referred to him as Smoky to his face. You just called him sir. And you never commented on his mania for collecting, unless he brought it up first: his office was the last resting place for a legion of special-edition coffee mugs, political pins, and commemorative coins. In his previous career he’d minted millions as an investment banker, and he seemed bent on wasting all of it on glorified junk. In many ways he was the precise opposite of my Uncle Horace: to a casual observer, he cared for nobody and had nothing to offer except snarky one-liners and heartless sarcasm; but after a while, you learned that Smoky was tough on people because he knew the world was tough and it wasn’t doing anyone a favor to pretend otherwise.
That night in his office Smoky told me bluntly that the old editorial director had stunk up the place, and he liked what he saw in me. “You’re the best writer we’ve got,” he said, “or you will be, after I mold you into shape.”
I thought he’d want to talk about the job, or my new staff, but instead he pushed back his chair and asked if I’d ever seen his matchbook collection. This was his latest obsession: antique matchbooks. He had a 7-Up matchbook, a Blue Coal promo for The Shadow, and a flawless Mickey Mantle book that he said cost a couple hundred bucks. He went on for a long time, till the gold light faded behind the river outside his window; at last when he remarked on the time I mentioned that perhaps I should get back to my desk.
“People are waiting on the reports,” I said. I was responsible for writing a post-market summary based on the notes from our market analysts. The summary was emailed to all our clients who had email addresses. At the time, the notion of having a daily email summary was stunning and unique; people still marveled at the idea of dial-up accounts at America Online or CompuServe, wavy online worlds where individuals had control of what they read or saw, in contrast with television or newspapers. The idea of emailing the summaries had been mine, one of a few small innovations that, as the young Turk on staff, I’d introduced and lobbied for against the stodgy preferences of the old editorial director. Clearly, the report would be one of the priorities of the new regime under my direction. I told Smoky as much as I stood up and politely prepared to leave.
Smoky frowned, shifted in his seat, and crossed his legs.
“You really believe that report matters,” he said, “don’t you?”
As he spoke, he flipped open the Mickey Mantle cover. All the strikers were lined up in two rows inside. That, he had just told me, was what made the matchbook worth so much money. But while staring at me now, he ripped out a matchstick and raked its head across the flint. He touched a thin black cigar to the spitting flare. Then he leaned forward and tapped on his keyboard. “Let’s see if I can clear up a few things,” he said. “Consider it part of your new perspective.”
On his computer monitor Smoky called up a view of someone’s account. The screen filled with digits – he had one of those old-style terminals with pale green letters on a deep sea green background. I knew at once that he wasn’t supposed to show me this information. There was supposed to be – by agreement of common metaphor – a so-called “Chinese wall” between the money management side of the business and the research side, where I worked.
Smoky’s computer screen flickered with hundreds of lines of numbers, and an impressive tally at the bottom with nine zeroes. I glanced back at Smoky, who smiled widely. “Hold on,” he said, and he keyed up another account. Fewer zeros, but still far more dollars and cents in total than I’d seen in all the years of my life. He kept me standing there for five minutes while he paged through all these accounts.
“You know who these people are?”
“They’re our biggest clients,” I said.
“Close but not quite,” he said. He ashed his cigar into a ceramic dish. “They’re our clients, yeah; they’re the clients who matter.”
He leaned back in his chair and puffed at the cigar. As the light end flared, a similar smug light tinctured his flat brown eyes. “Honestly, Ace, do you think that anyone here besides you really gives a shit about the small fries on our client roster? They’re just part of our marketing angle. They’re just part of the story we tell people. We’re like all the rest. You’re either in this for the big ones or you’re in this to lose.”
He shooed me out of his office shortly afterward. Back at my desk, I had to sit very still and stare at the slate gray wall for almost five minutes before I was able to gather together even a fraction of my once potent motivation. Smoky was still in his office when I left later, but I didn’t stop in to say goodnight.
I was too young and too idealistic to be discouraged by a glimpse of the cynical hands at work behind the corporate curtain. For the next few weeks, I struggled mightily to produce sterling research materials with almost half of the necessary staff. The weeks turned into months as we reacted to new S.E.C. regulations and market shifts. The work never let up, and I continued to believe that what I did made a difference, but I never forgot the look on Smoky’s face.
Sometimes late at night if I was still in the office, I’d wander the deserted line of cubicles to the end of a row, and I’d stare out the shoulder-width windows toward the dark harbor to the south. I’d count lights, one for each night I’d clocked here – until I believed again in a grander purpose, a final tally that was still in the process of being totted up and valued for its total worth.
My sense of self-worth was ripe for plucking, then, by the time that I encountered the subway ad that would change my life. I was hanging from a metal strap on the trip under the East River at the time. This was the morning after my thirtieth birthday shindig, and I was feeling hung over, tired, and dissatisfied. I’d had more than a few glasses of scotch bought for me the night before at the Trade Center’s top-floor watering hole, the so-called Greatest Bar on Earth, and I was paying for each of those freebies with every lurch of the rail car. I stared at the ad as if the words could anchor me down, keep me in one piece. A local mentorship program wanted to match up troubled high school kids with role models. They were looking for mentors in nearly every field of professional work. They just needed to find people who were willing to believe the world could be made into a better place. No doubt the hangover and the big 3-0 birthday had put me in a contemplative mood.
My career had continued to fare well in recent years; as the tech market took off, and the dot-com era began, I had continued to innovate our services with email newsletters and web sites – but when it came to the broader pattern of my life, well, I knew that I had not applied the same scrutiny, nor had I met with such quantifiable success. I worked on Wall Street and lived alone and dated serially and had only a few close friends. My life earned a passing grade, yes; but it was not truly making the world a better place. I wrote the mentorship’s phone number on my palm with a blue pen and then disembarked the train in a crowd of suits and satchels at Fulton Street.
I forgot about the program until later when I noticed the smeared blue digits on my skin. The numbers were already almost illegible. I was in a meeting, but I stood up and walked out; I knew if I didn’t act right then, I’d lose the momentum. I went into a spare office, picked up a phone at once, and dialed fast. Someone answered and then transferred me to someone else, and before long I had traded a slew of facts about myself (hobbies, education, habits, ethnicity) and in exchange I was given a name. I wrote the name on a legal pad: JOHN LOGAN MARION. The words carried no weight for me then.
I remember how I wondered if John would be a nice kid, or if he’d just try to get me to loan him money. I figured if the whole set-up felt weird, I could always just quit. It’s funny to look back and see yourself in those moments of starry-eyed ignorance, before life wades in and slaps you upside the head.
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