This blog is a novel.

This blog is a novel.

Compensation
A novel
(Part 1 of Money is a Language)
by W. James
New York, NY



It’s necessary that every man and child, free and slave, male and female, the whole city, ceaselessly sing to itself these songs, which are changing all the time yet hold themselves together multifaceted, so that for the singers there be an ever insatiable desire for and pleasure in the songs. Plato’s Laws, 665c

Let this now be the final opinion, even though strange: the songs have become our laws, ibid, 799e10.



Looking back on it now, it all seems as if it happened at once, and what I didn’t know about my friend Allen probably doesn’t matter. It’s just that it wasn’t obvious all along. What that says about me, I do not know. And Carl, my former boss, I still think, is morally upstanding and well intentioned. Just because it didn’t work out for him at the end, losing all that money in the market, doesn’t mean he’s a loser or a fool, not in any transcendent sense, regardless of how unfortunate he may think the circumstances of his situation.
I try not to be judgmental, but in the end, I am. Everyone is. How can you not? Carl got caught in a position in which he never thought he would find himself. And so did I. In the end, you have to make some judgment on other people. It’s not that I see some good guy and some bad guy or that Carl is stupid. Far from it. But I can’t say that I feel sorry for him. Ultimately, what he did led to how it turned out for him, and his investment decisions can be seen as foolish. But I don’t hold anyone totally responsible for what happens to him. Yes, we make choices, of course, but that’s not the whole story, I don’t think. Nor can I say I wouldn’t wish it on him. In fact, I did and, in a sense, even had a hand in it. In a way, I wanted to see what would happen to him and what he would do.
We’re all basically the same, myself included, self-interested individuals looking to secure what’s best for us, what we think is best for us. As for enlightened self-interest, well, probably not. Crass self-interest is more like it. And that includes watching other people get burned and taking some measure of satisfaction or even enjoyment in it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be, men who look out for ourselves primarily and, if we have anything, what belongs to us? And if that means the other guy loses out, well, that’s the way it is. I’d rather admit this than try to maintain a front of hypocrisy. And sometimes, quite often if looked at honestly, when it comes to screwing someone over and getting something out of it, even if it’s just a little satisfaction, we give a little shove.
But like I said, I try not to be judgmental. None of us escaped unharmed. But that’s the nature of things, the way it is. What follows is how it happened at the time, just a few months ago, in fact.


“MY LIFE IS KILLING ME, it’s like a demon crawling up my back, claws raking into my shoulder, reaching for my neck, my scalp.”
“You keep saying that Allen, what are you going to do, kill yourself? What do you mean?”
“Nothing, Price. I’m not going to kill myself. It’s better to live for nothing than not to live at all.”
“What are you talking about? The thrill of the fuck not enough for you? What is it, you’re not getting enough pussy?”
“You know something? I hate to admit it—I know it sounds superficial, but no matter what anyone says, it all comes down to looks for me. I wouldn’t date a girl that’s not good-looking.”
“Yes, but it all depends on what you think is good.”
“Yeah, I know. Like this chick I met over New Year’s, Valerie. I met her last summer out at Montauk. She’s got a place at Ditch Plain this summer.”
I vaguely remember meeting Valerie at the New Year Eve’s party. We were extremely wasted on an assortment of drugs and I recall Allen going off with a petite and delicate girl with a finely boned face and penetrating eyes. My name is Mark Price, and I’m sitting in my car with my friend, Allen Lewis. We are driving east on the Long Island Expressway for the first weekend of the summer. Allen and I had arranged the summer rental of a small beach house on Accabonac Harbor. The actual structure lacked any luster, just a box, but it sat on a dazzling, well-lighted spot, a thin golden tongue of sand surrounded by Gardiner’s Bay, Accabonac Harbor, and Napeague Bay in the distance. I’m driving my convertible, and there is, as usual in these situations of clarity, bright stunning sunlight, wind whirling through the cockpit—we are living in the present and thus have no idea what will happen in the future, what form the rearrangement of the present will take. That’s why I specialize, as best as I can, in living in the present, whatever the price. It isn’t even that I don’t care to live with the constant expectation of what will come, but that it doesn’t matter: I get married, I make partner at the firm, I buy a mortgage on a house in Connecticut or Westchester so I can take the Metro North into Manhattan rather than the Long Island Rail Road or New Jersey Transit, plus the real estate is a better investment there; I have two kids—everyone has two kids if you notice, and so will I, no doubt. And there you are, bitching and hoping for the tuition to send your two kids to a good enough school. In contrast to that, there’s a certain formlessness to living in the present that gives a sense of freedom, probably deceptive I admit, like the dream of a grand oceanic expanse of the possible, a dream of unlimited pleasure and possibility, abstract potentiality. Yes, in a way, it is an irresponsible way of thinking, but I have always run aground on the same conclusion, and have argued vociferously for it on drunken occasions, that if you can get yourself far enough out there, why not just stay? Out there. As long as possible. And just see what happens. Sure, you’ve got to take care of business, and yes that implies work, a job, money to pay for a piece of waterfront property and ease into the process of getting old rich. For being poor when you’re old is a particularly American fear. But why let these basic goals comprehend your life? It’s not as though it’s all that difficult, in the end. Many of these things work themselves out. They just happen—or do they? Regardless, why torture ourselves so much with the idea of self-improvement? Why not just be what we are? Or perhaps what I’m afraid of is facing up to the limits that define us as individuals, not just death, but the finality of every decision taken at every step in your life, grades in school, college, law school, making your millions and all the rest. If God exists, I hate to say it, he’s not much of a sculptor. I’m sure I’m missing something: biology, evolution, family, love and happiness, Christianity, Judaism, cultural conservatism, prudence. I just can’t take all that seriously. I’m an atheist. I just decided one day, when I was about fifteen, that I would try not believing in God and just see what happened. So, in disbelief, I live in the present. Surprisingly, I’ve found that this gives me the ability to see a little bit into the future. Not far off, though sometimes I fool myself into actually believing that I’m seeing decades or centuries into the future. Not perfectly, but I do get images, potentialities. For instance, sitting in the car complaining about his life is Allen, and suddenly there occurs in my mind an outlined figure of him later in the summer, and now it starts to come into focus, the form filling in with polarized glare-free technicolor, he’s splashing and frolicking in the surf and sun, dark hairy chest, muscular pecs and abs cut, and he’s surrounded by a rich blue hue, diamond droplets of spray scattering violet light around as he jumps and smiles and laughs, like a picture in a spring J. Crew catalogue. There are bikini clad girls, skinny, lying, sitting and standing around, on and in the sand, bony hips jutting out, golden skin—not weird, but typical images, like ideals providing a goal to which we can strive--and then Allen leaps up and forward—I can’t tell if he’s catapulting himself toward the shore or out to sea—but it’s clear that he does a somersault, a full flip and then flops onto the wavy surface, the light purple and blue and gold painted on the ocean, then he disappears into a bank of white foam and is gone, leaving a bathtub-sized hole in the surf, an image of the future. Behind my mirrored shades, I blink and the instant changes, jumps back to the present reality, and my eyesight flashes back to where I am and trains on the LI.E., gleaming metal reflecting chrome reflecting red and orange plastic flashing in the white glare of pale concrete.
I refocus and hear Allen saying, “Yeah, but you know what, Mark, that’s just it. Getting laid is not the problem. Not that I’m not getting enough snatch, but I want more, not more pussy necessarily, although that would be alright, but something more. The city is so boring. It’s like I’ve already done everything and there’s never enough time, no time to do what I have to do and no time to do what I want to do. I wake up and it seems like the day is already gone and I’m out for drinks. I want to go places, Patagonia, Thailand, Europe, you know. The Hamptons are great. I love going out, all the clubs and restaurants, the beach. But I hate all those people. Half of them are from two towns over from where I grew up on Long Island, half are from New Jersey, and then there are a few sprinkled in from half way around the world. Do you remember Imran Aroshi, that guy from Iran, or Iraq or Pakistan or wherever, but he’s Jewish somehow? The guy who sells cocaine and ecstasy? He was in our house last summer. He used to hang out by the pool or in the Jacuzzi with a different blonde chick every week, his hands all over her. I tried to get in the tub one time and started talking to this beauty he had in there, some ski instructor from Utah—turns out she’s a lesbian or just told him she was to get him off her back, but very good looking. And the asshole starts to freak out, saying she’s with him, et cetera. Meanwhile, she’s rolling her eyes at the sky and I just said fuck it, see you later, smiled at the girl and left. Later on I saw them at some party. She was totally ignoring him. I should have moved in on her and screwed her that night just to fuck with this guy’s head.”
“I don’t know why you even bothered with that scene last year, Allen. You bitched and moaned about it all year, bitterly, yet every weekend there you were, I know I know I was there too, sitting in traffic from the Midtown Tunnel all the way out the L.I.E. or the Northern or whichever route you take. And look at us now. Here we are again. Why are we doing this? We’re just one more German sports car in a sea of B.M.W.s, Jags and Mercedes.”
“Yeah, no one wants an American car anymore.”
“For a long time now. Except for the S.U.V.s.”
“Maybe I should get an S.U.V. They’re pretty cool.”
“Maybe.”
“No, I’m going to lease a Porsche.”
“Really?’
“Yeah.”
“When?
“Soon.” Allen snorts. “Yeah. This year I’m through with that scene. All those people are too young for me now, I realize. And the owners of that house, that gay lawyer couple. I’m so psyched that we got this place this year. It’ll be quiet, kind of a retreat, we won’t have to see people if we don’t want to, it’s on the water. It’s great. It’s going to be great. I want to meet a real woman, someone my age.”
“You’re hypocritical, Allen. What are you going to do about it? Why don’t you do something with your life.”
“I am. I am. I’m not in a share this year.”
“Right, as if that one thing will change anything. You’re always complaining about this, that, sex, money, your boss, the market.”
“So what, Mark? Everyone does. I’m just making conversation. My life’s not bad, I know. I’m lucky, really, what I’ve got. I mean, I’m successful, good looking . . .”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Hey, I’m good looking in the sense of okay looking, not a model, but you know, pretty good, better than average.”
“Whatever that is. You do work out.”
“Yeah, I’m getting bigger. Thanks for the compliment. But I want to get even bigger. I’m just saying, Mark, I mean, doesn’t everyone complain? I shouldn’t really. Is that what you’re getting at? I guess you’re right. I’ve got no reason to complain.”
“Forget it, Allen.”
“It’s alright. I do want to meet someone though this summer.”
“A girl.”
“A girl. A woman. Whatever. What the hell, I don’t know. I really like Valerie. Who knows? Maybe she’s the one.”
“What are you talking about, Allen, the one? Like that twenty-year-old from Australia you met in Hawaii this winter? What was her name again? Was she even Jewish?” I say, my eyes straight ahead piercing the future, the traffic streaming to the left and the right of us, as though brushing off our shoulders, as I pass everyone; we’re funneling through the empty space that happens to exist before us for a moment in the middle lane, and like everyone else thronged on the road, sensing in the speed the power of the thrumming engine as my own freedom, an opening to shoot through, like an arrow darting to its target over a cluttered field.
“Yeah, you mean Diana. Her? I’m through with the younger chicks, Mark. I think I need an older woman. The problem with Diana and chicks her age is they’ve got nothing to say, absolutely nothing. It’s frustrating, I sit there and say, do you want to do this, do you want to do that, and she’s like okay okay. I hate that. Have you ever noticed that women don’t seem to know what they want?”
“You mean girls.”
“Whatever the distinction you want to make, Mark. It’s like they’re always looking to us to tell them what to do and then they fly off the handle and get all huffy and irritated and hate us for telling them what to do as if they knew all along what they were doing. But are we any different, really, Mark? I mean what the hell are we doing?”
“Living in the present, man.”
“Yeah, I’m just trying to get what I want. Is there anything wrong with that? The pursuit of happiness?”
“No, Allen, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Right.”
“But that’s bullshit, that you’re interested in older women.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Older women are much more likely to see through you, or they want you for the money you make, and have kids.”
“Not necessarily. But anyway, didn’t you keep up a relationship with that girl from Hawaii on e-mail for months?”
“Well, yeah, but so what? She had a great pussy, gripping, but forget her. I only fucked her one time. She e-mailed me the other day, I just deleted it. She doesn’t know what she wants and I’m sick of girls like that. Fuck her. No.”
“Okay, Allen. But isn’t Valerie like twenty-two?”
“She is, I think twenty-four, but she’s different.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No I’m not. Don’t be an asshole, Price.”
“I’m just trying to hold you to what you’re saying. Whatever happened to Julia, that aerobics instructor?”
“I don’t know. It was weird, man. We met online, it goes so fast, you know so much about the other person through e-mail. When we met, I was relieved—she was how she looked in the photos she posted. Great body, worked out a lot, really hot, thirty, going to school to be a teacher, Jewish, I really liked her. And she liked me too. We had sex the first time we went out. I don’t know what happened.”
“What happened.”
“I called you that night, remember, we had just finished fucking and I went to take a shower and tried to call you from the bathroom and left a message. But what happened with her? I called her and called her for like two weeks and she never called back.”
“Maybe she just wanted to get laid.”
“Yeah. Fuck her. That night, after I called you and left a message, I went back in and she was lying on the bed with the covers swirled around her, and she was just quiet, staring at me with this look in her eye. Unlike other chicks, she didn’t say anything, she just looked at me, like she was judging me or something. I mean, I looked pretty good, just coming out of the shower, this was a couple of months ago and I wasn’t as big as I am now, but I had been working out a while. She didn’t even try to say anything. It was really uncomfortable.”
Allen has a cruel piece that he unleashes regularly on himself as well as others. When you first meet him, he seems a likeable guy and you can’t imagine him hurting anyone. But beneath that is something cynical. He also has become a bit of a body builder, works out at the gym everyday, or at least Monday through Friday or Thursday in the summer, so he can exhibit a mildly threatening physical presence. In fact, working out is the one area where you see Allen’s discipline and work ethic. You know that he had to work hard when he first started in the brokerage business, but you wouldn’t know it hanging out with him now, all he does is party and fuck. His job consists of following investment reports put out by his company and other sources of information that he’s cultivated over the last couple of years and advising his clients on managing their investments accordingly. He’s a good-looking guy, about six feet, a hundred and seventy pounds.
“So, who’s this Valerie?” I’m trying to remember meeting her on New Year’s Eve and then I start to see in my mind Allen and a girl slumped back on couches fucked up in one of the rooms in Jeff Baxter’s penthouse apartment on Fifty-first Street, but I can’t remember anything about her, I just have an emptiness, a vacuum, in my mind. Allen has mentioned her throughout the spring, but it hasn’t really registered as anything significant beyond another girl he’s been dating. I can’t even remember if he’s said he has fucked her, but now he’s talking as if he has.
“She’s hot, Mark, really good looking. You met that night, didn’t you? Remember? Small, petite, dark-haired.”
“Barely, Allen. There were a lot of cute girls there that night.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve been seeing each other.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Beuell. Valerie Beuell.
“How do you spell that?”
“I don’t know, asshole. She’s from Connecticut. Her dad was a communications executive at 3M, I think.”
“How old did you say she was?”
“Mid-twenties. Like me.”
“Allen, what are you talking about, you’re turning thirty this year.”
“Whatever.”
“So what’s up with this chick?”
“She’s great, Mark. I think I could get serious about her.”
“What do you mean, serious, Allen?”
“You know. Monogamy.”
“Monogamy. You’re kidding. Is she good in bed?”
“Fuck you, Price.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll meet her, Mark, and see what I mean. She’s a fun girl, non-pretentious, non-high maintenance, parties, drinks, has her own friends. Likes the beach, surfs, smokes pot.”
“Right, we met at New Year’s. I’m starting to picture her now, skinny, small useless tits. . . .”
“Asshole.”
“Well, I’m just trying to remember, to see if she’s the one. I was pretty fucked up that night, if I recall.”
“I know. You were with that girl, what was her name? Rachel. What a slut.”
“Fuck you, man.”
“No offense, Mark, but that girl was some piece of ass, with that short skirt, cheap leopard skin pattern, in the middle of winter?”
“It was a very warm New Year’s Eve, Allen.”
“And that halter top she was wearing! Come on. Where did she come from?”
“She knew Jeff’s sister, I think. They went to Columbia together. She’s a New York City kid. I liked her. You’re just prejudiced against anyone who’s not middle class, white and suburban.”
“What did you do that night?”
“You mean with her?”
“Yes.”
“I forget.”
“It was a great party though, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. But who is Valerie? I can’t quite picture her.”
“Man, I’ve been telling you. You met her, too, zombie.”
“Did I like her?” I say laughing.
“I don’t know. You don’t remember. You were as fucked up as I can ever remember seeing you. Remember New Year’s Eve the year before? When everyone thought there would be a technology breakdown in all the computer systems in the banks and nothing happened? That computers would freak out when the last two digits of the year went from ninety-nine to O.O. and that all that data would be lost? And nothing happened. What a joke. That liquidity ramped up the last leg of the bull market, you know? We made so much money the next few years.”
“We did too.”
“It was great.”
“I know. But that night, what a joke. Nothing happened.”
“What assholes we were.”
“Yeah. Friends of mine had to work all night at banks and brokerages and mutual funds and clearing houses. Losers.”
“Sucks for them. What did we do that year?”
“I can’t remember.”
“I don’t think I even knew you then.’
‘We were just starting to hang out.”
“This year’s party though, Jeff’s party, was great. I was so fucked up. Did you meet her there?”
“No, I met her last summer out at Montauk, surfing.”
“She surfs.”
“She’s pretty good at it too. Not as into it as I am, but it’s cool to have a chick that likes sports. She went to Yale.”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you.”
“No. I don’t know where she went to school. I can’t remember. Connecticut College? U. Conn. New Hampshire, somewhere? She dropped out. Some place like that. Maybe in Boston, somewhere in New England. She’s cool though. I like her. What difference does it make anyhow, where she went to college? I’m not intellectual, I went to University of Delaware, total party school, got straight Bs, a few Cs. It has absolutely no bearing on how well you do in life, what school you went to. Look at all these brainiac nerds. They can’t even have a normal conversation. All they can talk about is books or computers.”
“Hey those guys make a lot of money now. I know a guy, writes software, who got a lot of stock options from his company and exercised them for over two million dollars. Just bought two condos in the Florida Keys.”
“Fuck that, Mark. You should give me his number. I know you went to law school at N.Y.U. and everything, and I think that’s great and everything. But what school you went to doesn’t necessarily mean that much. It can get you into the Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley training program. And it definitely adds to your resume and will get it to the top of the pile and get you a call, but screw that anyway though. You’re a lawyer, you know what I mean. I mean, look how much money I made the last couple of years, and I don’t have an M.B.A. or anything. Where did you go to school, anyway, Mark?”
“Bennington. But sure, Allen, I know what you mean. Don’t get upset. I know you don’t have to go to H.B.S. to do well. It helps though. Look at Bush.”
“Yeah, right.” We’re stopped in traffic now and a sweet whiff of auto exhaust rises, intoxicating as it touches the back of my nose and throat.
“This is so slow,” says Allen.
“There’s no other way here.”
“We could check the Northern.”
“Maybe. We’ll see what we get at the next exit.”
“What the fuck are all these people doing slowing down.”
“Probably a merge coming up.”
“Or an accident.”
“No, it’s probably a merge. Look up there. See?”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Forget it. Let’s put the top up and turn on the A.C.” I also turn on the radio and intercept a news report on Bloomberg about a man arrested in Tompkins Square Park for killing pigeons, luring them with food and grabbing them by the neck between his thumb and index finger and flipping them over his wrist. Then on the hour, they update the Friday markets, the Dow is up, the Nasdaq is down eighteen, which isn’t anything as its been down for months now, or a year, and so many people have lost money, but on the surface at least, you don’t really notice. Everyone has a brand new car still shining, you can see the whole world reflected in the gleam, growling, not like some busted up old truck but a musical buzz, a bass intonation with just the slightest metallic clink of pistons firing and gears meshing. Everyone’s lost money, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Life goes on in the so-called real economy, as if there aren’t any consequences from the financial markets, even though trillions in market capitalization evaporated. The S&P is down for the year, but up for the day, a squiggle. Companies aren’t going broke, and the banks aren’t going under. Yes, there is some blood being let, shareholder lawsuits in the making, but the effects have been spread out over a hundreds of thousands of investors, and there have to be losers, that’s the nature of the game, and we all know that, anyone who is a player. The losers keep quiet, except for the occasional quirky guy who has been taken for a ride in a limo, dropped off in the middle of nowhere, no phone, no money, no credit card; you hear about people who have lost their life savings, they pop up in the Wall Street Journal, the victim of some rogue broker in the Midwest suing Lehman Brothers for four million dollars, but, I mean, the institutions haven’t collapsed, they’ve adjusted, people haven’t pulled their money out of mutual funds. Where else would they put it? You have to do something with it, that’s the nature of money. It’s not inert because it’s not a thing that can just sit around. An S.U.V. groans as it sails by, gleaming, black, hulking.
“There’s so much money sitting around on the sidelines right now,” says Allen, as if reading my mind. “That’s why I’m not worried about the markets, man. There is a lot of liquidity out there. I’ve got one account with six million in cash. I can’t believe it. I mean, how fucking stupid is that. It’s just sitting there. He’s losing money in cash. But, to him, he thinks money holds its value. It doesn’t. It’s got to do something or else it pisses itself away. Or someone else does something with it, uses it as a reserve to give somebody else margin, just an entry on an account balance.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? It’s his money. Keep talking to him. Tell him it’s going to be alright. When the market starts up again, he’ll buy into it. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety out there. But you know what, Mark? Fuck it. It’s only money. It comes and goes and you work for it, I work for it, but you can’t constantly live in the shadow of it, like some towering pile of shit. You have to set it aside in your mind and live your life. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important and you’ve got to work. I work hard every day, well not every day, but I earn my money. Is my job harder than other jobs? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Sales is a great job and it’s lucrative, but it’s not easy. But nothing is easy. You use your personality in sales and that’s it. Sometimes I feel like I’m using it up, and I’ll get to the point in my career where I’ll have nothing left, and that’ll be it, I’ll be nothing. But there are other aspects to pitching stocks, you’ve got to stay organized, pay attention to the details. The main thing is you have to be persistent and you have to be true to yourself. They’ll trust you, that what you’re telling them is the truth. I never lie to a client. Ever.”
“Come on, that’s bullshit.”
“You know what I mean. You never lie in a way that you’ll get caught. Everything you say has to be totally true to the best of your knowledge, at the time. Little by little, some of what you say about this stock or that stock comes out as not exactly true, but, hey, people understand. It’s not like I have total knowledge. Nobody does. And everybody understands that. Nobody knows which way for sure some price is going, up for awhile, drops down, hangs around. Nobody has absolute knowledge. Yes, for a short period of time, if you know something is going to happen, you can trade on it. Your customers learn that you’re not perfect, but they start to see that you’ve got their best interest at heart—they have to believe it in the end or they pull their money, right? So anyone who’s been with you for a while implicitly trusts you. And you can’t take that trust lightly.”
I look over at Allen and see he really believes what he’s saying. I’ve got four hundred thousand invested with him. Do I trust him? I guess yes. Well, not really. But I’m not pulling my money either. He’s a convenient conduit, and I can glean information from him. I’m young, I’ll make more money. Hell, Allen’s made me a lot of money over the last year. I’d like to be a millionaire by the time I’m thirty-five or thirty-six. And Allen’s already got a couple of million in his portfolios. He’ll probably be worth eight figures in a couple of years. Carl, I think is worth around nine million, which is a lot. It’s not a lot, I mean, it’s all relative, really. We’re all just trying to make it up in the world. Carl is not some big time guy, I know. He works, just like we all do. But it is nice to drive a Bimmer. I turn the AC to high. I’m not even sure it’s worth it. How would you calculate it, the money? Well, yes, of course, you can count it. But the intangibles? Money itself is an intangible. How do you count an intangible? With the market fluctuating like a seasick stomach, how do you quantify the time and energy you spend making a living, a good living, a million dollars, whatever. I mean really how? Carl would say, you have to look out at the long-term picture. Where you see yourself in five years. Your vision for your life. It’s a standard corporate interview question. But whatever you say, it says a lot about you, it says everything about you, your hopes, dreams, desires, goals, and also what you are going to do about it now, right now. Most people don’t even take the time or effort to imagine themselves, envision themselves or where they want to be in five years. Do I? Yes. Well, somewhat. I mean, I’m not so sure it matters, ultimately. The difference between me and Carl is he really believes this stuff. I think, a part of me thinks, life just happens. Another part of me thinks it’s what you pick up and do with it that makes all the difference. But you don’t know for sure, do you? In real life we’re restrained by time, energy, ambition, insecurity, knowledge--traffic, that’s what it all comes down to, the market, the competition to get in front of each other swerving and swiping desperately to get ahead of the other guy and cut in front, then squeeze the brakes and I’m stuck right in front of the guy I just cut off but now I’m right on the ass of a grey Lexus, in front of the Mercedes turbo diesel fifteen years old, who is this guy kidding, but on the other hand the new Mercedes are so cheap now, under thirty grand, anyone can afford them, any mid-level sales executive who’s strung together two or three good years in a sellers market, right? I mean it isn’t rocket science because if it were, we wouldn’t all be on this fucking L.I.E. bumper to bumper humming along at eighty miles an hour oh shit what’s this stupid fucking asshole doing, whoa, stand on the breaks the Bimmer fishtails out and I’m on the shoulder to the grassy medium for a second, nothing happens, but I imagine the car flipping over, the rag top shredding and then Allen’s and my neck snapping and we’re decapitated and the last thing I see, my head rolling and bouncing into the grassy ditch is my crumpled BMW banged, crushed and compressed as I die. “This fucking sucks. We’re never going to get there,” I say.
“Sure we will. Don’t panic, man. Yeah, Valerie and I hooked up that night. Very cool girl. I really like her. But we didn’t get together again until like a month later. She was still working in the city part time at some media slash advertising agency and I was busy, still kind of dating Georgette, so I didn’t really know where any of it was going. But I did know I liked her.”
“Well, Allen, if there’s any thing you know, it’s what you like.”
“Fuck you man, I don’t know why I put up with your sarcasm, Price.”