Some Books Aren’t for Reading

by Howard Marc Chesley

  “Does anybody know where he lives?” I ask. Helmet Head knows where Nick lives. Maybe they have reciprocity.

  “Probably under a bridge,” says Bunk.

  “Nobody knows,” says Nick. “He just appears like a cockroach. What would you do if you knew where he lives anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a plan for you.”

  I look at my watch. I have to pick up Caleb.

  Chapter 10

  It was on a Monday at the agency that I was supposed to be thinking about a series of television spots for Carswell Automotive Group, a regional network of GM dealerships. Rick Carswell is its aggressive young owner. We usually shunted local and regional clients to smaller agencies, but Jerry Seligman, my boss and a senior VP at the agency, asked me to woo them. Carswell had just bought out dealerships in Santa Barbara and Palms Springs, and had a modicum of real cash to spend. Not only that, but Rick was a likely choice to be the next head of the GM Western Regional Dealers Association, a marketing cash cow now aligned with a competitor agency. Rick would be entrée into that account.

  Rick’s little empire had been started by his dad. In the sixties, Carswell père used to appear on local TV stations dressed up in a caveman costume standing in front of a line of cars with price stickers. He would announce the price and a buxom cave girl would exclaim to the camera, “Stan is such a wild man!”

  No doubt Rick in his Italian suit carried some discomfiture about his heritage, although the car agency was doing undeniably well. He came to our firm because he was a fan of the slick Nissan national TV campaign that the agency had shot with a lot of cutting-edge visual effects in Monument Valley. At the end the car morphed into a puff of smoke. But Rick was savvy enough to know that Nissan’s budget of four million for three thirty-second spots was clearly out of his reach. And paying even a fraction of that would make his dad spit up lunch in the clubhouse of his Palm Springs golf retirement community.

  I liked Rick and I had anticipated the problem. We talked about it over lunch at Drago. He was right that he needed corporate-looking branding—he needed to tie the dealerships together and give the impression of trustworthy solidity without sacrificing the approachability and friendliness associated with a local agency. Anything cheesy would undermine that message. I had the agency’s best artist rework their logo and I planned to hire a dulcet-toned public radio announcer to do narration that would emphasize Carswell’s fifty years in the business. I knew a talented young director recently out of NYU Film School that would work for a quarter of what we paid the famous movie director that did the Nissan spot. There was a new computer graphics company that worked on inexpensive PCs that, for pocket change, could nearly approximate the wizardry of the Nissan ad. I had a strategy for ad buys on regional cable that would give him the most bang for the buck and groom him as a client. I was on my game.

  Sitting in my office on Monday morning, while musing on a concept that would (as we in the ad business sometimes say) whisper loudly “Carswell Automotive Group,” I thought about my encounter with Chuck Firestone. He may have had friends from Deerfield, but I was an uncomfortably shy teenager and had few remaining connections to Hotchkiss.

  As a matter of policy, I think Hotchkiss would have preferred a darker shaded Negro than me. When I appeared for my admissions interview I could sense the interviewer’s disappointment as he looked at my father’s mocha skin and then at my lighter café-au-lait complexion. No doubt he was on the prowl for deeper browns to better offset the snowy whiteness of his crop of ninth graders. But my Scarsdale public school grades were good, my manners were well honed by proper parents, and there was a commendatory note in my file from the coach of the Hotchkiss sailing team (I was a local champion in Optimist dinghies at our yacht club and a Junior Olympian). Even better, Hotchkiss wouldn’t need to dig into the scholarship fund, yet could still include me in their minority count.

  If I had any doubt of how Hotchkiss regarded me, however, it was made clear when I arrived for the first day at my dorm, Coy Hall, an old, two-story, Spartan brick building. My roommate was already there and unpacked, sitting on his bed. His name was Elwood Johnson. He was from East Baltimore and his skin was a deep, dark brown-black. He looked at me in my polo shirt, khakis and Docksiders with a cocked, inquisitive grin.

  “You a brother or what?”

  “My dad is black.”

  “Well, I guess this here must be where they keep the niggers then.”

  It turned out that there were five black students counting myself in the incoming class of two hundred. The other three were given white roommates. I can’t help but think that I was matched with Elwood as payment for the uppity insult of wearing a Brooks Brothers suit to my admissions meeting. My father was angry (what was the point of going to prep school except to further distance oneself from the Elwood Johnson sort of culture?) and wanted to speak to the headmaster to make him change my roommate, but my mother prevailed. She said she thought it might be a positive experience for me to have the opportunity to interact with a bona fide inner-city black person in totally safe surroundings. I think she didn’t want to make waves.

  Elwood was an “ABC” student, part of the “A Better Chance” scholarship program that was meant to troll for promising inner-city kids from dead-end environments and give them a leg up by putting them in prestigious prep schools. Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Groton and Hotchkiss were all subscribers.

  Elwood had academic talents, but he was also a former junior member of a violent street gang called the Tree Top Pirus or “TTPs.” His language and demeanor had a lot of the street in them. He said “axed” instead of “asked” and “nigger” was exponentially his favorite word although he was canny enough not to use it in class. He was a certifiable math genius. He had gotten an unheard-of perfect score on the SSAT prep school math entry exam and immediately was placed in senior calculus despite being also assigned to remedial writing classes.

  Although he was a total fish-out-of-water, his social charisma was astonishing to me. Even the social register types fought each other off for his attention. He ran for freshman class vice-president and won. With the zeal of an ex-con telling scared-straight stories, he regaled wide-eyed preppies with tales of drug dealing and revenge killings in the streets of East Baltimore. I wondered how much was actually true. Although I made the varsity sailing team, garnered a coterie of sailing friends and was middling social, he was the shining star of Coy Hall room 18.

  One day when I came home late from a sailing regatta in New London I found him sprawled senseless on his bed. A paper bag and several tubes of airplane glue were on the floor. I was afraid he was dead or comatose and I shook him vigorously. He woke up with a start.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  “Are you okay?”

  Clearly from his vacant eyes he wasn’t, but he shrugged and denied.

  “What the fuck? I’m fine.”

  Although some of the younger kids sometimes smoked pot in the woods behind the school and I had heard a few stories of cocaine among upperclassmen, glue-sniffing was acknowledged by everyone as both dangerous and déclassé.

  Elwood looked down and saw the empty tubes of glue and the paper bag and clumsily gathered them up. He and I both knew that Hotchkiss has an ironclad honor code and that if I didn’t report him I could be expelled.

  This may surprise you considering my current state of moral laxity, but I took the school honor code very seriously. Not just because of the expulsion threat, but because the simplicity of the code relieved me of the burdens of equivocation. As a junior sailor, one is expected to act in a “Corinthian” manner. If one breaks a sailing rule while racing, it is one’s duty to notify the race committee. Some racers do. Some don’t. When I was eleven years old, I was leading the pack of thirty Optimist dinghies in the final big race of the season, the Long Island Sound regional junior championship. While rounding a mark of the course, a large inflatable buoy, my rudder just barely kissed
the mark as it bobbed up on a swell. Nobody saw the infraction but me. Without hesitating I chose to re-round the mark, losing twelve places in the race and thereby losing the champion’s trophy. I was devastated to lose the championship, but content with my decision not to burst my moral boundaries. I was not a perfect young man, but even at that young age I understood the lasting comfort and strength one derives from following the rules and doing the right thing, even when nobody is watching.

  “If you tell anybody about this I will kill you. That is not pussy-preppie-repp-tie chitchat. I will fucking come at you, Oreo, and I will kill you. You know this is true.”

  Nobody had ever called me Oreo before. I think of myself as more homogenized than an Oreo—more like a maple cookie.

  Did I think he would really kill me? Probably not. Maybe. Was he scarier than the honor code? No question. Might he have benefitted from a drug intervention brought on by my betrayal? Possibly. Nevertheless I kept my mouth shut, reluctantly ignored the honor code and lived. I also applied for a single room and when a diplomat’s son transferred to school in England, my name came up on the waiting list. When Elwood didn’t return for sophomore year it turned out that in his summer at home in Baltimore he was involved in a dispute with a rival gang and was caught nearby in a car full of guns shortly after a drive-by shooting. When the school heard about it they sent a lawyer to petition that he be tried as a juvenile. The headmaster wrote a letter on his behalf. Because of the letter and a school-provided lawyer he was given probation while his less connected buddies went to jail. Hotchkiss at least had the good sense not to offer him his old spot in the class.

  Still at my desk, I tried to banish thoughts of Elwood and concentrate on the NASDAQ account, but my mind had difficulty making the transition. As mind sorbet I checked my portfolio on the internet. Pretty much an average day in the market. NASDAQ was up about one and a half percent. An auspicious beginning to a ninth straight week of advances. I clicked on the view that would allow me to see how much each of my stocks had gone up.

  Intel was up almost two points to $67. Apple, my new darling, had climbed three and a quarter to $80. Qualcomm was at $67. I bought it two months ago at $39. So far on this day I had made about three thousand dollars, several times what Sather and Knowles paid me. Perhaps I have been spending my hours at the wrong job.

  Thoughts of watercraft filled my head. Not stubby, noisy, smoky powerboats but tall-masted, slender sailing yachts. I imagined my hands resting on the expansive, coxcombed wheel of a sixty-foot ketch. I experienced a familiar sense memory as little kicks of water turbulence fed back to the wheel from the rudder below, like a baby sending signals from the womb to a pregnant mother.

  I reached for my keyboard.

  I remembered what Chuck had told me and typed in the URL for www.stocksynergy.com. The home page was straightforward but not artful and littered with box ads for investment newsletters and portfolio gurus. I found topic headings that included “Big Board,” “NASDAQ,” “Penny Stocks,” and “Mutual Funds.” I chose NASDAQ which led me to an A-Z menu for names of stocks. Just for fun I looked for activity on the Intel forum.

  From: Wavygravy

  Subject: Intel Mid-Day Line

  Intel is up 4¼ from intraweek moving average and should cross 150 by the end of the month. Any pullback to under 120 and I’m in.

  That would be good. I got in at 70. I’ve almost doubled. 150 would be more than doubling my money.

  From: Biggercap

  Subject: Intel Mid-Day Line

  I don’t expect to see it down to 120 again in my lifetime—until of course when it splits! J

  Splitting… That would be nice if it split.

  From: Diddler

  Subject: Intel Mid-Day Line

  Intel is having a major problem delivering Celerons to Toshiba. This is well known among friends who work for Toshiba America and they are rejecting about 20% of the chips that Intel ships.

  Maybe I should sell my Intel and take my profit. I had boasted to True that we had almost doubled our money in Intel. I didn’t want to be made a liar to True. I could sell now and still be a hero in her eyes.

  From: WallyW

  Subject: Intel Mid-Day Line

  You’re behind the curve, Diddler. The Toshiba Celeron problem is old news, reported in a bunch of chipmaker trade publications two days ago. Toshiba is less than 1% of Intel’s gross. I’m looking at 180 by the summer and then a split.

  To my mind credibility rested with WallyW. I decided to let my Intel ride for the moment.

  Having dodged the Intel bullet I wandered to the J’s. I had been eyeing JDS Uniphase. I didn’t own any, but had been considering it. The upside was that it qualified as a pick-and-shovel company. In fact, it was even better than pick and shovel. It was infrastructure. Everybody knew that in a world of “convergence,” where our computers and televisions and telephones were all to be part of the same system and reside in the same box, the delivery network was key. Broadband communications. Fiber optics. Exactly what the product was I couldn’t tell you precisely, but I knew in my gut that JDSU was going to be one of the prime constructors of the internet superhighway, getting rid of those meddlesome bottlenecks. JDSU had the critical mass to command the market. Like Cisco did with routers. Remarkably enough, I could say the word “router” with such comfort to my office friends that I was almost convinced I knew what a router does.

  While I had been modestly doubling my money in Intel, JDSU had skyrocketed from $15 to $150 in six months. And now it was about to eat its competition, with a plan to buy its smaller rival, SDL. Of course I knew it was volatile compared to the stocks I had been buying, but look what a little risk taking had gotten me. Larger risk could mean only larger rewards.

  I pulled up the Seymour Schein Investments page. I used Seymour Schein because it was a ubiquitous, hungry, booming national discount brokerage and trades were much cheaper than traditional brokers like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. I logged in with ID (Adman) and password (utopia). (Don’t bother to try them—the account is long dead.) Other passwords I have used are destiny, salvation and resurgence.

  JDSU was down four points at $194⅛. A sign of weakness or a dip and perhaps a buying opportunity? I checked the consensus of analysts’ reports. Of fourteen analysts following the stock, twelve thought it was a “strong buy” and two worrywarts thought it was just a “buy.” Nobody advocated “hold” or “sell.” The six-month target price was $250, but this was an era when targets were always moving, and always moving upward.

  There was only seven thousand dollars in the cash account, and to add to it would mean that I would need to get True to cosign a draft from our bank to the brokerage. But I had a margin account which meant I could automatically borrow money from Schein to buy using my equity in the stock as collateral. A hundred shares would cost over twelve thousand but I didn’t have to put it all up. I had a good feeling about JDSU.

  I put in a good-until-cancelled margin order for a hundred and fifty shares at $102—five dollars under the current price, hoping that the train hadn’t already left and JDSU might never see $192 again.

  Two hours later, I was straining to noodle a Carswell TV ad concept, but all that came to mind was young Rick Carswell dressed in his dad’s caveman costume.

  An email from Schein popped on my screen informing me that my order for three hundred shares had been filled at $191¾. I abandoned Carswell immediately to go to the Schein website to check the current price. When I found it was now down to $188 I got a pinched feeling in my gut.

  Chapter 11

  I muse about Hemingway in Cuba as I sit parked in the pickup line at Jefferson School. True drops Caleb off in the morning on Thursday (our switch day) and I pick him up in the afternoon. That way we don’t have to see each other during the handoff. Sunday mornings, when I drop him off at her house on Colonial Street, are more awkward. I park in the driveway and let Caleb out, making sure that he has all of his school things in his backpack, an
d then I watch him go to the front door and ring the bell. True gives him a big showy hug without a glance in my direction. I know she’ll quiz him later on what we did together. If we went to the Space Museum, she’ll suspect I’m pandering and trying to buy his allegiance. If I take him to odd neighborhoods with me while I look for garage sale books, she’ll enter into her scorecard one more affirmation of my neglect.

  I doubt that Hemingway waited to retrieve his children after school. I read that one of his three boys became a transsexual. That would be fitting payback to homophobe “Papa” for spending his time dodging bulls in Pamplona and fighting marlin off Key West rather than showing up early like me for a good spot in the K-3 pickup line.

  Jefferson School turns out to be not so bad. Caleb’s kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Mirisch, took a liking to my shy and well-mannered little boy. Also, a resolute new principal is running a turnaround operation. Under her leadership the school has been cleaned up, largely with co-opted neighborhood parent labor and money. I spent a Saturday with Caleb and families painting away graffiti on the cinderblock wall of the school that faces the back alley. I contributed some large and shiny books to the school flea market to be sold for a dollar or two each and received the nodding approbation of the PTA chairwoman.

  The school bell rings at three on the button and, five seconds later (I instinctively count down from the sound of the bell), I hear the crescendo of youngsters scrambling headlong to the school perimeter. I spot Caleb in the throng. His eyes search and then land on the Volvo. With a broad grin he radiates primal pleasure as he sees me. He runs akimbo toward the car. I get out and greet him with a fatherly caress on the shoulder, open the car door for him. He has a slender face with nicely chiseled, delicate features and rich dark brown eyes. His complexion is fair like True’s family but I gave him his soulful dark eyes.