Some Books Aren’t for Reading

by Howard Marc Chesley

  “We’re treading water.”

  “Oh well.”

  “Oh well?”

  “I had hoped that we would somehow be magically rich.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. We’re fine the way we are. We’re very lucky.”

  I didn’t say anything but I reached for the radio. She took my hand tenderly.

  “Don’t feel bad, Sweetie. Think of all the poor people out there who are probably losing their savings.”

  Caught in the discomfort of the moment I somehow found myself driving home by way of Chuck’s house. No doubt Chuck was in the interior of my thoughts at the moment and perhaps that is what drew me there. In True’s presence I tried not to show a special recognition, but I did note by turning my eyes and not my neck that the boat was no longer there and that the Jaguar was still under its cover on the edge of the front driveway.

  “You know, I am not comfortable with the stock market. I know I said I was. But I’m not,” she said as she turned down the Mozart on the radio.

  “Not comfortable?”

  “Just I don’t like risk. You know how being near a blackjack table in Vegas makes me crazy and nauseous. And I think about my dad. Can you imagine what he would think if he knew we were playing his money in the stock market?”

  “I don’t know that ‘playing’ is the right term.”

  “He was very conservative about finances. You told me that you respected that about him.”

  “I did.”

  “Can we get out? Can we just sell what we have invested and get out? I mean it.”

  I hesitated a moment and swallowed.

  “Sure. We’ll get out.” In a manner of speaking, we already were.

  “You mean it?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re not disappointed?”

  “No. We’ll get out.”

  “We could take a little vacation with some of it. What do you think?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m glad. This high stakes gambling isn’t for us. It isn’t who we are.”

  I wondered what the fallout might have been for Chuck. I wondered what among the things that he told me might have been true. Did he indeed have four thousand shares of Biogram as he said? Did he suffer bigger losses than I did? I certainly hoped so. I would have enjoyed seeing a “for sale” sign on his lawn and a moving van parked in front.

  Chapter 21

  I really should depart chez Helmet Head. After HH’s offer to teach me to be a better bookseller I find myself curiously hesitant to move on. Am I really considering accepting HH’s offer of counsel? God knows I could improve. For some reason I seem to be drawn to him in his alternate persona.

  “How could you help me?” I ask warily.

  “You could start off by getting more comfortable in your own skin.”

  I nod, immediately regretting having given him the opening. He continues. “You think you’re too good for the job.”

  “With all due respect, you don’t know what I think.”

  “People sense it, Ralph. They sense that you think you’re above them. I don’t have that problem.”

  “You want me to follow your example?”

  “Fuck no. But a little humility would enhance your business and your life.”

  He grins and pauses, feigns an “aha” moment. “Your wife dump you?” He continues on at my non-response. “Because of money?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Could you perform sexually?”

  “That is none of your business and yes. I thought you were going to tell me about Desert Storm.”

  He opens the refrigerator which is largely bare except for a large supply of cheeses and a box of eggs. He flips the lid on the egg box and there are only two eggs inside.

  “Oops. Low egg alert. I have a nice Idiazabal here and I have a good Malbec-Cabernet from Sonoma that I’ve been saving.”

  “I’m guessing Idiazabal is cheese?”

  “It’s Basque. It’s mildly aromatic and medium hard. I have some soda crackers. We could do that and you could eat when you get home. You’re probably better off. I got stomach issues that make me fart big time when I eat eggs.”

  “Good. Where were you wounded?”

  I have to wait for him to put the cheese on plates and pull out a bottle of wine from an impressive looking rack of wines over the counter.

  “It’s a 2005 from a little vineyard that only does a few hundred bottles a year. I got six bottles for a buck apiece in an estate sale in Hancock Park. Estate sale people haven’t got a fucking clue about wine. It sells for about a hundred a bottle at Wine Merchant.”

  He opens it with one of those fancy openers that looks like a gynecologist’s instrument and puts it on a butcher block counter off the kitchen area. He motions for me to sit on a bar stool as he finds a knife for the cheese. I am not totally comfortable, but pleased to see his knife is small and benignly rounded at the tip. He settles onto a stool, cuts several slices off the cheese and speaks.

  “I was an E4 in the 37th Engineer Battalion and they flew me to Qatar in 1991. I never saw a living Iraqi soldier in combat. Plenty of dead ones after. After they buried half the Iraqi army alive in trenches and blew to shit the rest of them, my platoon was supposed to follow after and blow up their ammo dumps. You ever hear of a place called Khamisiyah?”

  “Nope.”

  “Weapons storage facility in the middle of the fucking desert. Remember this is March already. We had a cease-fire in February and by the time the cease-fire comes, nobody’s thinking chemical weapons anymore. The 82nd airborne has already done a security sweep of the area. If the Iraqis had them, they would have used them. We all had these MOPP suits but nobody was wearing them. We just carried our masks and we figured that if there was a problem the detectors would start buzzing and let us know. So we’re basically in this place which is a bunker in the middle of fucking desert nowhere and there’s ammo stored there. There’s bullets, but there’s mortars and explosive shells and rockets and grenades, too.”

  “Can I ask you something? What were you doing in the army? Did you just join up?”

  “Hello? The draft’s been over for thirty years.”

  “Was your father in the army or something?

  “My dad was an art dealer on Melrose Avenue.”

  This wasn’t the answer I was expecting but it could help explain the Ed Ruscha on the floor.

  “Your mother was an ethnomusicologist and your father was an art dealer?”

  “Yeah. And I dumpster dive for books. Is that what’s bothering you, Ralph? The incongruity of it all? Maybe your great-grandfather was a slave.”

  “Actually it was my great-great-grandfather.”

  “Well, he’d probably be very disappointed in you if he could see you now, don’t you think?”

  “Why did you join the army?”

  “Because I thought it would be better than jail. I was young and didn’t know any better.”

  “You would have gone to jail if you didn’t go in the army?”

  “I got in some trouble. As I said, I was young and I might have been dealing a little meth to make ends meet.”

  “You were going to go to jail for dealing meth?”

  “Let me say now that I think meth is a really bad thing and I would never be dealing it today.”

  That would explain a lot. Not enough, but a lot. He continues his story, however.

  “Anyway, I sold a quarter ounce to some tasty little fox and I wound up taking part of it in trade if you get my drift. And it turned out she was fourteen. And she told her parents and they—well, you get the picture.”

  “So they let you go into the army instead of going to jail.”

  “It wasn’t about me. It was about my ‘poor parents.’ Their friends in the DA’s office couldn’t let me put a black mark on their permanent parenting record.”

  “So they just let you off.”

  “There were some favors invol
ved. My dad knew some people. It would have been bad for his business to have offspring in jail for meth.”

  “Were you in trouble before?”

  “Of course I was in trouble before. I got suspended from Beverly Hills High School for selling a little pot to friends. But nothing like rape. That I didn’t have before. I was still in school for Chrissake.”

  “Beverly High?”

  “And University of Spoiled Children after.”

  This can’t be. Deep inside I expected to find a Hector without a story. Someone who had sprung full blown out of a crack in the sidewalk and was destined from inception to tussle with old ladies over DVDs at church sales. But educated, upper-middle-class parents, University of Southern California? If he has a story of degradation and entropy, then anyone can have a story of degradation and entropy. Even I could. Part of me would like to end this conversation and part of me can’t be stopped.

  “I am on fucking Megan’s list,” he adds. “I thought you wanted to hear war stories.”

  “So what happened in Iraq?” I ask.

  “It wasn’t my job to be looking for chemical weapons. My guys were just support. Carry things and look out for trouble for the EOD guys.”

  “EOD?”

  “Explosive Ordinance Disposal. Guys are fucking crazy. They do the roadside bombs and shit. Anyway the EODs were told that the Iraqis marked all of their chemical weapons with yellow bands. That’s how they kept from poisoning themselves. And if there was any chemical stuff—and mostly we were expecting sarin and cyclosarin—they’d probably be in the 122mm rockets. And there’s like a zillion 122mm rockets in cases there. So they go through half of them and none of the boxes they open have markings on the shells or on the boxes. Good to go, right? So they pack the bunkers with two hundred pounds of C4 and everybody in my platoon goes two clicks northwest which is upwind and we wait and there is the biggest fucking bunch of booms you ever heard and smoke and sand and pieces of ammo and boxes and everything goes up like a mile in the air. And we’re thinking that’s cool and then one of the M8A1’s starts going berserk—”

  “Who’s an M8A1?”

  “Not who. What. It’s our chemical detector.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We’re way the fuck away from things and we can see it’s still blowing downwind, but the sergeant starts yelling to put on our MOPP suits, so we do, even though mine and most of the others are full of holes. So fine. And none of the other alarms go off and everybody says it was just a fluke.”

  “And did anyone get sick?”

  “A couple of guys got nosebleeds the next day.”

  “And you?’

  “I got the shits. But I had the shits half the time I was there.”

  “So what happened?”

  “A week later I’m in a tent in the desert and I get up in the middle of the night and my skin is all burning and I can’t breathe. I get sent to the hospital in Qatar and they say I have asthma. They don’t know about my skin burning and it’s stopped but I have like these red spots. I never had asthma in my life. And I can’t eat anything. And my gums are bleeding. And I’ve still got the shits. And then I get this thing where I kind of twitch my shoulders. It’s kind of subtle. I don’t know if you notice it.”

  Subtle as a sledgehammer. But I give a kind of shrug to acknowledge without prejudice the existence of the twitch and he continues.

  “And there’s other guys there with a dozen different versions of what I’ve got and there’s a buzz about chemical weapons. One guy says he was someplace where he got some kind of yellow powder all over him after an Iraqi rocket went off near the compound. But nobody wants to hear it and some lieutenant comes in to see me and says that it would be bad for the war or morale or something if rumors started about chemical weapons and that I should shut up and not jump to conclusions at least until somebody figures out what happened to me. And a doctor comes in and tells me that I’ve got PTSD. Fuck me. I’ve got Post Poisoned-With-Fucking-Chemicals Disorder is what I’ve got. But that’s not even the completely weird part. You want to know what really freaks me out?”

  “What?” I say, although maybe I don’t really want to know.

  “The medics decide to send me back to Qatar when I start coughing up blood and they put me in a Humvee with two lieutenants who were being reassigned and some shit-kicker kid from Mississippi driving the thing and he drives sixty miles an hour into a fucking ditch and the Humvee flips like seven times and then explodes. All three of them are totally wasted and dead. I get thrown out into a sand dune and outside of the fact that I’m poisoned by Saddam, there’s nothing wrong with me besides a sprained shoulder. I mean what the fuck is that about? Is God preserving me so that he can torture me with Iraqi chemicals? Is that what this is about?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the guy who goes to church.”

  “Anyway they ship me back to Walter Reed and I seem to have a bit of a problem with some of their cognition tests. I mean in some ways I’m still there, but in other ways you can see I’ve got wires crossed. The ones with all the squares and the triangles I always screw up. I didn’t get stupid, but I have problems putting some things together. You ever go to Mexico and all the signs are in Spanish and everything seems the same but different. That’s how I feel all the time. And I’ve got dreams about exploding puppies and falling in big vats of sulfuric acid. Before all this happened if I had a bad thought, I’d think of something pleasant or smoke some pot and everything would be cool. Now things are happening inside my head and I can swallow a pharmacy and they don’t go away.”

  My phone rings. I look and it’s True again. This gives me a chill. I haven’t forgotten Caleb is sick. I also know True doesn’t make a habit of calling, and calling twice never happens. I grab the phone out of my pocket and move a few steps away, turning from HH.

  “True?”

  “I’m taking Caleb to St. Mary’s emergency room. I think he’s having an allergic reaction to the Ceclor.”

  My stomach feels light.

  “How do you know?”

  “It started with a rash on his arms and then all of a sudden his face started puffing up. I called Dr. Levy and he said to give him Benadryl.”

  “Do you have Benadryl?”

  “Yes! I gave it to him and it didn’t help!”

  I can hear the panic in her voice. It is a very unusual tone for her.

  “He started turning blue and he’s having trouble breathing!” Now I hear her speak to Caleb, “It’s okay, baby, we’re almost there. I’m talking to Daddy.” Back to me. “Can you hear him wheezing?” I can’t, but I can imagine it. “I called Dr. Levy back and he said to go to the emergency room and he’d meet me there.”

  “Where are you?” I ask.

  “I’m two blocks away!”

  “I’m coming over!”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Hollywood. I’m leaving now.” I am not sure why I am saying Hollywood instead of Crenshaw. It’s a silly white lie for no good reason. HH senses I am about to leave.

  “My kid is sick,” I tell him.

  “You know I was just fucking with you about the book. No hard feelings. Right?”

  I kind of nod as I head for the door.

  “You know, sometimes you should look past the publisher’s page. Just a suggestion.”

  I take this as a small insult, as if I needed to be reminded that art is more important than lucre, but I let it go. I put the book under my arm. I am in a hurry.

  Chapter 22

  Weeks went by and I found myself unable to tell True the truth about my stock trading or to come up with a viable plan to restore the money. The NASDAQ had made a modest retrenchment from its April low, up 6 percent after losing more than a third. Mostly I chose not to read the financials because they only brought me back to the same unpleasant place, but when I did I found myself with a despicable case of schadenfreude applied to all investors, not just Chuck and his bosses. I am embarrassed to say that I ch
eered the market downward so that others might suffer as I have.

  I had time to think, reason and research (going forward I will always begin with this process and not end with it) and I was able to come up with several plausible explanations of what happened to me. I probably will never know for sure, but here is the scenario that seems most plausible:

  As Chuck had said, Roos and Selvin was a small investment brokerage that managed money and made trades mostly for its own clientele. They also traded for their own account and had sizeable positions in a number of stocks. Chuck was what was called a position trader and he had done quite well for the company, although in the late nineties it was hard to do badly. A fair amount of their portfolio was in biotech stocks and R/S became known as a market maker in the biotech area sometimes referred to as (the irony is not lost on me) “the smart money.”

  Roos and Selvin had taken a large position in Biogram, a relatively small biotech company, presumably because they had good information that it would succeed with Hemobiplastin. Now here is where I am still a bit confused—it is entirely possible that, suffering in the sudden new bear market, Roos and Selvin indeed had to come up with cash to satisfy the SEC as Chuck said. Frankly, I had no way of verifying that but it was a possible scenario.

  It is alternately possible that Chuck and his company had inside knowledge that there was a problem in the trials and knew before I came along that the stock was going to tank. In that case, his ostensibly self-serving deal for warrants would have been part of the scam.

  In either case they desperately needed to dump some Biogram. If a market maker like Roos and Selvin were to sell large quantities on the open market, buyers would recognize the source and immediately suspect that something was wrong because the “smart money” was getting out. Suddenly buyers would disappear and the stock would slide. Best for them to unload it quickly and privately, preferably not on their best customers who then would probably leave the brokerage in anger, but rather unload it on strangers. Enter good neighbor Mitchell Fourchette.

  As I said, I don’t know if Chuck had inside knowledge of the clinical trial problems. If he didn’t, then what he did to me might have been a slightly less heinous equivalent to the moral difference between slaughtering elephants and slaughtering whales, for example.