by Jack Livings
Yes, a seemingly intractable situation, Shahin said, shaking his head somberly.
We met through a mutual friend—a friend from college days, Bo said.
Of course, Daisy said.
Why had he said that?
My old roommate from Boston days, he said. There’s a terribly funny story behind it—I’ll have to tell you when there’s time. Neil Ford. He’s at JPM and as it happens does some work for Mr. Jahanbani’s family.
Shut up, he thought. Stop talking.
Yes, I’m afraid we’re all but permanent residents now, said Shahin.
It’s awful, what’s happening, Daisy said. Bo forced himself not to sneer. Is the old bag actually bringing her little fucking embroidered hankie up to her nose, the mere thought of revolution too much for her delicate constitution to bear? Yes, she is. And there, with the hankie poised, she waits. What’s she waiting for? She’s waiting for Nelofar or Shahin to divulge some intimacy—the source of their money, their real connection to Bo, an opening into which she might insert her proboscis and drain them of their precious life-giving mammon, but they, in turn, were waiting her out, nodding sympathetically back at her, and Bo saw that they were going to stall her until her wings melted and she fell right out of the sky, and he could have just dropped to his knees and mauled the toes of Shahin’s calfskin brogues with his tongue, and Nelofar, oh, Nelofar, oh, spiced tits and mystery—
But what if it’s too late? What if Daisy’s already got what she needs and she’s just digging in the turd pile to see what stinks?
My god. Look at these poor souls, Bo boomed. Waiting here dry as a bone and I’m just standing by like a drugstore Indian without even offering—champagne? French 75? A scotch? Old-fashioned?
Champagne would be lovely, Nelofar said.
I’ll accompany you, Shahin said. Mrs. Walker? Anything for you?
Daisy held up her glass of white to decline. She tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve.
The two men lurched through the crowd to the bar.
Cagey old girl. Before you arrived, she was trying to suss out my bloodline, Shahin said.
She’s a scourge, Bo said.
Insultingly direct. Something about talking to a brown person does seem to give these people the idea the boundaries of good taste are porous, Shahin said. And the look on your face! Charging over like a mother elephant to protect her calves. I was touched.
Jesus. No way I’d leave you alone with that one.
You have such little faith in us? Look at Nelofar. Like Talleyrand. She’ll take that woman apart and leave her in pieces on the floor, Shahin said.
It was true that already Nelofar had Daisy on her back foot, flashing those porcelain dentures like fangs, and Bo felt another hot surge of lust.
No ill can befall me so long as she is by my side, Shahin said. But you know that. She’s not the one you’re worried about. You’re worried what I might slip and offer up without so much as a finger’s pressure?
Nonsense. Only trying to protect the investment, Bo said.
Ah well. In any case, misplaced concern, though I admire the energy you expend guarding your investment. I am sober as a judge, I promise. And when in this unfortunate state, I do know how to keep my mouth shut. Didn’t I tell you about my exit interview? SAVAK had me in a chair for three days before they’d grant us visas and I can assure you they were slightly less civilized than dear old Daisy over there. I’m not a complete moron, you know, Shahin said, turning back to the bar to collect the scotch and champagne. And, Bo? If you want to shag my wife, just come out and ask. I know you Americans are pathologically afraid of voicing your urges, but it’s just pitiful to watch you try to keep your tongue in your mouth.
With that, Bo’s twenty-five-million-dollar long position in the West Texas Intermediate crude market walked back to his wife to present her with the champagne flute he so elegantly cradled in his fingers. Shahin leaned in and spoke into her ear. She smiled broadly and raised her glass to Bo, diamond bracelet flickering at him like a thousand tongues. Goodness gracious, he thought. There’s something to file away for a rainy day.
Dirty business, this, and gee, he felt terrific. Except the soul-sucking Beatles were still killing his party, hacking at its shins with their ice-cream sundae spoons, and he made haste for the hi-fi cabinet. The Idiot or Lust for Life? Lust for Life, of course. Ozone and hot aluminum when he opened the door. The needles tipping to George Harrison’s guitar, barely even touching 100 watts. Pathetic. Bo hadn’t paid some kid with bad skin in a Zeppelin T-shirt to build a system for him. He had sourced every item himself. Teac X-300 reel-to-reel direct from Tokyo. Two Audio Research EC-5 crossovers; Sansui amps and preamp; a TU-717 tuner; Bang & Olufsen Beogram turntable. He had two pairs of KLH Double Nine speakers, but those were for private listening. A party was a waste of their reproductive qualities. Arguably, a party was a bigger waste of the beasts from White Bear Lake he had running now, and which he’d taken delivery of only months earlier, Magneplanar Tympani IIIAs and a IIIA-W bass panel, speakers the size of room dividers, and that were, without question, the best money could buy, the Hope Diamond of speakers, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the fucking Covenant right there blowing divine wind into your ears. Too much for these cretins. But to hell with it, he was letting everyone listen to them because that’s the type of guy he was. And George Harrison quim-toeing around the mulberry bush was no fucking test of the engineering behind a system like this.
A quick transition would be key. Silence, even silence signaling the death of the loathsome Beatles, would give the party time to think. You might as well turn the lights up and open all the windows. Like an empty glass or no one to talk to, silence stirred you from the shared dream, clapped a damper on the rhythm that propelled you from one conversation to the next, the upward flow of vibes, the expansiveness that overtook you after the third drink and a bump of coke. Look upon your kingdom, behold your subjects, how they move, their hair bouncing, their bodies like leaves on a swift river. You cannot deny them sound, even the wretched Beatles. God, now it’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” though he could let it play through and spiral out, end of side A, switch to Iggy then, everyone knows the album’s all downhill after the first side, it would be natural, a seamless shift, but he’s got Lust for Life out of its sleeve and Iggy’s smiling out at him with those big goo-goo eyes like Pat Boone, and god whatever became of Pat Boone, on the radio in some hot moldy place by a lake where the moths laid themselves flat against the screens at night like hieroglyphs and the frogs sang so loud the air had texture. They’d been down South somewhere, the walls and ceiling of the place knotty pine coaxing pareidolian visions as he and his brothers lay in bed summoning animals, old hags, battleships, long-limbed ball players, boobs, rockets, genitalia, and they’d lie there in that hotbox of a house after lunch, imposed rest to keep them out of the water so they wouldn’t cramp up and drown, until set free to swim and lie on the hot boards of the dock and watch the honey-colored boats pull skiers back and forth in endless, lazy loops of the cove where there was no chop because the smoothly sloping banks absorbed their wakes with susurrous little splashes. Pat Boone’s “Ain’t That a Shame” on the transistor radio all summer long, and the Fats Domino version on the Negro stations, and they would switch back and forth and never not be listening to it. Domino’s was better—his really swung, and it was he who converted them so that by the end of that July all they listened to was WNKO. All night, jazz and gospel, the Soul Stirrers and Swan Silvertones, and R&B in the daytime, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats.
“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” faded out and Bo hesitated, his hand over the shelf of LPs, his finger seeking out Fats. Hell, why not, it was his party. The needle tracked through the deep groove, the desert land of dead wax, reached the end of its journey, died, and floated away. Bo’s fingertip bumped across the top of the albums. There. Tip, pinch, pull. He heard the shush of the sleeve sliding out, a sound he couldn’t possibly have heard over the crowd but
that he did, all the same, hear, and there he held it, a temporal artifact—a record, ha!—encoded with his past, a time-travel machine. All he had to do was place it on the spindle and he would be transported to that summer, the one without his father, where he and his brothers and mother lived a light, gentle existence in a cabin by the water.
But not tonight. A more urgent need worked at his heart. He put Fats back on the shelf, laid on its side atop the rank and file. A voice shouted, Sounds, Vornado! and he responded with a middle finger directed at the heathen who might put demands on him in his time of reflection.
Because Bo knew that not one soul at his party had heard Lust for Life yet, and he desperately wanted to make sure that every time they ever heard the album again, they’d think of this night and his party. He knew the music was that good, and at the time, it was rare. Released September 1977, failed to chart in the U.S., buried under the re-release of Elvis’s backlog so RCA could capitalize on the King’s death, you couldn’t pick up a copy at King Karol, couldn’t find it at Bleecker Bob’s. No one even knew Lust for Life existed until Bo played it for them, and therein lay the nucleus around which he had molded his entire life: the Sutor Mantellassis, the Joan Mitchell, the Magneplanars, the Iran oil deal, the R107 SL he kept on the island, his desire for any woman he’d never seen before, young, old, goddess, or goblin, the Patek Philippes, the Montblancs, the trips to Mustique, the standing army of acquaintances that filled seven Rolodexes. This party, this intimate gathering for five hundred. Displays of wealth and power? Sure, man. But wealth and power served a greater master: novelty.
Bo loved possibility. He was a hopeless romantic who saw limitless potential in every new thing he acquired. He couldn’t help imagining his life transformed by the addition of new things—and so it had been, over and over again, each accumulation an adjustment. Just never enough. Boredom, that rarefied boredom known only to those who managed to achieve exactly what they’d set out to do, persisted. Make no bones, a charmed life is a dull life.
Bo slid the vinyl from its paper sheath and executed a gyroscopic flip, side one sunny-side up, spidered his hand beneath, checked the pitch sensor, checked the amp volume, gave it some gas, and with something like a giggle slotted the hole onto the spindle and released. For a moment before the velvet surface caught, the record hung there while the table executed glissade, and he got a quick thrill on the order of seeing a Mustang doing a burnout, the self-annihilating explosion of laying a good hit on a running back, a hard fuck in the daylight. Fuck, yeah! he screamed and dropped the needle and the crackle came and a deep breath later the kick drum started thumping, cymbal clanging, the bass joined up alongside at the same pitch, the guitar picking up the rhythm, and on and on for thirty bars, seventy seconds of setup, the band lathering up and rinsing off like they’re all drunk and aren’t sure they even want to play, but that rhythm keeps pumping along irresistibly, a swinging tetrameter built on a kick drum floor tom Morse code, and they can’t leave it alone, they have to join in.
What could Bo know about the song except that he loved its dance-hall jungle beat, that he loved Iggy Pop for being a profane presence in the world? What more did he need to know? Did he need to know that Pop and David Bowie wrote and recorded the song at Hansa Studios, a stone’s throw from Checkpoint Charlie? That Pop and Bowie, thrown together in Berlin, settled in to watch Starsky & Hutch every Thursday night on the Armed Forces Network, whose station identifier was a pleasant rhythm of dits and das, a rhythm that Pop and Bowie passed along to drummer Hunt Sales, who immediately recognized it as the beat from the Supremes’ “Can’t Hurry Love,” and cooked up a version that sounded like a big-bore V8 running wide open on a cold, deserted Indiana highway?
If he’d known any of this, would he have been somehow more rabid for the song? Would the rest of the party, who had, incidentally, reacted exactly as Bo had known they would, collectively trampolining, sloshing their drinks all over the Afghan rugs and the calfskin sofas—would they have felt any different? Probably not.
It didn’t matter to my father, either, who mentioned none of it in his book. But it matters to me, that military brat of a song, conceived at AFN, delivered wet and squirmy on the front lines of the Cold War, its birth certificate stamped in a country whose chief arms supplier during both world wars, Krupp AG, had just sold a stake in its operations to the government of Iran.
* * *
At their first meeting, in a booth at Studio 54, bubbles pumping out of tubes hidden in the ceiling, the music so loud it actually made champagne glasses shimmy across the tables, Shahin had yelled at Bo: I’ll tell you a secret!
Bo opened his eyes, mouth, tipped back his head in a pose of open acceptance.
Pipeline management! Shahin yelled.
Bo flashed the thumbs-up, though he’d passed the threshold of aural paralysis about an hour back, when someone had fired an honest-to-god cast-iron naval cannon from the mezzanine at the twelve-foot Godzilla piñata gliding across the dance floor on urethane wheels, spooky as hell, Boom, smoke, paper everywhere, pharmaceutical-grade guts spilled all over the floor. Mob scene. Bo’s ears had flatlined.
Three days later, they met again, this time at Neil’s apartment on Park, in a living room with textured wallpaper and golden tassels on the brocade sofa pillows. If Shahin under the strobes had come off as a prick, Bo accepted that under normal light it was nothing more than standard Oxbridge snottery. Okay, so he’d eaten caviar out of some whore’s cunt in Paris and he’d boxed up at university and beat off under his subfusc with the rest of them, let’s get down to brass tacks, whaddyagot?
Shahin: The problem is not that the Shah will be deposed. He’s an interchangeable part manufactured by your government. He failed to keep his own greed in check and he’ll be overthrown. So be it. What will go with him, unfortunately, are the engineers managing the oil fields. The new regime will replace them with inexperienced engineers whose only qualifications are that they pray five times a day, and then we’ll start to see real problems. Problems with extraction, problems with transport.
Okay, Bo said.
The oil won’t dry up, but it will choke. My suggestion is to look away from Iran for profit. Look domestic. Look for profit in the expansion of the West Texas fields.
I appreciate the advice, but I can buy into the WTI market without you, Bo said.
Shahin shrugged and frowned in the French manner that said, Obviously, asshole.
All right, then, what? Bo said.
I have excellent connections in West Texas.
So do I, Bo said.
Excellent connections.
Bo laughed. Okay.
I know a man who knows everyone in West Texas and beyond.
Ah, Bo said, gears beginning to turn. Saudi?
He is Saudi, yes, Shahin said.
Aha.
He is currently partner in thirty-two ventures in West Texas.
Only thirty-two?
Thirty-two under the family name. There are more, you’re correct.
How many?
Shahin shrugged again, looked at the ceiling. Fifty? he said. Seventy-five?
It was as though a stream of warm, fragrant oil had been poured over Bo’s naked body. He struggled to control the muscles in his face, which were conspiring to set off a smile that would introduce the corners of his lips to his fucking eyebrows.
A partner of yours? Bo said.
Of sorts. We were up at Millfield together. And it is his opinion that American domestic production is set to rise. But I only tell you this as thanks for your time. I’m in shipping, what would I know about oil?
Right, Bo said. You’re in shipping. He knew what was coming next, and he sat back and waited.
Shahin obliged, of course, cuing the origin story. My father, he said, was born into a feudal system and orphaned when he was ten. What happens to an orphan in Iran in 1920? He becomes a beggar. But my father was taken in by the caretaker at a mosque, a man named Parizad. He learned to read, he studie
d the Quran. He became a porter. By the time he was twenty, he had an army of porters working for him. After the British and Russians left in ’46, his operations expanded, and after years of humble hard work he was in a position to take over some shipping routes in the Caspian. As you know, we now control three companies. Two overland, the other covering international waterways. To be frank, I’m having difficulty liquidating the companies, and every day my country moves a little closer to its inevitable fate. My family’s money is staked in accounts outside the country—and that money is not money I can risk, you understand? That is money for unborn generations.
I understand.
I am an honest businessman, as my father was. My father cared for Parizad until the day he died. We are loyal. Until I am able to liquidate my companies, I need a partner who will—for lack of a better term—front me some cash. And for his risk, I’ll pay back at a more-than-fair rate.
Gotcha, Bo said. And where do you plan to put the cash?
I’d like to make an investment in the West Texas fields, of course, Shahin said. I would never make a recommendation I’m not willing to take myself.
And what’s my rate of return?
For this particular line of credit?
For this particular line of credit, yes.
Five percent and a percentage of the sale price of the shipping companies.
Gotcha, Bo said. He could get eight percent and a toaster at the Harlem Savings Bank. This was all expected. He’d walked into the room assuming the conversation was a front. The sale of the shipping companies—which would never happen—the absurdly low interest rate, all of it was stagecraft, polite misdirection. But because he’s on his knees, he’s going to make me come out and ask for it, Bo thought.
What more can I offer you? Shahin said. More than five percent?
Five isn’t much.
Even in this market, Shahin said, the companies are worth thirty million. The assets alone would bring in fifteen. What do you want? Ten percent of the sale price?
