Simpson, it seemed, had been a college chum of Hopscotch, and although the former finished his studies, the latter did not; nevertheless, it was Simpson who went bankrupt and he reputedly did so with the Hopscotch dough, a veritable small fortune amassed through some shady speculation on shale deposits underneath the Merrimac Caverns in Missouri.
The James Gang once lived in the caverns when the boys were on the lam from marshals who forgot to look down. Bo was fascinated with the gun-slinging, felonious activities of wild-west crooks. That should have been an early clue all was not O.K. at the corral.
But we had a singular common bond. After all, I’m a blood relative of Daddy, one of the biggest swindlers of the century, a chronic condition brought about no doubt, by his direct descendant lineage from Sally H. Butler his great-grandmother, who shot and wounded her boyfriend, a sheriff in Jacksonville, Illinois. According to the gossipmongers, she had found him in flagrante delicto with the local milliner’s wife who, alarmingly, was a man. I always thought those old-fashioned hats had more feather boas going on than any real woman could credibly consider comfortable.
While perusing some old west memorabilia in which the shale deposits were mentioned, Hopscotch came up with the idea for Merrimac Cavern Shale and Oil Holding Company of Missouri. The MerriMac, as it became known in brokerage circles, held the lease to some of the oldest shale deposits in North America.
What potential investors heard, however, was that the MerriMac was the best-kept, moneymaking secret this side of the Atlantic. Hopscotch knew people hear what they want to hear. Armed with a phone script that would become a prototype for the telemarketing mania of the late eighties and nineties, his phone jockeys began calling the preferred list of clients whose outstanding common denominator was they had fallen for scams like this one in the past.
How do I know this? Daddy is a partner in a brokerage house, somewhere on the East coast, and he was discounting before it was fashionable. The combination of discount and deference is too much for many people to resist.
“It’s a numbers game, Ret,” Daddy always said, adding, “If you call enough fools, someone’s gonna agree to pay the phone bill. Don’t forget that,” he said. I thought of my currently past due phone bill and wondered for the millionth time if I were adopted.
Before anyone could say MerriMac a dozen times, the stock was practically a blue chip caliber issue. Somehow, despite everything being technically on the up and up, nobody made any money except Hopscotch. Simpson subsequently squandered the same money on numerous deals that went tapioca.
In the end, though, friendship being what it is these days, with everyone so terribly flighty and awfully damn forgiving about it, if you ask me, Hotchkiss simply prevailed upon Simpson to find one final investment opportunity.
Frankly, I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about either man’s spiritual integrity, so long as they maintained some semblance of mannerly mediocrity, and, of course, came up with the money necessary to save the Gay Banana. The situation with the mortgage payments could have been worse, I suppose, but only in the sense it was unlikely a bank I owned would foreclose me--or rather, a bank I would someday own, which is almost the same thing, isn’t it?
“Not exactly,” commented Mr. Walters, the banker. “Naturally, we wouldn’t dream of foreclosing on you until every single courtesy has been extended.”
Bad news delivered in mild tones makes me feel as though I’ve underestimated the extent of the damage and what I’m hearing is, in fact, tragic news I haven’t yet grasped. I asked Mr. Walters to qu’est que ce the phrase “has been extended.”
“That would be about five to seven weeks,” he calculated, “...uh, from the end of last month.”
As I think now of that day I sat nervously across from Mr. Walters, I realize neither of us, then, really thought things would reach disaster proportions. Before hitting bottom, we both assured me, I would raise the money to save the Gay Banana from the itchy hands of its original owner, Daddy.
Yes: Daddy. I was supposedly given, and I use the verb lightly, the Gay Banana as a test of my ability on a microeconomic scale to someday run Daddy’s macroeconomic Empire. Well, one woman’s gift is another man’s sport.
Having given me the chance of a lifetime, Daddy then proceeded to give me the scare of my life. Without warning, explanation or apparent justification, he became obsessed with running me out of business. Even his own business associates thought his behavior strange and bizarre.
Sometimes, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of one of Mother’s long, long sentences, Daddy would leer toward me, laugh maniacally and attack the air between us with the tip of his fork. While Mother paused briefly, to sigh, Daddy would interject a warning. It was, more or less, the same lecture each time.
“They’ll try to run you out of business and out of town,” he would say, menacingly, “and I’m just trying to make sure you’re man enough to take it. That’s all. It’s love, doll face, it’s just love. If I didn’t care, it would be different.”
“How different?” I once asked, trying hard not to reveal my acute interest in a condition, any condition, different from mine.
While Mother continued sighing, Daddy would swallow whatever he had in his mouth, take a large gulp of wine or water, and point that damn fork at me again.
“Trust me, doll face, someday you’ll thank your ole Daddy.”
“But Daddy!” I’d cry, “You’re ruining me! You’re the only one trying to run me out of town!”
“You got that right little fella! Now, let’s see how you handle it.”
Recognition Page 8
