What’s the angle? they asked. The choke point, the place to look?
“See if Morningside Realty pops up,” she suggested. “They’re the broker for this offer on the Met tower. If they’re brokering more like that, I’d like to know. That might tug all the leads together. Also Pinscher Pinkerton. Keep an eye out for them, they’re trouble right now.”
She stayed for the meetings but quickly grew tired. There was a reason they called it Lame Ass. Lemmas, that was some kind of bread, also the name of their local currency, issued in blocknecklaces; but Lame Ass was usually how it went. Everybody had to have their say, no doubt this was right, but damn. How people went on. She could see why Vlade and Charlotte didn’t make many of these meetings. End of a long day, go over and help run the whole wet zone as a town hall meeting, Robert’s Rules of Order or whatnot: painful.
Then again, the alternative was worse. So the lawyerly and conscientious, the young or argumentative, or stubborn, kept meeting and making the effort. Hang together or hang separately: the great American realization. A Ben Franklin pun, young Franklin Garr had recently informed her with a look of amused pride.
She finally stood when the meeting was over, and lots of people grabbed hold of her, many of them strangers. They liked having her there. They were the same as the submariners; it was nice to have some manifestation of the force on hand and paying attention. Even if she had been falling asleep in her chair.
Now they needed her at the dance. “Ah God,” she protested. But they dragged her along, and a punk power band with a gaggle of vocalists was firing through Lou Reed’s “Heroin” like it was the national anthem, which down here maybe it was, and Gen wanted to object that the drug being celebrated was more likely to create a flow state than this supercharged nails-on-blackboard style they were indulging in, but what did she know really. They made her dance to it and she did, it was still just the jitterbug, shimmying with gusto, bouncing big men into the walls with her butt, ignoring her sore dogs. You could ignite a dance floor if you let the spirit come down. And God did they need it. Afterward someone gave her a ride home in a gondola. She would fall asleep the moment her head hit the pillow. Just like she liked it.
Lorca was on Wall Street on Black Tuesday in 1929 and saw many financiers dive out of skyscraper windows and kill themselves. One almost hit him. Later he said it was easy for him to imagine the destruction of lower Manhattan by “hurricanes of gold.”
Bert Savoy was struck by lightning after talking back to a thunderstorm on the Coney Island boardwalk. “That’ll be enough out of you, Miss God!” he said right before he was hit.
Henry Ford was afraid that the amount of dirt that was being removed to make room for the foundation of the Empire State Building was so great that it would have a disastrous effect on the rotation of the Earth. Not a genius.
g) Franklin
Well, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right.
She lied to me. Or so I told myself. She told me she was a trader in a hedge fund, so we were doing the same job, had the same interests, shared common concerns and goals. So I fell for her, I most certainly did. And it wasn’t just because she was so good-looking, even though she was. It was because of her manner, her talk, and indeed those interests we shared. We were soul mates as well as bedmates or I should say cockpit mates, and the former made the latter out of this world. I’d never felt like that before. I was in love, yes. So fuck me. I had been a fool.
But I still wanted her.
The thing is, working for a hedge fund—that’s about making money no matter which way the market moves, no matter what happens. God declares Judgment Day, you’re hedged. Okay, you’d have to trust God to pay out as being the final source of value. But any conceivable scenario less apocalyptic than that, you’re covered and you’re going to make a profit, or at least you’re going to lose less than the rest of the players, which is the same as making a profit, because it’s all about differential advantage. If everyone’s losing and you’re losing less badly than the others, you’re winning. That’s hedging and that’s what hedge funds do. Jojo worked for one of the biggest hedge funds in New York, I worked for a big hedge fund, we were a match made in Black-Scholes heaven.
But not. Because in many hedge funds the effort to maximize profit had led to activities additional to trading per se, including venture capital. But venture capital makes liquid assets go illiquid, a cardinal sin in most finance. Liquidity is crucial, a fundamental value, it’s the hyphens in M-C-M'. Venture capital is therefore small potatoes in most hedge funds, and VC people usually end up talking about “value-added investing,” suggesting that they aim to bring in expertise that will help whomever they are investing to succeed at whatever they’re doing. This is mostly bullshit, a flimsy excuse for the outrageous illiquidity of their investments, but there’s no denying that a lot of them cherish the delusion.
And this, I feared, was the rabbit hole Jojo had dropped into. That she wanted to do more than make money, that she wanted to make some kind of value-added investment in the so-called real economy, was worrisome. Eldorado was almost certainly leveraged a hundred times beyond their assets on hand, so illiquidity made them vulnerable. VC was super-longing and thus dangerous, because there was no such thing as super-shorting to balance it. This suggested Jojo had gotten emotionally overinvested in a small part of her company’s business, which was dangerous in itself, and indicated that her eye had strayed, that she somehow wanted more than what finance could give her, while nevertheless staying in finance. So there was delusion and pretentiousness and aspiration and lack of focus there that I didn’t like to see.
But now, damned if I hadn’t gone super-long on Jojo herself, in essence making the same kind of mistake: lost liquidity, desire for equilibrium, dislike of volatility, attachment to a particular static situation, which even the Buddha warns against. And in that very dangerous situation, my intended partner in the mutual project of coupledom, which was also a kind of venturing of capital, had not hit the strike price. She had walked on her option. Actually these financial metaphors were making me sick, while also continuing to pop up in my head in a way I seemed unable to stop. No, just stop. I liked her, I wanted her. She didn’t want me. That was what it really was.
So, to get her back, I needed to do things that would make her like me. Put it like that. Just start from scratch, that’s all.
Fuck fuck fuck.