Recording #2
I see the humor now: that when I hopped that plane four years ago, with those vows clutched in my fist, I was heading home, to Rhome, to my mother, who had long ago written “Deep in the Valley,” the story that decimated me at eleven, and “An Outlaw Life,” the story I thought had set me free at twenty-two; and to my father who would describe the newest surgery he was devising, where his travels would take him next as he healed people’s sight the world over; and to my brother who would regale me with the minutiae of his computer program responsible for his fucking success, and watch as he ran Solve=MC2 from the Manning homestead, bossing around his team, strutting like the big man he was, at only seventeen. But home I went, to the renovated house I had so rarely stayed in, and I conquered. Or rather, I stayed as briefly as I could, heeded my father’s advice, and used the substantial earnings from my aborted venture capital career to buy an apartment in Washington, DC—aware that I might never again have such a bundle of cash. I moved in and took my Wharton undergrad degree, and the business acumen and glib patter I developed out in the Valley, and talked my way into Think Inc., one of the country’s most prestigious financial magazines. I applauded myself for the display of gumption that landed me the job. I could not make my own fortune, but I could write about those who did, and although writing magazine articles was not what I envisioned for myself as a child, I thought I would try to be happy. It was, after all, writing of a sort.
My first published article, “Gold Rush of the Future,” was about a young, hard-charging chief executive I nicknamed Golden Boy. He reinvented prospecting for gold in the twenty-first century with an innovative financial mechanism called gold streaming—Wall Street panhandling by purchasing stock in Golden Boy’s company, which funded the mining companies: a conglomerated modern-day version of the miners of yore. Golden Boy had the gift, had raised more than a billion dollars during his first swing through the venture capital markets, the hedge funds, and the investment banking firms. He said the accumulation of investment funds was intoxicating, but he most loved the weeks he spent hanging out with the actual prospectors who talked about the sheer exhilaration that accompanied the hunt for gold, the lust and greed that sweetened the entire enterprise. In one of our several telephone interviews, Golden Boy said, “It’s an addiction that bit me hard in the ass, my friend, took a solid chunk from most of one cheek,” and I felt the cold mine air on my skin, the weight of gold nuggets in my palms, the bump of a bulging wallet in my back pocket.
When I handed in the finished piece to my editors, I did not feel the elation I expected with the imminent publication of my first article, conceived by me, my first byline on top. I realized that Golden Boy reminded me of my brother—the certainty they each had in their synaptic goods, the novel business models they invented, each tearing up their worlds with their genius and their ability to make patent what so few of us can see. People like that always do reach the pinnacle, and both Golden Boy and my brother had. I was not of their ilk, and I realized there were far more people like me than like them, and that those of us who had no extraordinary skills with which to dream big might be very interested in the unconventional ways in which ordinary people catapulted themselves beyond their origins and into the financial stratosphere.
I made a decision then never to write again about venture capitalists, or about the CEOs of major companies, or about people born with a deep and abiding talent they had found and mined well; I held a grudge against anyone who achieved their success by virtue of incomparable intellect, stellar schooling, connections, or the injustice of winning a hereditary lottery. I searched for the average people, the ones who weren’t prodigies, weren’t members of Mensa, who lacked obvious genius and had no mastermind skills, whose futures had always been of absolutely no interest to anyone, including themselves; rags-to-riches of a sort. I set these stories within a larger milieu, that of the global financial markets, the trends in financing, and the like. It was the kind of column the magazine had never published before, and it became my specialty.