Prologue
In a barrier island village along the Florida Coast, the name of which is unspeakable, there lived until a short while ago, a gentleman of a certain estate. He still kept a mallet and saddle around, but the stable of ponies for contact sport and the greyhounds for coursing were gone. His abode was a measly ten-room apartment above a mere twelve-car garage, and what little income he had left, from renting out the manse, was consumed by debt and daily expenses.
A crock of well-spiced brisket of beef, otherwise known as chili, squabs he reared in a homemade coop, and vegetables raised on the polo ground, served as his principal diet. His vast collection of bespoke suits, ill-adapted to the Florida climate, had formerly sold on consignment, yet still, he cut a courageous figure in Brooks Brothers seconds from the outlet mall.
He was known by his peers for his excellent mind, though few could have said what for, and given to perusing sophistical tomes by Leo Strudle, Ein Rant, and Friedrich von Hiccup, which still infected the imagination of the drug-addled leadership class. As these had become obnoxious to him, he burnt them on his bluestone hearth and collected second-hand cookery books from which he gleaned his knowledge of chili and the delicacies of the Creoles. He supplemented this reading with novels, chronicles of the open road that urged him to dispossess himself of all that he once held dear. The most notable of these were Don Quixote and The Tale of Huckleberry Finn.
It is said by some that he went rather mad when, touched by death, consumed by debt, and wilted by the endless summer, he auctioned off his remaining estate and all the valuables therein. Rumor had it the auction price defrayed his debts to his banking buddies, but did not leave enough for his bookie. As the white-collar criminal class might say, Eddie was on the lam.
A Man Out of his Element
It’s just as well I’m not attached to money, as money is not attached to me.
Anonymous
If Eddie had known where he was going, he never would have left where he was at. Half slumped down in the driver’s seat, he was leaning a little to the right, elbow deep in the armrest, left hand draped on the wheel, left foot planted on the edge of the seat where he kept it for highway driving. The heel of his boot had worn a spot to the warp and weft of the velvet[1], but that didn’t bother Eddie much. He knew the old heap would be ready for scrap long before that seat wore through, and the way he drove that Cadillac car, he might have been on to something.
The boots were custom-made from horsehide, black with silver toe caps on them, initials cut from lizard skin. He’d kept them up with polish and spit but, along with everything else about Eddie, they were starting to show their age. They’d cost him a thousand dollars once when he was on the tear, spending the fortune his forebears earned making useful things for people. Several billion, some said it was, but Eddie went through it in less than a decade after his grandpa died, on slow dogs and fast women, derivatives and mortgage bonds. If it hadn’t been for the leveraged bets, he’d be a rich man today, but all that was left of his family’s sweat were the worn out boots, the junkyard car, and the clothes he’d packed in the trunk.
In dire need of company, Eddie keyed his microphone and launched into some of that CB chatter in a version of Texas Twang he’d learned from nowhere anyone could place.
“This is Gofer Aynis talking, heading west on Highway Ten, anyone out there? Over.”
The accent would seem genuine, even to Texan ears, were it not for the riffs off Gomer Pyle[2], and bits of central Florida cracker he’d picked up at the track. It wasn’t that Eddie was phony or nothing, but it didn’t take much, to his way of thinking, to feel that Connecticut lockjaw wasn’t the way to appeal to truckers working the Deep South routes, and it seemed as far from who he was as any voice could be.
“This is Gofer Aynis talking, heading west on Highway Ten, anyone out there? Over.”
Bestowed on a Doofus he once portrayed on the open mikes of comedy clubs, the handle was now a private joke, made at his own expense. It represented a side of Eddie, repressed throughout his youth, that emerged when he doubled down on risk to earn more compelling returns and acquired a ruinous reputation for turning platinum into tin. Comedy was an outlet for him, a means to escape the hedge fund work he’d never had much interest in. He’d always wanted to be on stage, started college in dramatic arts, but no one would give him speaking parts because he didn’t have the acting chops, so he joined the family firm instead.
The routines were the work of his songwriter buddy, a one-hit wonder with a Grammy award, who had faded into obscurity in a haze of mind-altering substances. He was a surgeon when Eddie knew him, the kind who trims the trees, and he had all manner of harebrained schemes for drawing attention to himself, consisting of youtube videos, mostly, that never seemed to go viral. With his beatnik jive and bohemian style, he offered a welcome change of pace from the rentiers on the resort circuit who were Eddie’s most loyal investors, and was one of few who would speak to him after his final fall from grace.
Eddie keyed his mike again. “This is Gofer Aynis talking. I’d sure like some company. Anyone out there? Over.”
Despite its limited usefulness, the CB fad had swept the country at the height of the sexual revolution, celebrated by popular culture in film, television and song. Its demise coincided suspiciously with the rise of the AIDS epidemic, yet still it served its original purpose as a medium for teamsters. He figured it would enable him to be whatever he chose to be, and say whatever he had to say, with one distinct advantage over the social Internet. Unregulated by the FCC[3], unmonitored by the NSA[4], and unrecorded by Lockheed Corp. for the spooks at DHS[5], it was the one remaining medium of free and unfettered self-expression. The words he spoke would be gone forever, a memory only to those who heard them, never to fly back into his face after going viral on him, or louse-up his career prospects due to their nonconformity to the range of acceptable ideas. But all he had gotten so far was dead air.
Eddie put down the mike and sighed. The romance of the open road was not living up to his expectations. He’d been a full day on the road already, up through the swamps on Route 19, where boundless groves of wax myrtles were a man’s sole travel companions. Unless you count the Florida heat, which felt like being hauled around in a marathoner’s jockstrap. He’d warbled into his transmitter all the way up that lonely road, singing every song he knew, issuing pleas for company, and wishing he’d taken the Interstate. With lightning flashes from a distant storm, resembling his old portfolio charts, crashing down on a landscape laden with the relics of the housing bust, it was not the time for solitude. Eddie switched the radio on -- “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose...” -- only to shut it off again. Much as he revered the singer, to one who’d know the freedom once of nothing left to gain, the words stung like mockery. With emergency repairs that morning having taken his last two cents, and the blinker on the gas gauge demanding his attention, there was nothing liberating in it.
The sharp blast of an air horn jarred him out of his despond as the snarling grille of a big Mack tractor loomed in his rear view mirror. Eddie swung his wheel to the right, veering into the slow lane. Watching the tanker truck roll by and cut in up ahead, his eyes were snared by the skull and crossbones looming over its tail end. Alas, poor Yorick, voices murmured. To be or not to be, they said. Eddie fingered the red bandana wrapped around his neck and shifted his weight in the seat. If you don’t find some work real soon you just might have to end it all, just like your... Eddie tipped the wheel to the left, gunning the motor to pass the skull and all the morbid thoughts it brought him.
Suddenly, the scanner squawked. “This is Hairless Hairy. Anyone know some banker jokes?”
Almost overwhelmed with joy at the sound of a human voice, Eddie grabbed his microphone. He knew lots of banker jokes, many of them personally. He had such an array to chose from, he let someone else beat him to it.
“This is Tango Tyler, Harry. How does a Wall Street bankster resemble a Master of the Universe? Over.”
Eddie rolled his eyeballs. Not that old saw.
“Beats the hell out of me, Tango,” Hairless Harry replied.
Not wishing to denigrate central Asians, let alone people with Downs Syndrome, by equating them with investment bankers, Eddie left the punch line[6] in the air and steered the conversation elsewhere. “This is Gofer Aynis, Harry, you get clipped in the bond market, too?”
“What the hell you talkin about?”
Man’s a write off, Eddie thought. “Whaddayasay there, Tango Tyler? This is Gofer Aynis talking, heading west on Highway Ten.”
“Whatchya haulin, prairie dog shit?”
“Seat of your pants, there, Tango Tyler, think you’re some kinda comedian, do ya? Rig full of laughing hyenas here be much obliged for your jokes and all but you wouldn’t want to mess with them none. They ain’t been fed a spell.”
“Don’t be givin me lip now, boy,” Tango Tyler shot right back. “Runnin a handle like Gopher Anus, you take what’s coming to you.”
“Got your attention, didn’t I?”
“Don’t be lettin it go to your head. Been tryin to raise some chat all day.”
“You ain’t the only one.” Eddie replied. “I’m looking for that good old boy they calls Ophelia’s Darling. Ain’t heard tell of him lately, have you?”
“Sounds like a live one to me, Good Buddy. You two doin the hanky-panky?”
“Hell I am. But your wife might be. He’s one hell of a womanizer -”
“Don’t be talkin about my Mama,” Tango Tyler said.
“Just squaring up the put-downs, pardner. Heard that handle round these parts?”
“Can’t say I have there, Gopher.”
“How long you been driving, Tango?”
“Darn near half my lifetime, and I’m well over fifty.”
“And you ain’t heard of… damn! All his cooking and womanizing… boy’s a legend near as I can tell.”
The traffic ahead was slowing down toward the brow of the next hill, at least what passed for a hill in those parts. It was undulating woodland mostly, elongated peaks and troughs that rode a bit like waves. To Eddie, it mirrored the chart pattern of a real solid equity buy, but songwriter buddy’s words of wisdom echoed in his mind.
Get your head out of that world, Big Daddy. The market’s just a pack of wolves feeding off a diminishing herd. Think of what else you can do for bread instead of running money.
While he might have corralled some new investors and found his way back in the game, he knew it had gotten beyond his ken in the years that he had played it. Having learned to read from yearly reports and calculate from balance sheets, stocks were second nature to him. His lemonade stand was the trading desk of his family’s investment firm, where he learned how to watch the order flow to pick out the daily highs and lows, thus turning numbers into gold. Making money out of money was the only trade he knew, but he drowned in an alphabet soup of products that, at least, assured him good returns when all else seemed to fail. Now, having lost his family’s wealth, he was ready to do what his father urged but never had the courage to try. Like many a fictional character before him, and a few real people, too, Eddie set out to seek his fortune with barely a dime to his name, and would use the means at his disposal to promote himself to that end. Eddie keyed his mike once more.
“Just like I was saying, Tango, that boy makes the best damn gumbo, heard tell it won prizes too, down in New Orleans and pot roast chili, hoot dee dang! Made with brisket, stewed in beer, with garden herbs and chili peppers, couple of secret ingredients just to round the hot stuff out, served with long neck Dixie Beer. Worked cafes from here to Abilene long as I been driving rigs, last I heard he’d be in these parts. I always like to taste his cookin whenever I pass through, but that boy never stays put nowhere. Gets himself in woman trouble everywhere he goes, has to hotfoot out of town once they get that way about him. Says them gals want saddle ponies they shouldn’t be ridin rodeo.”
In love with the sound of his own words, Eddie smiled with satisfaction. My advertisement for myself went off pretty well, he thought. He’d spread the word about his chili, made it sound right tasty, too, and sexy enough to sell it. He enjoyed that trickle of endorphins he always got when things went well, and a warm feeling came over him that he was off to damn good start. He’d read some Horatio Alger tales back when he was a boy, and hoped that he could do the same, but the fact that he wasn’t a lad anymore, and had never known anyone personally who started up with nothing, began to penetrate his pate.
As Eddie reached the crest of the slope, a cacophony of voices erupted from the scanner. The talk was full of exit ramps and alternate routes, etcetera, what the cause of the hold-up was and how long it might be. Another half a mile on, Interstate Ten was a parking lot, and a truck stop parking lot at that, filled with scores and dozens of trucks, all within range of his radio, and all at a dead stop. Eddie looked down at his gas gauge, turned his vapor fueled car to the shoulder, and waited for the chatter to settle down.
As Eddie sat there cooling his heels, enjoying the opiates in his veins, that little pac-man[7] in his head that always came when he got that feeling started to gobble it up, consuming his self-confidence. His past was full of accomplishments, but none he cared about all that much. He wondered if, had he gone his own way, done what he wanted to do with his life, and achieved that standard to which he aspired but gave up trying to meet, would things have turned out differently for him, and would he now feel so feckless? Then, it occurred to him what went wrong. Goddam it, Gofer Aynis, you forgot about the outfit. How’s anyone gonna recognize me and offer me a job?