It Don't Pay To Think Too Much
I walked around the corner at the Micro Center, deeply distracted and in the grip of something between self-pity and disgust, and I saw him: stooped with age and the violence of the stroke that had stolen his life from him, but smiling nonetheless, making small talk with his nephew, his eyes alive still. Then he saw me, and he kept smiling, and he held out his hand, and then I had nowhere else to go, did I?
Robert Bly writes that each man must find "the second King":
A great theme in fairy stories is that there are two Kings. Trouble happens with one's own father — the first King. Then one has to leave the first castle. After some time of suffering and isolation, a second King somehow appears in the picture, finds the hero while hunting, adopts him or her and sets a task...
I met my second King when I was in my early twenties. At some point, he had briefly been the step-uncle of another friend of mine and the two of them had stayed in touch. A former cop turned drug dealer of a sort, then turned businessman, he was a massive black guy not completely unreminiscent of Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction. He spoke slowly, wore a massive gold Rolex Submariner, and drove an Andial-tuned 930 Turbo Cab with a Glock 17 under the drivers seat. Everybody always thought I was making him up until they met him. There was something deliberate about his chosen public persona; he'd grown up watching Superfly and the like and nobody had told him that you really couldn't live like that.
He didn't have too much use for me at first; I suppose I was a bit too bland and soft-faced, still a child at the age of twenty-four. When we met a few years later, I had been through a series of unfortunate events, so to speak, and I was ready to speak his language. So we went into business together, or more properly speaking, I went into business working for him.
So far this all sounds very Jay Gatsby and Meyer Wolfsheim, but the business we were in was perfectly legal, even if it was heart-wrenchingly immoral at times. For five years or so, the sky was the limit. Our driveways swelled with cars; anything we wanted, as long as it didn't draw too much attention. So I had two Phaetons instead of one Flying Spur, and he had two AMG Benzes instead of one Phantom, and that sort of thing. We were fixtures at the better restaurants, where he would occasionally beckon a news anchor or a senior police official over to the table to hear a quiet word. I would sit there blank-eyed in a five-thousand-dollar Kiton linen coat and wait for the conversation to end. Occasionally, however, he would make an introduction, along with a significant look to me: remember this one, and he will remember you.
He had a partner in his business, a glassy-eyed, vile creature even physically larger than he was, a white guy whom he'd groomed to be the "front" of the business to the other white people but who had eventually managed to surpass my friend in influence and power. You see, my friend wanted to enjoy life: weeks in a six-bedroom house above Vegas, thousand-watt stereo systems and custom paint jobs on the S-Classes, a series of discreet but tumultuous relationships with young white girls. But his partner just wanted power for its own sake. He wanted to be famous, well-respected, a player. The two desires were, to some extent, incompatible. After thirty years, they had come to detest each other, although they wouldn't admit it to anyone, not even to me.
Something had to happen. I'll gloss over the events of 2006-2007 because it would take fifty thousand words to explain what happened to whom and why. The critical detail is that my friend had a stroke and his partner seized the day. I had the explicit choice: sell my friend out, turn over evidence of his alleged misdeeds, and join the winning team --- or I could preserve some fraction of my friend's position, knowing that I'd take a bullet (metaphorically, I hasten to add). I picked the latter. And that was that. End of the line for the money, the lifestyle, the fun.
One day I woke up way before noon and for the first time in a long time, I just went to work. At a regular job. Like a regular guy. And my friend went to therapy and learned to walk and speak again. But the fire was gone, really. Even at the age of sixty, he had possessed a quiet menace, a fearsome dignity, but he lost that in the stroke and became, simply, an old man. He's officially retired, a shuffling African-American fellow in a blinged-out Audi SUV, relaxing in his house and avoiding the public eye.
At least he had the mild triumph of outliving his partner, who finally managed to die of one of the mostly imaginary complaints that plagued him throughout his adulthood. I didn't bother to not smile when I got the news. The organization the two men founded is run today, and not terribly well, by an effeminate failed attorney who had been installed some time ago as a kind of snitch for the snake who handled their legal work and the singularly moronic son of the dead man.
Someday my old friend will die. It might not be long now, but then again he might surprise us all. Either way, once he dies I'll be free to tell the whole sordid story to the world, warts and all. It should be interesting, to put it mildly. I'm both looking forward to and dreading writing that book. It should keep a few people up at night to know that I'm even thinking about doing it. Good.
My friend and I rarely speak nowadays. We're like two shipwreck survivors who are both more comfortable not re-living the experience, I suppose. But when I saw him yesterday, I was happy to see him up and about. His voice was good and he was eloquent when talking about his new Touareg TDI Executive. And wouldn't you know it, another old friend came around the corner, a fellow who had sold both of us a ton of exotic computing machinery over the years, someone who knew of our shared lust for the newest, the greatest, the most expensive.
"Look who it is! You guys working together again?"
"No," my friend replied, "I'm retired."
"So you're passing the baton."
"He," my friend smiled, nodding in my direction, "was the baton." Even after the stroke, he has the knack of saying something that's funny and profound and meaningless all at once. We briefly embraced and I headed back to work. I thought about a night nearly a decade ago when we'd driven to Michigan to look at spots where we could open up methadone clinics. I remember doing the numbers during the drive. They were staggering: maybe $75,000 a month in additional clear profit for us. We sat and laughed about it as I stroked the big AMG CL coupe along at 110mph down Route 23. How could we spend the money? I said I was going to finally get a Lamborghini and just never drive it to work. He said he would buy a fractional jet share and spend his weekend nights overlooking the Vegas Strip in the company of some Vegas stripper.
"No matter how we slice it," I laughed, "it will just keep getting better."
"Or," he said, "the best times could be right now, you never know." And he was right. Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if he'd stayed healthy, if my second King and I had built the kingdom we were planning, if the good times had never come to an end. But, as Townes once sang, it don't pay to think too much on things you leave behind.