Weekly Roundup: The (Dead) Ant And The (Dying) Grasshopper Edition

This is a true story; only the names have been changed. Let's change them to... Bill and Rick. About forty-five years ago, give or take a few, Bill and Rick started a business. At first glance, they were quite different. Bill was lily-white, a farm-raised college basketball player with an Ivy League graduate degree; Rick was black, a self-made man and former Cleveland cop, working the worst streets and not always playing strictly by the rules. When asked how he paid for a customized Eldorado on a police salary, he said "You turn some people upside down and see what falls out of their pockets." Their sole common denominator was size; these were 300-pound men who radiated menace even when they smiled.

Bill and Rick created their business out of nothing but some good will and laser-sharp instincts. It relied on public funding, and it was supposed to help people, although you'd have a hard time finding anyone who was ever truly helped in the process. Actually, that's not quite true. Their business helped the doctors who worked there, most of whom had exhausted every legitimate opportunity and burned every bridge before joining the firm. It helped the woman who ran their public relations program, a fading but legitimate beauty whose inexhaustible appetite for trade-show hookups had scorched the industry before she settled down with a man ten years her junior who knew nothing of her past. Most of all, of course, it helped Bill and Rick.

If you looked at the disclosure statements filed by the company, neither man ever earned much more than $175,000 a year. But that was the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more money to be extracted. You just had to turn the operation upside down and see what fell out of its pockets.

This is the story of how those two men spent their money, and what happened next.

Remember the fable of the ant and the grasshopper? If not, here it is:

It was fall and the ants were laying their food away for the winter. A grasshopper stopped by. "Why are you wasting your time with that?" he laughed. "There's always plenty of food to eat. Now is the time to play music, fall in love, live life to the fullest!" The ants made no response but continued to carry their provisions to the anthill. . Four months later, in the dead of winter, the grasshopper showed up starving at the entrance to the anthill. "My friends," he begged, "a little food, please! A little charity, lest I die!" The ants replied, . "If you play during the summer, you will starve in the winter."

That's the story, and in that story Rick was the grasshopper. His showcase home in a prestigious subdivision was double-mortgaged to the hilt, interest-only deferred balloons and every payment made at the last possible minute. Though he lived alone -- at least between wives, of which there were four -- the three-car garage was always fully stuffed with Porsches, Benzes, Range Rovers, you name it. Nothing was ever left stock. There was always a full aftermarket stereo, chrome wheels, ceramic tint. His Cadillacs were restyled by a Cleveland firm called "Roman Chariot"; golden transparent vinyl wraps and massive "dubs" on pearl white Escalades and Sevilles.

Most of Rick's clothes were by Pelle Pelle. His usual going-to-work outfit was something like this: bright-yellow tracksuit, fresh Nikes, sunglasses worn indoors, Kangol cap. Think Jim Brown in the Seventies. He affected the speech patterns and behaviors of the Black gangsters for whom he'd once been a stainless-steel scourge. You could find him most evenings at a steak restuarant, holding court and telling fabulous stories of days past. His sense of humor was both subtle and considerable, and he was in a good mood more often than he was not.

Rick's excesses and his behavior never sat well with the company's board of directors, and it occasionally ruffled the feathers of the elected officials who oversaw his funding, but that's where Bill came in. He reassured everyone that the firm was in sane hands. Bill owned and drove a single vehicle, usually a Chevrolet truck. He wore flannel shirts, department-store denim. Rick had gold teeth; Bill's were stained the crooked brown of rural healthcare and intermittent cigarettes. Where Rick had a quip and a leer for every occasion, Bill's words came slowly and after much consideration. You would talk to him for half an hour and realize after the fact that nothing had, in fact, been said; that what seemed like a commitment or an approval at the time was, when re-examined in daylight, merely a few vague phrases strung together with a smile.

By common acclamation, Bill was senior to Rick, though they had founded the company as equals. "You see," Rick told me once, "everybody likes to see a White man in charge. They figure he's keeping me in line. We do it the other way... well, that's unnatural, isn't it? Raises a lot of questions. They'd be asking about the money. You can't ask an old cracker like that about the money, cause that would... impugn his integrity, you see."

"Yeah," I replied, "but isn't it ever a problem that you're out here in a Cayenne Turbo and Bill is in a Tahoe? How do you get away with it? Doesn't Bill want to do something similar?"

"Oh, Bill gets his," Rick laughed. "And one day you'll see. Bill has... a plan." And one day in 2005 or thereabouts I found out all about it. I went out to Bill's house.

It was fifty miles from the city, in a small town that had once been rich from farming and industry, on a street with a bunch of other Victorian-era mansions. From the outside it was impressive enough, but once you went inside you understood in a moment that Bill was, in fact, getting his -- and possibly to a greater extent than Rick. I have never seen a 122-year-old home like it. Every single square foot was flawless. Leaded glass, long curving staircases, hardwood floors of a quality unapproachable today. A full custom kitchen that wouldn't have been out of place in a ten-million-dollar Manhattan co-op.

On the day I was there, two Amish craftsmen were making a new railing for a staircase. The rotted original railing was laid out on a rug and they were copying it, using nothing but hand-powered tools. Bill's wife noticed my interest. "They've been working on it for a few weeks," she noted. "I think it's almost ready to go." I thought about what it would cost to have two master carpenters at one's disposal for a few weeks. For a staircase railing. There were other contractors coming and going as well. "We're redoing it from the ground up," his wife explained. "You'd be amazed at what everything costs." A massive double-door Sub-Zero refrigerator had just been installed; from personal experience I knew that it cost perhaps $30,000, or more.

Not that this money-pit mansion was the only expenditure Bill had on the books. During my visit, one of his two worthless adult children poked his head in to see what was going on. He'd been "on tour" for over a decade with a rogue's gallery of unsuccessful bands. In-between tours he lived in the home, on his parents' sufferance. Two years later, he would come off the road for good and his father would celebrate this mid-thirties achievement by giving him, of all things, a Dodge Nitro. "A loser of a car," Rick suggested, "for a loser of a son."

The people who knew both Bill and Rick thought they understood the story. Rick was the grasshopper, thoughtlessly squandering forty or fifty thousand dollars every year on leased vehicles and that much again on fine dining. Bill was the ant, rebuilding a dream home that would surely recoup his seven-figure investment while driving a thrifty Chevrolet to work and wearing JC Penney. My father, upon hearing the story, suggested that I was much closer spiritually to Rick, but that I could learn something from Bill.

It wasn't just the money, of course. It was how they conducted themselves. Everyone figured Rick would die of a heart attack at some point; he was too heavy, ate too much red meat, ignored the counsel of doctors. Bill, by contrast, was under constant medical advice and pursued a fitness program designed to keep him vital into his seventies. When Rick became ill and almost died fifteen-ish years ago, Bill moved to take full control of the company and the peanut gallery nodded as one: It's the triumph of the low-profile, rural-mansion, health-nut ant over the AMG-Benz, velour-tracksuit, steak-and-vodka grasshopper. This reading of the situation was not exactly contraindicated by the fact that Rick was black and Bill was white. "It's just what you'd expect", the company accountant told me, though he declined to clarify further.

That's the end.

No, it's not.

Rick recovered -- not perfectly, but enough. Having been cut out of the company, he accepted a small pension and curtailed his lifestyle. He lives a modest life today in a rental unit for senior citizens; his sole extravagance is a leased Audi, which everyone thinks he should give up. Rick is not interested in this advice.

And Bill? He didn't make it to seventy. With a new kidney, he'd have made it, but his sons decided that on the whole they'd rather have the life insurance than go under the knife for a donation. His death happened at the tail of what we now remember as "the global financial crisis". His wife tried to hold on to the house, but without the income to maintain it there was no way to do so. One of her sons had been given a $100,000-a-year job at Bill's old firm by the board of directors on purely sentimental grounds, but of course he had other ideas for that money. After a two-year cascade of periodically lowered asking prices, the house sold for less than they'd paid for it as a shell in 2004; you couldn't have duplicated the kitchen for that much.

Last week, my man Rodney and I went out to a rural dealership to order my new truck. We knew the sales manager there, because we'd both worked for him back in the day. Going down the main street of that town, I realized... that's the house! It was Bill's mansion. I hadn't seen it in fifteen years, but I recognized it immediately.

Rodney and I pulled my Lincoln over and stepped out. The house didn't look abandoned, but it showed the clear signs of a decade's neglect. "This was Bill's dream?" Rodney was incredulous. "It looks like shit." We could see where the restored slate roof had been replaced with vinyl in a few places to fix leaks. There was a car in the garage, which looked like it had suffered a break-in at some point. The yard wouldn't have passed muster in a suburban neighborhood. I didn't look in any of the windows -- that's a great way to get headshot in a small Ohio town -- but I suspected that the interior bore similar signs of neglect.

On the way home, Rodney offered his opinion. "You know, Bill was always smarter than Rick, so I'm surprised at how it all turned out." I thought about this for a few miles, listening to Coltrane's "Lazy Bird" as the farmhouses flashed past my windshield, before replying.

"Everyone always said Bill was smarter. But he died with two worthless sons and an incomplete house that turned out to be worthless, too. All those years of driving a Tahoe, dressing cheap, eating salads in his office. It was all for nothing. While Rick... shone. Renting vacation homes in Hilton Head and Vegas, driving six-figure cars exclusively, eating an eighty-dollar steak in a custom Giallo Fly velour tracksuit and wearing a solid-gold Submariner. Four wives and who knows how many women in between. So who was really smarter?"

"You," Rodney admitted, "might have a point."

So here's the old fable, revised: All summer the grasshopper played. There was no malice in his heart, and no thought for the future. Just a desire to enjoy a life he'd always imagined as a dirt-poor child, just an innocent delight at the idea of owning a thirty-thousand-dollar watch and driving an Andial 930 Turbo. Meanwhile, the ant had contempt in his heart for the grasshopper. The ant had a better idea. It was future-oriented. It was respectable. It was decent, and it was normal. But the ant didn't live long enough to see his plan come to fruition, and the economy had other ideas about home valuation anyway, so he died as if he'd been poor his whole life. The grasshopper continued to live another decade, always hand-to-mouth, without the dignity for which we'd all hope in our old age -- but if you lived the way the grasshopper had lived, just once, while he was young and it was all there to be taken, who could worry or care about the conditions of that closing chapter?

At the end of the winter, both the ant and the grasshopper were dead. But only the grasshopper had ever really been alive.

The end.

For them, anyway. It's the end for the rest of us, as well; for you, for me, for everyone who reads this. We just don't know exactly when. So if you see me driving by that house a few months from now, in a truck I probably can't afford and shouldn't be driving, just think of me as a grasshopper, living in the pure moment, hopping and skipping at the dog-days end of my summer. What lies ahead? Nothing but hard seasons, of course, but not yet, my friend. Not yet.

* * *

For Hagerty, I considered the odd fate of an ambitious automotive platform and reviewed the maximum Lexus.