Gasoline - Chapter 2
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Transcript of Gasoline - Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Know Your Dealer
I was born and raised in Libertyville, Illinois. They
say it’s a suburb of Chicago and nowadays it is, but it was
founded in 1837 and was basically a stand-alone small town
that was absorbed into an upper extremity of the Chicago
metropolis by the 1950s. You have the old-fashioned shops
downtown surrounded by a thin veneer of Victorian homes and
bungalows, all encased in a thick outer shell of strip
malls and tract houses. Fortunately, they preserved a lot
of the forests so we wouldn’t wind up looking like
Schaumburg.
I lived in a three-bedroom Cape Cod in the middle-aged
part of town (most of the houses were built in the 1930's).
I grew up an only child, which had its benefits and
shortcomings. I had a full bathroom all to myself, and my
parents’ undivided attention, but on the flipside, I didn’t
have anyone close to me in age to look up to or look up to
me. But whatever, life was good.
My Dad’s name was Victor. He was a financial analyst
who worked at just about every major insurance company that
ever had a branch office or an HQ in the Chicagoland area:
Allstate, Aon, Fireman’s, Zurich, you name it. He was a
consummate job-hopper. He got laid off twice in his career
but the rest of the time he just jumped ship when he saw a
better-looking boat across the bay.
He was a brilliant and complicated man who didn’t say
much outside his areas of interest and never got worked up
about anything. In other words, he was “quiet.” That’s
what everyone always said about him, especially my Grandma
Jane. Every time she talked to my Mom she would say
something like, “He never says anything. Are things
alright between you two?”
My Mom’s responses ranged from “That’s just how he
is,” to “Why don’t YOU be quiet Mom?!” It all depended on
her mood.
He graduated high school in 1966 and got drafted into
the Army soon after. He saw action in Vietnam but wasn’t
much for details. When asked if he ever killed anyone, he
would always say, “I fired my M-16 into the trees where
they were shooting from. Whether or not I hit anyone,
can’t say.”
But he made it out alive and went to Roosevelt as soon
he was stateside. That’s where he met my Mom.
My Mom’s name is Alice. She’s a consummate musician.
By the time she finished college she knew five instruments,
the piano, oboe, piccolo, clarinet and her favorite, the
flute. She actually played flute for the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra in the 70s. She quit because it got, “too
catty.”
After she left the CSO, she did the neighborhood
lesson thing for a while, discovered she liked teaching and
became the music teacher at a grade school in Grayslake, a
job she held until retirement.
She also sang in the church choir. My parents weren’t
especially religious but we all went to The First Methodist
Church every Sunday so she could sing and we could hear
her. She was a bit of diva like that. I also think she
did it so that I’d be exposed to a form of music I wouldn’t
experience anywhere else. She once said to me, “They don’t
sing hymns on MTV. Where else are you going to hear them?
Any kind of music you don’t experience is a loss for you.”
Much to my surprise, she applied those standards to a
lot of the music I listened to. She liked The Smiths,
Phish, They Might Be Giants, even Nine Inch Nails (although
she couldn’t quite understand why someone with a lucrative
recording contract and legions of fans could be so
persistently depressed).
She was the same way with symphony music. Every year
she got season tickets to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
and on every Tuesday from fifth grade until my sophomore
year when I could use my job as an excuse not to go, I
would get stuffed into a suit and suffer through music that
sometimes brought my Mom to tears. Of the fifty some-odd
concerts I attended, I only remembered the one with Yitzak
Perlman, and I only remembered him because he was on Sesame
Street.
Overall my life was comfortable and nice. I had no
serious hardships, just asthma and typical suburban teenage
social shit. We were never rich, never poor, just solid
middle class. I guess you could say I was born with a
bronze spoon in my mouth. I got along good with my parents
and they got along good with each other. I had at least
five friends who were children of divorce so it was nice to
go home to people who loved each other.
It seems like every family has at least one dark
secret and ours was that my Mom was married briefly before
she met my Dad. The guy was her high school boyfriend and
was very eager to get married. My Mom (thinking that’s
what women were supposed to do) accepted his proposal.
A year after they got married he suddenly wanted kids.
Mom thought this was a little strange because when they got
married, he was adamant about not having kids until he made
enough money. Then she found out from a friend that the
government had changed the draft deferral rules: married
men were no longer exempt but married men with children
were. This guy married my Mom to get out of the draft.
She suspected this was the reason all along, as did a lot
of her friends, but she didn’t want to believe it. The
whole kid thing confirmed her suspicions.
She confronted the guy, he confessed his true motives
and she left him. And the best part? After they had the
marriage annulled, he wound up getting drafted. When Mom
finished telling me the whole story, Dad said, “There was
nothing funny about Vietnam, except for what happened to
that guy.”
They told me this story when I was seventeen in a very
matter-of-fact yet out-of-the blue conversation. I didn’t
know why they felt they had to tell me but I’m guessing it
was because I was in a pretty deep relationship at the time
and they were worried that I might stumble into a similar
situation.
The girl’s name was Rachel York. We dated on and off
from sophomore to senior year. She was the only high
school girlfriend who I’d describe as serious -of course
serious to someone who’s seventeen and serious to someone
who’s forty-six are two different words in two different
languages.
She wound up dumping me for good a few weeks after I
graduated. She basically said that was I going away for
college, she still had a year left of high school and who
were we kidding? In retrospect it seems embarrassingly
silly, but I was devastated. I actually got down on my
knees and begged her to reconsider, and when someone is
breaking up with you for very pragmatic reasons, getting
down on your knees doesn’t do much for your cause, or your
parting image.
I spent the rest of the summer wallowing in a misery
that would make John Keats look sanguine, only he had it
better because he had legendary poetic output as a trade-
off for his misery. I had shit. But it was nothing the
first week of college couldn’t fix. I found someone else
in short order and all was good. And just so you know, I’m
not bringing up Rachel because I miss her and look
longingly back on the time we spent together. I bring her
up because she’ll be important to the story in just a
little bit.
I had a pretty good time in college but managed not to
have too good of a time. I sometimes think college is less
about having intellect and more about being able to use
your intellect while under a constant barrage of
distractions -and I allowed myself my share of
distractions. I hung out with an assortment of liberal
arts majors who were united by the idea that they would all
sell screenplays, publish novels or become famous actors by
age 25 and that consuming lots of weed and hallucinogenic
drugs was an essential part of the process.
One out of two ‘aint bad.
After I finished college, I had my one and only regret
in life -I could have gone to Europe and didn’t. My best
friend in college was Steve Morse and he had been saving up
for a trip to Europe for two years. The itinerary was to
fly to London, Chunnel to Paris, bus to Brussels, hitchhike
to Amsterdam, inch up to Hamburg, hop over to Berlin, go
down to Prague, sidestep to Vienna, then top it all off
with Venice, Florence, and Rome. He was going with two
other guys and a girl and invited me, no, begged me to come
along, I didn’t.
And I could have! I had saved up some money. My
parents even offered to pay for the airfare and give me
some spending money as a graduation present. But I was
listening too closely to my own excuses.
I’m going to graduate school in the fall, I need to
get myself in the right frame of mind to work hard and I
can’t do that if I’m backpacking through Europe.
I’ll have a ton of loans to pay off once I get my
Masters, I can’t spend all the money I’ve saved on a trip
overseas.
This one was really lame: There’s so much in this
country I haven’t seen. I haven’t even been to New York!
I can always go to Europe later.
Little did I know.........
So I politely declined and regretted it as soon as I
moved back in with my parents. But it was only a regret
until November. Then it became a blessing.
I got a call from an old high school friend who wanted
to get together and catch up. He told me to meet him at
TGIFriday’s. I waited at the bar for about an hour before
acknowledging that the prick stood me up. I wasn’t
surprised. That guy was one of the biggest social sluts in
the world and would proudly say so. He typically lined up
five or six engagements per night and stuck with the one
that was the most fun. Come to think of it, I would’ve
been surprised if he had shown up.
I had a few beers, watched the Bears get annihilated
on TV, chatted with the bartender a little, and then, on
beer number three, it happened.
Two girls took a seat at the other side of the bar.
The one on my left had brown hair with blond highlights,
light purple lipstick, matching nail polish, no earrings, a
black sweater, blue jeans, black leather jacket, and a pack
of Camel Lights and a purple cellphone next to her purse.
She looked extremely cute and extremely familiar.
Familiar enough for me to ask, “Are you Rene
Schwall?”
Her eyes brightened, she smiled a little. “Yeah,
um...” Her right hand held an unlit cigarette. It went up
in the air and made circles. She was trying to place me,
having trouble and then her cigarette hand slammed down
palm-first on the bar.
“CANDYMAN!”
Back in 1992 this movie Candyman came out. You might
have seen it or heard about it but just in case, it’s about
a ghost with a bloody hook for a hand named Candyman, and
if you stood in front of a mirror and said his name five
times, he’d appear behind you and rip you in half with his
hook.
Right when that movie was in the theaters and everyone
had seen it, I was at a party at this guy Mark’s house.
His parents were gone, the place was pretty crowded, I had
to take a piss and the bathroom downstairs was taken. So I
went to the upstairs bathroom, opened the door and turned
on the lights.
The first thing I remember were two, ear-shriveling
mezzo-soprano shrieks that managed to drown out the music
blasting on the stereo downstairs. Then this blond girl
charged out of the bathroom, knocked me down, ran into the
nearest bedroom and slammed the door behind her. I looked
up and saw Rene leaning against the sink, clutching her
chest with both hands and taking deep, heaving breaths. I
thought she was having a heart attack.
I later found out that she and her friend, Nikki was
her name, had a few drinks and decided to try the whole
Candyman thing in the upstairs bathroom. Just to give you
a visual, the door to that bathroom faced a huge mirror
that ran the full length of a double vanity sink and went
almost all the way up to the ceiling. I’d been in that
bathroom before and always thought it was kind of jarring
to flip on the lights and immediately see me staring back
at myself. Right as Nikki and Rene said the fifth
“Candyman,” I opened the door, turned on the lights and
there I was, standing right behind them in the mirror. I
would’ve wigged out too.
I’ll never forget the look on Rene’s face as she
leaned against the sink. It went from fear to anger to
laughter as she went from thinking I did it on purpose to
the realization that the whole thing was just an incredibly
freaky coincidence. She called me Candyman ever since.
For about two months after that incident we were
friends on the edge of being something more. Rachel and I
were taking a break and Rene had just broken up with her
boyfriend of over a year. Perfect timing right? Not
really. Rene told me (without me making any overtures)
that she wasn’t looking for another relationship, she just
wanted to be free and unobligated.
But she would do these little flirty things that would
totally mess with my head, like sitting next to me at lunch
and putting her feet up on my lap, or calling me at odd
hours just to chat, and the piece de resistance, reading me
poetry she’d written and hadn’t shared with another living
soul –most of it was inspired by her love of The Cure.
This created a real Lady and the Tiger situation for
me. I could play it safe, painfully keep my emotions in
check, just be her friend and miss out on what could be the
love of my life. Or I could play it dangerous, lay all my
emotions on the table, freak her out and never see her
again. I wiggled and waffled on these choices and before I
could scrape up the balls to make a decision, Rachel told
me she wanted to get back together.
As you might imagine, Rachel wasn’t too keen on me
having a flirtatious female friend who had a pet name for
me, so I started blowing Rene off and she got the message.
The last time I saw her before that night at Friday’s was a
month after Rachel dumped me. We ran into each other at a
party, ironically at the same house where we first met, and
we spoke just long enough for her to tell me how much she
loved her new boyfriend. Then she vanished from my life.
I thought I’d never see her again.
And we just happen to meet in a cheesy chain
restaurant four years later.
But it gets better. We were reminiscing, talking
about who was doing what and where, and then we got to our
relationship histories. The guy she was dating when I last
saw her was named Dan Friedman and they dated for almost
four years. They both went to UIC and commuted so they
were both able to keep it local and stay together. The
problems started when he wanted to get an apartment but she
wanted to stay at home and save her money. She was telling
me about the fights they’d have, then she all of a sudden,
she stopped and asked me, “Who was that girl you dated
senior year after I met you?”
“Rachel York.”
When I said her name, Rene did that sarcastic smile
and one-beat laugh people typically do when someone they’re
not very fond of comes up in a conversation. Turns out
that Dan and Rachel had a lot of mutual friends, there was
a mutual meeting with a mutual attraction and he wound up
dumping Rene for her. To the best of Rene’s knowledge,
they were still dating. Our ex’s wound up together. How
freaky is that?
Now I’m normally a very rational man. In fact, I’m a
very cynical man (in case you haven’t noticed). But I do
leave enough room in my brain for the joys of the
unexpected yet strangely planned, in other words, fate.
The moment Rene and I got reacquainted, we both felt that
forces beyond our power brought us together.
Three months later we drove down to the Cook County
Courthouse in Chicago and eloped. I won’t take up your
time going into every single vivid detail that I recall on
that day and the three months that preceded it. Let’s just
say that we were both in front of a big wave: we could surf
it, swim it or try to fight it, but one way or another, it
would take us there.
Both our parents were shocked but shocked into a numb
and happy acceptance. Their first assumption was that a
pregnancy was involved, which it wasn’t. When they
realized it was plain old-fashioned love (and that the
horse had long-since crossed the state line and it was
pointless to even look at the barn door) they gave us our
blessing and sent us on a honeymoon.
Our first place was a one-bedroom apartment in
Prospect Heights. I worked at a seafood restaurant to make
ends meet while I finished up grad school. Rene worked
full time in the accounting department at Allstate.
That time was great emotionally but stressful
financially. We had primed our minds to pay rent and
luckily we both owned our cars, but there were a lot of
little things we weren’t used to paying for that all added
up, like gas, electricity, groceries, telephone, etc.
Plus, you had the double-pronged pitchfork of the
consumption economy: the credit card and the advertising
culture that made you feel like a failure if you didn’t
have at least two and you didn’t use them all the time.
Added to all that, I was going to grad school and
racking up loans with the possibility that I might not even
have a job waiting for me when I finished. I knew I wanted
to teach but I’ll be honest, I didn’t have a backup plan -
and you kind of need one if you’re stretching out your
college education on your own dime. I had a cousin up in
Minneapolis, straight-A student, went to Duke, stayed on
for law school, got his JD, passed the Minnesota Bar and
what did he do afterwards, what was he still doing while I
was going for my Masters? He was doing contract legal work
for peanuts and living at home so he could pay off his
loans. Of course, his Mom swore up and down that he was
just, “Decompressing after some very demanding years before
he goes to the big leagues,” but who knows? Maybe even
academic prime ribs like him were hard to employ, in the
boom times of 1998!
Fortunately, things worked out okay. Once I got my
Masters, I got a teaching job and we were able (with
donations from both parents) to get a 3-bedroom condo in
Vernon Hills. And it was right in the nick of time because
Rene got pregnant and we needed an extra room.
Vernon Hills was not a place where I imagined I’d
live. It was just to the south of Libertyville but it was
a totally different kind of town. Libertyville was a
classic 19th century town that eased into the 20th and 21st
centuries with its identity and character more or less
intact. Vernon Hills was a collection of farms that
exploded into a shopping mall in the 1970s – character came
a little later in the picture. It was the kind of place a
guy who absorbed too much pretentious, wanna-be
counterculture crybaby bullshit in college would turn up
his nose at, which is exactly what I did.
But it was the best we could afford. I always thought
of Libertyville as a middle class town and while I was
growing up, it was. But all that changed in the 90’s. A
huge chunk of forested land was turned into a neighborhood
of closely spaced McMansions with a golf course for a back
yard. Almost overnight, the town where I grew up was
priced out of my range. When Rene and I were looking at
houses, we checked three pages of Libertyville listings and
the prices, even for the 2-bedroom cracker boxes, made our
jaws hit our toes.
Vernon Hills was within our means and Rene actually
sat me down and went over a list of why I should be
practical and realize it was a good choice. It had
affordable condos, great schools, and because of the mall
and the strip malls that I hated so much, our taxes would
be manageable. My grandparents had to live in a town with
steel mills to have affordable taxes. I’ll take lack of
aesthetics over air pollution and carcinogenic drinking
water any day.
The burbs have been subjected to a lot of artistic
libel over the years, usually from people who grew up in
the burbs and are just too hip for their privileged
upbringings. They can’t appreciate the fact that the
mundane is like a blank wall and if you stare at it long
enough, the secrets of the universe are revealed and your
spirit is fulfilled. My only problem in life was making
enough money to get by, it won’t get any deeper than that.
But if you want to give my story some artistic cachet, I’ll
let you pretend my wife and I hate each other and I’m
searching for meaning while lusting after my daughter’s
best friend.
Our son Jonathan was born in September of 1999, Dulcie
in September of 2001, and Ehren in November of 2005.
You’ll learn all about them as the story goes on. Right
now I want to tell you about my incidental family.
There was a Mobil Station at the entrance to my
subdivision that I patronized on a regular basis. I always
stopped there for gas and little pick-me-ups that I didn’t
feel like dealing with a grocery store to get. Over the
years I developed one-eighth of a relationship with the
people who worked there; I saw them all the time for just a
few minutes at a time. Some of them treated me like any
other customer they’d never see again. Some of them would
give me a look like they recognized me. Some would say
“Hey man!” and strike up some short conversation. But I
never got their names. They didn’t wear tags and I never
thought to ask. But I did give them nicknames. It was
intimacy in my own head.
There was Thigh-High, this cute Latina with jet-black
hair down to her waist. She always wore these black
leather boots that went up just above her knees, hence her
name.
Then there was Woob-Woob. He was this white dude in
his twenties who had a scraggly mustache and always wore a
red Marine Corps cap. He must have had some kind of
condition like Tourette’s or something because he was
always saying Woob Woob before, during and after everything
he said.
For example, I’m buying gas and snacks:
“Woob! That all for you? Woob woob!”
“Yeah that’s fine.”
“Woob! That’ll be twenty-six nineteen. Woob woob!”
There was Color Me Bad, a recent import from Mexico
with a jeri curl mullet. He reminded me of that guy in
Color Me Bad who looked like Kenny G. He was a pretty cool
guy. I talked to him a lot.
There was The Dude. He was an old white guy with long
gray hair pulled into a ponytail with a goatee and three
turquoise-on-silver rings on his fingers. He always wore a
black leather vest with a denim button-down. I never saw
him wear anything else. I just took one look at the guy
and said, “Man, that’s the Dude.”
There was Cheech, a white kid with dirty blond hair
who either had really bad allergies or always burned one
before coming to work because his eyes were the color of
raw steak and one-quarter shut every time I saw him.
Al Roker III was a heavy-set black guy who looked like
Al Roker and since Mancow already had a sidekick named Al
Roker, Jr., I went with Al Roker III.
But the most memorable of all the members of my
incidental family was Champ, the owner and proprietor.
Unlike the rest of the Mobil crew, Champ’s name was his
own. He was the only person who wore a nametag and it
said, in big capital letters, “CHAMP.”
He was a Dravidan Indian with a white mustache, white
hair on his temples, a shiny bald dome and a gut that
looked like he’d swallowed a sack of potatoes. I went in
one time to buy some milk and I heard him saying to the
Dude, “I’ve seen too many people in my country, in my
family, go hungry. I was going hungry.” He patted his
belly. “I come here to get fat. Not the only reason, but
a big one.”
I got to know him in 2002 when I started my warm
weather Friday night routine. On a typical Friday night
from late spring to early autumn I would go on a bike ride
with a couple of beers and some smoke if I had any –my
counterculture pretensions didn’t survive my transition to
the real world but my enjoyment of weed did, it simply
evolved from wake and bake to weekend dabbling. I didn’t
have the cash to barhop, all my friends were living
downtown, and in any event, Jon was 3, Dulcie was 1 and
Rene worked on Saturdays, which made me the caregiver (and
trying to give care to a toddler and an infant at 6 AM
while hung over is just no fun at all). So I partied semi-
soft and on the cheap.
Rene was an earlier sleeper and as soon she hit the
sack around 11PM, I’d hop on my mountain bike, ride to
Mobil, buy two oil cans of Fosters and go to this spot by
the stormwater retention pond that was next to a huge
willow tree and directly under the approach corridor for
one of Palwaukee Airport’s runways. I’d drink, take a few
tugs from my one-hitter, listen to the wind blow the willow
branches in and out of the water with a light hiss,
punctuated by the plash of the pond fountain and the
occasional roar of a Learjet gliding over my head and soak
in a moment. Once I had a nice buzz going on, I’d ride
home, play Grand Theft Auto 3 for an hour or so then go to
bed.
On one of those typical Friday nights I took a few
hits, rode to Mobil and saw Champ working all by himself.
I bought my beers, we talked a little bit about the Hindu
caste system and how he was born into the warrior caste but
was a merchant for most of his life, and then he pointed to
the donut case and said, “I have to throw those out
tonight. They’re okay but they hit the expiration date at
midnight and the Health Department says they gotta go. You
want them?”
From thought to words: I’m baked like an Idaho potato
in aluminum foil and gettin’ hungry. “Hell yeah I want
‘em!”
“So take them.”
Our friendship progressed from there. It wasn’t a
close friendship, but enough of a friendship for me to
remember him to my dying days. His real name was Madhu
Padmanaban. I asked him why he called himself Champ and
his response: “It sounded American.” And he said that like
I should’ve known that was the reason and the fact that I
didn’t meant that it didn’t sound American, so shit!
He was born and raised in Goa, India and came to the
states in 1976 with his pregnant wife in tow. He started
out in Chicago as a cab driver and moonlighted at a Mobil
station on Fullerton Avenue. He managed to land a
management job at the Mobil in Vernon Hills and moved to
Mundelein, the next town over. As time went by and he got
more money, he opened up an Indian grocery store in
downtown Mundelein and converted an old Victorian home into
four apartments. He was the first true entrepreneur I’d
ever met.
Then, one hot summer night in 2012, I walked into
Mobil and instead of seeing Champ behind the counter, I saw
a younger thinner version with a full head of hair. It was
his son Kirpal.
I asked him where Champ was and he relayed the tragic
story. Champ had a stroke, twelve days shy of his seventy-
first birthday. One minute he was standing behind the
counter counting cash from the till while a John Belushi
lookalike employee I called Bluto restocked the cigs. The
next minute he listed to one side, dropped to the floor and
bashed his head on the vinyl tiles, compounding his
cerebral woes with a concussion.
He survived but was incapacitated and would require
months of physical therapy to get pre-stroke. He summoned
up enough of his part-time Hinduism to reason that his
dharma had run its course and it was time to hang it up.
So he handed the keys to his son, dipped into his 401 and
moved to a retirement community in Marysville, Tennessee
with his wife.
Kirpal fit into my Friday night routine just fine. In
fact, I kind of knew him already. He went to Mundelein
High School and was one grade behind me. I hung out with
some kids who went there and when I dropped their names, he
knew a few of them. Who knows, we might’ve gone to the
same parties and passed each other in a drunken haze
without even knowing it.
He used to be in commercial lending at Chase but lost
his job in 2008 when the banking industry cratered. After
faxing resumes by the tens and having meetings with
headhunters that went absolutely nowhere, he went to Plan B
and asked his Dad if he could be involved in the family
business.
Champ had added a few more gigs to his portfolio by
that time. He had another apartment building in Mundelein,
another Indian grocery store in Gurnee and a sales cart in
Gurnee Mills that sold hair extensions and costume jewelry.
Trying to manage all that by himself was a task and a half
and he was thrilled to take on Kirpal as his “Executive
Assistant.” He ran the numbers, balanced the books, did
the taxes and prepared to take on some onsite management
duties when the time was right. That time was 2012.
Kirpal kept telling himself that working for his
father was a temporary thing and he’d get more dejected as
time went on and he realized it wasn’t. He was one of
those people who didn’t have much patience for the footnote
to the American Dream; he wanted the main text and he
wanted it now. He made good money at Chase, put a lot of
his surplus dollars into the stock market and spent many
long hours hunched over his computer figuring out how to
parlay all that money into millions. And of course, like a
lot of fiscally intelligent people who thought they had a
foolproof scheme, he lost all but the last layer of skin on
his ass.
Losing all his savings and going from a world of
Forizei ties and letters of credit to plastic name tags and
cash registers was a little bruising to his ego. Add to
that equation a house in Libertyville that he had to walk
away from and a wife who was three months pregnant when all
this shit went down and I’m amazed he kept it all together.
A weaker mind would’ve moved the body it occupied in front
of an oncoming train.
Eventually our friendship moved beyond the gas
station. In 2013 he invited the family and I over to his
house for dinner and we had a blast. He has two sons, one
of whom is a year younger than Jon, and his wife Kalpana
got along great with Rene. I had been in a friendship
drought for a couple of years and it was nice to finally
meet someone who was more or less where I was in life.
He spent a lot of time bitching about how far he’d
fallen and I was the silent, sympathetic ear until I felt I
knew him well enough to tell him to stop bitching and
appreciate the cushion he’d landed on. I was like, “Dude,
you have a job, a good job all things considered, you were
able to move into your parents house and assume their
mortgage, I don’t have a house and who knows if I’ll ever
have one. You were able to get insurance. Everyone’s
healthy. Stop bitching! Fear will drive you into a rut,
bitching will keep you stuck there. I wish I could say I
lived by that credo all the time, but I am trying.
After awhile he mellowed out and started taking a
stoic and appreciative view of things. But he never lost
that entrepreneurial, risk-taking spirit. I’d say he got
it from his Dad but it came out different in the
translation. His Dad went out and found his opportunities
at street-level small business. Kirpal never took to that.
He liked looking at the stock market and seeing the
opportunities through a computer screen. The only thing
that kept him from indulging in that was a lack of seed
money. I asked him if shell shock had anything to do with
it and he said no. Plenty of people lost a helluva lot
more than he did and got it all back. His problem was
simply not having the money to hit REBOOT. All his income
was, in his banker jargon, “pre-dedicated.”
But he’d still spend a few long nights hunched over
his computer seeing stocks that he felt pretty good about
and wishing he had the dough to play them. Sometimes I’d
listen to him go on about why this stock looked or good and
that one didn’t, all under a pretty convincing theme of
having learned his lesson the first time around and how
he’d be older and wiser if he ever played the market again
If only he had a little extra dough.
That’s where we went from friends to partners in the
illegal gasoline trade. But first I had to earn his trust.
I earned it by saving his life.
Let me tell you about 5/9.