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“What do you think he’s go
I ran the possibilities through my mind. “I’m not really sure—Oh, shit, I know exactly what…”
All at once, faster than would seem possible, Da
A dozen young sales assistants seated close to the action jumped out of their seats and recoiled in horror at the very sight of Da
“Oh…my…God,” said Janet. “He’s go
Just then Da
“He’s got it!” cried Janet, putting her fist to her mouth.
“Yeah, but the million-dollar question is, what’s he go
An instant reply: “A hundred to one? You’re on! He won’t do it! It’s too gross. I mean—”
Janet was cut off as Da
Janet the welcher: “I want to cancel my bet right now!”
“Sorry, too late!”
“Come on! It’s not fair!”
“Neither is life, Janet.” I shrugged i
A hundred sales assistants let out a collective gasp, while ten times as many brokers began cheering in admiration—paying homage to Da
I started snickering at Janet. “Well, don’t worry about paying me. I’ll just take it out of your paycheck.”
“Don’t you fucking dare!” she hissed.
“Fine, you can owe me, then!” I smiled and winked. “Now go order the flowers and bring me some coffee. I gotta start this fucking day already.” With a bounce in my step and a smile on my face, I walked into my office and closed the door—ready to take on anything the world could toss at me.
CHAPTER 6
FREEZING REGULATORS
It was less than five minutes later, and I was sitting in my office, behind a desk fit for a dictator, in a chair as big as a throne. I cocked my head to the side and said to the room’s two other occupants, “Now let me get this straight: You guys want to bring a midget in here and toss his little ass around the boardroom?”
In unison, they nodded.
Sitting across from me, in an overstuffed oxblood leather club chair, was none other than Da
Da
I shook my head in disbelief. “Where are you go
Andy nodded sagely, as if he were measuring the appropriate legal response. He was an old and trusted friend, who’d recently been promoted to head of Stratton’s Corporate Finance Department. It was Andy’s job to sift through the dozens of business plans Stratton received each day and decide which, if any, were worth passing along to me. In essence, the Corporate Finance Department served as a manufacturing plant—providing finished goods in the form of shares and warrants in initial public offerings, or new issues, as the phrase went on Wall Street.
Andy was wearing the typical Stratton uniform—consisting of an immaculate Gilberto suit, white shirt, silk necktie, and, in his case, the worst toupee this side of the Iron Curtain. At this particular moment, it looked like someone had taken a withered donkey’s tail and slapped it onto his egg-shaped Jewish skull, poured shellac over it, stuck a cereal bowl over the shellac, and then placed a twenty-pound plate of depleted uranium over the cereal bowl and let it sit for a while. It was for this very reason that Andy’s official Stratton nickname was Wigwam.
“Well,” said Wigwam, “in terms of the insurance issues here, if we get a signed waiver from the midget, along with some sort of hold-harmless agreement, then I don’t think we have any liability if the midget were to break his neck. But we would need to take every precaution that a reasonable man would take, which is clearly the legal requirement in a situation like…”
Jesus! I wasn’t looking for a fucking legal analysis of this whole midget-tossing business—I just wanted to know if Wigwam thought it was good for broker morale! So I tuned out, keeping one eye on the green-diode numbers and letters that were skidding across the computer monitors on either side of my desk and the other eye on the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window that looked out into the boardroom.
Wigwam and I went all the way back to grade school. Back then he had this terrific head of the finest blond hair you’ve ever seen, as fine as corn silk, in fact. But, alas, by his seventeenth birthday his wonderful head of hair was a distant memory, barely thick enough for the dreaded male comb-over.
Faced with the impending doom of being bald as an eagle while still in high school, Andy decided to lock himself in his basement, smoke five thousand joints of cheap Mexican reefer, play video games, eat frozen Ellio’s pizza for breakfast, lunch, and di
He emerged from his basement three years later, a fifty-year-old ornery Jew with a few strands of hair, a prodigious potbelly, and a newfound personality that was a cross between the humdrum Eeyore, from Wi