After Effect

Now that I am sitting in the bean bag chair of my old bedroom in my parents' house again, nobody from my high flying days seems to call me anymore. Except for the collection agencies. They still call. But it's a fact that since the BMW was repossessed and my credit cards were closed, my penthouse apartment neighbors disappeared. The last thing I heard from my girlfriend was: "I'll call you," and I haven't heard from her since.

I suppose that's what they mean by 'human nature', and I guess, in the end, people can't help looking after themselves. So I don't blame them anymore, any more than I blame myself. I just sit here, listening to records I used to listen to when I was a kid, on the old stereo my father saved up in the attic along with all the other things he couldn't throw away. I look out of the window at the people walking in the street under the trees. Somehow the trees, turning colors in the crisp, fall air, seem more substantial. I used to think it would be nice to hear from people I called friends, especially someone I spent thousands of dollars on jewelry for. But that's how it goes.

That's all turning out to be a part of the world that existed before the Great Recession. Before the market crashed. There definitely is a 'before' and 'after', everybody who went through it knows that. We are definitely in the aftermath, the after effect, now. It's funny how, in the aftermath, you come to see so many things that you once thought were so indispensable, so many people you thought you couldn't live without, turn out to be so insignificant. Even the dreams of comfort and ease that you once hung all your ambitions on seem to have blown away like leaves in the wind, and now, all that matters is the sky outside the window, your pulse, and the person who will listen to what you have to say in any given moment.

I used to be a market analyst. Even just saying that makes me laugh. As if being a market analyst is something akin to being a steelworker or a carpenter. But back then, back in the roaring nineties, when I graduated college, it seemed like something. My parents didn't know what to make of it. My father was a small business owner, and put all his money in the house. My mother, ironically, was born in the Great Depression. But I thought I was going places. I was going to be one of those guys in the suit, carrying a briefcase and commuting to Wall Street, mysteriously making money appear, literally, out of thin air. Or at least off of a computer screen.

The people I went to school with all thought we were going places too. We were all going places together. I remember how we used to hang out in the bar after our final exams, dressed in our sports jackets and silk pastel shirts, toasting each other with glasses of Glen Livet scotch and Stolichnaya vodkha, talking about the new BMW's we were going to buy, the condos in Palm Beach we were going to own, the rich socialites we were going to date. We'd watch some girl walk passed the window in a Chanel one piece with pearls around her neck and a perfect coiffure, and tell each other what we'd do to land her.

When we graduated, we all got jobs in brokerage firms like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. It's amazing how much of a lifestyle the job was. Every day we would have lunch in Fraunces Tavern, around the corner from the Stock Exchange, and talk about the future of the companies everyone else was working at. Citibank, Macys, and Krispy Kreme donuts. We saw ourselves as the people pulling the strings behind the scenes, making the make or break decisions. I don't remember ever talking to the employees, the people who worked in those places, saving their paychecks for their dream houses or their kids' college education. For us, it was all about product acceptability, marketing plans, cost structures and revenue leverage.

You might well ask, what the hell is it that a market analyst actually does? Well, a market analyst analyzes companies; their products, their production capacity, their profit margins and revenue, divides it by the shares outstanding, or the 'float', and tries to come up with a forecast of what the earnings, or profit per share, will be. If it sounds like looking into a crystal ball or reading tea leaves, I guess you could say it was. I mean, I was right out of college, and what the hell did I know about making mortgages or managing donut shops? But I looked at the numbers, did the math, and made the predictions. The market went up. Maybe it was a self fulfilling prophesy, I don't know. But people sure paid us to come up with those forecasts.

And money attracts people. Not really the money, but the things you can buy with it, the places you go, the cars you drive, the restaurants you eat in, the hotels you stay at. It's all about the status. That's how I met Jeanne, my girlfriend. She was one of those smart ass, sexy young cats with the disarming smile in the DKNY dress and the high heels that catches your eye as soon as she walks into the bar. The girl with the immaculate hair you're just dying to run your fingers through, the girl with the porcelain skin and the knock-out figure. I guess I was the guy with the high powered Wall Street job, the suit with the Italian shoes, the BMW she wanted to drive around in. At the time, she seemed perfect for me. It was like we were made for each other. Ah, those were the days. Walking around Columbus Circle in the light of the streetlamps, French kissing on the promenade of the Top of the Rock, with St. Patrick's Cathedral and the skating rink glittering beneath us.

There didn't seem to an end in sight, back then, and our dreams expanded with the money we were making into a super highway steaming across the continent. We were at the epicenter of the world. Jason and Carl, my friends from the brokerage, and
Rebecca and Taylor, Jeanne's fashionista buddies, we were the Caballeros. We even had our own table at one of those Italian restaurants on Mulberry Street. We went to Cancun together. We made love, Jeanne and I in a chaise lounge out on a balcony of that hotel, under the Mexican moon. We drank martinis till dawn. I bought her a gold necklace, and she told me she loved me. As if love were a trinket anyway.

It all changed, when the market crashed. None of us saw it coming, though I guess we should have, with our knowledge of technical analysis and Elliot Wave theory. One day the market just started going down, and it kept going down. It became a torrent. A waterfall. People sold everything. Big companies went bankrupt. Our firm merged. And I was laid off in the merger.

I was living with Jeanne in a condo on Riverside Drive when it happened. It was a nice condo. You could see across the river from the balcony, and we could jog around under the trees along the river in the evenings. It had a pool, a spa, and a health club. When I told her I lost my job, she dropped her Coach handbag and collapsed onto my leopard skin couch. When I told her I was going to have to leave the condo, she packed up her things and told me she would call me.
And I never heard from her again.

As the banks foreclosed on my condo, and repossessed my car, and cut my credit lines, I saw less and less of Jason and Carl. Carl survived the layoffs. He was the son of one of the managing directors, and I heard he actually got a promotion and a raise out of the whole thing. Can you imagine that? Jason got a job in Charlotte as a bank branch manager and moved. They took their suits with them, in their new capacities, and kept driving their BMWs and dating their fiancees, they were able to maintain their membership in the country club. I realize now, after I lost those things, how much of ourselves, or our sense of ourselves, is a creation of the people around us, the status of our job, and the money we make there. If you don't believe me, then walk into a bar and tell one girl that you're a market analyst, and tell another one that you're homeless and unemployed, and watch the difference in the reaction.

What I think I came away with is the transient nature of that kind of success, and how much of our perspective depends on that success, or failure. When it's gone, you are left with the man in the bean bag chair, listening to old records, trying to ignore the stark unknown opening in the space in front of him. You have to fall back on your own wits and faith in something else, a higher power, the hope for redemption, and transformation, the hope for a new kind of success. You gain respect for the mother and father who took you back in, who lend you money for a used car to go out on job interviews. Blood is thicker than water. You don't wave at the people who drive passed in their BMWs anymore, and they don't wave back either. They seem quite irrelevant now, in the after effect.

With Jeanne gone, and the banks serving me with foreclosure notices, and looking around for a place to live, it was like being in the eye of a storm, and the wind stripped away my dreams, all my pretense, and left me with the day to day struggle for survival. Life became an exercise in procuring a box of macaroni, a bag of cheese, and a jar of tomato sauce, one day at a time. I forgot about travel, and retirement plans and expensive liqueur, designer clothes. I packed up a suitcase full of jeans and t-shirts and moved back home. After I got there, the wind started to die down, as it does after a storm, and the dust began to settle. The sun came out of the clouds again.

I appreciate the sunshine a little more now, I think. I go outside and help my father weed the garden, like a penitent convict on a work detail. We talk about simple things. Grubs and fertilizer, whether to plant cucumbers or zucchini. When he goes back inside, I like to sit out there with the plants. I enjoy watching their simple craving for the necessities of life, sunshine and water, and I appreciate what they have to give me; peppers and eggplant and butternut squash. I am content with whatever they give me that day. Tomorrow is another day.

Lately I've been going for walks with Sarah. Sarah is the librarian who befriended me. She saw me sitting out there on a bench in the library park one afternoon, staring at the petunias, wondering what was going to become of me, and I guess she felt sorry for me and came out on her lunch break to talk to me. She asked me if anything was wrong, and I told her no; I had just lost my job. But she didn't walk away. She took me inside and helped me rewrite my resume, and fill out job applications. She helped me post them online, at the library computers. As the result of all her help and encouragement, I took a job as a night manager in one of those pharmacy chain stores. It's not what I was used to, but it might lead to a store manager's job some day. The pay is enough, not more, but it's enough to take Sarah out to the diner once in a while.

Sarah is a couple of years older than me, and not exactly as striking as Jeanne was, but she is single, and I'm beginning to think of her as more than a friend. That's human nature too, I suppose. We all need someone to hold onto, whether we're in a penthouse apartment or a basement rental. The big difference is, Sarah cares about me because of who I am; the meatloaf I buy her to pay her back for the resume coaching, the jokes I tell her when she has a bad day, and not because of the clothes I am wearing or the car I drive. See the difference?

One day I think I will walk up to her, sitting at her library desk, in her spectacles, and say: "Sarah, how would you like to go for a walk on the beach with me? Let's go for a walk at the beach, right around sunset. What do you say?"

And I have to believe that she will smile, she might even laugh that laugh of hers, and say: "You want to thank me for all those times I sat on the park bench with you?"

And then I will say: "Oh no, it's more than that Sarah. I want to start living again. I found someone to live for."