Letters Journal

KARRIER

My Dad was always wrong. It was great.

He worked on Wall Street. He was Wall Street. He analyzed the market. Always wrongly. He was always wrong for a big firm that kept him high in a corner office with drawn shades and a bare bulb. He was the worst.

He was the worst, your old man, the former retired market analysts will say to me, in admiration, no rancor, their faces recessed and protruding, eyes redly milky, at the anniversary of the Crash.

I’ll disagree.

He was the worst, they’ll insist, shaking their manes, raising snifters of superior sherry.

Yadley here remembers the time he went in to your old man and he said Karrier he said he said Karrier, gone over the material yet on this newfangled Eastman Kodak outfit? and your old man he said, Yadley, no. As in not even a fraction of a chance. Meaning a bare zero potential for growth. He pleaded with Yadley, Yadley did he plead or did he plead? he said You gotta believe me. Trust me on this one. A dead bird. Stillborn. A loser. A dink. A dead bird, spiralling out of the sky. I’m imploring here, he said. He said grab Mr. Lynch by the lapels.

Get Mr. Merrill in a headlock if you have to. Not a cent into this dry sponge. This commode for funds. My gut is crying out on this one.

Yadley has a snapshot of the whole thing, he’ll say.

He was great, they’ll say.

And he was great. He was wrong about Coca Cola. Frozen OJ. Ford. ITT. CBS. AT&T. Radio. Nabisco. Xerox. He put himself squarely behind The Dumont Network; washboards; the Calvin Coolidge Charm School; the Fatty Arbuckle kid’s doll. An automatic icepick concern out of Sag Harbor. The future of chipped beef. Teapot Dome Petroleum. Lead paint. Streudle; scones; the Ritz- as opposed to, the Marx-, brothers. He was Wall Street. His big firm reacted negatively off his every call. And got so big they became Wall Street, for a while. They relied on him. He was their weapon. This was what was great: he was always wrong.

…

KARRIER

I’m pretty unhappy. I live in a watch-towered uptown condominium I was sure I’d hate when Mr. Diggs put down the deposit. It’s up-to-the-minute, metal and deco glass, and the glass and metal windows are just so much more art; they make me feel empty, outside them. Though the price is sure right.

I tend to be dour. I’m overweight and asthmatic. My chest twitters when I breathe. My lips are wet all the time. I’ve got a kind of dent in my forhead, as if I’d been creamed with a shovel. My skull juts in back. I waddle and sweat. I have retrograde ejaculations and unpleasant breath. My wife is a beautiful girl whose love for me I doubt. I see the hate behind her smile. I feel the restraint of black urges behind every neck massage.

And the baby. Don’t even ask about the fat white baby with its little dent and empty Halloween grin.

It’s great to always be wrong, though. Just thank God I found Mr. D. there next to me on that bridge that night. He explained how he’d pulled over when he saw me balancing my weight between the weight and the rope. He asked me Why, kid, why. Give it here he said. I gave it there. Cars were going across the bridge. I could see his eyes, they were the color of skin in the light of his Day-Glo tie. Those ties were the rage. I trusted him. It was an instinctive thing. I tend to be ruled by instinct.

I refused to even consider going back to his Agency’s office with him. In his car I told him several lies. In his Agency’s offices Mr. Diggs tested my claims at length.

The Edsel, kid? he asked, eating tuna with his fingers from a can on a desk in an office off the docks, near the bridge.

I had Edsel-instincts. All the way. A national phenom. Sell the farm. Run don’t walk to your nearest Edsel dealer.

This Elvis boy?

All hips and lips. Dirty, derivative, dark, doomed to die, thin as a rail, destitute. In detention. Morals charges.

He ran his finger around the inside of the can.

I feel stuff like this I said. It’s like I feel it, inside me.

He looked at the empty can of fish. Your destiny? he said.

I began to wish I could see the noosed braid of the bridge’s lights across the docks and unlit Sound. To try to follow in my Dad’s footsteps, I said, and to fail. To miss every print in the snow.