Dawn of the Unthinkable (20 page)

“There you go,” Cunningham said, signing it
and handing it over. “Here’s the course syllabus,” he said, handing
Ryan a sheet. “A midterm and a final, plus four papers, standard
undergrad workload. You up to it?” he asked.

“I hope so, although I haven’t done this
since ’85, to tell you the truth. I hope you grade on a curve like
Steve Carlton,” he said, naming the old Phillie Hall-of-Famer,
testing to see if Cunningham was about the same age.

“Lefty, huh?” he said, rocking back in his
chair. “Man, those were some great teams, weren’t they? Luzinski,
Schmidt, Rose, man, watching baseball was fun back then,” he said
with a nostalgic tone to his voice.

“Yes it was,” Ryan agreed. He had learned
later in life that teachers give better grades to those students
that always sit up front in class and take a small personal
interest in them. Ryan wanted to erase whatever bad impression he
had made by acting surprised at finding a black professor.

“Well, enough sentimentality. You’d better
get over to the bookstore. They’re probably lined up three deep
over there, and you’ll want to get started on the readings,” he
said, pointing to the list of three books that he would need.

“Okay, I’ll go check it out. See you in
class next week
,
” Ryan said and left the
office. He felt more confident in his decision to take the course
after meeting this apparently friendly man.

He walked to the administration office first
and turned in his card and the check the government had cut for the
course. The deal was as long as he got at least a B, they would pay
the entire amount of the course. He didn’t feel he would have any
trouble getting a B, but you never knew. He wasn’t certain his
newfound interest in political/social systems would hold up over
three and a half months. But he was excited to be back in the rat
race of students, pushing and shoving, and trying to take care of
all the details. He finally got everything processed, bought his
books, and went home to start the assigned readings.

Kathy was waiting for him to see how her new
student’s first day of school went. He showed her the books. She
picked them up and said, “Well, I’ve never heard of any of these
guys, and frankly, they look super boring, good luck with all that.
I got to admit, I do look the smell of new books, though, they
smell like,
knowledge
, you know? How much did all these
cost?”

When he told her, her eyes went wide in
disbelief, “Jesus, are you shitting me? We have to shell that out?
This whole thing is turning into a major pain in my ass; please
tell me this is the last you’ll be spending on it in a while.”

“Yeah, yeah, this is it,” he said hurriedly,
not wanting to get her any angrier. He needed her on his side, if
not to agree with the idea, at least to not block him from doing
what he felt needed doing to see it through. The books were
something; the smallest one was over seven hundred pages long. Of
course, they had so many footnotes that in effect large portions of
their book were actually written by someone else, but it still was
impressive. He remembered how his own puny effort had taken him
about two months to complete; he wondered how long it took these
guys. His textbooks were both above version six, so he knew there
were bucks being made on what was essentially a sequel to the
original book. This was truly one of the greatest rip-offs of the
world in that the books were required so there were guaranteed
sales, and then every year they made a few revisions, so you could
rarely buy a used book. The prices of them would knock your socks
off, and seemed to fluctuate completely independently of the fact
that inflation was going down. Knowing enough about business, he
realized that there were probably some very compelling reasons why
the pricing was set as it was, but he hoped it wasn’t obscene
profits. Profit was okay. It was what compelled people to go into
and stay in business, but obscene profits were a drain on society
and what had sparked his interest in all of this in the first
place.

He struggled through the readings, which
came to about three hundred pages. Most of the writers were very
dry and presented the information in a very factual manner. He
found himself nodding off after he had read a very little amount
and worried about how he would hold up in class. He was notorious
for falling asleep in meetings and classes. This was probably due
to his staying up late at night, usually not going to bed until
after midnight. He enjoyed the quiet time after everyone else was
asleep and would often stay up grazing in the kitchen and reading
the paper till the wee hours. He was going to have to cut back a
little on the recreational reading, though, to accommodate this new
requirement.

He had pretty much read all of the assigned
material by the time he got to class. It was on Tuesday and
Thursday nights, starting at six and running till nine. He had
grabbed a quick bite at McGillan’s Old Ale House before he went
over; his agency’s employees stopped there so frequently that they
called it “the Annex.”. He took a seat right in the first row,
which would have been unthinkable for him before, but he didn’t
want Cunningham to forget him. The rest of the students came in,
mostly older like him since it was night school, but also a fair
amount of youngsters. The class was pretty much filled when
Cunningham came in, set his books down, and wrote his name on the
board. He then turned to the class and looked around. The class
settled down and looked back at him.

He smiled and said, “Good evening everyone.
My name is Wayne Cunningham, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a
large African-American.” The class broke up, laughing nervously at
this loaded icebreaker.

“The reason I say that is that there was a
long, harrowing journey made by people I’ll never know, people I
never met, who made it possible for me to be here, teaching a class
of many races. Those people were probably not living their lives
with someone like me in mind; they were just trying to survive. But
survive they did, flourished even, to the point that I am now able
to earn in a year what Michael Jordan gets paid to run around in
his shorts for one game.” This brought more laughter from the
class. The nervousness of putting yourself in someone else’s hands
whom you’ve never met before was starting to slip away. Ryan
started to relax.
This is going to be fun
.

Then the professor launched into a summary
of the pages that he had read and made the dry material come alive.
He could see that it was lost on the younger set, who shifted in
their seats, looking for that one position where sleep could be
achieved without falling out of the chair. For him and some of the
others, though, they were fascinated how he readily shifted gears
from telling how the prime minister had pushed the policy through
and how it affected the blacksmith or local tradesman’s guild. He
knew what the suffragettes thought of a particular farming policy
and why the cops supported one candidate solely on what type of gun
he owned. By the time he finished three hours later, Ryan could
hardly believe that much time had passed, and he had not fallen
asleep once. Even when he assigned a paper at the end of class, and
the youths groaned, he wrote it down eagerly, happy to try to show
this interesting man what he was capable of. The guy reminded him
of a Tom Peters type, who could rattle off quotes, statistics, and
anecdotes all day with just the slimmest of notes.
How do they
do it
? Ryan wasn’t sure, but he knew it impressed and inspired
slack-jawed yokels like him.

Driving home from class, Ryan tried to
remember any of the facts he had just learned from Cunningham. He
couldn’t, but he knew he would always remember the excitement with
which it was taught. It filled him with renewed excitement about
his idea, and increased his desire to make it real somehow. He knew
if someone else could be that fired up about society and politics,
he was not wrong for pursuing his vision. He could hardly wait
until the time was right to show the Professor his baby.

Brian Willows was happy with how his
portfolio had done, as usual. The markets were up and he had ridden
the crest of the wave masterfully, stopping the bleeding on some
experimental ventures that just didn’t pan out, holding others that
Riven bailed on. Overall, the portfolio that he managed was up for
the year 26.7%, beating the Dow, which was making outrageous gains.
Riven had cleared 20%, which was pretty good for a conservative.
Even he was having a hard time appearing pessimistic in the face of
the continual upward rush of the market, but he usually found a
cloud in the silver lining to justify prudence. He was always
chiding Willows about how eventually the sky was going to fall and
the guys like him were going to have a shelter while everyone else
was going to get killed. Willows just laughed; he had built in some
safety nets that he didn’t tell Riven about that would not only
shelter him but might even build a castle where he could retire
early.

When he was growing up, his family was poor
and he ended up in a lot of hand-me-down clothes and eating peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches. This was okay for a while, but he went
to a high school where a good proportion of the students were
better off than he was, and they used to make some cruel remarks
about his attire. He was a relatively sensitive kid so he went into
a shell, sometimes not speaking to anyone for days, ashamed of his
appearance. He became obsessed with making it big and developed his
abilities along the financial lines. While he was doing well on the
Street, he was impatient to make a big score and be able to show
the people from the high school what he could do when he went back
to his reunion in a few years. Pretty shallow reason for wanting to
succeed, but many of the important parts of a person’s personality
are formed early in life, and even if many layers are added later,
the core remains the same.

He studied those who had made it huge, like
Bill Gates, Howard Hughes, and even Michael Jordan. What did they
have that he didn’t? All had extraordinary talent, which many
people have, but these few figured out how to market that talent to
practically everyone on the face of the Earth. He couldn’t see what
he had to offer that would be desirable to the masses, so it didn’t
look likely that that was going to be his ticket. He continued to
think about it while reading the
Journal
, not really paying
much attention to what he was reading. Suddenly, he saw something
in the article that he was scanning that caught his eye and started
him on a brainstorm.

The article was about another broker who was
caught by the SEC churning his client’s holdings based on insider
information. The guy was pretty obvious about it, expecting to pump
some significant commissions before he was found out and taking off
once he was questioned about it. He had been caught by one of his
sharper clients who poured over the details of his quarterly report
and noticed a pattern of unnecessary trades. The SEC moved quickly
to prosecute this broker because things were going too well now for
people to be getting greedy, and they knew that the scent of money
that pervaded Wall Street could corrupt the Pope. He would probably
get a light sentence at a minimum-security “country club” prison,
and the secret admiration of many of his colleagues who wished they
had the audacity to try a scam. The idea of churning planted itself
in Willow’s mind, and even though he had a strong sense of ethics,
he rationalized to himself he would just try to think about how the
guy could have done it without getting caught.
Purely as a
mental exercise
.

What you needed was access to a large,
diverse pool of funds owned be people who were content to stay the
course if they were getting their expected return every month. You
also needed a watchdog in your own firm that was somewhat asleep at
the switch or was distracted by other concerns. Probably better to
be in a small firm where trust was automatic instead of a large one
where internal security was tough and computer programs scanned all
trades for anomalies. You had better have a good explanation for a
trade that on the surface did not make sense. While the guy in the
article was caught earlier in his scheme than he planned, he would
have been caught by the firm eventually when the pattern showed up
on the questionable sales report. His had figured that by the time
he was questioned he would have salted enough away to make a decent
start on a new life.

But Willows thought, why not instead of
trying to do it in a hurry, you do it over a long period of time,
sporadically, so the trades kind of blended into the woodwork?.
Unnecessary trades in relatively stable stocks and funds that could
be justified if questioned. If you continued to work in the
business, you could do it several times a quarter and probably
never catch anyone’s attention. You could probably get a nice
nest-egg together on the side, and if you wouldn’t be rich at the
next reunion, you probably wouldn’t be in a federal pokey, either.
The money could be put in an account overseas and be waiting
patiently for its clever owner to come claim it when he was ready
for his Monte Carlo debut. He wondered if the guy had thought about
that; he would have plenty of time to reflect on it now.

Just then, Riven plopped into his chair
across from Willows. He had two or three different lunch bags from
different vendors; it gave Willows heartburn to watch him eat.
Riven was close to happy, the increased fees he had been collecting
had allowed him to increase his food budget and he had probably put
on ten pounds in the last month. It also allowed him less guilt
when he indulged in his one athletic ability, which was playing
darts at the local pub. He had moved up to tournament level and
could amaze people by throwing consecutive bulls-eyes with his eyes
closed. He started with a chili cheese dog, washed it down with a
Yoohoo and threw some onion rings in for good measure. A couple of
egg rolls were dealt with next. Willows had a strong stomach but
didn’t usually cross the cultural food line so daringly
himself.