White Man's Problems (8 page)

“It
was
beautiful,” said Maria. “I remember.”

“And there was a wonderful part of the eulogy about the old pope losing his own mother at a very young age. And they said what he did was transfer his sadness and loss to love to the Virgin Mary. And
that
sustained him for the rest of his life. That giving over of himself to something beyond is what opened his channel to such deep faith.”

“That's right,” said Maria.

“I really think Mike changed at that moment,” said Mary Meehan. “I felt it. And from then on, it was like he was hooked.”

Maria smiled. John said nothing.

“And I will never forget being at Mass a few weeks later. I look next to me, you know, out to the side, quieting myself down the way you do before the priest comes out.” She paused, and waived to indicate her left side. Then she let out a laugh. “Here comes Mike, down the aisle. He sits right next to me in the pew. He says, ‘Mary, tell me when to kneel. I think I remember everything else.'” She laughed to herself, lost in the memory and the wine.

The three sat on the couch for a while without speaking.

Mary opened her pocketbook and pulled out a little laminated card. “I cut the pope's eulogy out of the newspaper and gave it to Mike. He cut out this section with an exacto knife and had this card made, and he kept it with him. He gave it to me in the hospital before he passed. Here, read it.”

John looked at it and read,
“‘He, who at an early age had lost his own mother, loved his divine mother all the more. He heard the words of the crucified Lord as addressed personally to him: “Behold your Mother.” And so he did as the beloved disciple did: he took her into his own home.'”

After finishing, John said, “At the end, there's some Latin:
Totus Tuus
.”

“Now here's the best part,” said Mary. “About six months ago, Mike shows me, right here”—she lifted up her forearm and turned it inward—“he's got a tattoo. And it says:
Totus Tuus
. Big green letters, you know…a tattoo like your father's, like all the kids get these days. You couldn't see it at the viewing because the undertaker dressed him. But it's there.
Totus Tuus
.”

Maria was looking at her hands. After a minute, without looking up, she said, “
Totally yours
.”

“That's right,” said Mary, nodding. “
Totally yours
.”

John got up to look for Donnie to bum another smoke. As he moved toward the center of the house, where the crowd was dying down, he wished for a cold, cold night from long ago, when basketball was holy and he could sleep in Annemarie's bed.

Mulligan's Travels

J
im Mulligan stood in boxers and a T-shirt in the refrigerator light, beer bottle in hand, in the same spot as countless American men before and since, at once living the whiteness and watching it, a picture within a picture, hoping for a miracle snack. He was somewhat medicated, overtired, and experiencing the conflation of his three more or less permanent worries: work, money, and what to eat. Nothing moved him.

Mulligan had learned to accept such times of doubt and pain, but at the moment he was caught up in something else, something careless he had done. When he had walked into his house in Brentwood two hours before at midnight, he realized he had left a brand-new shirt in the hotel room in New York. The lapse ate at him. He loved that goddamned thing, with its small logo of intertwined dollar signs in distressed ink on the back collar. It was roomy and chocolate colored and made from thermal underwear material, a cool shirt from a cool store, the kind of effortlessly hip clothing it was so hard to find. At fifty, with an undefeatable gut, he faced the attendant problem of finding clothes that struck the right balance between young and old, thick and thin.

It was not supposed to be this way. This was not supposed to be his life. He had started for the UCLA football team for three seasons, and his self-image was still that of a free safety, lean and stalking, ready to pounce. He could change the game by making plays. Now he just watched and obsessed along with any other fan, gradually losing his battle to stay fit, which meant losing the battle to stay sharp and distinct, which meant wending his way to old age and dying.

Tight shirts from Maxfield and Fred Segal were ridiculous. Sports jerseys didn't work anymore. Everything was a brand from a chain bought in a mall. His solution was devolving, the way the solution to a bad day was getting drunk. Any time he was not in a suit, he reached for the same things: the same jeans, the same blank XL dark-blue T-shirt, the same sneakers. The new brown shirt had represented a welcome opportunity to revive his vanishing style. It was nondescript enough to satisfy his dislike for clothing that shouted its brand name, branded enough not to be plain, and comfortable enough that he didn't feel like a sausage in its casing. It was miraculously lightweight, wearable without a jacket in the fall in Los Angeles. It was a step in the right direction. It showed he wasn't giving in.

He went to the bed where Rita was sleeping with their daughter, Isabella, and their snoring English bulldog, Henry. There was no room for three humans plus Henry, so he carried the big, dumb, lovable, brown-and-white-brindled dog into Bella's room. The task was growing increasingly difficult. When Mulligan returned and climbed under the covers, he noticed that, even after extracting old ninety-pound King Henry, neither wife nor daughter woke up. He wished one of the girls had at least opened an eye, asked,
God, what time is it?
and, comforted by his arrival, had fallen back to sleep. They didn't stir, leaving him in his own company, to return to his troubles.

Again with the shirt. It had been a birthday present from their longtime housekeeper, Mariana, of all people, and he thought back to how Bella had said “
aww
”
when he opened it. He had been nonplussed and skeptical of how it would look, only noting later—and only to himself—that it was kind of great.

He checked his BlackBerry for new messages—he was expecting messages. Finding none, he plugged the device into its charger and set it on top of his iPad. The New York trip had not gone well. The MexiCloud deal he had been trying to put together for two years was in danger. The pressure was snowballing: the firm's fee was to be paid when the transaction closed, and his salary had been cut by 25 percent until he got it finished. All his eggs were in the MexiCloud basket—dangerous in light of his big monthly nut. There were six mortgages on four properties: the Brentwood house they had lived in for two years, the Brentwood house they had moved from but not sold because it would not sell, the place in Park City, and the place in the desert. Piled on top were various other obligations: cars, household employees, private schools, charitable pledges, and a troubled closed-end technology fund that had been making unexpected capital calls. Like most of his peers—he knew this because they talked about it—Mulligan calculated his net worth daily. Depending on his mood, the mood of the newspapers, and his mood after gauging the mood of the papers, he was worth somewhere between four and ten million bucks.

The MexiCloud deal, which involved buying ten thousand new automated teller machines and supporting enterprise software and data-storage infrastructure for the Mexico-based operations of his client, HNBC-Bering-Bloodworth, should not have been so complicated. It should have been like calisthenics. Mulligan's career had tracked the rise of the cash machine. He realized very early—it didn't take a rocket scientist—that the ATM was the future of money, and he ascended smoothly through the ranks of his first job at Harriman Hartman as an investment banker (or advisor) for transactions between the manufacturing companies that made ATMs and the commercial banks, otherwise known as “regular” banks, which in the past twenty years had deployed the machines in every branch and on every street corner in America. While Rita quit practicing law and reinvented herself as a mom and private-sector productivity consultant who worked from home, he worked like a fire ant, spending all-nighters with bankers from Drexel and missing Bella's fall graduations and most softball games. He earned promotions, played golf, had season tickets, went to lunch, went to Vegas, went to New York, went to Hawaii, and got Bella into Harvard-Westlake.

On the run up in the nineties and into the new century, Mulligan's ATM niche was a way to make easy money from the public's desire for easy money. He and his LA-based team became the go-to bankers for integrating new third-party data-storage methods, beginning with server farms and then, in recent years, leading the charge into the use of cloud computing to handle the infinite on-the-spot daily transactions. Mulligan specialized in keeping it simple: he had no clue how the millions of little machines he placed kept track of the bazillions of dollars that blazed around each day, but he did know how to put together all the people who made all of the stuff, and he had faith that he could conceive of and deliver the most profitable strategies. He pioneered debt-financed purchasing, the use of sale-leasebacks, Bahamian joint ventures, and the issuance of special securities to maximize the value of ATMs. This made him, he explained to Bella when she asked, an investment banker for companies, and sometimes those companies were banks. So, yes, he told her, you could call him a banker for banks. This became more complicated, of course, once Citibank, which everyone called simply “the Bank,” bought Hartman Harriman. Thereafter, he became a banker for banks inside the Bank, until his division got spun off in the wake of Lehman—which he called “the Mess”—creating the new yet old-sounding firm Harriman Hartman Citi, at which point Mulligan returned to being a plain old banker for banks.

Now the boom was over, and everyone lived in post-Mess times. It was harder to hit the numbers so easily yielded in years gone by, and there was less room to be creative and less of the casino feeling of endless opportunity. Congress was closing in on the bullshit fees banks could charge consumers for the privilege of rubbing the ATM genie. Harriman's banking bankers, of whom he was in charge, looked abroad for a second chance, which meant looking south, for the easy money, or so they thought. Having taken what turned out to be the anfractuous assignment of Latin America, he was trying to help a current client (HNBC Bering-Bloodworth) leapfrog the current generation of ATMs in Mexico, almost every one of which he had helped place five years earlier in a killer deal he had middled on behalf of a former client (Banco Popular de Oaxaca), the
current
leader, which, through its
current
investment bank, Mulligan's biggest competitor, argued that in these uncertain times—with the coming of the cloud, in other words—all that was needed was an upgrade of the
former
deal, an argument that could potentially scotch the
current
deal, which he needed desperately in order to remain among the very rich and not just the rich, which required, according to
Barron's
, a person to have ten million bucks.

Mulligan interlaced his fingers and hit his ducked forehead three times quickly: he had sworn he would never get in this spot, that he would never be one of the guys about whom other guys said,
That's too bad; he just kind of blew it
. He had been one of the smart ones, nowhere near the wreckage of the Mess. If anything, as Bob Rubin said on more than one conference call, guys like Jim Mulligan saved the day because it was the
regular
banks with the deposits—which were only bolstered by the easy money at the ATM—that possessed the balance sheets strong enough to pull all the other idiots through the Mess. Jim Mulligan had been one of the ones doing the clucking as the Masters of the Universe scrambled to save their asses. If it had not been for the people like him outside New York, plying away in the provinces, assisting the boring old regular banking business, and staying out of the ridiculous derivatives and CDO swaps, the whole ship could have gone down. But now, just a few years later, here he was in trouble, trying to squeeze margin out of impossible new markets, debts rising, salary decreasing, nuts in a wringer, while the pricks who caused the Mess were making money again.

Sleep did not come, so he grabbed the iPad, which sat on his bureau glowing in the dark. He still didn't have any new e-mail, but the always-encouraging moving circle went round at the bottom. It said, Searching… and he hit his favorite app, Check Mate! trying not to think about the lost shirt or the almost-lost deal. Instead he wondered whether the app came through the Internet and thus would not now show up because the Wi-Fi wasn't working due to spotty reception in the bedroom, or whether, since Check Mate! had been downloaded, it was always there, permanently embedded on the hard drive or—he guessed that this was the way they did it now—the device's virtual replica of the hard drive in the cloud. It was one of
those moments of technological helplessness that weaved in and out of his life, like not knowing when an attachment would open on a BlackBerry or, during his brief flirtation with a MacBook, how he could get on the Internet without knowing the answer to that old Mac question of whether his Ethernet connection was via a DCPH1 or ANDN protocol.

Then lo, his unfinished game from the plane filled the screen. Crazy as it was given the nature of his job, Mulligan didn't understand much of what made any of these things work. Truth was he was a salesman: salesmen sell, and the best salesmen in the world traveled around the business of money. He could have just as well sold shovels, and he would have happily put together Bahamian joint ventures for shovel companies if shovels were in the right place at the right time, like ATMs. Secretly he was clueless most of the time about the fundamentals of connectivity and information technology. He wondered if his weakness was related to his lifelong lack of knack for the everyday. He could not fix anything—couldn't change a tire, couldn't hang a picture, and could barely replace batteries. Still, just because he wasn't handy by nature didn't mean he had to be digitally dumb. Logic would dictate that he should be better with technology because he was numbers oriented—after heading west to play football, he went to Stanford Business School, where he focused on finance and did well enough to land an impressive job at Harriman in LA, which, in fine Mulligan form, he started right after graduation. As a result, by now he knew just about everything he needed about the intricacies of banking and investments. Shouldn't a more educated type understand techy stuff better than a tradesman? It wasn't the same as mechanical, all this computer crap. Or was it? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe not knowing if an attachment would open was
exactly
the same shortcoming as not having a clue as to how to change a fuse or fix a hot-water heater.

When practical problems arose throughout his life, he paid people to fix things, just as he had promised his brother, Dennis, when they were teenagers, upon being challenged as to exactly what the fuck he was going to do when the electricity went out in his house or when one of his kids needed a Pinewood Derby car: Simple. I'm going to pay some guy to do it for me. It may have been forgivable that he said such a thing, because of their station in life then, when he and his brother were using his mother's portion of his father's support payment of food stamps to buy dinner in an exurb of Hartford. It certainly did not seem likely when that now-famous line was spoken that either of them would one day be paying anyone to do anything. But Mulligan managed to climb out through football and hard work in school and the desire not to worry about money ever again. He figured out quickly that the poor were poor because they didn't acquire anything. So, as his salary grew, he concentrated on accumulating assets at all turns, buying stocks, municipal bonds, and—perhaps foolishly—the real estate upon which the mortgages currently eating him had been taken.

The problem these days was not all the new technology. New technology in and of itself was great. He had made a fortune from it. Nor was the problem too much technology. The pundits who opined about the negative effects of information overload, of overconnectedness and too much choice, of a society being entertained and digitized to death, did not have it quite right. The thing that was killing people—the
problem
—was that the
shit did not work
.
Nothing ever worked.
He popped himself in the head with his interlaced fingers again. There was human error, sure. He was the first to admit that he himself sometimes did not, in fact, know how to execute things. But, more often, it was the product that did not do its job. The ability to get money out of a machine or watch a 1977 Creedence Clearwater Revival video anytime and anywhere or get into the movie theater with a piece of paper you printed at home was great. But once the possibility of getting cash or watching a Creedence video or getting into the movies with a plain old dipshit piece of paper existed, an
expectation
was created. The monster was out of the box. And one did not need to be the Unabomber to see that the monster did not always show up when needed.
That
was the problem. People ended up spending most of their time trying to find out when and how the cash machine would give money or whether the video would buffer. People stopped their cars in cul-de-sacs or walked out on the porch to get cell reception or set their laptops by the espresso maker facing the pantry shelves in the kitchen or were told
almost there
while they waited
a few more seconds
for the goddamn basketball game to come on. People wondered why the car phone worked less on foggy days and whether that could
really
be the reason, like whether turning your beach chair to face the sun
really
worked. Everywhere, promised connections were not being made, and the humans who had bought a solution were left trying to solve a problem. People went down depressions into hollows to survive. So much so that the hollows became comfortable—preferable to the constant exposure to mistakes, malfunctions, and unmet expectations. Taken with the diminishing nature of a finite lifetime, choices became more important, multiplying daily, requiring constant double downs of the just-to-break-even variety, until there were no choices left other than to find a hollow.