This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  Nobody was drinking, which was unusual for Bobby. A couple of people at the tables nearby were staring at him, and he carefully ignored them, though he pushed his blond hair a little to the side. Pete slid in next to Lev and opened up his menu. The hostess showed up with his drink and he called her an angel of mercy and took a couple of gulps.

  “What looks good?” The other three picked up their menus like an afterthought. He went down the list of entrees. He was rigid about what he ate, because lately he’d noticed that it tended to stick to him if he wasn’t. He was good at refusing things, though. At least, things other than cocaine. Or women. Or, gotta face it, booze. Crazy menu. He didn’t even know what half this shit was. Radicchio? Why couldn’t they just call it a radish? You needed a fucking special assistant just to order for you. Radicchio, radicchio …

  “So…” he drawled in a leisurely voice, without looking up from the menu. “Some guy repo’d my Boxster yesterday.”

  He dropped it in and then peered up over his reading sunglasses at them. Jason looked like the menu was the most interesting thing he’d seen his whole life. Bobby looked annoyed, and for a few seconds the only sound he heard was the João Gilberto tune playing in the background. The safe choice. Classy in a completely generic way.

  “Jason…” Bobby’s voice had that overly friendly tone that meant he was ready to start yelling at someone. He pulled down the menu that Jason was looking at. “Why don’t you explain it to him?”

  Jason swallowed. His voice was quavering a little. “Well, first of all, I want to say I’m really sorry about how this all turned out.”

  “You’re sorry? That’s my Boxster, man. Why is some three-hundred-pound Samoan guy showing up with a fucking court order and telling me I haven’t made my payments? Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

  There! He’d fucking laid it out there for them and they’d better have an answer.

  Nobody said anything, and then Bobby nudged Jason with his elbow. “Go on, Jason, tell him.”

  Now Jason picked up a piece of paper and held it out to him. It was shaking.

  See, Pete, we’ve got some liquidity issues at the moment …

  He started into one of those long Jason-type speeches that Pete tuned in to and then out of, but still looking like he was thoughtfully following it all. He put on his reading glasses to look at the piece of paper Jason had given him, looked over them to see if he could spot the hostess, took them off, and wiped them. He really liked these glasses. He’d picked them up a few months ago when he left his Versaces on an airplane. These were Gucci: slightly pink, very cool. He’d had the original lenses taken out and replaced them with the tinted bifocal ones. This way, if some paparazzi caught him off guard, it’d look like he was wearing sunglasses, not reading glasses. They were from last summer, though. Maybe he should pick up a new pair. That could be tomorrow’s mission. Get mirrored lenses, or maybe black, like a limo window. Flip ’em down below his eyes: climb right in, sugar. Those’d be some kickass reading glasses! Meanwhile, words kept popping up over and over again from Jason’s little speech: bond, derivative, liquidity. He might as well have been speaking Egyptian. This was shit that he paid people like Lev and Jason to think about. Why were they bothering him with this? He waved his hand upward in a little spiral of dismissal. “Whatever, Jason! Just take care of it. That’s what I pay you and Lev for.”

  Jason looked at Bobby and Bobby glared back at him.

  Lev took over. “Pete, Jason invested most of your money in a bond fund called Crossroads Partners. They bought a kind of bond based on people’s mortgages. Jason thought they’d give you good income without any risk.”

  “I was told they were fixed-income—”

  Lev cut him off. “But you didn’t read the prospectus.”

  “When the biggest banks on planet earth are selling it as fixed income, you don’t read the prospectus!”

  Lev turned toward the musician. “‘Fixed-income’ means rock-solid investments that don’t fluctuate in their rate of return, like municipal bonds. You’re a retired businessman with a million dollars in the bank and you buy bonds at five percent and live on the fifty thousand a year. They never lose value.”

  Jason wouldn’t let it drop. “Their guy stood up in front of fifty financial advisors and said they were fixed-income! Fixed-income that paid nine percent! How else was I going to keep Pete afloat? You know how much he spends! Do the math!” He turned to Bobby and said angrily, “Do you mind if I get up to take a piss?”

  Bobby slid out to let him pass, then got back in.

  Lev said, “That’s the last we’ll see of that idiot.”

  “Fuck, man.” Pete laughed, lifting his empty cocktail tumbler. “I’m dry already. And I definitely need another one.”

  Lev talked some more. Pete listened to him, but he kept getting distracted by the poker hands on his shirt. All royal flushes. But if everyone has a royal flush, they split the pot, right? So what the shirt was really saying is, even when you think you’re holding a winner, life’s a goddamn stalemate, so fuck you. Maybe that’s what was so special about that store in Bangkok—fucking irony.

  “… And the first thing is, do you want to take the deal?”

  “What deal?”

  Lev looked annoyed. “One of the big banks is offering to buy out what’s left of Crossroads’ bonds for five cents on the dollar, and you have to decide whether to take it. You’d clear about four hundred thousand.”

  “Four hundred thousand. That sounds pretty good.”

  Lev looked over at Bobby, who put his hand to his forehead and looked away. “Pete! It’s not good. It’s what you have left out of eight million.”

  The singer took off his reading glasses. There was something really serious about this that he didn’t like.

  Lev went on in a soft but insistent tone. “Let’s try it again: if you take the offer…”

  He was listening now. Listening harder than he’d listened to either of them in a long time. It was like there was a messenger on horseback wearing a red coat, coming from far away over the hills, reappearing around each bend a little bit closer, a little bit bigger, that red pennant, the pounding of the hooves: he’s coming. If you take the money, you’ll have enough to live on for a few months at your present level. Otherwise, there’s a class-action lawsuit you can join, in which case you might get a payoff a few years down the line, but maybe not. In these kinds of class-action lawsuits …

  He put his hand up in the accountant’s face. “Hold the noise for a second, Lev. You said, ‘enough to live on for a few months.’”

  Lev stared at him for a second, looking annoyed. “Pete! You’re broke!”

  “What do you mean broke? I can’t be broke! Jason told me I had eight million dollars of assets!” Actually, he couldn’t quite remember how much Jason had said he had, because Jason always gave such complicated explanations about assets and liabilities when what Pete really wanted to know was: can this go on? And if it could, then he didn’t need all that static about liabilities and cash flow and etc., etc., etc.

  Now Lev started in on him again. “You had eight-point-three million in assets, but you also had liabilities. Unfortunately, your assets are worth about one tenth of what they were before. But your liabilities are the same. And when that happens, and you miss payments, people start wanting your assets. That’s what happened with the Boxster. I’ve been telling you this for six weeks. Didn’t you read my e-mails?”

  Bobby was actually trying to be gentle with him. “You’re broke, Pete. That’s the bottom line.”

  Message delivered. He was still taking that one in when the hostess came up to them. “Would anyone like a drink?” She looked like she was giving him a special smile as she glanced around the table and finished looking directly at him. Yeah, she was definitely available. Probably thirty-five, nice body tone, all the parts still in place, and with a whole lot of experience at making them work together. He stretched his gaze up at her over his reading gl
asses. “What’s on offer?”

  The messenger in the red coat had moved on now; things were back to normal. Bobby and Lev knew better than to cramp his style, and he had a nice little exchange with the hostess before he ordered another vodka and mango. He watched her walk away, then turned back to Lev. “So I’m broke.” He shrugged. “I’ve been broke before.”

  “Exactly,” Bobby said, comfortingly. “It’s nothing you can’t deal with. You’ve been up and you’ve been down, and, either way, you’re still Pete Harrington and you’ve got millions of people every day who listen to your music and love you. Meanwhile, we have to do some streamlining.”

  Lev pulled out some papers to explain exactly what “streamlining” meant, which was sell the house, sell the place in Montana, sell the race car, take the deal offered by the bank. Get an apartment and keep his living expenses under five thousand a month. That would look good to the judge when he got to bankruptcy court.

  “Bankruptcy court?”

  “Yeah, Pete. A couple of banks are getting ready to foreclose on your houses and they’re going to want your song catalog, if they can get it.”

  “The banks?” He remembered the article he’d looked at in the magazine the day before. “You mean the same banks who just pulled off the biggest heist in the history of the fucking world? Those banks? The ones who held the whole fucking galaxy for ransom when they needed a bailout? Where the fuck do they come off foreclosing on me?”

  The hostess showed up at that moment with his second drink, and they all went silent as she put it on the table. She started with a big smile, but then she glanced at the faces and left without a word.

  Lev said, “Maybe you ought to hold off on that drink until we’re finished.”

  “I could use one,” Bobby said suddenly, putting his hairy fingers around the tall glass. “That okay, Pete?”

  “Fucking whatever, Bobby!” He let the annoyance pass. “Lev, I’m about to go on tour in three months. Can’t that raise enough money to take care of this?”

  Lev looked at Bobby, then back at him. “Pete, we looked at the income side, and I’m not seeing salvation there. We could sell your catalog, but that wouldn’t save much and would leave you without any income stream in the future. I don’t want to see you go there.” Lev went back to the list. “I guess the Boxster’s taken care of. Then there’s three Harleys. Anything left in the wine cellar?”

  Another one of his hobbies. He still got the Sotheby’s catalogs. “Nope.”

  Lev raised his eyebrows without looking up from the list. He started to go into more detail, including an action plan for each item: call a Realtor, fix the driveway, sell the horses—crap he wouldn’t know how to do in a million years. Look for an apartment—was he serious? Lev was still rattling on with various tiresome shit when his order came: a twenty-five-dollar hamburger made with meat from some special farm, cheese from some special village in the French Alps. They should have called it hamburgicchio.

  “And, uh, Matthew’s got to go.”

  “Matthew! That’s ridiculous! What am I going to do without Matthew?”

  “Let’s see … Go to the supermarket? Answer the phone? Take your own clothes to the dry-cleaners? Not to be snippy, Pete, but most of us do that every day.”

  “Well, I’m not most of us, Lev, and I would think you’d have figured that out by now! Everybody has an assistant! I mean, you’re a fucking accountant, and you’ve got an assistant!”

  “Show some respect, Pete,” Bobby cut in. “Lev’s just trying to help you out here.”

  “Hey! You’re right. I’m sorry, Lev. My head’s all messed up.” He put his forehead in his hand and squeezed his temples. He could see his Gucci reading glasses sitting on the table, but they didn’t look cool anymore. They just looked like reading glasses. “What happened here, Lev? Is it my fault? Is it Jason? Because if it’s Jason, I’m going to track his silly ass down and beat him with a fucking seven-iron!”

  He expected Lev to get all over Jason’s shit, like Bobby had, but Lev’s voice was strangely gentle. “Jason never should have put eighty percent of your assets into one instrument. And he should have read the prospectus, just like thousands of other people should have. If you want to go after Jason, you have good grounds for a negligence suit. But you wouldn’t get anything out of him. Jason’s ruined. He lost his house and his FA license.” He shrugged. “And he deserved to. But the fact is, Jason got conned by experts. There was fraud every step of the way, but the guy at the top walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he’ll never be prosecuted for anything. You want to track somebody down with a seven-iron? That’s who you ought to go after.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Peter Harrington.”

  “Yeah, Lev, that’s really funny. I really need sarcastic morality shit right now.”

  His accountant smiled. “No, really! His name is Peter Harrington! If you were ever ego surfing, you must have run across him.”

  He tended to consider those other Peter Harrington entries on the Internet interlopers on his fame, but, come to think of it, Crossroads did sound familiar. “The fucker even ripped off my name?”

  “That’s ironic,” Bobby said.

  “No, man, it’s not ironic,” Pete answered. “It’s seven-ironic! Yes!” He curled his fingers, and Bobby responded with a congratulatory fist bump at the pun. “I’ll deal with Mr. Peter Harrington later.” He motioned toward Lev’s list. “Go on. Because every item on that list I’m taking out of that guy’s ass.”

  As they went over the accountant’s plan, it began to dawn on Pete that things really were about to change. When he left this table, he’d be walking into a whole other life, a sort of underlife that had been secretly waiting for him beneath what he thought was his real life. He tried to put it out of his mind.

  The bill came, and they all stared at it for a moment. Close to a hundred bucks for a burger and a couple of sandwiches. Pete waited a few seconds to see if anyone else would pick it up.

  “We can split it,” Lev said.

  “Forget it!” He reached for the check. “It’s still a business meeting.” He threw his gold card down on the little black tray. A few minutes later the hostess came back with an awkward look on her face. Pete knew why she looked so embarrassed. This was her last chance to hook up and she had to figure out how to make her play in front of everybody. He smiled encouragingly at her. No use making her beg.

  “Mr. Harrington?”

  “Angel of mercy?”

  “I’m sorry. Your card’s been declined.”

  He laughed out loud. It looked like that date wasn’t happening.

  Bobby picked it up and they all left. The same valet fetched his car, a young Mexican guy who looked just about right driving up in the old Volkswagen. The Gardenermobile. “Here you are, Mr. Harrington.”

  He felt like pretending the car was someone else’s, but there it was, served up with his name on it. He folded up a fifty and put it into the valet’s palm, who thanked him smoothly, without even looking at it.

  * * *

  He was on the computer within five minutes of getting home. Matthew was on his laptop, posting messages on the boards, or some shit like that, and he started to tell him about his phone calls, but he walked right past him, “Not now, Matthew,” and went straight into the studio, which, since it hadn’t been too active lately, he’d fitted out with a massive TV screen. He reached into the minifreezer for a bottle of vodka and was pleased as always to find it so cold that it was almost syrupy. He poured some vodka in a glass and shot it, then poured some more and flopped onto the couch. He put the keyboard on his lap and searched his name and “Crossroads.” He got over a million hits on the wall-sized monitor. Shit! This other Peter Harrington was as big as he was.

  He clicked on the pages, and the story started to come out. First, most recently, the fallout: journalistic crap about the collapse of Crossroads and how it had laid waste to a butt-load of banks and pension funds.
Everybody shaking their heads, like this Harrington guy was Satan’s fucking ethics professor. It didn’t mention any bankers or pension-fund guys losing their jobs—that wasn’t how those guys played it—but they did manage to find some Moms and Pops out on Main Street who’d seen a big chunk of their retirement get vaporized. They looked old and wronged, in that sour, hurting way that kneels down at night and prays, God Almighty, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and a large-caliber handgun filled with fucking magnum rounds to blow this greedy motherfucker’s balls off. Amen! Or something like that. A prayer that never got answered. Even the government was crying foul, ponying up $160 billion to stabilize some insurance company, another couple hundred bil to rescue some banks. The funny thing was, searching back a few pages, all the same fuckers were saying just the opposite! Ass-kissing write-ups in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Harrington’s a genius, a rock star! Rock star! Nothing remotely “rock star” about him: that pasty skin, the high forehead and wispy brownish hair. His face was shaped like a peanut, for Christ’s sake!

  He kept moving backward in the search engine, where relevance to the terms “Peter Harrington” and “Crossroads” began to drift. Now the foreign-language entries began to surface, in German and Chinese. He translated a few, but most came out too garbled to understand. A bunch of hits to the Metropolitan Opera and the Museum of Modern Art, and a half dozen other charities the shithead seemed to mess around with. Showing up at parties with his picture next to unrecognizable people who must mean something in that world. Hey, there he was with Al Pacino! And again next to some model chick, and Calvin Klein. Livin’ large, on my money. Further back, the traces of Harrington’s earlier career were floating around. Promoted to vice president of Special Purpose Vehicles at Goldman Sachs, something about extreme skiing. He skied? Something fired in Harrington’s memory, and he clicked on the link.