Iyow - in your own words

September 18th, 2008.

“It’s going down!” my buddy Chardmo yells.

I am awake.

“What’s going down?”

“The shit is hitting the fan!”

“When?” I mumble.

“Right fucking now! Let’s go! Move, Bitch! NYC for life!!”

I arise from my single bed that I have been sharing with Chardmo. My body comes alive. I can hear CNN rolling on our hotel’s Samsung TV set. I have no idea what the reporter is talking about. However, I can tell by his tone that the economic
excitement that kicked off this week is still in full effect.

“Let’s move!”

“Jesus. Alright. What’s the rush?” I mutter walking to the shower.

“Lehman Brothers. Wall Street. Now.”

“Ok. Ok. Give me a minute to wash off last night’s party.”

Spic-and-span and twenty minutes later, we were out on the street. Seventh Ave. Four blocks from Lehman Brothers, exactly. Three days after one of the most powerful financial firms had filed for Chapter 11. Don’t get me wrong, we had been here since Monday, doing our best to ignore the financial crisis with the best that NYC has to offer. The MOMA, the MET, Central Park. But not today. We could no longer ignore the fact that the American financial system was starting to crumble, and that we were at ground zero for this monumental event.

Fuck yeah!, the anarchist inside me rang out. Maybe there would be no more jobs, chaos, Mad Max, zombies! Wait, let’s not get carried away…. Yet a boy needs to dream.

Anyhow, back to Seventh Avenue: Lehman Brothers was the same as the days before. Police barriers, reporters, camera crews litter the entrance of their corporate lobby. We walked by, making stupid comments, “Nice one guys.” We stood there for a minute; it felt a little strange. I thought maybe we should lay down some flowers.

However, I thought wrong. From a distance the entrance looked like a frenzy, but once up close it just felt like another piece of the NY sidewalk. “Way to go guys, you blew it.” A man walked from the building. Had he been laid off? Was he responsible for all this? All what, exactly? A company folds, a new one pops up. Why is this one so special? Oh, because it lost millions, billions, responsible for trillions. What’s a trillion? Is that like a terabyte? Trillion, tera, both start with T! Genius, I know this.

We needed answers. We needed to know exactly what was going on here. How serious is this situation? Will we still have jobs? Nuclear winter, Hadron Collider, zombies. We needed answers, and we needed them now. Being dicks at (the financial) ground zero was not going to turn up any answers, just point out who the assholes from San Fran were. Where then? Wall St! Clearly, those fuckers over on the stock exchange will know what the hell is going on. Quickly to the iPhone, Chardmo retrieves his magic slate pulling up Google Maps.

“GPS?”

“T-r-i-anungulation, beotch!”

“Bam son! Hook it up!”

Completely ignoring the maps we head to Central Park.

(Insert mishaps, hi-jinx, comments on the NYC weed quality here)

Scheming, dreaming, and blazing our way through Central Park my phone started to vibrate. “I’m blowing up!” A text message from my homie back in SF. He just wanted to tell me that WaMu was in trouble and that I needed to put my money into BOfA. Panic! Buzz kill. Sadness, this economic crisis has just killed my head. Now it’s personal. Once outside the park, I bee-line to a WaMu ATM. I immediately take out $200, no, I select “Other Amount” and go for an extra $100. The ATM is slower than usual, and I wonder if it’s even going to work, or if the money is going. More Panic.

Then it starts to hum, and I hear the gears starting to move. While the gears of the scrill machine start counting out my $300, I begin to ponder my actions. I am taking out $300 because of a tip from a friend, who on several occasions Instant Messages me to Paypal him $20 for lunch or for a record on EBay. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second. What’s wrong with this picture. If everybody listened to their slacker friend for financial advice and took their money out of WaMu and put it in BOfA, then WaMu would definitely fail, and BOfA – the bank that put me in Chexsys for $23 – would become even more a of a behemoth. Hmmm, I need a ruling on this one. I text my girlfriend who handles all my investments, as she is Chinese, and stereotypically more intelligent than I when it comes to things like math, money, music, and pretty much any activity that begins with M.

But not Marijuana – I win there.

4:20pm-ish. Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange.

“Where is it?” I ask.

“That’s it under that blanket.”

“Huh.”

Lo and behold, The New York Stock Exchange. Not the powerful Wall Street image I had imagined, as its columns of power and boldface were covered with a huge advertisement. Was it always like that? However, I knew that behind those blanketed columns was a frenzy of greed, power moves, and heart attacks. Then we spotted it, right where we needed to be. For musicians on the move, bars seem to hold a lot of answers, and clearly we were gonna find them at Bobby Van’s.

Once inside, I knew we were gonna drop some scrill. Out-cashed, maybe. Out classed, never. And there we sat, sipping Martinis, taking in the energy at the world’s most powerful watering hole. To my immediate left was a man, who had stepped into the bar for one drink, but had just started number two. Forty-three, going on 60. Judging this man by his girth and grays, he will make more money than my blood line for the next 18 generations. To my right was a collective of about five gentlemen—powerful gentlemen. Gentlemen that reeked of wealth, power, cigars, and impotence. Men that have sold their souls to the institution of Big Scrilla, and won. Well, except for the boner part.

“We need to get in touch with Dusseldorf, but that can’t happen until tomorrow. No one is gonna pick up the phone at night.” The Smith Barney-looking man throat-fully grumbled to the league of wealth surrounding him. “Hmmmmm.” Chardmo and I “hmmmd” together while making squinty eyes in unison, as if we had each just unearthed some juicy tidbit of wisdom that would eventually lead us to the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

There was the clue we needed. Certainly the boys in Dusseldorf knew the answers. The pros from Dusseldorf? We sat there pondering, knowing that somewhere on the other side of the globe there was another contingent of wealth that had the answers. Answers to what, exactly? Well, we’re going to have to speculate on that, as there was a sudden surge of suits filling the bar with new conversations, washing out any hopes of us overhearing another clue to what was going on with our country’s economic crisis.

This second wave of suits was triumphant and upbeat, not the depressing mess of financial ruin I was expecting. The market was booming and so was Bobby Van’s. All right! Bartender, more Martinis and a cold fish plate with oysters on the top. Bam! Nothing like a little gluttony in the form of cold shrimp and lobsters when trying to solve the nation’s financial problems. Bobby Van’s was alive! Alive with brokers, lawyers, and traders. Cash money pirates in all forms packed the bar.

The men and women of our nation’s financial elite – done with their daily dose of kicking ass in the monetary trenches – swarmed, blowing off steam with a little liquid relaxation, swapping tales of their daily triumphs and defeats. One man held up the daily news and mimicked the image on the front page of a broker leaning back, with his hand on his forehead, with a big sigh of dismay on his face. “Oh no, meatloaf again!” The man jokes. Wait, the man doing the mimicking is actually the man on the front page, or claims to be. Everyone is laughing and having a great time on the eve of one of our country’s largest financial disasters.

“Hey, Frankie, scotch on the rocks, make it a double will ya! I just reached settlement with my second wife!” a spirited patron announces. The bar erupts with laughter!

Well, what have we learned from this minor adventure? Other than the fact that a couple of Martinis and fish plate cost $200 on Wall Street. I don’t know, but if our nation’s monetary combatants are whooping it up on the day of financial Armageddon, then I am too.

“Bartender, another round of Martinis, I still got one last hundred to go through.”

J. C. Bertrand, Journalist.