The Leading Indicators (11 page)

“So the counselor tells me Caroline has been called to the office twice this month for wardrobe. I did not know she was leaving here in one outfit then taking clothes off in the washroom when she got to school. We had a screaming fight about the tank tops and her belly button always showing.” Margo paused to listen. “No she's not acting out an issue in our marriage!” She listened again. “I don't understand why they don't freeze either. In the mall these teen girls have nothing on; the boys are in shorts when it's snowing. Why aren't they freezing? Some kind of genetic mutation has made the next generation impervious to cold.”

On the feet of the contemporary teen girls were boots, even in warm weather. Their feet and ankles were the only body parts well covered. At high school and the malls, teen girls showed lots of skin. At parties the girls would come as close to naked as possible—hot pants with tank tops or very short black dresses that barely covered their behinds. Margo wondered how teen boys could stand it—how did boys pumped with hormones function in this environment?

Perhaps it was an unconscious group evolutionary fitness strategy on the part of girls. Since around the time the slut look came into fashion—and began being tolerated by the moms who bought the clothes—girls' grades and college admission rates had soared while boys' grades and college admission rates went down. Williams College, a generation ago all-male, now was 53 percent female; the University of Georgia was 62 percent female; two out of three bachelor's degrees were being awarded to women. Education is the key to future economic power, and girls and young women were significantly outperforming boys and young men in this contest. Keeping the teen boys staring at their legs in class, unable to focus, conferred a selection advantage.

As she talked on the landline, Margo methodically punched buttons on the cell phone to go through the voice prompt, which kept asking different versions of the same questions and for repetition of information already entered. The repetition was intended to get callers irritated so they would hang up. Modern corporate voice-prompt 800 numbers ask your name, address and account number half a dozen times before finally putting on the line an agent whose first question is your name, address and account number. No matter how often you say “agent” or “representative,” the voice prompts drone on, with the same questions over and over. After fifteen minutes or so the voice prompt finally will ask if you want to speak to someone, as if this outcome were an unprecedented surprise. The computer voice prompts are always so chipper—“Hi, I'm Julie, I'm here to help you.” Of course they are not here to help you.

Margo's landline phone call continued: “And Megan, I never should have given in on ears pierced at twelve, now she wants her tongue pierced. She's not doing well in school either, and Megan was reading
The Grapes of Wrath
in fifth grade.” She paused to listen. “What—that's what she wants the pierced tongue for? Yes, I bet it would increase her popularity! I'm going to have to confront Megan. Just what I need, another confrontation. I considered taking the girls to counseling. But … we are kind of between health plans right now. Changing schools twice in three years cannot have helped.”

They had picked the new apartment because it was in the best school district they could afford. A decent high school, nothing special—at least no metal detectors at the main entrance. Tom was driving an hour each way to his job in order to put them there. Margo had gone back to work. She had not worked as a waitress since the summer of her sophomore year. If you'd told her then she would be waitressing again two decades later, she'd have fainted.

Margo tried to find something in finance. Her qualifications were solid, but as it was the big banks and investment houses were laying off staff even as they awarded their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses that were subsidized by the federal deficit. The payments were justified as “retention” bonuses to prevent the executives from jumping to other jobs. Since there were no other jobs in finance at the moment, this was a transparent ruse. Members of Congress nodded in assent, in return for campaign donations.

Serving men vodka at eleven-thirty in the morning and flirting like mad in the hope they would leave a five-dollar bill—that had not been Margo's life plan for this point. Maybe, she mused, I should have Caroline pick my outfits, to increase tips. Margo worked the lunch rush, not dinner, so as to finish in time to meet the girls at school. She parked a block away and they walked to her so their friends would not know what car Margo was driving.

“All these years of grooming them to be doctors or university deans,” Margo said into the landline. “Now one behaves like her career aspiration is to be a part-time barista while the other wants to work street corners. It's the constant message of appearances, the superficiality and cheap sex they are exposed to in the culture. And who's behind the constant messages of superficiality and cheap sex? Not radical artists. Corporate America: Comcast, Disney, Nike, Fox.”

The cell phone clicked and clunked. “Wait, I have to call you back, I finally just got through.”

Margo rung off the landline, picked up the cell and began to speak. “Hi, I need to cancel my cable. My account number is—fuck!” She slammed down the cell phone. The connection had broken the instant she finally was put through to an agent. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Kevin was in the living room, watching television. When he heard her repeating “fuck” over and over he came to the door arch and asked, “You all right, Mrs. H?”

“Why—yes! Yes of course.” In addition to being angry, Margo was now embarrassed.

“So it's true about women's fantasies,” Kevin said.

“Sorry?”

“I was reading the
National Enquirer
last night at the Burger More,” Kevin replied. “I went in for a Double Mega and a Phake Shake. This story said a famous psychologist had proven modern women constantly fantasize about—”

“Oh!” Margo laughed. “Actually women fantasize about square footage, winning the White House … those sorts of things. Sex, too. But mostly about conquering the world.”

A few hours after meeting Kevin at the convention center, Tom had been fired. The Bayliner woman not only complained vociferously, she stormed into the executive office area to complain, despite the secretaries insisting no one could enter without an appointment and of course, appointments never were granted. She got all the way to the office of the Associate Deputy Administrator for Administration—the only high-ranking official actually present that day—before security escorted her back to the convention floor. The Associate Deputy Administrator for Administration was furious about being confronted in his office, where he'd been using his laptop to watch a Bruce Willis movie while filing paperwork for early retirement at age forty-six; his plan was to activate his pension, then return to the same job and double-dip. Half the top figures in the city and county government were double-dipping, the other half awaiting the first possible legal day to do so. Shouting about incompetent Facilitators, the Associate Deputy Administrator for Administration ordered that heads roll.

Eleven government employees with lifetime job security, funded by borrowing, had to sign Tom's dismissal notice. He supposed the entire executive-suite staff at the convention center, perhaps fifty people, did nothing for an entire day except fire him.

A week later Tom took a job selling fiber-optic Internet and television services from a mall booth. Not even a store—a glorified pushcart in a mall's foot-traffic flow. The pushcart was decorated with screens that were supposed to simulate high-def images; there were clipboards with contracts for the marks to sign. Tom was fired from the pushcart job after the local sales manager, whose pay was a percentage of each salesperson's commission, found out Tom helped a young Hispanic couple who didn't seem to have much money read the details of the offer. He suspected they needed other things a lot more than the “Platinum Package” with twenty-five premium-price channels. Once they understood the terms, the young couple walked. Once the local manager knew that, Tom was cashiered.

The last thing a corporation wants is for anyone to read the disclaimers. Many disclaimers are in all-caps six-point type to discourage reading. In disclaimers, warranties and similar quasilegal documents, all-caps does not mean “this is the important part.” All-caps means this is the part they want to make sure you can't read. The first line of most disclaimers might as well say, PLEASE DO NOT READ BEFORE SIGNING.

Before Tom was fired from the pushcart job, Kevin had wandered by. He and Tom got to talking and later went out for a beer. Margo understood that Kevin had been living the dismissal-to-dismissal lifestyle, and Tom felt sympathy; but in retrospect, she wished Tom hadn't given Kevin his cell number. When Kevin was tossed from an SRO, tumbling even further down the breakwater of life, he showed up at Tom and Margo's apartment, asking for a few nights on the couch. A few nights became a few weeks. Margo was far from happy regarding this, especially with teen daughters in the same small space.

“My first wife, Donna, didn't fantasize about anything; mainly she tried to think of ways we could keep the house,” Kevin said. Margo winced. Kevin had already told her this many times.

“It must have been hard for you when she got sick,” Margo said. She looked intently at the papers on the table, trying to send the message that she was busy.

“We should have given up and sold the house sooner,” Kevin said. “That way she could have gotten the operation while there was still time.”

“You didn't know.”
Many, many times
. Kevin talked about himself almost exclusively, and Kevin's life entailed events that soap-opera scriptwriters would have rejected as clichéd.

“Before they would do the operation, the hospital insisted we sign the house over to them. I waited too long. I should have just signed it over. When I finally tried, they knew the foreclosure had already started. They told me to find a cosigner! Who was I supposed to get, the pope?”

“You mustn't reproach yourself. You did everything you could.”

“She talks to me sometimes,” Kevin said. “I mean, I'm not crazy. But I believe Donna can see me and is trying to guide my life. I hear her whisper to me about what the baby would have been like. Which lotto numbers to play. That kind of thing.”

“I am sure she was a remarkable person.”

“My second wife, Gigi, she did think about fucking all the time. Just not with me.”

“She was a foolish woman, then.”

“Hey, thanks Mrs. H. You're stand-up. You know that?”

“Donna wants you to get back on your feet,” Margo said. “Donna wants you to get a job and find your own place.”

“Between the debt to Donna's hospice and the alimony to Gigi, I'm stuck behind the eight ball. Even when I'm working, most of the paycheck is garnished. That's how me and Tom got to be friends. We'd both lost houses and were both headed down the toilet financially. Gave us something in common.”

These were not agreeable words for Margo to hear. She saw Kevin as someone her generous husband had encountered by chance and generously offered to assist on a temporary basis. Tom told her, “I meet a man in need, how can I not act?” A narrative like that worked for Margo as an explanation of Tom extending his hand. That narrative involved a good deed, a mitzvah. But there was no sign of Kevin getting on his feet. And the notion of Tom and Kevin becoming friends with commonality alarmed Margo deeply.

“Tom will bounce back soon,” she said.

“Oh, he will! He's got the degree, that way of talking, of pretending he's interested in what you are saying. I guess in college you get a lot of experience acting nice to people you can't stand. That's a valuable life skill.”

“I'm sure you would have done well in college, Kevin. You have practical intelligence.”

“Tom is my inspiration. I wish I had his way to stay calm and talk calm.” Kevin wasn't sure what to call poise, and didn't have much experience with it. “When they laid us off at the drop-ship facility, I wanted to ram a broom up that corporate guy's ass. I know I shouldn't of screamed that I would cut the brake lines on his car. But that was no cause to arrest me, nobody thought I really meant it. Man, I was steamed. I'd been there two years and not one day of severance. I still don't understand how they got away with giving us nothing.”

“They put the firm's assets under a new name in a spinoff corporation headquartered in the Caymans, then had the old firm declared bankrupt, voiding debts to bondholders and obligations to workers. One week prior, they issued $80 million in bonuses to top management,” Margo said.

She remembered the options traders she once worked with, who considered that sort of thing perfectly normal—pilfer from investors and labor, place the proceeds into the pockets of insiders. Bernard Madoff wasn't some weird exception—rather, a man who took common Wall Street practices a tad too far. Enron's bogus accounting caused $63 billion of other people's money to vanish, while Enron executives rolled in wealth and political influence. Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron president convicted of securities fraud, was arguing on appeal that systematic lying for personal gain does not constitute fraud because it is normal procedure in the corporate world. The sophisticated investor should expect to be lied to! After elite money firms AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were exposed in 2008 as wood-paneled con jobs, no one from these organizations went to jail. The banker or corporate executive who lies to the public while lining his pockets knows he may someday be caught and embarrassed, but also knows there never will be any criminal consequences, and he'll keep the funds he stole. The scandal is not what corporations do in violation of law. The scandal is what they do legally.