Solomon Bull: When the Friction Has Its Machine Page 2

  I carry Katrina to Keith’s room and dump her beside him. I’m the enforcer that keeps people true to her word.

  By the time I get the paint off my hands I’ve lost fifteen minutes. I slam a Red Bull and two ginseng capsules.

  Oh yeah. Here we go.

  Finally on the bike; same route as last night. City-bound traffic trickles. My legs slam like a locomotive’s main rod, up, down, metronomic.

  Cars cloister at the billboard ahead. I thought it might be the road construction, but they seem to be slowing to read the billboard. A news helicopter hovers. A man points a television camera and a competing channel’s bird stalks low on the horizon, coming quick.

  A black Suburban sits on the shoulder below the billboard. Tinted windows. The kind of vehicle you see doing security for presidential motorcades. I saw a video on You Tube of one of these bad boys opening the sunroof. Some space-age Gatling gun telescopes through the aperture. A ninja-suited man thumbs the trigger mech and creates a dotted line of lead moving three thousand feet per second between him and the bogey.

  I pedal past. No sideways glance to acknowledge traffic has slowed. Cyman’s bodyguards are there, news choppers are above. But should I turn?

  How would it look to pass without wondering why their panties are knotted? I’m the criminal and I’ve returned to the scene of the crime. Stupid. But since I’m here—look at it this way. If I didn’t know I did what I did, would I notice the traffic? Sure. I’m an observant guy.

  But would the average guy?

  A few hundred yards beyond the billboard, I turn left and dismount at the curb. Fake like I’m tying my shoe. The sign is still there but a man in black climbs the ladder. Maybe it’s the turret gunner. Cars honk as he attains the pedestal and begins tearing the paper. It was good while it lasted.

  Onward. I set my mind to Desert Dog.

  The race has been run during every monsoon season for the last six years. Monsoon, to take full advantage of the deadly combination of high temperatures and high humidity. Former Green Beret Cal Barrett designed the course with Vishnu in mind. I read an article where he said he was thinking of Robert Oppenheimer mistranslating the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

  Barrett said if he runs a race and no one dies, it isn’t much of a race.

  His hair is silver, straight and long. His thick, Scott mustache could stop a machete. He’s got hams for arms and his chest is a beer keg. A tat of a trident-wielding devil adorns his forearm. His eyes say I’ve killed men, mostly because I like it.

  I pedal shy of Barrett’s ranch. This is where I train, where I saw the snake and the girls. I’ll hammer out a circuit and be home before the New York Stock Exchange opens.

  Barrett changes the course every year to keep it fresh, but the race consists of the same core events. The beginning six-mile trail around his ranch is just to loosen up. The last few years, whelps—as he calls contestants—circumnavigated his ranch on mountain bikes five times, or thirty miles. Then they ran the same six-mile trail. He starts the race at ten a.m., so the final legs will be at two in the afternoon, when the temperature is usually a buck fifteen and the humidity around sixty per cent.

  Don’t think you’re going to conserve energy. Pace yourself. Rest when you need to. Barrett bought hives of Africanized bees to keep men scrambling through the rare shaded areas.

  After the run, weak men have already collapsed.

  Barrett owns land on both sides of the aqueduct from Lake Pleasant. The free style event that follows the six-miler involves climbing a mountain trail, scaling a rock face, sliding down burnt volcanic rock through Cholla beds, and climbing a ten-foot, razor-topped chain link fence. Diving into a fifteen-mile-an-hour aqueduct, and pulling one’s whelp self out the other side, thirty feet away. This is where men drown. This is where lumberjacks suck their thumbs. The run continues along the aqueduct until Barrett decides it’s time to cross again. No one knows—Barrett may not know—how many crossings he will demand.

  The cement is slick and the current is fast. This isn’t like crossing a river, where pockets of water move at different speeds. Where you can grab a rock and rest. And once you reach the other side, which is only thirty feet from where you started, you’re liable to slide along, unable to claw your way out, for miles. Barrett places ropes along the way, and they are your only hope. If you miss them, you will drown.

  Let’s say you grab that one-inch hemp. Think a man like Barrett will have tied knots so your wet hands won’t slip?

  Get out of the water. Get in the water. Out. In. Out. In. You scale the chain link. Slice open your arms, guts, and legs. There’s a group of Jeeps and trucks, two miles ahead. As you near them, you see Cal Barrett standing like Thor among men, and your heart races. This wasn’t bad. You can do this. You cross the finish line, and Cal slaps your shoulder as you stagger along. Drop palms to your knees. Wheeze hot desert air to your starved lungs.

  “Lap one!” Cal screams. “Get your bike, numbnuts! Two to go!”

  ELEVEN DAYS to RACE DAY

  We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.

  John Adams

  I jiggle the mouse and the monitor wakes. Log in. Pull up the charts. I’ve missed the opening bell but I don’t trade the first fifteen minutes. It’s all about probabilities and the only thing predictable about the first fifteen minutes is most times I don’t have a clue which way a stock is going to travel.

  Lot of stock jocks think they’re chartists. Some are news hounds. The real suckers, the ones who crash a hundred grand in two weeks, take their cues from the chat rooms.

  The pros manage risk. Though there’s plenty of adrenaline, this isn’t about the ups and downs or seat-of-the-pants decisions based on hunches, smashing keyboards, screaming into telephones.

  This is about making sure a trade never takes you down.

  There are two kinds of trades. Add their inverses if you play the market short, and you have four. I keep it easy. Just two on the long side, and only two ways to play them.

  The momentum trade and the bounce.

  With a momentum play, you buy a rocketing stock when it trends on a one-minute chart, and you only buy in the direction of the prevailing trend. Easy. You sell the instant it breaks the line or your four-period exponential moving average crosses below your nine-period simple.

  This is Burger King. There’s another trade so you can have it your way.

  Trade two: the bounce. Climb aboard when a stock finds support. Doesn’t matter if it breaks through the roof and jumps higher, or thumps its ass off a thirty-eight percent Fibonacci line. When the four crosses above the nine, press the buy button. Trust the probabilities. Screamers keep screaming.

  Don’t waste time trying to figure out which direction a stock is going to go. You’ll never predict the breaking news on CNBC about the CEO of the company you just dumped your entire 401K into who just got filmed laying pipe in a goat at that special ranch outside of Seattle. You buy a stock, you better be willing to dump it cold.

  There. Go forth and be a millionaire.

  ***

  I’ve added three grand to my account this morning riding Dryships, Inc. It’s ten a.m. and time for mac n cheese.

  I’m stirring pasta, watching the timer on the microwave. I drain the water at exactly five and a half minutes because any man who tolerates limp macaroni… I don’t even have to say it.

  Keith’s door creaks open and his head kilroys around the wall. “Solomon,” he says.

  I look. He shakes his noggin. I think he’s cold, but it’s just blue ink on his lips.

  “Dude,” he says, “you got to help me get rid of her.”

  “I tried last night, but you were high on the nectar. Don’t come complaining of thorns.” The microwave timer b
eeps and I splash noodles into the colander. Drop a quarter stick of butter in the pan, a dollop of half-and-half, cheese mix. Stir. Keith closes his eyes. He has that stoned look that comes from ten hours of sleep.

  “She’s psychotic,” he says.

  “You need her.”

  “What?”

  “She’ll teach you what she taught me. People can’t be saved.”

  He grunts and returns to his room. I stir the cheese sauce and noodles, dump it all into a cereal bowl and splash a little gourmet Frank’s Red Hot.

  Chowin’ down at my computer, I jet in and out of a few stock positions. Not bad. I’ve removed four grand from the ether. I siphon two thou in settled cash from my trading account to my tax account, and slip in a CD purchase just under the wire. I file quarterly, but allocate funds toward my tax liability daily. Uncle Sam never misses his split.

  Uncle Sam is the neighborhood Mafioso that will take a ball bat to your knees if you don’t give him half of everything you make. With your money, he lives in style, keeps his patrons’ palms greasy. This age-old strongman social order is legal. Today, we dress it in red, white and blue, proud colors of civil religion, and call it government.

  I launch a browser window and scan the Rudge headlines. My handiwork has made it big time. Rudge hates Cyman.

  Hock Campaign Denies Vulgar Billboard

  The story takes a full minute to load… must be getting a billion hits. I glance over the text. The ostensible beneficiary of the billboard’s message, Duane Hock, is a moron. The Hock campaign has distanced itself from what it terms a ‘vigilante supporter’ with whom the campaign has had no prior contact and vigorously denounces. Making fun of a person’s name is the worst kind of politics, and doing so when vital issues are finally making it into the public discourse threatens to derail the progress the candidate has fought—

  Et cetera.

  Secretly, they ought to be loving it. This is like when George W. Bush didn’t realize the microphone was on and called a reporter an asshole. The base swooned because they knew most reporters are assholes. It fed the straight-shooting, stick-by-principles mystique that got him elected. Some say Rove planned the whole thing, knowing likeability is far more important than the capacity to say nuclear.

  In a couple of days I’ll check Real Clear Politics and see if the polls change.

  Dryships is trading flat but that usually changes two hours before the close. I tilt my monitor forward and sit straight-legged on the floor. Stretch. My lower back is tight as two quarks necking. If I don’t get some ice on it I won’t be able to run this afternoon. About to rise, a knock on the door halts me.

  “Yeah.”

  Keith opens the door, says quietly, “She’s taken over my sock drawer and my underwear drawer. You’ve got to take her back.”

  “Keith. Be a man. Throw her out.” This is not my conversation. I slip into running shorts while he grumbles. Pull on trail shoes. Log off the trading platform, lock the computer and force Keith to step aside as I close and lock my bedroom door.

  “Uncool,” he says.

  “You pick that lock and let her in my room, I’ll drive her fifty miles west and leave her face down in a hole.”

  He tilts his head. Eyebrows wrinkle. “Would you?” He follows me to the kitchen. “I’d chip in for gas.”

  I fill the Camelbak with ice and water.

  “You can’t kick her out,” he says. “She’s pregnant.”

  “You know I shoot blanks, right?”

  “That’s what you’ve always said.”

  I’m at the door, opening it. “Well, I’m sure you two will do the right thing.”

  “She won’t abort.”

  “Yeah, wow, I honestly don’t know what to do with that.”

  In fifteen minutes I’m at the trailhead. One more round of easy warm-up stretches. A valley spreads to my right. The aqueduct from Lake Pleasant zig-zags six or seven miles and splits the valley floor. At its most immediate point, on the near side of the fence, a man rides a horse.

  His hair is silver.

  I run like a cheetah with his backside soaked in habanero salsa. After fifteen minutes of shale that tinkles like glass, I’m thirty feet behind.

  “Mr. Barrett!”

  He ignores me. I give the horse a wide berth and trot alongside.

  “Mr. Barrett, I just wanted to say hello, and that I’m looking forward to Desert Dog.”

  The horse lopes easily; his head like a buoy on a lake with syncopated waves. Barrett keeps his eyes forward. I tell myself tough guys are often loners.

  I pull ahead a little and his head swivels.

  Telltale white lines drop from both ears to a shiny purple device clipped to his shirt. The baddest mercenary in Arizona is listening to a purple iPod. Offsetting this mildly effeminate fashion statement, his horse bears a brand of a coiled rattlesnake—like on the Gadsden flag.

  I wave.

  He nods.

  “I’m looking forward—”

  He pulls a bud from an ear. His hand looks like a chewed-up leather dog toy. He flashes a grin. “What?”

  “I’m looking forward to Desert Dog.”

  He nods, begins to put the earphone back in.

  “How’s the course shaping up?”

  He drops his arm. Looks at the sky and exhales. Glances at me with eyes like the scales of justice.

  “Or not…” I say. “Just thought I’d say hello.”

  “You’ll know we’re in the End Times when a woman is the CEO of Apple.”

  “Excuse me?” I stumble on a barrel cactus.

  “You notice the size of these things?” He indicates the iPod clipped to his lapel, about the dimensions of a decent beetle turd. “Smaller and smaller. Soon, the only way to carry them will be under your skin. And don’t think for a minute the government isn’t already gearin’ up software, waiting on the day.”

  “Right.”

  “Damn right,” he says. “You’ve heard of the mark of the beast, right? How we’re all going to have computer chips? Think how much easier full compliance will be when the people who are most capable of rebelling form lines and shell out money—pay the government—to implant the chips that will enslave them. Our enemy is clever.”

  “What’s that have to do with a woman CEO?”

  “You ever hear of the Garden of Eden?”

  “Uh.”

  “Uh-huh. Wha’d they eat, and which one ate it?”

  Nietzsche said Adam ate the apple, and quickly blamed Eve. Philosophy, I think, would antagonize Mr. Barrett. “The woman ate an apple,” I say.

  “Eve.”

  “Right.”

  “Apple. iPod. Clear as a bell.”

  “Yes sir. Well, I thought I’d say hello.”

  He returns the bud to his earlobe and gazes straight forward.

  ***

  Break the Cyman. Vote Hock.

  Rudge has taken the photo of my billboard graffiti from the lower left side of the webpage and turned it into the banner shot. The caption is HMMMM…

  Interestingly, in the bottom right corner of the photo, in the distance, a cyclist with long, straight, black hair approaches with his head down.

  I follow the link. Doomberg has picked up the story. The headline: HOCK CAMPAIGN FURIOUS ABOUT MAVERICK SUPPORTER.

  This is going to be more difficult than I thought. Duane Hock’s campaign manager is dipped in stupid. If he knew how to play it, my billboard could have turned his campaign. All he had to do was deny any involvement, wink, and let Cyman rage. Instead, Team Hock insults every potential voter who thought he must have ice in his veins to pull a stunt like that.

  I pause. There is something rather nihilist about helping an intellect as far left on the bell curve as Hock win a senate seat. He’s two standard deviations down the dumb side, and I’m working overtime to make him my representative against The Machine.

  But it is fun. A happy convergence of agnos
tic politics and prankish daredevilry.

  The challenge is that Hock’s posturing doesn’t ring true. People saw my billboard and thought Hock had it on the ball. Now he has seemingly turned on himself, just when it appeared he was lugging cannonballs in his boxers. He’ll be seen as intolerably dishonest or intolerably stupid.

  Voters will abide a lot of dishonesty and stupidity, but the upper limit can’t be broached. As soon as a politician resembles a guest on Jerry Springer, he becomes a guest on Jerry Springer. We’ve been inoculated against the dishonesty and thievery and stupidity of our ruling class… We’ve turned our backs on our duty to kick the thieves out of office and hang them from a scaffold… but we have all the time in the world for Wife Swap and Duck Dynasty. Hence we don’t actually notice the political elite until they become entertainment.

  Keith thinks the right stew of government programs can set things aright.

  I, on the other hand, believe we are tumbling down the waning slope of democracy toward bureaucratic tyranny. Until something nixes our ability to bury our heads in entertainment, we will allow our leaders to tap shoes in airports, screw interns, pageboys, and hobos at truck stops. Take bribes with impunity, raise taxes, start preemptive wars, monitor every single email or telephone conversation…

  When the iPod is miniaturized enough to slip inside the hollow of a needle, I’m bugging out, regardless of who runs Apple.

  ***

  I drop my sweaty shorts and tank top to the bedroom floor, wrap a towel around my waist. Katrina made her jab about men with Van Damme bodies chasing me, but the fact is, I could kick Van Damme’s ass from here to the lawn chair. I don’t have the movie muscle, and my abs won’t put you in the mind of corrugated steel. But I bring ten years as a karate black belt, and ten thousand years of Blackfoot wiliness to the fight.

  Van Damme is getting old.

  And let us not forget he is French.

  Twist the knob all the way to the hot side. Mom always said a shower should be as hot as you can stand, and I took her literally. With shampoo in my hair and my eyes closed, the curtain drifts inward against my legs and the temperature changes.