My mother didn’t have to work for the windfall she received, but she did raise me, which I assure you was plenty work enough. We were never close, especially as I got older, but from the moment I could bridge the chasm between us with money, everything became easier. A conversation with my mother generally involved her speaking a great deal and me remembering to turn off my phone for a few hours while she went on. But with family you have no choice, you are bound to them for life. Perhaps it was because I found the conversations so tedious that I never got tired of buying her things, of the pleasure each new item so obviously generated. If it is true that purchases have never been such a great pleasure for me, that I prefer to earn, the least I could do was to enjoy the activity vicariously through her.
The other reason we weren’t closer is that I was always too busy working. Now that she is gone, I of course regret this. Even if it was often endlessly boring, it still would have been better to have had more time. But work was, and remains, the absolute priority. An average day for me begins at five a.m. with one-on-one reports from a few top executives regarding developments within their division. I try to keep these meetings light and friendly, to create a sense of warmth, a feeling that if they have problems in the future they can always come to me. The early morning start reflects the fact that, personally, I am at my best when I first wake up, an hour at which many of our employees are still groggy. I also believe this gives me an edge.
There is an espresso machine in my office, and for these early morning one-on-ones I generally prepare the coffee myself, instead of having a secretary do so, which is most often the case later in the day. I feel this act of making and serving coffee for an employee, as a psychological gesture, is essential and even fascinating. It’s a kind of display: that I am doing something helpful, that I am there for them. There is no milk, cream or sugar to be found anywhere in my office. When you drink coffee with me you must take it black, and I make each portion strong and thick. This also gives me an advantage, since I am accustomed to the harsh caffeine shock, the bitterness, while many of our executives are not.
At times I also schedule these meetings to overlap, paying careful attention to the moment when the next appointment arrives and realizes that the previous one is still underway. Endlessly intriguing how both employees deal with the situation and with each other. After briefly apologizing for the overlap, I’m already at the espresso machine, pulling another shot, observing how it all plays out from the corner of my eye. Often the previous appointment offers to leave and the game is up, but just as often they attempt to negotiate the space of the meeting, taking turns with their presentations or even awkwardly weaving them together. During these moments so much pure competition is present in the room, an absolute charge, sublimated into pretend co-operation or sparking up briefly as conflict. In general, my philosophy is that there can be no business without co-operation, but people must never get too comfortable. Co-operation must never rule the day.
2.
Since I set myself upon my clear and vicious goal, I have been living as frugally as possible. There is a simple rule for making one’s economic life viable. It’s never a question of how much you earn, only of how much you spend. I eat two meals a day and both are small. A ten-pound bag of rice will easily last me six months. For protein, a few slivers of meat or fish, lentils, steamed dark green vegetables. I eat nothing outside of the house, nothing I don’t prepare myself. And, strangely, I never get bored with this relatively monotone diet, instead finding it steady and comforting. The less food you eat the less food you need, the less hungry you are, perhaps displacing the hunger towards other matters. I want nothing around me that might get in the way, nothing that could distract. This simpler life has benefits I hadn’t predicted. I feel calmer, more focused, more precise. A billionaire is just a man like any other. I am also just a man. One man kills another in the name of justice. It’s symbolic of the fact that all of us, in matters of life and death, are equal. No one is superior and no one is above the law.
The third interview was by far the worst. I’m still turning it over in my mind, trying to recover. They had phoned every single reference on my resumé and easily ferreted out the lies. Nonetheless, I believe I handled the situation well, explaining that I had fallen on hard times, desperately needed the work, and was therefore resorting to tactics that in other circumstances I very much deplore. They seemed sympathetic, but it was difficult to tell how sympathetic they actually were. I remained relaxed, commending them for their thorough detective work, explaining that other organizations had been considerably more negligent, adding that if I were ever to hire a security firm, which seemed unlikely considering my current poverty, they would be my first choice. I found their reply sobering, as they informed me that other companies most likely did the exact same diligent research, but simply didn’t see any point in confronting me with their findings. After all, I didn’t get any of the other jobs either. I kindly thanked them for their honesty and felt devastated.
Leaving that interview was the first time I seriously questioned my ability to fulfill my stated goal. It seemed I was in over my head before having made even the first step towards it. And then I began to wonder: if they had discovered my lies, if they had found my resumé so full of holes, why had they even bothered to interview me in the first place, then wondered the same thing about the first two companies, if in fact they had also followed up on my fallacious references. I came up with a strange, unverifiable theory. Maybe these organizations require, from time to time, someone who is completely expendable. And hiring someone unqualified, someone who lied on their resumé, might fulfill this necessity, so later they can say it was the liar’s fault, he fooled us with his lies, and pack the scapegoat off to jail while the rest of the company remains unscathed. Maybe it was only this scapegoat position I was being interviewed for.
But becoming paranoid gets you nowhere. And now, even though I suspected there was some clear next step I could take, that all was not lost, I was at a complete loss for what kind of next step it might be. I called in sick for my dishwashing shift, and lay down on my small bed, almost unable to move or think. The more untenable one’s position, the more tenaciously one clings to it. Absentmindedly, I picked up the book nearest to the bed — his book, the first one I stole, the mangled copy — and flipped through it at random, eventually landing on a chapter about shareholder meetings. I remembered this chapter, since it was the one in which he gloated most pompously, each sentence inserting new, red-hot embers into the fire of my anger. How proud he was of smoothly deflecting shareholder concerns about the financial health of the company, which I suspected was experiencing difficulty only because he was putting the money in his pocket. All the facts and figures he could so easily memorize, recite back to the crowd and distort. How he could use his mastery of these facts and figures almost like a force field, or like a talisman to mesmerize the crowd.
I knew he was a fake, an imposter, since I also knew a little something about showmanship from my days in front of an audience. The way one walks out to the piano, with confidence or hesitation, clearly influences the judges’ assessment of your performance. One learns this and, if you want to win, adjusts one’s gait accordingly, until your natural walk is no longer your own. If, when you speak, you think not of what you are saying but of what effect it will have on those in front of you, on the crowd, then your words are also no longer your own. You don’t know who you are since everything you say or do is designed to have a specific impact. Sometimes, by hesitating slightly as you walk on, you can lower expectations, therefore creating a moment of surprise by opening the recital with a confident first few notes. But this is a dangerous game, since a negative first impression is difficult to overcome.