at First Sight (2008) (7 page)

I know, I know. You're thinking, what a load of bullshit. But this is the way you negotiate in business. You don't sell because you're strapped for cash; you take on a strategic partner. You don't roll over and expose your soft underbelly to the Great White of Wall Street; you pretend you don't need him.

The little man wearing Sears Roebuck trousers stood for a long moment before he pulled a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

"What's this?" I said, smiling.

"My offer. Not a penny more or less," the midget intoned, looking and sounding like a tiny Shylock, or a badly turned-out Ebenezer Scrooge.

Now, let me say right here, this is not the way business is done. My company, while currently experiencing hard times, was once the third-largest Internet site on the Web.

I admit, we made no profit, but that was a calculated strategy. We used every cent, plus all we could borrow, to expand. Product was flying out the door. Millions and millions of website hits a month. We lost money, but we built volume and name value. Name value equates to dollar value. This is a business truth. A brand name can be sold. If you owned the name "Kleenex" for instance, you would have something you could sell for a fortune. I'm not saying bestmarket
. C
om was as well known as Kleenex, or that it was a brand name by which all Internet entertainment sales were referred to, but I am saying that people knew who we were, and in the intensely competitive world of Web commerce, this is a very valuable asset. Millions of people hit our site just because they knew it was there.

I looked at the slip of paper and I couldn't believe what was written there. Two million dollars.

"Two million dollars for what?" I asked, dumbfounded. I was personally on the line for big long-term leases: the warehouse and our six-story L
. A
. office building. Walter Lily had to know all that if he'd done his due diligence, which I was sure he had. The two million dollars wouldn't even cover my litigation costs when I terminated all th
e l
ong-term contracts with my employees, or handle the breach-ofcontract problems I was sure to face.

The only thing that was keeping my creditors from swarming me was the knowledge that I had nothing but a thinly capitalized company. If they put me into Chapter 11, they'd get ten cents on the dollar for what we owed them, so they were carrying us, hoping we'd work our way out of debt. But Lily knew this. He knew if I tried to walk away from these contractual obligations, I'd be in court forever.

This little asshole was trying to steal my company for nothing. He had the cash and personal assets to restart the operation, reinstate my studio and record-company deals. He'd make my fortune instead of me.

Ten years ago, in the good old dot-com wizard days, we'd had a paper value of six hundred million dollars, as estimated in Forbes magazine. Admittedly, we'd slipped some, but this offer was nuts.

"T . . . two million?" I said, stuttering my disbelief.

"Yes." He looked at me like a malicious child who had just pulled the wings off a moth and was watching it flop around helplessly on a windowsill.

"But, sir, . . . the liquidated break-up value is at least seven," I said, retreating immediately to my absolute bottom-line number. I snapped open my briefcase and went for the doctored spreadsheets.

"Don't bother with any of those," he said as I pulled them out. "That's the offer. This time next month, you won't get a dollar from me or anyone else."

"I can't sell for two million. The name alone is worth four times that much."

"Goodbye, then:' he said. The little bandit turned and walked out of his office, leaving me standing there with the narrow-shouldered shepherd in the gray suit.

"Is he kidding?" I said.

"I'll show you out:" the man said.

It appeared I'd come three thousand miles just to let a dwarf in shiny pants shit on me.

Chapter
8

SECONDS LATER I WAS BACK ON THE STREET, SLEET washing my head, running down my back.

I still had options. The Brooklyn Bridge was only a few miles away. I could give these Wall Street assholes a great headline. I should've cabbed over there and jumped. If I had, I'd be way ahead of where I am now. But that isn't what I did. Instead, I did something much worse.

Somehow, I found my way to the Hertz Rent a Car in downtown Manhattan. Somehow, I managed to rent a blue Ford Taurus. Somehow, I got out of New York City. I didn't really know where I was going. The windshield wipers clicked and clacked. I was out of options. My tortured thoughts circled the edge of this new business dilemma like a hungry wolf at the edge of a campfire. I drove for hours and hours, not even knowing where I was going . . . not caring. I vaguel
y r
emember Arlington, then Myrtle Beach. I drove without stopping, except for gas. My mind was chewing on all the terrible consequences of my life, starting with my father's death .. .

Okay. As long as I brought it up, let's get on that broken-down mule for a minute. When I was a child, my father always seemed to me like somebody who had all the answers. He wasn't some big-time show-biz powerhouse, I admit, but he was funny and smart. He could make you laugh, make you believe. An agent.

He loved Hollywood Park . . . loved the ponies.

He was always taking me to the track. Money was power, he told me. And he bet heavily, trying to become more powerful. He let me pick horses and taught me how to read the racing sheet. I learned to handicap by going to the track with him at dawn, studying workout times and injury reports just like all the other six-thirty railbirds. Once, when I was ten, I got a four-horse parlay, won three hundred dollars. I started carrying wads of money around. I was only in fifth grade, but I learned that my father was right. Money was power, even in elementary school.

Mom didn't get it. She was always bitching about Dad losing the egg money, because lots of times he did. She didn't understand that money won was twice as valuable as money earned.

But Dad understood that, and so did I.

Ever since childhood, I've been a regular at the Jockey Club. When I was in the chips a few years back, a lot of my dot-corn bonus cash went right through the pari-mutuel window. Call it a learned behavior, a conditioned response. Dad was Chick Sr. I was Chick Jr. W
e l
ived in a parallel universe. The rest of the world ran in the next lane over. He got to drink and screw the B-girls at the Paddock Bar. I went to elementary school and flashed my track cash. Got my first piece of ass in eighth grade when I bought the girl a fifty-dollar ring and got laid in return. I was fourteen. Talk about a defining moment.

Then came the night when dear old Dad ruined it. The night he got drunk and put the silver Jag into the bridge abutment. They had to cut him out of the car. He came out in four pieces.

Since I didn't get my mother's vibe at all, I had focused everything on Dad. I wanted to be like him even though I'm not sure I even knew who he was. He was a big, happy guy in a checkered coat who taught me that people will respect you if you've got cash in your wallet and bullshit on your lips. Mostly what I liked about him was he paid attention to me. I thought it was about me back then, but as I grew older and gained insight into what motivates people, I realized it wasn't about me at all. It was about him. I was the only person in his life who gave a shit what he thought.

We buried him at Forest Lawn and I remember thinking back then that it was pretty much over the day they closed his casket. You see, my one goal in life had been to please him, to one day make him proud of me. And then, before I could do it, he took off for the big paddock in the sky. I was only fifteen when he died.

I was left to be raised by women--my mother and grandmother. What a hen party that was. They clucked and prodded, complained and bitched. My grades were never good enough, my hair never short enough, my girlfriends never refined enough. Then, under all thi
s c
riticism, I sort of started to veer toward drugs and sleazy women, just like Dad. I went into the army, where I heroically defended my post on Wilshire Boulevard, winning the war of one-liners. Afterward, it was a decade-long party that ended with six months in the Hawaii State Prison.

Through all of this, I slowly began to form a different opinion of my father. More and more, I've come to realize that Dad was just a loser with a great line of b
. S
. A guy who nobody listened to except sleazy women and a son who had nobody else. So, the hero of my youth slowly became an emotional stone around my neck. As an adult, I came to hate what he stood for and prayed I wouldn't end up the same way. I actually threw away my two checkered sport coats the day this realization finally dawned.

I grew up with no real male role models--nobody to try to be like. So whom did I eventually choose? Pop culture assholes. The celebrities in People magazine. First, it was drug-culture rock bands, then investment sleaze balls like Ivan Boesky and John Delorean. I lusted after all the things that the product machines on Madison Avenue told me were cool. I didn't like who I was, so I bought everything these false prophets and culture hucksters told me would validate me. I blew money on exotic cars, dressed out of GQ, put almost a quarter of a million dollars into the sound system in an office so large you could use it to play half-court basketball. I married a woman other people wanted to fuck. She gave great blow jobs but had thoughts so thin they disappeared completely in a flurry of demands, complaints, and recriminations.

The age-old loser questions started waking me up at night. How did I get here?

What do I really want?

Why am I so damn unhappy?

And then the big, scary ones: Am I turning into my father? Is that why nobody takes me seriously?

These were the things I was thinking as I pushed the little blue Taurus south out of the sleet of New York City, onto the cracked, dry roads of Virginia, heading nowhere special, not knowing where I was going until I got there.

I drove all afternoon, into the night, my mind elsewhere, yearning for something I was unable to even describe.

You'll never guess where I ended up. Or, maybe you already have. I ended up in front of Paige Ellis's house on a residential street in Charlotte, North Carolina.

It was 10 P
. M
. on the night my whole life changed.

Chapter
9

THE HOUSE WAS SMALL, WITH A TINY FRONT LAWN. IT was not the kind of place you'd expect to find the scion of the Chandler media fortune, certainly not a house I would choose if I had his money. I was parked a little way up the street. The address, written down so carefully in Hawaii, was open now on my lap. The letters, in her delicate hand, were wavering under my blurring vision.

I looked at the house and I remember saying out loud, "Chick, this is nuts?' Of course it was way beyond nuts. This was real, hard-core, front-of-the-line stalker nonsense.

I had driven more than six hundred miles to park outside another man's house, so I could look into his lighted living room, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife as she passed by the window. Unacceptable.

It was as if just letting the vision of her find its way into my brain might salve the pain of these past few days--of Melissa in jail, my sorry business going bankrupt, and the dwarf in the shiny pants with the hair growing out of his ears.

I watched. I waited. What was I doing? I swear, at that moment I didn't have a clue. I wanted to start up the blue Taurus and leave, but I couldn't move my hand to the ignition key. Every time I tried, I hit some sort of powerful force field. My fingers hovered inches away, unable to make contact and close the distance, which would have saved me.

I don't know how long I sat there. My thoughts were becoming pretty jumbled . . . pretty abstract. I thought about my dad, my wife. The first time I saw Evelyn at Mike Donovan's pool party. I thought she was beautiful then, never seeing the woman she would become. Not seeing the anger or the self-hatred that now drove her to pump iron obsessively for hours in our basement gym. I thought about Paige and Chandler Ellis and this little house so far away from L
. A
. I thought about the insanity of this trip down here, not knowing until I pulled the address out of my pocket what I was really doing, but then knowing in a flash that it had been my plan to come here all along.

That realization, that truth, hit me harder than any of the events of the past month. I knew this was insane, and still I couldn't leave. I
couldn't put the little car in gear and save myself, because, you see, I knew that no matter what happened to me, whether I stayed or left, I would never again be the same Chick Best. Somehow, I knew right then that my coming here had changed who I was forever.

I didn't need some Beverly Hills therapist to explain that, either. The trip here had convinced me I had lost control. My love for Paige Ellis had morphed into an uncontrollable obsession.

That's when the door opened and Chandler Ellis walked out of his house. At first I thought he was going to the mailbox. But instead, he walked to the green Suburban parked in the driveway, got in, started the vehicle, and backed out.

I ducked down as his headlights swept over my car. Then I sat up, and without knowing what the hell I was doing, I started the Taurus.