Rewind. Our new lives on the FBI’s Most Wanted ultimately began on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones fell 508 points, 22.8% of the market, the largest one-day drop in history. Twenty-three major world markets experienced a decline that day, with losses estimated at 1.7 trillion dollars. People feared another Great Depression. But the writing had been on the Stock Ticker. I could explain about the House Committee on Ways and Means introducing a tax bill that would reduce the tax benefits associated with financing mergers and leveraged buyouts. And that unexpectedly high trade deficit figures announced by the Department of Commerce had a negative impact on the value of the dollar while pushing interest rates upward, but let’s be honest, the crash was the impetus that got us on the road to thieving. And because all our assets and funds were tied to the market, the Gimmelmans, once popping Champagne corks from our surging portfolios, were about to get fucked seven gazillion ways come Tuesday.
Thank God for office windows that didn’t open from the inside.
While watching his Monday turn from this-ain’t-so-good to complete-toilet-overflow, Barry Gimmelman pondered a splat against the pavement. He even crawled up on the window sill, checking for a way to unlock what he conceded as his inevitable destiny. Coworkers wandered past his office, shrieking and wailing, banging their heads against the walls, attempting to slit their wrists with tie clips. He worked for one of the biggest firms on the Street. Not only had he lost a fortune in a matter of hours, but he lost the fortunes of some very powerful people who would be rightfully pissed and looking for a target to blame.
His superior Edina shuffled inside, hair zapped like it had been electrocuted, grinding her teeth so hard he could hear the shards whittling off the bone. Her zombie eyes told Barry she might not ever recover. She pleaded with him, arms outstretched as if begging for alms, morphing into a bag lady in mere minutes.
“What am I to do?” she asked in the voice of a child.
Edina, one of the toughest women he knew, who had risen the ranks in a boys’ club operation of pinched butts and misogyny. Who looked like a shark with her prominent forehead and poof of hair like a fin and proudly thought of herself as one, hovering in circles around the office searching for blood.
She left his office without getting an answer. Like everyone else in this field, his job prospects tomorrow would be slim. He also had invested all of his money in stocks because they were doing well enough to get him a palatial home in Jersey, close enough so his commute wasn’t a ball killer and a Maserati in fire-engine red. For his daughter Steph’s bat mitzvah four years ago, he’d booked the band Men at Work to perform “Down Under” for her friends. He liked to only wear Armani suits, have steak tartar at the 21 Club, despite it being far from Kosher, foie gras in a baked eggy dough at Lutece (also not Kosher), and martinis at the Odeon with clients. Growing up, his parents squeezed pennies and owned a Jewish bakery down in the Lower East Side. They all lived above in an apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen and sheets to partition the bedrooms for him and his older brother Morty. Adult Barry believed he and his offspring deserved a rich life after an ancestry filled with plight and suffering. No more fighting with the household mice for a piece of babka that caused his mother to have carpel tunnel from the repeated twisting and braiding. With his blinding smile and knack for utilizing market trends, New York City became Barry’s playground to prosper.
He could see visions of that sad bathtub in the kitchen. His family, forced to look the other way while hearing the splash, splash of one of them simply wanting to get clean. A mouse going to town on a nub of babka and the growls of his children’s stomachs. The growls turning into a voice that would ask, Why couldn’t you get a more stable profession? You could’ve been a doctor, like his mother would’ve loved, God bless her, or a lawyer, like his father pushed, Hashem bless him too, even continue running their bakery on Elizabeth Street rather than going to Columbia. The market had been going up-up-up; it was bound to cave. He had been too blinded by foie gras and Maseratis to see it.
And Judith, what would she say? He had avoided his brick of a cell phone, even though she knew not to call during work. His hippie moon goddess turned lady-who-lunched at the Four Seasons. The amount of hats she owned was enough to keep the country of India dry during monsoon season. Their home in Tenafly was not close to paid off. That sea of hats would soon be repossessed like everything else they owned. And the kids in private schools. They had just started the new school year in September! Little Jenny in the plaid uniform she hated but with teachers who kept her from becoming a true terror. Yours Truly so smart, and Steph, starting to think about colleges. We’d be torn apart in public school, forced to wind up at community colleges, then bagging groceries. And since Barry would be out of a job too, he’d be bagging groceries right beside us.
“Goddammit, there’s no lock on these windows,” he shouted, beating against the glass, hoping against hope for it to shatter so he could plunge. His boss, Oren, roamed by, high on cocaine and sputtering nonsense. Conspiracy theories out the wazoo, a bloody line dripping from the man’s honker.
“Oh no, death is too easy,” Oren said, wiping away the bloody line only to rub it under his eyes like a football player ready for war. “Kinda luck we’re having, you’ll bounce right on the sidewalk and land back up here in Hell.”
Oren shuffled away, the last time Barry would ever see the man. Apparently, death did come easy for Oren that night with a coke binge that exploded his heart.
Barry tossed his computer screen at the window, only for it to boomerang back and knock him over to the ground. With shaking fingers, he found his giant cell phone and called his love Judith.
“Baby,” he said, squeezing out tears.
“Oh Barry, my Bear-Bear,” she said, a nickname due to his furry chest. “Is it as bad as the news is making it out?”
He had crawled under his desk, gripping the giant cell phone. The melee happening outside kept to a din in his new secluded cave where only he and Judith existed.
“It’s worse,” he said, having trouble swallowing. “There’s nothing left.”
“There’s always something left.” He imagined her in the kitchen, curling the cord around her finger, telling herself to keep him hopeful, to be his rock. “You and I, the kids, we’re not publicly traded.”
“I looked out my window,” Barry said in a daze, the words spaced far apart as if he had to search through the fog to find them. Something was burning, a crackle of flames down the hallway. Had they finally reached a place where the devil reigned? “I’ve ruined us.”
She let him break down for a second, only a moment of self-pity, before continuing in the authoritative voice of a dominatrix.
“Listen to me, Barry Gimmelman.” Her tongue clicked like a whip. “When I met you, you were high on acid without a coin in your pocket and clawed your way up from nothing. Now we have a swimming pool I do laps in every morning and a maid, but it’s just a bonus. I grew up in Sheepshead Bay, and my mother sewed clothes after my father died. I never realized I was poor until we became rich.”
“What about your hats?” he blubbered, wiping his snot on the inside of the desk.
“Pish. So, I won’t have hats. So, I’ll skip the beauty parlor. ‘So buttons,’ as my mother used to say. Are we rich in health?”
“You say this now…”
“Are we rich in health, Barry Gimmelman?”
“Yes, yes, our kids, you, I—we have health.”
“Feh, that’s all I need.”
“I don’t want to tell you what I thought about when I looked out of the window, Judith.”
“Then you don’t have to.”
“My biggest fear is of failing.”
“Barry love, you’re certainly not the only failure today. The world failed, and we got caught up in it. Now come home, baby, we’ll put on a record, open a bottle of red, and defrost a roast we shoulda eaten last week.”
“You cooked?”
“It’s leftover from when we breaked fast after Yom Kippur.”
As Judith enticed him to come home for old meat, a body flew past Barry’s window—tie flapping up, face mashed into a final scream, toupee left in the clouds. Barry scooted out from his desk cave to watch this man’s ungraceful fall, his arms flapping in an attempt to fly. A thud at the bottom of the street so soft it was barely a whisper. If he hadn’t seen this man’s horrible descent, he never would’ve known it happened. Even peering out of his prison window, only darkness could be seen at the bottom of the building, along with a guess of how many lives that day had taken.
“Barry? Barry, are you there?” Judith squawked, for my parents had a psychic bond, and she could read his stress levels tilting to maximum from far away.
“I’m here,” he said and then repeated it definitively. Black Monday would not be the end of Barry Gimmelman. He would rise from the stock chit ashes and defrost that roast, chasing it down with a bottle of red and his family by his side until he figured out his next move.
He ended the call and breached out of his office into the chaos of the hallway, past souls pulling their hair from its roots, and onto the street where the city was both loud and eerily quiet at the same time.
Got in his Maserati to floor it to New Jersey, searching for songs on the radio to avoid the news and settling on the oldies station where Janis Joplin sang “Cry Baby.” The song from when he first held Judith in his arms and tickled her ear with tales of their imagined futures, laying her down in a mud-splattered field, and tasting the acid tab on her pretty pink tongue, and then her pretty pink self, until the future laid out in all its glory like a great Smorgasbord of a feast.
He’d find it again, in whatever nook and cranny it hid. He’d hunt for that sweet paradise he so deserved.