I made my first mortgage payment at 26, and my last one three months later

College was a heady time for me. I was fresh out of the service and going to school on my GI benefits. I’d survived Viet Nam and now the world was filled with possibilities. I was a couple of years older than my fellow-freshmen at the State University, but among those headed for business degrees, my age seemed to be a benefit rather than a detriment. I was more experienced. And when the draft lottery came about, I was able to hang a sign on my door that said, “Been there, done that.”

Into the chaos of my college life, stepped two of the most remarkable people I’d ever met: Simon Barnett and Brenda Lamb. They swept me into a social life that I’d never had before. If there was a party happening on campus, we were there. We went to ballgames, lectures, concerts, and plays. If there weren’t three tickets, either we didn’t go, or Simon pulled strings and found three. It was all new and different to me, and I don’t know how I got included. If anything, I was an accounting geek, Simon was an entrepreneur, and Brenda knew more than anyone how to have a good time.

Among us, though, we were going to change the world. We were going to do great things so that Viet Nam didn’t happen again. We were going to find cures for cancer and end world hunger. We were going to do such great things.

I didn’t drink and wouldn’t touch drugs because of what I’d seen among my friends in Viet Nam. Brenda and Simon thought that was funny, but loved having me along as their “designated driver.” And whenever there was a dispute, we always yielded to what “Simon says.” With Simon so much the dominant personality among the three of us, maybe it wasn’t surprising that Brenda and I connected in a different way. For all the fact that I’d been in the service and was older than the other two, Brenda became my first lover. There was nothing that I wouldn’t do for her, and very little that I didn’t.

We were married a month out of college.

All three of us remained close. Simon was my best man. Our plan was for Brenda and I to be working in the corporate world while Simon found the deal that would put us in business together. Brenda and I both had good jobs. I was recruited and started working for Anderson Elliott Consulting right out of college. Brenda got a great job with a Puget Sound Bank, but two years later when Simon had acquired his first business, she went to work for him. We had our timetable down. I would join the new business the next year and it would be a three-way partnership. No one questioned that Simon would have the controlling share at 51%, and that Brenda and I would split the remaining 49%. Washington was, after all, a community property state anyway, so we would have joint ownership.

It was Simon who found the house. It was a big old house in Madison Park overlooking Lake Washington. I couldn’t imagine how we’d pay for it, but Simon, as usual, had a plan. He would finance the house and we would pay the mortgage to him. And since he intended to live there with us, he would pay us rent. Brenda and I would have our dream home while we were young enough to enjoy it, and Simon had a way that he would cycle the money and we’d all benefit. And he couldn’t wait until we had kids so he could be an “uncle.” The deal was closed.

We moved into the house and began furnishing it. We each had private spaces and we had common public ones. My special space was where I had a reclining chair (yes, even back then), a stereo, and a picture on the wall. I’d sit there in the evening while the TV was on in the next room and listen to Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, or Credence Clearwater Revival while I vacationed in that seascape picture.

I was sick one day about three months after we moved in and came home from the office at noon, intent on going straight to bed.

Damn.

The bed was occupied by Simon and Brenda. Apparently we weren’t being fast enough about having kids for Simon.

The confrontation was remarkably brief.

I threw up on them.

They were both all over me, getting things cleaned up, getting me to bed, tending my fever. I was so sick that for a while I thought I had hallucinated the whole affair. But I knew that wasn’t true. On the morning I woke up and could stand up, I packed up. I realized, even before they told me, that it wasn’t an accident of proximity, it was an affair that had been going on for years, even before we were married.

As it turned out, I didn’t have all that much to pack. My clothes, my car, a favorite chair, and the one painting that I owned.

I signed a quit-claim deed on the property and filed for divorce. There was no contest and no partnership. I kept working at Anderson Elliott. Simon and Brenda got married. I got an invitation to the wedding.

Damn.

For a few months I spent most of my time sitting in the efficiency apartment that I rented, in my big chair, staring at the picture hanging on the wall. It’s always been my secret place of peace, even today. I wish I really see the colors in that sunset. I’d managed to keep the secret through my army days by having acuity for memorizing relative details, so I knew the color striping on a transistor by memory, not by sight. But the only time I’ve ever missed seeing color was when I was trying to imagine the colors in that painting.

That’s off the subject. Where was I? This seemed to be happening more and more often lately.

Yes, I’d been transferring funds from account to account. I knew how to hide tracks when moving money, Simon knew where to put it. The 21 named accounts that I’d found were the shadow accounts that Simon had set up and into which he was gradually bleeding off the assets of the company.

I couldn’t believe how quickly I had fallen back under Simon’s charismatic spell. I didn’t for a minute believe that he was doing anything out of his altruistic nature, though I came to suspect that it pleased Angel to see money going to various charities. And it pleased me to see title to Far East Exchange transferred back to Earl Schwarz.

It was going to take a couple of days for me to move all the funds that Simon had identified and not leave tracks until it was too late to follow them. Simon sat across from me with his sleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned. Gold chains hung loosely around his neck. I shook my head to myself and went back to work. Sometimes he was such a little bantam rooster. But to him it was all part of the role he’d chosen.

I looked back up at Simon. One of the gold chains had a state-of-the-art USB flash drive hanging from it. He saw me looking and automatically reached a hand to his neck.

“What’s that?” I asked pointing. I studiously tried to focus my attention back on my computer screen. I glanced back up. He had a pursed-lip smile that I recognized as Simon when he perceived he had been too, too clever.

“That is my life,” he said. “If anything ever happens to me, all you have to do is look on this and you will know exactly who the villain is. You cracked my laptop, long before I gave you my password, and found lots of interesting things, but what’s on here, you can’t imagine. It’s my insurance policy. Anything happens to me, I release this. Instant calamity, earth-shaking disaster that would collapse the economies of half a dozen countries and even more businesses.”

“Seems like an albatross around your neck,” I quipped. “So if something happens to you, you release the disk?”

“Right.”

“How? You’re dead.”

“They’ll find it.”

“Which they? And what if you weren’t found?” I continued. It wasn’t often in my life that I’d caught an outright fallacy in Simon’s thinking, but when I did it was always incumbent upon me to make the most of it.

“I’ll be go-to-hell,” he said and left the room.

I worked late into the night. When I finally lay down, I’d transferred ten businesses on a time-clock so that they would all move at one time on the day before the long holiday weekend next week. That would reduce the risk of discovery until all transactions had cleared in Europe and Asia.

I was back under Simon’s spell. I asked myself a dozen times before I fell asleep if what I was doing was right. The answer always came back in the form of a question.

Does what I’m doing make a difference?