The Last Days Of A Great Capitalist - Sex And God Compete For His Attention

Bradford Hart was a billionaire, not as unusual today as it was even a generation ago, but still, something to take notice of.

Brad had had the instinct for making money, or rather an intuitive understanding of worth. He knew exactly what to charge for shoveling old people's snow, washing and waxing cars, and picking up vacation mail.  He bought novelty items from a local variety store and then sold them to his classmates for a profit. Palm buzzers, flies in plastic, and whoopee cushions were increasingly hard to find, so Brad tracked shipments, bought wholesale, and sold at retail with significant but not discouraging markups. 

 

He noticed and wondered about variable pricing - why one gas station charged one price per gallon and the one across the street another; how the price of lettuce, milk, steak, and eggs varied weekly; and how people valued their time.  Old Mr. Frampton spent whole afternoons searching for the best deal on refrigerator parts instead of trading on his financial wizardry and helping wealthy widows sort through their portfolios. 

Brad quickly learned how to live on the ethical margins of the market.  Exchanging a pair of once-worn shoes to a store with a generous return policy was within bounds since the store had factored in questionable transactions.  If the store raised its prices because of a higher than expected rate of such returns, it was their problem, not his. 

In short the boy had an uncanny understanding of the workings of the market and a remarkable nose for profit. At Yale, he bought an old hearse, contracted with a local appliance store for unsold inventory, and made his tuition selling used refrigerators to students.  He imported Danish pornographic films and set high prices his wealthy classmates would quite willingly pay. 

 

After Yale, he borrowed five thousand dollars from a well-off uncle, bought prime Cape Cod real estate in a down market, and resold it at a handy profit to a developer who made a fortune.  Before he was thirty Brad had made his first million and was well on the way to tripling it in the next year.  His diverse portfolio of commodities, creative financial instruments, and startup investments was a high flyer. 

Everything he touched turned to gold, a real-life King Midas; and before long he became not just an investor, but an owner, and in an unheard of event, two of his companies were in the top twenty Standard & Poor's list of the largest and most profitable corporations in America. 

Making money had long since become a necessity, but it was so much a part of Brad's being that he could not relax and retire.  Profit was his drug of choice. 

And sex, for Bradford had had his pick of women since he was at Yale, and enjoyed every minute or conquest, sensuality, and the pure joy of rutting.  It wasn't just his millions that drew women to him, although he was never adverse to taking advantage of the credulous beauties who saw profit in his bed.  The most delightful, charming, sophisticated, and successful women found him attractive and desirable.  There was something fungible about his drive for financial gain - women sensed his sexual drive and were abjectly welcoming of it. 

In sex as in buying and selling Brad lived on the margins.  Sexual relationships were matters of contract like those of business and finance.  One had to know how much to invest, when to short, when to go long, and when to pull out; and in each and every case it paid to wait for the most propitious moment to act.  Living on the margins, when risk and reward were delicately balanced, was not for the faint of heart or the ethically timid. 

 

Life was good to Bradford Hart, but not without a bit of luck.  He had been gifted a good set of genes, the luck of the draw, and kept healthy and alert well into late middle age.  There was no reason why he couldn't live to 100 and even beyond, and as long as mind and body held, he could enjoy both his financial and sexual enterprises. 

It was surprising then that this man of few doubts, little existential reflection, and certainly few anxieties about the future began to wonder what was next. Such reflection necessarily leads to a valuation of the past. If life ended without fanfare, an extinguishing moment, a mystical disappearance after so much organization, planning, and secular effort; then what had the soon to be ended life been worth? Anything? Everything, since death promised nothing?

He like all older men faced with the same prospects, shook off these morbid thoughts; but they, insidious as they were, were consequential in and of themselves.  He thought more and more about women, and less and less about God. In a paroxysm of sexual energy he had a December-May affair with a young attorney, a passionate sexual jamboree which did all but erase any upsetting thoughts about his failing and ultimate demise.  

 

When the affair ended, as all such affairs must, Brad was disconsolate, confused, and at loose emotional ends.  The downside of the exhilaration of sex with a younger woman is the heroin crash of withdrawal. Life after such an affair is even more despairing and empty than before.  What was I thinking, he wondered?

Of course he was never alone.  He had a large family, a bevy of friends and colleagues, and acquaintances from east to west; but the satisfaction that he always had had among them had disappeared.  They were cold comfort to what he felt was his approaching final irrelevance. 

And so he turned again to that heady, irreplaceable, inimitable sexual pleasure he had enjoyed since he was a young man; and in each case the days were as happy as any.  However the letdown and depression following them became worse and worse. His famous fungibility left him - financial dealings, buying and selling, profit-making and risk-taking which were always the seat of pleasure, were no longer so.  Sexual desire had erased them and the satisfaction they provided; so all that was left was sex and God. 

'What a choice', he said to himself in a rare moment.  Jewish humor and he wasn't even Jewish. 

Why wouldn't the affairs of life cease to tempt him? Why wasn't old age a period of equanimity and acceptance?  Why was he always thinking of sex, its remarkable rejuvenating and renovative power? Its magical ability to dispel doubt, concern, even guilt?  If there was a God, then why did he give men a few short decades to love, and then consign them to years of impotent longing?  It was His greatest irony, his cruelest test of faith. 

His holdings had long since been sold or put in trust and the days of sexual dalliance were over, so he was left with God or nothing.  Again, what a choice! Not a totally unpleasant one as he remembered his catechism, high mass, and the pretty novitiates of St. Aloysius.  Maybe there was something to it, after all. 

 

In any case, he pulled himself together, resigned himself to his fate of prurient dreams and imaginings of an afterlife, and either fortunately or unfortunately lived to the 100 years he had hoped for.