Breakfast

You are meeting Drew for breakfast. Drew is the kind of guy you could have been. Drew is a contender; no, strike that, a champion. Drew has arrived.

He is ten years younger than you, so you didn’t share a childhood. You know exactly what he would have been like if you had though. A leader. Someone who did well in school and on the playground. Someone who didn’t ask himself a whole lot of questions. A 12-year-old moving forward. Quiet, calm, self-assured, not like the rest of the Wall Street crowd which must at all times let the whole world know it is self-anointed royalty. That must be why he’s eschewed the Perrine Hotel this morning for your meeting. No 88 dollars for two plates of eggs, two cups of herbal tea and bagels with marmalade. No maître d' to pretend so successfully that there is absolutely no other place in the city to have a simple breakfast.

You’re meeting in the Perrine’s shadow in a diner on East 60th Street, Manny’s Coffee Shop, that kind of New York City place. Windows so dirty you lie to yourself that it’s some type of condensation, a form of indoor fog. Ketchup-stained menu on the inside glass, black marker covering last year’s prices, taken down and put back up so many times it’s hanging illegibly from years-old clear tape. A standing sign on the floor in big black and red letters posting the two-egg special for $4.25. You remember college days when you washed down eggs, toast, bacon, and hash browns six or seven times a week with impunity and without knowledge of why cholesterol could be both good and bad.

To your left, you see the grill and the two sweating men attending to it. To your right, you view the grumpy man at the register you assume is Manny. Straight ahead are the counters, four semicircles filled almost to capacity with scant more than the tops of foreheads visible above smartphone screens. Everyone here seems to be a regular except you. And Drew. You don’t care one wit because you know breakfast will be irrelevant. Drew wants to meet with you and this should be big.

There he is, way in the back, saving your seat at the last counter. He’s waving you over, ignoring the annoyed, mole-expanding smirk from the heavyset bleached-blonde woman in the fire engine red outfit with the broach of a yellow school bus atop her bosom. You smile and wave back and head that way.

“Don’t get up,” you say. You put your briefcase down, shake hands and ease into the empty seat. “How the hell are you, man? It’s been way too long.”

And it has been too. You met Drew when you were both lawyers at the same firm. You were a permanent associate, a term of art in New York legal circles that gained currency decades ago when law firms found their greed levels approaching those of the corporate clients they represented. Firms like yours would make fewer partners but they still needed assholes like you to sling paper around.

Drew was a young associate at the firm, a fresh-faced bachelor with the same kind of top six law school pedigree that landed you at the place ten years earlier. But he was different than you, from a different generation. He didn’t hang openly with a gang of lawyer malcontents, complain about billable hours, talk about buying a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise or making an independent feature film in the same conversation. He never once was heard to lament how law school had sprung from a deadly cocktail of indecision and fear. Drew carried the briefcases, did the 2,200 billables a year, attended the firm’s Christmas parties in the financial district, schmoozed the corporate clients and manageD to dress as well as they did. For four years, halfway to what seemed like a certain partnership.

And then Drew did something you unfortunately had not done. He departed. Disappeared. Without warning, without notice, without a trace. You alone knew where he was though because he’d singled you out for communication. He popped into your small office under a cloak of confidentiality to tell you he was leaving to do deals with another youngster from a wealthy New York Wall Street dynasty and to remind you that you were too good for the shitheads in the corner offices. He didn’t actually ask you to come along but you recall that the air had been heavy with the possibility. The irony was apparent immediately back then and it remains fixed in your mind now. You, the malcontented, were still at the firm, capably and whiningly doing whatever was asked of you. Drew, the contented, was gone five years now.

“Whaddaya want?” Drew asks, calling your attention to the gray-haired waitress standing before you. “The eggs are good.”

“I’ll have eggs and rye toast,” you say.

You are distracted by Drew’s appearance and his slurred slang and you momentarily forget that there are more ways to cook eggs than there are types of toast. They both look at you strangely. You add over medium and the placated waitress heads off towards the kitchen.

Drew looks away, maybe because he knows that you’re puzzled, maybe because he’s setting you up for the dramatic delivery. His hair has thinned from mane to mosaic, his face unshaven. His eyes have the kind of deep circles around them that only twenty more years of living or a metal press should have been able to create. No muscles ripple under his suit for he has neither muscles nor suit. He is clad in torn plaid Dockers, beaten brown leather sandals and a dirty white Izod shirt with the alligator’s head obliterated. His voice is shaky, his demeanor similar. It seems that the only thing that hasn’t changed is his height.

“Still at Buckley Warren?” he mouths, shaking his head. “You must be going on your third lifetime there now.”

“Seems like it.”

You sip at the black coffee before you. You wonder about Drew. You were expecting him to talk about high technology deals that he might be able to bring you in on. At 45, with your last kid almost through high school, with your 15-year loan on the last legs of its amortization schedule and your wife still working, you have begun fantasizing anew about leaving the third floor at 1110 Avenue of the Americas. And your fantasies have given you a renewed energy, if not the courage that still seems absent. Give me a reason, any reason, you have told yourself lately. It is your last chance at adventure or, if not adventure, good old-fashioned novelty.

The waitress has put down your plate and you are ignoring your eggs. The food is as secondary to a true power breakfast as the ballgame is when taking a client to Yankee Stadium.

“I don’t want to waste a lot of your time,” Drew says. You find yourself hoping he won’t be so quick to come to the point. “I’ve asked you here today because I’m looking for money.”

Your eyes light up, internally at least, because you are prepared for this time in your life. You have been prudent with your investments all your life. Your self-directed pension has blossomed to over 350 thousand dollars, courtesy of Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon, and a technology-laden mutual fund, and your retirement seems assured. It’s these next twenty years that are tricky. You’ve known for a long time that there would come a day you when you might no longer be able to respond judiciously to an assignment memorandum from a partner at the firm. For most of the last year you have known that day is near. That’s why you’ve kept your other monies, three hundred thousand dollars of it, as liquid as liquid gets. You’ve been waiting for the call from someone like Drew. Your money’s good and you’re ready for your first taste of real equity. The fact that Drew looks and smells like he’s spent the last two weeks in a stable with a case of whiskey is sobering but probably explainable.

“I’m not looking for big money,” he continues as the waitress slaps the check down and you swear to yourself that he appears to have pushed it under your water glass. “And you’ll be paid back two or three times over. You can count on it.”

You’ve done a lot of work on the kinds of deals Drew left to do. There were some early oil and gas and shopping center ventures but lately they’ve been all alternative energy, biotech and artificial intelligence. You’ve heard the verbal come-ons of your promoter clients and their coterie describing the 10-bagger and 20-bagger returns of their last five deals. Then you’ve drafted the lists of risk factors in the offering memoranda explaining in the first ten pages why the investments are all likely headed for the toilet. You’re not an idiot and you know your money will be at risk. But you’re willing to take that risk, for the right deal with the right partner, because you so desperately want to be a promoter, a player. You, the risk-averse permanent associate, want to step up to the plate with your three hundred thou and make it three hundred mil. Finally, at long last, you are ready to step out from behind the desk and piles of paperwork and become the client. Drew, ten years your junior, is going to take you there.

“Just what kind of deal are we talking about?” you hear yourself ask as you pick up your water glass, leaving the check exposed.

“Deal?” Drew mumbles. “The deal is this. My wife left me six months ago. Took the baby and the apartment at Park and 95th. I did get the Carrera. But I wrecked it on the BQE in a week.”

He shook his head and looked around the restaurant, then back at me intently.

“Look, I made a ton of money on wireless deals a couple of years ago and rolled it all with the rest of my partners into some Indian Internet stuff. The guy running the show was a freaking genius. I spent six months running back and forth to Mumbai every week. You know what kind of flight that is? And the food sucks, it really does, but it all would have been worth it of course. If the guy was a freaking lucky genius. But he wasn’t, and we weren’t, and the market tanked in the beginning of the year and the bank called in the line and we couldn’t do a secondary. Hell, you know the rest of the story, don’t you?”

You say nothing, just take the deepest breath you can without showing it.

“You were the best damn lawyer at the place,” he continued. “I never understood why you stayed or why the sonsofbitches never made you partner.”

He is talking so fast now that you can’t possibly interrupt. The woman with the mole slides a few feet away to a now empty seat.

“That’s it, my man, I’m nowhere. My wife left ten minutes after the money did. I can’t go back. I can’t go forward. I’ve got a wife who hates me, a kid who doesn’t know me and I need two thousand dollars by tonight or I’m going to have my legs broken. Like I said, I’ll pay you back in spades when and if I can. Am I making any sense?”

You know just what you have to do.

First, you pay for breakfast with a twenty. Second, you remove your checkbook from your breast pocket. After all the risk factors you’ve drafted for years, you know that the only true risk is doing nothing, then dying. You write Drew a check for three, not two, thousand dollars. After all, it isn’t all that much more than breakfast at the Perrine. You have a certain feeling that he’s the kind of guy who will be close shaving again soon. And when he does, you want in on it this time.

PETER BRAV is the author of the novels Zappy I'm Not, The Other Side of Losing, Sneaking In, and 331 Innings. His shorter work has appeared in Black Fork Review, Kelsey Review, Monarch Review, Echo Magazine, US1 Magazine, Mortal Mag, South Florida Poetry Journal, and other publications. He lives on a Central New Jersey farm.