It’s A Complicated World
As I’ve been sending out my magnum opus to my friends, my 444-page coffee-table book about twenty-five years of motorcycle riding, called The Ride is All, it has given me cause to reconnect with a few friends who had fallen by the wayside. I am rewatching (for the umpteenth time) one of my favorite recent vintage movies, Green Book with Vigo Mortensen. As Tony Lip (Vigo) is driving Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) around the south for his performances, he has to bail Shirley out of a jam at a YMCA where he had engaged in a tryst with another local young gay man. This was 1962 in somewhere like Tupelo, Mississippi. When Shirley apologizes to Tony for putting him in that position, Tony tells him there’s no need to apologize and that he understands. There is a wonderful moment when Tony simply says to Shirley, “It’s a complicated world.” It is one of the great moments of acceptance and raw humanity in any movie I have ever watched.
As anyone who knows me is aware, I spent the formative years of my career working for Bankers Trust Company, a bank that ceased to exist in 1999 after ninety-three years. I was a member of the Management Committee of the bank in 1998 when we were offered $93/share by Deutsche Bank, and we made a graceful and profitable exit by selling ourselves to them, closing the deal in mid-1999. People are always referring to me as a Deutsche Bank or a Bear Stearns guy because I spent two and four years at each respectively as CEO of the Asset Management businesses. I always correct them and tell them I was and am a Bankers Trust guy. I spent twenty-three years there and the people I grew up with from Bankers Trust are the people with whom I feel the strongest bond. One of those people is a guy named Lee Barba. Unlike me, who grew up at BTCo. from a pup, Lee had joined from E.F. Hutton and Kidder and was brought in mid-career as a specialist in the structuring and distribution of complicated credit products, which were starting to become all the rage in the late 1980’s as derivatives and other even more complicated instruments came into vogue.
Lee was a senior professional in an area of growing importance to the business and we intersected in many ways in those good old days. We were both partners of the bank and we both did well when the bank was sold to Deutsche Bank. I just read (or actually listened to the audiobook of) Dark Towers, the story of Deutsche bank. In it, the first half focuses on a guy named Edson Mitchell, who was an ex-Merrill Lynch guy who ran the trading businesses for Deutsche when we were acquired by them (some would say it was a merger, but when someone gives you cash for your interest, its an acquisition, pure and simple). I always thought of Lee Barba and Edson Mitchell as similar guys because they were both fair-haired New Englanders who worked the trading floor with great effect.
What made me connect more with Lee than with other partners at Bankers Trust was that he rode motorcycles. Of the 60-70 partners that were still at the bank in 1999, there were only a few of us who rode motorcycles. I suspect that the normal risk-aversion of banking precluded many from the sport and the partners tended towards more golf and tennis pastimes. But Lee and I rode motorcycles, so we agreed we had to ride together when we could. Lee went off into various entrepreneurial pursuits and I went my way. Motorcycling can be a very solitary endeavor or it can be done en-masse with a group. I formed a group and Lee went solo. But after about a decade moving in our respective circles after Bankers Trust, we reconnected in 2009 and Lee decided to join my then fifteen-year-old motorcycle group. He was urged in by our mutual friend Andy, who was also a BTCo. partner who had reacquired an interest in motorcycling after the bank days.
Lee joined us for five rides over as many years, always being more of a loner than an active joiner in the group. He would often ride in across the country, traveling further and more alone than any of us were inclined to do. He chose to ride with us on one of our international trips, this one called the Dalmatian Coast Ride in September, 2013. That ride started in Venice, went up into the Dolomites and over to Slovenia before dropping down along the coast of Croatia, down to Dubrovnik. We then went into Montenegro, up through Bosnia/Herzegovina, and ended back in Croatia in the capital city of Zagreb. It was an interesting and complicated trip traveling through five countries that constituted the former Yugoslavia and were now just a group of Balkan countries that were post-hostilities and not at war, but not quite Europeanized just yet.
This little Dalmatian Cost Ride caused our small group to get inflicted by the Balkanization bug, and not in a particularly good way. While the weather started and ended in fine form, in the middle as we edged our way down the fractured coast of Croatia from Opatija, to Krk, to Zadar and Split before getting to the Dalmatian mother-ship of Dubrovnik, it poured rain the whole way. Weather does funny things to people on a motorcycle trip. It brings out the worst. As people split up into riding pods, the irregular coastline and islands made for disjointed daytime traveling with people getting ahead or behind, making and missing ferries as we went. The normal stresses of group riding got more frayed than normal. At one point we lost Lee on account of a misunderstanding. He and I had ridden a rainy day together and then we miscommunicated about the next day and left him to ride alone, which he had said was his preference. When we saw him at the Montenegro border, he rode past us in a bit of a huff and it was the last we saw him for some time on that ride. He was with us, but not, as we managed our way back to Zagreb through the rugged hills of Bosnia. It was in Zagreb that we lost Andy.
Andy suffered a mild stroke on our last morning before departure. He had lost his ability to communicate. Talk about a complication. You haven’t lived until you’ve navigated your way through the Croatian medical system with a patient who is unable to speak or write or communicate in any way. Thoughts of Lee’s riding protocol concerns got left by the roadside as I settled out Andy’s more pressing needs and the needs of the three people waiting for me to drive them to Lake Como for our next sojourn.
When I finished The Ride is All I wondered if I should bother Lee with a copy since I hadn’t heard from him in the seven years since Zagreb. I haven’t seen Andy either, but Andy had a fair excuse in his recovery and we have touched base. But Lee, I sensed, was angry with me, perhaps not actively, but enough not to rejoin the group for any rides. I included him in the mailing out of abundance of enthusiasm for my work and our long history.
Lee responded and told me of a difficult bicycle accident he had suffered last year that had him medivaced back to New York for difficult and emergency hip reconstruction surgery. He went on to say that he had an almost new BMW R1250 GS Adventure motorcycle that he needed to sell to satisfy his wife and daughter who were afraid for his well-being. It so happened that I was in the market for a new bike and the GS Adventure was one of the finalists in my thinking. We made a deal via email. I helped him solve a complicated problem with his family and he helped me solve a need that a bike in the dealership shop and an anticipated Lemon Law filing created for me. All’s well that ends well, even in a complicated world.