The Boy on the Bookshelf
There was a time when my life was all about collecting tombstones. My Wall Street friends know what I mean, but for the rest of you that think I have some morbid adolescent taste for collecting grave markers, tombstones are those little Lucite mementos that are given out by investment bankers to memorialize a deal. When you realize that investment bankers don’t create anything tangible, you can better understand their need to create something they can put on their credenza or bookshelf that symbolizes what they do make, which is money from deals arranged.
I still have a few of those, but only the very most meaningful ones, at home or at my house upstate. The rest, literally hundreds, went into a dumpster upstate several years ago. I decided that I no longer defined myself by how many deals I had done or touched. You see. These tombstones get handed out as campaign trophies to those too junior to have their own deals and to those too senior to have the time to do their own deals any more. So you could have tombstones that you can barely remember. The more unique they are in shape or by nature of the embedments in them probably determine how long you keep them. If one of these symbolizes the deal that made you a Senior Vice President or put your bank account over the top of the “fuck you” level everyone aspires to attain, you might keep that one longer. Like I said, I’m down to just a few now.
So what do I keep on my office bookshelf now? The days of three-ring binders has long passed. Now it’s a bit of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not collection of oddities that give people reasons to ask questions. Top of my list are things having to do with large observation wheels, a passion I pursued for six years trying to build the largest one on New York Harbor. There are three metal model wheels, one Coney Island Wonder Wheel ticket and one pop-up cardboard card wheel. Three are a few books on Ferris Wheels (decidedly NOT the same as an observation wheel, but that’s a battle long since lost and forgotten).
People are always giving me things that they think I will like. The most common has to do with motorcycles, my lifelong passion. I have some great books on motorcycles and a few miniature bikes of all shapes and sizes. My wife collects mermaids and once the word is out, every holiday brings more mermaids to the collection. I remember when we started a company with the word bee in it, we collected an entire wall of bee memorabilia. It is shocking the amount of junk in the world that someone bothers to manufacture for motorcycle, mermaid or bee enthusiasts.
Then there are the plaques or tombstones given to me for some speech or presentation I made. I have an honorary membership to the Rotary Club. That is memorable for the Pledge of Allegiance I had to recite and the testimonials that they give each and every week. There’s a Staten Island Chamber of Commerce plaque and some crystal award that implies that the Wheel was the greatest thing to ever happen to Staten Island (Whoops!). I even have two pairs of cufflinks from my time on the wheel project. One is in the wheel logo…only green for some reason. The other is a set of cufflinks shaped like LED lightbulbs, which I can only assume came from Philips when they were selling us $5 million of lighting for the wheel.
I also have a bunch of stuff from the charities I have worked over the years. They would be Cornell (you name it, I have it when it comes to Cornell chotkas), CARE mementos and College of Staten Island dolphins (don’t ask me to explain the symbolism in dolphins in the cold waters surrounding Staten Island….an oyster might have been more appropriate).
I have one section dedicated to things given to me by business partners or clients. My personal favorite is the twenty-pound silver ram under a Lucite cover given to me by the General that runs all the infrastructure projects in Pakistan. Pakistan is a #3-rated country according to the US State Department and this ram signifies us risking life and limb to go to Islamabad. I keep it to remind me that a promise is sometimes not really a promise if it comes from an authoritarian regime. In case I want to reconsider, I also have a gold-plated 50-year symbol in a red velvet box from the same general that suggests that his promise to us is good for 50 years. We have 49 years I guess for him to still make good on it.
Then, of course, there is a serious shelf with my authored books on it. One is an academic book on the Global Pension Crisis. One is a piece of fiction called Gulag 401(k). One is a biography called Mater Gladiatrix and the last one is a pet book called Eat Play Poop. It’s much too long a story to explain all these great works, but suffice it to say that lightning has still not struck my literary talents.
And the last bit of bookshelf detritus relates to my current project. I am running a scientific R&D company, a topic I generally know nothing about. That has never stopped me before, so it isn’t stopping me now. Instead, I have gotten a set of Periodic Table of the Elements wooden blocks. I have arranged them on the shelf so that they spell out the major electrochemical reactions we are working on and trying to achieve. There is Nickel, Cesium, and Zinc and so on and so on. I actually use them once in a while to have our scientists explain what in hell is going on. If I get bored with that I have two superballs fashioned in the shape of multi-colored molecules. That can keep me entertained for hours. But just in case, I have a set of five metal spinning tops that are finely machined from Brass, Copper, Titanium, Magnesium and Damascus steel. They have their respective components (in the case of the brass and steel) and their atomic weights (ranging from Carbon at 12.011 to Lead at 207.2) and I can twirl them around all day if I choose.
I do some work in my office, but mostly I ask myself the question that Robert Redford mentions in The Old Man & the Gun, when he says “I ask myself what that twelve year old boy would think of me” and that usually give me my best answers.