The Lone Ranger Gets a Black Eye
Dave had been a child of the Wonder Years, but he suffered from cartoon-interruptus, which is to say that his mother had dragged him overseas to a remote tropical valley in Costa Rica just as he was getting a taste for Saturday morning TV.
For our younger readers, let me set this stage a bit more clearly. The year was 1959 and Dave was five years old. In 1959 Upstate New York, television was watched on a big mahogany RCA model 6T/76 set with a small (by today’s standards) 16” diagonal screen with a fairly high curvature rate that distorted images on all four boundaries. While there was an aerial on the roof, there was also a rabbit ears set-top antenna that gave the set the fine-tuning to keep the image from flipping vertically or going diagonally askew. Visual static snow was a fact of life and there were only two stations within reception range. Given that there were three major TV networks, this was a livable inconvenience, but it kind of stunk since some shows were simply not on the menu.
Dave suffered from an as-yet undiagnosed astigmatism that induced him to place his chair within three feet of the television. He had lived for his first four years in Venezuela while his mother worked on development programs for the poor indigenous tribes there. He had come back to the U.S. just at the age where TV was sure to ensnare his youthful interest. But no sooner had he gotten a taste than he was relocated to that damp and distant spot just north of the Panama Canal Zone. Fun in that tropical valley lent itself more towards lassoing small banana trees and planting bean sprouts which would grow veritably before one’s eyes in this warm, moist part of the world. So, no TV and long before any sort of VCR’s. Thus, when Dave came home to his grandfather’s stuffy, dusty old house for a visit, the RCA 6T/76 sprung into active use.
While Saturday mornings were a bonanza (as opposed to that new prime time show Bonanza), the staple of Dave’s day quickly became the grainy black and white reruns of The Adventures of Superman and The Lone Ranger. Superman was OK, but boys in 1959 (particularly ones prone to lassoing banana trees) were all about cowboys and Indians. The Lone Ranger had both and they were very special.
Now you may have figured out that Dave was being raised by a single mother. While she was pretty manly for a post-war mother (driving jeeps in the tropics is the imagery here), the absence of pure male influence made Dave gravitate toward whatever male figures he could find. The Lone Ranger was a good one. The man’s motives were pure and his methods were fair but tough. It was actually a great role model for a young fatherless boy. And not to slight Tonto, his loyal, strong, silent modus operandi was a decent reinforcement of some other valuable life lessons.
Now fast forward to 1973. The protest-prone 60’s were past and Disco had not really begun. Dave was in college (again in Upstate New York, strangely enough) and spending his free time watching reruns of Star Trek and real-time episodes of All in the Family. There were plenty of life lessons in both, but the Lone Ranger and his pure goodness were long gone.
Dave hung out at his fraternity, stumbling his way through college, drifting from engineering to economics, not quite sure where it was all going. His college experience was somewhat classic in that it was his age of discovery. Some had come to college knowing they were pre-Med, others pre-Law and still others (only a few) with subscriptions to Business Week. Most of his friends were into music and light drugs, but neither held much appeal to Dave for some unknown reason. Even alcohol, that ubiquitous college beverage of choice did not float Dave’s boat. Maybe it was his high school years spent living in Europe, where wine and beer were available at all ages and in any quantity.
Then one day, while playing pinball in the student union, Dave heard a song come on the jukebox. It was Jim Croce’s Don’t Mess around with Jim. Most kids just thumped to the beat of the day’s music, but Dave was always drawn to listen to the lyrics. The song was about a bad-ass dude from 42nd Street (the baddest part of town in NYC). Now Leroy stands about 6’4”, which was more or less Dave’s height, but Jim Walker was just BIG, and then again, so was Dave. The warning was all too poignant.
“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger. And you don’t mess around with Jim.” There was Dave’s entire youth, laid out for all the music-loving world to hear about.
The song is actually about how some guy from Alabama named Slim takes down big Jim, so the message is quite clear. You ain’t ever as big and bad as you think, so you best show a little humility or end up with a face like a jigsaw puzzle. I may have mixed and messed with Jim Croce’s songs, but they’re really all about the same thing. It was a sign to Dave that he had not lost the Lone Ranger at all and whether you were big Jim or bad Slim, there are certain things you just don’t do. First among them was tugging on Superman’s cape, but right behind it was pulling the mask off the old Lone Ranger.
Think about that for a moment. Is goodness and fairness so delicate and anonymous that it must be masked? I guess so, and in a few decades Dave would come to understand why.
As a storyteller I do not like time-shifting. But when I do need to do it, I like the image of pages on the calendar flying off, taking us forward to 2019. Dave is now just another aging Baby Boomer. As an MBA (who knows why that happened, it just did), he spent forty years on Wall Street and did pretty well. He rose high enough to distinguish himself several times over, but never approached super-stardom the way some financiers do. He was probably miscast as a banker, but it all worked out. Someone once introduced him as “a wood sprite in the body of a banker.” He liked that. He used to say he was a actor because he had acted like a banker for so long.
But now Dave is faced with a deep existential crisis. Since leaving his mother ship in 2000 (the bank where he had worked for twenty four years) he had stumbled into several other spots and each time come away with an interesting, but questionable story. The thing was that every situation had something funky about it. Sometimes he was aware of the funkiness and proceeded with caution and sometimes it just turned funky. Let me explain.
His first gig was a venture capital company that he and several colleagues co-founded. There was nothing funky going in or coming out. But in between there was a rough patch where that market skid to the ground and things looked pretty desperate. It all ended up well, but it had its moments. The partners, though not always getting along perfectly, remained friends and collectively prospered for themselves and their investors. There was nothing wrong with that situation.
Then Dave joined a big, rough-and-tumble investment bank in a senior position. The place was known to be a den of vipers, but Dave’s position was more or less walled off from the fray and he had the autonomy to handle things as he saw fit. That was important because on Wall Street the line is not only very narrow and fuzzy, but it actually moves around enough that you can find yourself over the line before you know it. Over the line was not a place that the Lone Ranger would be proud of and Dave knew better than to tread on those grounds. All was well for four years and then the Tsunami of the financial crisis came along. Nothing that Dave or his unit did was wrong or in violation of any rules, but the Tsunami hit with full force on his little bungalow. In fact, Dave often said he owned the first bungalow on the beach to get hit by that Tsunami. His bungalow, built with care, love and attention was flattened in the span of two months.
Dave knew how the game was played and he exited stage left on cue, not feeling that he was guilty of an act of commission, but rather that he had suffered an act of omission in failing to prevent the Tsunami. There were the six months of watching the financial news pundits suggesting that indictments were in the offing. And then there were the meetings with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Remember, even the Lone Ranger occasionally got pulled in by the local sheriff and questioned. In the end, Dave was released and able to ride into the sunset head held high…or at least not in a noose…but perhaps a Hang ‘Em High rope burn.
The next adventure was a strange one indeed. In the aftermath of the crisis, there was a need to work out troubled assets. Dave was not a workout specialist, but was, nonetheless, based on seniority, thought to have the ability to solve distressing problems. The company was public, but the majority owner was a high profile foreign ruffian billionaire that had made his money in the dark corners of the globe and been put on the cover of Forbes along the way. Dave was installed in a fancy office in Times Square (isn’t that where Big Jim hung out?) and he set to work. Strangely enough, when the distress is deep enough, all things are possible. Dave did the impossible and solved the company’s problems in a scant two years.
Dave knew it was time to leave when the billionaire (let’s just call him Slim to keep this story consistent) started showing up and claiming that what had been accomplished was no big deal. Dave exited, but this time with a poke in the eye and dueling compensation lawsuits that finally ended in settlement two years hence. The funky part came soon thereafter when Slim got put on the government’s “no-fly” list as a bad guy and Dave started getting calls about some of Slim’s Asian and African partners that had been involved in considering (not doing, just considering) the restructurings. To this day, Dave gets calls from intelligence spooks and investigative journalist sorts about those shady characters. The Lone Ranger got a little schmutz on his white shirt it seems. Nothing a Tide stick couldn’t handle.
Funny thing though, several of the properties that Dave restructured eventually got sold to the son-in-law of a powerful but smarmy future political figure, who shall go unnamed (did I stump you with that one?). And then it came out that Slim was somehow connected with Mr. Smarmy as well. How does that happen? Well, Dave had indeed been in to see Mr. Smarmy at his fancy-pants office in midtown, but there had not been any basis for a deal of any sort, so he assumed that was that. That is never that, it seems.
So now Dave is off and keeping himself busy (i.e. not retiring) by running a start-up company in the global chemical sector. Nothing could be further afield from what Dave has done in the past. But here’s the thing. Like toilet paper on his shoe going up a gangway, some of the affiliated smarmies has trailed him into this situation. There is a famous autocrat who talks to his company founder about investing in his country. There is a disgraced and felonious ex-military/political guy who has spooks all around him who wanders into the office trying to help said autocrat get his deal. And then there is the company’s advisory board that has on its list the one member of a disgraced and indicted trio of partners from Washington D.C. that is not yet on the hot seat. What are the odds that there is no gum on his shoes?
Dave is truly the Lone Ranger. He wanders from job to job just like Clayton Moore did in the unfenced open range. His heart has always been pure and his motives just and fair. He does his work and he goes on his way, not looking for thanks or reward (my guess is that the Lone Ranger was independently wealthy). But here’s the thing, why did the Lone Ranger need the mask? Did he have a past to shield? Did he have a family to protect? I prefer to think that, just like Dave, in his wanderings around the wilderness that is Wall Street, he couldn’t help but run into bad guys that spent their time figuring out how to poke him in the eye. I tend to think that the old Lone Ranger don’t want you pulling off his mask because he constantly gets black eyes from all the poking he has to suffer.
So the next time you see Dave out there on the street, trudging into his next job, remember not to pull on his cape or pull his mask off. The Lone Ranger is a more sympathetic character if you think of him as unblemished and pure in all ways.
By: Richard A. Marin
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