Time to Do What?
Time. It flies by and it stands still. It is most precious and yet we all waste it. Sometimes wasted time is the best time. Yet there is never enough of it.
Barry was the Marlboro Man. In 1975 he had the best look a guy could have. Imagine a young Tom Selleck. Big manly mustache. Longish floppy hair and a quick and broad smile. Tall, lean, but well-muscled. And to make it all complete, he had a killer nickname from somewhere. He was Bronco. Wow. I wanted to be Barry.
He went down into the annals of our business school class thanks to Bob. Bob had the nickname GB, which stood for Gross Bob. GB was ten years older than most of us thanks to a long stint in the Navy as an enlisted man. That was OK with all of us who had avoided the draft for one reason or another. Swabbies may not have been high on the pecking order, but he had served and probably not killed too many babies. If you knew GB you knew he hadn’t killed any babies at all. He had probably killed a few bottles of booze. He had probably slayed a few damsels in distress. He undoubtedly had been the bane of more than a few commanding officers. But he was always the first to laugh and last to fall asleep.
During an advanced finance class, Barry was sitting next to GB while Professor Jerry Hass was lecturing on the topic of financial leverage. He was using a case involving Gould Pumps, a well-known local company. As was Jerry’s habit, he had gone off on a tangent focused on his own Gould pump on his farm in the adjacent town of Lansing. GB raised his hand with a question. When called on, GB said, “who gives a damn, Jerry?” Now Jerry was a pretty relaxed guy as professors went, but there were certain things you didn’t mess with and one of them was Jerry’s farm or anything on it. Jerry narrowed his glare at GB as the scattered laughter subsided. As it started looking serious, Bronco took the opportunity to slide over to a seat further away from GB. This broke the silence as the group returned to laughing. While GB did what he always did in getting himself out of another jam, it took a prolonged, loud and private discussion with Jerry in the elevator lobby. Jerry had been threatening to leave class, but GB got him back and Bronco slid back over to the seat next to him. That was the move that got everyone including Jerry laughing and shaking his head at the phenomenon that was GB.
Barry went to Wall Street like many of us had. He became a specialist in the very serious and very rough-and-tumble world of restructuring. That meant that Barry worked the dark side of finance, and he has done it for some of the nastiest places on the Street including Bear Stearns and Drexel Burnham Lambert. It was not a high-flying or fun area of finance, but it sure did garner respect. And Barry rose to the top of the heap with integrity. You see, while I had met Barry in business school, where he concentrated on finance, he was a religion major as an undergraduate. I’m not sure what his aspirations were with that major, but I’m sure it was a far stretch away from the bankruptcy courts that he frequented in his career.
Barry did things his own way. He rose steadily in his chosen field with one big hiccup in 1990. That was when Drexel went sneakers up. As a Managing Director of the firm, he was considered a principal, so when the United States Attorney’s office decided to toss the firm on the trash heap for its perceived illegal activities, Barry became one of the recipients of a very nasty notice. He was at his modest Poconos ski house with his wife and five boys waiting for a pizza delivery. When the knock at the door came he was ready with the money for the pizza guy. Instead of pizza, he was handed a subpoena to appear at the U.S. Attorney’s office of the infamous Southern District of New York. The notice explained that under the RICO statutes, the government could seize all assets of both the firm and its principals…..and that included Barry. Nothing like setting your net worth meter back to zero at age thirty-eight to get your attention.
Over the years, Barry had stayed involved with our business school alma mater. He was more peripherally involved than not, but as he hit his sixties and had sufficiently rebuilt his net worth enough to put his kids through college, so he chose to get more engaged. Barry believed in giving back and he did just that. Whether it was his humble manner of the natural student fascination with the walking dead (bankrupt companies), students loved it when Barry lectured on topics like the Six-Flags Amusement Park restructuring. He had lots of great case studies. In the last decade, no story was more popular than the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, a process Barry had had the honor to supervise from his seat as a Vice Chairman of Investment Banking at the vaunted Lazard, Frêres.
At age 65 in 2016, Barry decided to retire. He agreed to stay on as a Senior Advisor to Lazard, which was more for the firm’s relationship benefit than for any need of Barry’s. Barry was ready for retirement. He actually had a plan. It involved building their dream retirement home in Tuckerstown, Bermuda. Barry dreamed of spending his time on things other than financial restructuring. He wanted to catch up on years of overlooked reading. He might even want to write that spy novel he had thought up twenty years ago. He certainly wanted to sleep in and have breakfast with his wife. He wanted to take an afternoon nap if he wanted to. That was his plan and he now he had the time to enact it.
Two weeks after his retirement party, Barry woke up with a sore throat. He thought nothing of it, but after three days of it, his wife insisted that he see his doctor. He did so laughingly, but he didn’t laugh when the doctor told him what he had found. It was a large lump next to his larynx on the right side. The doctor had arranged for Barry to go right away to Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital to see the leading throat oncologist there. All the tests were done and results delivered, as they say, stat. The results were not good. Barry had stage-four Laryngeal Cancer and it’s involvement in Barry’s larynx was simply too complex (involving breathing, swallowing and his vocal chords) to allow for surgical removal. Laryngeal Cancer Had a survival rate of 77%, but that fell to 25% for stage four. Those were not odds Barry liked. All that was left was radiation therapy and chemotherapy, and that would take a course of sixty days.
Barry took an apartment near MSK for a few months since he needed to be there every day. He wanted to make this as easy for he and his family as he could. That was Barry’s skill; making a bad thing as good as possible.
Barry was back to having too much time on his hands. He couldn’t concentrate on reading or watching movies. He couldn’t sleep well so he got up early. About all he could do when not under the fluorescent lights in the hospital, was take 20-minute naps. It was not the way he wanted to be spending his time. It’s not the way anyone wanted to spend time.
Time was flying and standing still at the same time. Barry wanted the ability to determine when he wanted to hold time preciously or just waste it. The one thing Barry was now more certain than ever about was there was simply not enough time.