Future Martin Money

Martin Money never wanted a repulsive void. As a youth he was
abandoned to an arbitrage fund.

**********

Phoulish Money saw everything he was and could have been in his son
Martin; and better! He detected none of the semi-paranoid and
destructive neurosis in the smaller Money that often drove himself to
near despair. He had leveraged himself into a position of ruin from
which he could not emerge. His IPO had never taken off. He had
violated what was left of the S.E.C.’s regulations for an on the shelf-
registration. Priding himself on having done all the work himself
without benefit of legal or accounting guidance, he was still unable to
sell the shares of his virtual, do-it-yourself, soft-core pornography
software. It had all the earmarks of great success, he had thought --
except the funding. And of course the programming... The
programmers in India had been hard to reach. They rarely returned his
calls and either laughed at his exhortations or asked for more money.
Money was the one thing Money had little of. All there really was to
his latest scheme were some sophomoric pictures of naked ladies that
looked like they were drawn in a high school lunch room.

And his wife Ophelia, Martin’s mother, had found out about this. He
had violated the terms of their reconciliation: He had skipped
meetings of Entrepreneurs Anonymous; left his job at Home Depot
and was back to his old tricks ... and drawing dirty pictures while
hiding in the bathroom too!

Ophelia had come from the old Burgher family and had connections at
various levels of local government. The coming, irrevocable split would
take Martin away from him for good. The lad’s hopeful joy and
everything-is-still-possible philosophy was the only inspiration left,
and far less nasty than the cheap supermarket gin that was its
replacement.

P. Money, if not already crazy, was cyclothemic. While others were
driven 17 hours a day to DO something, he seemed to spend much of
his time wasting it, harboring precious energy and scarce motivation.
It was the lifestyle of an invalid. When struck by a better mood, he
surveyed his meager prospects, compared them with his bettors and
embarked on plans and schemes meant to change reality. When the
schemes invariably collapsed he would declare to Martin, who did not
yet understand these things: “I am not merely a failure; I am a wizard
at failure.”