Black Fridays Read Online Free PDF Page A

and still palatial. I was used to sharing an eight-by-twelve space with bars in place of a fourth wall and nothing beyond a toothbrush to call my own. This space—where I could walk more than five paces in any direction without running into a wall—was all mine.
    The three tall living room windows looked down on Broadway. New York—or my little slice of it, at least—was laid out below me. Not at some distance where all the human beings on the street were reduced to ants, but immediate, as though I could become just another man on the street, going about his business, never having been to prison. Never having had my fifteen minutes of infamy.
    I turned back to the room and began an inventory.
    The furnishings were all mine, but nothing felt right. It was like walking through a diorama of someplace I had once lived.
    Dust covered everything. I would need to have the place cleaned. Then I realized I couldn’t afford to think that way anymore. I would need to buy a vacuum. A broom. A mop. I had no idea where to shop for those things, but that’s one of the things I love about New York. You can always find anything you might ever want at any time of day. And have it delivered.
    Three large cardboard boxes blocked the entrance to the bedroom. I opened the first, and recognized the faint scent of Bolt of Lightning. Angie. The box held linens, blankets, pillows, all still wrapped in Bloomingdale’s bags. The sheets were Ralph Lauren—600-thread count—and all in various shades of lavender. Angie was incapable of giving a present that wasn’t something she would rather have bought for herself. I would have bet she got herself a set as well.
    The second box was full of clothes—suits, shirts, socks, etc.—all custom-fitted for a different man. A man two years younger. A man with the concave shoulders and nascent paunch of a desk-bound Wall Street executive. I doubted that I would ever fit that model again.
    The last box touched me. It was my music. Hundreds of CDs—jazz, rock, funk, fusion, and a smattering of classical all mixed together in a plastic soup. It would take hours—days—to sort through and arrange my collection, but the fact that Angie had even thought to save it all for me was enough to generate a single shaft of hope.
    She’d called four days after the party at the Met.
    “Hey,
cher.
Are you busy?”
    It was the middle of the trading day.
    “Not at all,” I said, all thoughts of the euro’s two-cent plummet driven immediately from my mind. “Where are you? I thought you were working this week.”
    She had flown to the British Virgin Islands on Sunday.
    “We’re done. Paolo finished shooting this morning. Everyone is going home.”
    “That’s great. Can I pick you up at the airport?”
    “Well,” she said, with a sly smile in her voice, “I have this huge room with a private pool outside where I can lie out all day with nothing on but my sunglasses.”
    “I see.” Crashing disappointment met full-color mental images of her basking while she was talking to me. At that moment I wouldn’t have known a British pound from a Thai baht.
    “And it’s all paid for through Friday and I was thinking it would be a shame to just up and
leave
!”
    The magazine had booked Richard Branson’s Necker Island resort for five days for the shoot. The annual swimsuit issue.
    “Everyone else is leaving?”
    “Almost. I’ll be all alone on this whole island with no one to rub lotion on my back. There’s this one little spot I just can’t reach.”
    I was on a flight three hours later.
    The dust and the memories were starting to get to me. It was hard to breathe. I needed to get out. I went for a beer.
    I grew up living over a neighborhood bar. My father owned what he affectionately referred to as a “gin joint” in College Point. It was the kind of place that can be a gold mine or an albatross, depending on how much time and energy the boss puts into keeping an eye on things. We had a six-room railroad