Employee Number One

My parents were very disappointed with me when I turned down the college coaches offering me full-ride football scholarships. I was a 6’2″, 220 lbs. wall of muscle, making me a pretty good linebacker; many major universities wanted me to play for them.

I had better ideas on what to do with my life besides allowing my body to be beaten up for the cost of public tuition. It was 2002, and people were starting to wake up to how powerful the internet is for the average business, and I knew easy ways to make a lot of cash.

At eighteen, I graduated high school a semester early and moved from my hometown of Orlando, Florida, out west to San Francisco with my nerdy best friend, Josh.

We were ready to live the all-American dream out in California, but as it turned out easy, money wasn’t easy to come by. We worked 100-hour weeks regularly, often without pay, while sharing a studio apartment for the first three years we lived in San Francisco.

Our internet-based businesses always succeeded just enough to make us think we were about to break out big; then, something would happen to put us out of business. Every time a company failed, it would send Josh and me back to the restaurants and clubs to work as bartenders at night while we worked during the day to build the next venture.

At twenty-one, we finally had a business going smoothly enough that we felt comfortable renting a 2-bedroom apartment. Two years later, at the age of twenty-three, we sold that business with an after-tax net of $37 million each. It took five years of complete focus, but we had finally achieved the dream we had left home for.

In all five years, the only fun Josh and I allowed ourselves was the occasional fling with one waitress or another from work, just to relieve our sexual needs long enough to focus on work again. So because we were workaholics, we didn’t know how to celebrate our newfound wealth. We ended up hiring a party planner who flew us to Vegas for a week.

Somehow Josh and I managed to blow $450,000 in just seven days. Not much was spent on gambling or drinking, but a ton of money was spent on strippers and escorts who insisted on emptying our balls at the first sign of arousal. Also, I may or may not have “on purpose” blown up a $100,000 SUV while on a demolition range. The supervisors were pretty pissed at me for that one.

After Vegas, we did what every Silicon Valley millionaire does. We flew out to Southeast Asia to go backpacking. For two months, we enjoyed the change of scenery and the local women, but mostly we talked about what we would do next in business.

Josh had decided to start a new research and development company, which would keep him in San Francisco.

I chose to move back to Orlando; I knew about the mortgage crisis that was about to sweep the nation. My mom worked as a real estate broker, while my dad had a mortgage company. With the help of my parents, I had always been in the loop on national real estate trends.

Coming back from Asia, I bought a commercial building in Orlando with several restaurants on the first floor and multiple business offices on the second floor. I took the corner office space on the second floor as the future headquarters of the new real estate investment company I would build.

I renovated the office space with new carpet, paint, furniture for future employees, classy artwork, and a 99% reflective tint on the new soundproofed exterior windows. A sign was put up outside saying “Crigler Realty” Finally, I ordered new business computers and stored them in the supply closet. After working on the office space for a month, I turned off the lights and locked the door. I was going on another vacation. I decided I would return to Orlando when the crash was underway. I only had to wait seven more months.

***

After leaving Orlando again, I wanted to make up for the lost time in my dating life, so I spent the next seven months learning how to be a pickup artist. I paid for rather expensive coaches. Guys who had turned picking up women into a full-time job.

I was somewhere in Italy at the time, in bed with another girl whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn when the call came. In the darkness of the hotel room, I was woken up by my phone buzzing. Giving my eyes a moment to adjust to the screen light of my iPhone, I read that it was my dad calling.

Answering the phone, Dad’s voice came across the line. “Hey, buddy, how are you?”

Trying to clear the fog out of my throat, I said in a tired voice, “A bit sleepy, Dad; it’s 4:00a.m. over here.”

“Oh, sorry to wake you up, Carson. I can call back another time.”

“No, no, it’s ok. I’m up now.” I said, sliding out of bed and putting on my robe.

“Ok, umm, hey, I’m kind of embarrassed to ask this, but I really need your help.”

“Sure, anything you need.”

“Ok, umm, wow, this is much harder to say than I thought it would be.” Dad had a lot of emotion in his voice, which wasn’t unusual for him. Dad is not a stoic. “You see, business for your mom & me has pretty much stopped dead. We haven’t closed anything in almost three months now.”

“Oh, that sucks; I saw on the news the real estate market was getting a little soft.”

“Ya, it’s worse than that; it’s completely dead over here. We haven’t closed any business, and I don’t want to take any money out of our mutual funds while they are down by almost half.”

“I can understand that. What about your rental houses?”

“That’s what is killing us. Our tenants have stopped paying, all eight of them. We are now on the hook for nine mortgages, including our house, and we can’t sell them because they are all underwater on the loans.”

This is precisely what I had been waiting for, but I didn’t think it would hit Mom and Dad as hard as it had.

“Ok, Dad, here is my idea. I will wire you and Mom $20,000, then when I get back to Orlando, we will work out a price for me to take the rentals off your hands.”

“Thank you, son; I appreciate that so much.”

“No problem, Dad; money is useless if you can’t help the people you love with it.”

“That’s true, but I still wish I could have seen you play for Florida State.” He said, his usual comment to me when a conversation was over.

“Love you too, Dad. I’ll see you soon.”

After hanging up the phone, I started packing up my hotel room, waking my nighttime guest. She initiated another round of sex before I sent her out the door. I finished packing and booked a first-class flight back to the States, where I landed at Orlando International Airport roughly 25 hours after talking to Dad.

After retrieving my bags, I found the driver waiting outside luggage pick up. He wasn’t there to drive me; he was there to drop off the keys to my car I had placed in storage when I left Orlando. He took my bags and guided me to the pickup line where another driver stood next to my red with black stripping 2007 Ferrari F430 Scuderia. Securing my bags in the back, I took the keys and tipped the two men $100 each.

Sitting in the car, I took the time to appreciate the feel of the seat wrapping around my body, the sensation that I was part of the car with how the wheel felt in my hands, and the low roar as I started the engine. I pressed on the gas a little harder than I should have as I sped off toward my parents’ house.

I pulled into the manicured HOA-managed suburban neighborhood my parents had moved into shortly after I graduated high school. I parked my Ferrari in the middle of the half-circle driveway out front.

I rang the doorbell, which triggered the predictable barks of my parent’s tan Labrador Retriever Max. I always enjoyed his stupid look when he pressed his face against the windows to see who the intruder was.

Max was still barking at me when the door swung open, my mom Sasha standing in the gap.

Mom looked confused for a moment, then yelled, “Carson!” as she leaped from the door and into my arms for a big hug. I loved hugging my mom’s tight body; she had given birth to me and my younger sister, April, while she was young, but she always stayed in great shape. Before Mom got into real estate, she was certified as an instructor for Yoga and CrossFit. She was forty years old but could easily pass for twenty-five. If I had to compare her to someone, I’d say back then, she looked like Autumn Calabrese did at the same age of 40, but with a younger face.

Behind Mom was my Aunt Victoria. Her face lit up when she saw her ‘favorite nephew’ She pushed my mom out of the way and gave me her own big hug, hands venturing low on my body as she quickly gave my ass a squeeze just out of mom’s sight.

Aunt Vicky had always been more handsy with me than was appropriate between an aunt and nephew, but I always enjoyed the attention because she was a total bombshell. She is mom’s younger sister and had also married young, just like mom, but still managed to spend time as a professional cheerleader with the Miami Dolphins while being a stay-at-home mom to my three cousins, Heather, Lily, and Sara. My thirty-eight-year-old Aunt Vicky looked like Zuzka Light at the same age.

I let my aunt hug me for a while until Mom started clearing her throat. It was a clear and well-established warning to her sister that she needed to stop touching her son.

“You give the best hugs; that’s why you’re my favorite nephew.” My aunt said, breaking our hug but still resting her hand on the front of my shirt, just over my abs.

I moved so that I had an arm over both women, holding them in a side hug. “You know I aim to please. It’s a pleasant surprise to see you here, Aunt Vicky.”

“Not that pleasant.” Mom said, looking at her sister. Vicky’s face darkened slightly as she looked down and away from me. “Her husband filed for divorce. He did it the day after Sara graduated high school last week.”

Vicky started crying a little bit. “That bastard has been cheating on me for years, and I always let him get away with it. I thought I could be a good homemaker, and that would keep him from leaving, but now the girls are gone, and there is no home to maintain anymore.” Her tears were streaming down her face for what was definitely not the first time today.