Worth exactly what you paid for it

People always ask me, they say “Simmons, what do you think of the way the markets have been acting, what do you think I should do here.” And I always tell them, “Knucklehead, I think you should learn to pronounce my name first, that’s my advice.” I mean, seriously, how hard can it be? S-I-M-O-N-S. You got a single vowel “I” followed by a single consonant “M.” Last time I was trolling the grade schools they told me that combination adds up to a long vowel sound. (They also told me to stay away from the playground.) Just look over there at Mr. Edie Brickell, nobody’s calling him Paul “Simmon.” Although maybe they would if he were at a Renaissance Festival because it kind of sounds like “Persimmon.” He could be pouncing around the woods with a floppy hat and some love beads, busting out ‘Greensleeves’ on the Autoharp…

Maybe not. Anyway, yeah, money… and how to get invest it. It’s funny, I can remember the first time somebody acted on the financial advice I’d given them. Ages ago I told my mother-in-law she couldn’t get hurt buying some Chevron; she bought just a bit of it and within a year or two it had doubled. Then she complained because it went down 20%. She was kind of that way. During 2002 I pitched her a bond fund and she had me run it by her accountant, who billed me $150 for the meeting and told her it was too dangerous — something I was too young to understand. Over the subsequent five years it returned a cumulative 50% tax free. More important, she’s dead.

I had a lot of people telling me that year I didn’t know what I was talking about. Well that’s always been the case, but I’m talking about the markets. I was a broker, sorry, financial advisor for Morgan Stanley, and my second day in telemarketing, sorry, production was, wait for it, 9/11/01.* You may recall stocks didn’t do so hot that year or next, so I tried to focus on bonds, sorry, fixed income. I tended to “focus” on them with such obsessive analysis that by the end of the day I would have a 100% ideal portfolio, sorry, ladder, but I wouldn’t have made any calls letting prospects know it existed. Oops.

It’s just as well though, because invariably, when I would finally meet the customer, sorry, decision maker in person, he or she would react in disgust at my appearance. No, it wasn’t because I was too homely — I was too young. On the phone I could rattle off info about duration, yield-to-worst, tax-equivalent anything, but when my baby face walked in their door it was “What does this kid know about bonds? Rates are low these days –and in the 70s and 80s they were really high! How could this youngster possibly know or understand that?” Um, by reading a book maybe? and by putting Paul Volcker’s stand against inflation into its proper historical context while pointing out that globalization has created international competition so fierce that producing nations should probably be more worried about a deflationary lost decade than anything else? You feelin’ lucky punk?

They never felt lucky, and they never got lucky, either. They passed up the tax-free bonds yielding 5%, waiting for rates to go higher, and unless they sunk their money into those wacky muni mousetraps called ARPS, they must still be waiting. Bitterly obnoxious kid 1, old dudes 0.

So you should really take my advice seriously when it comes to everything money. And my advice for where to put money today? Not a fuckin’ clue.

But thanks for listening.

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*That was also five days after I had finished my three-week sales training course, conducted in WTC1.
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Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. The alternate Wednesday came and went with no reports from the chemo wing. But I have a note from my doctor with the perfect excuse — my chemo session was canceled, or as the doctor put it, aborted. Look, you can even recognize his handwriting, right under the part where he says to fill a prescription for 200 Vicodin.

See, it went like this. I came down with a UTI the night before and I — wait, that was a couple weeks ago. Ah, hang on, yeah, I was totally wiped out from too much Dilantin and too little sleep and — no, that was still two weeks ago. They ran an MRI of the brain and found that four out of eight lesions surveyed were growing — yeah, that was still two weeks ago, but that’s where our story begins. Unless you’d rather I push it back to what my lousy childhood was like and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. (Ed. — works for us.)

All right, so let’s push it up to the non-chemo Wednesday, February the 18th, just a couple days after I celebrated my 38th. I meet with my radio-oncologist and he recommends treating the brain tumors with something called CyberKnife. I agree because the name sounds cool and on the web site there’s a picture of the device, which uses a robotic arm to circle your head and accurately hit you with its laser beam. Thing is we have to run it by the insurance company first, send them a tweet along the lines of “Hey this guy’s about to die, will you pay for him to not die, get back to me whenever.” It turns out the CyberKnife was actually developed from an assembly line tool used to manufacture cars, so I’m thinking if the insurance company balks I can work out some kind of Modern Times scenario with General Motors. I mean the bailout and all, it’s only fair, amirite?

Christ on his throne, 400 words in and we’re still a week away from this past Wednesday. Wrap it up motherfucker God! All right all right. Insurance company says okay, so all I have to do next is meet with a neurosurgeon and have my 19th MRI and my 20th CT scan and fill out a living will and then we’ll be all set, right? Well we would be except for that calf sprain I obtained by taking a stumble in the middle of the night two weeks ago, back when I was all dizzy from the too-much-Dilantin-too-little-sleep business I told you about earlier. The neurosurgeon said last Tuesday I should have an ultrasound to rule out a blood clot. I relayed to this news to my oncologist the next day.

“That’s ridiculous!” he said with disgust.

What’s ridiculous? The fact that we’re past 500 words and we’re just pulling in to Wednesday the 25th, the day of the regularly scheduled chemo treatment that never happened, is he ever going to finish this gripping yarn?

“If they think there might be a blood clot they need to look at it now. Let’s abort the chemo and send you over for an ultrasound and see what it shows.” Come to find out it showed (drum roll) a blood clot, which is being treated with Luvonox, which I get to inject into my abdomen every day for the next six months. It’s all right, the abdomen needs a distraction from my attention-whore stoma — that thing actually required a man yesterday to stick his finger directly into the large intestine to clear up a blockage. I was that full of shit.

The worst part is, he hasn’t called back.

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Expiration date

So it was around St. Patrick’s Day a year ago when I almost kicked the bucket, I mean really this time. That was a fun story, but I left out a piece, namely my reaction to the surgeon’s announcement that I might not make it. Here it is, the profound, poetic epiphany that only comes to you when you’re up against the Eternal Footman himself. Ready?

I can’t die now — my wife won’t be able to figure out how to fill out the tax return!

Can you believe this guy? He’s got maybe four hours to live and his overriding worry is adjusting the cost basis on a couple of mutual funds so he doesn’t overpay the Treasury Department by $500. Miserly Bastard he is now.

Well it turns out the jig is up for Miserly Bastard. The 1099s are trickling in, we’ve already got Form 8282, the Schedule D looks hellacious complete — that tax return is just about finished, and maybe our hero is too. I’ve got permission to die on April 15, or maybe April 17 / 18 to make sure we didn’t get audited for claiming the cat.*

Well this won’t do at all. I gotta think of some new mile markers to set up, some of that “Man’s reach should exceed his grasp” kind of jazz, what are those called again? Goals? That can’t be right. Wait, goalposts! That’s it, we need to move the goalposts out. Let’s look at the ol’ calendar for 2009 and see if we can’t find some incentives lying around.

I got one right off the bat, coming up sometime this summer — Metsgeek reunion at Nationals Park! The trip to Pittsburgh was the highlight of last year for me, so I definitely have to keep on the right side of the grass until this one rolls around. Do me a favor guys, try to schedule it for late in the year.

Oh wait, there’s another one on the agenda — 20th High School Reunion! I think it’s cool that they’re going to let me attend even though I actually graduated closer to ‘94 and I’m five years younger than the rest of them. The promise of an open bar in Jersey itself is reason enough to stick it out for October.

Hang on, just thought of something even more important than friendships and money — LOST. By my calculations I’ve sacrificed more than 66 hours just to watching this show, which doesn’t even begin to cover the many nights of confused theorizing, debating the latest developments with my wife, or trolling fan sites using the handle Sawyerblows79. If I’m in for this many pennies I better be gaining some serious pounds by seeing the last episode in mid-2010.

Last but not least I’ll have to keep myself going until the Mets get themselves another World Series title. Owner Fred Wilpon oversees the team with the same care as he manages his own money, so this could take a while. But I’m in no hurry. You might call me a die-hard fan.

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*Would’ve linked to the Kurtis Blow song ”The Breaks” but his label seems to have a niggardly attitude toward file sharing. His company sucks.

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The price of regress

So yeah, it was about nine months ago when decided to purchase one of those trendy sub-notebooks that everybody was talking about. I settled on an HP 2133 8.9-inch Mini-Note, intending to use it for bloggin’ on the go. It ended up sitting in a box for a few months, but when we donated the second full-size family laptop a while back, it was time for Junior to get some exercise. Here is a short review of the product:

FAIL

Allow me to translate from picture into a thousand words. I found this thing so infuriating to use that I quickly sent it to a watery grave. I didn’t even take the time to ship it somewhere that would recycle its circuitry board, memory chips, et al. I threw it in the dumpster outside my apartment, and I hope that as its toxic chemicals eventually leak into the ground over a period of years, Mother Earth will come to feel a lump in her breast and sue H-P for giving her cancer.

Why so furious? I will start by making excuses like a battered spouse admitting that some of the fault in the relationship was mine. I’m nearsighted and too vain to wear glasses, and my hands sometimes tremble from all the exciting medication I take battling cancer. Between the Mini-Note’s smaller keyboard and the smaller screen, I found it extremely difficult to (a) write and (b) make sure that what I was writing wasn’t littered with embarrassing typos. “Days of lore” — I’ll never live it down.

The Mini-Note isn’t pretending to be big (there’s actually the word ‘mini’ in the name if you look closely), so if I had gone into a Best Buy and tried it out before buying, all of this could have been avoided. Of course, then I would have had to go into a Best Buy. And actually, I don’t think Best Buy sells it. Who else is around here, Circuit City? The Apple store is probably no good… Wait a minute, this wasn’t my fault, this was e-commerce’s fault! Jeff Bezos owes me $600 now!

I also lay plenty of blame on John Sculley for failing to license the Macintosh OS to different hardware manufacturers in the 1980s, allowing Bill Gates to market something called “Microsoft Windows.” I’ve heard of this beast and even tangled with it off and on back when I was still employed, but it’s been All Apple for me since 2003. Reuniting with my old nemesis I am aghast to see the state of him. My reaction is the same as when I first tried PCP — people really use this shit?

Turns out that Windows Vista is slow and unstable, much like Dick Cheney. Whenever I ran any app more taxing than WordPad the MiniNote would groan audibly from the strain, although it didn’t sound like a groan. It sounded like a million tiny demons typing at a million different keyboards, which is probably how the Vista OS was coded together, come to think. Something ain’t right with this software, because it does not play well with others. Take it somewhere with WiFi and watch how neurotic it acts: You have to give it a lot of time and attention and booze to have it connect. Your MacBook and your iPhone, they’re all like Hey we’re here, thanks for the vine.

The Mini-Note wouldn’t even connect to the laser printer I had, which is surprising when you consider they were both made by Hewlett-Packard. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that HP was headed up by someone who called Sarah Palin a “person of great accomplishment.” In hindsight my fervor for the HP sub-notebook should have been more subdued.

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Shootin’ rockets to the moon, kids growin’ up too soon

A partial listing of movies with adult themes that various adults allowed me to see back before I was an adult. We’ve talked about my mortality and my shitter on this blog, but in many ways this post is the most intimately revealing of all — you can look up the films on the imdb and figure out my real age.

First up, Lassiter, the film that turned Tom Selleck from a television joke into a bankable film star. My best friend and I were 13 when his mom took us to a matinee showing of the film, in which Selleck plays a dashing international cat burglar in 1939 London. The first place he burgles is fresh out of cats, but it does have a bored housewife who catches Lassiter in mid-rob and, naturally, disrobes. Six minutes in and there’s already a bare pair right up there, on the screen; couple minutes later Selleck is on top of a nude Jane Seymour. Just a few minutes after that and we get Lauren Hutton riding some guy and then stabbing him with an ice pick, Basic Instinct-style. I thought I might be misremembering that part, so in the interests of science I went to YouTube to check out the first reel. After my fifth viewing I began to think I may have given that “World’s Best Mom” mug to the wrong woman. Apologies, Mama DiBella.

But I can’t sell my own mom short. She did take me to see Flashdance when I was 12 — me and a couple of adolescent sisters who needed help developing insecurities about their bodies, I guess. Or maybe she was hoping the movie would inspire them to be dancers, or welders, I don’t know. What I do know is that she misheard a line from the Irene Cara title track: “Take your pants down and make it happen.” I says to her “Pay attention Mom — she hasn’t been wearing pants for the last hour and a half!”

And then there’s ol’ dad, he doesn’t get off scott free either. Took us all out for an afternoon of family entertainment when I was 12 — Risky Business. My overriding memory of this outing (passing even the generous servings of Rebecca DeMornay) was the moment when two of my sisters busted out an air-drum-solo to that Phil Collins song that plays when they “make love on a real train.” Must have taken hours of rehearsal time, I reckon. After the film Pop asked what I thought and I told him I gave it a boner thumbs up. He said “You were supposed to say you liked it but you didn’t understand it.”

If by “it” we mean “A laid-back parenting approach that lets a 13-year-old watch Purple Rain on cable,” then yes — I don’t quite understand it, but I liked it. Liked it very much indeed.

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I’ve always said, I’m not as nice as Phil Collins thinks I am

Faithful readers of GITGAW may recall a beef the author has with a fellow patient in the cancer ward, a guy they call The Talker. Well, that’s what one of the nurses called him at least. I would have gone with The Loudmouth or maybe The Blowhard. Of course, as we all know by now, my nickname is The Gasbag.

I know everything what you’re thinking. How bad could this guy be? and what kind of creep takes the time to publicly ridicule a fellow cancer sufferer?

This kind!

There’s a couple reasons The Talker gets under my admittedly thin skin. Let’s start with the first time I meet him — I’m getting my delicious chemo drugs pumped into my veins and he takes a seat that abuts mine. He asks what I’m in for (or maybe he didn’t, now that I think about it) and then proceeds to share the details of his predicament. So far so good, perfectly fine, normal, legal, whatever. The problem is he keeps going on and on without giving you (i.e. me) a chance to disengage, which can be a little trying by he time you move on to your fourth hour of chemo on the day. I mean it’s like you married the guy by sitting next to him; he will get in your face, bellowing about whatever, and will not leave you alone even when you drop subtle clues that you might like some privacy.

The first subtle clue I tried was picking up my Times crossword puzzle anthology and pointedly holding it in the air for a second, long enough that he could figure out I wanted to retreat to a world where I can read Leon Uris novels on a beach that’s always at neap tide. No good — in an instant I hear barking to put screen pooch Asta to shame.

“Crossword puzzles! I’ve got a dictionary at home, and what it is, you look up the clue from the crossword puzzle, and it gives you the answer!”

Ooooo, kay. Could you get me the answer to 36 down? The clue is ‘inconsiderate boar’ and it’s seven letters, ending in -ackass.

Of course I didn’t say that — that would be rude. But I don’t want to lead him on encourage him further, so I quietly mumble something non-committal like “Oh, that’s helpful.”

“WHAT??” He’s hard of hearing too — may have gone deaf listening to himself bark at the cashier for 20 minutes in the express aisle.

“I SAID ‘OH, THAT’S HELPFUL!!’”

“Oh yeah, yeah, it makes it real easy, you just look up what the clue is and it tells you the answer.” Right, got it. Glad we’re both clear on that. Hey if you don’t mind I’m actually going to unplug the IV from my port-a-cath and walk out bleeding from my chest. It’s nothing personal, I just don’t want to hear you bellow at me for another two hours, and I dislike you so much that I would rather cut my tumors some slack than sit here another minute listening to you. Kthxbai.

There’s another reason this public nuisance really aggravates me, apart from the fact that he’s aggravating. He’s trying to position himself as the court jester of the chemo ward — and we all know that’s my job. So out of hateful spite I’ll relay a joke I heard him mangle to one of the nurses a while back, a joke that I thought only took ten words (“The masochist says hurt me and the sadist says no”) but, well, let’s hear him tell it:

Well the sadist and the masochist had been out of town on vacation, uh, and they hadn’t seen each other in a while, uh, and they’re walking on the street, uh, and one’s on one side and one’s on the other, uh, and they’re getting closer to each other, and uh, the masochist is getting excited, uh, and then they meet each other, uh, and the sadist says ‘Hurt me!’ and the sadist says ‘I won’t do it!’

A sadist who talks to himself. That’s you all up and down, bub.

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Let it go? I’ll give you something to let go of!

Shorter Wrap it up, SON:

I HATE YOU CLINT EASTWOOD!

I WANT THOSE TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE BACK!

AND YOU OWE ME THREE FOR MYSTIC RIVER WITH THE ACCRUED INTEREST!

Whew, that’s better, that’s a lot better. I feel all right now. The doctors will probably let me out today or tomorrow.
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Wrap it up, SON

Yeah, so, seeing as how important it is to see all the Oscar-nominated films and performances before the Oscars are awarded in a broadcast that’s an hour longer than it needs to be, I made it a point to rent a movie last night that’s an hour longer than it needs to be. Ladies and gentlemen, Academy Award winner Clint Eastwood presents Academy Award winner Angelina Jolie in a serious movie over here: CHANGELING.

There’s no “the” in the title. That’s how serious this movie is guys.

It’s based on a true story. Let me tell you that story over the phone: “Hey did you ever hear about this woman in the 20s whose kid went missing, and the police couldn’t find her kid, but then they found some other kid and tried to pass it off as hers? I know like she wouldn’t notice, right? I know, I know. Yeah, I think it turned out her kid had actually been abducted by a total stranger who killed him, him and a bunch of other kids I think. Oh it was totally crazy, she’d be like ‘This kid isn’t mine, he’s shorter’ and the police would be like ‘Well he hasn’t been eating right, of course he’s shorter.’ Oh dude.”

The kid’s shorter, and that telling of the story is shorter than Clint thinks it should be, by a factor of maybe 100. See ol’ man Eastwood is going to make sure you really “get it” by making you watch the same scene over and over again. That scene goes like this:

Jolie: That boy — he’s not my son!
LAPDude: Sure’n he’s your son Mrs. Collins! You’re just a wee bit confused is all!
Jolie: That boy — he’s not my son! My son wasn’t circumcised and this boy is!
LAPDude: B’gosh and b’gora Mrs. McCollins, you must have circumcised him in the middle of the night and forgot is all!
Jolie: That boy — he’s not my son!
LAPDude: Ya really want another gold statue, that’s what all this moanin’ is about, isn’t it Mrs. O’Collins?

Now do you understand why it was a bad thing that the 1920s LAPD pretended they’d found the missin’ lad? Just to be clear here — we’re talking about this woman’s son! That makes the film important in its own right, and you have to sympathize with the Angelina character whether you like it or not, or whether Clint takes the time to tell you anything about her or her son so that you would care if he went missing. When the cops give her the boy who’s not her son you’re almost like, Well, close enough.

I mean, there’s no question that the story is remarkable, but that doesn’t automatically translate into a film that’s compelling, or even interesting. It’s definitely not going to be interesting in the heavy hands of an anal-retentive director who has to relay every single development his research team ran across. She told the police he was too short. She told the police he was circumcised. She told the police his pediatrician didn’t recognize him. She told the police his teacher didn’t recognize him. She told the police he was black. Are you writing this down? There will be a quiz later if you’re still awake after the second act.

Second act — the story is moving forward! Because I’m pushing it!* We find out what actually happened to my son. The one honest cop in L.A. goes out on a hot tip about an illegal immigrant Canadian kid staying at a ranch in the middle of fucking nowhere. Driving there he runs across a stranded motorist who might as well be wearing a John Wayne Gacy t-shirt and carrying a blood-stained machete. Krazee Eyez Killa gives the cop directions to his ranch / kill room — accurate directions! Always with the self-sabotage, these child murderers. It’s sad, really.

Anyhow, cop finds the place, finds the Canadian alien kid, finds out that my son was one of the victims in Gordon Northcott’s chicken coop. (By the way, anyone else disturbed by the fact that Eastwood keeps filming nine-year-old kids trapped in underground lairs? First Mystic River and now this. If I were a parent in Malibu I would have my kids skip right past Chez Eastwood come Halowe’en.) In any event the case of the missing son is resolved and the movie’s over and we can go home, right?

Wrong! You still got forty minutes left!

I gave up. Eastwood wasn’t finished with me but I was finished with him. He can squint all he wants and act tough all he wants and cash pension checks from his stint as mayor of Carmel all he wants, but I’m still not taking him seriously. Call me when he goes back to being a sidekick for a wise-cracking orangutan.
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* (You’re pushing it all right — Ed.)
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Blood, piss, and tears

Well, it’s the alternate Wednesday again, time for more thrilling tales from the cancer ward!

8.30 a.m., alarm rings and I get into the tub. I’m a shower guy all the way, but around 12 hours ago I had noticed a problem, er, “voiding,” which was relieved when I took a bath. Just when I was bragging about daubing feces on my schmekel, fate slaps me in the dick face with a UTI. My better half was forced to drive to the all-night pharmacy in the freezing rain; to make it up to her, I pissed in the bathtub. It’s just the kind of guy I am.

9.30, hammer time vital signs.

10.00, which side is your port on? Less than 150 words in we’ve got the blood and piss covered. If they send me home because the UTI has fouled up my counts your author might be able to wrap this up in under a century.

10.30, nope, chemo’s a go. Looks like we’re stuck together. Speaking of sticking, have you noticed that when someone who never tells a joke finally cracks wise, it’s 10 times as funny? The pharmacist here is always in bright spirits, but this morning she’s clearly been getting into her own product. When I walked up to the counter to pick up my Ativan, she called out from her desk 40 feet away, “Hey, do you want some drugs??” I paid with 10 singles which she noticed were stuck together. “I guess you just printed them this morning.”

10.45, they’re asking for a urine sample to check on this UTI story I’ve been peddling, so I head to the john. Come on, come on, COME ON!! Why is this so hard!? What do you — Hey that’s not funny! I quit after it starts to feel like I’m squeezing out gleets in the manner of Al Swearengen. When I sheepishly hand over the plastic jar my performance is rated as “incomplete.” Not for the first time.

11.00, an older woman walks by and we smile at each other; she looks working class. An in instant my mind flashes all the prejudices you would expect from a son of privilege who should burn in hell the day after tomorrow. You have no money; I have a ton. You’re ignorant; I have a Master’s from Berkeley. You buy your groceries at the gas station; I buy $8 milk at Whole Foods. He deserves the UTI, doesn’t he folks? Hell he deserves the tumors.

11.15, I wasn’t stressing out about the suboptimal sample because I had a hunch the chemo was going to set me free, or at least my urine. I’m not sure if it’s the saline, the atropine, the irinotecan, the leucovorin, the fluorouracil, or the act of Googling to check the spelling of all these, but there’s a noticeable diuretic effect. Sure enough, I head back to the john and blast out a winner. I have enough for my sample and one for Albert Pujols if he still needs it.

11.30, the woman I had pegged as a cracker* isn’t getting treatment there, she showed up to support a friend. A deaf friend, it turns out; the two of them and an alternate are trading hand signals as fast as they did at Carentan. (It’s hard to tell from here but I think all three are actually deaf.) My sense of superiority over her fades as I realize she knows one more language than I do; the sense of shame is making up the difference.

11.45, back to hit the head — the dyke has burst! Somebody call a doctor for the woman! And somebody report the guy to GLAAD!

12.00 pm, my best friend from Oberlin was supposed to meet me on Facebook for a friendly chat about now, but she dumps me for something she calls “work.” I e-mail her back to fill her in on all the fun I’ve had since Kurt Cobain hit the big time, and at one point I appraise her two daughters: “I see from your picture you have a beautiful pair.” Yeah, that’s gonna need a rewrite.

12.15, anybody need some urine? Got a lot of urine goin’ spare here.

12.30, I think about the e-mail I got last night from a beautiful woman I met last August, the one that brought tears to my eyes. Start crying anew. At least I can’t see my street cred plunging before my eyes.

12.45, the “Financial Counsler” comes out to show the deaf patient how her treatments will be costing her thousands. I may be ill but this country is sick. We can nationalize the investment banks and auto companies, but don’t ask for any of that socialized medicine jazz. What does it say that you can translate “You’re responsible for the 20% co-pay until you meet your deductible” into sign language?

1.00, The deaf friend is anguished, possibly about the bill. She begins to flash hand gestures with ever increasing fury and even yelps in spots. People can cry in any language.
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*Dear Jesus, the tumors you sent aren’t working fast enough, please send lightning. Sincerely, all of humanity.
**Oberlin, Berkeley, trust fund, thinks actual poor people are icky. Yep, that’s your basic liberal right there.
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Location, Deception, Location

UPDATE — The security deposit has been returned, 100 days after the lease ended. Scroll to the bottom for details.
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So it was a little over a year ago that my original oncologist walked into the examination room, said “We got a problem” and poked me in the chest with both fingers. That was his way of telling me that my rectal cancer had spread to my lungs. They actually do teach doctors a class on how to break bad news to patients, and I think Dr. Greg Monaghan might have missed something there.

Looking for doctors with greater renown, I signed on with a big fancy New York hospital and began treatment with oncologist number two. That guy damn near killed me, and I soon found out that I actually had recurrent rectal cancer metastatic to the lungs, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, and brain, but that’s not a big deal. The important thing is that I sublet a Manhattan apartment with a lease running from March through October of 2008. Hey, look at me — I’m a New Yorker!

If you’ve never rented an apartment in the most overrated greatest city in the world, well, you must still be able to afford lunch and dinner. It works like this: You hire a broker to find you a place. A second broker represents whoever owns that place, and each broker gets a commission big enough to buy the car you can’t afford any more. It’s like DP on your wallet and it’s so violent you’re thinking to yourself “Jesus, this place better have one hell of a doorman.”

Oh yeah, there’s one other thing — like anywhere else, you have to give a security deposit. This deposit gives the owner, worried about the line in the 700-page Co-op application mentioning your interest in pyrotechnics, a sense of security. When he sees that everything is in order at the end of your stay, the selling broker promptly returns to you the security deposit.

If he feels like it.

Is this a face you can trust or what?

If he doesn’t, he might be named Eyal Tanel and he might work for Peter Ashe Real Estate on Lexington and the second circle of Hell. As the company’s web site notes,

Eyal joined Peter*Ashe in March of 2006 but still maintains a scientific and analytical approach to real estate world but understands the pricing, marketing, and selling home can be as much af an art as a science.

Unfortunately, Eyal suffers from a disorder where he says things that have no basis in reality. Things like, “Mr. Simons, yes, if you could give me your mailing address I will make sure that the deposit is returned back to you.” He has been saying things of this nature for more than two months now, but the security deposit never does get sent. The longer Eyal remains divorced from reality, the more I fear he will become divorced from realty, as word gets around that he cannot handle the simplest of tasks, like returning a security deposit to someone who has recurrent rectal cancer metastatic to the lungs, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, and brain.

Ashe, Asher, whatever

I mean, my brain is a little foggy these days, considering I have to undergo five hours of chemotherapy every other Wednesday, but even I can remember the part about someone owing me $8,700. I guess the president of Peter Ashe Real Estate, Asher Alcobi, is hoping that he can keep the security deposit if he stalls long enough for someone who has recurrent rectal cancer metastatic to the lungs, liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, and brain to finally give up and die.

Your company sucks.
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UPDATE

Once again, GITGAW is getting results. Sunday night: Complaint aired in a post. Monday afternoon: Check arrives in the post. Sure, the check was sent last week, but only because they knew what was coming. Their company still sucks.

I don’t know whether the apartment owner, John Connell, has a business, but if so, his company sucks.

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