First Citizen (21 page)

Starrett handled hundreds of millions and, apparently, kept a few of them for himself. The family had a ranch, with horses, west of Golden, fifteen acres of lawn and fifteen hundred of scrub with a wedding cake house of white stucco and glass in the middle of it all. In a much grander way, it reminded me of the home in Pacific Grove.

Tracy had rooms there, when she wanted, and also kept an apartment up in Boulder. She had a part-time job keeping a computer warm doing the accounts in a doctor’s office while completing her university degree. Busy girl. But she found time to work me in.

We made love on the fourth date, which in those times was a standard of propriety that the Pope would applaud. After that, she was about the only woman who registered on my retinas. Tracy was frank, witty, knowing, expensive, stunningly beautiful, and sensuous as a cat. With me. Before me, she claimed a state of near-virginity: She had known just one boy on her prom night—“and didn’t everybody?”—and had experienced one long-term love affair with an older man— “which was almost like a marriage, it got so twisted”—during the start of her acting career. I was the first man she could relate to “at anything like my own level, thank God!”

We got married at the end of the summer on the Starrett ranch. As a social event in the Oil Patch, it was almost like a marriage of aristocracy. However, after the shocks in the energy market, this was a dowager aristocracy living on coupons and the tired cachet of the Nineties, while a new and more vulgar life surged around it.

The reception at Golden got a little fragmented. At one point the pills were running three-to- two against the champagne, and toward sunset, a wing of the Arvada version of Satan’s Slaves roared in on their spidery Harleys. Leather, lungs, and lusts. But a couple of the houseboys hustled them out quickly, without even wrinkling their own white uniforms, and after that I focused on the bulges in those boys’ biceps. All in all, the party stayed remarkably decorous.

That night, Tracy and I left for Bear Lake and two weeks at a cabin she had wangled from a friend for our honeymoon. When we got back, I put her in a penthouse along San Francisco’s new Embarcadero. I worked harder than ever to make her happy and keep her in the style she demanded.

Hard work doesn’t mean drudgery. I learned that early enough. The garbage mining business was exciting. We were solving tough problems, beating out the competitors and the imitators, discovering new byproducts and new sources of supply. Birdsong and I founded an organics research center that was supposed to discover new ways to crack hazardous wastes, which are mostly human-made, very complex molecules. We were even thinking of branching out into radioactive wastes and reprocessing spent fuel from all those Federal reactors.

Yes, the business was exciting right up until it was making really big money; then it became predictable. And any business, once you’re on top of it and the problems are knocked, becomes a bore. If you’re selling high fashion, after a while the daring cuts, the textures and materials, and pouting models, all begin to blur and it’s as much bean counting and nickel busting as running the bargain basement at Macy’s. Garbage got to be like that: all a blur.

You might think backing the lottery in Montana—and later in New Mexico—would be exciting, but only if you are a gambler and don’t understand the business. For me, they were a cold-blooded investment with a guaranteed payoff. About as much fun as buying double-A-plus bonds.

For a while, I dabbled in the developing futures markets for municipal solid wastes and sewer sludges. Of course, Birdsong and I had created that market, but what the hell, owners could be players, too. Except that I knew it so well. There’s no fun when the pace is seasonal, the wrong moves are obvious to anybody, and the suckers are just handing you their money. Another guaranteed payoff.

Then I discovered S.W.E.E.P. Electric futures is the fastest-moving commodity market in the world. It was so exciting and unpredictable that I loved it even when I lost money. I just had to buy myself a seat on it—but why do they call it a “seat” when you never have a minute to sit down?

The actual trading floor—called just “the Pool”—is located in Las Vegas, of all places. Maybe because it’s close to Hoover Dam, the first big regional energy project. Maybe because it’s about the most central place in the southwestern U.S. that’s not Los Angeles. Maybe just because of the action and the type of people it draws.

The timing for electric futures was on a dozen different interlocking cycles. Longest cycle of them all was the rate at which the old privately or publicly owned utilities and the new Third Party Producers could build power plants. That cycle was in fives and tens of years. But news of a proposed big project could rattle contracts and coalitions just months out.

In a slightly shorter range, years and months, were the boom and bust of economics. Mostly boom in the Twenty-oughts. You bet against what the Imperial Valley’s growers, the peach canners, and the electric-arc steel people would demand from the grid.

The seasonal cycles were fairly predictable. When would the fall rains come? What would the winter peak for heating in the mountains be? How about the summer peak for cooling in the deserts and California’s Central Valley? Those were events you could bank on—just about. Climate.

Weather, however, was the biggest thing in the daily cycle: You had to study the forecasts and look out for heat waves. In the Southwest, that meant air conditioners humming on every rooftop, drawing megawatts of power like a kid sucking soda through a straw.

And the joker, the wild card, was downtime. Who, among all the suppliers of capacity, would suddenly get a hot turbine bearing, discover a leaky steam generator, lose a cooling tower, or drop a control rod and have to trip off line? Then the scramble for surplus power was on and we brokers earned our commissions.

Well, we earned it secondhand. Our Pool men did all the actual buying and selling. As brokers, we merely supplied the cash cushion and the tolerance for risk. What’s a Pool man? To work down on the floor of the Southwest Electric Energy Pool required someone who could speak a totally new language, a verbal shorthand made up of “gigs” and “megs,” of delivery times counted in “moes,” “dass” or “hows” from that morning’s opening, of electricity as either “cap” for dispatchable capacity or just “ergs” for available energy only.

That last may need explaining. You see, a wind turbine will give you electricity, but you can’t switch it on and off; it only runs when the wind blows. The windmill is just ergs and so less valuable to the user system than a fossil or nuclear power plant which is switchable—you can run it anytime you want—and so “dispatchable” by the system operators.

And there are a dozen other, similar details to running the grid. Most of them are communicated with hand signs and body language down in the Pool. The pace is that fast. Deals are made and kept on the word and memory of the Pool men, backed by their brokers. The grid’s computer system lags about twenty seconds behind deal and delivery for the real-time and daily transactions, and about ten
minutes
behind for the month-by-month futures trading. So the action is all in the head.

If I had tried to work the floor myself, the other Pool men would have cleaned me out in fifteen seconds. They would have clustered about me shouting offers and orders at my head, making a deal on every flinch and twitch, just like an auctioneer running up the bids on a half-asleep buyer who’s nodding in the back row. Breaking in a new Pool man costs a brokerage about N$300,000 until he—very rarely a she—learns the lingo and the body language. A seasoned Pool man has a useful life of about five years. Then he either gets out and starts his own brokerage with subcommissions he’s earned, or collapses in a heap from the scoriations on his cardiovascular system. The pace is that fast.

My most exciting day in the Pool, even secondhand, was August 19, 2008. It was the third day of a heat wave that was held over our heads by a massive high-pressure system in the California Central Valley. No relief in sight for a week, at least. The heat in Vegas was so thick that the sweat popped out in just the five steps between your air-conditioned limo and the lobby of your air-conditioned casino. Oh, the hum of that lovely power!

I’d flown down from San Francisco to watch the action from the vantage point of the Pool’s gallery and its on-line monitors. Even before I focused on the screens’ numbers, I could sense the tension in the air. Electric! A glance at the joggling columns of figures told me that the market was, um, under-supported. Through his ear-plug, I told my Pool man, Joe Dark, to buy everything he could for a week out, with delivery in hour lots. Other sharks were moving in ahead of me. Joe actually took the time to turn and find my face along the gallery windows. He scowled and made a choke sign in my direction.

“Get in there!” I growled and made a strangler’s grip that he could see. Joe shrugged and waded in. Inside of nine seconds, he had bought twenty-seven percent of Palo Verde, ninety percent of all five units at San Onofre, and eighty-two percent of Diablo Canyon—for a total of 9,300 megawatts in nuclear power.

“Good show!” murmured the broker to my left and signaled his own Pool man to sell. Then Joe bought all of Hoover Dam, big chunks of Bonneville, Grand Coulee, and the Sierra hydro systems—another 2,000 or 3,000 megawatts at least.

“Daring, that,” someone said behind me in the gallery. I barely turned my head. Other Pool men were now gathering around Dark. He was picking up antique fossil plants, all of The Geysers and the new projects with geothermal brines, half a dozen solar towers, and even the first-generation wind farms. All of this was on three- to seven-day delivery, counted in hours. For some reason, the sharks were dumping on him. Fast.

“You’re going long,” one of their handlers crooned past my ear. As Joe finally went after any of the out-of-region power contracts that might be lying around, my insides suddenly sagged. Was something about to happen, I wondered, that everyone could see but me? An imminent change in the weather? Maybe a black cloud or storm front coming in? Were the other brokers planning to run me up and then gut me for a novice? It had happened before. And I was catching dirty looks from Joe over his shoulder as he went on buy, buy, buying contracts.

Then my spine stiffened. “Keep going, man,” I whispered into the mike. “Take it all.”

Within two hours I owned 24.7 gigawatts of dispatchable capacity and another 13.6 in simple energy, all for delivery sometime in the next week. All bought at top dollar, or so near the top—an average of about thirty-two cents per kilowatthour—that the only way for that electricity to cost more would be to pay the secretary of the Exchange to rub two sticks together. I
owned
the southwestern energy market for the next week. Since there wasn’t but a handful of resources left to buy in that timeframe, the Pool’s action immediately moved on to long-term futures.

The other brokers lining the gallery windows all looked at me with grim chuckles. One even patted my shoulder, telling me exactly what to expect. A shift in that high-pressure zone or five minute’s worth of cold rain that week could break me. I mean, the payments would go on for
years!

When I went out to lunch, I turned a hard stare up at the sky. That same silver glare shone down, only turning a softer, smoggy yellow just above the peaks that surrounded the city. The Exchange building’s air conditioner roared above me. A bead of sweat rolled down the inside of my leg. “Maintain, baby, maintain,” I said to myself.

By four in the afternoon, I was sitting in my Vegas condo with the air conditioner turned all the way off and still shivering in reaction. Visions of a cold snap, sleet, a hailstorm … flash floods were passing through my brain, washing acres of greenbacks down the scraggly valleys. I stayed in that night, praying for the wind to die.

Then the following morning, Wednesday, San Onofre’s Unit 4 developed a steam leak and had to trip. The operators ended up paying
me
—and triple for breach of contract. Thursday, a minor
temblor
in the Mono Lake area weakened the dam impounding Lake Wishon at the top of the Kings River hydro system. The State inspectors ruled there was no alternative but to spill the water all down that stairway of reservoirs and powerhouses. The operators had to do it by day
and
by night—when their energy wasn’t under contract. Another triple indemnity for me and a further squeeze on the region’s electric resources.

God heard my prayers and raised the temperature three more degrees, average, all across the Southwest. And the wind died in the mountain passes, stilling those second-generation wind farms that Joe Dark had missed out on buying for me. We ended up unloading all that power at about a six-cent profit on every kilowatthour, of which there are a million in a gigawatthour. Paid in every hour. For a week. My take was N$390 million, just on two hours’ trading one sticky morning in August. The pace was that fast.

As I say, it was my best day ever. But the action was all secondhand. More to Joe Dark’s credit than to mine. And after a few years of it, even trading on the S.W.E.E.P. seemed to go pretty stale. However, at the end of that week I went back to San Francisco feeling pretty good about myself. Then I walked into a fine old Italian tragedy.

The cab from the airport dropped me off in midafternoon along the seawall of the Embarcadero and I crossed to our apartment building in the South of Market. It was one of the new buildings with three levels of fancy townhouses on the roof, seventeen stories up. The elevator opened on a series of hidden gardens. Around them were balconies, window walls, rounded arches on private pathways, grilled gates, fountains doing double duty as cooling sprays for the building’s air conditioning, and ground lights tucked into the ivy. I had to walk through this twisting jungle to get to our door.

The first thing I heard was the music. Loud music. Our music.
Modo reggae.
The first thing I saw was the door to our apartment. It was open six inches. Waves of that heavy
modo
beat were almost visible coming out of it.