Want Not (17 page)

Dave’s memories of observing his father at work were suffused with shame and disgust, not from his behavior—the old man enjoyed showing off for his son by flinging pennies back at startled drivers, skimming a dollar here and there for the boy to stuff into his jeans pocket, shouting
Fuck you very much
to drivers of Mercedes or BMWs as they passed beneath the gate arm—but from the job itself: the cramped little booth with its fogged-up windows and its grease-whorled cashbox and its squeaky vinyl-clad chair from which yellow stuffing leaked like the split guts of a woodchuck on the Palisades Parkway, the air around the booths layered with bands of leaden smog that choked tears from Dave’s eyes, the way drivers ignored his father (many of them used their tollbooth intermission as an opportunity to pick their noses) as though he were a vending machine or some other nonhuman coin-sucker, the sad ceaseless sameness of the transactional exchange:
dollar-thirty,
like strophe and antistrophe,
dollar-thirty, dollar-thirty.
This, to Dave, was
collection,
and he wanted no part of it; like his father, it felt below him.

Acquisition,
however: That was different. He loved the word—“I’ve got an acquisitive mind,” he was fond of saying—nearly as much as he loved the word
asset,
which scored double bonus points for containing the word
ass
and thereby evoking his number-one favorite female attribute. ARC, which Dave had spun out of a one-man bounced-check collections company he’d founded as a Rutgers undergrad, specialized in stale debt portfolios. Not the “firsts,” the industry term for delinquent accounts that hadn’t yet been charged off, and which sold for twelve cents on the dollar; these were too pricey for Dave, plus the big boys, the publicly traded outfits, kept an exclusive grip on those. And not even the “seconds,” the charged-off accounts that had stymied prior collection efforts. Dave’s forte was in acquiring packaged portfolios of dead debts—years-old, out-of-statute consumer credit accounts, which he could usually score,
en masse,
for less than a penny on the dollar—then, using a proprietary algorithm he’d developed for sifting out probable payers on those accounts, extracting payment on those debts.

The profit percentages were outlandish, as unfathomable as unicorns: math at its giddiest. The Cashomatic PayDay eLoans deal, for instance: $12,750 for $1.3 million in abandoned accounts. His “acquisition teams”—forty-seven employees working out of a giant phone bank in a Sparta office park, using scripts (written by Dave himself) that were notorious industry-wide for the way they strained the legal boundaries established by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act—had already wrested more than $285,000, mostly in arbitrary settlements with the debtors, from those so-called dead accounts. Dave adored doing the numbers, dancing his hairy fingers across a calculator’s keys: a 2,235 gross profit percentage, and still growing. Water squeezed from a stone. Financial Lazaruses, called forth from their tombs. There’s profit everywhere, he was fond of saying, so long as you know where to look.

At least once a week—more frequently if he was feeling down—Dave would roam the phone banks, dispensing backslaps and thumbs-up signs to the good employees (the “acquisitors,” in ARC-speak) while scouting for the weak ones. The weak were easy to identify: Their mouths were closed. They were the ones nodding—patiently or impatiently, it didn’t matter—while Mrs. X from Milwaukee or Mr. Y from central Ohio (Raymondville, possibly) tried to explain why the debt was no longer valid or why he couldn’t pay now or why the account belonged to an ex-husband who’d absconded to Orlando with that chippie from the Meineke muffler shop, etc. This was where Dave liked to swoop in, commandeering the employee’s computer mouse to click the
TERMINATE CALL
icon, then removing the headset from the employee’s head and fitting it onto his own head, coolly adjusting it like an astronaut prepping for liftoff. Leaning across the desk, he’d click
INITIATE NEXT CALL
. “Take notes,” he’d command.

Because Dave could work miracles, on the phone. Fiber-optic cables were like a frizzy extension of his will; by the power of his voice, he could move people’s hands toward their checkbooks, dictate the numbers they scrawled, could extract from them their bank and routing numbers as easily as a cane-pole fisherman drawing bream out of a farm pond. Not through charm (though his arsenal included a salesmanish version of that) and not through its antithesis, coercion (though browbeating was an old specialty of his), but through a counterbalanced combination of the two that called to mind an expert dog trainer, with the
sit
and
stay
commands swapped for
shut up
and
pay.
The key, he’d discovered, was never to listen to the debtors, because listening only complicated what was in essence as simple and choiceless an exchange as passing through the Bayonne tolls. You had to let them talk, of course—they hung up if you didn’t—but you couldn’t
listen
to them talk, because then some empathetic instinct might kick in, causing their problems—the ex-husband gone south with his chippie, the disability preventing them from working, that sort of thing—to infect
your
problem, that being how to most efficiently convince them to pay money on a debt they had every liberty to ignore. Because, if you kept your focus and your distance, you could get them to do almost
anything.
Not all of them, of course—but
enough
of them.

This was a lesson Dave had learned young, as a college student, when he’d taken a part-time job with a 1-900 psychic hotline. A killer student job: flexible hours, fair pay, crazyass stories for the amusement of his Kappa Sig brothers. All he’d had to do was answer a dedicated phone line between the hours of, say, 4
P.M.
and midnight, and bend the callers’ questions and dilemmas into a set of provided scripts. One night an old woman called. She’d lost her brooch. The “Lost Objects” script—he had scripts for everything: love, death, illness, sports predictions—instructed him to tell her the object was in a “place of meaning,” and to walk her through the history of the loss without ever asking, as a parent advises a child with a misplaced toy, the last place she’d seen it. But Dave was bored. “Did you look under the bed?” he asked her. When she said yes, he told her to look again. “Now?” she said. Now, he answered. He waited six minutes—with the meter running at $3.99 per, though, since he didn’t work on commission, this was insignificant—until she returned to the telephone, panting, to say nossir. “Check behind the refrigerator,” he told her next. It was so friggin
beautiful,
listening to her grunt as she heaved the fridge forward, that Dave had to bite his sleeve to muffle his amazed laughter. For the next seven weeks Dave experimented with increasingly absurd variations on this theme, persuading people to throw away their toasters, mail him nude Polaroids (that worked with two chicks, both of them ferociously ugly, but he’d kept the photos anyway), rename their pets, bet their savings on racehorses with eleven-letter names, and, in one instance, urinate into the scotch bottle of an abusive and potentially unfaithful husband (to which he also listened, until he heard the presumed husband enter, midstream, and heard the caller say “ohmygod” before the line went dead). It was like long-distance puppetry, and Dave excelled at it.

“Mrs. Garcia,” he would say, as the employee avoided Dave’s bossman stare by eyeing the keyboard in pseudo-concentration, “I understand your predicament. I
empathize.
But I gotta predicament, too.” (A pause, as he prepared to deepen his voice, serrate his tone.) “Mine is that I’ve got an apparent case of fraud in front of me. You borrowed seven hundred dollars from Cashomatic PayDay, and the account history I’m looking at”—a lie, since Dave had no access to histories—“suggests you never intended to repay that money. That smells like fraud. That fits the definition. But—no, no, you need to listen, this is important—Cashomatic is willing to settle this without formal legal action. Without any kind of seizure. Without anyone showing up, unannounced, at your home or place of work. I’m authorized to waive the interest and penalties on this debt, and cut the principal by”—this fraction was always dictated by the debtor’s resistance level—“half. But you need to decide
now,
do you understand? Because there’s a deadline on this account, and it’s scheduled to move to our legal department tomorrow morning. And I can assure you things get ugly, not to mention
extremely
expensive, from there.”

The end result: Marcella Garcia of Holbrook, Arizona (a cashier at Jack in the Box whose stated predicament involved rebuilding her life after a bout of methamphetamine addiction while caring for a brain-damaged three-year-old), pays $412.50 ($62.50 added to the settlement as a “processing fee”) on a $700 payday loan on which she defaulted twelve years earlier, a loan Cashomatic charged off ten years earlier (before going bankrupt in the wake of a books-cooking scandal) and which was expunged from her credit history five years earlier—a debt, therefore, that wasn’t presently affecting her, adversely or otherwise. The end result: $412.50 for a debt that ARC paid 6.6 cents to acquire, and which Dave spent seventeen minutes collecting, or as he put it, “recovering.” The end result: the American Dream, at least from Dave’s end of the phone line, by which the son of a Turnpike toll collector acquires and assetizes, acquires and assetizes, marries a hot widowed actress who knows the correct way to pronounce “Bulgari,” then sets her up in a 4,400-square-foot house with a three-car garage and a swimming pool and the builder’s top-of-the-line “Brazilian hardwood” option. “There,” he would tell the employee, clicking
TERMINATE CALL
with a fat prideful flourish. “Keep
your
mouth moving, not theirs. You play them right, and they’ll do anything. Get ’em to pee in a scotch bottle if you want.
Anything.
”

In the kitchen he encountered Sara from the backside, his favorite view. He’d met her this way—on a standing-room-only New Jersey transit train out of Penn Station, him seated, her standing, that cotton-clad rump just inches from his twitchy rabbity nose; relinquishing her his seat had sparked small talk, then the exchange of cell numbers, then dinner in Sparta, then by and by this: her standing in the kitchen they’d designed together, loading the Thanksgiving dessert dishes into a custom-panel Viking Intelli-Wash dishwasher—and three years of full-frontal togetherness plus one surgical enhancement had done little to broaden the specificity of his attraction. He set down his beer glass and placed his hands on her hips, paying tribute to that attraction by giving her rear a few herky-jerky but affectionate crotch-thrusts. He calculated the odds of her unbuttoning her slacks right then and there as being about seven million to one, give or take a million, but then what were the odds of him having sculpted a triple-coil turd? Biology was his amigo today.

Or maybe not. Startled and jostled, Sara muttered “Jesus, Dave” as three dessert spoons went fumbling from her hand down to the floor.

“What?” He was still pumping a bit.

“Seriously, Dave,” she said, bending to retrieve the spoons. From her forehead she wiped away a few strands of blonde hair disheveled by his dry-humped endearment. “Enough.”

Dave shrugged, rebuffed, then investigated the refrigerator. “Any more of that pie left?” he asked.

“Tell me you’re not still hungry.”

“I didn’t say I was hungry,” he said. “I asked if we still had some of that pie. There’s a difference.”

“I saved some for Alexis.”

“She won’t eat it. No dairy, remember? Bad for the you-know-what.”

“Well, let her decide that. Everything okay out there? I’m almost done . . .”

“It’s all good,” Dave said, shifting glass containers around in the fridge, unpiling and repiling them. “Your sister’s scowling, Jeremy’s doing his knitting. Hey, where’s all the beer? Christ, I bought a whole case.”

“Jeremy put it outside.”

Dave straightened. “Outside?”

“In the snow,” she said. “Smaller carbon footprint, or something like that.”

Dave’s jaw dropped loose. “But more of
my
footprints, jeezum.” He shut the refrigerator with a sour grunt. “So, really . . . I gotta put my fucking boots on to get a beer?”

“Sorry,” she said, raising her hands to denote helplessness. “You know how he is.”

“Fruitycake, that’s what.”

“Be nice,” she said.

“I’m always nice.” There went that grin of his, the same one he’d flashed her that evening on the train when she’d agreed to give up her cell number. For mysterious reasons people called this a “shit-eating grin.”

“Am I nice, or am I nice?” he went on. “I’m nice.”

“You’re nice,” she agreed.

“I’m
so
nice, see, I’m gonna go dig around in the snow for my own friggin beer.” This he said with the benevolent gusto of someone heading out to donate a kidney, just for the altruistic hell of it. Dave knew Sara shared enough of Liz and Jeremy’s liberal tendencies for him not to belabor the carbon footprint issue. Better to play along, he thought. He waited to be buttered with praise.

“Want to be even nicer?” she said, in a decidedly unbuttered tone.

“I think I’m red-lining already.”

“Take the trash out for me?”

Dave sighed through his flat nose. Snubbed, scolded, and then saddled with a chore. This was not lifting his buzz. Practiced in the art of “recovery,” however—in extracting from people what they don’t want to give—Dave made one final attempt at Sara’s affections, giving her right buttock a firm, piggy, I’m-not-done-with-you cupping. “That’s nice, too,” he said quietly, in what he thought was seductive understatement.

But Sara said nothing—just hit the switch for the sink disposal, which gurgled and slurped and filled the room with a harsh machine racket that seemed intended to drive him out. Not even a coquettish wink, or the promise of “later” that she used to whisper in his ear. He stood there, looking victimized. Frankly he thought he deserved a little something-something for having put up with Liz and Jeremy all day, for biting his cranberry-sauced tongue when Jeremy had launched into a rant about “factory farming” at the dinner table, thereby insulting the turkey Sara had so expertly, Food Network–edly roasted. But no:
nada.
He feared his holiday might have peaked on the potty.