0.17 Circling the drain  (Page 5/7)

Then one day F5 dropped its lawsuit against Joey, and a few weeks later—June 3, 1999, to be exact—Squish called to say that the next day F5 would be going public. When I got to work that morning, I logged on to Nasdaq and saw that F5 was indeed trading. It would close the day at $14.87 per share—a price that set Squish’s worth at nearly $20 million.

Suddenly, Squish and Sumi were reconciled and Sumi was on her way to getting bejeweled, married and pregnant before the year was out. And a few weeks after the IPO, shortly after a visit by Squish to New Orleans, a cartoon by Walt Handelsman appeared in The New Orleans Times-Picayune . It depicted two chubby little boys, ten years old or so, wearing T-shirts and shorts, standing outdoors. They were holding bananas to their ears as if they were telephones, and talking to one another. “I gotta go, Joey,” one was saying. “Someone just offered me $200 million for my banana.”

Days passed. I kept trying to relieve my post-IPO numbness with doses of beer.

There was this weird way in which Squish and Joey’s sudden wealth was an abstraction. They still hung around my office and hectored me about my worthlessness, just as they always had. They still talked in vague ways about my future with them. They still bought lunches and beer for me—although now we went to fancier establishments. They still dressed and acted like aggressively crude slacker adolescents. And although much of their talk now was about brokers and financial advisers and Goldman Sachs people and this whole new world they had been vaulted into nearly overnight, they didn’t seem materially changed—it was as if the money they had now was symbolic, or virtual, or in some way not entirely legal tender. And it grew more abstract in my imagination with each passing day as the stock price shot into the stratosphere.

Perhaps it had to do with the unreal way they went about spending. Squish went out one day and bought a mansion—a huge, turreted, old classic home on Queen Anne Hill, looking down at the Space Needle. It had four stories and more rooms than I could count. He moved his three pieces of furniture into it and rattled around like a ball bearing in a boxcar, emailing photos of it to Sumi as part of his campaign of persuasion to get her to marry him (“Look at the house I bought us!”) and calling me at home in the evening, offering me endless beer if I would just come over and keep him company. He would lie there alone at night wide awake and frightened by one noise after another, like a little kid alone in a haunted house.

Another day, he and Joey drove across Lake Washington and bought three new Mercedes (two Kompressors, Joey’s being silver and Squish’s the color of a pumpkin, and a larger, black four-door E320—the bigger car, Squish emailed Sumi, being their eventual “family car”), and came racing back across the lake in the Kompressors. A few days later, Joey drove his over the mountains to eastern Washington, where the highways are straight, and floored the accelerator. He was traveling at 160 miles per hour when the radiator hose burst. Night after night, Squish would come back to his mansion in his Kompressor after dark and crash into the pillar on one side of his garage door, the turn being too tight for him to make in the dark. Within weeks, he managed to make a $60,000 car look like a splendidly appointed piece of junk.