Under the Stars and Stripes (Under Him)

I hadn’t particularly planned to go into finance. My degree from Columbia University was in Fine Arts. Sadly, there weren’t many openings for painters or illustrators when I graduated. I tried cartooning for a while, but my sense of humor proved too avant-garde for a general audience.

I got some work with indie magazines and underground comix, but the amount I made fell well short of my obscenely high bills and I had to get what my dad always referred to as a ‘suit job.’ He had mostly worked from home and had a work wardrobe consisting of an astounding array of pajamas and robes, color-coded not only to the day of the week but also to the time of day. Cream white or bright yellow for morning, dove gray or red for afternoon, and blue for evening.

His evening outfits were also the ones he slept in. My mom was far too busy raising me to have a job, as well as obscuring strongly the trappings of the Capitalists system as laid out by Adam Smith. Her preference went in favor of the Calvinist-based Keynesian school of exchange in which trade was to be a public service and mutually beneficial.

So, she started an online store back when Amazon still only sold books and Etsy was not even a thought. Money could be exchanged, but it needed to be on an equal basis, much of the business on the site using a consensus bartering model in which people agreed what they would give for something else. There was haggling galore, and it was rare, but no one ever ended up getting cheated.

They both nearly fainted when I said I was going to work on Wall Street. It was only two years after Occupy and tensions were still high, wounds still fresh. Mom had been there everyday, conducting business from her smartphone.

Dad kept an eye on developments, including when mom was arrested. It took four NYPD officers to literally carry her, a cop per limb to the paddy wagon, at which point she remained laying on the floor and refused to ‘give the pigs the satisfaction.’ It wasn’t a terribly surprising development, considering the 1312 tattoo she’d had since high school.

It had been an accident and fluke of a situation. The stars aligned just right to make it so that I had a natural knack for numbers, including the meta-processing and preternatural understanding of Systems Theory to accurately predict up to 85% of the time.

One of the downtown investment firms had run an ad looking for analysts. Freshly graduated and newly mothered, I jumped at it.

It had been a pretty hard sell. A 22-year-old with no business experience applying to a top flight investment house sounded ludicrous, even to me. Though, the way I figured it the worst they might do is laugh at me, and I was certainly used to that.

Except they didn’t laugh. They called back. Apparently, the notion was just odd enough to pique their interest. At least to see what I was playing at, likely assuming that I had applied because I had something going on that wasn’t immediately apparent.

It felt like a parlor trick. Going by what I had said in the preliminary phone call, the hiring board concocted a test by which they assembled previous numbers for businesses they had already invested in to see if I could predict their later worth, up to and including the date of the test. I was right within a cent.

There were particular advantages to my position. Those who worked in numbers and tech were, with all due respect to George Orwell, the real unacknowledged legislators of the world. Not in terms of clout but rather in the far more important aspects of the function and direction of the company.

There really was no company to run without them. It was a situation which brought a particular level of freedom, which in many ways was more important than power. Those in so-called ‘power positions’ were subject to the arbitrary whims of the corporate rules, including dress code, and always had someone above them and could be fired at almost any time.

I couldn’t. I was too important, and the executives and directors bloody well knew it. I also didn’t have to wear a suit at all if I didn’t want to. Except if I didn’t, I knew that some Junior Trader or another would feel the need to correct me, thereby requiring me to explain the situation and I had neither the time nor patience.

It was tempting. My lunch break was short, and the walk was long, but I just couldn’t see trying to get my car out. Thank goodness I always kept a pair of sneakers in my briefcase for just such occasions.

“Lookin’ good,” Amy said, as I sat at our table.

“Seriously?”

“Sure, Victorian by way of hipster. I like.”