REKT - Chapter 22

Chicago Andy

I find Andy three days later flirting with his stylist. Find is not the right word. I’ve been summoned. He wants his electronics back. He called me to one of those hip brick warehouses that photographers and film people work out of for a few years before the building gets converted to condos and sells units for a thousand a square foot. There’s a bare utility to the room, like they rent it by the half day. In one corner, the stylist is using a rack of power suits to block off her makeup table. Against the back wall, there’s a green screen surrounded by commercial grade lighting.

Andy’s teeth have taken on a new shade of white, his skin glowing with a tan he did not have in Maui. His hair has been molded into a Christian Bale in American Psycho business coif, skin smooth, possibly exfoliated. He’s definitely had his nails done. Doofus. What he can’t hide is the tiredness in his eyes. Despite the pancake makeup, I can tell he’s not rested, that he has not put the last three weeks behind him.

Andy doesn’t bother introducing me. He keeps talking to the stylist, asking to see pictures of her family, commenting on how good-looking her mother still is. Telling her how gorgeous Colombianas are. Andy’s doing this on purpose. He’s trying to punish me, make me feel small. It’s retribution for leaving him in Maui. This goes on for four minutes, five minutes, she keeps looking over at me, embarrassed at Andy’s rudeness, trying to take the initiative to introduce herself, but Andy always interrupts and redirects back to his flirtations. I’m running through the scenarios in my head, knowing that anything other than silence is a win for Andy. If I drop the bag and walk off, he wins, if I clear my throat and interrupt him, he wins. I win by standing silent and eating shit. I win by doing nothing, by letting him act so obnoxious that it becomes obvious to everyone here how enormous a douche Andy is.

So, I stand and wait, holding a trade show backpack full of all his gear. A little weasel walks into the room. He’s got the black hoodie on, the blue jeans, the vintage Jordans. He’s got a set of index cards, inked up and highlighted. Andy breaks off his conversation with the stylist and turns to the weasel. They speak low in murmurs, trying to keep the conversation from me. Andy thumbs through the cards, nodding, pointing out minor corrections, continuing to ignore me. I’m getting used to the world moving on around me, I’m approaching a point of imperviousness few can imagine. The weasel looks at me, I stare right through him. Old me would avoid the eye contact, but I want the weasel to see just who he’s in bed with even if I don’t know what the fuck he’s doing here, what any of these people are doing here. They are talking about alt coins, some borderline shit coins. This weasel lives online, I can tell because Andy doesn’t address him by a first name. He calls him Bull God. I snort every time Andy calls him Bull God. The first time because it was hilarious, the second and third time because I’m an asshole, but all the time after because it is hilarious. Bull God. This weasel is maybe twenty-five, he looks like a trainee for a Big Five accounting firm gone rogue. The most ridiculous part is the big gold medallion with the bitcoin logo hanging from his neck.

“Something funny?” the weasel asks me.

“Nothing at all Bull God.” I burst out laughing as I say that.

“I’ll flame you so hard bro.”

“Flame away Bull God. Like I give a fuck.”

Bull God doesn’t realize that I’m not really online. Sure, I have my Netflix and my Spotify and my Amazon Prime. I’ve got my Seamless and my Tinder and my Google Maps. If the internet disappeared tomorrow, a good portion of my life would be really fucked, but my social life wouldn’t. I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, Insta. I don’t have a podcast or a YouTube channel, never been on Twitch, haven’t updated LinkedIn in five years. He can flame the fuck out of me, but I’m not sure what he’s going to flame. There’s an old Tumblr and a Blogspot address he can go to work on.

Bull God doesn’t realize that I don’t have much of a social life. I’ve got Andy and Niko. I’ve got Deacon Joe and Kelvin and all the other bros from the road. I have a fantasy football league with my buddies from ASU. We do a golf trip in the summer and a ski trip in the winter together. I’ve got my family and four friends back home. That’s all I need. Social pressures are something I cut out early on when dealing with anxiety, trying to manage the panic. I don’t need much more than a bare minimum of people, provided that those people are interesting. Explains a bit about Andy and me, why I tolerate him, what we owe each other. I find him fascinating. He filters the world and feeds me the parts he knows I like. I make sure he keeps his shit together. Symbiosis.

“Who is this tool?” the Bull God asks Andy.

Andy looks up at me and winks. I’ve won, he’s broken first. The temptation to fuck with Bull God greater than his interest in freezing me out. This is something we do. We fuck with people. Sometimes we get the bear, sometimes the bear gets three hundred BTC from us, but we still fuck with people. I don’t think we’ll ever learn.

“This tool is Ryan Declan, my partner in Icarus. Flame him and you flame me.”

Bull God doesn’t like that answer. I don’t like Bull God.

“Hey,” Bull God says as he nods at me.

“Hey.” I reply. Normally there’d be a shaking of hands after this, but neither of us is putting ours out first.

“Just let me finish with the Bull God and we can talk,” Andy says.

“Sure.”

***

We are outside on a fire escape. The wind is coming off the lake. There’s no warmth left in this land. It won’t be back until March or April. I can’t see that far off. I can’t think that far away. Everything is narrowing, that much is clear. We are entering a tunnel. The bubble is a tunnel that rises higher into space, its walls are collapsing, growing narrower. Flow is becoming critical. What can we push through the tunnel of the bubble before the walls burst? This is the new nature of things. Not that the old nature was much different, only that there was room for imagination, there were still alternatives out there. Decentralization was a real possibility for a moment. There could be a future without Facebook, without gatekeepers. We could have had a distributed consciousness. It could have been immune to manipulation. That’s what true faith was about. It was never about coins or lambos or mooning. It was about giving the internet back to the people, creating an infrastructure that was resilient, fault tolerant, self-healing. That dream is dead. Money has taken over. Ask anyone about Bitcoin and they know it. Ask anyone about blockchain and most have an idea. Decentralization? No, that knowledge never made the leap. The apostles were co-opted so quickly by the church. The church is money, magical fake money.

I never had the true faith because I never believed that decentralization had a chance. Kelvin asked me if I was naïve or cynical. The answer was always cynical. Icarus was a vehicle for co-existence between cash and coins. It was an agent of the co-opt, but the banks didn’t even need that. The banks view this entire thing as a circus that’s going to spin out on its own. That’s why they didn’t want to play ball with us. They don’t want the stink, the scandal. Unlike so many other messes, this one isn’t worth the effort of cleaning up, so they never got in it to begin with.

Andy and I are aligned in our cynicism. I can read that on his face, his fake tan, fake white teeth face. He’s gussied himself out for the sake of flow. He’s determined to push something through the tunnel of the bubble. I need to find out what. Where do we begin?

“How are you?” I ask Andy.

“Good, I’m really good. First time I’ve been right in a long time.”

“What’s all this?”

“I’m doing a series of video shorts. Providing analysis on coins, giving my expert opinion to investors.”

I don’t remember Andy having expert opinions. I don’t remember him performing any analysis. He knows a lot about exchanges, the places where people buy and sell coins, but the actual coins? That’s not a part of our portfolio. We know the big guys, we know Blockstar of course, but the alt coins? Andy never had time for that. He never bothered to learn. That’s why we put trading on Nikola. She has the big brain for the market. She has the trader’s instincts. Andy is all name and personality. That explains the Bull God.

“Bull God is your analyst?” I ask.

“Yeah. He’s a big fish in a little pond. Smart kid. Has a lot of good insight, but he’s not good on the mic. He gets in a lot of beefs online, has a bit of a Napoleon complex. No one wants to book him for bigger segments, so we’ve hired him.”

“We’ve hired him?”

“It’s not loud out here Ryan. You heard me. We’ve hired him. He’s my ghostwriter. I’m his mouth.” “Andy, are you really alright?”

Andy puts his hands on my shoulders. He squares me up, looks deep into my eyes. He’s putting the entirety of himself into this now. He’s locking me in, creating a tunnel between us. I’m about to get the no bullshit truth out of him.

“Ryan, I need to be in position on the field. That’s why I left Maui. I have a purpose now. A real purpose. Everything that happened up to this point, the partying, the breakdowns, the shakedowns, all was leading to this moment. I’m clean. I’m going to stay clean. I’m working with my doctor here. I’m taking my meds. Call Maui Lutheran. Talk to Dr. Wendy. Check in with my doctor here. All I can ask is that you trust that I’m taking care of myself.”

He didn’t answer my question. He danced around it with every answer other than the one I was asking for. He also revealed what he knows, that he knows about Fritz.

“Andy, are you alright?”

“I’m better than I’ve been in a long time. I have a purpose. I need to be in position on the field.” Again, with the non-answer.

“So, what’s the celebrity angle? Why are you turning yourself into a talking head?”

“That’s what Ram told me to do. He said I needed to preach, that I needed to spread knowledge to the people.”

And there we go. Andy isn’t alright. He’s following Ram’s script. Let’s give him a piece of news and see how he reacts. I need to fluster some truth out of Andy, read him on a fractured level where there are so many broken pieces of a person that it’s hard to stay on message.

“Andy, there isn’t going to be a hedge fund. I’m getting out of all this after Icarus closes.” “No, there isn’t going to be a hedge fund. That’s not our path. That’s why the world was pushing against us, delivering us into dark shit.”

Ah, okay so he’s really leaning into this Ram prophecy. In one way it’s very convenient. Keeps me from having to break hard with him. Keeps me from worrying too much about this preacher televangelist or whatever thing he’s up to now.

“Andy, you know that Fritz shook us down. That our stack took a huge hit. Nikola has us back to about six hundred thousand. I’m sorry man.”

“Fritz is a fat fuck who will get his in time. You did what you had to do Ryan. I’d have made the same play. Don’t worry about him now.”

“Are you sure Andy? That was a ton of money, puts us back at square one.”

“What was the alternative? No one would have listened to my words if Fritz cooperated, and we got taken down. Everything that has happened has led to this moment,” Andy says.

“What’s this moment Andy? I still don’t get it.”

“You said you spoke with Ram?”

“I did and I thought she was a load of shit. Sorry man, but if you really believe in her then I’m not sure you’re right.”

The door to the fire escape opens. It’s that weasel, as if on cue.

“Andy, they are ready to shoot.”

“Are you going to watch Ryan?”

“No, I’m going to check with your doctor, with Dr. Wendy. I’m going to see what they have to say about you Andy. This doesn’t feel right to me.”

Andy gives me a hug. “Have some faith Ryan. Go on, verify but have some faith in me.”

“Hey Andy.”

“Yeah?”

“I need to talk to you about Joe. He’s out there.”

“I know. We’ll talk later.”  

PREVIOUS CHAPTER - NEXT CHAPTER