A Plate Lunch

The Emirate of Dubai

You're Moving Where?

"Wailuku."

"Why what?" Andy said - cocking his head like a spaniel.

Andy was from an island himself. Some desolate rock off the Scottish coast. He'd spent the last forty years or so wrangling money for companies like Shell Oil and a few others in the Death Star class but at the moment he was CFO of an outfit in Dubai called Shelf Drilling. I'd been working with Andy for about a year and a half getting an IPO done (or, as things turned out not done) on the London stock exchange for the group of private equity swells who owned Shelf.  The private equity boys had bought a bunch of 40 year old offshore drilling rigs on the cheap from the Transocean boys in Houston.  The Transocean boys had spilled about 200 million gallons of crude oil (give or take) in the Gulf of Mexico in the Spring of 2010 and needed to pay a lot of freight to the EPA.

In one of those Forrest Gump moments which had come to define my life as a bean counter, several of these drilling rigs had familiar names. They were the same ones my family had made a buck off of in the late seventies on the Texas coast selling fuel and drilling mud to.  It's a small world.  And like jet airliners (which are in the same price range as shallow water jack-up drilling rigs) these old vessels can be kept good as new for many decades.

Just like me.

A random series of events had led to my wrangling the 30 kilograms of documents Andy was putting together. These meticulously dense notebooks containing a vast word salad of financial and accounting terms would permit Shelf to squeeze a quarter of a billion pounds sterling out the widows and orphans of Great Britain.

Andy knew Roger, Roger was an ex-partner of mine, Roger had left Deloitte, I had just gotten back from North Dakota, John Garris was working for Roger and had sold a consulting package to Transocean for the carve-out financials, John and I had implemented Sarbanes-Oxley at US Oncology back in the aughts...   Like I said, sort of a Forrest gets a college degree kind of story - minus the heart strings.

During the time I'd been in Dubai I'd gotten to know Andy a little bit - which is to say, as well as I wanted to.  Andy thought he was smarter than me because he made a lot more money than I did.  I thought I was smarter than him because... well, I am smarter than him.

We had almost gotten off to a bad start when he sent me an email strategically copied to a group of his subordinates a few days after I had hit the ground. The longish note contained a few snide remarks questioning my arithmetic skills and a sampling of his English vocabulary. Clearly, it was designed to put me in my place. Not strictly necessary, as I knew my place: taking money from a bunch of filthy rich guys for writing regulatory poetry spiked with random numbers.  I promptly responded to the email (not neglecting to cc all his boys) and indicated that not only did I do long division - maybe even a bit better than he did - but also knew some big words too.

There were reasons I was working for Andy and not the other way around.  Business books speak of something called 'emotional intelligence.'

Relationships between guys like me and Andy are always a little complicated.  You know you're only there for the money - they know you're only there for the money.  Pretenses to the contrary are necessary, tedious and exhausting. These guys need you just a tad more than need them. But at the prices you're charging they expect to be treated like spa resort patrons (the occasional clarifying email notwithstanding.)  Inevitably they begin to think of you as an employee. One of the reasons you're a hired gun is that you don't want to be an employee.  But living in five star hotels, riding in black cars and realizing a very high yield on the "money to hassle" ratio... is almost more enjoyable than the gigantic inconvenience of finding another gig.

Besides, there's always a self-regarding CFO no matter what sort of deal you land in.  There's always an Andy.

Shelf had a limited number of work visas available to them.  I didn't have one and so they had to fly me somewhere like Amsterdam (or Cambodia, or Spain, or, you get the idea) every 60 days for a long weekend to get my passport re-stamped, and was of the opinion I had landed another in a series of pretty sweet gigs. I am pretty lucky.  And I know people.

Also I have some pretty fancy bullshit at my disposal.  Bullshit is the engine of capitalism.  I like to think of myself as sort of a Donald Trump without the orange pancake foundation.

Or the $8 billion. Or the 757.

Old Andy rang me up about 40 seconds after I hit send on my ill-advised (though accurate and precise) email and asked me upstairs for a visit.  Would I be heading to the airport in a few hours and hopping the next Emirates flight back to Houston? Apparently not.  After our little dust up, just like a couple of school yard kids, Andy and I became faux friendly.  He began delegating some of project's more unpleasant heavy lifting to me. He spent even more time doing nothing.

To be perfectly candid, I'm probably better at standing up to guys like Andy than I am at authoring stock prospectuses. But in corporate finance, the more zeros there are, the more valuable hubris becomes. This deal had nine zeros.  But these things are, candidly, somewhat less complicated than they look. However, there are a finite group of people who know the spreadsheet formulas, can manage the egos of the 'C Level' guys and are willing to live in hotels for 18 months at a stretch.

My job pays about the same as dentistry.  But technical accounting is more interesting and less dangerous than sticking your hands in the mouths of sedated people.

At least I think it is.

Over the next eighteen months Andy and I managed a few cordial interactions and I was getting feedback from my boys in Houston that Andy kind of liked me and respected my competence.  None of that was probably actually true - but the fact that he was sending out those signals was enough to manage my own fragile ego.

*  *  *

A sad fact of life in high finance (and trailer parks) is this: Not all deals get done. No matter how brilliant the private equity trick or the nimble IPO technicians are, sometimes the rabbit just stays in the hat.  When the price of oil went from $115 to $45 in what seemed like half an hour one afternoon about a week before the geniuses at Goldman Sachs were going to stuff the freshly minted Shelf Drilling shares down the throats of a few hundred of their luckiest clients... we pretty much knew all was lost.

I stayed on for about eight months after the offering tanked.  There were floors to be swept. Arithmetic problems to be solved - bond holders to be placated.  When that large a dollop of shit hits the fan in a private equity cash out, a lot of the talented employees hit the exits - or are thrown out the windows. Consultants tend to have the safest gig in the house.

So I stayed.

And stayed.

I went to Thailand and visited a pal who was playing sort of the same game I was.  One month in Basra in the Iraqi oil fields counting beans and one month in Phuket in a beach house.  Although there is some risk in getting your head removed by ISIS in a scenario like that, it's a relatively low risk. And my friend Trey couldn't seem to get enough of that bargain basement Thai luxury. I toured Angkor Wat.  I went to Salvador Dali Museum in Barcelona. I stopped off for a few days in Antwerp.

Antwerp?

Pretty much like most bad things - all good things come to an end.  I was told in February that this three month contract was going to be the last one.

But just like my old friend (and inspiration for many of my career choices) Forrest - I knew that there were other good things out there.  Just over the shimmering sand dunes of the Arabian Peninsula.

I started thinking about what was next in this big old box of chocolates as I sat at the bus stop headed to the business class lounge at DXB.  Something else back home in Houston?  Maybe South America. The shit was hitting the fan again in Venezuela - there's always a buck to be scrounged in the oil fields of Maracaibo.

I can say with complete candor that the Hawaiian Islands were not in the mix as I vaguely contemplated my next caper.

* * *

My kid called me up from the Maui Memorial ICU.  She was working nights and it was high noon at the Shelf building.  She had a lull from tending the sick folks and decided to give her pop a ring.  She and I have a sort of a Jewish mother and daughter thing going on.  We talk about 3 times a day on the phone - even if we're 10 or 12 time zones apart.  Out of  nowhere she says:

"Nick and I discussed this and we think you should move to Maui."

She had made a trip to Hawaii on July 4, 2013 after having spent a year giving Thorazine injections to crazy people in South Harlem for some social services agency. Sort of a chip off the old block. After two weeks she had called me up and tried to get me to name some reasons she shouldn't stay in Maui. I honestly couldn't think of any. She never even went back to the City.  Now here she was trying to pull me through the looking glass with her.

"Ask your boyfriend how many public companies are headquartered on Maui.  What the hell am I going to find to do in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?"

Note: there is precisely one public company in domiciled on Maui.  Maui Land and Pineapple Company, Inc.  NYSE ticker MLP.  They don't even grow pineapples.

I like Hawaii as much as the next guy - but I also like to eat.  Yet, somehow, she talked me into it.  I actually tried to get some work with the boys at MLP. They were extremely polite.

At length, some moments before my funds ran out - I manage other people's finances but never seem to get around to my own - I went to work for a local CPA firm in Kahului.  They gave me a gig but didn't turn out to be quite as polite as the boys at Maui Pineapple.  I didn't stay at the CPA firm long and I think everybody was pretty happy about that.

I know I was.

They say most people last less than a year out here in Maui but this isn't exactly my first island rodeo. I've survived in New York City.  I must say though, the other islands I've lived on: Manhattan, Galveston, Key West, South Padre - they all had causeways to the mainland.  And public companies in the neighborhood.

But the Gump abides.  I've taken on a sort of Jeff Lebowski ethos and, although I can't quite do the Hawaiian shirt thing, I do wear my Birkenstocks most every day.

I've got my own little CPA firm now.  And I hear Andy flew the coop back to Scotland a while back. One of the private equity B-School kids is babysitting the Shelf Drilling bondholders.  The IPO is still somewhere in the future.

I'll soon be celebrating my second birthday here in Wailuku Town and the jungles of West Maui are feeling more and more like home every day.  My little bungalow suits me just fine - and I get to see my daughter the nurse two or three times a week instead of two or three times a year. Keeps the long distance bills down.  And although I seem to be making about 20% of what I used to, except for the occasional clamshell boxed plate lunch, I can't seem to find anything much to spend money on here. Even a high powered financial executive like me can pretty much outfit himself down at the Savers thrift shop for next to nothing.

It's not like I'm going to learn how to surf or anything - but I'm getting  used to the place.

I am having some trouble with the names of things. I've never seen so many vowels in my whole damn life. But there's not really much here that makes me want to be elsewhere.  I remain amused at the locals bitching about the cold weather when it drops below 70.  And having done stints in L.A. and Houston, I really don't understand how the word 'traffic' even exists in the local lexicon.

I've been back home to Texas a time or two - and even looked in on my friends in New York and L.A. - but I feel pretty happy on final approach to OGG.  I think I even made out my little place in the Iao Valley from the air last time.

Is there a Hula dance in my future?  Who knows - like mama said: you never know what you're gonna get.


Ah Hui Hou, Ya'll.


MarkLuku Gump
- stranger in paradise