Cash Out

Dedication

For Nancy

Contents

One

Palo Alto, California

2008

R
od Stone scrunches his face as he thinks about it.

“So this guy's gonna handle your testicles?”

I stare back into Rod's gray eyes and glance down at the stubble on his square chin, refusing to crack a smile, knowing he certainly won't. He gives me this look, like I'm chewing a grasshopper, and squints. Juts his jaw. “This man will need to soap you up, won't he?”

I wave him off and look away. “Okay, okay.”

“He'll shave you.”

I nod, conceding.

“His hands soft and gentle”—he shudders in mock disgust—“as they drip warm, soapy water over your balls.”

We look at each other.

“Your legs spread wide open for him.”

I have to look away, unable to keep my straight face a minute longer. Then I take my pint glass and lift it toward him.

It is noon on a Tuesday, and I'm sitting in a dark lounge. By Friday, I'll have $1.1 million deposited into my bank account. I'll be like a bird uncaged, ready to fly away with my family, ready to start a new life. All I need to do is last another three days. Oh, and brave my way through a vasectomy.

“To my testes,” I say.

Rod Stone squints and juts his jaw out again, looking away. “That doc's gonna rip out your plumbing like a—”

“Okay, that's enough.”

F
ifty minutes later, my teeth are gritted, my back is arched, and my fists are clenched.

“So what's FlowBid stock at now? One-twenty?”

The doctor has my legs in stirrups. I've got a surgical clamp hanging out of my privates. I am not in my
safe place
.

“I should've bought when it was at ten.”

I nod and gasp. “Ten.”

“I bet you got in low, huh? What, you started there in oh-five, right?”

I grimace. “Oh-five.”

“You hang on a little longer, and you'll be sitting pretty the rest of your life.”

My jaws clench. “Sitting pretty.”

God, my wife would love seeing this. After birthing two ten-pounders and enduring decades of OB-GYN visits, she's been more than a little amused by the prospect of Vasectomy Day—by knowing that finally I'd be the one in stirrups, exposed and uncomfortable, the one whose crotch was absorbing wave after wave of throbbing pain. Of course, I don't think any of her OBs were ever as rough as my jock-swaggering urologist. You see, guys aren't gentle with each other—even when it comes to vasectomies. When Doc gave me his presurgery scrotal wash down, it felt like he was scrubbing a pot.

Then, as I lay on the table, I am suddenly struck by it all. The statement I'm making with this surgery, this de facto announcement that I'm done fathering babies, hits me like a ton of unexpected emotional bricks, and I'm transported back to two of the most amazing moments in my life.

Six years ago.

Three years ago.

Six Years Ago

I am a new daddy. Forty-eight hours after Harry's birth, and I am still overcome with joy. When my wife and son sleep, I can't stop crying. My new family is safe, my son Harry is here, and my life will never be the same. It's instant love, and it's the most beautiful thing on Earth. What did I ever do to deserve this?

Sometimes it blows me away to think that six years have passed since then. When I drive Harry to school, I watch as he bolts from the car to join his buddies, smiling and joking, fully independent there on the playground, complete and well-adjusted and on his way, and think back on everything: all the times I slept beside his bassinet with my fingertips on his chest, worried he'd stop breathing; all the times I changed his diapers; all the times he needed to be rocked; all the times I had to put a favorite toy in “Daddy Jail”; all the times he cried out in the night and I'd come padding down the hallway; all the times he needed Mommy and no one else would do. I think back on all the firsts: the first steps, the first words, the first day in big-boy underwear, the first haircut, the first rush to the hospital, the first time he saw something that truly ignited his imagination, the first time he insisted that his mysterious and elusive imaginary friend, “Abey Dabey Cabey,” was real and much too complex for us to understand.

Would be nice to go back to that time, for a moment.

Three Years Ago

It is less than an hour after Ben's birth. I am a new daddy again, and I am overcome with joy. I look down at him, and he is beautiful. I'm still staring at him when a newly minted doctor slips into our room, refusing to look me in the eye. She announces that our son has a massive tumor in his abdominal cavity.

In an instant, our world darkens and tilts. This can't be happening. But I know all too well that the worst does happen to people—every day. The doc leads me to another room and shows me an X-ray of Ben's little tummy. On one side, all you see is solid white.

I stand there and nod. I can't speak.

That night, I cry on the phone with Rod Stone. I hold Kate's hand until she falls asleep. I pace the hospital floors until the wee hours. I stare at the walls. I stare at Ben—he is so beautiful.

The next morning, a platoon of doctors parades in with news: It was all an awful misdiagnosis. The white mass in that X-ray was nothing more than an air pocket. A trip to radiology confirms it. I am numb. My family is safe, Ben is actually healthy—in fact, uncommonly strong.

It takes a long time—months and months—before I really believe the doctors. After all, I know the darkness always looms, is always right around the corner—waiting for its moment, waiting to toss lives upside down, waiting to make anyone wilt in its iron grip. It has hit before, and we know it will return someday, as it does for us all.

Someday.

M
y urologist is cutting and pulling and snipping. It doesn't hurt anymore, not exactly, but it
is
screwing with my head.

“I'm conservative, Dan. A belt-and-suspenders guy.”

I grimace. “Suspenders.”

He throws something at the trash can. A wet slap against the plastic liner.

“So”—
yank
—“I'm thorough.”

Smoke. I smell smoke.
What the hell?
I lift my head just enough to see a stream of thin white smoke meandering out of my crotch. I close my eyes and lower my head.

“What I do is, snip, double-tie, double-tie, cauterize. That's what you're smelling.”

I have to change the subject. “I was gonna say—you didn't buy any FlowBid early on?”

“No.” He sighs, irritated. “I was stupid. My adviser told me to buy eight hundred shares, and I passed. I was a nonbeliever, Dan. I mean, who could've predicted this?” Another snip, another wet slap against the trash can. “But what do you think? You think there's still some upside there?”

People always ask me that. They always want to know how much higher the FlowBid share price can skyrocket, how much more money it can make them, whether there's still decent coin to be made if they get in now—because, hell,
someone's
buying more and more of FlowBid, given its ever-skyward share price.

Such a dilemma.

The FlowBid story is just one of many that have played out in the last decade, across Silicon Valley and all the way up the peninsula to San Francisco. Google. Facebook. NetApp. The reborn Apple. Along with hundreds of smaller companies, they're fueling this second Internet boom—along with skyrocketing property values and easy loans, that is. That dot-com crash eight years ago? These new economists warning about a storm brewing off-coast? The chance that it all could come crashing down?
Meh
—that's all just noise. Moderation? Caution? That's for losers. So more and more fortune seekers come pouring into the area every year, from across the country and around the world, sending rent and home prices into the stratosphere, clogging the freeways with an endless procession of BMWs and Audis and Porsches, flooding posh restaurants and spas, overcrowding the Whole Foods aisles and espresso shop lines. And with them they're bringing an entirely new kind of lifestyle to the Bay Area: Out go the values of balance, tolerance, and diversity,
in
come fast and easy wealth, unquenchable greed, insane work hours, outsider arrogance, and supreme indifference to anything that's more than five years old.

My world is tilted.

The place where I grew up is gone.

I want out.

Just a few years ago, I felt like I was making a difference. I was working as a reporter, calling out people hurting other people, people taking things that didn't belong to them, while shining a light on people who were doing amazing things, people who wanted more from their government. I covered issues that mattered to real people, issues that dwarfed the IT babble that now dominates my life.

Now I find myself with the suits, dealing with people like Janice from Finance.

Take yesterday. Janice pops into my cube, her face worked up into a knot.

“Waddlington needs the PMO master doc for the P5s by EOB. And if you can't get the Q1 POD results sooner, then we'll need to put the P6s into the FOD, and that includes the L2s and L6s.”

“Um . . .” I squint at her, confused. “I write speeches. I think you've got the wrong guy.”

Her face tightens. “No, I don't.”

“Huh?”

“Beth Gavin sent me. She's Stephen Fitzroy's—”

“Executive assistant. Yeah, I know.”

Beth Gavin loves this kind of thing: throwing shit assignments my way, assignments that have nothing to do with my job, that throw me off my game. This is what Beth Gavin does.

Janice adds, “And don't forget the SWAT reports for the L10s and L16s in the FOD.”

My throat is so dry, I feel like it'll crack.
How did I get here?
Not that anyone else around here ever indulges in second thoughts. They're too busy talking about
the new guy
.

“Fitzroy loves the new guy,” Barbara from Procurement keeps telling me.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Out-of-the-box thinker,” she says. “That's what they're saying. ‘Out-of-the-box thinker, out-of-the-box thinker.' On and on and on.”

The new guy doesn't look like us. He has this whole I-don't-give-a-shit vibe going. Long, dark beard that comes to a point near his sternum. Big head of black wavy hair. Big, thick tribal tattoos on his long, muscular arms. Dark sunglasses, worn indoors. Heavy, charcoal-gray jeans, worn-in T-shirts, and big black boots. Yeah, he's a pretty jarring sight around FlowBid.

I wish I could dress like the new guy. Then I realize,
In a few days, I can.

B
ack on the vasectomy table, the doc asks, “So what do you think, Dan? That stock of yours have more gas in the tank?”

And, like an idiot, I say what I always say: “We still see a lot of upside.”

Because, hell, FlowBid ain't never gonna crash.

I realize I'm still arching my back, still gritting my teeth, my fists still balled up at my sides. I pull in a deep breath and force myself to relax. Then the doc swaggers around the table, takes my hand, and squeezes it hard.

“All done,” he says. “Now, remember what I said—ice on, ice off, every twenty minutes, for the next twenty-four hours. Use a bag of frozen peas. No strenuous activity of any kind.” He squints at me. “You screw up my work, I'll kill you.”

In a minute, my tighty-whities are stuffed with a mound of gauze and the doc is leading me out. “You're still packing heat the next ten times, so be careful where you point that thing.”

The nurses are mute as I pad through the waiting area and head for the elevator. I know what they're thinking, and they know what
I'm
thinking—that we're all thinking about my nuts and scrotum, which I have to admit is kind of funny. When my cell phone breaks the silence, I know who it is without looking.

Kate.

She's giving me her you-poor-baby voice, slightly amused. “How they hanging?”

“Not hanging. Hurting.”

“Poor little Danny had a little procedure.”

The elevator doors open, and I shuffle in. “I get the couch tonight? Doc's orders.”

“I know, I know. You sure you can still do this appointment?”

Appointment?
Mind scrambles.
Oh shit. . . . Fuck.

That would be our weekly meeting with our sex counselor, the professional who's supposed to help us get our groove back, help me prove to Kate once and for all that I really do love her. Like a macho idiot, earlier this week I insisted that we keep the appointment on the books. A little snip wouldn't put this man out of order.

I grit my teeth. “Oh, I'm fine.”

“You sure? I can just go solo.”

Solo? Not with our counselor. “No, no. I'll be there.”