Without O’Connelly realizing it success had progressively transformed his financial situation from that of a wage earning journalist to a successful writer with a substantial income earned from the sale of his books. When the US tax authorities started to become over interested in his growing prosperity, he decided it was time to return to Europe renting his Telegraph Hill apartment to a senior investment banker at Wells Fargo.
He enjoyed the profits of his success, though whenever he took his boat out into the Bay he remembered what J.P.Morgan had replied when a friend asked what a yacht would cost to operate – if he had to ask that question then he couldn’t afford it. O’Connelly did not ask, because not only did he know the answer, his accountant constantly reminded him of it, and many other things he would have preferred to forget, like when his new book was scheduled for publishing.
He consoled himself with the thought he had bought his San Francisco apartment when he had, prices had since gone through the roof, and so had rents, though in the last months the Bay Area prices had been sliding, but Telegraph Hill was not the Bay Area – it was a golden investment. For a rather successful writer he was a wealthy man and his success had come at the right time enabling him to build an asset base which had risen spectacularly, the boat apart. His stock market investments had also risen, when with the luck of the Irish, he had invested in the stock market after the dotcom crash betting on Google and Microsoft. However, he remembered the saying: if you don’t stay humble, the market will humble you – after all he was a writer and what was important was a new book, instead of counting his past successes.
San Francisco had been qualified as the third most unaffordable housing market in the world, that is to say seriously unaffordable. He remembered his accountant had advised him against paying cash for the apartment, but accountants and advisers were often wrong. Was it money in the bank? That was the least sure of future predictions, in the worst place it was a place to live, and a damn good place at that, especially if things got bad in writing, where a writer could fall into disfavour and disappear forever in the blink of an eyelid. He had never really trusted the stock market; too many ordinary people had lost their shorts too many times. All he knew was the money he saved in interest on bank loans could only be to his advantage and the way things were could inflation seemed to be back. He wasn’t a mathematical genius, but as a student at UC Berkeley he had noted the San Francisco peninsula was a cul de sac that could not be physically expanded.
The gleaming towers of steel and glass that had once symbolised the power of American capitalism had given way to an obsession for niptuck, dental rebuilds, liposuction, health and eternal youth, and a refusal to care for the hideous excrescence of living dead slowly lurching down Mission towards the Financial district, its tentacles threatening to pull a debt burdened elite into its own dark world. London, Frankfurt, Shanghai and Bombay now boasted their own skylines and their versions of capitalism. The American dream was fading and even its once mighty army struggled, mired in the clutches of a Babylonian nightmare.
3
Rue Montbelliard
De Nugis 110, 24-25
You are asking an inexperienced and unskilled man to write, and to write from the court: it is to demand no less a miracle than if you bade a fresh set of Hebrew children to sing out of the burning furnace of a fresh Nebuchadnezzar.