***
I sat at a side desk in the cool comfort of Professor Leavitt's office, one of the roomiest on the business campus. Leavitt said so himself, several times. As always I was crunching numbers—copying from text files the professor had procured from some database, pasting into a spreadsheet for calculation and manipulation. Leavitt always complained about the price of the data, even though he didn't pay for it himself but instead passed the bill through to the school. I always shook my head at every mention of the data fees, since they contradicted his reverent, almost religious belief in efficient markets, which assumed the instant and costless flow of information among all participants. It seemed to me that if such basic financial data—stock prices, quarterly profits—was only available for a fee from a database, then that information didn’t flow as freely as he believed. Clearly some people were better informed than others, and better equipped to make smart decisions.
As always I was at the side desk, and as always Leavitt leaned back in his leather chair, spinning third-hand anecdotes about various financial titans. That day it was Michael Milken and the geniuses at Drexel Burnham who invented junk bonds, high-risk loans that financed companies which were too shaky to borrow anywhere else. Leavitt went on and on about the revolution that Milken created, and how much he had been screwed over by the feds.
As I worked I only half-listened, having heard all of it too many times during the past year. Under Leavitt's direction I compiled information on leveraged buyouts—debt-heavy acquisitions of companies whose new owners' usual first order of business was mass employee layoffs, done so the company could afford to pay off all that debt. Leavitt insisted on a balanced, unbiased study to determine the benefits that LBOs created. From my statistics classes I knew a large data sample was needed to make the results meaningful, but Leavitt regularly had me delete companies from the study, muttering vaguely about them being anomalies, unique situations, outliers. Though I never dug any further to find out for sure, it seemed like many of the companies he eliminated had performed badly after the buyout, with some of them even going bankrupt.
But I never pursued that thought, as I realized the job had only a few weeks left and I probably had nothing to gain. And he seemed so pleased at how the study was progressing that he was almost pleasant to be around. He mostly left me to my work, kept giving me the hours and paychecks that I needed to live on, plus the air-conditioned reprieve.
He suddenly interrupted his Milken lament with a short laugh, followed by silence. I stopped typing, took my eyes off the computer screen and stared at the floor. I didn't look at him, not knowing if his laugh was about something he wanted me privy to. After a few moments he laughed again.
"I saw the damnedest thing, walking up here today, along the Quad. I had lunch with the chancellor in his private dining room, and on my way back I saw these scruffy guys kicking around a beanbag."
"Hacky Sack," I offered.
"Right, that's what those are called. So they're kicking the thing around, completely oblivious to everything but the game and their boombox. They're playing some stoner music, the Grateful Dead I think, singing along off-key at the top of their lungs. So this Quad dog trots up and starts sniffing the boombox. I can see what's about to happen, but they have no idea, and suddenly they realize, too late, that the dog is pissing on the boombox. They yell and scream but the dog just keeps doing his business, then finishes and runs away."
He laughed again, more heartily this time, and I forced out an obligatory chuckle. "Right away the box starts buzzing and crackling, and the music goes dead. The dog must have made a direct hit on the battery."
He paused with a satisfied grunt. "They had it coming, wasting their time like that. And probably wasting mommy and daddy's money. I really wonder about guys like that. Why the hell are they still here over the summer anyway?"
He looked up at me, as if realizing his implication. "No offense. You're here because I have work for you to do. Important work. They're only here because they're lazy."
It occurred to me, for the first time, that over the past year he hadn't once asked about my job hunt, where I was looking and if he could help in any way. Now he actually believed I was still around because I didn't want to give up his internship, unaware that I would have eagerly given it up right before graduation if I had a real job to go away to, in Chicago or anywhere else.
"I see so many guys like that around campus, slackers, with beards and tie-dyed t-shirts, with no purpose in their lives. No direction, just floating through the world, soaking their parents..."
Leavitt went on but I no longer heard him, the lifeless data on the screen interesting me more than his philosophy. The mention of beards struck me. He surely didn't mean Wheatyard specifically. I doubted they had ever crossed paths—Leavitt wasn't the type to frequent Cellar Books or The Grind, and at the Union he'd lunch in the private dining rooms instead of the cafeteria with the commoners. But if not Wheatyard in particular, Leavitt was denigrating his type—carefree, non-conformist, guided by the ethereal and not the rigid world of numbers. Six months earlier I would have heartily agreed with him about the Hacky Sackers—and, by extension, about Wheatyard—and might have even laughed along, but by then, in July, I was much more ambivalent. I could still see Leavitt's position, but I no longer necessarily agreed with him.