Homeland Elegies(3)
My father, like Trump, binged on debt in the ’80s and ended the decade uncertain about his financial future. A doctor, he’d transitioned into private practice from a career in academic cardiology just as the hostage crisis began. By the time Reagan was in office, he’d started to mint money, as he liked to put it. (The playful attack of his Punjabi lilt always made it sound to me more like he was describing the flavor of all that new cash rather than the activity of making it.) In 1983, with more money than he knew what to do with, Father took a weekend seminar in real estate investment at the Radisson hotel in West Allis, Wisconsin. By Sunday night, he’d put in an offer on his first property, a listing one of the instructors had “shared” with the participants on a lunch break—a gas station in Baraboo just blocks from the site where the Ringling brothers started their circus. Just what it was he needed with a gas station was the perfectly reasonable question my mother flatly posed when he announced the news to us later that week. To celebrate, he’d mixed a pitcher of Rooh Afza lassi—the rose-flavored squash beverage was my mother’s favorite. He shrugged in response to her question and held out a glass for her to take. She was in no mood for lassi.
“What do you know about gas stations?” she asked, irritated.
“I don’t need to know the day-to-day. The business is solid. Good cash flow.”
“Cash flow?”
“It’s making money, Fatima.”
“If it’s making so much money, why did they need to sell? Hmm?”
“People have their reasons.”
“What reasons? Sounds like you have no idea what you’re talking about. Were you drinking?”
“No, I wasn’t drinking. Do you want the lassi or not?” She shook her head, curtly. He tended the glass to me; I didn’t want it, either; I hated the stuff. “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t expect you to support me. But in ten years, you’ll look back on this, you both will, and you’ll see that I made a great investment.”
I wasn’t sure what I had to do with it.
“Investment?” she repeated. “Is that like when you buy a new pair of sunglasses every time you go to the store?”
“I’m always losing them.”
“I can show you fifteen right now.”
“Not the ones I like.”
“What a pity for you,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she headed for the hallway.
“You’ll see!” Father cried out after her. “You’ll see!”
What we were to see were the subsequent “investments” in a strip mall in Janesville; another in Skokie, Illinois; a campground outside Wausau; and a trout farm near Fond du Lac. If you don’t see the logic in the portfolio of holdings, well, you’re not the only one. It turned out the haphazard purchases were all the advice of the seminar instructor, Chet, who’d sold him the first. All were financed with debt, each property operating as some form of collateral for the other in some bizarre configuration of shell corporations Chet came up with—for which he would be indicted in the aftermath of the S&L crisis. My father was lucky to dodge the legal bullet. Oh, and yes, we did have our obligatory copy of Trump’s The Art of the Deal on the shelf in the living room—but that wouldn’t be for a few years yet.
My father has always been something of a conundrum to me, an imam’s son whose only sacred names—Harlan, Far Niente, Opus One—were those of the big California Cabernets he adored; who worshipped Diana Ross and Sylvester Stallone and who preferred the poker he learned here to the rung he left behind in Pakistan; a man of unpredictable appetites and impulses, inclined to tip the full amount of the bill (and sometimes then some); an unrepentant admirer of American pluck who never stopped chiding me for my adolescent lack of same: If he’d had my good fortune to be born here?! Not only would he never have become a doctor! He also might actually have been happy! It’s true I can’t seem to recall him ever looking as content as he did for those few middle Reagan years when—on the promise of the system’s endlessly easy money—he awoke each morning to find in the mirror the reflection of a self-made businessman. It would prove a short-lived joy. The market crash in ’87 initiated a cascade of unfortunate “credit events” that, by the early ’90s, reduced his net worth to less than nothing. I’d just started my second year of college when he called to tell me he was selling his practice to avoid bankruptcy and that I would have to leave school that semester unless I could secure a student loan. (I did.) If not fully reformed by the reversal of fortune, Father was certainly chastened for a time. He returned to his position as a professor of clinical cardiology at the university and threw himself back into a career of research, for which, despite his misgivings, he was clearly suited. Indeed, after just three years back in the academy, he found himself once again at the top of his field and on an awards dais, handed a medal for his recent studies of a little-known disorder known as Brugada syndrome. It was the second time he’d won the American College of Cardiology’s Investigator of the Year award, making him only the third physician in its history—and likely the most insolvent—ever to be honored twice in a career.
It was Father’s work on Brugada, a rare and often fatal arrhythmia, that led to his first meeting Donald Trump.
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