Black Buck(45)

Going home. I hope whatever you did tonight was worth it.





Rhett stood and placed a hand on my frozen shoulder. “You don’t look so hot, Buck. You okay?”

I stood there motionless, my phone resting in my hand like a gun I’d just killed someone with: heavy, cold, and unaware of the damage it had done.





III.



Discovery





Success has a price. If you aren’t prepared to pay it, you shouldn’t expect to achieve it.

—DAN WALDSCHMIDT





3 Months Later



12





I never expected to be where I am today. Living on the penthouse floor of a ninety-eight-year-old building, worth millions of dollars, and admired by people from Brooklyn to Brazil. If you’d told a younger me that I’d be here, I’d have said you were smoking rocks. But here I am, and there you are, looking in from the outside and hopefully getting what you paid for. I worked hard to get here, and if you continue following me, I’ll help you better your life and the lives of those you love most. I guarantee it.

In the world of tech startups and sales, three months, aka a quarter, is a long time. A lot can happen. And for me, it did.

On the first Monday in June, the first workday after Hell Week, when we achieved our goal for the twelfth month in a row and partied like savages, the newest members of NWA—Frodo, the Duchess, and I—hit the phones. On day one, the Duchess shot from the bottom of the almighty whiteboard to the top. She had a few of her father’s friends—CEOs, titans of business, and other suspects of questionable character—lined up to qualify and hand off, which meant she hit her goal in a few hours. She piled on more SQLs and deals throughout the month.

Even Frodo had a few connections—like trustees of Notre Dame who fondly remembered Arnold Bagini, the right tackle who often played through multiple concussions to bring their university glory. He qualified one of those on day two and added a few more. He didn’t end the month at the top of the board, but he was somewhere safe and comfortable in the upper middle.

And what about your boy Buck, you ask? Well, I made more than one hundred calls a day for two weeks but couldn’t get anyone on the line. Most of the numbers were fake, went directly to foreign voice mails, or led to receptionists who told me so-and-so was dead.

When I brought it up to Clyde, he said, “Part of the game, Buck. Welcome to the show,” before patting me on the back and telling me to keep at it. But when I eventually told Charlie, he looked at my list and realized that I, yes, only I, was being sent leads from the “Do not call, they’re absolute shit or dead” pile. If you’re wondering who was in charge of marketing’s lead distribution, it was Clyde. So much for a truce.

All of this is to say that I ended the month with a big fat, uncooked, and likely salmonella-infected goose egg. I earned nothing in commission; Frodo earned $535 dollars, and the Duchess, of course, earned over $1,500. It’s funny how the rich always somehow end up richer. Fortunately, no one had come close to qualifying anyone on their “Advance to AE, collect $200” wish list. Even the Duchess and all of her incestuous wealth connections couldn’t swing that.

The rest of the months followed the same pattern. Only after getting better leads with Charlie’s help did I start generating opportunities, which moved me a few spots up from the absolute bottom of the board. I even earned a couple hundred bucks in July and August, which I used to celebrate Soraya getting into her nursing program and pay for a dinner for her, Ma, and Mr. Rawlings at a fancy Manhattan restaurant as an apology for missing my Hell Week celebration dinner. Jason, still saltier than a sailor, declined the invitation.

Aside from that, all was cool on the home front except for two things. One was that Ma missed a few more days of work due to fatigue. I kept pressing her to go to a doctor, but she said she already had and that they said it would pass, that it was all part of the aging process. She hit me with the same line over and over again: “Jus’ focus on work, Dar.”

The second thing was that the real estate company that had sent Ma a letter in May, Next Chance Management, called every few weeks until I picked up and said if they didn’t lose our number, I’d have to “take care of them.” An empty threat, but it worked.

Which brings us to day one of September. A time when the junglelike heat of New York City begins to settle down, when yoga--pants-wearing, Pumpkin Spice Latte–drinking, and basic-as-free-cable Beckies emerge from their Southampton vacation homes like bedazzled cockroaches. A time when the whole city looks back at the summer like one long acid-laced dream that possibly couldn’t and absolutely shouldn’t have happened. A time when the Church of Sumwun, and all of its constituents, came under grave threat. Before long, we would be taking fire from the media, investors, and even stale talk-show hosts clinging to their dwindling viewers like Southerners and their “It’s not racist, it’s tradition!” Confederate flags.

In short, we were about to enter an all-out war.



* * *





It was the first Monday of September, and the war started after lunch. Frodo and I were discussing the merits of being born in summer versus winter and whether the time of year you were born actually had an effect on your character.