The Geezer Squad

By Bruce Weir Benidt

A group of old friends, most just past sixty. Theyve done well in careers, although only one has put away enough money to think, without wry laughter, about retiring. But they want to do something meaningful in these later days of their lives. As with a lot of baby boomers, their raucous idealism of the Sixties has been drifted over by layers of jobs and mortgages and families and divorces and vacations and cars and gadgets and

Whatever happened to that changing the world thing?

Tired of just bitching, they decide to get active again, put something back in the stream. Theyll right some wrongs, fight for the little guys, take down some corporate greedheads. They get plenty more than theyre ready for, running into arsonists and hired guns along the way to nding that deeper meaning they seek.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491799390

Bruce Weir Benidt

Bruce Benidt, a former journalist and college teacher, is currently a communications coach. He is the author of The Library Book, The Centennial History of the Minneapolis Public Library, and the novel Cross Over the River, Lives of Stonewall Jackson. Born in Washington, D.C., and a longtime Minnesotan, he now lives in the Tampa Bay area. Author photo by Ally Kramer

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Copyright © 2016 Bruce Weir Benidt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is fiction, a story flowing from and through experiences and people and places I’ve known, picking up pieces and images and tastes as it goes, and then swirling along with made-up stuff.

I’ve flat-out stolen parts of people I know and love – expressions, attitudes, histories – and have bent them around to new shapes. The characters are composites, drawn from many sources, blends of the real and imagined.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-9940-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9941-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9939-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016909566

iUniverse rev. date: 09/27/2016

CONTENTS

1 Executive Suite

2 Death on the Lake

3 Made for the Shade

4 Sinking

5 Gathering Purpose

6 Chosen Family

7 The New Cabin

8 Development Pressure

9 Extra Innings: How It Started

10 Gathering Clouds

11 Florida Reflections

12 Coffee Shot

13 Ill Wind

14 Digging In

15 You’re No Al Pacino

16 Lizard Enlightenment

17 Light on the River

18 Lighthouse 1, Many Streams

19 Lighthouse 2, Confluence

20 Fire on the River

21 Aravaipa

22 Calling the Cops

23 Power Struggle

24 Fire on the Lake

25 With a Little Help From My Friends

26 Threatening Weather

27 Passing Time

28 Biker Bar

29 Elusive Quarry

30 Going After Armored Dillo

31 Coming Down With Cold Beer

32 Just Action

33 What’s It All About?

34 Illusive Quarry

35 The New Recruit and the Cat

Thanks

About the Author

Dedicated to the people who got me reading—my parents, my brothers, good teachers along the way. And to all the dear friends I’ve been lucky to have and who’ve made this long strange trip such a joy.

1 Executive Suite

Come in, Mr. Lane.

The CEO, Montgomery Lane, wasn’t used to having someone, certainly not a stranger, welcome him into his own boardroom. Something felt odd, a Richter-scale twitch, something was wrong. And he didn’t like it.

Sit down, sit down, said the stranger as he rose from a well-padded chair at the end of the long board table. The stranger was a tall, imposing, sixty-ish-looking man in a dark suit with greying sandy hair and the beginning—a good beginning—of a pot belly. Another man, with more-than-greying hair but in a sport coat, open-collared shirt, and jeans, sat in a chair back from the table, watching.

Lane wasn’t about to sit down. Not for this upstart who’d been sitting too comfortably in the chair at the head of the table. What’s this about? Who are you? Lane was, the tall man noted with amusement, looking down his nose as he said it. Actually had his head tilted back and was sighting down the long ridge of his nose, looking at him with a deep sniff of arrogance. So fitting, the tall man thought. This is going to be fun.

My name is Barnworthy, Alexander Barnworthy. And this, he nodded to the second man behind him, is Mr. Ballard. It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Barnworthy said, stretching his hand out.

Lane ignored the hand. He pulled together the front edges of his suit jacket, a sleek midnight-blue Zegna number, as if to gird himself by buttoning his CEO outfit. He petted the soft silk of his tie to flatten it, to feel it, like a talisman. My secretary said the chairman of the board wanted to meet me in here. Where’s Kepper?

Barnworthy smiled, looked down at the table, where he had a few sheets of paper spread out. The chairman of the board does want to meet you, Mr. Lane. And he looked up at the CEO. I… and Barnworthy paused with a delicious taste of drama, want to meet you.

Lane looked confused, his eyebrows bunched together, and he frowned. What the hell do you mean? Where’s Kepper? Lane looked around the room, as if the round, dumpy former bank president who had been chairman of DisTek for the full seven years of Lane’s tenure might be hiding, improbably, behind one of the leather throne chairs.

The boardroom was sumptuous. On the eighth floor of the headquarters building in one of the western suburbs of Minneapolis, the room had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on woods with walking paths, a sprawling shopping center, a highway interchange, and several arms and bays of Lake Minnetonka, on the shores and points of which Lane and Kepper and many of the well-heeled senior executives of DisTek—and many of the other major companies in Minneapolis—had large, lovely, lavish homes.

The room itself had a long central table made of the same honey-colored South American rainforest wood that also paneled three walls of the room. The wood was illegal, protected because it was on the edge of extinction. But when the headquarters building was built six years ago, the general contractor, a golfing buddy of Lane’s, said he could get some of the wood off the books, if you know what I mean. And so they’d done it. And every time Lane came into this boardroom, he smiled inwardly with the joy of having gotten away with something, of pulling something off. Even better, the joy of having something almost nobody else had—this wood that glowed with rich light deep in its whorled grain. Trees, Lane always thought, are for cutting.

Electronics of all kinds were hidden in the table, the walls, and counters and cupboards around the room. Teleconferencing and videoconferencing and PowerPoint presentations and Internet access and videos and killer sound could all be had at the press of a pad, all to show how the sales and the money were piling up. All to show Lane how his empire was expanding. Size did matter, by God, Lane had always said to himself, hitching up his pants almost—almost—unconsciously.

Kepper wasn’t in the room. Nobody but Lane and Barnworthy and the other guy, Ballard, were in the room. Two men he’d never seen before. And Lane, impatient and perturbed, was about to leave Barnworthy and Ballard alone in it. He turned and took two strides back toward the door.

I wouldn’t, Ballard said from his chair, quietly but with a firmness that caught Lane by surprise. Irked him. Pissed him off, really. Lane slowed.

Not until you hear what Mr. Barnworthy has to say. He’ll be brief, Ballard said, his voice now even more quiet. You should listen to him. It’s about your severance.

Lane stopped, dead.

My WHAT? Lane turned, a look of astonishment on his face as if this preposterous man Ballard had just pulled down his jeans and was starting to squat on the carpet. WHAT? Lane barked, wagging his head back and forth.

Barnworthy gestured toward a chair again with what Lane knew was false hospitality. Not just misplaced, but vicious. Lane ignored the offer again. Just stared at Barnworthy, with that focused executive eyebeam that melted the resolve of anyone trying to cross him.

Barnworthy sat, smiled, steepled his fingers, and rotated a little in his chair, not from nervousness but from the building thrill that was starting to spark up and down the knobs of his spine. I’m going to tell you about your severance package. Barnworthy’s smile was starting to leak into the corners of his mouth. He looked Lane in the eyes, Lane’s looking more bewildered now, as if he’d been dropped into the day room of a loony bin. In round figures, Mr. Lane, for your long years of service to the company, we are going to give you—exactly nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. Oh, and your car lease is canceled. Leases, I should say. Your wife will have to get a Metro Transit card. Barnworthy could no longer suppress the smile, which rose slowly like floodwater up his lips to the corners of his nose and into his eyes.

Lane felt the room tilt, just the slightest bit. Another tectonic tremble. He’d heard rumors months ago of a shareholder revolt. He’d hired investigators who nosed around and told him there were some disgruntled shareholders out there, but they didn’t think it would amount to much. Then came the notice that a shareholder group had filed to run its own slate of board candidates. Lane hadn’t been worried. Shareholder revolts never succeed. His minions told him there would be a fuss, but no damage. No chance. Even when two proxy advisory firms, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, weighed in on the side of the rebels, Lane had scoffed. Single digits, that’s all they’d get in the vote, that’s all these things ever got, low single digits. No problem.

Had he been wrong? Lane felt his chest constrict, as if he were leaning over the edge of a great height.

Barnworthy was playing a hand that was, in fact, not as strong as his bluff, but he was playing it well. And with gusto. He and Ballard and his co-conspirators had gathered, they were quite sure, pretty sure, oh God they hoped so, enough votes to win. And Barnworthy wanted to have this little moment alone with Lane to tell him to his face what he’d been telling investors for months.

Here’s the thing, Montgomery. Lane looked up sharply at the use of his first name. Unauthorized use. Who the hell did this guy think he was? In about thirty minutes, Mr. Kepper, that fat greedy little toady who always thinks your ideas are so wonderful, will no longer be chairman of the board of DisTek. He drilled Lane with his eyes. I will be. Barnworthy let that one hang in the air for a long luscious moment. Lane put his hand on the back of the nearest chair. And that means, my dear sir, that you have about half an hour left in your career as CEO of this company you have used as your own private strip mine. Barnworthy’s voice had grown rich and husky. It’s over. Lane just stared. You’ve pillaged this company for way, way too long. You’re done, sir.

Barnworthy leaned back in his chair and trilled his fingers along the back of his head, releasing nervous energy now that the long-planned coup was on.

The besieged CEO looked sick and furious at the same time. He reached into his reserves of executive power, his ability to cow people, to act as one of the important leaders addressing the plebes, those noisome little folks who were too stupid and common to become titans of industry. Lane’s executive presence started to gather. The skin around his eyes crinkled, and there was a twitch under his left eye. His eyebrows rose and his lips thinned with a force that showed he wasn’t going to stand for any more of this shit. He rolled his shoulders back, straightening the lines of his lovely Italian threads, and just as he opened his mouth to pronounce some pompous platitude about how Barnworthy would never get away with this, Barnworthy stretched his neck like a cat looking behind itself and said to the wall, Tony? It was time to put Lane into his misery, so well deserved.

Lane stopped, mouth open. What the hell was this?

A balding man walked purposefully through the door next to the hidden screen and whiteboard, a door that led into a well-appointed kitchen and gold-and-marble rest room. Tony Andonian, CFA, was bringing, metaphorically but quite happily, the chains and the scrap-iron weights that would finish the job of sinking Montgomery Jepson Lane completely out of sight, only a few bubbles rising to mark his last sputtering gasps.

Tony spread files and papers on the table. Here are the numbers. You’re a numbers guy, Mr. Lane, true? Lane looked vaguely at Tony’s display. Trepidation started to eat into his anger. We have seventy-three percent of the votes, by my nose count. Enough, and Tony paused for effect, to make you gone.

Crisply, he highlighted the proxies they’d gathered and the share of the stockholders’ votes they believed they controlled. Most impressive was the list of institutional investors that had joined them. These funds, often from state retirement plans, held the biggest portion of DisTek stock. Employee-retirement plans tended to dislike investing in companies that welshed on retirement promises to their own employees, as DisTek had. Tony plopped down a large binder that showed, step by step and quarter by quarter, the damage Lane had done to DisTek, with pro-formas projecting the company’s future decline. Then there was the audit of Lane’s expenses. The man lived, on company money, like a spoiled trust-fund kid. Stockholders had paid for posh family birthday parties in Vegas (Really, that’s where you go, when you can go anywhere on somebody else’s dime? Tony said), a swimming pool at the Lane home, and tutors and au pairs for the kids. Finally, with a flourish, Tony opened a dark-blue folder marked Montgomery Lane Severance Package. It was perfectly empty.

Tony sat back. Barnworthy leaned forward, as if to confide in Lane.

Proxies are wonderful things, Barnworthy said. Kind of like the morals of a chief executive, they lie fallow most of the time, untouched, but they never really atrophy, unlike those morals. You call on them, spark a little fire into the nerve endings, and they spring to life. We’ve had fun with the proxies, Mondo. At the use of his nickname, which only his closest friends used, Lane jerked his head up and looked, shocked, at Barnworthy. A sliver of fear slipped into Lane’s eyes, the fear of a prey animal at the first unmistakable padding sound of the predator.

Oh, we’ve had lots of fun with the proxies.

Lane shook his head. He felt himself tip more precariously. Was…this…possible?

Let’s just say, Mondo, that the annual meeting isn’t going to go quite as you had planned.

Slumped, his voice low and shaken, Lane said, You can’t do it. You don’t, that vote total, you don’t have that many, you can’t.

Barnworthy smiled with one corner of his mouth. That’s what you’ve wanted to think, all along, Mondo. We’re about to find out, at the meeting in a few minutes, if our vote count holds up. I’m betting it will. Do you know we’ve got Ribbentropf?

Lane’s body jolted. Abe Ribbentropf was a media-darling investor who held large stakes in many companies, including DisTek. Lane’s people had told him Ribbentropf was wavering, so Lane took him to dinner and turned on the charm. Not enough, it appeared. He also got Ribbentropf’s niece a job. He’d felt sure he’d kept the old coot in line.

You didn’t take us seriously, Montgomery, just like you haven’t taken your customers seriously, or your employees. That’s dangerous, Mondo. You knew we were coming after you, and you thought we were just buzzing gnats. Barnworthy shook his head, telling a sad tale.

Like so many top execs, like LBJ on Vietnam, you didn’t want to hear anything that didn’t match what you already believe. So pretty soon your people stop trying to tell you what you don’t want to hear. And you didn’t want to hear you were vulnerable. And now, Barnworthy opened his hands and tipped his head, you’re history.

Ballard, sitting back watching Barnworthy as he’d marched Lane from the tumbrel up to the guillotine, thought of his father. Fitting, at this moment. His dad always said that bad would be found out and corrected. He didn’t say it with the Sixties phrase What goes around, comes around, nor had he been familiar with the concept of karma. But he had faith that people who did wrong would not stay on top for long.

Ballard’s dad had been a senior executive at a large milling and food company, and had been well liked and effective. His dad’s boss, for the longest time when Ballard was growing up, was a wonderful man with a growly deep voice and a kind face and a delightful smile. His dad loved and admired him. After that boss retired, Ballard’s dad was stuck with a new one who cut corners, played politics with sharp knives and watched eagerly for turned backs, and who thought power came from publicly dressing down his subordinates. His father’s ethical sense, always backed up by his former boss, was dismissed as naïve by the new one. Ballard’s dad was unhappy, of course, with the new guy, and thought of leaving the company, even though he loved his job when left alone to do it. It was also the only time Ballard saw his dad be snippy and short with his mom—unkind and unfairly critical sometimes. It was the pressure of working for someone who was an arrogant, selfish, power-hungry prick—although his dad would have never used that word.

But Ballard’s dad told his family that this trial would pass, that the new boss’s lying and shirking of responsibility and shifting of blame would be found out. For two years it wasn’t. The new guy was rewarded for his perfidy, and Ballard senior’s faith was severely tested, although he got more used to just trying to stay out of the guy’s line of fire. That took an inner toll on Ballard’s dad. He had trouble sleeping, and his stomach turned to acid.

Then one day he came home with an uncontrollable smile and said to his wife and kids, Boys and girls, the millwheels of justice may grind slowly, but they grind fine. Mr. Timmony is no longer employed by the company; Mr. Timmony’s office is empty as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard; Mr. Timmony, bless his pointed little head, is no longer my boss. The only time Ballard had seen his dad’s smile that wide was when he got together with his brothers and sisters, unscrewed some bottle caps, and told old stories about growing up in the Dakotas. This time, the elder Ballard clapped his hands and rounded up the family and took them all to the best Chinese restaurant downtown, usually reserved for Mother’s Day, and they celebrated his liberation from the doubt Mr. Timmony had caused about how the world worked.

Wrong will be found out, in time, Ballard’s dad had said.

Was that partly why Ballard was taking such uncharitable pleasure at being part of a group that was slamming a lance into Lane’s chest and tipping him ass-high off his horse into the mud-caked straw? Was this about justice, or retribution, or his own hubris? Was this about trying to enforce karma, which seemed like a contradiction in terms and possibly a violation of the forces of the universe? Or was this just a pleasant echo of an upbringing that Ballard cherished, a resonant note of continuity across a generation? He didn’t know, but liked the fact that his dad was visiting him at this moment. He saw in his memory the smile and the nod, that broad smile under the sizeable nose, that firm nod that said, Well done. If Ballard had doubts about the rightness—the righteousness, certainly bordering on self-righteousness—of his role as enforcer, seeing his dad’s face helped him feel he was on solid ground.

So did the fact that Montgomery Lane was a monumental asshole.

Lane had harmed thousands of employees, screwed over hundreds of thousands of customers, and through his actions and decisions clearly expressed his certainty that he was one of the most important people on the planet, not to be bothered with the rules of behavior and decency that smaller people fussed with. It almost certainly wasn’t Christian (or Buddhist or Muslim) of Ballard, but he was enjoying the hell out of watching Barnworthy take this jerk down.

Ballard felt Montgomery Lane had acted, in the last seven years, like royalty. Business royalty, which in America is what passes for aristocracy. Sure, there are singers and movie stars and athletes who make ungodly piles of money and take up unconscionable space in our media and brain cells, but the people most Americans bow and pull their forelocks to are businessmen. And they are mostly men. They run our companies. Determine our fates. Build houses that are monuments of bad taste—and could house most of the homeless of the cities they rule. They buy third and fourth homes in places warm and fashionable. Sit on the boards of big arts organizations—or their wives do, their third or fourth wives. They make millions. Buy cars the rest of us have never heard of. They’re of two types. Tall and trim with greased-back hair, raptors moving with avid speed from one pile of money to the next; or shorter, dumpier men who think they look good in their expensive clothes. The former swagger, the latter lumber. But they all take up great amounts of space in any room or gathering. They’re the cool kids from high school, the centers of the cliques, the ones everyone wants to be close to; in the halls then, in the sleek restaurants now. And, as with those kids in high school, these corporate princes are not the smartest or the funniest or the most creative, but those around them make them think they are.

They’re the ones who have something the rest of us don’t have: the certainty they belong in the center of—everything. It’s a confidence that easily becomes arrogance. A taste for attention and adulation that easily becomes an addiction. And a slow-igniting but hot-burning lust for money that, like a heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral, starts with a gradual liftoff but quickly soars to heights they had barely imagined. To get more money, more adulation, more power, they’ll extinguish their own souls and the hopes and savings and futures of people who are so much smaller than they. This is strictly a business decision, they learn to say, and nothing personal, as they lop off the retirement savings or the chance for college or the unrequited loyalty of the very personal human beings they sweep away like dinner crumbs off their fine wool pants—the troublesome little beings who did the real work that built the big guys’ fortunes.

Not all of them are like this, Ballard knew. There are humane, visionary, principled CEOs who feel the responsibility of supporting the jobs of the thousands of people who support their companies. Who make moves, and tough calls—merge, contract, grow, create—that are good for customers, for the environment, for employees and their families. CEOs who care about their communities, not just themselves.

Montgomery Lane was not one of those.

DisTek had started as a data-storage company. Then it had gone into keeping not just the data and records of other companies, but working with that information to provide strategic direction to the companies. Then it had taken over many outsourced functions of those companies: HR, financial transactions, purchasing, payroll, accounts receivable. Then management functions, such as grooming and training people for promotions, then deciding who was promoted. And cutting costs. And cutting people. To be more efficient. For the stakeholders. As a centralized processor of administrative and management information and decisions, it could do all the back-shop and middle-management functions of its client companies with far fewer people than those companies had been using. So DisTek helped its clients reduce headcount. Eliminate jobs. Often jobs of people who’d worked at the client companies for many long years. That’s just business these days. Realignment. Nothing personal.

When Lane came to the company, he kicked it up a notch. He discovered two wonderful things. India. And playing with balance sheets.

In India, he found people who worked for a third or less of what those sniveling entitled Americans would work for, and they’d work quietly, without bitching. They were polite, smart, and halfway around the world. Lane never had to see them except for a trip or two each year when he flew the flag in Bangalore or some fly-infested smelly place and patted a few of them on the head and made them think he appreciated their work and dedication when what he appreciated most was their uncomplaining acceptance of low wages and his own corporate Gulfstream flight back to civilization. With offshore labor, he could reduce the headcount of his client companies. The Orkin man knocking down roaches.

And, man, were the CEOs of his client companies happy when he took them out for thousand-dollar dinners and told them how many people they could cut. It wasn’t joy in terminating careers, chopping family incomes, that his fellow CEOs felt; it was the holy duty of increasing shareholder value that moved them so. They knelt to shareholder value. And, funny how that works, the largest individual shareholders whose value they were increasing were—themselves. How about that. And together, Lane and his partner CEOs increased their bonuses by increasing the efficiency of their companies. And if along the way the customers got shitty service or shoddy goods, and if in the pursuit of streamlined operational efficiency a few—well, a few hundred, a few hundred thousand—breadwinners lost their grip on the family bread, it was all in a good cause. The cause of growth. Of increasing value.

And balance sheets. Things of beauty, when looked at as pieces of a puzzle. Goose the numbers, tickle the money. Take a couple balance sheets and blend them into new configurations. Take them apart, number by number. Shake them up. Break them up. Dance them around. Change the columns. Change the inputs. Change the outputs. Load up on debt. Leverage, baby, leverage. Make the next few quarters look good and BAM!—you’ve got a winner.

Satisfied customers? Dedicated employees? Reputation? Quality? Long-term prospects? Sure, okay, yeah. All those things are fine, you can get those things, or hire advertising and PR types to tell people you have them. No big deal. But keep your eye on the numbers, on the stock.

Montgomery Lane began buying his clients. DisTek had grown bigger than most of its clients, and so it became, in a way, a boar eating its young. It was easy to raise the money for the first couple of purchases, modest little acquisitions that didn’t stir things up too much. There was some murmuring among existing DisTek clients that it was rather unseemly for DisTek to step from the background into the foreground—hell, into the boardroom. But several analysts and reporters called the first few purchases bold and surprising. An innovative way for a service company to break out of its sector and become a larger player. Lane stripped down the first company he acquired to a more efficient, much leaner operation, and then sold it, for a $150-million profit, to its main competitor, which quickly absorbed it like a sponge absorbing a spill. Gone. More jobs gone. Customers stiffed. But, man, The Street liked it. Wall Street. But Main Street in the deceased company’s town wondered what had hit it. Then two more acquisitions, bigger, more leveraged, bolder, and Lane was gaining a reputation as a player. A gambler. A man to be watched. More companies stripped like coal-bearing hills, more workers cut, more value created—for Wall Street, for Lane. Just look at the balance sheets, fold and cut. If it’s that easy to kill a company, then it wasn’t that strong to begin with. Lane and DisTek were forcing evolution, spurring the survival-of-the-fittest companies.

Some called Lane a pirate. Some called him the devil. He called himself—and his vision—transformational. He was remaking companies. Trimming them up for rough seas.

Some reporters and analysts, while admiring his style and his balls, expressed quietly, deep in their reports, concern about the long-term viability of Lane’s strategy. Everything looked good quarter by quarter. But was Lane, like a baseball manager using up his pitchers’ arms to win at all costs this season with no thought for the next, building something that could last? Or would DisTek burn out and fall as fast as it rose?

Cavalierly, Montgomery Lane, his board, and his sycophantic direct reports kept shredding companies, building stock prices out of air and blood.

That’s when Barnworthy, Ballard, and their little band of revolutionaries started moving down from the mountains toward the edge of Havana.

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They were a group of friends. Most just past sixty. They’d done well in careers, although none but Tony had made or saved enough money to think, without wry laughter, about retiring. But they were thinking seriously about what came next in their lives.

They wanted to do something meaningful. How clichéd. But they did. They’d all done some good along