The Arsonist

By Ken Coulson

Are there any chances left for a man who helped stoke the flames of a global financial meltdown and then reaped the rewards?

When Cal Minor strikes bottom-losing his home, career, wonderful wife, and children-redemption appears at the elite Atlas Corp led by the corporate bull, Hank Henleman, who is hell-bent on monetizing the looming glob

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: Mar 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9798888242568

Ken Coulson

Ken Coulson traveled the globe in a fast-paced, over-the-top career with Wall Street's biggest banks before an epiphany during the financial crisis set him on a path of sustainability and music. He has written and released over 100 songs, many in support of climate action. Ken founded the sustainability think tank Future Bright and writes on Medium on mindfulness and the art of here and now. The Arsonist is his debut novel.

Book preview

ONE

THE BENDS

Some things are simple; others are hard. Often, we confuse the two.

The doorbell rang successively, accelerating, echoing, pounding in my head. The bell was still set to the five-note descending Japanese pattern Beth had installed before she left. It rang again and again, restarting before it could hit the fourth and slightly melancholy note, full of ancient wisdom, as music from Japan often is.

I was trying to do something important. I didn’t have time for this. I had a deadline, so to speak. I slid my highball glass across the granite island in the kitchen and tied my plush fleece robe tight across the bulge in my stomach. Who the fuck? Ring-da-ding-da-dong. Then a pause.

I stopped in the brick-lined pass-through filled with dying plants that led to the atrium and then to the grand three-story foyer. Had they given up? Smiling to myself, I turned . . . 

Ring-di-ding. Ring-da-ding. Ring-da-ding.

Motherfucker! I swung the heavy oak door open.

Not him. Not today.

He was dressed in a yachty suit complete with the billowy linen scarf and navy jacket with gold leaf embroidery. He had on mirrored aviators and white pants. The outfit wouldn’t have been complete without the captain’s hat, perched slightly askew. It was my neighbor, Randy Welltower, and he was dressed for a sail—in October.

Minor, I was beginning to think you weren’t home, Randy said with a laugh that always sounded forced.

What gave you that impression? I asked. Was it the fact that you had to ring for fifteen minutes?

Well, glad you are, he said, ignoring my question. Drink? He rattled the oversized shaker in his right hand. Randy leaned back as if his head was filled with some dense material that his gangly frame of six feet and change couldn’t hold up. He sniffed the air to clear his nose, which was large and bent to the side from a drunk driving accident for which there were no repercussions.

Mine’s inside, I said flatly, with eyes that could strangle. Predictably, he didn’t notice. When he tried to step inside, I moved to block him. No, thank you, I’m busy, I told him. And when he just stood there smiling, I added, What can I do for you, Randy?

He shuffled through his coat pocket and pulled out a thick bone-colored card, waving it in front of me like candy. Jackson’s annual. It’s to-mor-row!

My face found my hand, then I craned my neck to look past him toward the circle drive and rolling lawn speckled with American Beech trees, Japanese maples, and Belgian block landscaped gardens wrapped in blue-black mulch. Beyond that, the property stretched back into a nature preserve, extending the backyard ostensibly for another thousand acres. If I were to kill him, would anyone see it?

He’d driven his kitted-out, neon-blue golf cart from his seven acres to mine. From his big box modern farmhouse reproduction bursting with bonus rooms and secret alcoves and guest houses and Maldives-style pool cabanas and mature specimen planting and everything else, it was identical to mine save except that he’d ordered the jumbo package from the builder, clocking in at a monstrous fourteen thousand square feet to my seven.

I didn’t like Randy. He was aloof and a total snob. He’d been born with money, then swallowed too much water from the dead-end gene pool growing up. He’d stumbled through boarding school, made it to Harvard via a new library wing with his parent’s name on it, and fell stone drunk into daddy’s private equity firm. He’d been clipping coupons from companies he’d never even visited ever since.

But Jackson Seeger was worse. His family had just sold their nutritional supplement company for ten billion dollars. The Seegers were the blond-headed, always-tanned and smiling, health-nut version of Swiss Family Robinson, except they all did cocaine. To keep the weight off, of course.

Sure, the party would be astoundingly lavish. I could probably get laid a few times. There might be an exotic animal or two. Maybe even a lead for a job . . . 

No, fuck that. I couldn’t handle any more Riverwatch Connecticut. Randy and Jackson were par for the course.

It went on and on and on and on. Eighteen percent of all hedge funds are in a twenty-five-mile radius, including a trillion-dollar behemoth down the street.

Half of all new products on the shelves of Whole Foods are created by bored Riverwatch housewives taking a break from their affairs. They are manufactured in some nondescript contract manufacturing plant in Utah, slapped with the organic label du jour, and shipped across the country for endless consumption at hefty 200 percent margins.

The Pharma Bros, C-Suite execs of the major pharmaceutical companies, live in large estates ringing a nearby man-made lake. The principals of private equity firms that generated billions in fracking convinced the town to carve out some of the wildlife preserve, where they built a private gated community aptly called Mint Gardens. But Riverwatch is more than just a haven for Tesla-driving absentee landlords who’ve gotten rich off the extraction economy. Other types flock here, too.

Numerous celebrities own a fourth or fifth estate here. Johnny Depp, Paul Simon—you name it. Some don’t even move in. High-ranking US officials like the beaches, woods, and general anonymity of living in a town where private equity billionaires, high-profile divorces, and controversial dog parks get all the headlines.

I’m a blip on the radar, an interloper living on borrowed time in the gardens of Elysium.

Why?

Well, I’d gone belly-up in every way possible. Duped by the crisis of the same name—DUPE (derivatives of university placement equity)—the implosion of the $3 trillion student debt bubble and the cascading destruction of private credit markets.

It was a simple headline, easy to miss as the cattle prod of crisis often is.

Harvard and Yale Law Schools announce starkly lower placement rate.

We’d been talking about the automation of white-collar jobs for years, the technological S-curve of artificial intelligence, but still, the swiftness surprised everyone. The schools had bet on their stellar placement rate by staking the students’ NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in lieu of full tuition. With suddenly dimming job prospects, the assets collapsed, and the complex derivatives the endowments had written against them exploded. The chain reaction of swooning endowments set off a massive sell-off of risk assets. It was the final nail in the coffin of the promise of upward mobility—the American dream was declared dead.

I’d been riding high as a star multi-asset trader until the tide went out. The firm imploded. In an instant, I’d swapped millions in stock for a sorry-looking cactus Beth had given me. In hindsight, it must’ve been a warning that she was about to grow thorns.

When Beth finally did leave, she turned the screws, and I guess it was the only fair thing to do after all. A half a million in alimony. The fully paid Charleston house.

I’d say she turned the kids against me, but I’d be hard-pressed to prove it.

And my friends . . . what about them? The young traders I’d made rich. My bosses who’d shared healthy profits for years. The guys I came up with blowing rails off various silicone-enhanced body parts.

Well, after five years of unreturned phone calls and near-miss reinventions, I guess I’ve learned the truth about Wall Street. It’s less "Call me anytime, friend" and more "I’m having trouble remembering how we met."

Come on, Minor, you must come. Randy waved the envelope closer to my face. If I pounced, I thought I could take his pointer finger off. I wanted to see that shit-eating grin disappear.

Sure, men like Randy would smile at you. But ask him for a job in his private equity shop, and he’d no longer know your name.

I’d tried everything. Big data, cyber, you name it. And forget about the mainstream shops. Since DUPE, the world—and the game—has changed rapidly. High finance has a new face, an expensive one, and a far larger ass that it needs to fit into a small chair. Digitization, consolidating wealth, shrinking profit opportunity, and a social march toward political correctness have all but marked my kind for extinction: over forty white males in the field of finance who don’t program computers.

Sorry, Randy. I’m afraid I will be unavailable, I told him. In more ways than he would know.

Minor, don’t be such a commie liberal fuck. It’ll cheer you up, Randy mused.

I think Randy knew. He had to know. My divorce wasn’t clean. Things were broken. My Boxster had ended up in the pool one night. He had to know.

You see, I was still valuable in one way. In the race for wealth, schadenfreude, gratification from someone else’s misfortune, is a big part of the chemical cocktail the brain needs to justify all the other types of destruction industry can reap. The ego needs fuel, and the destitution or harsh fate of others is like magnesium shavings over shredded birch bark. It’s like the spank bank for self-praise.

At least I’m not Cal Minor, they could say. What the hell happened to him?

Here I am, guys and gals: a forty-eight-year-old white male, once highly-functioning alcoholic, still alcoholic, a decent tennis player, possibly a scratch golfer with the right mix of drugs, a reformed sex addict, once divorced, and currently living alone in this cavernous space.

Randy had changed the subject. And the one he chose was an icepick to my brain. Jesus, Cal! This market! Another all-time high was set this morning, and I was burning the last of my IRA statements that showed a million dollars in early withdrawals and a zero balance, alongside my partially-written memoir and myself, if people would just stop bothering me. It was some respite that no one would be around to pay the penalty when the IRS came knocking.

Randy, the truth is, I am trying to kill myself, and you are putting me decidedly behind schedule . . . if you don’t mind. I nodded, feeling oddly gratified. My mother was right. The truth does feel good. Even when it’s morbid. I moved to close the door, but Randy’s red schooner slip-on blocked it.

He looked shocked; his jaw dropped, a mix of emotions quivering across his thin mustache. You missed Bitcoin? he asked. After multiple halvings, the cryptocurrency supposed to democratize finance traded north of $350,000. Let’s just say the underbanked were not dancing in the streets. But Riverwatch had an enclave for those types, too. I called it Glowing Lamborghini Land, complete with turf lawns and pet emus.

No, Randy, not Bitcoin. Another face-palm. Randy was ruining my suicidal bliss.

What’s the real reason you’re not coming? he pleaded.

Hmm, how about more truth—there’s nothing to lose anymore when you’ve lost it all. I hate you, Randy, and I hate Jackson even more, I told him, my face emotionless.

Okay, Minor, I’ll play. Randy took a swig from his shaker directly, and his face shuddered in ecstasy. So, how are you going to do it? This suicide thing, Minor. He seemed genuinely curious.

I’m going to burn the house down, succumb to the smoke, and be rendered ash alongside this money pit. Hey, care to join? I figured I’d be doing the world a service.

Tempting, Minor, but I’ve got a 1 p.m. tee time. And Masterson cheats. . . . I can’t be groggy.

But you’d be dead, no need to worry . . . Randy leaned forward, his neck cracking audibly, and placed the invite on my chest.

I turned to see what he was looking at.

Sophia had her blond hair loosely tied back and wore an old Colorado sweatshirt I thought I’d thrown out. She had on her backpack and wheeled a weekender roller behind her.

I’m moving down to Sarasota with my sorority sister. It’s been fun. Thanks, she said to me.

She walked past us, nodding to Randy and smirking at his outfit before rolling down the ramp and toward the garages.

Randy watched her ass in tights until I cleared my throat.

Geez fuck, Minor, you dog. I see why you’re busy. Randy slapped his leg with one hand.

Sophia was my niece. She’d been living in our nanny wing for the past eight months, taking classes at Fordham, and I’d totally forgotten about her.

I briefly flashed back to late nights involving weed and tequila, loud music, and God. At least, I’d given up hookers, I think. Here, I thought I’d been living in an empty house, but I actually hadn’t.

She’s family, and she’s eighteen, I told Randy.

I’ll bet, Randy said with a wink-wink, grin-grin. You know you really must come to Jackson’s. It’s going to be incredible. Bring—he gestured toward the garages—her—they’ve got a waterslide park installed with class-4 rapids!

I pulled the invitation out of his hand, which was still on my chest, and stared at it in my shaking hand. I knew exactly where this was going.

Randy was saying something else, but his voice sounded like an overactive orangutan’s unintelligible chirps.

I slammed the door in his face midstream and shuffled back through the kitchen, grabbing my glass. I walked through the dining room, noting the empty space where my barnwood sixteen-top table once was. Back behind the bar in the cavernous and equally empty great room, save for the plush vegan recliner and my original Dr. Seuss painting, I poured myself another stiff old-fashioned and made my way. It was eleven in the morning. I had transcended time. Each second remaining was an eternity.

Randy was a momentary distraction. A blip in my march to power down my matrix.

Ring-ring-ring. Oh, not the fucking phone now. To have a heart attack after having planned such an elaborate suicide would be truly tragic, but, thankfully, it stopped.

If I only had the time, I could tell you some stories. They were already written down, after all, stuffed and cramped in a four-foot totem of past-due notices, foreclosure warnings, and my divorce papers. All those stories, soon to become spent carbon.

Stories of endless nights of dance music, scores of hookers, and mountains of cocaine. Stories about enormous amounts of money being paid, made, traded, and lost in a unique world that just happens to be the center gear of our economy. Our whole way of life, really, our ethos, and our belief in the possibility of endless growth. Stories of opportunity, excess, exaltation, rapture, obsession, addiction . . . 

The confessions of a dead man—it would have made a good book. Maybe a better movie.

Step right up. Here, you will find tales of characters grasping futilely, like Dante’s Casella, for immortality through a gilded legacy. The good, the bad, and the ugly—the side effects of a career in the markets that are seldom told, not treated with therapy, but often treated with pharmacology.

You might enjoy these stories.

I ran the redhead against the striker and relished the sound of the hiss and the bright whiteness of the spark. The sulfur smell drifted up and clung to the back of my throat.

TWO

THE HOPEFUL DOCTOR

My body pressed back against the worn skin of my favorite chair, and I sloshed back some bourbon. The liquor’s warmth against the cool ice orbs tasted like smoke and leather. The ice cubes rattled in a dance of delight and certain death. Bourbon was a slow and sure path, but fire would be resolute.

I let the match burn up at an angle, watching the yellow and orange chase the blue until the hairs on my knuckle shriveled and crisped. The burn felt like home, breaking through the numb, and then the tiny flame flickered out. Dry run . . . 

I held a picture of Beth and me in London. It was a crudely taken shot by a drunken colleague named Monroe after a Saturday spent, as they say in England, on the piss.

I was set askew like I often am, posing as if I were auditioning for a pop music album cover, and she was centered and pristine, the half-smile beaming from her face that spoke of passion and depth. Beth, before the rise and fall. Beth, with eyes full of aspiration and kindness. Beth, as she once was before . . . me.

It was 2003, during the spring, when we first met. It was two years after my company was transplanted to London via acquisition. She was a lawyer who’d graduated from Columbia Law after having attended undergraduate at Virginia. She was on the cusp of something new when I met her. She’d realized she’d wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon, actually.

Smart and empathetic, she wasn’t cut out for the gray area her work as a corporate defense attorney required. Not that gray areas didn’t exist in medicine, but Beth saw it as a field where she could assert her ethical controls and ultimately achieve a balance she hadn’t found in the law. Besides, in the early 2000s, no one was aware of the extent of conflicts between the makers and prescribers of medicine. We had yet to experience the vulture capitalism of private equity firms snapping up life-saving drugs and health centers, then raising prices astronomically. Nor had we entered the tragic period marred by opioid addiction and the complicity between the drug makers, distributors, and prescribers that fueled the flames of the catastrophe. Even if Beth had an inkling of what evolutionary path lay ahead in healthcare, surgery was always one of the few areas, as she liked to say, that could be black and white. When we met, she’d just quit her job and was taking prep courses for med school.

The chance encounter occurred during the halftime of a Chelsea soccer game while grabbing drinks. When I spotted Beth, she was overloaded with a tray of Pimm’s cups for her girls, and I was all too eager to help. Her auburn hair, streaked with blond, was raked back in a loose twist. Her eyes were a stunning green, like jade amid the clay pools of a deep mine in Indonesia. Her face was delicate with a slight nose and soft cheeks, sun-kissed and packed with freckles. She looked sexy as hell in the electric-blue jersey. She would later say it was love at first sight for her, and I can’t say I didn’t fall for her straightaway, either.

After dropping off the drinks, we watched the rest of the game from the bar, sharing several drinks, laughing, and talking.

The law—I mean, it’s anything but direct, she told me, I feel like half my life is consumed by meaningless drivel. There was almost a sadness in her eyes. It drew me in. I told her she’d been spared.

A trading pit is equal parts human zoo and porn shop washroom. It felt good to make her laugh. I had to burn my clothes from those days . . . couldn’t get the smell out.

There was an apprehensiveness in her smile, but she wouldn’t tell me why until later. Instead, she stuck to smells. She remembered fondly, It’s sweet and earthy at once, hay. I used to fall asleep in the barn loft and listen to the mutterings of Tessa and the other cows. I still have the blanket we wrapped her in when she was too old to go on—a patchwork of old shirts that my grandmother had put together. She blinked away the tears, but it wasn’t clear whether she mourned the memory of Grandma or that of her favorite cow. What was evident was that she had been raised well, and her father’s farm had become a part of her. I would later learn that the depth of her empathy was capable of both bovine and human love.

I wondered about her dreams. Did you ever think about staying? I mean, if it was an option. It was easy to picture her in overalls and a checkered bandanna. I’ve always been a sucker for white tank tops.

Yes, it was. I thought about it, but I guess, you know, I wanted to make it in the world. She shook a fist to conjure some bravado.

I know what you mean. I used to want to be a birdwatcher. It’s what my mom loved to do. My dad said it wasn’t a job.

Well, he was wrong. She put her hands over her eyes, still caught up in bittersweet memories. Sorry.

I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I watched her lips and told her about my first fumbling days on the streets of Berlin. Back and forth we went, revealing some things light and others deeply personal. The hours evaporated.

I remember having the thought that this was the first real conversation I’d had with a woman in, well, what felt like forever.

Afterward, we both went with our friends to the infamous Slug and Lettuce bar at Fulham Broadway and sang Sweet Caroline and Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer until the lights came on, and we were herded like cattle into the street.

We’d kissed sloppily until her friends, declaring her too drunk to run off with a strange bloke, pulled her into a black cab, but not before she’d written her number on the inside of my hand with a red Sharpie. I called her the next afternoon after a three-hour brunch and said, I hope it isn’t too soon, but I can’t get those green eyes out of my mind. She laughed and toyed with me, pretending not to remember meeting a Cal last night.

Besides, American expats are a strict avoidance in my book, she continued, always immature, flawed to the point of moral failure, and often quick, ineffectual bedfellows . . . The pause drew out.

Uh, was all I could conjure, so she continued, In fact, I’ve come to London to wed royalty. She dawned an English accent. How presumptuous of you . . .

Another pause, and then she burst out laughing. Oh, Cal, I wish I could see your face!

It’s pale, I assure you. You had me, I stammered.

I know. I’m sorry. She took a deep breath, which spoke of contemplation, then finally said, I’m slammed all week, but I would love to see you on the weekend.

I’d been in a string of senseless relationships, including quite a few with Chelsea Girls who let you put it in their butt for an extra hundred pounds. I tried for a normal relationship, but it didn’t work out. I’d prioritized my work, but carnal desires still beckoned. A beautiful and sexy Korean credit trader had ridden me on my miniature modern flat’s faux black leather couch. I wanted more. She was smart and attractive but also ten years older than me. I’m unsure if she was toying with me or looking for someone to leapfrog straight to kids. There’s a lot of pressure in Korean culture around that. Either way, she dropped me after a handful of dates, and I went back to my random philandering that would occur in London clubs between the weekend hours of midnight and three a.m. It was hard to form meaningful relationships when screening partners through the lens of half a dozen vodka Red Bulls.

There was Diana, a snog-happy shag rabbit, who offered to share her roommate with me. There was Elise, who came across as royalty and only ever let me kiss her and fondle her pointy breasts. An Indian girl, Tara, kept wanting sex, but she would get so drunk after two drinks that we never made it to the bedroom. Alexa was another lawyer and would only do oral. Not a problem. All interspersed with frequent trips to London’s famous Spearmint Rhino, the world-famous strip club where extras were included. Those trips often ended with a late-night call to the service, and sometimes, even the same girl from the club would show up. At least the ice had been broken. . . . This was me in my twenties: chasing sex but never really knowing women.

If I have a defense for my behavior, it starts this way. My heart had not ossified. I was simply confused. I thought this was