“Not surprisingly, each of our employees had a serious dysfunction, although, in Frank's case, it had more to do with his wife. She had a rare disease called alopecia totalis, which had caused all of her hair to fall out, even her eyebrows and eyelashes. She looked like a female Yul Brenner. George Barbella's dysfunction was that he was completely obsessed with the food, even more so than Elliot. He used to walk around complaining how our shrimps had been glazed with water, to add weight to them. ‘When my customers cook them,’ he'd moan, ‘they turn from jumbos into micros.’” I shrugged innocently. “But glazing was standard industry procedure, so it wasn't my fault. Anyway, what he reallyshould've been concerned about was the food smelling like kerosene.”

The Bastard recoiled in his seat. “The food smelled like kerosene?”

“Sometimes,” I replied. “Paul's garage didn't have any heat, and by the time December rolled around we were nearly freezing to death. So we bought this giant kerosene heater, which looked like a torpedo on wheels. It did a fine job heating the place, although the thing burned hotter than the sun and was noisier than an F-15 on afterburners. And every so often it would misfire—belching out a thick cloud of smoke, which got on the food. Still, it was better than freezing to death.” I paused, taking a sip of water. “And then there was Chucky's dysfunction, which was, among other things, pulling his pants down in the garage and injecting himself in the ass with testosterone. But on the bright side, he had a terrific sense of humor and gave each of us nicknames: Frank Bua was the Gerber Baby; George Barbella was Tattoo, named after the midget from Fantasy Island;and Paul Burton was Cinema Head, because he had an enormous forehead, which, according to Chucky, was large enough to project a movie on.”

They already knew Elliot's nickname. I was about to offer up mine when OCD smiled and said, “Elliot was the Penguin. What was your nickname?” He narrowed his eyes shrewdly. “Let me guess: You were Napoleon, right?”

Fucking asshole!I thought. The Duchess used to call me Napoleon when she was trying to annoy me! She even made me dress up as that little bastard for Halloween once. Had OCD heard about that? I mean, was it really thatobvious to everyone that I had a Napoleon complex? Or had he just guessed? Well, it didn't really matter.

I was about to tell OCD to fuck off when the Mormon saved me the trouble. “Look who's talking!” snapped the Mormon, and he started chuckling, as did the Witch and the Bastard. The unspoken message was: OCD and the Wolf of Wall Street both have Napoleon complexes!Magnum, however, hadn't laughed, refusing to mock another man's stature; after all, he was the size of two full-grown men, and to make fun of a pint-size one would have been inappropriate.

Before OCD had a chance to pull his gun on the Mormon, I said to him, “You're partially right, Greg, at least about Elliot. But his nickname wasn't just the Penguin; it was the SuicidalPenguin. See, we were already on the verge of bankruptcy by then, and Elliot was on the verge of suicide. So Chucky used to waddle around the office with his index finger to his temple and his thumb sticking up, as if he were getting ready to blow his own brains out. ‘Hi, I'm the Suicidal Penguin,’ he'd chirp, ‘and I deliver meat and seafood to local restaurants. I have an overorder on my truck and can't get back to the freezer,’ and he'd keep saying it over and over again, as he waddled around the garage, flapping his arms like a migrating penguin. ‘Help me! Help me!’ he'd chirp. ‘Hurricane Gloria pissed all over me and the kerosene heater is suffocating me and the Gerber Baby's wife looks like a space alien and Cinema Head's mother is closing down our movie theater and…’” I started chuckling. “He was really something else, Chucky, and then, one day- poof!—he was gone. Vanished like a fart in the wind. It turned out he was robbing liquor stores at night. Last I heard of him was when two NYPD detectives came by the garage, trying to ascertain his last-known whereabouts. He's probably dead by now, either that or he's doing stand-up comedy somewhere.”

“So what was yournickname?” asked the Witch, compressing her thin lips until they all but disappeared. I smiled and said, “I got off easy, Michele. Chucky called me J.P., which was short for J. P. Morgan. See, Chucky never made fun of me. He believed in me, and he loved the meetings. After each meeting he would pull me aside and say, ‘What the fuck are you doing with this business? It's beneath you. You're the sharpest guy I know, J.P….’ And he'd tell me to cut Cinema Head and the Penguin loose. ‘They're holding you back,’ he'd say. ‘You're J. P. Morgan, and they're smalltime bunko artists.’” I paused, thinking back on his advice. “He happened to be right on target with Paul; he was much too lazy to sell door to door. And he was also right about our company; going door to door with a pickup truck was a fool's errand, totally fucking ludicrous.

“But he was wrong about Elliot. The Penguin was a winner, in the truest sense of the word. No one worked harder than him, and he was completely loyal to me. We would go on to make a fortune together, although not in the meat-and-seafood business. It would be on Wall Street. First we needed to be taught a few more lessons in humility.”

I took a deep breath and said, “It was sometime in late December when we finally hit bottom. We were literally out of money, and Paul's mother was threatening to call the sheriff. All seemed lost; all options had been exhausted. And then something incredible happened, something entirely unexpected. I'd just gotten back to the garage from another torturous day in the field, when the Penguin said to me: ‘I got a strange call today from one of our meat suppliers. They asked me what terms we wanted.’ He shrugged, as if confused. ‘I didn't know what they were talking about, so I told them I'd think about it and get back to them.’

“ ‘What does termsmean?’ I asked. ‘Terms for our surrender?’ to which the Suicidal Penguin shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I'm not really sure, but what's the difference? The freezer's empty, and we don't have money to buy food. We're out of business.’”

I paused, smirking at how unsophisticated we'd once been. We hadn't the slightest idea that our suppliers would be willing to ship us food on credit. It seemed like an outlandish concept that they'd be willing to go out on a limb like that, but, as I was about to learn, it was standard operating procedure: Everyone gave credit. The business lingo was terms,which was short for terms for payment.

With a hint of mischief in my tone, I said, “Once I found out that our suppliers would be dumb enough to ship us food on credit, I quickly saw a way out. It was simple: Grow like wildfire. Take on as much credit as possible and push the payment terms as far out into the future as I could. Then buy as many pickup trucks as possible, all of them with no money down—which you could do if you were willing to pay twenty-four percent interest. But I wasn't concerned about the monthly payments, because the more trucks I had on the road, the more food I would sell and the better my cash flow would be.

“In other words, since my suppliers were giving me thirty days to pay for the food while my customers were paying me every day, as long as I kept selling more and more, my cash flow would continue to improve. Even if I weren't making a dime on a sale, I would still begenerating cash, using the thirty days of float.”

The Bastard said quickly, “It's Business 101.”

Yeah, right! I thought cynically. The Bastard couldn't possibly appreciate the dark art of juggling cash flow! (He was far too honest.) Perhaps he understood the simple math of it, but there were so many devilish strategies to employ, especially in the endgame, when your creditors were circling and your balance sheet was bleeding red ink faster than a hemophiliac with a gunshot wound. It would take a month to explain all the scummy nuances to someone like the Bastard.