his son, and former second-in-command of his now-defunct financial advising firm, people assumed I was just as evil.
I wasn’t.
But thanks to the old guilt by association thing, I was fucked.
My mom had called me one rainy New York morning about three years ago, crying, “Your… your father has just been taken into police custody.”
I’d been in a cab, navigating Manhattan rush hour traffic in shitty weather. The windows were steamed up on the inside, and the driver smelled like cigarettes.
“What, Mom? It’s hard to hear you. Can I call you when I get to the office?”
But calling her from the office never happened. I arrived to a chaotic shit-show of FBI, police, and the District Attorney’s office swarming the place, with the last few remaining employees packing the little they were allowed to take before hitting the road.
My life changed that day. But not as drastically as the lives of the people my dad had ripped off.
I must have been asked a thousand times, how did you not know?
And I’ve answered a thousand times, I wish I had. I really did. He’d hid it from me. Sure, other executives in the company knew of my dad’s scheme. It wouldn’t have worked without them. But I hadn’t known a damn thing.
Dad would take money from new, unsuspecting investors, and when he lost their money in the stock market, he’d just lie and pay them with investments from other new, unsuspecting investors. A pyramid scheme in the truest sense.
I knew nothing, and my innocence was eventually proven. But by that time, my reputation was shit. My friends and colleagues, for the most part, had bailed on me.
See ya.
It was the end of my life as I knew it.
So I left New York.
I’d always been curious about being an educator, so I started as a teaching assistant at Wellshire University and worked my way up to associate professor. I was enjoying teaching math, my favorite subject, when a new boss joined the department. He didn’t like me. Not one bit. He knew all about my father’s company and how people had been swindled. He was convinced that if I’d had nothing to do with it, then I at least must have known what was going on.
I was guilty in his eyes and always would be.
So my full professorship was lagging. Actually, it was more like dead in the water. I was losing hope it would ever happen.
“I mean, what does one do when you’re passed over for tenure?” I asked rhetorically.
I already knew the answer, but Benno decided to clarify it for me.
“You can stay and just hang in there, or you can leave. Go to another school, or do something else altogether. Sorry, man.”
I needed to stop bitching before I ruined the night.
“So what’s going on with you, Sexiest Teacher in the West?” I asked, slapping my hand on the bar and laughing my ass off.
“Fuck off. And if you must mock me, get it right. I’m the sexiest professor, not teacher.”
I fake-gagged. “How’d you get picked for that, anyway?”
He threw me his serious stink eye. I knew he hated the attention, but it was funny as hell. There was no denying it.
He shook his head. “Dunno. I guess someone nominated me and they picked me. I wouldn’t mind finding out who did it, though, so I could punch them in the mouth.”
“Dude, get over yourself. It’s funny, not the end of the world.”
He looked down at his beer and shook his head. “No man. It’s embarrassing as hell. In my first class yesterday, some joker wrote it up on the board. I didn’t even notice until the students pointed it out.”
“Well, I ain’t crying for you.”
Benno’s face turned serious. “Hey, Jamie, I have to tell you the craziest thing.”
Anything to get my attention off the university, and my stalling career.
“You know how there was that birthday party thing for that guy in my department Tuesday night?”
I nodded. “Yeah. That new guy, right?”
“Yeah. We had beers and then ended up at Club V afterward. He’d never been. I didn’t really want to go, but all the other guys did, so I figured what the hell.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it all day.
“So, there was this dancer who paid special attention to me. Freaking amazing, stunning woman. At first I couldn't figure out why she was focused on me, shaking it in my face and all that, until she finished and whispered ‘happy birthday’ in my