5. Gage
CHAPTER 5
Gage
I step out of the shower, my hand automatically reaching for one of the towels. I give myself a quick dry and wind it around my hips.
It's Monday morning. I've got a million things to do in my new local offices, and I finally feel half-human. I'm on my way to resuming all my regular habits other than sleeping when I should.
I even went for a run yesterday and then again today.
It seems like most of the symptoms of the air sickness and the collateral effects of the meds I took that were plaguing me last Friday have entirely dissipated. I still feel somewhat tired, and I've got a slight headache that won't budge and a heavy dose of insomnia that no amount of melatonin has been able to fix yet. Still, it's nothing I can't handle and nothing I wasn't expecting since I'll probably be under the influence of jet lag for a couple of weeks more, at the very least, while I adjust and my circadian rhythms move away from my Japan schedule.
For most of Saturday, I was completely knocked out, though.
I fell asleep around the time the asshole, whoever he is, finally killed the Aerosmith BS.
Once I dropped off, I stayed like that, and the next time I woke up, it was almost evening. I've never slept for these many hours during the day in my life.
After that, I felt a bit better all in all, but I couldn't even stand from the bed, let alone eat.
Sunday was another story. I couldn’t sleep a wink the night before, but I felt more like myself in the morning, and the nausea had let up. So, I went for a short run and even managed to eat something and keep it down.
There’s been only one persistent side effect bugging me to no end since the whole incident happened on Friday.
After spending something like four hours straight lying powerless in my bed, and listening to that fucking song on a loop for what felt like a million times or more, all the while feeling like shit warmed over and mad as all out hell before it finally all stopped and silence reigned supreme, Pink has been stuck in my head. I find myself humming the harmonica intro or hearing it in my mind throughout the day.
It would be funny if it weren’t so damn annoying.
In the end, the fact that it took me almost two days to feel better helped me cool down some. By the time I felt well enough to move around, I was no longer mad about the accident, so I never got around to talking to my loud neighbor –or rather, strangling him, as I had originally envisioned. I haven't heard a peep from the other apartment since Saturday morning when whoever was blasting Pink finally took their ass to bed or whatever, and that contributed to making me come down from the head of steam I had worked up and leave the whole business behind.
Usually, when people are not blaring music in my very tired ears for hours on end in the middle of the goddamned night, I'm a pretty reasonable, level-headed guy, so the rude jerk got lucky there.
I'm pretty sure that whatever happened was a once-off kind of deal, after all.
Or maybe the person wasn’t even at home, and there was some kind of malfunctioning with his Alexa or Spotify setup or something.
I mean, it's not like I'm renting a unit in a frat house somewhere. This is a respectable building rented out primarily to suits like me, not exactly the rowdy types that would keep blasting music all night long.
I’ve got so much on my plate and so many things to do and oversee with the construction going on and the hiring of new execs and stuff that it’s not like having a fight with some idiot was very high on my list once I finally got about twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep and was no longer feeling like a wounded bear.
I walk into the bedroom, where the clothes I laid out are waiting for me, and start to dress up, my mind going in a million different directions.
My PA, who's been temporarily acting as my driver until I hire one, will be waiting for me downstairs in twenty minutes. I'll check if the finishing touches I wanted are being executed to my specifications by the working crew. Then, I'll leave the office behind and move on to a restaurant nearby where I have three back-to-back meetings and one power lunch with the CEO of Halls Tech, Xander Halls, an old friend of mine that I haven't seen in a couple of years –or rather since he got married and had twins and didn't feel much like traveling any longer. Not that I don't understand him. If I had found the love of my life and had babies with her, I too wouldn't be too keen on traveling all over the place unless I could take them with me.
I’ve been told that some business acquaintances that we have in common –and that have been now more than blacklisted by the both of us– have been talking behind his back about this. They have, of course, never done so in my hearing unless they wanted to catch a fist to their faces. Rumor has it that they’ve been going on and on about Xander having gone soft with marriage and fatherhood. Of course, they are full of shit and we both know it, but it doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy fucking with them a bit by pulling the plug on some deals that up until a few weeks ago were in the works. It’s the least I can do for my friend. I really admire Xander because he has a good head on his shoulders, both as a family man and as a businessman and doesn’t put on airs even though he’s a billionaire.
How could I not with the kind of snobby, crappy, good-for-nothing father I grew up with?
If I do one thing right in my life, that one thing has better be having not a single one of my sperm donor’s bad habits and being the exact opposite of the kind of man he was.
This is something I've been working on since I was a little more than a teenager and he died on us after being a non-entity in my life and that of my brother since day one, a nuisance and a bringer of constant heartache to our poor mother and his own for even longer than that, but not before ending up dissipating the family fortune within five years of having gotten at the helm of operations.
He left us in so much trouble I still don't know how I managed to pull us out of it.
I come from the proverbial blue-blooded family of the upper echelon of Seattle high society. The Bannon dynasty has been at the top since the start of the nineteenth century, working hard and making money.
By the time my great-grandfather came around, the Bannons had so much money they didn't know what to do with it. So, he opened foundations to help people, financed hospitals and schools, and put money in as many charity associations and non-profit groups as they were available in his day. When he was done with all of that, he was bored to just sit on top of the rest of his money, and so he started investing it just to give himself something to do with all the free time he had. He bought properties, wisely played the market, and finally settled on a pet project that he truly loved: a small hedge fund company that started out as nothing more than a pastime for him and ended up being one of the biggest and most renowned in the country. Then he got married, had kids, and I've been told he was a very good father who actually spent time with his children —which gives me hope about my genetic makeup since it seems that my own father was some kind of aberration in a long line of careful, kindhearted and responsible men. By the time my grandfather was old enough to take the reins, Great-gramps was handing over a thriving, carefully thought-out business operation.
Grandpa was a chip off the old block. He turned that tiny thriving pet project that his father loved so much firstly into the spearhead of the whole umbrella of companies that fell under the name of Bannon Enterprises and then into the main focus of his work because he didn't like to spread himself too thin as he wanted to have time to spend with his family at the end of every day. He chose the hedge fund over all the other venues and put his heart and soul into turning it into a vast operation. Bannon Enterprises was dismantled and sold for more money than he thought his heir could spend in fifty lives, and Bannon Hedge was born. By the time I came around, my grandfather had turned the old and prestigious boutique hedge fund into a business that had headquarters in all fifty states, even fucking Alaska. While my brother Parker was learning to toddle around, he made it international.
Meanwhile, I don't know what the fuck my father was doing since he was never there for any of us. We got lots of postcards from him as he was always traveling. I rarely saw him in person during my first ten years of life, mostly in between stops from jetting to one place and getting ready to fly to another. Then, when I was sixteen, he stuck around for a while. He got my mom pregnant with Parker, and off he went as soon as he heard the news.
I was still in high school when Grandpa lost all hope that his son would or could step up to the plate and be his heir. He knew that leaving everything to him would mean the utter and complete ruination of everything our family had worked so hard to put together since the man had no respect for money or the work you need to put behind it to grow it, but he sure as fuck liked spending it.
His personal trust fund amounted to a full billion because he was the only heir, and all his uncles and aunts had, over the years, being adding substantial bequests to it since they were all childless.
By the time I hit my teens, though, he had already burned through it, and there was nothing left.
Back then my grandfather was already training me to take over and had his lawyers working on changing his will to reflect that. He told me that his health was failing, and he was scared of what Daddy Dearest would do to our company and fortune. His idea was to put the company on the freeze. He would leave it to his board of directors to oversee things until I turned at least twenty-one and could fully take over.
My mom was relieved, and so was Grandma since they did not yet have an inkling of the kind of trouble my dad was already in.
My grandfather got his people to fix up his last testament and was set to sign it in front of witnesses when he suddenly died during the night. His heart had failed him.
No one thought that my father would stoop so low as to contest a will that left everything to his own kids –Parker was small then, but Grandpa had made plenty of provisions for his future– a will that had been expressed to all and sundry, even to him, and that only missed a signature.
But of course, his selfish, greedy ass did just that.
And he won, too.
The law was on his side, after all.
He was the rightful heir, I wasn’t of age yet, and Parker was just a child, and the last will they found was just a draft since it hadn’t been signed and notarized.
No one could do anything to stop him, not even Grammy.
All of a sudden, the man who could not spend a single week in Seattle at the old family stead just didn’t want to leave.
We were all flabbergasted until we understood that it had been Grandpa’s presence to keep him away. He could not have the lifestyle of dissipation he held so dear with his father constantly putting a stop to his fun, but with the old man gone, he could come to play in his own city rather than having to do it elsewhere.
Without Grandpa there to protect us from his bullshit, we got to see all of it. We got to see too much.
The drugs, the prostitutes and the mistresses, the shady-looking characters he owed money to. All of it.
And just as Grandpa had feared he would, my father took what had been built in over two hundred years of sacrifices and abnegation and torched it until there was nothing left of what had been and our family’s name that had once been golden and trustworthy turned into nothing but a synonym for scandal and ruin.
My father's biggest issue was that he thought what his ancestors had done before him was easy. He had a very high opinion of himself, and his inflated ego didn't let him see that, aside from hemorrhaging money due to his vices, the hedge fund op was taking hits because he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. He didn't listen to me because I was, in his opinion, only a kid who knew nothing. He didn't listen to his mother or wife because, as he put it, they were just women, and, therefore, they understood nothing about high finance. He wouldn't listen to his board of directors because, to him, they were just a bunch of old, cheap curmudgeons who couldn't tell their asses from their heads, never mind that most of them had more than forty years of experience in the field.
Everybody was stupid, and he was the only smart one so because of his smarts and business acumen, we ended up crashing and burning.
He was a risk-taker for one thing, and he didn’t have a good head for business like, at all, and he loved to live a gilded, extravagant life and surround himself with extreme luxuries he didn’t really need and could not afford any longer. He steadily but surely lost clout and clients, all the while throwing our family’s hard-earned money away so he could spoil his many lovers, leaving Mom and Grandma to deal with his bullshit.
When I turned twenty and Parker was four, our father had managed to crumble two hundred years of work entirely. Our company was gone, and our family standing in Seattle was destroyed. We were utterly bankrupted, and there were so many debts we didn’t even have a place to live in by the time the IRS was done with his lazy, trifling ass since, aside from being a shitty businessman, father, son, husband, and human being all around, the asshole also had a heavy gambling addiction and didn’t much like to pay his taxes.
He was set to go to jail for a long stint when he had a heart attack while in the company of some air-headed bimbo, so he never had to face the mess he was responsible for, leaving us to pick up the pieces.
I had to hold down three jobs while attending school to care for my mom, my little brother, and our grandma.
The poor women were so ashamed and desperate that they hardly ever left the small apartment we had to move into for the first three months or so; the shock was that devastating to them.
When the confusion and disbelief started to wear off, they got down to work, helping me as much as they could.
We all pulled our weight so that we could keep our heads above water.
Grammy Vivienne and Mom had an Ivy League higher education, but they had never formally worked a day in their lives. Still, they understood business more than most men who had spent years working in finance since they both had been a massive help in managing our family charity foundations and other munificent efforts.
They both found work in accounting thanks to a couple of old friends who had had the decency not to turn their backs on us like most of the rest of the so-called high society had done, no matter how many times our family had had a hand in pulling their asses out of the fire in the past.
I kept going to Yale and even managed to graduate with a double major in finance and business management since, thankfully, my tuition fees had been paid in advance by Grandpa in their entirety. All the while, I kept working my ass off, trying to build a future for us where my baby brother could walk around with his head held high. I didn't want the taint of our father's cowardly actions to touch him and screw up his chance at making his way when he got older.
By the time I turned twenty-five, all the family's debts had been repaid, although, in the process, nothing remained of the trust funds that were personal to our mom, our grandmother, and the ones who had been put aside for my brother and for me by Grandpa. But at least nothing was hanging over our heads anymore, and we could all start over with a clean slate.
I got it into my head that I had been trained too well by my grandfather to let it all go to waste. My ancestors had built our fortune from nothing, after all, and so could I.
My mother and Grammy were my rock all through it; they supported all my decisions and got me a meet with one of my grandfather's oldest friends, a Mr. Olson, who mostly lived overseas since his wife was European and liked France more than she did any other place in the States. He had been my father's godfather, but he had never been able to have any kind of relationship with him because of my father's complex personality and the many differences in the way they lived their lives and managed their wealth. I had met the man once when I was in my early teens. He had already retired about ten years earlier. He had left his company in the hands of his very capable son and daughter and their respective spouses, so he hardly ever came back to Seattle since his wife wanted to be in Paris. He would do anything to make her happy, and their children were usually the ones who visited them.
During my father’s brief but destructive reign over our businesses, he had been out of the country and was back now for the birth of his first great-grandson.
I didn’t expect anything from that meeting, honestly.
Mr. Olson, on the other hand, had plenty of expectations about me. He had snooped around my personal business, even going as far as to talk with the former members of our now dismantled board of directors who had known me from all the summers I had spent shadowing Grandpa when I was a kid, as I would later on learn. He had had talks with my mother and grandmother and even met with my college professors.
He asked me lots of pointed questions about what I had planned for my life and asked me to raise the family name from the mud my father had left it in to honor my grandfather’s memory. I shared all my plans with him, thinking the old man would only dispense a few good advice here and there, but he did more than that.
He cut me a check for a hundred thousand dollars.
I was blown over. I couldn’t speak for a good minute. When my grandfather had been alive, such a sum would have meant very little to me, but now it represented a chance I could have never come by on my own asking for a bank loan, not at my age at least, especially with my family rep now shot.
He told me that, as my father's godfather, he had set up a trust fund for him more than fifty years ago at the time of his christening. He had it dismantled when it was time for the man to get possession of it at twenty-five after they'd had a talk. He had given all of it away to charity because he realized then that giving it to a man like my father would be the equivalent of dousing it with gasoline and setting it on fire. The trust back then had amounted to little more than fifteen million dollars.
What he was giving to me now was less than one percent of that sum, but he knew I could do something with it. He was sure of it, he said, because he could see nothing of my father in me and plenty of the other good men in my family line that he had had the luck to know when he was a young man.
I told him I wouldn’t take the sum as a gift but only as a loan, and Mr. Olson shook his head.
He said if he wanted me to get a loan, he could have simply gone to pay a visit to one of his banker friends in town, but he didn't want that type of pressure on me, not after what my family and I had gone through to fix my father's mess and pay off all his debts.
He said he would never want it back from me, but I could give him a gift if I pleased after restoring the Bannon name. He patted my shoulder and left the cafe where we'd met after telling me I was a good man in the making and that he was already proud of me for cleaning up after my father and doing it without dropping out of school and then he was gone.
I sat there staring at that check for a good five minutes or more.
When I left there, I had a plan.
I knew I had to be careful, that I only had one shot to make it. I was aware that I was already luckier and in a better chance of accomplishing all that I set about doing than my ancestors had ever. For one thing, my forefathers didn’t have my mom and grandma in their corner and for another, they didn’t have a hundred bucks to their name, let alone one-hundred thousand dollars when they started out. In fact, I had even more than that sum because in the last year, I had managed to put aside five thousand dollars, invest them and turn them into twenty thousand.
I knew I could do something big, build something that would be solely my own and that Parker, who was nine by then, would come to love and be a part of when he got older.
I did lots of research and realized quickly that even though Grandpa had trained me and thus I would have aced managing a hedge fund, going that route wouldn't have worked.
That line of business has one single solid foundation, and that's not money but trust. My father had killed the possibility that people would trust our name in that field for many years to come, maybe even forever, so finance wasn't a viable sector for me.
It would have been stupid to pour all my money into such a venture just out of misguided pride and the fact that I was innocent of any wrongdoing.
I therefore decided to go in a completely different direction by founding an international freight and shipping company that would oversee every step of the logistics chain—from supply and global warehousing to transportation. That was when Bannon Overseas came into being, and in hindsight, it was the right decision. I launched our headquarters and opened the first warehouse in Seattle, then invested in a fleet of top-of-the-line trucks. A few years later, we expanded with a growing number of cargo ships and, finally, added planes to manage air freight.
I quickly started to rise to the top.
Two years later, I finally found the perfect present for Mr. Olson and had it shipped to him in Paris.
I got him a Bugatti worth ten times the money he had given me to help me on my way up.
About a week later, I got a thank you note from him. It came in the mail as an old-fashioned card written in fountain pen in one of those high-end cursive calligraphies from a bygone era that no one teaches anymore, not even in one of those snooty private schools I had gone to as a kid. His words to me were worth more than he would ever know or I could ever adequately explain.
He said that he loved his toy and thanked me profusely for it. However, his kids weren't too pleased about an eighty-three-year-old man speeding around on that pricy death trap. Still, he was well aware that they only talked out of jealousy because they knew he would never let them take the car for a spin. He also thanked me for making sure he could go to his death with a smile when the bitch came to claim his ass, knowing that he had played a small part in saving the legacy of one of his dearest friends and that the Bannon line was now in my hands.