9th March 2011
Schemes of My Father
“My father didn’t let on that anything was amiss. I knew nothing about the real estate crash, of course, or that savings and loans like my father’s were going bankrupt all over the country, the calamitous tide of fraud and reckless lending that would become the S&L crisis. I didn’t know that it would culminate in the failure of 1,043 S&L’s or cost taxpayers over $120 billion to repair the damage. In Baltimore, at least, my dad had taken me to his office occasionally, a breathtakingly messy place that smelled like fast food and B.O. and Xerox ink, the floor carpeted with documents I wasn’t allowed to step on. Strangely, though, after we moved, he never once brought me to his work. To this day, my own mother can’t tell me a thing about what he was doing those years in California. As far as I was concerned, the secrecy added to his glamour. But even before more things began to disappear—the pool table and tennis lessons and Ferrari sedan he kept in the garage—the truth of my father’s failure came out in subtler ways.
