My History Lesson

One of the stars of the firmament of market research where I worked my way through grad school was a guy named Kevin S.

Kevin was an amazing analyst -- he could get people who should have known better to give him the installed base numbers for ROLM PBXs or Mitel key telephone systems like the best investigative reporter, and he was a spreadsheet jockey to boot. (Lotus 123, Excel hadn't yet been stolen, er, invented).

These numbers made up scintillating research reports like the North American PBX Market for 1984, and were teased in the monthly Telecom Strategy Letter (all of which I edited).

Like most great reporters, Kevin couldn't put two sentences together if you gave him two paper cups and a string, but man could he schmooze his sources. He was also Mr. Kool; he would rollerblade up and down the original wood office loft, looking like a cross between Kevin Bacon and Clint Eastwood, if either of those guys were sharp enough to wear leather pants like Kevin.

I should also mention that Kevin was a 100-degree or something black belt in some hitherto little-known but notably murderous martial art, because who wants to learn judo or karate when you could learn how to pull someone's eyes out and show them to them before they died?

Kevin was brought up by a traveling father of some kind and misspent much of his youth in Belgium, and so spoke close-to-fluent French. Which helps explain how one day a million years later, across a whole ocean of expectations, I was walking down the rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, which is basically one long and truly delectable market, and I hear a voice calling out my name. And it's Kevin S.

So we exchange amazements and because we're in a wholly different context, and neither he nor I are nobles or serfs any longer, but suddenly equals by virtue of it being France, both of us lucky fluent French-speaking Americans, Kevin invites me over to his apartment on rue Mouffetard, in an apartment on the courtyard, all while explaining that he's married to a former cop late of the People's Republic of China, who has written a book (translated from Mandarin to French at the publisher's cost) about her rafting trip down the Yangtze River, the only female on the expedition -- an expedition which was in and of itself a very rare if not entirely unique occurrence, which she recounted as a means of illustrating the misogyny, fecklessness, and narrow-mindedness of the bureaucracy she had left behind.

He introduced me to his powerfully built, incredibly beautiful wife with high cheekbones and eyes that could burn a hole through the sun, who bade us sit and put down on the table a sumptuous meal that included dumplings, a Szechuan stir-fry concoction, and soup.

I paused from my gobbling long enough to dab my eyes, tearing from a combination of emotion and spices, to give Kevin a look of admiration, and he laughed complicitly, saying "I eat like this every day, man! Every. Day!"

At the time, my son must have been around three but I was no longer living with his mom, Charlotte. Charlotte was brilliant. She had a degree in fine arts and another degree in computer science. The national robotics institute had hired her to beta test powerful newfangled computers used to render 3D images, and she used some of their software on her Amiga and her Commodore 64 to create an animated adult soap opera for Canal+ -- this was in 1991 or thereabouts, long before people worked from home, eons before Adult Swim, years from the existence of the Internet as we know it. It was truly avant garde.

Kevin is looking to hire someone who can build an online presence for his new business venture, and I know someone who can do it for him. Charlotte, who needs money.

At the time, I’m working at a French brokerage firm that Barclay's has acquired in order to be able to trade on the Paris stock exchange, and I'm surrounded by a bunch of snarky, wide-boy, market makers run by a mutton-chop suspender-wearing old hand of the British Empire by way of Singapore and "the Lebanon," who reads the FT standing up at his desk with the salmon-colored broadsheet spread across it, leaning leanly and predicting quite accurately that while the world hasn't heard from Kosovo and Nagorno-Karabakh since WWI, it was about to get a refresher course in Serbo-Croatian history.

So Kevin shows up at my office and his Kevin Bacon cum Eastwood face is all kind of fucked up. I ask what happened, and he gives me some cockamamie story about falling off his bicycle or opening a car door while in reverse -- his cheeks had acquired narrow trenches you could grow corral in.

We have lunch and he finally confesses that his wife got mad at him for something and kicked his ass – and raking his face with her fingernails wasn't the half of it, he said. This is coming from the black belt in murder, remember.

Anyway, I introduce him to Charlotte by phone, they agree on a price, and off we go into our separate fairytale fantasies of what life would be like next month, next year, in the pre-glow of glory and riches to come.

Only a month later, he realizes she's quoted him a price something like 1000x times the going rate. He calls her and tells her he only wants to pay a fraction of what they agreed upon. She calls me and essentially says that if I'm any kind of a man, I'm going to make Kevin pay what he agreed. You know, the guy who knows how to pull your heart out with his pinky finger and who’s married to a frenzied female Chinese cop — I’m going to make this guy cough up the moolah.

So, surrounded by snarky Brits, I punch his number into my desk phone and ask him to explain himself and he does and I say something along the lines of "at the risk of our friendship" and he says "the friendship is already over" and I'm like well, still, and he makes a final offer that I know she will refuse because she would rather have nothing at all than compromise even an inch. And I know my friendship with Kevin is over, and my opportunity of supping at his table is over, and any idle chance of redeeming my manhood with Charlotte is over, even though it was never a question of my manhood with her.

She used to tell me she was convinced I was only in it for what I could write about.

But I tell Kevin what a lousy guy he is, how a deal is a deal and he made a deal, and she's already done the work, and how is it her fault that he found a cheaper deal after the fact.

And we hung up on each other. I was certain that I'd made no impact on him whatsoever, and also figured that was the last I'd ever hear of him.

A few hours later, I get a call. It's from his wife, who tells me that as a Chinese national, she had never really heard of Hitler or known anything about the Nazis until she'd met Kevin, but now, having heard about our latest conversation, wished that Hitler had succeeded in killing all the Jews.

And if that comes out of left field to you, you can only imagine what it felt like to me, as I realized that Kevin, whom I had known for the better part of ten years, not only identified me as a Jew, he had THOUGHT OF ME as a Jew -- me, the secular Jew who didn't celebrate any Jewish holidays or Sabbaths, or even believe I believed, or even thought of myself as a Jew until after I listed things such as writer, Yankees fan, father, New Yawker, American, dog lover, and then maybe, maybe Jew -- not only that, he believed the worst of what people think about when they think about Jews. He didn't think of me as Hickins, the writer, or Hickins the stupid baseball fan (because baseball is about as stupid as you can get), or Hickins the fat klutz, or Hickins who got lucky with a crazy beautiful chick, or Hickins the pain-in-the-ass editor who thinks I don't know how to write, all of which would have been logical and acceptable and fair (if wrong, because baseball is gorgeous).

But no. He thought of me as Hickins, that Jew.

And I still can't get over it, can't absorb the lesson, don't want to absorb the lesson, that some people will never see beyond that label, that fact, that historical accident.