Written by Kevin Quigley
Photo: © Depositphotos.com/konstantynov

Every time I start a story about growing up, I stop myself.  I mean, I got older, sure.  But growing up?  No.  I stopped growing at one foot, eleven inches.  I’d be in Guinness probably.  Sometimes I dream about that.  The Guinness Book of World Records, and there’s my picture under the heading World’s Shortest Man.  But, freakshow nature aside, that would be an accomplishment.  And accomplishments aren’t for people like me.  They’re for people like Big Roger Bundy, investment banker and hedge fund guru.  My father.

Big Roger’s magnanimity is legend in the world of investing.  Day traders the world over constantly speak of his generosity of spirit and wisdom.  “Nice guys don’t finish first,” goes the saying, “unless you’re Big Rog.”  But they don’t know him like I know him.

For my eighteenth birthday, he bought me a rolling chair on casters, just like the one he sits in, but Ken Doll sized.  People saw that and they thought, Well now Big Rog is surely doing a kindness to that boy, who could never get up in the world by himself.  They don’t know the depths of his cruelty.  Some days, he’d put a piece of paper with a pie chart on the floor of his office.  On the chart were the names of funds.  Then he’d put me in the chair and have me stick out my legs and spin me around so hard I almost puked.  Whatever I landed on was a fund he wouldn’t invest in that day.  I was anti-luck, he said.  No one, he told me, wanted to invest in me.

When he bought the bullhorn I thought I’d go crazy.  Now, instead of just spinning me around, he’d shout at me: Pick me a loser, loser! he’d shout, then cackle his raspy laugh.  Why did he even need a bullhorn?  His voice had been the voice of doom my entire life, booming through the hallways of my ears.  My tiny, tiny ears.

But I’ve had a secret, kept long and kept well.  You see, every time he’d spin me on that chair and I’d land on a fund, I would invest in that.  Big Roger Bundy never thought to check on the health of the stocks his bad-luck son picked; he only saw dividends from the ones I didn’t, and assumed that his method worked.  What he didn’t know was that I was actually a good-luck charm.  A great-luck charm, to be exact.  The funds he picked against me did moderately well, enough to keep his shareholders happy.  The funds I picked?  Did astoundingly well.  Good enough so that, literally right under Big Rog’s nose, I have created a portfolio that exceeds his by threefold.  I’m rich.  And he doesn’t know it.

Not yet.

The next time he puts me in that chair, I’m going to see what I land on, and memorize it.  Then, I’m going to climb up on his desk with my own bullhorn, just to make sure he hears me.  I’m going to tell him everything I am, and everything I’ve become, and everything I’m going to be.  He won’t listen, but that’s fine.  I have to be the bigger man here.

Sometime soon, I’m going to board a plane for anywhere but here.  I’ll pay the child’s fare because I can.  And while Big Rog is floundering without me, I’ll be letting my investments pay for an early retirement on some beachfront property.  I’ll sit in the window with my special keyboard, and write the memoir I was born to write.  I bet you can guess the name.

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Kevin Quigley is a novelist, a monographer, and a columnist.  He also produces and directs comedy all over Boston and sometimes beyond.  Once he had roquefort cheese in Paris so it’s all downhill from here.