Rough Trade

I realized that it was voices, the mingled voices of the thousands of Monarchs fans.
    Chrissy led the way down two flights of stairs, around a sharp corner, and through a set of heavy double doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. We banged through them and suddenly found ourselves back in the world of bright lights and fresh paint. There were trainers carting armfuls of towels and huge coolers of Gatorade, and tense-looking young men clutching clipboards and wearing headsets. Off to one side were three sportscasters, each standing in his own halo of TV lights, speaking to the camera, each oblivious of the others.
    I saw the players coming just in time to step out of the way. Chrissy and I stepped back and pressed our backs against the wall to let them past. The players, enormous men made even more so by their equipment, emerged from the locker room at a trot, shouting. Chrissy took my hand and led me in their wake up the ramp and through the tunnel toward the light. As soon as the first one hit the field the roar obliterated everything else. I heard the groan of the bleachers as the sellout crowd rose to its feet and raised its voices in unison.
    “Isn’t this amazing?” demanded Chrissy, shouting to be heard over the din.
    You hear so much about an adrenaline rush, but this was something different. An adrenaline rush is what you get when you have a fight with your boss or a truck cuts you off in traffic. This was like some kind of powerful drug, like having firecrackers go off in my blood. As I stood there in the tunnel watching the Milwaukee Monarchs take the field, the hair on the back of my neck actually stood on end.
    In an instant I understood everything. I thought of Beau Rendell and knew just why he didn’t want to give any of it up and more importantly why he was afraid to move the team. As I listened to the roaring adulation of the fans, I knew that somewhere above me Beau Rendell heard it, too. I wondered whether, high in his box, he was thinking the same thing: What would it be like when the energy behind all of the cheering and adulation suddenly turned to hate?
     

CHAPTER 3
     
     
    When I arrived back in Chicago and got to the office, I was disappointed to discover that the corporate law fairy had not paid a visit in my absence and made the Avco file disappear. It was the deal from hell and it was never going to go away. I’d been working on the initial public offering for Avco for so long that it was getting hard to remember a time when the company and its problems had not consumed me.
    Avco Enterprises billed itself as an entertainment company. It was the brainchild of a pair of creepy Eurotrash twins, Avery and Colin Brandt, who’d started out in the adult video business and ended up owning a string of adult entertainment restaurants called, of all things, Tit-Elations. The restaurants were scattered across the Midwest in Places like Muncie, Indiana, and Portage, Ohio. Their plan was to take the company public, raise $40 million, and turn Tit-Elations into a nationwide chain.
    It was just what the world needed.
    My only consolation was that the porno brothers (as I called them behind their backs) and their tawdry enterprise had been forced on me. They were really Stuart Eisenstadt’s clients. Stuart had been a partner in a smaller firm that Callahan Ross had acquired lock, stock, and copy Machine in one of its periodic buying binges. How he managed to convince Callahan Ross’s notoriously puritanical management committee to allow him to handle the deal in the first place was totally beyond me, although I secretly hoped that blackmail was involved.
    Of course, once they’d given their okay, the managing partners immediately came down with a case of the vapors and began slapping conditions and restrictions on Eisenstadt, the most onerous being that I, with my extensive experience with IPOs, take the lead on the transaction. This was exactly the kind of passive-aggressive bullshit for which the management committee was famous. Eisenstadt was furious and I must confess I was feeling pretty cranky myself. I suspected that they’d tapped me for the case expressly because they knew it would make my flesh crawl. I just couldn’t decide whether it was some kind of, test of my loyalty or a payback for my subversive attitude* and general lack of rah-rah spirit regarding the firm. In my more cynical moments I decided it was both.
    Like most shotgun weddings, this one had been rocky from the start.