At the annual shareholder party, things were a little different. There was a jazz band who played softly-- cool generic nighttime music and "The Max Weinberg Seven" had never sounded so good. There was the celebrity quarterback who shook hands. At another promotion he had sold artificial turf grass in front of admiring fans. He was on hire part-time, and gave a talk on "team work" in front of the new corporate boardroom, speaking in a deep voice and patting a football with the mighty abstract it represented.

Figaro Thunders showed up fashionably late, pulling up in a black limousine and opening the passenger's door-- all the while strutting down the red carpet, waving and smiling at the flash-bulbs. Reporters crowded up to the depending velvet-rope in admiration, hurriedly asking questions of the celebrity, caught in the wave of hype.

"Yes, folks. I'm the one to turn this company around!" he grinned, eyes manic.

A white limousine pulled up on the heels of the black one. It was Shane.

"Sir, how does it feel to be the youngest vice-president in the history of American business?". Shane arched his eyebrows at the question.

"Fine, I guess". He was weary from 14-hour days, six days a week. At least this party was a welcome respite. Though Figaro denied it, the CEO's new hours were putting a strain on his marriage. When Shane visited their home on a few occasions, he found Heidi drunk and surly. Once he heard them screaming in another room and the round-house slap as Figaro decked her. The next day at the office, he was present as Figaro ordered flowers over the telephone. "Honey, I love you" was the personalized message.

Figaro glad-handed that night, a whirlwind of tireless zeal, approaching investor after investor like a humming-bird of the shady corporate executive. He was personable, whereas people thought of Shane McClure as "paste".

Later, Figaro took the stage. "Hey, I pay you to applaud!" he flashed his grin, holding a wine glass of champagne. Half-joking, really. The audience responded with wild laughter. Eyes glittering with dollar signs, he wove an epic of exhilaration and assurance, detailing his plans to squeeze out every cent possible for the investor's sake. As the party wound down, the CEO grabbed a pair of 25 year-old interns for he and Shane to go out on the town drinking with.

Tom Gucci of "The Securities & Exchange Commission" wanted to have a word with somebody. The office refused to talk to him, an ominous wall of "brush-off". He circled, stopped, sat in the waiting room.

"Mr. Thunders and Mr. McClure are in a very important meeting", the secretary informed in her sing-song voice.

(-- Actually, at the moment they were testing their golf swing in the office with a computer laser-light apparatus, wearing Scottish caps as the occasion ordained).

Gucci went through this ritual no less than five times. His resources were limited, his spare time less, but an unidentified outside source had a tip that the new Clamp Inc. was "cooking the books". He finally took to waiting outside the skyscraper and grabbed Shane McClure's sleeve one morning. He was easy enough to spot, his face on the cover of Business Week (-- "What's his secret?"; "I don't know, you just do it" he was quoted as saying, eyebrows arched in conceit).

"Hey, kid. You ever thought about who you're'working for'?" Gucci inflected with significance, as if Shane might "work" for him. He was a regulator in this job out of good-natured idealism, though President Reagan had slashed his agency's funding to a ghost of its former self. Since "Black Tuesday", the one-day stock market crash of 1987, the public sided with the S.E.C. "Free markets", left to their own devices, tend to collapse under their own momentous greed.

"Your chum, Mr. Thunders, may not be playing a 'clean game'. Have you ever thought of that?" Shane shook the man off. He owed Figaro everything.

"There's lying and then there's marketing. You understand that?", the memory echoing in Shane's coke-addled brain. He trusted his mentor. And to have this mustached man trying to drive a wedge between them?!

"I trust my boss".

The "old man", Donald O' Herily, had been aghast. "Fiscal responsibility requires tough decisions, not gimmicks!" Figaro Thunders had finally lost his temper, after giving all manner of sweet explanations, as the honorary board member sputtered on like indignant British aristocracy, and interjected "put a sock in it, old man!" when he got sick of him.

Because so much of his fortune was tied up in Clamp Inc. stock as its chief investor, it was very unlikely that he would tell anyone. Right?

Clamp Inc. was suing John H. Patterson for defamation. The ousted vice-president had been quoted in the Wall Street Journal denouncing Figaro Thunders as "a liar" and "a cheat", and derided Shane McClure as a "slick, no-talent stock-room boy".

The upper brass took umbrage at those "slurs" and set out to "silence him". The share price quavered, dipped, then shot up again as Patterson formally renounced his views.

"That should keep any more 'disgruntled' ex-employees from speaking out", CEO Figaro sniggered. Shane merely arched his eyebrows with amusement, second in command.

To smooth over any lingering doubts, Clamp Inc. paid economists to write positive editorials on the state of affairs, in response to critics. The share price kept going up and up. They were sitting on top of the world! Most press conferences were a brief, tightly controlled Q & A where Figaro addressed the shareholders and the press personally. The reporters would never dream of being hostile or skeptical, infatuated with this American success story. Clamp Inc's scandals were "water under the bridge", so far as the public was concerned.

"Clamp Debacle; 67 instances of accounting fraud, stock diving in price"

-- The Wall Street Journal March 30th, 1990

Well, Figaro Thunders cashed out his stocks early. And disappeared. Shane McClure was caught snorting cocaine in the executive wash-room by the FBI, serving out a subpoena dispatched by Tom Gucci. Eyebrows arched in depraved stimulation, powder crusted in his nostrils, he was dragged away, the officers grabbing him by the armpits as his feet trailed on the marble floor. Gucci waved his arm, an overhead gesture, like a general.

Shane was the co-signer on all incriminating documents, though he was largely ignorant of just what was placed under his nose (-- except for the cocaine, obviously!). Figaro had mostly confined him to tedious busywork, just to make Shane feel important. And now the CEO was gone! Trouble brewed in the air, once the company quit reimbursing its executives for expenses on their corporate "Diner's Club" cards. It was Shane who "faced the music" as was intended all along!

"These measures are unfair and unjust", said Barnaby Chalmers, reading from a speech before a swarming press conference. Flashing cameras, standing there in a starched suit as "the company shield". His face was knobby and impatient, jaw set, ready to dispel and prick apart the charges being leveled. He was very impatient and dismissive of hostile questions, standing there with a constipated frown.

"Ethics-- won't you ever learn?", was the sorry, rueful question posed by Andy Rooney on CBS's "60 Minutes".

"Why, it was all just 'pie in the sky!'". The new corporate officers stared on blankly, listening to the lecturer talk on about abstract principles, using vign diagrams to get the point across.

It was a "fire-sale", that was for sure. Clamp Inc. had to sell off most of its subsidiaries to pay off its debts, not to mention the $300 million looted from the company!

Figaro Thunders did turn up eventually. . . . . Heidi repeatedly ran him over with her Mercedes in the parking lot of the L.A Hilton. His infidelities had long last caught up with him.

As for Shane, sitting in an orange jumpsuit in a minimum security Federal prison, he decided to tell his story through a ghost writer to at long last clear his name. . . . . and this is it.

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")