My grandfather left me a hardware store and thirty thousand in the bank,
he said keep the lights on, keep the people straight, and never let it tank,
I sold it inside a year for three times what the building said it’s worth,
and spent the profit on a sports car and a condo overlooking Perth.
I told myself I was upgrading, told myself the old man was naive,
that sentiment was just a luxury that hungry men don’t get to keep,
I took the buyer’s handshake with a smile
and signed the papers smooth and clean,
and drove away from forty years of family history like it’s just a dream.
Gold teeth and empty rooms, that’s what the winning looks like here,
gold teeth and empty rooms, and a handshake every time you steer,
you smile at all the right occasions, you close on every deal,
gold teeth and empty rooms, and nothing left to feel.
I got into real estate development in the years that followed fast,
buying neighborhoods and flipping them before the ink on contracts passed,
I’d knock down buildings that had stood for decades, put up glass and steel,
and tell the city council it was progress, tell myself it’s real.
The families that got displaced became a footnote in my pitch,
the local bar that closed, the barbershop, I told myself don’t twitch,
the market demands what the market demands and sentiment is overhead,
I learned to speak in margins and in multiples and IRR instead.
By forty-five I owned a portfolio of properties and debt,
so leveraged that a single rate increase would leave me soaking wet,
but leverage is just confidence expressed in financial terms,
and confidence was all I ever sold, that’s how you live and learn.
I hired consultants to write up my impact and my social worth,
three pages about how my towers brought vitality and rebirth,
a charity donation here, a ribbon cutting there on cue,
and the papers ran the stories that my publicist pushed through.
My second wife called me a beautiful disaster in the end,
she said I was the best investment and the worst place she could spend,
she packed her things on a weekend when I was out at a closing deal,
left a note that said she hoped I found out what it meant to feel.
I read it at the airport between a meeting and a flight,
folded it and put it in my carry-on and dimmed the reading light,
I told myself I’d think about it when the Zurich deal was done,
I’m still thinking about it now and that was years ago and then some.
The man in the mirror has a very expensive smile these days,
a watch worth more than most folks earn in something close to three years’ wage,
but the eyes above the watch are doing something I don’t recognize,
like a building with the lights turned off behind a clean facade of glass and lies.
I keep the hardware store receipt framed in my office on the wall,
not as nostalgia but as reminder of the first thing I let fall,
the first decision that I made where money beat out who I was,
the first gold tooth that I put in and lost the feeling just because.