ONE YEAR AGO THIS MONTH, THE NEW ECONOMY, AFTER A BRIEF, VIOLENT ILLNESS DIED. THE MORNING AFTER HAS BEEN TOUGH. BUT WE’RE OKAY NOW, BECAUSE THE GRIM REAPER, THE BUZZARD, AND THE RABBI ARE HERE TO GUIDE US THROUGH TO WHATEVER COMES NEXT.

I am sitting with a buddy in an overpriced restaurant south of Market Street—San Francisco's Internet district —when it happens. It is a rainy January night, and we are talking about what we have in common: we both were CEOS of now-vanished dot-coms. We've talked about this before, through the fall,

always ending with an exchange of stories about being so close we could breathe the ether, some money raised, everything falling into place, big capital coming, on the precipice of dizzying connectedness and vast wealth. As we pick over a duck-liver pate, Andrew Keen goes through his riff about how his company—a music and culture site called Audiocafe.com—was moving from content to prod­uct sales and big-time investors were signed on. It was his moment at the epicenter of the awakening, the Gutenberg moment, the disruptive dawn. We all tasted some of that. Whole country fed off of it.
“So, tell me again,” I say. “How did it feel to be there, in the midst of it all?”
He looks at me quizzically. Something’s off. Rhythm broken.
“You know. How did it feel?” I ask again.
“I’m not sure,” he murmurs, dazed, like someone who reaches down for a lost limb. Then he looks at me, startled and stricken.
“I can’t remember anymore. I can’t remember how it felt.”

I CAN'T EITHER.
So what begins now? Where do we go from here? Whom do we become? This search starts, as most do, with the past - the ruins of Mecca. Each new period rises in reaction to its predecessor. Clues to what’s coming often lie at the center of the destruction, in the debris.
First stop: Judge Jim Grube of the U. S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California, which covers Silicon Valley. Grube, a large, bald man with a pencil-thin white mus­tache, is the guardian of prudence as he takes all comers with equanimity and paternal good cheer, admonishing debtors, chiding lawyers, setting up payment plans. He’s been doing this for twelve years, during the entire life cycle of this easy-money era, hundreds of cases a year. Each of us has his flaws; Grube’s seen them all.
In his chambers after the morning’s docket is cleared, he talks about “getting ready for insolvencies to pick up this year” and how bankruptcy court is the only place “people hear the word enough.
“In the last few years, I think it was the only place in the culture they’ve been hearing it,” he says, sitting in his chilly, pin-neat chambers with golf pictures and plaques on the walls. “You can build a whole life on that word.”
At fifty-eight, Grube, a Vietnam combat veteran and former collegiate offensive tackle who grew up collecting walnuts in this valley for fifty cents a gunnysack, understands the ancient connections between exertion and reward. Yet it is clear, after a few hours of chat, that he was infected, like everyone out here and across the country, with a kind of boom-time money lust. Leaves real life tasting bland.
And it’s hard to kick, like nicotine. For Grube, it snuck in through golf. He’s an amazing golfer, a three handicap, and he gets invitations to play with the fellas over at Los Altos, about the cushiest, lushest club in these parts. When he describes how the club’s initiation fee was “$340,000 last April, then in May it was 360, then it went to 390”—even while the new economy’s foundations were crumbling—he gets dreamy. He reminisces about talking in the locker room to a guy from that firm, “whatchamacallit, that invested in eBay, where, you know, a $3 million investment ended up being worth $7 billion
Benchmark? I say.
“Right, that’s them,” he says in a reverential whisper.
“Benchmark.”

This goes on for a while. It’s unseemly. You can tell he’s hoping that it’s not over yet, the glittering time, but knows it is, and he seems devastated that he passed the once-in-a-lifetime, big-money championship game sitting, well, on the bench. It kills him. And makes him sad. Makes me sad, makes us all sad. So we sit there, me and Silicon Valley’s bankruptcy judge, trying to embrace our grief that it’s over and there are now bills to pay. TEN MILES AWAY IN PALO ALTO, Lincoln “Link” Brooks is sizing up Manvinder Saraon, the CEO of Surprise.com, over one of those little round Ouija-board tables at Starbucks. Link is the grim reaper of Palo Alto, the bankruptcy attorney everyone knows of but no one wants to call for lunch. He is al­so fifty-eight, large, dour, and clear-eyed, with an “emotional range,” he says, “that’s maybe one sixteenth of an inch in either direction.” That makes him a seasoned change agent—twenty-six years in bankruptcies—who seems to have no desire to be liked. Speaks like a

blunt instrument, like W with a big brain and real experience. You have a company in the valley that needs to be put down? Come to Link. He’ll do what is widely known as an LBQ, a Link Brooks Quickie. Gets creditors to see the hard facts, puts you through hell, then lets you start a new life. Fastest turnaround: nine days.
Link is the grim reaper of Palo Alto, the bankruptcy attorney everyone knows of but no one wants to call for lunch. He is al­so fifty-eight, large, dour, and clear-eyed, with an “emotional range,” he says, “that’s maybe one sixteenth of an inch in either direction.” That makes him a seasoned change agent—twenty-six years in bankruptcies—who seems to have no desire to be liked. Speaks like a blunt instrument, like W with a big brain and real experience. You have a company in the valley that needs to be put down? Come to Link. He’ll do what is widely known as an LBQ, a Link Brooks Quickie. Gets creditors to see the hard facts, puts you through hell, then lets you start a new life. Fastest turnaround: nine days.
Manvinder, as a dot-coin CEO, is an anachronistic character, but one who can’t be dismissed lightly. Like all dot-com chiefs, he’s the carrier of a virulent germ: Americanus reinventus. Every minute, every hour, he’s looking for what’s next. At this point, desperately.
He and Link quickly discover that the building Surprise.com has been in for a year abuts Link’s small, unadorned office.
They talk about the space’s previous tenant, an Internet company that got funding, moved out, flew high, blew its wad, and is now dying. That’s when Manvinder, an affable thirty-seven-year-old Indian-born Californian, lets his veneer drop. Dot-corn CEOs must always be confident and unflappable; investments are made and creditors kept at bay on those qualities alone—on not blinking. That means there’s little chance to confess doubts or confusion. Manvinder suddenly realizes he’s been given an opportunity: a confidential chat with the grim reaper
“So, ummm, how do I avoid being like those other companies? How do I keep from ending up in your office?” he asks sheepishly.
This draws a mocking laugh. “It’s like asking a heart surgeon how to avoid a heart attack. By the time you see me, it’s too fucking late!” But then Link begins to noodle, his mind racing across three decades on the landscape of searing, in­voluntary change, through all the countless coulda’s and shoulda’s that make the soil of failure so fertile.
“All right First, always take cash as payment, not credit Second, you can’t acquire long-term assets with short-term liabilities. Third, the amount you spend bringing the customer in the door must be less than that customer pays you. If you have a product or service that people want, they will pay you a fair price, which is what you should charge them, not a penny more.”
They look at each other across the little Ouija table. Manvinder nods and laughs as he tries to memorize what Link just said. The grim reaper looks away, distant, tugging gently on this line of thought to unravel something bigger.
After a moment, he says, “Right, do all that and you’ll have a nice little business for yourself. And to build a nice little business is a thing to be proud of "
I ask Manvinder about that, about whether he’d be happy having a “nice little business.” He looks puzzled, then snaps to: “Never thought of it that way. You know, I’d run things differently if I did.” His mind is racing.
Meanwhile, Link has dug through the detritus for another gem.
“This perfection crap is beyond grasp. It’s ruinous,” he says softly as Manvinder, brow furrowed, struggles to process. “You want to evolve? Applaud mediocrity.” I laugh. Wouldn’t have been caught talking that way two years ago. Now it rings like a gong.
“Huh?” says Manvinder, trying to catch it.
“Applaud mediocrity,” the grim reaper muses. ‘You’ll be much happier in the end.”
LINK’S COUNTERPART IN SANTA CLARA, Michael Malter, descends a winding staircase, a neat, smiling man with a trimmed beard, muscular like a featherweight boxer, in a beige merino-wool sweater Binder & Malter is an eight-man bankruptcy firm, one of the biggest out here. They’ve just added a lawyer and are looking to add another
There are people who make money from wrenching transition. Michael, with two little girls, a wife at home, and a mortgage, is one of them. Business is unbelievable, and he knows that a ragtag army is on the way.
“They’ll want redemption, but first there’s pain,” he says, sitting in his immaculate office. “This process boils people right down to their essentials. If, at that point, I can get them to look in the mirror, well, that’s the start of whatever’s next. A new way of thinking about who the hell you are and how you’ll conduct your life.”
He likes the sound of that last sentence. “Isn’t half the country doing that right now? Age of Bush. Recession coming. Illusions burned away? Hey, lowered expectations can sometimes yield happiness.” There it is, another new-age riff The phone rings. Someone here to see him.
A young man named Baldemar Fuentes walks hesitantly into Malter’s office. He’s a handsome Latino-American, thirty-one, dressed stylishly in black. He was sent over by another firm handling the bankruptcy of his company, a portal through which customers could connect to local print shops, because investors were going after Baldemar person­ally. He was CEO. It’s about to get messy.
Michael walks him through the Chapters—7, 11, 13—and explains the nuances of each. But something’s distracting him. He keeps looking down at Baldemar’s file. It might as well have AMERICAN DREAM stamped on the cover: the middle child of five raised by a single mother in Brownsville, Texas; went to MIT on scholarship for bachelor’s and master’s in engineering; five years at Hewlett-Packard in the laser printers; then a joint MBA and engineering degree from Stanford. Raised $2 million for his Internet printing portal from star angels, including Andy Bechtolsheim, cofounder of Sun Microsystems; had a staff of twenty-two; and had $7 million more on the way when every­thing collapsed in the cold summer of 2000.
Michael flips to Baldemar’s asset page. Some of his investors are lawyers and “you know how nasty they can be,” Michael says gently. He goes through a couple items listed:
A condo worth $340,000—a rabbit hutch out here—with a large mortgage. A 1960 T-bird, because Baldemar, with his advanced degrees in engineering, likes to work on cars.
As he is reduced to a list of unprotectable assets, Baldemar’s foot begins to shake under the chair I had nightmares about this sort of moment. My company—which combined content expertise and streaming technology—died quietly last June. Didn’t raise much money. That’s what saved our skins in the end; the company just dissolved, painfully but naturally.
Though the tombstone for Baldemar’s company would have almost the identical dates as mine, his soul remains locked in purgatory, the fires burning below, as Michael zeros in on the numbers, on final judgment. Baldemar’s “perceived value” early last year, based on his share of the company investors agreed to fund, was about $6 million; currently he has real assets valued at $108,000, but they are largely unprotectable, including that beloved T-bird, which someone might soon pick up for a song at a bankruptcy auction. Essentially, Baldemar’s worthless.
Michael comes to the bottom of the asset list. “Ummm. It says there’s a house in Brownsville, Texas. You bought last year, and, ummm... a $40,000 house -ahhh, let me see - $17,000 in equity.”
It seems as though Baldemar might pass out.
“Mother?” Michael says, wincing, his eyes a little watery.
“Yeah, I bought it for my mother,” whispers Baldemar
“I’ll do my best,” Michael says. “All we can do is our best.”

{2. The Buzzard}

THE BUZZARD IS HIGH OVER AMERICA in his Cessna jet, following a scent. Everywhere these days; he smells death, a change of seasons, the fecundity of debris. It’s at bankruptcy auctions, in warehouses of teetering new-economy companies, on the shelves of dazed retailers across the country... and he’s descending on them, state by state, fool by fool.
“I deal in surplus and self-delusion,” he says, lodging a pinch of Skoal into his cheek. “I buy up both for fifteen cents on the dollar” He smiles and spits into a plastic cup. “Nothing exotic. I’m just a force of nature reasserting itself My arrival is overdue.”
Pitiless and efficient, the Buzzard—the proudly worn nickname of one Bill Hudson, surplus kingpin of Hattiesburg, Mississippi—is making a fortune. Right now, though, he has indigestion. Something he ate.
“Damn, I need that Prilosec.” Bill grabs the pills, an ulcer medication—very potent. “These things work miracles. Wonder who makes them?”
For some people, that’d be an idle question, a curiosity. For the Buzzard, it’s a direction finder If that company—if any company whose scent he catches—were to stumble.. . well, the Buzzard would bring his personal ethic of “extreme value” to bear upon the wounded entity. He would feed off the carcass, and it would nourish him and his customers—folks who are working class or worse in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Indiana—with the actual goods, maybe a little bruised or stamped SALVAGE, but it’s the real stuff, at 30, 60, or 70 percent off, depending on how long it’s on a Hudson’s shelf And God bless them, those Hudson’s shoppers. They want nice things, too. And, hell, so does the Buzzard, with overall annual revenue in his private compa­ny reputed to be $200 million and growing fast.
But this is not just a matter of business. Oh, no. There is a cleansing, competing worldview at work here—a replacement ethos—a Martin Luther, Diet of Worms challenge to the corrupting indulgences of “perceived value.” Perceived value? That’d be the high-church dogma, the ecclesiastical heart of the ever-escalating economy, the creed of you are what you can buy, borrow, or claim as valuation; that was the holy writ of the last ten years, practically written on the crumbling cornerstones of the Nasdaq.
Of course, it’s still everywhere, even threaded into the notion that your Brooks Brothers jacket makes you better—yes, better in fundamental ways—than the schmo wearing the stuff from Target. Why else would you spend four hundred bucks on the damn thing?
“Hmmmm,” sayeth the Buzzard, steering his white Cadillac through Hattiesburg with his left hand and reaching across with his right to check the inside pocket of my blazer “What if I told you I know the actual maker of that, the guy in the sweatshop? And that I have the same jacket on my rack, with a different label, for $40? What is it you’re actually buying for the $400? A symbol of perceived value that then funds a store on Fifth Avenue, a bunch of high-priced offices and salaries, and, of course, an advertising budget—to make you want to waste your money again and again!”
It makes me dizzy to start deconstructing it all—where your money goes and what value really means—but it makes the Buzzard fiercely clear and focused. His brow, his thick brow, knits up over that gently hooked nose, and he starts to preach as we snake through his eternally forgotten little flyover town.
“You see, I try my best to live in the church of intrinsic value. Real value. It’s a mystical thing. The intrinsic. I try, best I can, to find it everywhere. What’s something worth? Really? Does it keep you warm? Does it fill your gut, make you happy or complete in some way? Does it supply some basic need? I’m searching for it, the intrinsic value in goods, in people, in my own life. But perceived value, oh, it’s like a drug, and it’s a hard thing to kick, ‘cause it’s everywhere, trying to hook ya.”
I laugh. I’ve landed on solid, fertile ground, and I try out the phraseology—the Era of Perceived Value giving way to the Era of Intrinsic Value. There’s nothing gentle about it, though. This is a land war for the soul of America.
We’re on the scenic tour of strip malls and shopping plazas dropped on the flat red clay of south Mississippi, slowly making our way to the airport, from which we’ll be off to the tem­ple of perceived value, Amazon.com. I’ve just spent the morning at a big Hudson’s Treasure Hunt store, about sixty-five thou­sand square feet, with every good imaginable: clothes, lamps, canned food, plastic flowers. And then the main warehouse, a four-hundred-thousand-square-foot monstrosity, a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare of consumerism’s endgame, containing items of every flavor, consigned by bankruptcy and hubris of all kinds to a bin destined for this store or that in Meridian or Mobile, or for Hudson’s even lower-priced chain, Dirt Cheap, in backwaters like Moss Point, Picayune, and Gautier.
Someone out there who didn’t prosper during the big boom needs a blouse for work and those damn sheets for their damn bed and enough left over for a Cup-A-Soup. God bless. Buzzard sells them, too. But now we’re turning onto an access road near the airport and Bill is moving from the tyranny of perceived val­ue in goods to the improper valuing of people, including himself. “See, right about here I got picked up for speeding a week ago. I was going, hell, least seventy, anxious to get to the plane. Cop pulls me over, comes to the window. I give him my license and registration, and he says, ‘‘Scuse me, you the Bill Hudson? From Hudson’s Treasure Hunt and all?’ And I say, ‘Yes, I am,’ and he thanks me and lets me go on my way. Perceived value, there it is! Hell, I could be the nastiest, low-down, law-skirting son of a bitch on wheels, but he knows my stores and that I’m a rich man in Hattiesburg, and he thinks that means value, though he doesn’t know shit about who I really am, ‘bout what’s under the label. But then, like everyone, I feed off of skin-deep perceptions; I use them.” Listening to this monologue, I’m laughing, too hard. I know how the past era breathed unholy life into the notion of perceived value—financially, culturally, you name it. I can recall it like a fever dream, how at the launch of my company in the fall of’99—the apex of the mania—reasonable, credentialed people were assuring me that I would soon be a billionaire. No question. And they started to treat me—a guy with a couple of suits and an ‘88 Volvo—as someone I was not.. and it was intoxicating and unstoppable. And here’s the Buzzard, possessor of the actual wealth, wrestling with those same forces—the separations and presumptions that money creates—to try to keep some earlier, recognizable version of himself in focus. A moment later, we’re on the plane, a Cessna Citation II jet. His new wife, Elizabeth, a knockout blond schoolteacher from Dallas, and his star surplus “picker,” Steve Davis, a straight-arrow ex-marine, are with us. They watch the Buzzard with gentle care, both of them.
And we’re up, Bill leaning way back in the little bucket seat, all six feet three and 220 pounds of him, eating turkey sand­wiches. “This is about the only thing I can keep down,” he says, looking out the dinner-plate-sized window, as southern Mississippi—where he grew up hunting squirrels, fighting cocks, and working like a hog when the babies started coming, right out of high school—vanishes beneath white clouds.
Down there, the Buzzard’s life bumps forward along the arc of deliciously ruinous success. In this case, Your Honor, there’s a first wife, Angela—he was nineteen, she was sixteen—and three kids; the divorce proceeding, two years along now, is already legend in south Mississippi, which is why the Buzzard must be discreet about some financial matters these days. And there’s a father, who had young Bill sizing up inventory when he was eight, built the operation to a few million a year, and then was pushed out by his son in an acrimonious buyout in 1996. And so sometimes the Buzzard—wondering which world he belongs in - retreats to his farm, knocks down trees for days on end with his bulldozer, writes melancholy poetry, and then emerges to resume his search.
A half hour later, his latest prey is before us. There, on the outskirts of Memphis: the half-million-square-foot Amazon/ToysRUs.com warehouse. It’s a monstrosity built, practically, on the fumes of perceived value, or, in its stock-market term, valuation. Valuation turned to currency for Toys­RUs.com, its new partner, Amazon.com, and various other lesser-known dot-coin retailers who rented football fields in­side this tin box and loaded shelves to pregnant expectation for a new age of clicks and UPS trucks that never came.
Pacing the lobby in his coal-black overcoat, his hair damp from a light drizzle, the Buzzard breathes deeply, staying centered. He’s been here before. Last year, he devoured the carcass of Proteam.com, a sports collectibles and memorabilia dealer, sold the surplus at a nice profit in the stores— people love that shit!
The door buzzes, and Tony Marchese, the warehouse op­erations manager, guides us in. Team Buzzard wordlessly folds behind the man in black—the lovely Elizabeth, Steve the marine, me, and a guy who met us here from a friendly Canadian salvor that may take some of the $10 million of goods the big man’s looking to eat today.
The Buzzard works on Tony as we snake quickly through cinder-block hallways—like the concrete tunnels leading into a stadium—to get as much as Tony will tell. Yeah, it’s bad, Tony says. Real bad. He’s the key man, ToysRUs.com’s expert in “fulfillment,” the mission-critical business of storing, retriev­ing, and shipping product, of knowing what’s selling and what’s not, of keeping the inventory straight and keeping the cost of this vast octopus in check. If you think of the Internet as a curtain of dotted light, this is everything behind the curtain— which is everything, or at least everything you can actually touch. And Tony, who is king of this tin city, is gone by April.
Let go? Really? The Buzzard’s left brow arches, and Tony lays it out dry and neat, how Amazon’s strategic alliance with ToysRUs.com, struck last summer, means that all fulfillment will now be subbed out at a high fee to Amazon—”though you’ve never seen such a disorganized, screwed-up fulfillment operation in your life.”
“Hmmmm,” sayeth the Buzzard. “Sounds mighty ugly to me. Sounds like you need to empty out this warehouse, and quick. It’s been a bad Christmas season all around, and now this restructuring. As you know, Tony, inventory doesn’t get better with age.”
Tony laughs, and the Buzzard laughs, and then the ceiling vanishes as we emerge into a biosphere of madness— shelves as tall as redwoods, lights so high they’re celestial, endless plateaus and sheer cliffs of trailer-sized boxes—and then we’re walking up steps to shelves that are actually floors. The Buzzard is flipping through the inventory list Tony gave him—thick, with thirty lines to a page, each with the type of item, cost per unit, number of items, and total cost. Flipping and walking and laughing.
He spots something. Points to a line. Tony hovers in.
Pokemon Booster Pack... 125,279 units. . . $3.49 price total: $437,223.71.
“Let me see them,” the Buzzard says, not laughing now.
After a few quick turns, Tony’s cutting open a box and handing the Buzzard a pack of playing cards with a little Pokemon character on the front. The Buzzard frowns. “Pokemon’s history, this is way overpriced at $3.49, and, far as I know, no self-respecting third grader in America would be caught dead with this piece of shit.”
Tony shrugs. Buzzard picks up a few other lines of Pokemon cards on another page and mumbles, “At least $600,000 of this garbage in the overall lot. Zero value, as I see it.”
Tony knows what he means and nods an assent. He has 901,349 items with retail value of $8,615,814.34 in this warehouse and another $1.5 million of similar inventory in smaller warehouses in Pennsylvania and California The salvor’s rule of thumb is to bid ten to fifteen cents on the retail dollar—so the Buzzard will probably pay $1 million to $1.5 million for the haul—but that swing of five cents, or movement beyond that range, will be determined by what Team Buzzard sees as it examines the inventory. It is, of course, an exercise in value— intrinsic versus perceived. There are few better at this than Bill Hudson, and he may find that the sins of perceived value are so egregious, the foolish, stupid, off-the-mark abandon of toy manufacturers and ToysRUs.com so great, the intrinsic value of these items so minimal, that it’s not worth making an offer. If he’s merciful, he may just break Tony’s back on the price, and Pokemon just knocked a penny, maybe two, off the bid.
So Tony quickly moves us through some of his better items, running across shelves and cutting boxes: VTech Computers, $49.99, little laptoplike jobboes ("Yes, good for the kids who can’t afford PCs,” says the Buzzard); WCW wrestling figures; Precious Moments dolls, Sunny, Chrissy, and Blue Bell (“Sure, the little girls will like them,” whispers Elizabeth); then Rock & Roll Elmos, only $9.99 per item, and 6,905 of them, a mountain of Elmos. “Those Elmos are underpriced,” the Buzzard whispers to Steve, who nods and shrugs his huge marine shoulders. “Something’s up, Steve.” And after a few leading questions, followed by a jaunty “Shake, Rattle & Roll” sung by Elmo, Bill gets Tony to fess up. ‘Yeah, they were actually an incentive giveaway for customers who spent a certain high dollar amount on toys. We never put them out at this price.” Buzzard licks his lips. A gem. He could put them out for $9.99 and start reducing from there. Pure profit This helps offset the valueless Pokemon junk And then there are the Barbies. Boxes are cut open to reveal a whole race of Barbies at $19.95 pen “They’ll move,” the Buzzard says, nodding, as he holds little Barbie in a Dodger uniform and instantly calculates profit with his average discounted sale price of $8 per Barbie. “Just like my girl,” he says as Elizabeth blushes. “She’s a beautiful girl who loves those uniforms. She watches football with me, those Dallas Cowboys.”
Tony smiles, everyone smiles, but then the Buzzard grabs Tony and points to the inventory sheet.
“This has to be a misprint.”
Millennium Barbie ... 56 units . . . $499.99 . . . $27,999.44.
Tony just shakes his head, and, after a few quick turns through an Erector set of platforms, he cuts a box. And, next thing, the Buzzard’s holding it up, a big black box with a sparkly-gowned Barbie smiling through the plastic window with her little Mona Lisa smile. He looks at it as if it were the artifact of a dead civilization. ‘A thousand years from now, an anthropologist could hold this up and say, ‘This is what happened to them. They were selling Barbies for $500,’ “the Buzzard whispers. “It’s a sin against God, against the intrinsic.”
“It was a special time,” Tony says. “The millennium and all.” The Buzzard looks at him blankly. “And that time’s now over.”

WE’RE BACK UP to thirty-seven thousand feet, banking west for Kentucky, and the Buzzard decides he’ll bid 13.31 cents per dollar for the inventory, or about $1.3 million for the whole lot. “Sell some now, warehouse the rest for next Christmas. It’ll all be gone soon enough, make some kids happy.” He says this without inflection. The rush of the kill is wearing off. He’s reflective now. “The mist of perceived value, of excess, is burning off in the economy day by day. Deep down, we all want value, real value,” he says absently, almost to himself. “It’s an essential need.”
We land in northwestern Kentucky and drive up a mountainside to his hilltop estate just across the Indiana line, overlooking Louisville. It’s a ten-thousand-square-foot house he bought last year after he married Elizabeth, and it’s huge and dark and icy-cold. Elizabeth begins fixing something to eat with Steve. The Buzzard retreats to his study.
“I come here to get grounded,” he says, ulcerous and spent, walking by a polished piano, down some steps into the well of a room that sweeps upward as high as the atrium foyer of an art museum. A place you pass through. The bookcases are twenty feet high, alongside ornate windows.
In this room, the Buzzard seems smaller, uncertain. There’s a photo on a credenza of Bernice Hicks, the eighty-two-year-old leader of a small denomination of Christians who study ancient Greek and Hebrew versions of both the Old and New Testaments. Bill was raised Baptist, but, as in every other part of his life, a few years back he started to dig for extreme value, some deeper core, and ended up burrowing right through the foundation of Christianity and into bedrock. “More and more, I’m liking the Old Testament, with its depth and clarity, with a God of judgment who brought forth fire and flood and a promised land to people walking this earth. I feel a kinship with that, with a world of dramatic action, of accountability. Of course, I still love Jesus, but lots of the New Testament seems more like the marketing materials. I just can’t accept the brand of Christianity that most people embrace. Hell, there might be deep doctrinal error in it.”
Up close, I see these books are not ornamental but functional, beaten up, fingered, and pressed. There’s The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon and a huge version of the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Torah.
“Bernice says if I keep digging, I’ll find it,” he says. “That it’s in there, the key to me finally seeing the glowing intrinsic value in myself, in all men. And when I find it, I’ll finally be able to sleep. Pray God she’s right”
The plane takes off early the next morning, 6:30 A.M., and the country splayed beneath us is vast. The Buzzard seems revived as we cut northeast at 420 miles per hour toward Ohio. His men back in Hattiesburg are checking the burn rate on dozens of companies with inventory potential so that when their moment of crisis comes, the Buzzard can make the fateful phone call. He flips through his morning memos. A tornado in Alabama and a huge load of pinpoint-cotton sheets. A fire at a Sears in Buffalo. Bankruptcy of a candy-maker in New York. Carrion buffets of Internet insolvencies. “And the retailers are suffering all around,” the Buzzard chortles. “One of my sources tells me JCPenney is dumping eight million items of clothing in the next two months. It’s never been a better time than this. Never better.”
He looks out the portal, silently eyeing the shrunken terrain. “I’ve waited so long for this, for the age of extreme value to start And finally.., it’s here.”

{3. The Rabbi}

SO WHAT SHOULD I DO Now? Please, describe my future, or several futures, and let me choose. That’s what they ask the Rabbi, who is counseling the wayward as he steers his hunter-green BMW 740iL across the Bourne Bridge onto Cape Cod. “I’m telling you that a new age is starting!” he shouts into his cell phone. “It’s time to exhale, to take account, to stop buying what you don’t need and evolve a little! Are you ready for that, you son of a bitch?” (One imagines this same deathbed benediction playing out from every cell phone in every BMW 740iL in every corner of the country!) He stops, lets the guy on the other end of the line—a failed Inter­net CEO—react for awhile. This gives the Rabbi, who is not ac­tually a rabbi—he’s a headhunter—and whose moniker was affixed by clients who rely on his spiritual advice as much as his job-finding expertise, a chance to do his breathing. In, out, in, out, slowly—helps him fight back nausea from this morning’s radiation treatment. Prostate, like half of America. But very aggressive. One blast each morning, cleansing the polypy gangrene of excess—or so he hopes.” Look,” he says, quieter now, “it’s like I tell all my people. If you feel you’re ready to live a more meaningful life, then you have a lot of company right now”
The grim reaper presides over the past. The Buzzard devours the present. And finally, simply, there’s the Rabbi. He is Peter A. Rabinowitz, of PAR Associates Inc., a longtime stop in downtown Boston for the most rarefied, specialized placement needs: the CEO, the chairman of the board, big-brained VP of vision, college president, or foundation head. You call the Rabbi, thirty-four years in the biz, and soon you and your company are asking different questions, fundamental questions, and getting a new type of answer. So you keep calling just to check in, to take his pulse and let him take yours, or, like a big health-care company in Nashville, to have him deliver most of your executive team. Rabinowitz: a seen-it-all change agent of the first rung.
Of people who are especially suited to their jobs, it is often said that they are what they do. The Rabbi, though, has carried this concept to a mystical realm: He has become change. He inhaled it, and it is shooting out his pores. He is now a vessel, an embodiment, a cipher. The word become man. Here’s how it happened, how the Rabbi connected to earth and sky.
March 2000: Some leading analysts mur­mur that they have lost confidence in some banner new-economy companies, that they are unsuitable for investment. It’s the first warning signal, after some Nasdaq bubble bursts early in the month. A few whisper that it could be terminal, but most disagree. On company balance sheets, there is a mandate to shrink excess, cut expenses, seek earnings— a call for strong corrective action. Looking back, it’s the beginning of the end.
March 2000: Rabinowitz, after five kick-ass years for his firm in the booming economy, is turned down for life insurance. Warning sign:
A test in his physical indicates the possibility of cancer. A follow-up confirms it. By now he feels it in his balls. A call for strong corrective action.
Spring and summer: The new-economy stalwarts blunt their muscled-up, libido-crazed, kill-or-be-killed nature as the capital markets cool. En masse, companies try to become more prudent and sensitive, think long term, get in touch with basic operations.
Spring and summer: Rabinowitz starts hormone treatments to kill off production of testosterone, which is feeding the tumor. Loses his sex drive, said to have been legendary Cries a lot. Experiences hot flashes.
August: Serious layoffs commence in dot-com, telecom, and technology companies A few companies in content fold. Fortune 500 companies in retail and media start trimming Web divisions.
August: Rabinowitz shuts the Boston office of PAR Associates Inc. after sixteen years. Wants to get in touch with essential core value: top clients who simply want him. Shrinks staff and moves office to Cape Cod; exhales.
All the while—since April, since the discovery of the cancer in the economy—business, the business of preparing people for death and walking them over to the other side, the Rabbi’s business, has been booming An avalanche of calls. He has to be selective. Many just want to talk about asking the right ques­tions. An epochal change is afoot. An era ending. The notion of economic laws being rewritten, of limitless growth—an assumption underlying countless lives in a hundred industries—is steadily dissipating.
And here’s the twist: At this moment of greatest need, the Rabbi has never been better. Just as scores of confused friends and clients grapple with denial, rejection, and ac­ceptance of their fate, Rabinowitz is, moment by moment, granted clarity from this gift of death being nearby. One more morning blast of radiation, one more therapy session on the drive home. A concerned client asks after the Rabbi’s health. “Yeah, I think they got it all. I mean, they think they got it all.” Then something snaps, a cross-beam gives. “Who the hell knows if they ever get it all. Do you ever know? Is there ever one fucking moment of certainty? Sonovabitch!” He pauses. Hot flash. Breathe. In, out, in, out.

IN MANHATTAN, at the sprawling Jacob Javits Convention Center, the Rabbi’s meeting some clients about a museum president’s job and attending the annual gift show. He and his new wife, his second, have a little shop on the Cape that sells handmade stationery, invitations, and whatnot It’s a good product for the moment. Handmade simplicity sells well. You can charge plenty. They decided to open the store back in August, part of his ratchet-down/break-free epiphany.
He wanders out of the thrumping circus on the trade-show floor so we can meet for coffee in the center’s echoing foyer. The Rabbi—five feet ten, 170—is wearing an expensive hand-tailored blazer, an azure-blue shirt, creamy Bally loafers, and crocodile suspenders, an en­semble that disguises a mild paunch.
It’s late January. The radiation treatments and hormone blasts are over. Been given a clean bill. He’ll live. Now what do we do? Whom do we become? “That’s what they’re all asking me. But there are other questions you have to answer first Who are you now... and how are you now?”
The museum post he’s working on today—the directorship of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia—is an ideal emblem. “They say I’ve made a little money and won my freedom, or There’ll never be a time to make money like the one that just passed, so fuck it. I want to be head of a nonprofit, head of a school, do community development, some­thing mildly creative. They say they’re willing to take less money if they can have the rest of their life be better. I say fine. You like the sound of it, yes, museum president You like thinking of yourself as no longer a money-grubbing investment banker or bank president, or your Internet company crashed and now you’ll be a person with a cultural commitment. I say fine.”
Setup complete. “Now, examine what are the sacrifices you are prepared to make in the name of readiness and change. No more obsequious staff and limitless expense account. A modest drop in salary say $600,000 a year down to $100,000 a year.
“It’s a moral trap they’re in, that we’re all in,” he says quietly all marrow now. ‘You’ve lived a life that demands being discriminate, needing to judge. Judgment is paramount You’re judged by what you do, what you earn, what you can buy and you judge others with the same yardstick. How do I change my need to judge everything? Can you judge less and accept more? Can you get past the fix of relying on people’s judgment of you? Hell, you’ve got enough. If you can accept that you have enough, that’s the start. If you can get past judgment, you’re free. You can do anything with the little bit of time you have.”
He’s barraged with the seekers yearning for deeper meaning for fulfilling lives. They want help, guidance. It’s exhausting. And he’s got a little espresso in him and it’s as if he’s in combat with someone or something unseen. There’s certainly nobody else here except me, but now the Rabbi’s mad.
“Don’t tell me about happiness, about how do I get it! Happiness is not a goal. Opportu­nity is not a goal. Security is not a goal. Those things happen along the way—maybe, maybe not—when you’re not looking. So grow up!”
Next to our little pedestal table, a half dozen people getting chair massages—a dollar a minute—look over to see who’s yelling. Rabinowitz’s phone starts to ring. It’s a client Then one of his kids from his first marriage, then the American Express concierge—he’s trying to get raspberry cremes in the shape of a heart for his wife for their anniversary. “They can you get you anything those AmEx guys.”
He checks his watch, a gold Omega, and rises to go meet his young, attractive wife. After a few minutes of futile searching through the cavernous Javits center, Rabinowitz stops. He’s been thinking about it, about being free. Getting past the cancer didn’t do it. “I wish I could get past judgment,” he says with a weak smile, “just like everyone. It’s time. New millennium and all.”
The din inside this glass city of steel beams and flashing lights is rising as the sun sets and exhibitors start to stream out, giddy for a precious evening in Manhattan. He watches them pass. Then, of all things, Rabinowitz begins to recite: “Apollinaire said: Come to the edge. They said, We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them. And they flew.”
He looks at me. “So when do we start flying?”

BUT THERE WAS A TIME back in the fall, when he was taking his medicine, massive amounts of poison medicine, in hopes that it would kill the cancer before it killed him, all the while bravely irascibly counseling his disciples that the medicine would be good for them, too, back then the Rabbi wasn’t so much interested in flying up and up and up. In truth, he was scared to death, and he was resigned to it.
“Okay sure. We all want certainty,” he said one day after ministering to yet another one on the cell phone. “It’s a lie. A fix. A fool’s notion. But people were pretty fucking certain in the last couple years as I helped them leave the old economy Now they’re not so certain about anything” Hot flash. Breathe. In, out, in, out.
“I tell them I consider this progress, a step up, an ascent.”
Or, wait, maybe a descent.
He’s thinking the hunter-green BMW 740iL idling “Fine, fine,” he says after a mo­ment. “A descent..."
Hot flash. In, out, in, out.
He’s racing fast across the savanna of change he knows the way he knows his own breath, and he’s seeing something now.
“It is a descent. A descent to decency That’s what’s happening That’s the future.”
AS I LEAVE RABINOWITZ at the Javits Center and make my way back home, the Rabbi’s descent to decency has me thinking hack on the past few months of search, and especially about the kid from Brownsville, Texas, Baldemar Fuentes, our American Dreamer. After he stopped shaking I asked about where he might go from here, whom he might become.
He had thought a little about it. “I’ll go back and try something again, maybe even start a company ‘he said. “I’ve learned, though. I won’t even think about the money about being instantly rich, or changing the world. At this point, I don’t even want any of that. I just want to have some impact in my life.” He smiled through the circles under his eyes. “That’s all. Just to have a little impact—that’s plenty.”
Impact! Of course, that’s all we should want in the new new era. Scalable, with vast applications. My fellow former CEO, Andrew Keen, wants it in his stable, calm new job. Judge Grube wants it, though mostly on the golf course. The grim reaper, the Buzzard, and the Rabbi want it. And there in that office, sitting across from a recovering Baldemar Fuentes, so does a tough-as-nails bankruptcy lawyer from Silicon Valley who was moved by his desire for impact to take on a particular case for free.
And, thereby hope—a quieter, reasonable hope—still lives. Baldemar’s mother kept her house.