More Die of Heartbreak by Bellow Saul

Author:Bellow, Saul [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780141913773
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

Here I could pay myself a compliment (as people are forever doing) and say that I didn’t want to interfere in Uncle’s affairs. But that’s simply not true. The complications were forbidding, and I couldn’t have been effective. Besides, he wouldn’t have taken the right advice even if I had had it to give. So more for my own sake than his, I made a date with Vilitzer’s son Fishl.

Fishl shared office space downtown with another erratic character, and was listed in the phone book as “Vilitzer Associates—Seed Money for Beginning Entrepreneurs.” In Uncle Benn’s opinion, which seemed right to me, Fishl would have done better to leave town after his father broke off relations with him. There was no access to old Vilitzer through his son; he wanted no part of him and made no bones about it. For fifteen years or so, Fishl had been entirely on his own and he had organized quite a few colorful failures for himself, some of them right on the edge of felony. Not very long ago he had conceived of a combined yoga-style and commercial venture. Describing himself as the local representative of a West Coast maharishi, he put out an investors’ manual and mailed it to a substantial number of subscribers. The general idea was to play the market from a spiritual base. Meditation, by reducing the oscillations of consciousness, made you a more capable investor. Some success attended this, until the idea hit Fishl of telling his clients to get a large number of credit cards, say five hundred at a minimum. By borrowing a thousand dollars on each card (short-term), you obtained half a million dollars, paying little or no interest. With this capital you went into the options market, and with nervousness expelled by meditation, you could make quite a pile of money—at least a thousand per thousand invested. You traded on a daily basis, for safety, avoiding the risk of extended commitments, and within a month you had half a million dollars of your own. The banks affected by this took immediate action to block these cash raids and their lawyers came down hard on Fishl’s counseling service, in a case widely reported in the press. Some government agency also got into the act—maybe the SEC—and before it was all over, old Vilitzer, with plenty of troubles of his own, had told the press, “He’s no son of mine!” Demoralized for a time by this failure, Fishl next studied Chinese acupuncture, and presently set up a special practice as an acupuncture abortionist. Again he was sued, this time by a woman who had had a baby after receiving treatment. You can always count on litigation. A Philadelphia jury has just awarded big damages to a lady who was robbed of her psychic powers after undergoing a CAT scan. After long years as a medium, she was forced to close up shop. Say what you like about America, but few countries have welcomed originality more warmly, and never before has it been a mass phenomenon.

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