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  67. 3:46 a.m.

He was mysterious, odd, and about as different as it got. Maybe I felt in some way he would understand what it was like to be me. To be and have Henry Bins. But mostly, I loved him because he could sing his ass off.

Intermixed with the Prince posters were a mass of whiteboards. When I first started trading stocks in the early 2000s, I remember telling my dad that I needed a bunch of whiteboards. Then each day for ten minutes, I would wake up, check stocks and graph them. Of course, all this information was available on the internet, but I liked drawing them out myself—it made me feel more connected to whatever I might be buying. Not just a mere spectator, but an active participant in the stocks’ triumphs and failures. And in those first five years, I lost a lot of money, my father even having to take out a second mortgage on the house to invest in his son playing Wall Street. But eventually, I picked the right stocks. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe because my time was so constrained I was forced at times to simply go by my gut, but I always felt it was something about holding that red dry erase marker, graphing the company’s past, present, and future, that led to my eventual success.

Three years after my dad took out the second mortgage, I paid off both the first and second mortgages, and I told him that if I ever caught him hovering over a government manual again, I would break both his arms. So I can be blamed for my father’s licentious hobbying. I enabled him. But there was no amount of money that could repay what that great man did for me. For every hour that I was awake, he put eight hours into planning out every minute of my day so I would turn into the man I am.

But Prince and walking down memory lane isn’t what brought me upstairs to my neatly kept room. It was a shoe box hidden in the back of my closet.

I sit on the queen bed, the brown and green striped comforter pulled taut, and lift the lid. I smile and remember the day my dad handed me the shoebox twenty years earlier.

“Every kid should have one of these,” he’d said smiling. “A shoebox full of fireworks.”

::::

“Lassie! Murdock! Pay attention!”

I look down at my cell phone.

3:53 a.m.

Seven minutes.

I wipe off one of the whiteboards with my forearm, the steep rise in Oracle coloring my arm pink, and pick up one of the aged markers resting in the tray at the bottom.