“You know some o’ these places, they get companies to donate food or clothes and what-have-you and they charge what to most people seems like a small amount, but what they don’t even realize is just how much fuckin’ money these guys are makin’. You realize if someone gives me this coat for free and I sell it for six dollars, that’s a six hundred percent profit? You’re either the devil or a fuckin’ genius to think up a business plan like that.” He laughed to himself, pulling at the leather of a fruit roll-up with the front of his teeth.

Mark was one of the strangest people that Aria had ever met. Most people who didn’t have a place to live or food to eat were preoccupied with money. But Mark took it to a whole new level. He was financially obsessed. Money had dominated the majority of their conversation and much of it was financial advice about 401Ks and IRA accounts and other things Aria had never even heard of before. Aria took what he said with a grain of salt, given that he was giving advice about how to be a millionaire when he himself was out on the streets. Despite the length of his unkempt brown hair and the swell of his weathered face, even Aria had to admit that he looked more like a man who belonged in a corporate corner office than a man who would be on the receiving end of a charity dinner like this.

Mark had been a self-made man. His mother was a single mom who had raised four kids on a $250 welfare check each month. He considered himself an entrepreneur at the age of ten, when he and a buddy of his had realized that all the kids at school loved reading comics that their parents wouldn’t buy them. They saved up their money and bought as many as they could. Every day at school, they would charge the other kids money to read the comics they had bought. The profits they split from their little venture proved to be enough to buy himself what his mother could never afford. From that day on, he had harbored a secret love affair with money.

The first product Mark sold was investment-grade diamonds. From there he did private placement stock. By the time 2008 came around, Mark had become a banker.