Pecking Order
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Colophon
ALSO BY OMAR TYREE
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Boss Lady
Diary of a Groupie
Leslie
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For the Love of Money
Sweet St. Louis
Single Mom
A Do Right Man
Flyy Girl
The Urban Griot Series
Cold Blooded
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The Underground
College Boy
Anthologies
Dark Thirst
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Title Page
Copyright
Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Omar Tyree Incorporated
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tyree, Omar.
Pecking order / Omar Tyree.
p. cm.
1. Accountants—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Fiction. 3. New business enterprises—Fiction. 4. Parties—Planning—Fiction. 5. Branding
(Marketing)—Fiction. 6. Success in business—Fiction. 7. Millionaires—Fiction.
8. California, Southern—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.Y59P43 2008
813'.54—dc22
2008012091
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8024-9
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8024-7
Are we still thirsty
for knowledge?
Or
are we already saturated?
You tell me.
When I had my first money
I was excellent with it.
But when that first money ran out
I became desperate
and unethical.
So I had to build it back up again
like a true hustler.
Then I made stupid money
and spent it erratically
like an addict with surplus drugs
ending up in money rehab.
So now that I’ve faced and battled my demons
and won,
I only hope and pray
that I can make it back to heaven
and stay there
before I die.
“Peaks & Valleys”
by Omar Tyree
Contents
INTRODUCTION What Is the Pecking Order?
PART I THE START-UP
ONE Downtown San Diego
TWO Back to the Office
THREE Black Network Parties
PART II THE PROS & CONS OF PARTNERS
FOUR The Intimidator
FIVE Family Ties
SIX Football Party
PART III LEARNING TO DEAL
SEVEN Like a Pimp
EIGHT Deeper & Deeper
NINE Money Lessons
PART IV LIFE & MONEY MANAGEMENT
TEN Narcissism
ELEVEN Moving Forward
TWELVE Everybody Wants Something
PART V BIGGER FISH
THIRTEEN Setting Up Shop
FOURTEEN Celebrity Status
FIFTEEN It All Comes Together
PART VI MILLION-DOLLAR DEALS
SIXTEEN Bingo!
SEVENTEEN The Bosses
EIGHTEEN Only the Strong & the Smart
PART VII THE BOTTOM LINE
NINETEEN It’s Lonely at the Top
TWENTY Business Never Stops
TWENTY-ONE Let’s Do It Again
CLOSING INTERVIEW The Voice & Viewpoint
Introduction
What Is the Pecking Order?
WITHIN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, as much as fair-minded individuals would love to create an equal playing field for humanity and all its resources, there will always be inequalities. Some of us will become smarter, faster, taller, more confident, and more successful than those around us at producing surplus goods and wealth.
Scholars have argued for ages to explain the reasons for these inequalities, but whether or not we agree with their individual philosophies is a moot point. The result of human competition remains constant. Like it or not, someone will eat first, someone will eat last, someone will eat ten times more than what they need in a lifetime, and someone else will barely eat enough to survive for ten years.
As humans, we regard ourselves as more civil and intelligent than the rest of the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, when it comes to the natural resources we are all forced to compete for, we have yet to eradicate the animalistic nature of the pecking order. In fact, we continue to admire it and are forced, by man-made hierarchies and value systems, to accept our place in line.
In my sincere effort to explain the ongoing mechanisms of the pecking order, in seven parts and twenty-one chapters, I want to tell you a story about a young, respectable accountant who—in a span of just four years—changed his position in line to become a multimillion-dollar brand and entrepreneur in the region of Southern California.
In Part I: The Start-up, we learn who he is, what he has been through, and what his immediate and long-term goals are.
In Part II: The Pros & Cons of Partners, we are led to understand the influences of the people he attracts, along with those he will always be tied to.
In Part III: Learning to Deal, we learn the hard lessons of human business behavior that our protagonist will be forced to understand for himself.
In Part IV: Life & Money Management, we are able to witness the natural changes that occur when men and women begin to assess their worth.
In Part V: Bigger Fish, we learn how the branding of a good name, along with successful execution in business, eventually leads to larger opportunities.
In Part VI: Million-Dollar Deals, we are led into the promised land of the big hits, where available capital is abundant.
And in Part VII: The Bottom Line, our new millionaire is forced to ask himself the questions, “What is it all for?” and “Where do I go from here?”
Part I
The Start-up
One
Downtown San Diego
BETWEEN THE HOURS of eight and nine PM on a Thursday evening, a black Nissan Altima traveled through light traffic, heading southbound on Interstate 5 toward downtown San Diego. Overhead, a US Airways commercial airplane zoomed down toward San Diego International Airport, less than a mile west of the highway. And as the sun continued to make its descent across the far west side of the Pacific Ocean, the night lights of San Diego’s downtown skyline began to flicker into an evening glow.
Inside the fairly clean two-year-old Altima was dead silence. The driver was not in the mood for music at the moment; too much else was on his mind.
He checked the clock on the dashboard for the fifth time to make sure he was still on schedule for his date at Hooters on Fourth Avenue. He wasn’t particularly in the mood for flirty young women serving drinks, burgers, chicken wings, and fries in skimpy orange shorts with white tank tops. But a commitment was a commitment, so he continued on his way.
Exiting the highway on Second Avenue, the black Altima traveled southbound toward Horton Plaza, a downtown shopping center with a multilevel parking garage. When he arrived at the garage entrance, the driver stopped and rolled down his window to receive a ticket at the gate. He then accelerated past the rows of parked cars to find an open space.
Once he had found a parking spot on the third level of the garage, the driver checked the time for a final countdown. It was 8:43 PM.
“Right on time,” he mumbled. He climbed out of the car and straightened out his button-up shirt of light blue pinstripes. His pants were dark blue denim, and his shoes were soft brown leather. He had dressed down on purpose for a casual date.
At 8:47, Ivan David strolled out of the parking garage exit. He was a light brown black man of medium build and medium height, with light brown hair and multicolored eyes. Some people described his eyes as rainbows, with rings of color from blue to light brown to green.
He looked around for a second to peruse his surroundings and sniff the downtown air. The nighttime temperature was at seventy degrees. Perfect. As soon he stepped out into the street to cross it, a yellow Ferrari Spider raced around the corner from his left and forced him to freeze.
Shit! Do I move forward or backward? Ivan asked himself. He had already made it halfway across the street. Move back, he decided.
As soon as he stepped out of the way, the yellow Ferrari sped past him with a California license plate that read TOO SLOW.
Ivan got the message and grinned. “Maybe I am,” he grunted before continuing across.
Hooters was two blocks away. Ivan proceeded to enjoy his evening stroll past the young and old couples who walked in and out of the restaurants that populated San Diego’s downtown strip.
“I’ll have a glass of Chardonnay,” a gray-haired businessman ordered at his outside table at Buenos Días Café. His young-as-a-daughter date sat across their small table with a controlled smile.
Ivan looked into her calculating green eyes and wondered whether she loved her older man or his older money.
The dirty-blond beauty looked up at him momentarily, as if to read his skepticism. Then she looked away, unconcerned by it.
Ivan chuckled to himself as he passed them by, outside the waist-high black iron gate that separated their table from the sidewalk. All he could think about was the numbers game: a fifty-two-year-old man, earning a mid to high six figures, and a twenty-eight-year-old date, earning a low five figures.
“I gotta stop thinking like an accountant,” he reminded himself as he walked.
When he arrived at Hooters and stepped inside, he blinked and readjusted his eyes. Damn. The bright orange was enough to blind a man.
“Hey, Ivan, over here.”
He turned to his left and spotted Catherine Boone, an old friend and fling from his undergrad days at San Diego State. She wore a lime-green dress, full of cleavage and curves, with matching lime-green heels. Her hair was shoulder length and straight, ideal for no-nonsense business. Her medium brown skin remained flawless.
As she stood up from her chair and table to greet him with an open hug, Ivan could see and feel that she had put on a good ten to twenty pounds of maturity.
“Whoa, you’re filling out a little bit,” he told her.
She smiled. “And?”
He hesitated. “And, what?”
“And, what does that mean?”
Women were finicky about their appearance. So Ivan remained coy.
“I don’t know. You tell me,” he responded.
Catherine broke away. “Ivan, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Because I like my new weight. I always thought I was too skinny in college.”
“You thought you were skinny?”
“Yeah, you didn’t think so?”
Catherine sat back down. Ivan sat in the chair across the table from her.
He shook his head and answered, “No, not really. Your weight was always fine to me.”
Catherine grinned at him. “It’s good to see that you’re still the same Ivan. You’re as vague and as noncommittal as ever. And no new girlfriend yet, right?”
Ivan smiled back. “I like keeping my concentration.”
Catherine grinned even harder. “Are we that bad, Ivan? I mean, really?”
She got all serious and stopped smiling. She wanted a sincere answer from him. A Hooters waitress broke them out of their groove before Ivan could grant her wish.
“Welcome to Hooters, my name is Claudia.” She immediately wrote her name down on a Hooters napkin in front of them. She was a breezy brunette in the bright white and orange uniform.
“Are you guys ready to order yet?”
The Hooters menu sat out in front of them on the tabletop.
Ivan frowned and squinted his eyes. “Ahh…I really didn’t get a chance to look at the menu yet.”
“I’ll have a beer and some fries,” Catherine ordered overtop of him.
“Okay,” the brunette perked. She wrote it down on her order pad. Then she looked back at Ivan. “I’ll be right back in a minute,” she promised him.
Ivan nodded. “All right.”
As soon as the waitress left them, Catherine changed her tone and reached her gentle hands across the table to place over Ivan’s. “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” she told him. She had compassion in her dark brown eyes. She had heard about his mother’s funeral in Los Angeles through mutual friends. But her apology caught Ivan off guard. He froze for a second and daydreamed in her direction, before he shook it off and looked away.
He grunted, “It was gonna happen sooner or later.” He looked back into her eyes to finish his statement. “When you got any form of cancer, you’re fighting it to win or fighting it to lose.”
Catherine squeezed his hands tighter. “I know how much she meant to you.”
“Yeah,” Ivan grumbled. Then he forced himself to perk up. He said, “But the good thing she told me was to go ahead and live my life now, you know. I mean, I had been holding on for so long…”
“I know,” Catherine responded. She remembered it through their college years. Ivan’s mother had begged him several times each semester to stay away from home in South Central L.A. to finish his schooling in San Diego. She knew that her illness would be too much of a strain on him at home. And when he was offered an accounting job at the firm of Hutch & Mitchell in North Clairemont, his mother advised him to take it and stay there.
Now Ivan felt guilty about everything. Although returning home may not have changed the end result, he would have at least been able to see his mother more before she was confined to her deathbed.
Finally, he pulled his hands away from Catherine at the table.
“Look, we’re not here to talk about that. So, what’s up with this new job you got?” he asked her, changing the subject.
Catherine nodded and followed his lead. She wanted to make sure she got her empathy out of the way early. She had other plans for them that evening.
“Well, I may be moving back to the San Diego area if everything goes right,” she told him. She was originally from Sacramento. She said, “I had my interview this morning in Oceanside, but I made sure they put me up in a downtown San Diego hotel instead of all the way out there.”
Then she giggled. “I can get my way when I want it.”
Ivan sat back in his chair and smiled. “Yeah, I know it already.”
Catherine was a whiner, beggar, wheeler-dealer, or whatever else it took to get her way. She had worked her magic all throughout college as a business management major. And she was always in the middle of things.
Before she could get another word out, her conversation with Ivan was interrupted again.
“Hey, Ivan David. What’s going on, man?”
Ivan turned to his right and looked up. He’d recognize the Spanish-American accent with the rapid-fire tongue anywhere. It was Emilio Alvarez, an excitable rookie shortstop for the San Diego Padres.
“Hey, what’s going on, E.A.?” Ivan addressed him with an outstretched hand.
They had met a few months ago at the accounting firm offices. Emilio was a new Hutch & Mitchell client of Dominican descent from Texas. He was as brown as Catherine, with jet-black wavy hair. A happy-faced date stood attached to his right arm. She was as light as Ivan, with straight brown hair, and was Mexican.
“Hey, you tell me, I.D.,” Emilio responded. He had to pull his date loose to shake Ivan’s hand with his right.
Ivan joked, “You’re out here just walking around with no bodyguards? You could get mobbed.”
Emilio frowned. “Mobbed? Man, I’m just a young rookie trying to make a good name for myself. Nobody really knows me yet.”
As soon as he said it, the Hooters waitresses began to smile all around him.
“We know who you are, E.A.,” Claudia teased him. She spotted the rookie baseball player as soon as he walked in. She returned to the table with Catherine’s mug of beer and set it down in front of her.
Once Claudia spoke to Emilio, a few of the other waitresses breezed by.
“Yeah, rookies are still impressionable,” a bold blonde flirted, and laughed.
Emilio’s date didn’t look too pleased about that statement. But at least the blonde didn’t stick around long.
Emilio laughed it all off. He said, “Hey, Ivan, you know we have a big party down here tonight. You guys should come hang out with us. Big Deke is throwing it. So we’re gonna grab something to eat on Fifth Ave., then I can get you guys in VIP as my guests.”
Catherine listened as she sipped from her mug of beer. She immediately shook her head before Ivan could respond to him.
Ivan caught her response to the invitation and agreed to turn it down.
“Maybe another night, man. We’re just old friends over here catching up. But thanks for inviting us.”
“Oh, no problem. Anytime,” Emilio told him.
“Make sure you give me and my girls a few autographs before you leave,” Claudia commented to the rookie.
Emilio looked confused. “Ahhh…okay.”
His date said nothing the whole time, but her face said everything. She was just getting to know Emilio and had no idea how to respond to anything around them yet.
“Hey, rookie! What are you doing in here?” someone yelled from the doorway. The place was so bright that anyone could look straight through the glass windows and see everyone inside, just as Emilio had done to spot Ivan.
Ivan looked up again and recognized “Butch” Clayborne, a third baseman in his fifth year with the Padres. Butch had just signed a new multimillion-dollar contract earlier that year. He was a big, strong black man with two women: one white and one black. They were both proud to be his giddy companions for the night. And once the waitresses spotted Clayborne yelling through the doorway, several of them lost their cool.
“Oh, my God! Butch, are you coming in? Are you coming in?” they asked him with the double-talk of excitement.
He waved them off. “Nah, we don’t have time for that. Maybe another time.”
His two dates were already on their way in before he grabbed them back out.
“Hey, come on, let’s go,” he told them. Then he yelled back at Emilio, “Let’s go, rookie!”
The two women stumbled back out to join him awkwardly.
“Damn, my heel,” the black companion complained at the door.
The white companion laughed at her. In a flash, they were out of the doorway and headed up the street for Fifth Avenue.
Emilio looked back at Ivan and shook his head with a grin. “You see what I mean? I’m just a rookie this year. I got a long way to go to get to where he’s at. I’m just lucky he’s taking me under his wing.”
When Emilio left with his date, the Hooters establishment returned to its normal chatter. The surprise visit from the Padres’ baseball players had added a spark of insanity to the place. But as quickly as they had entered, they were gone.
“So, how do you know Emilio?” Claudia asked Ivan at the table. She had yet to receive an order from him. And she could see that the Padres rookie had a lot of respect for him. He had made it his personal mission to walk inside and say hi. He even invited Ivan and his date to a Padres party.
Ivan was still confused by all of it. “Ahh…”
Was it any of her business how he knew Emilio? How was he to respond to that?
Catherine was still shaking her head across the table with her beer. Things were getting a bit out of hand, from what she could see. Everyone was losing their focus.
She asked the waitress, “Are my french fries on the way out?”
Claudia caught her cold drift and got back to business.
“Oh, yeah, let me go get those for you.”
When the waitress left them alone again, Catherine said, “Now, that was just crazy. Did you see how they started to act in here? They act as if they never saw a baseball player before.”
Ivan smiled it off. “Yeah, but Butch Clayborne is more than just a regular player. He’s one of their bona fide stars now.”
The hype was no big deal to Ivan. He had been around plenty of wealthy and famous people. It was part of his job to go out and find new clients who had money. And they were all human. But what he didn’t understand was why Catherine wanted to meet him at Hooters in the first place. They would never have any privacy there.
“You wanna go somewhere else?” he asked her.
Catherine’s dress code surely didn’t fit Hooters. Her lime-green dress was more than casual.
She took a deep breath and calmed her nerves. She asked him, “How do you think my body compares to theirs?”
Ivan stared across the table to make sure that he had heard her right.
“What?”
“You heard me. How does my body compare to theirs?”
She bobbed her head to the left in reference to the Hooters waitresses, who were scampering around the tables, filling orders, and cleaning up.
Ivan couldn’t believe it. He shook his head and smiled. He said, “So that’s why you wanted to meet me here, to do a body check against Hooters waitresses? Are you kidding me?” He was halfway laughing. He said, “If you really wanna do a body check, then let’s go to this Padres party and do it for real. I mean, come on, none of these girls wanna wear the stuff they have to wear in here. It’s just a job.”
Catherine grinned back at him. She said, “I have my reasons.”
Ivan blew it off. “Anyway…next question.”
It was no competition in his book. He was embarrassed to even look at the waitresses. And Catherine was pleased to know it.
“Thank you,” she told him. A nod of confidence meant the world to a woman.
BY THE TIME they had left the place, it was well after ten o’clock, and Catherine was good and tipsy. It became obvious that Ivan would need to help her walk to wherever they were off to next.
“So, what hotel they got you up in?” he asked her.
Catherine was secure in his arms as they walked down Fourth Avenue.
“We’re almost there,” she told him. “And it’s a surprise.”
As they walked, a white stretch Hummer passed them by in the street and turned left down Fifth Avenue.
Catherine watched it and grunted. “Hmmph, I bet you think that’s more of your baseball players, don’t you? But if the Chargers were throwing a party, that would be a real party. I would have been interested in going to that.”
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