Diary of a Yuppie Read Free Page B

it's your generation. God is dead, and the frontier is gone, and there are no wars to fight, but a man must still use his fangs and claws. After all, there has to be
some
fun in life!"
    "Look, Mr. Blakelock." I have always found it awkward to use his Christian name, though he has repeatedly asked me to. "I'm not responsible for the low price of common stocks. It's not my fault that there are companies that take advantage of the market to buy up other companies. I thought you believed in a free economy."
    "I do. I do."
    "Well, we're adjusting to it, that's all. And helping our clients to do so. Why make such heavy weather of it?"
    "Because it seems such a travesty of the American dream!" Now he is pacing the chamber again, the great professor on the dais, peering from a murky past to a misty future. "The old robber barons at least covered our land with rails and factories. But their successors simply devour one another. We may all end up in the distended bellies of a few somnolent titans that will sit facing each other across the desert of our poverty like giant Buddhas, too gorged to do more than gaze with blurred eyes at their own navels."
    "You forget the antitrust laws."
    "They seem very resilient these days. Everything favors amalgamation. Even the computer, which is nothing but an instrument for reassessing what we already have. New ways of looking at the old. Our future has dwindled to a change of labels."
    "Which reminds me that I must be getting on with changing the label of Shaughnessy Products."
    "Right you are, my boy! Shut the old windbag up! You know that for all his prattle he's in this bloody business right up to his prating mouth!"
    The raid on Shaughnessy was peculiarly obnoxious to Blakelock because Albert Lamb, the target's president, had been a member of his Saturday golf foursome at the Antlers Club in Rye. Because of the ironclad secrecy in which preparations for a takeover had to be shrouded, it had been impossible for Blakelock to give the faintest warning to his friend. Indeed, it had behooved him not to betray the danger by the least change in his normal attitude and behavior. Even a failure to appear at the first tee on any Saturday morning at nine might have been taken as a sign of embarrassment, and Lamb might have speculated: embarrassment over what?
    How well I could imagine that last Saturday morning before the raid! The low, rolling, wooded, autumnal hills, yellow and brown and hectic red, the azure sky with here and there the puff of a cloud, the sweeping yellow-green course, and the four old boys in their tweeds, chattering comfortably (except for Mr. B) as they ambled along, on all the topics so dear to them, happy and secure in their male solidarity, free of the sharp words and possessive affections of the other sex.
    Perhaps they were discussing the war in Afghanistan that has just started. All would have expressed outrage at the Russians, Mr. B with particular violence.
    "The devil about the hydrogen bomb is that we can't afford to do the right thing. It's too dangerous. But at times I feel that if we don't take some chances, we're going to lose our souls as surely as the Soviets have."
    "What do you suggest, Branders?" This perhaps would be from Lamb, gray-haired, square of chin and shoulder, an executive from a cover of
Fortune.
"Would you send in troops through Pakistan and call them volunteers?"
    "Damn it, Al, I think I might!"
    "But the Reds would send in ten men for every one of ours. It would be Vietnam all over again against a foe many times as strong. You have nothing to fight with, Branders!"
    "It is recorded in the Scriptures that Samson smote the enemy with the jawbone of an ass." I can just hear Blakelock's high, snooty laugh. "So if you, my dear Albert, will oblige us by shipping your lower maxillary to the Department of Defense...!"
    But now Blakelock would be going too far. He would not be so acerbic if something were not eating at his heart. He knows that in a day or so