Wow! You mean you haven’t checked in since before the stockholders “informational meeting” in Las Vegas back in October 2016? Oh, man — it was crazy…!
It started with Les (wearing a tangerine-colored track suit with patches at the elbows and smoking a cigarette) and one other guy sitting at a table at the front of the room. The other guy was a thick-necked fellow in his late thirties who appeared to have been stuffed into a too-tight suit by his handlers earlier in the day. He also wore wrap-around mirror shades and during the whole time we were in the room he never took them off — in fact I never saw him move his head in any direction, he just sat there staring out at the audience like he was Secret Service.
On the table in front of this pair I saw: a pack of Pall-Malls Menthol; a calculator; a short stack of what looked like legal papers; and two other stacks that were quite a bit taller and appeared to consist entirely of one-hundred-dollar bills. I was seated three rows from the front, and when I thought I saw the numbers 1-0-0 on the bills, I got up and walked toward the table for a better look. Les blew a cloud of zingy-smelling smoke at me and barked: “Sit down! Everythingabe splained in the pree-zen-tay-shun.”
I returned to my seat.
A moment later Les began: “Thanks for coming. We’ll do this quick as we can." He tilted his head to his side. "This here’s my accountant and personal lawyer, Guillermo. Guillermo guided me through a couple of sticky business situations back in the Bahamas a few years ago, and he’s here to help get the Medinah house in order so that we can make our final presentation to the notario on Monday mor…”
A groan went up from the crowd. The thick-necked man flinched, leaned forward, placed both his palms face-down on the table as though preparing to leap into action. The groan abruptly silenced itself.
I thought: “Nothing but disaster has ever followed the invocation of the word notario."
Les, restarting: “We’ve gotta wrap things up quick here — me an Guillermo gotta a plane this afternoon. At 9 am Monday we’re meetin’ the notario down Santiago way.”
I thought: “Oh, no —Twice!”
From the row behind me someone called out: “Can you ask Guillermo to take off his shades? I met Ulander once, and to me Guillermo looks a whole lot like Ulander.”
Les glared over the top of my head, and growled: “I haven’t seen or spoken to Ulander in months. This is my attorney, Guillermo…” And here Les gave Guillermo’s last name, pronouncing it, as best as I could make out, as: "Gah-chay.”
Again, someone behind me whispered: “Looks more like JJ’s hitman to me…”
I had brought my laptop to take notes, and now I quickly googled every variation of “Guillermo Gah-chay” that I could imagine, but came up empty. Then, on a hunch, I went to the Interpol website and entered “Gotcha, Guillermo.” Bingo! Up popped a headshot of a thick-necked fellow in his late thirties wearing wrap-around mirror shades, with the caption: “Gotcha — seen leaving a brothel — Mustang, Nevada, 2015. Only known photo.”
I switched over to my E-trade account. The Medinah quote showed that the stock had closed at 6.5 cents per share the previous afternoon, had opened this morning at 6.7 cents, and had risen to 12 cents with 40 million shares trading hands before, well, before some-damn-thing surely must have happened. Because now I saw big red letters spread on a diagonal across the Medinah page, “TRADING HALTED BY ORDER OF SEC…”
At the front of the room Les had started his explanation: “All of youz are gonna come up here now and one-by-one you’re gonna show us the printout we told you to bring showing how many shares of Medinah you own. And as soon as you complete one of these forms signing your shares over to me and Guillermo and giving us your proxy on all voting matters…” — he lifted a page from the stack of legal-looking papers and waved it in the air — “As soon as you do that, me and Guillermo are gonna calculate you at twenty cents per share…" — Les picked up the calculator and waved it around — “and then Guillermo’s gonna round everything up to the nearest hundred bucks and pay you out…” — Les grabbed a fistful from the currency stack and waved it — “Pay you out in hundred dollar bills, and then me and Guillermo are gonna catch our flight to Santiago. Youz’ll all get your money today, but to make everything official we gotta show all these papers to the notario…”
BAM! At the back of the room, the doors splintered and a robot battering ram burst into the room — a platoon of black-helmeted, black-uniformed soldiers — SWAT? Special Ops? — sprinted in right behind it, surrounding the room, aiming their AR-15s everywhere at once…
Oh, god… I’m just gonna have to stop there… It’s way too painful to go on…
But obviously, when the trading ban was lifted several weeks later, the stock price had already dropped to three-tenths of a cent per share and it’s been hovering in that range ever since…
Good to have you back, Metallurgist! Misery misses company…
— madmen
.