Million Little Mistakes Read online

  His plan for your millions is conservative. He thinks you should keep your job for now, refrain from making any major purchases, tell as few family members about your new fortune as possible, decline all media appearances, invest mostly in blue-chip slow-growth mutual funds, and live off a modest monthly income. Sounds smart … but not very fun.

  He says smart is better than fun in the long run. Otherwise you may suffer from Sudden Windfall Syndrome, which happens to people without proper financial boundaries. Instead of saving their money and planning wisely, they buy big-ticket items, rack up debts, spin out their credit, and wind up bankrupting themselves. “Sudden money can become overwhelming,” he says. “Fifty-one percent of all lottery winners commit suicide. I’ve lost several clients myself.”

  Fifty-one percent? That means it’s not only possible you’ll commit suicide, but probable. He says most people expect money to fix their lives, to make them happy, to make them beautiful and well-liked and to repair their marriages. When it doesn’t, some despair. They think that since being a millionaire didn’t make them happy, nothing ever will. They drink and turn to substances. They forget who their friends are. Nobody lasts long after that.

  Next you meet with Mr. Bossrock, a big refrigerator of a man with a barrel chest and a deep laugh. He has a thick gold chain around his sunburned neck and a tight knot of chest hair peeking out of his open silk shirt. He just got back from the Caribbean, where he was checking out some offshore investments and spear-fishing for shark. He caught two and has the digital images on his phone to prove it. Everything about him seems exciting and alive. He manages the estates of many Hollywood celebrities, European rock stars, celebrity chefs, enterprising millionaires, playboy billionaires, and reclusive trillionaires. He explains his aggressive capital gain philosophy, which is to go where the crowds aren’t, to take big risks for big reward. He says Sudden Windfall Syndrome is a myth. Something conservatives made up. “If that guy’s had clients commit suicide,” he says, “maybe you’ll be next.” Bossrock thinks you should take a couple million and buy something fun. Cars, trips, a Rolex like his, whatever you want. Then you’ll buy up some real estate—namely, a new house to live in—and then you’ll start investing in some very hot deals. Hot deals only he knows about. “Think big,” he says with a wink, “and be big.”

  Two men, two totally different financial styles, and you have to choose one to help you manage your money. It’s not that big of a deal, really, it’s only the rest of your life.

  If you hire Bossrock, go to section 12.

  If you hire Cook, go to section 13.

  7

  From section 3

  You decide against hiring a financial advisor. Your family thinks it’s best and even Grandpa Joe approves. He looks you right in the eye (like only an ex-marine drill sergeant can), and says, “Darlin’, always trust your gut and nobody else’s. Come hell or high water, all right? Promise me that.” You nod and promise him you’ll manage your own money and life will be good. After all, life is short and this pile of money is tall. Think how many things you can do and what you can buy!

  Your family knows what you should buy. A kidney. Doctors say your cousin Lanie doesn’t have much time left without a transplant and the donor waiting list is miles long. Someone has to buy this girl a new organ or she’ll die. Your uncle’s having heart trouble from the stress and your aunt is all puffed up from crying. Everyone looks to you, the family’s only millionaire, to save the day.

  Buying a kidney is expensive however, and so is the aftercare and the ongoing treatments, which you’ll also be expected to fund. The doctors also warn you that her other kidney might fail, too. If you become Lanie’s medical benefactor, it may be a long haul and cost a big chunk of money. Possibly into the millions.

  If you pay for Lanie’s kidney, go to section 14.

  If you don’t pay for Lanie’s kidney, go to section 15.

  8

  From section 4

  You take your girlfriend, Sam, along with you on your three-month luxury cruise aboard the Asylum of the Sea. At a quarter billion dollars, it’s the biggest, most expensive cruise ship ever built, boasting a length of six hundred and fifty feet, a weight of forty thousand tons, and a virtual guidance system that communicates with satellites in space.

  The ship has a retractable stern, an amphitheater, a rock-climbing wall, a white-water rapids simulator, an indoor ice-skating rink, a simulation Central Park, an actual grass putting green, a vintage merry-go-round, a tattoo parlor, a fortune-teller, its own radio and television stations, and a clear Lucite swimming pool that cantilevers over the sea.

  The ship departs from Los Angeles and heads to the Panama Canal, Santiago, Antarctica, Cape Town, the Seychelles, Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Osaka. After the spectacular departure with fireworks and synchronized jets flying overhead releasing smoky ribbons of color in the sky, there’s a champagne toast and now all you have to do is soak up the luxury. Relax, read, sleep, eat, have sex, sleep. Repeat.

  Your staterooms are the grandest on the entire ship. The penthouse suite provides butler service, a personal chef, a master bedroom with small refrigerated nightstands so champagne is always in reach, a small but formal dining room with an endlessly replenished fruit bowl, and a private terrace with its own hot tub. The hot tub has a light show you can activate at night, which changes the simmering water from azure blue to bright pink to quartz yellow, only you think the quartz yellow looks more like hot pee, as if for some reason it was advantageous to bathe in a cauldron of boiling urine, so you don’t turn on the hot tub light show that much.

  The crew goes out of their way to make sure every experience is excellent. Stewards fly around the ship in little white jackets like startled doves and it’s said there’s one crew member for every two passengers on board, but that doesn’t seem mathematically possible. Where do they sleep? No matter what you do, from sitting down to dinner or setting down your towel, everything is whisked away or served up or replaced with nearly alarming speed, as though your every action has been anticipated and prepared for.

  Even with all this pampering and solicitous servitude, you and Sam do find some flaws in the service, actually. Every night the maids leave a towel on your bed folded into the shape of a swan or an elephant or a teddy bear or a monkey, but that’s it. Four animals only? After the monkey, they start up with the swan all over again and it gets boring. Also, you’ve noticed at dinner sometimes the pats of butter are carved into rosebuds, but other times they’re just plain squares. You hate the plain squares. These things could be fixed with the smallest of advance planning and you should probably write a letter.

  You begin to see little problems everywhere. Your stateroom, for instance. The complimentary bathrobes are knee-length instead of full-length. If you want a full-length bathrobe you have to buy one at the spa. Also the fruit basket, which is replenished daily, stops containing kiwis, even though you expressly asked your steward for kiwis. He says the ship is low on them but they still somehow show up every morning at the breakfast buffet garnishing the watermelon fruit bowls. You then notice an irritating hum coming from the ventilation system that keeps you awake at night, until between the robes, the kiwis, and the humming you can’t even stand to be in your stateroom.

  Then you meet a tall man with green eyes. Edward. He’s onboard with his family to celebrate his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. He’s witty, charming, and polite. The perfect gentleman. He escorts you to your room at night and never asks to come in. He invites you to eat with his family and the captain of the ship. (This ticks Sam off a little, as you leave her to dine alone across the room at one of the lesser tables closer to the kitchen, but whatever, you’re trying to start a shipboard romance here.)

  Finally, you can’t stand his genteel ways and attack him one night. You wind up making passionate (albeit slightly awkward) love in one of the fiberglass rowboats lashed to the side of the deck. At first you try to keep your budding romance secret, b
ut soon enough everyone can tell you two are in love, even your still-slightly-annoyed friend. You’re perfect together! You play tennis, get side-by-side massages, take long walks at twilight. You like all the same movies, all the same music, and he kisses you eagerly, hungrily, like he may never see you again.

  There are mishaps. You take a face plant on the lido deck while cruising around on a speedy little Segway trying to catch up to Edward, and when you’re trying out the very popular (but freezing!) wave machine while learning to surf, you fall and get caught up in the jets, spinning around like a frozen shrimp in an aqua blue skillet.

  Still, looking past these few minor bumps and bruises, you must admit it’s a breathtaking way to see the world, to sit in idle luxury as the purple mountains of Patagonia drift by, or to get a detoxifying aromatherapy massage on the lower deck at sunset, or to admire the pod of bottlenose dolphins following the ship as you chip biodegradable golf balls into the sea. (This is actually not as enjoyable as the other activities because you worry that [a] the balls are not biodegradable, that’s just something they tell passengers to get them to shut up and remain entertained for five minutes, and [b] one of these golf balls, biodegradable or not, is going to crack a dolphin right on the skullcap and kill him dead.)

  The cruise delivers some of the most visually opulent destinations you’ve ever seen. The Panama Canal is an engineering miracle. Imagine something as soft and secret as water lifting hundreds of thousands of tons of rusting steel, the locks delivering the ships one by one from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

  After Tierra del Fuego, the ship sails down the Drake Passage, through a maze of small icebergs to the Antarctic Peninsula, where it looks as though you’ve left the planet. In the Neumayer Channel, and the Gerlache Strait, mountains of turquoise ice floats on black water as penguins dive off flat cakes of snow. It’s all gorgeous and eerie and you sleep deeply in Edward’s arms that night.

  The voyage from Antarctica to South Africa is rough, as you were told it would be, but when you finally depart Cape Town, and steam northward, the water calms and you can relax again. Then, when the ship is just off the coast of Somalia, you suddenly spot a small motorboat approaching.

  You point it out to Edward.

  Other passengers gather around, wondering how such a small boat could be this far out at sea. You all stay quiet and watch with great interest as the strange and surreal events unfold. The small boat is loaded with thirty-odd Somalian boys, all thin and none of whom could be over nineteen years old. They pull up alongside your ship, which seems mammoth next to them, and toss grappling hooks onto the lowest railings, which two boys scamper up without effort. They throw rope ladders down to their comrades, who cheer, adding to the sensation that something amusing is happening. It’s only when the rest of the boys start pulling themselves hurriedly up the ladders that someone asks, “Are they pirates?”

  They are in fact pirates and they not only have guns, they have grenades, automatic weapons, and an extremely ominous surface-to-air missile launcher. An ear-shattering alarm starts to pierce the air and the captain comes on, ordering all passengers to the Poseidon Dining Room. He says to go as quietly and quickly as possible.

  Edward has vanished. You’re hustled along with the rest of the group like cattle into the Poseidon Dining Room, which is designated as the de facto meeting place for all emergencies because it’s the only dining room that can hold all the passengers at once. As you pass through the glass doors to the dining room it’s the silence that scares you the most. Everyone is waiting for instruction, some already with their luggage and wearing bright yellow lifejackets. Edward is not among them.

  The chief security officer calmly explains the boat is being hijacked and a collective gasp sounds around the room. You feel sick. Blessedly, Sam shows up beside you, linking her arm in yours while somewhere onboard the captain negotiates with the pirates.

  The security officer, a tall man with a thick shock of white hair and a refined chin, continues, “We are safe, ladies and gentlemen. This room is the hardest part of the ship to penetrate, aside from the engine room and the bridge. It’s specifically designed as a ‘passenger safe hold’ and can repel attack while supporting life. As you see, it extends the entire width of the vessel, leaving only two entrances. One in front, which you all came through, and one back through the kitchen, both of which my crew are now securing.”

  Everyone turns toward the front entrance of the dining room as a security engineer finishes punching in a set of codes and two metal doors slide over the glass.

  “These doors are now unbreakable,” the officer says. “Airtight and blast-proof.”

  “What about the windows?” someone asks.

  “The windows are unbreakable and bulletproof as well. I urge you now to stay calm, make yourselves comfortable, and let the stewards know if you need anything. Besides the convenience of bathrooms located directly to my left, the kitchen will remain open and there are enough provisions in the galley to last a week. Of course, once we explain to our new friends they’ve accidentally pulled over a passenger ship, we hope to have you back enjoying your cruise in a matter of hours.”

  He steps down as the whine of an electric screw gun starts up and the engineers rivet the blast doors in place. Then they set iron bars across them. Despite all these security measures and the officer’s assuring words, you don’t know what frightens you more, the fact that it’s happening or that they were so prepared for it. Then the engines stop. That constant, almost inaudible sound that’s always in the background ceases, leaving a queer silence magnified by all absence of motion. “Well, they made it into the engine room,” someone says, “or maybe into the bridge.”

  The security officer assures you it’s protocol to stop engines in this situation, so the ship is easier for the navy to track. Then he leaves, aided by two armed engineers. The next twelve hours are spent getting comfortable. Staking out little mini immigrant camps inside the great hall, people banding together with their families and friends. Thank God Sam’s here, especially since there’s still no sign of Edward. Someone says he and his family escaped on a private lifeboat. What on earth is a private lifeboat? Do people bring their own lifeboats on cruise ships?

  The chef who runs the carving station turns on his glowy red heat lamp and starts carving roast beef. By midnight almost everyone is sitting at a table or eating, telling every disaster-at-sea story they’ve ever heard. It’s a pretty decent waiting room considering the situation, and the waiters and stewards keep on like nothing is different, offering to bring ice water to tables and clearing away dishes.

  Another twelve hours pass and nobody knows what’s happening. Even the security officers who are locked in with you are clueless. The captain hasn’t issued new orders, and neither has their commanding security officer. The radio was cut. His last message was, “Hold at all cost,” which does not sound good.

  Nor does it sound good the next day, when the glass doors of the dining room begin to rattle violently and then shatter. Shouting outside starts and everyone clutches tighter into one big group as the crew stands guard, guns drawn. Popping sounds can be heard and louder banging. “They’re shooting at the doors!” Everyone runs to the far side of the room.

  Then a massive booming sound ricochets around the room and a big cloud of smoke pours into the hall as the doors blow open. The explosion knocks several passengers down. People are hurt, cut and bleeding from flying debris. The pirates unarm the security officers within seconds of entering.

  There will be no more roast beef carving stations from this point on.

  The pirates round everyone up in the center of the room and say they’ve taken the ship. The captain and his crew are dead. They need everyone to hand over their wallets, purses, cash, and jewelry. When people start claiming to not have their wallets or purses with them, escorted trips are organized, two pirates taking five passengers each to their staterooms to retrieve these items while the rest of the passengers stay gua
rded in the Poseidon Dining Room.

  The food runs out, the toilets start to overflow. People who don’t have their heart medication or insulin or allergy medicine start dropping. All this and there is still no sign of the coast guard. Nobody but you and these maniacs. And no Edward, of course.

  Finally the pirates say they’re going to trade 90 percent of the ship’s passengers for their own safe transport back to Somalia. They need ten hostages to remain, ten people willing to stay on board so that everyone else can go.

  Then they ask for volunteers.

  If you decide to get off the ship, go to section 16.

  If you volunteer to stay on board and remain a hostage, go to section 17.

  9

  From section 4

  You purchase the aristocrat’s life and the marvels roll in. An estate lawyer descends with a giant stack of deeds, titles, contracts, and other pertinent information. He explains you will be taking over the extraordinary life of a true Southern belle. He can’t say where she is or why she left, but rest assured, you’re about to have an adventure that only a few people in this world will ever experience.

  The LaLaurie House in New Orleans is now your home, a French Empire mansion on Royal Street in the French Quarter. As advertised, the estate comes fully furnished with pristine French Empire antiques, a full-service staff, a black stretch limo with driver, and a Bugatti Veyron with red and chocolate interior hand-stitched by Hermès parked in the driveway. (Only a few hundred will ever be made and the car can accelerate from 0 to 60 in 2.4 seconds with a top speed of 253 miles per hour.)

  You now own the Well-Deserved, a beautiful mahogany boat that debuted at the Monaco Yacht Show in 1934 and was heralded as “a boat for discerning pirates.” It’s made from the finest wood lacquered eighteen times over, every detail meticulously hand-finished. Also as promised there’s a membership at the prestigious New Orleans Country Club waiting for you. The estate lawyer blots his head with a handkerchief and admits this was the hardest part to pull off, as the club doesn’t hand out memberships to just anyone with money. You have to be somebody. It’s frequented by blue-blooded ladies of society as well as retired senators and seated governors, and, of course, all their wives and mistresses, so discretion is of the utmost.