MONEY, YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND

CHAPTER 24:

MONEY, YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND

I worked for a menial’s hire

Only to learn, dismayed

That any wage I asked of Life

Life would have willingly paid.

—Anonymous

Many years ago, Los Angeles was hit by a relentless rainstorm the likes of which

I’d never seen in my life. It rained for what seemed like forty days and forty

nights, nonstop and hard. Rivers overflowed. Houses slid down hillsides. Bad

hair wreaked chaos throughout the most image-conscious city in the world.

This was the kind of rain you didn’t want to be driving around in in anything,

let alone a twenty-three-year-old junker convertible with a leaky roof, no grill, a

back window that was duct-taped shut and a front tire that went flat every three

days.