Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales by Mark O'Donnell Page A

Loophole Sam, who got out of both death
and
taxes. Yes, the doings and boastings of these tall-in-the-portfolio characters have filled many an annual report, but none of them has ever been bigger or more diversified than a horizon-blocking butte of a booster they call Johnny Business, and if the busboys havefinished clearing the tables, lend an ear to the story I’ve been so well paid to tell. Lights, please?
    Johnny was only the biggest man that ever gripped a boardroom table, and that includes your ex-football players in public relations. Why, when he was born, he was fifteen stories high, with a view of the park on two sides! His pa was a profiteering man with an automobile so long, it started pulling into the hospital driveway the morning Johnny was born, and to this day it hasn’t completely arrived. Johnny’s mother was the infamous Ma Bell, a broad-shouldered woman who could hear a million conversations at once, and still not change her mind.
    One day when he was three, she took him out to lunch and said to him. “Son—you gonna be a deal-drivin’ man, like yo’ daddy?” And Johnny—through a representative—answered, “I have no problem with that.”
    When Johnny Business was a little baby
    Sittin’ on his Mammy’s knee,
    He said, “Government restrictions on my right to make a profit
    Gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord,
    Gonna be the death of me.”
    Well, it wasn’t long before Johnny’s pa was reduced to nothing by revenooers, and his poor old Ma got divested, so Johnny quit Junior Achievement and headed out on his own. Next slide, please. He made himself an attaché case out of an old airplane hangar,and along with his trusty secretary, Babe the Blue Blood, headed south.
    “South, Babe!” he told her, and held on high a billfold the size of a billboard. “South—to the Sunbelt!”
    Johnny Business went to the Sunbelt,
    He rented a penthouse there—
    It was up so high, he looked down on the sky,
    And he had to pay extra for the air, Lord, Lord,
    He had to pay extra for the air!
    Johnny was such a fast talker, he could sell feathers to a fish, retail, and in no time he cast a long shadow from Dallas to Atlanta. Old Babe had to do a mountain of Xeroxing as high as the Wrigley Building every morning before breakfast, and what they didn’t want kept they used for landfill to build high rises on. He had more credit cards than there are things to buy, and he worked it so he could charge the new ones on the old ones, and the old ones on the new ones, and not even your auditor could have figured out who was due what. And when Johnny took a client out to lunch, he drank his martinis out of old water towers from bankrupt railroads. “Here’s how!” he’d laugh. “Happy hour is here to stay!”
    Of course, people always get jealous when you’re big and jolly. Some sunken-eyed baloney-for-lunch types tried to get Johnny tied down, though of course they were too cash-scrawny to take him on in any leveraged way. No, they had to tattle, like a runt toa playground monitor. What happened was, one day Johnny was visiting a mining operation he was thinking of selling, and when he lay on his belly and squinted down that shaft, he didn’t like what he wasn’t seeing.
    “It’s Monday, Frank,” he told his foreman. “Where are all the miners?”
    Frank took to trembling so his clipboard started to splinter. “They ain’t workin’, Johnny!” he stammered. “Some kind of itty bitty scraggly ol’ foreign birdy told ’em to go out on strike for safer conditions!”
    Johnny’s scorn fell like acid rain on alkaline earth. “Nothin’ in life is safe!” he roared. “America didn’t get built on safety! Gimme that shovel, Frank, I’ll do the mining myself!”
    Johnny took hold of a gigantic shovel and was about to be labor and capital both at once, when suddenly, three little tiny woman lawyers you could barely see came up behind him and hit him with a Cease and Desist whammy. The first one had