Page 10 of Love All
“It sounds like a man building his own gallows and asking to borrow rope.” He walks a few paces, hands in his pockets. “Want to know what I think this actually is?”
“Not even slightly.”
“I think you’d find a reason on God’s green earth to spend two more hours a day near that girl, and Cole’s sad little heart is the noblest one currently in stock, so you’re requisitioning it.”
“That is an ugly thing to say about a man performing a selfless act of friendship.”
“It’s an honest thing to say about a man performing a selfless act of friendship for three reasons and copping to one.” He claps me on the back, hard, the way he does right before he’s correct atme. “For what it’s worth: go get Cole his girl. He deserves it, and you’ll be insufferable until you’ve fixed somebody. Just don’t lie to yourself about whose idea you’re actually running.”
I tell him he’s seeing things that aren’t there. He smiles and lets me have the point, which is the most ruinous thing he does, because we both know what it costs him: nothing. He’s not conceding. He’s filing the win for later.
Just another Tuesday. I go deal with the other impossible thing, which is money.
Here is my complete knowledge of fundraising on day one: nothing. Here is my asset column: a forehand, and the ability to make strangers like me. There’s only one experiment worth running, can the second thing be converted into actual dollars, so at the dinner rush I plant myself outside the dining hall with a borrowed card reader and a hand-lettered sign that says:ASK ME WHY I’M SMILING.
For the first four minutes, nothing. A river of students parts around me the way crowds part around anyone holding a sign, which is a humbling thing to learn about signs.
Then a girl in a chem-lab hoodie stops, reads it, looks at me, and says, flatly, “Why are you smiling?”
“The pediatric oncology ward downtown is twelve beds short, and I’m trying to fix it before a girl I know out-raises me and I die of public shame. Five dollars?”
She blinks. “That’s weirdly specific.”
“I’m a weirdly specific guy. Five dollars and I’ll tell you one true thing about yourself.”
She taps her card for ten and tells me to keep the true thing, so I give it to her anyway, that she has the look of the smartest person to walk out of that hall all night, which is accurate, you can see it in how she reads before she reacts — and she heads off into the cold standing about an inch taller than she arrived.
And that, right there, is the entire machine. Not the money. The inch. People will pay for the inch. They’ll line up for it.
They line up for it.
A guy stops who lost his grandmother to it — doesn’t say so in words, just “my grandma,” and taps his card and grips my shoulder once, hard, and leaves before either of us has to do anything about our faces. Three girls from my econ lecture make me guess their names as the price of admission; I get two right and lie with tremendous confidence about the third, and the third one knows it, and pays anyway, laughing. “You’re such a fraud,” she says, delighted. “I’m a fraud for thechildren,” I say, and she puts in another five.
A professor donates twenty and informs me, while the reader chews his card, that my paper on the Marshall Plan was “structurally optimistic” and that I should decide for myself whether that’s a strength or a diagnosis. I tell him I’ll take it under advisement. He says that’s exactly what a structurally optimistic person would say, and leaves looking very pleased with himself, and honestly? Fair.
A kid, maybe nine, gets hauled over by his dad. He looks up at me with the unblinking audit of the very young and asks if I’m famous.
“Only to people with excellent taste.”
The kid considers this. “I have excellent taste.”
“Then I’m extremely famous.”
His dad laughs and gives fifty, and the kid makes me sign a napkin, and I ask his name and use it twice, and he leaves lit up like a scoreboard, and I stand there in the cold having a feeling I decline to name in a dinner line.
It works better than it has any right to. Not the way Charlotte’s world works, no checks with commas, no boardrooms, no famous syllable doing the lifting. Just people. A lot of people, who’ll give five dollars to a guy they half-recognizefrom the sports page because he made them laugh in a line they were standing in anyway, and then text their roommate, who comes and finds me. By close I’ve raised four hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents, one cheerful conversation at a time, and somewhere around dollar two hundred I finally see the shape of the only game I can win.
Charlotte’s going to go big. Obviously. She’ll build something architectural, a committee, a marquee event, a small number of enormous gifts extracted from people who can afford a wing, the whole thing run in clean vertical lines off a spreadsheet. That’s her game, and nobody alive plays it better.
I can’t play it at all. No rooms, no rolodex, no patience. What I have is the one thing I’ve spent my whole life being faintly embarrassed by, the asset that never felt like mine because it never cost me anything: I can make an enormous number of ordinary people feel, for ten seconds, like the most interesting person at the fence. So that’s the strategy. Volume. Reach. A thousand small yeses against her ten enormous ones. Being liked, finally bolted to something that matters.
Standing there with eighty cents in change and a line still forming, it occurs to me that this might be the first plan I’ve ever made entirely by myself. Nobody handed it over. I had to lose something to find it, had to sit in the specific humiliation of opening my own contacts and finding nothing I built, nobody who owesme, not one door my own two hands ever opened — and on the far side of that there was this. A guy, a card reader, a sign, and a city’s worth of strangers who could not care less about my last name.
I’d take that humiliation a hundred more times to get to the part where something is finally mine.
Which leaves the genuinely hard problem. The one no card reader solves.
Charlotte.
