The feeling of securing the $30,000 retainer with George M. Hamlin was like finally putting the last piece on a perfect puzzle. The money was out of the Bronx and into a place where the logic of the street couldn't touch it. I had the biggest gun in the room, and now the war was corporate, not criminal.
Mama Sofia and I were back in Hunts Point, but things were different. Sofia was quiet, filled with the devastating moral clarity of the Maternal Crisis. She was preparing our quiet, final exit, banking on the $5,000 escape surplus that was now legally clean.
The city, though, was falling apart louder than ever. We went to a community meeting in the basement of a church. It was freezing, and the meeting was supposed to be about securing funds for the local school, but it was just a lot of yelling about municipal bonds.
I was sitting on the floor, playing with the Rubik's Cube prototype. It was my calm. I was ignoring the angry adults until the City Councilman started talking.
"We need the federal government to stabilize our debt!" the Councilman screamed, hitting the table. "We need to prove that New York City is a viable investment!"
I looked up. The word "debt" was the trigger.
I saw a violent Divine Revelation—a clip, fast and cynical, from the movie The Big Short(2015). The scene wasn't about the Bronx; it was about the collapse of the housing market decades later. I saw complex computer graphics detailing credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. The message wasn't about housing; it was about the simple, fundamental failure of sophisticated people to understand bad paperwork.
The revelation was brutal, and it showed me the truth: the clean system was just as corrupted by greed as the street game.
I stood up, holding the Cube prototype like it was a holy relic. The Councilman was waiting for applause, but he got me instead.
"Yo, Mayor Beame is selling rotten apples," I announced, filtering the complex financial data into my simple Gump-like voice. I used the sharpest Chris Rock cadence to deliver the economic critique. "You think this city's broke? You just got played by some bad paperwork, like a chump! It ain't the debt; it's the paper that's toxic, yo!"
The entire room went silent. The Councilman, a man who had spent his life dealing with local political corruption, looked genuinely pale. He thought the two-year-old had seen his private ledger.
He leaned down, his voice low and threatening. "What did you say, kid?"
"I said the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme!" I yelled, repeating a term I'd heard in the revelation. "Your paper is trash, and the only way out is to stop lying about the numbers!"
Mama Sofia grabbed me, horrified, her hands covering my mouth. "Elijah! Silencio!"
She dragged me out into the cold air. She was furious, but I wasn't scared of her anger. I was terrified of her faith in a system I knew was failing.
"You cannot speak to the Mayor's office like that!" Sofia hissed, pulling my hat down hard.
I looked at her, holding the Cube prototype tight. I had just paid $30,000 to Cravath, Swaine & Moore to trust the clean system. But the Divine Revelation showed me that the clean system was just as flawed as the one I had left.
"Ma, the honest man has no leverage," I stated, simply. "I gave Hamlin money to fight the government, not to trust it. The only clean thing left is this cube."
The confrontation secured my strategic certainty. The Powder was bad because it was violent, but the Paperwork was bad because it was deceitful. My exit plan was the only way to avoid both types of corruption.